Since the 1970s, women’s exodus from the countryside has become a serious problem in Japan and local governments decided to take measures to prevent further consequences. This was called “the policy to retain heirs to the agricultural way of life” (nôgyô ninaite seisaku) and recently subdivisions of local governments are specialized in this problem. Various programs have been projected to develop a secure environment free of gender bias in an attempt to make rural communities more appealing to young women.

In this paper, I will investigate the gendering nature of depopulation and rural revitalization in Hokkaido, the northernmost island of Japan. After an outline of the cultural politics of gendered depopulation in rural Japan, I present a case study, the Ladies’ Farm School in Shintoku Town. The school was established in 1996 intending on turning office workers and graduated university students into farming women by introducing them the “beauty of countryside” (knowledge) and the skills of agricultural production (technology), and eventually helping them to settle down as young “farming ladies” of the local community. Drawing on an ethnographic fieldwork in the town and the school, I examine how gender is contested and constructed by seemingly progressive changes in women’s social status. The argument I make here is that we reconsider the problem of gender inequalities and the sexual division of labor as local products of modernization, instead of interpreting them as universal (and transformable) cultural patterns of an imagined past.