The Unseen Forest

THE UNSEEN FOREST:

SPECTACLES OF NATURE AND GOVERNANCE IN A JAPANESE NATIONAL FOREST

A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE DIVISION OF THE UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI‘I AT MĀNOA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

IN

ANTHROPOLOGY

DECEMBER 2012

By

Eric J. Cunningham

Dissertation Committee:

Leslie E. Sponsel, Chairperson Christine R. Yano Jefferson M. Fox Mary G. McDonald Gerald G. Marten

Keywords: Japan, nature, forests, governance, spectacle for Aki, my constant companion ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The statement of acknowledgements has become a bit of a trope in anthropology.

Rightfully so in my mind, as ethnographies are never written in isolation (though it may at times feel like it). This ethnography is no different and throughout the process of researching and writing it I have felt it to be a collaborative work. Thus, there are many who I feel compelled to acknowledge.

First and foremost, I wish to thank the people of Otaki for their generosity and willingness to share their thoughts, experiences, and lives with me. This work would be impossible without them. In particular, I would like to thank Mayor Seto Hiroshi for listening to me about my research when I first ambushed him after an event in November

2007, and encouraging me to come to Otaki to fieldwork. His candidness, sense of humor, and unwavering support were invaluable to me during my time in the village. My gratitude also goes out to my friend, Tanaka Hideyoshi, with whom I shared many wonderful meals, drunken conversations, walks, and days on the ski hill, and whose guidance and mentorship continue to shape my research in profound ways. Thank you also to Tanaka-san’s wife, Junko, for some of the best meals I have ever had. I am also grateful to Saguchi-san, my “Otaki mother” whom I am convinced is a bodhisattva. Your hospitality was always a great comfort to me and I do not think there was ever a warmer place in the village then sitting with you next to your old wood stove. Thank you for all of the tea and snacks, and the many many many wonderful conversations. You taught me so much. I must also thank the Tachibana family for welcoming my wife and I into their home on innumerable occasions. The friendship and food you offered us was always more than we deserved. You enriched our lives more than you will ever know. Thank you

i also to Tōmi-san. Your bright face and enthusiastic attitude brightened all of my days in

Otaki, and you fresh vegetables kept me healthy and happy.

There are not enough words to convey my gratitude to all of the other people in

Otaki who enriched my life and helped shape my research. Humbly, I offer my heartfelt thanks to Sawada-san and the other members of the Board of Education for their help with various parts of research; Horiuchi-san, Kensuke-san, Shitade-san, Koshi-san,

Takeuchi-san, Miyamoto-san, Tajika-san, and Itō-san for your time and thoughts;

Ninomiya-san, Kei-chan, my “elder brother” Koyama-san, Noriko-chan, Kaminaga-san,

Yuka-chan, and Sayuri-chan for your support and friendship; my English “students”

Yoko, Ayako, Hirona, and Tokie; everyone at the Otaki Elementary-Junior High School; and to the many more whose names I have neglected. Thank you for your support and kindness. I miss you all. Lastly, I would like to thank my friend and neighbor, Kuni-chan, whose enthusiastic “welcome” continued throughout my stay in Otaki. Your friendship to both my wife and I is a treasure that we value dearly. Thank you for everything.

This work would not have come to fruition if not for the guidance and support of my many professors and advisors. Thank you all for your wisdom, patience, and words of encouragement throughout my education and the writing of this dissertation. In particular,

I would like to thank Dr. Leslie E. Sponsel for serving as my advisor and committee chair. Your continual support and encouragement, as well as your critical insights, have sustained me and helped to move my work in interesting new directions. I am also grateful to Dr. Christine R. Yano for her words of encouragement and advice, both of which were invaluable to me during what was at times a lonely and frustrating period of

ii writing. Thank you also to my other committee members, Dr. Jefferson M. Fox, Dr.

Gerald G. Marten, and Dr. Mary G. McDonald, for your support, comments, and time.

The first 18 months of my fieldwork in Japan was supported by a

Monbukagakusho Scholarship from the Japanese government’s Ministry of Education,

Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology, which was administered through Kyoto

University’s Graduate School of Human and Environmental Studies. Dr. Takako Yamada served as my advisor at Kyoto University and I owe a great deal of gratitude to her for her support and guidance. Also, I would like to thank all of the students in her graduate seminar for their patience in allowing me to take part in their discussions. In addition, I would like to thank Dr. Noboru Ogata for taking an interest in my research, and also for showing me around the streets of Nara and Kyoto.

I could not have completed the writing of this dissertation without the financial help of a Dissertation Completion Grant from the Research Corporation of the University of Hawai‘i. At the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa I also benefitted from the financial support of the Center for Japanese Studies, the Department of Anthropology, and the

Graduate Student Organization. In particular I would like to give a big mahalo to Dr.

Robert Huey and Dr. Gay Satsuma at the Center for Japanese Studies for their continuous support throughout my graduate studies.

In the process of completing this dissertation I have also benefited from the support and companionship of my friends and colleagues at the University of Hawai‘i at

Mānoa. A warm thank you goes to Paul Christensen, Kelli Swazey, and Adam Lauer.

Your intelligence, humor, and willingness to listen to complaints over glasses of beer

iii were just what I needed during some of the more trying times. Thanks also to Toru and

Naomi Yamada for reading parts of this dissertation and offering valuable feedback. And to my officemate, Rachel Hoerman, thank you for the wonderful conversations that helped me keep my sanity throughout the writing process.

My first encounters with forests came before I could walk, riding on the backs of my mom and dad in the mountains of Utah and Idaho. Thank you both for awakening in me a curiosity about the world around me that has fed my mind and soul more than you will ever know. Thank you also for your unconditional love and support, and for letting me follow my curiosities even when they have taken me far away from you. Please know that you are always there with me, wherever I go. Thank you also to my wonderful sisters and brothers: Kai, Kari, Soren, and Anne for all of your love. 僕の日本の家族へ、長い間お

世話になってありがとうございます。お父さん、お母さん、いつも親切にし、支えてくれてあり

がとうござます。色々、ご迷惑、ご心配をかけてしまってすみません。

Finally, my deepest gratitude goes to my wife, Aki. You have been the closest to this project, and have acutely felt its many ups and downs. You have made many sacrifices to support my endeavors, following me to places you probably never thought you would go. There have been hard times and you have seen me through them all.

