Life beyond growth? Rural depopulation becoming the attraction in Nagoro, Japan’s scarecrow village
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Rural villages in Japan are rapidly ageing and depopulating. On Shikoku Island, in the remote mountainous Iya Valley, is the village of Nagoro. Residents who have left or passed away have been replaced with ‘kakashi’ or scarecrows in the form of life-like dolls. Currently, scarecrows outnumber the village residents and appear throughout the community—waiting at bus stops, working the fields, and studying at the closed school. The attempt to preserve village life and identity through the scarecrow displays has begun to attract the attention of media and tourists. This paper examines this emerging rural tourism attraction in the context of Japanese rural depopulation and peripheralisation. Nagoro is representative of many Japanese villages where the rural lifestyle is disappearing. It has adopted a unique form of quiet resistance to the ending of an era viewed in the context of museumisation and abandoned landscapes. Rural communities are transitioning finding themselves between government rejuvenation policies and learning to live beyond growth.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".