This book tells the story of a citizen group through the example and results of their participation in local civic life. The book draws attention to the complicated conditions under which civic participation may succeed. The story is about the individuals and organizations in the regional Japanese town of Takefu, but these events are also placed in the context of the surrounding Japanese Sea region of west Japan and the wider currents of the Japanese nation-state at the time. Also inlcludes maps.

The Renaissance of Takefu tells the story of a citizen group that made good in an enduring and fundamental way through the example and results of their participation in local civic life. The book draws attention to the complicated conditions under which civic participation may succeed. The story foregrounds individuals and organisations in the regional Japanese town of Takefu (2001 population 73,000), but these events are also placed in the context of the surrounding Japan Sea region of west Japan and the wider currents of the Japanese nation-state at the time. The author relies on the familiar qualitative research methods of participant-observation, conversations, survey and semi-structured interviews in order to weave primary sources with his own observations as an interested outsider. Combined with the scholarship on citizen movements, cultural politics and historical representation, the result is a memorable account about good people perservering in their love of their townscape, in spite of numerous socially and culturally rooted obstacles they faced.