A precise history of Japans agriculturebased communitarian projects and the utopian theories that have motivated the countrys social changesAs a part of his research series on the historical practices of communitarian utopias in different countries Ou Nings new book The Agritopianists focuses on the labor experiments of intellectual groups in 20thcentury Japans rural areas. From the collective Atarashikimura New Village Movement initiated by Mushakoji Saneatsu through many other individual semiagricultural life practices of Japanese writers and artists the book traces the emergence of a shared agricultural fundamentalism that informed and evolved into the active political interventions of later years. Ou Ning combines original field investigation with a close reading of the historical archives to construct a narrative spanning period and geographies that is always attentive to specific detail.