Local Fandom: 

Can Digital Technology Revitalise Shrinking Communities in Mountainous Japan?

Ms. Jinjin (Kimie) Zhang

Ph.D. Candidate, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

July 8 (Tuesday), 2025, 18:00 –20:00 CET

Venue: Room 7, Wilhelmstraße 90, 72074 Tübingen

Hybrid (In-person and virtual attendance via Zoom)

Abstract

Many rural communities in Japan are grappling with population decline and searching for new forms of vitality. In this talk, I examine the potential and limitations of using digital technology to create opportunities for revitalising shrinking communities in mountainous Japan. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between October 2022 and August 2024, I explore a grassroots socio-technical experiment in Niigata Prefecture, where a local NPO collaborated with a social enterprise to reach global markets through NFT-based digital artwork. They formed a digital community that integrates external populations as “digital villagers”—who now outnumber local residents. These digital villagers, primarily Japanese urbanites new to the area, participated in discussions, promotion, voting, and physical visits to the mountainous Yamakoshi region, treating it as a second hometown to be shaped through future-oriented co-creation. These place-making dynamics constitute what I call technology-driven “local fandom,” which legitimises the involvement of digitally literate younger and middle-aged citizens in the revitalisation politics of marginalised areas as relational populations (kankeijinkō). Such local fandom channels flows of money, people, expertise, and infrastructure into ageing and depopulating communities, helping them improve their marginal status in regional stratification. However, the opacity of digital technology raises questions about communication in these place-making efforts—particularly in building trust between local residents and digital villagers. I argue that digital technology is not a panacea for regional decline but instead transforms how mobile citizens engage with localities, rooted in their appreciation of local authenticity and empathy with depopulating vulnerabilities. The Japanese state’s endorsement for this experiment reflects its neoliberal affect-driven governmentality, increasingly dependent on mobile citizens’ voluntary, often unpaid digital labour to sustain shrinking communities—if not the nation.

About the Presenter

Jinjin (Kimie) Zhang is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Japanese Studies (Anthropology) at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her research interests lie in the intersection between digital media and culture, migration and mobility studies, science and technology studies, community studies, and comparative social analysis in East Asia. She served as a Japan Foundation Fellow (2023–2024) at Waseda University and will be joining the Harvard-Yenching Institute as an STS research fellow​ for the academic year of 2025-2026. 

Contact/ Zoom Registration

All are welcome! In-person and virtual attendance via Zoom are possible. No registration required for in-person attendance.

For enquiries or Zoom registration, please contact Dr. Tsui Shuen (Chris) Lau at tsui-shuen.lauspam prevention@uni-tuebingen.de.

See also our poster.