More-than-Human Commoning through Women’s Kokorozashi Business for Collective Well-being: A Case from Aging and Depopulating Rural Japan

Abstract

Elderly women in depopulating and aging rural Japan confront their everyday challenges collectively through business practices based on kokorozashi – altruistic entrepreneurial practices through which they generate livelihoods and improve collective well-being. Drastic demographic changes and intensified economic globalization in the 1980s provoked precarity in rural livelihoods that depend on natural resource management. These changes simultaneously have opened up opportunities for women to start businesses assisted by state policies for rural revitalization and women’s empowerment. Previous studies have examined different contributions and pathways that rural women’s businesses have made to collective well-being. These studies rarely investigate how ethics come into play in collective natural resource management and its constitutive relationships among commons, subjectivities, and more-than-human elements. Drawing on a postcapitalist feminist political ecology’s approach to commoning, we investigate power dynamics and intersecting affective processes, including those related to gender, aging bodies, rurality, and more-than-human elements and demonstrate how ethical subjectivities and more-than-human communities are emerging in aging and depopulating rural Japan.