Thank you. Your own intellectual curiosities, your beauty and wit, and your gentle attitude have helped me through many times of worry and doubt, and your faith in me has always replenished my soul. On mountain tops and in the darknesses of forests, it is you who has always been there by my side. Thank you for your love and companionship.

iv ABSTRACT

This dissertation is an ethnographic study of the processes by which forests in central

Japan’s Kiso Region are culturally produced among actors and institutions, creating frictions out of which emerge forms of knowledge and meaning that shape human- environment interactions on all levels. I explore national forests in the upland village of

Otaki as sites of contention and shifting meanings concerning shizen (nature) and shigen

(resources), as well as ideas about what it means to be nihonjin (Japanese) and kokumin

(a national citizen). This exploration is framed within the context of the historical development of governing institutions in the region and the use of “spectacles,” defined as various media (such as pamphlets, websites, and reports) meant to communicate ideas, knowledge, and policies. In addition, I ask to what extent conceptual shifts regarding forest natures influence how local residents in Otaki think about themselves and the forest landscapes that surround them. I suggest that through the deployment of spectacles, forests in Otaki and the greater Kiso Region have become visible markers of the state apparatus, which express relations of power by helping to define local subjects as citizens of the nation. My analysis is framed within a broader examination of global discourses of nature, resources, and governance, which I locate within the development of neoliberal politics and free market capitalism.

v TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ...... i

Abstract ...... v

Table of Contents ...... vi

List of Tables ...... x

List of Figures ...... xi

CHAPTER I: NATURES UNSEEN ...... 1

HUMAN/NATURE ...... 4

THE SETTING ...... 9

GOVERNED NATURE ...... 15

THE POLITICS OF LANDSCAPE ...... 20

A SENSE OF THE LANDSCAPE ...... 22

SPECTACLES OF NATURE ...... 28

NOTES ON APPROACH AND METHODOLOGY ...... 32

OVERVIEW OF THE DISSERTATION ...... 36

CHAPTER II: MEANINGS OF FORESTS IN JAPAN ...... 40

GEOGRAPHY OF FORESTS ...... 43

FORESTS AND THE NATION ...... 49

vi DREAM FORESTS ...... 60

DARK FORESTS ...... 64

CONCLUSION ...... 67

CHAPTER III: NATURE, SPECTACLES, AND GOVERNANCE ...... 70

NATURAL RESOURCES AND GOVERNANCE ...... 75

“NATURES” ...... 77

NATURE AS NATURAL RESOURCE ...... 78

NATURE AS IDEOLOGY ...... 84

NATURE AS SUBJECTIVITY ...... 86

SPECTACLES OF NATURE AND GOVERNANCE ...... 94

THE UNSEEN FOREST ...... 98

CHAPTER IV: THE UNSEEN FOREST ...... 100

QUIET MAPS ...... 102

WALKING ...... 105

A SENSE OF OTAKI ...... 110

MOVEMENTS OF LABOR ...... 116

DELIBERATE MOVEMENTS ...... 132

OFF THE MAP ...... 137

CHAPTER V: MAKING THE SPECTACULAR REAL-- FORESTS, WATER, AND DEMOCRACY ...... 142

vii

DAMS AND PERIPHERIES ...... 145

ELECTRICITY AND EARLY DAM CONSTRUCTION IN THE KISO REGION ...... 146

FORESTS, WATER, DEMOCRACY ...... 152

TREES FOR THE NATION ...... 159

LOCAL & NON-LOCAL FLOWS ...... 161

NATIONALIZING THE LANDSCAPE ...... 164

WATER WAYS ...... 170

CONCLUSION ...... 174

CHAPTER VI: REVEALING THE SPECTACLE ...... 176

CRISES ...... 182

RECOGNIZING THE RESOURCE LANDSCAPE ...... 189

MAKING VALUE ...... 192

REVERENCE ...... 193

OYAMA ...... 203

REVELATIONS ...... 207

(R)EVOLUTIONS ...... 210

DWELLING, AFFECT, AND MOVEMENTS OF RESISTANCE ...... 215

CAPITAL N AND CAPITAL R ...... 218

THERE IS A CRACK IN EVERYTHING ...... 221

viii CHAPTER VII: THE TERRAIN OF FOREST NATURE POLITICS IN JAPAN ...... 226

NATURE OF THE SPECTACLE ...... 229

IMAGINATION AND THE TERRAIN OF NATURE POLITICS ...... 233

RETURN TO REVERENCE ...... 238

APPENDIX A: INTERVIEW QUESTIONS ...... 246

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 248

ix LIST OF TABLES

Table 1: Census of Otaki Farming Households 1985-2010 ...... 118

x LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: Map of study area ...... 9

Figure 2: Transition of felling amounts in national forest under Otaki Forestry Office jurisdiction ...... 23

Figure 3: Forestry Agency map depicting forest categories in the Kiso Region ...... 26

Figure 4: Central District Forest Management Office brochure ...... 47

Figure 5: Satoyama model ...... 54

Figure 6: Screen capture from the film Tonari no Totoro ...... 55

Figure 7: Inside page of Central District Forest Management Office brochure ...... 91

Figure 8: Kannon stature ...... 100

Figure 9: 1907 map of Nagano prefecture by Ando Rikinosuke ...... 104

Figure 10: Ontake-san ...... 112

Figure 11: Population of Working Farmers in Otaki by Age and Sex, 2010 ...... 119

Figure 12: Two women preparing sunki ...... 122

Figure 13: Figure 13: Otaki Population Change 1980-2010 ...... 125

Figure 14: Figure 14: Income from Timber Extraction in Kiso Valley Imperial Forests 1897-1935 ...... 126

Figure 15: Transition of Otaki Population Based on Industry 1960-2010 ...... 129

Figure 16: Figure 16: Numbers of Visitors, Ontake Highlands (Ontake-kōgen) & Ski Resort 1993-2011 ...... 130

Figure 17: Makio Dam ...... 142

Figure 18: Artist’s rendition of mokuzai ryūsō ...... 150

xi Figure 19: Preliminary sketch of the Aichiyōsui project ...... 154

Figure 20: Miura Daifu ceremony ...... 171

Figure 21: Shinto priests at the kaizanshiki (Mountain Opening Ceremony) on Ontake-san ...... 197

Figure 22: The adaptive cycle ...... 211

Figure 23: Ball and basin heuristic ...... 213

xii CHAPTER I Natures unseen

My feet felt more and more nimble as my body warmed and I began to perspire a bit.

