Abstract: This dissertation is an ethnographic study of Nishibanba, a village ( shuraku) located in the town of Rokusei, Noto Peninsula, conducted over a period of twenty-two months between June 2003 and January 2007. During this time, the 'Great Heisei Amalgamation' (Heisei no daigappei) reduced the number of municipalities in Japan by forty percent. On 1 March 2005, Rokusei merged with two neighboring municipalities to form Nakanoto town. Immediately, the new administration set upon creating a new history that consolidates the disparate village customs and local pasts into a cohesive narrative. To aid in this historical reinvention, the town employed scholars from a nearby university to study and catalogue the town's cultural properties. This group included a historian, an archaeologist, a preservationist, and, for a short period, myself as the group's foreign anthropologist. This process of municipal reinvention highlighted a gap between Rokusei town, which was formed in the mid-1950s, and Nishibanba village that has families, customs, and rituals that are thought to have persisted for many centuries. During the merger process, Nishibanba residents attempted to reclaim authority over interpretations of their past, most notably in publishing a village chronicle written by several elders. In this context, this dissertation reexamines several classic themes in the anthropology of Japan, including landscape, kinship, religion, festivals, archaeology, community organizations, and local government. These topics form the backdrop for an analysis of the 'village study' as a literary genre that includes nineteenth-century Japanology, pre and postwar anthropology, Japanese nativist ethnology (minzokugaku), and local history texts (kyodo-shi). This dissertation shows that contemporary forms of village culture are constructed through a dialogical relationship to village studies—where this literature aimed at describing village life has in turn shaped villagers' understandings and expectations of their culture. These texts form not only a body of knowledge about particular villages but also become guidebooks that help shape present-day cultural revivalisms.