Detachment from conventional agriculture in rural Japan

112 Pages·2013·5.28 MB·English

by  Daniel Hesby Mathé

Detachment from conventional
agriculture in rural Japan:

An analysis of embedded antifragility in satoyama
communities

Daniel Hesby Mathé

Master thesis in Human Geography
Institute of Sociology and Human Geography

University of Oslo
May 2013
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© Daniel Hesby Mathé
2013
Detachment from conventional agriculture in rural Japan: An analysis of embedded
antifragility in satoyama communities
http://www.duo.uio.no/
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Acknowledgments

First, I wish to thank my supervisor Erling Christiansen for his support throughout the
process from idea to end result, and for the many rewarding and inspiring
conversations over the past two years. He is the best teacher a student can hope to
have.
The field study would have not been the same without the huge help, kindness
and effort from my hosts Shiho and Taku Yamada and the rest of the Satoyama
Experience. They made my stay comfortable, interesting and memorable. I am also
grateful for the great effort made by Takafumi Yamamoto during my days in
Tanekura and in Hida-Furukawa as my interpreter and attendant. I wish him the very
best with his newly started organic farm. The project would not have been possible
without the cooperation of my informants, and I am very grateful for their time and
insights.
Finally, I would like to thank my lovely wife for her continuous
encouragement and helpful critical questions during this project.

Daniel Hesby Mathé
Oslo, 17 May 2013.
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Table
 of
 Contents:

Acknowledgments
 .............................................................................................................
 5

Introduction
 ........................................................................................................................
 9

Motivations
 ...................................................................................................................................
 9

Research
 question
 and
 rationale
 .......................................................................................
 10

Itinerary
 ......................................................................................................................................
 11

1.
 Background
 ..................................................................................................................
 13

1.1
 Livelihoods
 on
 a
 volatile
 archipelago
 ........................................................................
 13

1.2
 Satoyama
 –
 living
 with
 nature
 on
 the
 volatile
 landmass
 .....................................
 14

1.2.1
 Satoyama
 areas
 and
 practices
 ..............................................................................................
 15

1.2.2
 Nature
 and
 satoyama
 ...............................................................................................................
 16

1.2.3
 Satoyama
 as
 a
 bridge
 between
 humans
 and
 nature
 in
 Japan
 .................................
 17

1.2.4
 Current
 issues
 regarding
 satoyama
 areas
 .......................................................................
 18

1.3
 The
 sun
 rises
 –
 Japan’s
 metamorphosis
 into
 a
 westernised,
 industrial
 nation

 ........................................................................................................................................................
 19

1.3.1
 Industrialisation,
 economic
 growth
 and
 the
 farmer
 ...................................................
 20

1.3.2
 The
 sky
 is
 the
 limit
 –
 agriculture
 in
 the
 post-­‐war
 years
 ............................................
 21

1.3.3
 The
 limit
 is
 the
 sky
 –
 the
 downfall
 of
 the
 traditional
 countryside
 ........................
 22

1.3.4
 Nōkyō
 –
 Japan’s
 agricultural
 cooperative/finance
 multinational
 .........................
 23

1.4
 The
 Hida
 region
 .................................................................................................................
 25

1.4.1
 Tanekura
 village
 .........................................................................................................................
 27

2.
 Theoretical
 Framework
 ...........................................................................................
 31

2.1
 Neo-­‐classical
 economics
 –
 rational
 incentives
 through
 scarcity
 ......................
 32

2.1.1
 The
 foundations
 for
 neoclassical
 thinking
 ......................................................................
 33

2.1.2
 Scarce
 resources
 and
 the
 need
 for
 centralised
 planning
 ..........................................
 34

2.1.3
 Incentives
 driven
 by
 scarcity
 –
 the
 economic
 man
 and
 his
 actions
 .....................
 35

2.1.4
 Neo-­‐classical
 understandings
 of
 geography
 ...................................................................
 37

2.1.5
 Nature
 in
 neoclassical
 economics
 –
 unregulated
 scarcity
 ........................................
 38

2.2
 Critiques
 of
 neoclassical
 theories
 ...............................................................................
 40

2.2.1
 Institutional
 economics
 ...........................................................................................................
 40

2.2.2
 Social
 capital
 .................................................................................................................................
 45

2.2.3
 Political
 ecology
 –
 challenging
 the
 apolitical
 .................................................................
 46

2.2.4
 Antifragility
 –
 embracing
 natural
 disorder
 and
 benefitting
 from
 it
 .....................
 50

3.
 Methods
 .........................................................................................................................
 54

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3.1
 Qualitative
 research
 ........................................................................................................
 54

3.2
 Direction
 of
 the
 research
 ...............................................................................................
 56

3.3
 A
 case
 study
 ........................................................................................................................
 57

3.4
 Fieldwork
 and
 collection
 of
 data
 .................................................................................
 58

3.4.1
 Fieldwork
 in
 Hida-­‐Furukawa
 and
 the
 village
 of
 Tanekura
 ......................................
 60

3.4.2
 Kanazawa
 and
 Komatsu
 –
 Satoyama
 international
 training
 programme
 .........
 63

3.4.3
 Other
 aspects
 of
 my
 fieldwork
 .............................................................................................
 64

3.5
 Validity
 of
 my
 generalisations
 ......................................................................................
 66

4.
 Analysis
 .........................................................................................................................
 68

4.1
 Existence
 of
 satoyama
 –
 real
 or
 symbolic,
 organic
 or
 subsidised?
 ..................
 69

4.1.1
 Satoyama
 as
 an
 ecological
 myth,
 a
 symbol
 of
 the
 real
 Japan
 ...................................
 69

4.1.2
 The
 “real”
 and
 marketable
 satoyama
 ................................................................................
 70