Following the bed of a stream, I made my way up a narrow gully lined on each side by hinoki (Japanese cypress), sawara (Sawara cypress) and nezuko, or kurobe (Japanese thuja) trees, many of which towered twenty meters or more above me. Over the past days reports of bear sightings (shutsubotsu) had been broadcast over a village-wide intercom system, so I was sure to make noise by clapping my hands and singing various renditions of my favorite hymnal, “Amazing Grace.” The trail I had been following through a small canyon became less and less visible as I gained elevation in the gully. Higher up, hardwood varieties, such as chestnut (kuri) and beech (buna), became more prevalent.

There were no longer any signs of a trail, but I was determined to find a source for the water trickling in the stream that now served as my pathway. When the gully topped out, I climbed onto a nearby ridge and continued upward. Giant Japanese cypresses, their thick reddish barks laden with moisture from recent storms, dominated the scene. I had been walking for over an hour and my repertoire had expanded beyond “Amazing Grace” to include Townes Van Zandt’s "Pancho and Lefty,” "Jesus Gonna Be Here" by Tom

Waits, and "I Never Cared for You," a Willie Nelson tune. Before I could locate the source of the stream my stomach began to growl. I sat down on a tree stump and wolfed down three rice balls (onigiri) that I had prepared. The forest was calm. Sunlight filtered through the canopy at a low angle, giving vibrancy to the varied hues of green that danced in the forest around me. The late August air was heavy with summer heat and the

1 musty smell of moss. I removed my sweat-soaked shirt and reveled in the relief of a light breeze that flowed up from the canyon below, kissing my naked skin.

I had come to this area, known simply as the Seto River (seto-gawa), on the recommendation of several people whom I had talked with during the initial months of my field research in the village of Otaki. My interest was in forests and the people who dwelled among them. I wanted to learn more about forest governance by the state in

Japan and the effects it had on local communities. I also wanted to explore possibilities for local forms of governance. In the early days in the field I had difficulty explaining the goals and purpose of my research to people I encountered in the village. Most, perhaps, thought I was concerned only with forests--their structure or ecology--and thus had directed me to the pristine Seto River. In all honesty, I too was having trouble understanding the focus of my research. As any anthropologist knows, going to “the field” always changes the parameters of research as the realities of life crash up against the theoretical models that one has prepared. People in Otaki with whom I spoke seemed fairly uninterested in discussing the national forests that dominate village lands and showed little interest in thinking through pathways towards greater local participation in governance.

Prior to coming to the field I had spent much of my intellectual energies thinking about environmental change and resource governance and management. My framework for thinking about these things was constructed using theories and conceptual devices commonly employed within in the field of environmental anthropology, which I detail below.

2 I had also spent time reading and thinking about the concept of resilience

(Gunderson and Holling. 2002), which has recently gained popularity in scientific studies of both natural and social systems (see, for example, Berkes, Colding, and Folke 2003,

Walker and Salt 2006). The concept has taken shape as part of a broader heuristic framework known as “resilience thinking,” as a way to think about how various systems develop, change, and sustain themselves. Resilience can be defined as, “the potential of a system to remain in a particular configuration and to maintain its feedbacks and functions, and involves the ability of the system to reorganize following disturbance- driven change” (Walker et al. 2002: 19). As a framework for thinking about the nature of systems, resilience thinking promises alternative ways of comprehending change and sustainability, which sets it apart from equilibrium-based models of the past.

I describe resilience thinking in more detail in chapter VI, but for now it suffices to say that I went to Otaki with my head full of such ideas and a spirit eager to help make things better. I did not, however, know what this meant exactly. Later on, a Belgian colleague, after hearing a presentation about my research during a seminar in Kyoto, suggested that my desire to help sounded, “so American.” I realize now how right he was; there remains among U.S. scholars, and perhaps among the general public as well, a fascination with correcting or repairing a state of imbalance between humans and the natural world; a desire to restore a balance, or, in Judeo-Christian parlance, to restore the garden, and in the process, perhaps, our own human nature.

After finishing my lunch I sat in the silence of the Seto River forest for some time, looking through the stands of trees while gnats bounced around my head. I moved to the

3 ground and, leaning my body into the sturdy trunk of a Japanese cypress, looked up to gaze at its full stature. The tree was remarkably straight, a result of human care in the early years of its existence, likely some two or three hundred years ago. Forestry work by humans has long been a force shaping the Otaki environment, contributing to the making of forests that stand squarely in the conceptual divide between “humanity” and “nature.”

This conceptual divide, and the work it does to produce both “human” and “nature” subjects in contemporary Japan, is a central focus of this dissertation.

HUMAN/NATURE

As exhibited by studies such as the 2005 Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005), the

Earth is well into the age of global environmental crises. Threats have been repeatedly identified and analyzed, and time and again solutions to these threats have been offered and debated. More than any other issue, global climate change has become, and continues to be, a central concern of scholars, activists, policymakers, politicians, and many others.

Yet, even with such an immense amount of attention, it remains heavily contested, largely unsettled, and far from “solved.” Perhaps it is because climate change remains largely

“unseen.” The public is presented with enormous amounts of data, some of it put into graphs, or even more spectacular displays, and yet the reality of climate change remains veiled and mysterious. Perhaps more than any other media, former U.S. vice president Al

Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth (2006), dramatically revealed to audiences worldwide the implications of global climate change. But still, actions (or inactions) to address even

4 this most significant of threats continue to be slow in coming. The threat, it seems, is still not “real” enough.

Given this, one might assume that a phenomenon like deforestation, which is much more visible--much more “seen”--would elicit greater response and more easily spark countermeasures. And indeed, in many cases, it has. In fact deforestation, coupled with “loss of biodiversity” have become buzzwords for sections of society concerned with the destruction of nature at the hands of humans. Through the work of a host of environmentalist organizations, conservation and protected areas have increased exponentially around the globe. West, et al (2006) suggest that over 105,000 protected areas exist in the world today, comprising about 11% of global land area. At the same time, these authors argue that the unintended consequences of conservation and the creation of protected areas are varied and profound; they include: changes in social practices, displacement and conflict, the ideological reinforcement of nature/culture dichotomies, and the rise of virtualism (representations of nature in images, film, and other media) as a mediating force in human-environment relations. In a similar vein, Putz and Redford (2009) suggest that forest conservation projects meant to maximize carbon sequestration (such as REDD and REDD+) are often culturally, socially, and economically detrimental to local human communities, as well as to local biodiversity.

