This dissertation traces the emergence and development of Romantic agrarianism in early 20th century Japan. The first chapter discusses the cluster of writers and intellectuals who "returned" to the land, forming art and agricultural communes, seeking a way a living that would incorporate aesthetics, nature, labor, and spirituality into a holistic daily life practice. The second chapter examines how this Romantic approach to agriculture was discussed in literary magazines in the 1920s and how those articles explored the limits of the individual art and agricultural commune. Romantic agrarianists examined various models of producer and consumer cooperatives from other countries as possible models to alleviate rural poverty in Japan. The third chapter follows the formation of a series of agrarianist organizations in the late 1920s and early 1930s, as some of these figures embraced the term nohonshugi (agriculture is the root of the nation) to describe their ideology. The fourth chapter examines the critique of nohonshugi by the anarchist group the Rural Youth League, as they tried to hold keep the idea "rural village self-rule" (noson jichi) from slipping into the nationalist and fascist imagination. Would agrarian communalism be based on mutual aid and shared labor, or by the shared spirit of being part of the national body (kokutai)? The fifth chapter examines the collision of nohonshugi and political violence in the early 1930s, exploring the fusion of agrarianism and nationalism in an era of upheaval. I discuss agrarianism in Japan as a response (aesthetic, literary, philosophical, spiritual, and political) against capitalist urban modernity, that was expressed across a wide range of lived practices and politics that included anarchist, socialist, and fascist; and whose practitioners were fully engaged in the global discourses surrounding the politics, economics, aesthetics, and spirituality of agricultural labor and rural space. In following both the debates and alliances between agrarianists of different strands, bringing to light the complex ever-shifting web of approaches to the countryside and attempts to give new meanings to agricultural labor and rural space, this dissertation examines how---or if---the countryside is able to hold all these varied positions together in relation to the developing structure of the modern nation.