| 1 | !!''Furusato'' and the Idealization of Village Life in 21st Century Japanese Media |
| 2 | As described in [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BgEnbXPZX4s Naomi Clark's discussion]] of the cultural origins of the ''VideoGame/AnimalCrossing'' games, ''furusato'' (meaning [[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/furusato "hometown"]] in Japanese) is a cultural fantasy describing an idealized 18th century Japanese village characterized by shared, communal existence over multiple generations. Clark points out that in the [[TurnOfTheMillennium early 2000s]], the Japanese economy was just beginning to come out of the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Decade_(Japan) economic recession of the '90s]] (something it has still not quite managed to accomplish as of 2020), with home ownership at an all-time low and urbanization levels, extremely high. It is therefore unsurprising that any media tapping into the fantasy of owning a home in a "simpler time and place" would get so popular. |
| 3 | |
| 4 | It can be furthermore speculated that a major contribution to this was the cultural fatigue of rapid modernization, industrialization, and urbanization that Japan has been charging ahead with for over a century (from the Meiji era, through imperialist expansion and [=WW2=], to the post-war boom that ended in 1991). Such a rapid transformation of a society from a network of [[CloseKnitCommunity Close-Knit Communities]] to a population of urbanized, alienated individuals (i.e. from [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemeinschaft_and_Gesellschaft Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft]]) inevitably spawned a reaction that idealizes the pastoral lifestyle of their ancestors. |
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