They note, however, that despite this, “carbon-based conservation has received less scrutiny partially because it involves protecting forests and planting trees, activities that most people endorse” (400).

5 This begs the question: why, with our ever-increasing knowledge about environmental processes and the often negative impacts that many of our own actions have on those processes, do we continue to fail to adequately address the awesome eco- crises that loom today? Many social scientists, particularly environmental anthropologists, continue to focus on the capitalist mode of production as the primary driver of environmental degradation. Though the antecedents to such thinking can be found within the works of thinkers like George Perkins Marsh and his book Man and

Nature (1864), and even earlier, the links between capital accumulation and environmental abuses have been further developed in more recent years. The argument has perhaps been most fully articulated by James O’Connor (1998) in his theory of “the second contradiction” of capitalism, which “states that when individual capitals attempt to defend or restore profits by cutting or externalizing costs, the unintended effect is to reduce the “productivity” of the conditions of production, and hence to raise average costs” (245). Put differently, when single corporations attempt to increase profits through practices that are damaging to environments and/or human populations, the average, generalized costs of production increase. In other words, abusing the environment

(including humans) is bad for business overall, but tends to be a feature of the competition for accumulation among capitals.

Whiteside (2002) notes that a similar critique was part of early formulations within French ecologism, particularly those informed by activist and politician Brice

Lalonde. Along with other thinkers, he introduced the concept of “productivism” as:

. . .a social orientation toward ever-higher levels of material production. It consists of ideas and modes or organization (e.g., political centralization,

6 the creation of large-scale enterprises, increasingly fine distinctions in the division of labor) that contribute to this goal (Gouget 1985; Journès 1984: 240; Les Verts 1994: 51-56). Productivist societies aim to spur investment, to enlarge industry, and to innovate technologically. These economic strategies allow them to turn out more products” (37).

An excess of products, their critique continues, requires the creation of “false needs” in order to foster the conditions needed (mass consumption) to continue production. Thus, within productivist societies both humans and nature are abused for the purpose of accumulating capital through a continuous proliferation of production. Lalonde suggests that, “Ecologists want to construct a different type of society, centered much more on human relations, turning around the family, the clan, the neighborhood, the home and household. . . . We do not want to be moving all the time towards an abstract world that tears us away from ourselves, from our roots, from our nature” (quoted in Whiteside

2002: 39). This last part of Lalonde’s statement--“from our nature”--brings us to a central problematic within Western modes of thought concerning human-environment relations-- the ambiguous conceptual divide that remains stubbornly wedged between the categories of “human” and “nature.”

Early in my academic career, a professor posed to me the following question:

How can humans be simultaneously a part of nature and apart from nature (L.E. Sponsel, course syllabus, August 2005). At the time, I remember thinking that the question was overly-simplistic, almost to the point of being silly. However, as I have continued to engage and think about the central human/nature dichotomy it expresses, the question has taken on greater and greater profundity. The seeming simplicity of this question lies in the ease with which we are able to denote aspects of humans and humanity that fit neatly into

7 the broadly shared categories of “human” and “nature.” Human bodies, for example, are considered natural; they require food, they grow, they get sick, decay, and die. Similarly, the biological evolution of our species is categorized as a natural process. On the other hand, many of the hallmark traits of our humanness have come to express the ways in which humans exist apart from nature. Humans have the ability to recognize themselves within their broader environments, and to intentionally manipulate, change, and alter those environments, as well as imbue them with various meanings and significances.

Within what has become an increasingly widespread and dominant discourse, these features of humanity, along with others, place humans squarely outside of nature. Due to the ease with which we can list qualities that locate humans either within or without

“nature,” the question of the naturalness of humans is a deceptively simple one. Humans can be both a part of nature and apart from nature because they have varied qualities that locate them in both categories. However, this does not offer any satisfying insights into either the significance of culturally informed categories of “human” and “nature,” nor does it allow greater understanding concerning the existential status of humans.

Through detailed and comparative studies of humans in varied parts of the world, anthropologists have added much to debates centered on human/nature dichotomies.

Ultimately, however, the debate has become polarized and helped to reproduce itself through the formation of arguments based in either anthropocentric or ecocentric perspectives. Thus, we hear about “the noble savage” (Hames 2007); “primitive polluters” (Rambo 1985); or Homo devestans (Balée 1998), as if all of humanity (or at least significant parts) can be essentialized to configure to one or another understanding

8 of an assumed human/nature divide. My goal in this dissertation is not to contribute to either side of what I see as a false dichotomy, but rather to interrogate its relevance by investigating the ways that the categories of “human” and “nature” are produced and deployed in contemporary Japan. The central site of my investigation is the upland village of Otaki and the many forests that make up the landscape there.

THE SETTING

Otaki Village sits at the end of a narrow box canyon that runs through the southeastern slope of Ontake-san, a 3,067 meter volcanic mountain that has long been considered sacred by many in Japan. The canyon comprises a single watershed that is drained by the Otaki River, which flows eastwardly, converging with the larger Kiso River that drains the entire region and gives it its name. The Kiso Region occupies the Figure 1: Map of the study area. The Kiso Region and Otaki are in the lower left. southwestern corner of Nagano prefecture, which is located about 200 kilometers west of the Tokyo megalopolis in the center of Japan’s largest island, Honshu (Figure

1).

9 The Kiso Region is best known for its forests, which, since at least the 16th century, have garnered the attention of powerful elites. Throughout the Japanese archipelago’s history, desires for quality timber have helped shape political, economic, and social patterns and formations (Totman 1989), and forestlands in the Kiso Region are no exception. The majority have since the late 16th century been claimed and controlled-- to different extents--by individuals, clan groups, and/or institutions whose central formations were physically located outside of the area (Hirada 1999). Today, the majority of forests in the Kiso Region are designated as “national forests” (kokuyūrin), and are governed and managed by the Forestry Agency, which is part of the national governmentʻs Ministry of Agriculture, Forests, and Fisheries (nōrinsuisanshō). In Otaki roughly 87% of the forestlands that make up 97% of the village’s land area are designated as national forest. The implications of this situation are far-reaching and make up the bulk of the analysis presented in this dissertation. Citizens of Otaki lack formal legal recognition as stakeholders in forest governance and management and are thus at the whim of land-use decisions made within governmental institutions.

