{"id":2370,"date":"2025-06-20T09:24:31","date_gmt":"2025-06-20T07:24:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/userblogs.fu-berlin.de\/urban-rural-migration-japan\/?p=2370"},"modified":"2025-06-20T09:24:31","modified_gmt":"2025-06-20T07:24:31","slug":"guest-contribution-rural-connection-through-digital-nomads","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/userblogs.fu-berlin.de\/urban-rural-migration-japan\/2025\/06\/20\/guest-contribution-rural-connection-through-digital-nomads\/","title":{"rendered":"Guest contribution: Rural connection through digital nomads"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

by Axel Eriksson<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI\u2019m not in Kansas anymore,\u201d goes the expression from The Wizard of Oz, uttered when Dorothy finds herself beyond what once seemed normal. In the back seat of a car winding through the roads of south-eastern Honshu, I thought the same as we headed out to collect bamboo shoots at a cabin with two of my informants. Next to me sat a Japanese digital nomad, almost leaning over the front seat to chat in Japanese with the driver, who had her seat belt on, while her three-year-old child, unbuckled, sat beside her. Any romantic image of a safe Japan from TikTok faltered during this experience. Driving in Japan is intense, not exactly aggressive, but certainly energetic, though still conducted with a tone of respect. As they chatted, I struggled to follow the conversation with my limited Japanese, so I switched on my newly downloaded AI translator app for a test run: \u201cThat\u2019s what capitalism does, isn\u2019t it?\u201d the driver said, to which the digital nomad hummed in agreement. The future of Japan seems to be on everyone’s lips here in the countryside.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Picking bamboo shoots<\/em>
Copyright \u00a9 Axel Eriksson 2025<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The reason I was sitting in this car is my search for foreign digital nomads across rural Japan. Not long ago, Japan\u2014like many other countries\u2014caught the fever to attract those who use remote work to travel for extended periods. Yet freelance workers, business owners and others have long been able to detach themselves from a fixed home in favour of a more mobile lifestyle. What this new life could be was already described as early as 1997, when Tsugio Makimoto and David Manners coined the term in their book Digital Nomad<\/em>, which, in the late-1990s spirit of Fukuyama\u2019s book The End of<\/em> History<\/em>, envisioned a bright economic future shaped by mobility\u2014a hopeful era in which those on the \u201cright side of history\u201d could escape the constraints of capitalist life. Now, nearly 25\u201330 years later, while the digital nomad visa may be the most widely known policy tool, many other schemes have emerged to support small-scale entrepreneurs in making digital nomadism viable\u2014particularly in rural Japan. Digital nomads carry an aura of new hope, especially in connecting rural Japan to the wider world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trying to find any digital nomads in the Japanese countryside, however, felt almost like researching dead ends. Anyone who has done fieldwork knows that the world rarely unfolds as planned\u2014each encounter turns out to be disturbingly different in ways that seem contradictory or nonsensical at the time. The timing seemed ideal: the yen is weak and many people now enjoy endless flexibility to travel while working remotely. Before starting my fieldwork, I had believed that digital nomads would be wandering freely across Japan. Yet when I arrived in the countryside, they were only a few. \u201cHave you gone to Fukuoka?\u201d countless people asked me rhetorically, as if already knowing the answer. \u201cYou\u2019ll find what you\u2019re looking for there.\u201d Indeed, Tokyo, Osaka and Fukuoka are teeming with digital nomads\u2014just like any other type of tourist. Outside these areas, they are far harder to come by. Even Sapporo in the north, where I had hoped to begin my journey into rural Japan, felt empty outside the season I had just missed. Cities accommodating tourists seem to swallow digital nomads into the same gravitational pull. Their mobility often mirrors that of tourists, arriving with the seasons\u2014Hokkaido in winter, Tokyo in spring for the cherry blossoms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The empty roads of villages and towns in Japan<\/em>
Copyright \u00a9 Axel Eriksson 2025<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Digital nomads do occasionally venture beyond the classic tourist cities\u2014not by chance, but thanks to the intensive efforts of co-working spaces. My search led me to rural cities and towns across Japan which, at first glance, seemed no different from small places in Sweden, Portugal or Belgium, where I have lived before, but after some days walking in them it become apparent to me that they are slowly closing down. My realization of the need for revitalization did not come until I arrived in south-eastern Honshu, where I truly grasped the scale of Japan\u2019s depopulation crisis. What began as \u201cAh, they\u2019ll open later,\u201d soon turned into the quiet realization\u2014peering through shuttered blinds\u2014that \u201cOh, they\u2019re never going to open again.\u201d In response, digital nomads have become a key tool for connection. A project leader for one such initiative admitted just how few people were coming: \u201cWe have to do something. Otherwise, in sixty years, there\u2019ll be no one left on this island.\u201d Digital nomadism is a trend that, if nurtured, could offer rural areas a way to reconnect. It is not the digital nomads that I follow, but connections between these places that provides merits for research.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Dinner at a shared house<\/em>
Copyright \u00a9 Axel Eriksson 2025<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

As I visit these rural places that trying to attract digital nomads, it is hard to miss the willingness to meet new people and forge connections between temporary visitors such as digital nomads and local residents. On the winding roads of south-eastern Honshu, I find myself beginning to understand what digital nomads might mean for these areas. To most people I met in the countryside, I appear to be one myself. And not unlike other digital nomads, I have packed my belongings into a few cardboard boxes and left to begin another life. In that sense, I have become part of rural revitalization\u2014linked to everywhere else through the presence of nomads. As I look out across the rice paddies in an otherwise densely forested valley, I know I need to return, to connect again with rural Japan. And I must ask myself: what can I, as a ‘digital nomad researcher’, do to help sustain life in these places?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Axel Eriksson is a postdoctoral researcher from Sweden<\/em> who recently graduated at Mid Sweden University. He was rewarded a <\/em>JSPS short<\/em>–<\/em>term postdoctoral scholarship<\/em> to be in <\/em>Hokkaido University in Sapporo<\/em> conducting ethnographic research across Japan to understand how digital nomads connects to rural Japan. His research focuses on how groups meet and renegotiate their livelihoods, especially through tourism and new foreigner residents<\/em>.<\/em> <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Axel Eriksson \u201cI\u2019m not in Kansas anymore,\u201d goes the expression from The Wizard of Oz, uttered when Dorothy finds herself beyond what once seemed normal. In the back seat of a car winding through the roads of south-eastern Honshu, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7641,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[91],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2370","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-allgemein"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.fu-berlin.de\/urban-rural-migration-japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2370","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.fu-berlin.de\/urban-rural-migration-japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.fu-berlin.de\/urban-rural-migration-japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.fu-berlin.de\/urban-rural-migration-japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7641"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.fu-berlin.de\/urban-rural-migration-japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2370"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.fu-berlin.de\/urban-rural-migration-japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2370\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2375,"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.fu-berlin.de\/urban-rural-migration-japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2370\/revisions\/2375"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.fu-berlin.de\/urban-rural-migration-japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2370"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.fu-berlin.de\/urban-rural-migration-japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2370"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.fu-berlin.de\/urban-rural-migration-japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2370"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}