While I appreciate your attempt to reduce the title of my post to a set of shifting, mutable interpretations informed by the set of ideological biases—cultural, racial, economic, and political—that infect all ethnographic and commercial "histories," I assure you that I only used the word "villagers" because there were other pictures on the site in question that referred to humanitarian aid being delivered to Higashi Village in the Fukushima Prefecture. Although I cannot prove that the picture in question was taken at this or another village, I do not think it an unreasonable conjecture.

Having lived for three years myself in Sajima Village, I can further assure you that the term "village" has an actual, defined meaning in the hierarchy of Japanese public bodies. (That hierarchy loosely being Prefecture-->District-->City-->Town-->Village-->Ward. For simplicity, I won't get into "Special Cities and Wards".). Further, the term "village" in the Japanese sense has been greatly separated from any connotation it may have once had to a particular public body's agrarian, maritime, or industrial output. It is merely a sub-division and nothing more.

I can provide further examples of non-racist uses of the terms "village" and "villagers" upon request.