農村地域の持続可能な発展とクリエイティブ産業

Abstract

This paper aims to examine sustainable development in rural areas from the point of view of culture and creative industries. Through expansion of civil engineering since the 1980s, the finance of rural areas has become heavily dependent on national public finance. Income from agriculture has been only around 20% of all income in rural areas since the 1980s. Besides, the agricultural budget has become dependent on public finance. For example, the agricultural budget from national public finance was only 9% of all agricultural production in the 1960s, while it was 28% of agricultural production in the 1970s, and it became around 50% in the 1980s. Therefore, it is a very important issue to transform civic engineering in rural areas as well as to reform agriculture itself. Traditional research rather focuses on manifold functions of agriculture and discusses what policy should be in agriculture itself. Another approach is to focus on the distribution process and to recommend developing alternative industries relating to processing and distributing agricultural products which produce added value. Added value seems to be necessary for financial dependency of agricultural areas. However, I will discuss transformation of civil engineering in rural areas focusing on creative industries. Creative industries including tourism and vacation were rather neglected in traditional research in Japan. However, a small business producing beautiful leaves for cooking in Kamikatsu-Cho in Tokushima prefecture is a good example of a successful small creative business in an agriculture area. More generally, I will examine the role of culture for sustainable development in rural areas. Culture seems to play an important role for development not only in developed countries but also in developing countries. Culture has the potential to encourage people and their ability. Besides, cultural landscape and cultural heritage compose amenities which breed people's abilities and new businesses. For example, designation as cultural landscape relating to traditional tea production might raise the value of tea in an area. To rethink the role of culture in rural areas, I will criticize the definition of culture in traditional rural research and will discuss it from the point of view of network function.