My wife and I moved to Otaki in April 2008. In preparation for my fieldwork we had been living with her family in Kyoto where I was enrolled as a research student at

Kyoto University. As a lover of mountains and rural places, I was excited by the move, but my wife, who within Japan had never lived anywhere outside of Kyoto, had some trepidation. On the day of our move, we exited the expressway at Nakatsugawa and eased on to national route 19. The sun shone brightly, warming the brisk mountain air. Route 19 is a narrow, mostly two lane highway that cuts north-south across the Nobi Plain and

10 winds through the foothills of the Japanese Alps connecting the city of Nagoya in the south to Nagano City in the north. For much of its length the road follows the same route as an old foot path known as the Nakasendo, meaning “path through the mountains.”

Throughout the Edo Period (1603-1867) the path was one of two connecting Kyoto to the capital of Edo (present-day Tokyo) and thus was used by merchants and nobility traveling between the two urban centers. Today the highway is used heavily by truck-drivers seeking to avoid expressway tolls, making route 19 unusually treacherous, particularly during the extreme colds of the winter months.

Nakatsugawa is the last city of any size that one encounters before heading into the vertical world of Japan’s central highlands. As we drove through we passed a regiment of brand-name stores, standard in any modern Japanese city: McDonalds, KFC,

Lawson’s, Mister Donut, Aoyama, Circle K, Gusto, 7-11. We also encountered a string of gas stations all with familiar names—Eneos, Cosmos, Idemitsu—some were large and new with multiple pumps, others, however, were small and run down with only a single pump. Many of the smaller gas stations (called gasorin sutando, “gasoline stand,” in

Japanese) appeared to be family owned. Later, during my many trips back and forth to

Kyoto, I would stop to fill up at these smaller stations and it would be a mixture of younger and older people--children or grandchildren along with grandmothers or grandfathers--who filled up my tank and washed my windows (self-serve is only recently appearing in Japan). However, over the two years I lived in Otaki I witnessed many of these smaller gasoline stands close for business, often after a larger, presumably non- family operated stand opened nearby. Though this seems like a fairly trivial phenomenon,

11 it reflects a larger set of processes that are currently restructuring many rural areas in

Japan. These include demographic shifts, with less and less young people living in rural areas; greater incursions of corporate capital, signified by the appearance of large chain stores; and widespread economic downturn accompanied by increasing unemployment.

The extent to which these processes are at work across Japan is a matter for specific inquiry; suffice it to say, each of these trends was apparent in Otaki during my time there.

If such a thing exists, Otaki might very well be described as a quintessential

Japanese upland village. Its land area is just under 311 square kilometers, most of which is forested. The 0.51 square kilometers of residential land in the village is spaced along a section of the Otaki Valley. A central area of houses, shops, and government buildings makes up six of Otaki’s ten recognized hamlets and occupies a small bluff on the valley’s north side. Most older homes were built using primarily local timber (mostly Japanese cypress), while newer ones tend to be made of imported timber, as is the case across the rest of the country. In the past, roofs were created by stacking thin slats of wood in an overlapping pattern to prevent water from entering. These slats were held in place by large stones placed on top of long strips of wood that ran across the length of the home, perpendicular to the smaller slats. A few of these roofs still exist in the village today, but for the most part they have been replaced by corrugated metal that (for a reason I was never able to discern) is almost always red in color. The roofs are broad and low pitched, consisting of only a single ridge in the middle, and the homes sit beneath them short and squat to avoid damage from the strong winds that often roar down through Otaki’s canyons and gullies from the slopes of the sacred mountain, Ontake-san.

12 My wife and I turned off of highway 19 at Motohashi bridge and crossed over the

Kiso River, which was swollen and churning with the grey waters of melting spring snow.

The road narrowed dramatically as we began our ascent towards Otaki. Before long we arrived at the base of Makio Dam and the hamlet of Futagomochi. The dam was built in the early 1960s as part of a larger infrastructural project to deliver water to communities south of the Kiso Region. It was a monumental event in the life of the village, one that remains significant in political, economic, social, and cultural ways (I discuss the dam and its significance in detail in chapter V). We followed a road leading up to the level of the dam’s reservoir, Ontake-ko, which was named after the sacred mountain. For the next few kilometers we drove above the reservoir, which was almost completely empty, revealing a desolate section of exposed rock and mud. I looked over at my wife who wore a look of consternation on her face.

Guiding our car through the final twists and turns above the reservoir, we arrived in the village proper. We wove our way through the narrow streets between homes and plots of soil waiting to be planted until we finally arrived at the village office. A small pile of forms--rental agreements and applications for utilities--awaited my signature.

Before leaving the office we asked if we could offer a quick greeting (aisatsu) to the mayor. Our hopes for a short, informal meeting were dashed when we were asked to take off our shoes and to have a seat in a small room adjoining the main offices. I had met the mayor during a visit the previous fall, and had explained to him my research interests and my desire to conduct fieldwork in Otaki. Before long the mayor entered the room, his dark skin and quaffed hair made him look more like an Arab sheik than a Japanese village

13 mayor, which my wife later joked about. He looked at us and laughed a bit, “I didn’t think you’d really come."1

When we arrived in Otaki, the village population was a little over 1,000. It has since dropped below 1,000 (it currently it stands at 9182); hardly a drop in the bucket for

Japan, a nation of nearly 130 million people. In this regard, Otaki is no different from the hundreds of other rural communities struggling to stay afloat in the modern Japanese landscape. Persistent population decline (kasoka) due to nation-wide trends of urban migration in the post-war era have led most rural communities in Japan to existential crisis. Coupled with rapidly aging populations, these communities struggle to provide basic care for elderly residents who now increasingly live in single or two-person households. In 2010, the segment of Otaki’s population over the age of sixty-five stood at

36.4%.3 Depopulation and the “graying” of upland communities is a trend that worries many in Japan, both inside and outside of rural areas. John Knight (2003b) notes that for some commentators the phenomenon entails a “national disaster,” in which, “the depopulation of Japan’s upland periphery represents the release of nature from human control, with potentially calamitous consequences” (108).

