Overview
David Leheny is a professor in the Graduate School of Asia-Pacific Studies, part of Tokyo’s Waseda University. After earning his PhD in Government at Cornell, he served as an assistant and then associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and then as the Henry Wendt III ’55 Professor of East Asian Studies at Princeton University. Leheny is the author of three books published by Cornell University Press: Empire of Hope: The Sentimental Politics of Japanese Decline (2018); Think Global, Fear Local: Sex, Violence, and Anxiety in Contemporary Japan (2006); and The Rules of Play: National Identity and the Making of Japanese Leisure (2003). He has also co-edited (with Kay Warren) Japanese Aid and the Construction of Global Development: Inescapable Solutions (Routledge, 2010), written dozens of journal articles and book chapters, and served as a regional affairs officer for counterterrorism in the U.S. Department of State.
Research Focus
Scaling Affects: “Digital Garden Cities” and Imagining Lives in Contemporary Japan
This research project examines the affective politics associated with new efforts to repopulate rural Japan. For decades, rural Japan has been treated officially, in academia, and in popular culture as a repository of traditional Japanese culture, always threatened by the onrush of modernity in the country’s major cities. Initiatives to repopulate Japan based on the promise of bucolic tradition have long been a mainstay in public life, and have long been unsuccessful, with numerous rural communities collapsing through deindustrialization and the departure of younger residents for major cities with more economic and social opportunities. The new “Digital Garden City” initiative, developed in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, envisions these towns less as the treasury of Japanese culture but more as spaces offering the possibility of dramatic rescaling, with high-speed internet and remote work possibilities transforming them into smaller-scale versions of Tokyo (or Osaka or Sendai), with all of the amenities of a idealized contemporary middle-class lifestyle. The affective connections thus undergirding this proposal are not the storied references to the warm-hearted, collectivist ways of rural folk, compared with the hustle-bustle of major cities, but rather those related to one’s feelings about the proximity of educational opportunities, medical care, shopping and culinary possibilities, and so forth.
The literature on affect/emotion in Japan tends to focus on the nostalgic, and for good reason; its omnipresence in cultural and social life makes it hard to avoid. But it crowds out other sets of frames, including those disclosed by the Japanese government’s new interest in rural Japan as a rescaled urban landscape. As with my previous books, this project approaches these initiatives discursively, as administrative and political expressions in a dense intertextual environment of public intellectual debate, popular cultural expression, and literary representation. But it aims to untangle one of the central issues facing contemporary Japan: what it means for the country’s aging, shrinking population to be increasingly concentrated in major cities. What we increasingly see is value and affect connected not to the hallowed traditions of Japan’s mythic past, but rather to the conveniences and opportunities of a crowded metropolitan landscape, even as its limits — in space, in flexibility, in tranquility — become sources of complaints for many residents.
My goal with this project is to make it the cornerstone of my book manuscript examining affect, narrative, and the risks of “gimmicks” (to use Sianne Ngai’s 2020 conceptualization) in the politics of everyday life in Japan. I have also been pursuing case studies involving cases as diverse as the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and the 2022 state funeral of former Prime Minister Abe Shinzō, both of them far more controversial than the Digital Garden City initiative. I aim for this case study to show how this plan to reimagine Japanese lives, through a rescaled Tokyo mapped onto rural regions, becomes that rare form of Japanese state intervention to escape public criticism despite its highly public, even intrusive nature. Because I work in a social sciences/policy department in Japan, I miss the engagement with scholarship in the humanities that was central to my career during my years on the faculties of the University of Wisconsin and Princeton. I believe that a year in Cornell’s Society of Fellows would expose me to essential theoretical and methodological perspectives that would improve my work considerably, and I would hope that I could contribute to interdisciplinary discussions as I have in the past.