4.1.3
 Satoyama
 in
 practice
 –
 insights
 from
 the
 ground
 ........................................................
 72

4.2
 Actors
 and
 institutions
 in
 a
 satoyama
 .......................................................................
 74

4.2.1
 Fencing
 out
 nature
 ....................................................................................................................
 75

4.2.2
 Aging,
 depopulation
 and
 the
 consequences
 for
 satoyama
 .......................................
 76

4.2.3
 Less
 need
 for
 money
 (i.e.
 debt)
 in
 a
 satoyama
 ..............................................................
 79

4.2.4
 Past
 and
 present
 in
 Tanekura
 –
 the
 villagers’
 perspective
 ......................................
 80

4.2.5
 The
 future
 of
 satoyama
 –
 through
 the
 eyes
 of
 the
 community
 in
 Tanekura
 ....
 87

4.2.6
 Insights
 from
 Takigahara
 –
 using
 the
 local
 knowledge
 .............................................
 89

4.3
 The
 outlook
 for
 satoyama
 ..............................................................................................
 90

4.3.1
 Increasing
 fragility
 in
 satoyama
 areas
 ..............................................................................
 90

4.3.2
 More
 focus
 on
 the
 countryside
 and
 satoyama
 in
 Japan
 .............................................
 93

4.4
 Protecting
 satoyama
 –
 insights
 from
 economic
 geography
 ................................
 96

5.
 Conclusion
 ....................................................................................................................
 99

5.1
 Sources
 of
 fragility
 in
 a
 satoyama
 and
 their
 effects
 ..............................................
 99

5.2
 Critical
 reflections
 ..........................................................................................................
 102

5.3
 Significance
 and
 future
 challenges
 ...........................................................................
 103

References
 .......................................................................................................................
 104

Appendix
 –
 interview
 guides
 ....................................................................................
 109

1.
 Interview
 guide
 for
 the
 villagers
 ..................................................................................
 109

2.
 Interview
 guide
 for
 the
 department
 of
 economic
 affairs
 .....................................
 110

3.
 Interview
 guide
 for
 the
 agricultural
 department
 ..................................................
 111

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Introduction

Motivations

Finding solutions for a robust future are among the most important undertakings
mankind has faced, and there are many proposed solutions ranging from conserving
nature while building dense cities to building human settlements underwater. Many
measures have been superimposed on a global scale and have often had limited
effects, as the issues are complex and usually affect places differently. A local focus
is therefore taken in this thesis to se the bottom-up measures in action.
The idea for this thesis came to me while watching the documentary
Satoyama: Japan’s Secret Forest1 about certain areas in Japan where people have
lived in accord with nature for generations through adhering to specific land use
practices. Having spent a semester at a Japanese university a few years back, and
being quite used to the image of Japan as a technotopia with neon lights and
skyscrapers, I was surprised to see a different side of Japan that seemed to thrive in
this highly industrialised country. It is also a country with a materially wealthy and
well-educated population, it has a low unemployment rate, but it is also a country
where the urban areas have had a growing population and economic significance, at
the expense of the rural regions and smaller, robust communities. This development
has considerable consequences for the rural satoyama communities where the
population is aging and generations of knowledge are at risk of disappearing.
I firmly believe that important insights can be learned from the smallest places,
in this age of the global. Studying how the communities and their members handle the
changing social and economic environment are all reasons to undertake a qualitative
study focusing on the actors in these satoyama communities and how they are affected
by the changes in Japan.
The analytical concept of antifragility is borrowed from Nassim Nicholas
Taleb’s (2012) book Antifragile: How to Live in a World We Don’t Understand. He is
a professor at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University in risk engineering
and a former Wall Street trader. In the book he explains that something with

1 The documentary is available here: http://tv.nrk.no/program/koid20008810/japans-hemmelige-skog.
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antifragile properties improves and gets better through constant exposure to shocks
that force it to adapt, and antifragility is what makes complex systems resilient –
much like evolutionary process in nature (Taleb 2012:6-9). Antifragility is also highly
nonlinear, as causalities and precise effects are hard to measure. Something fragile
does not fare well when exposed to outside shocks, whereas the antifragile in further
strengthened. It is also in need of outside inputs and upkeep to function properly
without the inputs contributing to making it antifragile. They only contribute to
making it more fragile (Taleb 2012:11-3). In this thesis, antifragility is mostly
ascribed to traditional agriculture and its significance in satoyama communities. It
characterises the interactions with nature and resource use that have been
institutionalised over many generations that allow the community to live robustly with
nature. Taleb’s ideas might seem new, but share many of those found in institutional
economics and in economic geography in that local institutions and knowledge play a
vital part in for instance resource management, robust land use practices, innovation
practices and more (Fløysand and Jakobsen 2010; Ostrom 1999; Taleb 2012). I will
clarify these ideas and concepts further in chapter 2.

Research
 question
 and
 rationale

This thesis is about the robust satoyama communities in modern day Japan, more
specifically their local institutional context regarding their agricultural practices and
how that is affected by the changes that have happened in Japan over the past century.
I started out with a relatively wide reaching theme concerning satoyama communities
and how they have been affected by the many socio-economic changes that have
taken place. This has allowed a more explorative study where the many discoveries
made during the analysis have reshaped and rephrased my theme and refined it into a
problem statement. I seek to analyze traditional agricultural practices and their
modern equivalents, in what degree they are detached or attached to the input
structures in conventional agriculture, and the effects of this attachment/detachment.
My main research question is as follows:

What are the sources of fragility in satoyama, and how do they affect the embedded
antifragility in such areas and communities?
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