“Calamitous consequences” might refer to a variety of ecological transformations, such as increased wildlife pestilence, flooding, or forest conversion. However, it also refers to profound cultural anxieties over the transformation of natures produced over time in which the activities of humans were central processual components. The forests

1 本当に来るのを思わなかった。

2 Otaki Village homepage, http://www.vill.otaki.nagano.jp/index.html [Accessed 03/15/12]

3 Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries, http://www.machimura.maff.go.jp/machi/ map2/20/429/economy.html [Accessed 03/15/12]

14 that today blanket the Otaki Valley and the rest of the Kiso Region exist as expressions of ongoing sets of intertwined human and non-human processes, events, and activities. They are unique landscapes that defy, through the intricacies of the productive processes that have shaped them, human/nature dichotomies that continue to characterize them at various levels of society.

GOVERNED NATURE

Our use of the earth is what gives us life. Even at the moments of our births, it is precious air that animates our first wails, and we are immediately dependent on food, clothing, and shelter. This dependence is fundamental and unavoidable. And, through our use of environments, we continuously alter them. In seeking our livelihoods we transport, modify, and manipulate physical elements. Humans are not, of course, the only organisms that modify environments--ants build hills; elephants trample vegetation; beavers dam rivers. In other words, at a fundamental level there is nothing exceptionally human about the physical act of environmental alteration. What does differentiate us from other organisms in our uses of material environments, is the intentions and purposes with which we carry out these acts. As Marx notes:

A spider conducts operations which resemble those of the weaver, and a bee would put many a human architect to shame by the construction of its honeycomb cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is that the architect builds the cell in his mind before he constructs it in wax. At the end of every labour process, a result emerges which had already existed ideally. Man not only effects a change of form in the materials of nature; he also realizes [verwirklicht] his own purpose in those materials (Marx 1981: 284).

15 Humans thus incorporate the material environment into socio-cultural frames of thought and modes of action. Anthropologist John Bennett (1976) characterized processes of incorporation through time as an “ecological transition,” which continually create what he labeled “socionatural systems” (22). Similarly, the French thinker Serge Moscovici theorized a “human history of nature,” suggesting that:

If there is a natural history of biological and social man, it is because matter itself has evolved, and if there is a human history of nature, it is because man--by transforming himself--became able to reconstitute and extend that evolution. . . . [Human nature] resides in this process in which man appropriates and recovers, for himself as an agent, the history of the matter out of which he makes his history. . . . There is no need at all to discover and origin or a permanent end of this: the process alone is what is important (quoted in Whiteside 2002).

Following this line of reasoning, in this dissertation I begin with the basic premise that humans and their environments can be thought of as single phenomena (Balée 1998,

Balée 2006), and that the ways humans relate to and use the Earth tells us something of how they relate to and use each other (Bennett 1976: 311).

The incorporation of nature into human modes of thought, purpose, and action through histories of use and transformation of earthly matter raise fundamental questions about social organization concerning how to exploit, distribute, regulate, manage, conserve, and/or protect nature. We may broadly characterize these questions under the rubric of governance. Thus, at this point in the “human history of nature,” it is fair to say that natures are always always “governed.” However, it should be clarified that governance of nature is not limited only to the economic questions noted above; rather, it is also intimately linked to humans sense of their own humanity, to understandings of their connections to the world and the broader cosmos, and to their relationships with

16 each other and other organisms. In an expression of the world’s great cultural diversity, human societies have throughout history produced a multitude of answers to these questions; and thus a multitude of natures.

Within current manifestations of the capitalist mode of production and the relatively recent rise of neoliberal politics and policies, governance of nature is increasingly divorced from other domains of life and “takes place” (or, at least, is thought to) within the domains of Politics (i.e. transactions of power in designated spaces among designated actors) and Economics. Within this historically particular nature, economic transactions have become the basic modality of human interactions, with “natural resources” conjured as a way to evaluate the legitimacy and efficacy of interactions with the material environment. Science based environmental (natural resource) management has become a rubric through which these evaluations are made, and scientists increasingly serve as arbiters in the political-economics of nature (Igoe, Neves, and

Brockington 2010: 490). Despite the eco-crises that are linked, to greater and lesser degrees, to exploitative uses of nature within capitalist modes of production, an underlying belief remains that if humans can only create the proper institutions, design the appropriate economic formulas, and/or develop the right technologies that these crises will be averted, if not resolved.

Resilience thinking, mentioned previously, is the most recent iteration of this underlying belief of the abilities of humans to manage nature. And, while it was not initially conceived of as a program to investigate the possibilities of sustaining the

17 modern capitalist political-economy, I suggest, as have others (see, in particular, Walker and Cooper 2011), that it has now largely become co-opted for such a task.

Within ecology, what distinguishes resilience thinking from earlier equilibrium- based models is its centering of stochastic processes as fundamental components of ecosystems. The behavior of ecosystems (and all other systems) is described heuristically as an “adaptive cycle” consisting of four phases (described further in chapter VI). As systems move through these four phases they are more or less connected and thus more or less resilient to unforeseen agents or processes of change. As resilience thinking has progressed as an analytical framework the model of what are called “complex adaptive systems” has been extended beyond ecosystems to describe various other sorts of

“systems,” including economic, political, and social systems. In so doing, resilience thinkers have confronted difficulties, both practical and conceptual, with attempting to integrate--or “couple” as is the common parlance--different “systems.” Proponents of resilience thinking suggest that conceptualizations of “coupled human and environmental systems,” or “coupled human and natural systems,” as they are variously labeled, are something akin to the way that many “traditional societies” view their relationship to nature (Berkes and Folke 2002). However, in a piercing critique of resilience discourses,

Alf Hornborg (2009) argues that such a comparison is misleading in that most traditional societies do not have pre-defined “ecosystem” concepts to which they “couple” social components, but rather “[project] social concepts of reciprocity, harmony, conflict, and power onto relationships between humans and non-human species” (253). In other words, far from successfully integrating human societies with natural processes, resilience

18 thinkers tend to reify both while reinforcing the dominance of the former over the later through appeals to greater scientific management.

