Our research fellows Isaac Gagné and Sonja Ganseforth have presented their latest research on social and economic developments in Japanese rural and fishing communities at the AAS-in-Asia 2020 conference, held online from August 31 to September 4. Isaac analyzed how residents and volunteers conceptualize and actualize local moral worlds of care through community-based services in his paper ‚Moral Worlds of Welfare: Social Isolation and Community-based Care in Aging Japan‘. Sonja’s paper ‚New Marinalities of Japanese Fishing Villages‘ discussed how structural change in rural Japanese fishing villages can be understood through the analysis of interconnected local, national, and global dynamics. Their panel „Rurality Check: Tracing the Nascent Global Countryside in Asia“ was chaired and organized by Wolfram Manzenreiter (University of Vienna) and also had presentations by Heesun Hwang (Seoul National University) and Michael Leung (City University of Hong Kong).