Because of this re-emphasis on the divide between humans and nature, and accompanying re-articulation of the promise of a sustainable (or resilient) capitalism through scientific environmental management, resilience thinking has become complicit, if not implicit, in affirmations of dominate global formations of power. If nature is imagined as something “out there” divorced from and independent of social processes, than human relations to nature are relegated only to the domains of governance and management where the task of humans is to orient their activities in ways that are sustainable. Within this imagining, the concept of “sustainability” immediately becomes political, as it raises profound questions of power and its locations in society. As

Hornborg (2009) notes:

There are definitely powerful social groups who have very much to gain – at least within the anticipated time-frame of their own lifetimes – from the current organization of global society. As Michel Foucault and many other social scientists have shown, it is precisely these social groups who tend to exert a primary influence over the way social processes are defined – and even questioned. The language devised to manage socio-ecological ‘problems’ viewed through such system-serving lenses will naturally constrain our capacity to actually ‘solve’ problems in the sense of changing the direction of societal development, which may well require fundamentally reorganizing social institutions. The language of policy and management thus tends to avoid questions of power, conflicts, and inequalities (238).

Per my earlier suggestion that all natures are “governed,” in this dissertation I place questions of power, conflict, and inequalities in the foreground, and argue that what is required in contemporary discussions of political ecology are re-

19 imaginings of nature that allow actors at different societal levels and in varied geographic places to assert the significances and meanings of their activities, identities, and relationships to the world around them. What, I ask, are the processes that allow or do not allow such re-imaginings to take place among highland communities in contemporary Japan; in what ways do re-imaginings occur; and to what effect?

THE POLITICS OF LANDSCAPE

Humans, of course, do not only use and alter their environments, they also dwell within them. Through their movements and activities, actors trace lines in the world and, through their sensual experiences, weave webs of meaning, internalizing external environments while simultaneously projecting their inner lives outward onto those same environments (Crumley and Marquardt 1990,

Smith 2003). These interactions between what are commonly conceptualized in modern, primarily Western discourses as the exclusive realms of “human” and

“nature,” create what Gregory Bateson (1973) labels an “ecology of mind,” and what Tim Ingold (2002) pushes further to call an “ecology of life.” He argues, in part, that:

Organic life, as I envisage it, is active rather than reactive, the creative unfolding of an entire field of relations within which beings emerge and take on the particular forms they do, each in relation to the others. Life, in this view, is not the realisation of pre-specified forms but the very process wherein forms are generated and held in place. Every being, as it is caught up in the process and carries it forward, arises as a singular center of awareness and agency: en enfoldment, at some particular nexus within it, of the generative potential that is life itself (19).

20 In this broad ecological sense, in which the various elements of an environment are conceptualized as coming into being, and thoroughly intertwining together, attempts to tease them apart, to delineate where one ends and the other begins, become problematic. It is from this basic sense that I begin to conceptualize

“landscapes.”

In my use of the terms, what distinguishes landscapes from environments, but simultaneously links them together, is human perception. It is through the perceptions of actors that the material forms of environments are ascribed meaning and significance, making them landscapes. This does not mean that landscapes are entirely ideational, nor that environments are entirely material--for me the terms are heuristic. In other words, landscapes are not simply in the heads of perceivers, and environments are not entirely without ideational qualities. In his study of political dimensions of landscape formation, Adam T. Smith (2003) draws on Lefebvre to note that landscapes are produced through social practice both ideationally and materially in ways that, “bind together spaces (as forms of delimiting physical experience), places (as geographic or built aesthetics that attach meanings to locations), and representations (as imagined cartographies of possible worlds)” (11). Conversely, landscapes work to direct, limit, and/or allow perceptions and, in turn, social praxis. This means that landscapes are inherently political in both their production and in their power to produce. Landscapes are subjectively created, but also create subjects. They are not, in Smith’s (2003)

21 words, “simply expressions of political organization; they are political order” (77).

A SENSE OF THE LANDSCAPE

Back in the Seto-gawa forest, it was time to descend. I moved among the large

Japanese cypress trees, touching each one as I passed, feeling its damp, rough bark against the palm of my hand. The solidness of the tree trunks was conveyed to the core of my being and I felt more and more rooted in the landscape.

Reaching a place where I could climb down off the ridge and into the gully below me, I began sidestepping, making sure to place my feet squarely into the soft dirt that gave way to my movements. I looked up at my clumsy foot prints and recalled part of a poem:

The creak of boots. Rabbit tracks, deer tracks, what do we know.4

People in Otaki told me that the trail leading through the Seto-gawa forest was well worn, so I could not miss it. I had, as I worked my way up the narrow gully that had initially looked like a trail, wondered about this, and by the top suspected that I had taken a wrong turn. This suspicion was confirmed as I reached the bottom of the gully and picked up the trail I had initially departed from. There I also saw clearly the form of a rotting bridge that I had not noticed on my ascent. The bridge, I knew from my conversations with local residents, had been part of a larger railroad network built by Japan’s imperial government

4 from “Pine Tree Tops” in Snyder, Gary, 1974. Turtle Island. New York: New Directions Books

22 in the early part of the 20th century for hauling timber out of the myriad canyons of the

Kiso Region. Seventy kilometers of track were laid in the Otaki Valley alone. Trains powered by American-made Baldwin engines had chugged along the tracks carrying loads of timber almost nonstop until operations were halted in 1976. Data from the Otaki

Forestry Office from 1951 to 1991 begins to paint a picture of the volume of timber harvested from the area in the post-war era when clear-cutting increased to meet the demands of reconstruction. Intensive cutting peaked in the mid-sixties when foreign imports of timber relieved pressure on domestic stocks (Figure 2).

Figure 2: Transition of felling amounts in national forest under Otaki Forestry Office jurisdiction (1000 sq. meters) (From Oura 1992).

200

180

160

140

120 Clear-cutting 100 Selective-cutting 80

60

40

20

0

1951 1953 1955 1957 1959 1961 1963 1965 1967 1969 1971 1973 1975 1977 1979 1981 1983 1985 1987 1989 1991

The trail I had missed earlier continued on the far side of the bridge. I picked it up and followed it further into the small canyon. Large sections of the trail were elevated and I began to detect traces of railroad ties. Soon, I came to another bridge, this one much more distinguishable. Large timbers had broken apart from the bridge’s horizontal grade and now lay criss crossed below like a set of large chopsticks. The wood was green with

23 moss that glowed in fluorescent hues in beams of sunlight. Bunches of ferns and other ground vegetation grew atop the bridge, reminiscent of a floral arrangement. Interspersed among the large Japanese cypress were areas of planted forest. Rusting signs hung from some of the trees denoting the acreage and year of planting. One sign indicated that 0.76 hectares of hinoki (Japanese cypress) had been planted the 16th year of the Shōwa era

(1941). Seto-gawa, I fully realized in that moment, was a human-made forest in the fullest sense of the word.

On maps and in publications produced by the CDFMO the area in which Seto- gawa is located is labeled as “natural forest” (tennenrin) and as “water and land conservation forest” (suidohozenrin). Tennen (nature), as opposed to shizen (another

Japanese word meaning nature), carries the connotation of being originally and fundamentally apart from humans. The term’s characters, ten, meaning “heaven”, and nen, meaning “the way of” combine together to express a Neo-Confucian understanding of natural processes as the totality of the universe (Thomas 2001: 33). Suidohozenrin, on the other hand, signifies this particular forest as a resource (shigen) that provides a function (kinō). Taken together these concepts offer a window into a perception of nature that has gained prominence firstly in institutions of forest governance and in secondly in society more generally.

It is difficult to find clear definitions of what constitutes tennenrin, which suggests that the concept is entrenched enough that it often goes unquestioned. In a general sense, the term refers to forests that, in contrast to plantation forests (jinkōrin, lit.

“artificial” or “human-made” forest), grow by natural processes. Such forests, therefore,

24 are thought of as containing a mixture of tree varieties that differ in age and structure.

However, according to institutional definitions this does not mean that tennenrin are wild or that they do not require management. For example, the website of a Tokyo area office of the Forestry Agency suggests that:

Forests in which everything grows through the power of nature, not everything is in good condition. If you leave them be, their functions will begin to wither away. That is why, if humans lend them a hand, their vitality will return. Even with a natural forest, human assistance is necessary in order for it to be healthy.5

Thus, combined with the concept of shigen, forests like the Seto-gawa are constructed within institutions as “natural resources” (tennen shigen) that require governance and management, and Japan’s Forestry Agency presents itself as an arm of the state with the knowledge, expertise, and capacity to do so.

I suggest that through this perceptual framework the Forestry Agency actively constructs what I label a “resource landscape,” which is then projected onto specific environments, such as the forests of Otaki. The resource landscape forwards a view of

Otaki forestlands that is “top-down” in two senses. First, socio-politically it is produced and deployed by institutions aligned with centralized structures of governmental power that maintain a sense of holding the exclusive capacity to manage forests. Second, the perspective employed in the resource landscape is positioned above, as an encompassing

“bird’s eye” view where the entirety of the landscape is made “visible” (Figure 3). The forest is, therefore, by necessity simplified to a degree that the Forestry Agency can begin

5 でも何もかも自然の力にまかせて育った森は、全部がぜんぶ元気な状態とは限りません。放っておくと森 林の働きはだんだん衰えてゆきます。そこで、人間がちょっと手を貸してあげると元を取り戻しす。たとえ 天然林であっても、いつも元気でいるためには人間の手助けが欠かせません。Kanto Forest Management Office website http://www.rinya.maff.go.jp/kanto/policy/business/raise.html [Accessed 03/21/12].

25 Figure 3: Forestry Agency map depicting forest categories in the Kiso Region. Source: Central District Forest Management Office (chūbu shinrin kanrikyoku) website http:// www.rinya.maff.go.jp/chubu/kiso/kannainogaikyou.html [Accessed 03/23/12] to “see” it despite its great complexities (Scott 1998: 11-22). Such simplification has the added effect of guarding institutional authority by mystifying those on the ground who struggle to decipher the complex “simplicity.”

Though perceptions of forests among local residents in Otaki vary greatly, I suggest that they share commonalities in that they are oriented horizontally and are marked by movements and intimacies between human and environment. In theorizing this “ground level” perceptual experience of Otaki forests, I draw on Ingold’s idea of a dwelling perspective, which he defines as a perspective that situates actors within the

26 context of active engagement with their surroundings (Ingold 2002: 5). Key to this perspective is taking account of the experiences of moving through landscapes. As anyone who has walked in a forest knows, the experience is fundamentally different from, say, flying over the same forest in an airplane or viewing the same forest in a satellite image. This experiential distinction is so commonsensical that it may not even seem worthwhile making. And yet, it is a distinction that is consistently made in policy decisions regarding environmental management, and one that constantly shapes our perceptions of nature.

In this sense, there is always a politics at work in landscapes. I contemporary

Japan, I argue that forest landscapes are produced through processes of negotiation at different scales and in varying contexts. Accordingly, I suggest that the within these negotiations the movements of actors through environments are potentially resistive because of their originality and unexpectedness. Whether these movements gain voice and legitimacy within larger nature imaginaries depends on the qualities of the networks in which they emerge and their capacity to affect collectivity. Sadly, it is often the case that localized movements lack this capacity, and thus go largely unnoticed. So, another set of questions is: what are the processes that work to maintain the hegemony of the resource landscape in Otaki; and in what ways do local actors resist and/or accept these processes?

27 SPECTACLES OF NATURE

Within the global flows of late capitalism nature is as much something imagined, created, and consumed in disparate locales as something located in specific material environments. Images of nature flow across the globe in streams of electrons that circulate through networks of actors and institutions, effervescing in the pale blue glow of millions of televisions, movie screens, cell phones, computers, tablets, and other devices, as well as appearing in the pages of newspapers, magazines, books, and other media.

Inside these electronically woven webs, actors interact with spectacular natures that increasingly play a role in mediating their relationships with material environments (Igoe

2010: 380).

For many, those things that cannot be found in what are often thought of as

“nature-poor” urban and peri-urban areas can be contacted, experienced, and consumed through the use of images that create virtual connections between “humans” and

“nature” (incidentally, both categories summoned in the production-consumption process). While corporations use spectacular natures to convey knowledge and sell commodities, consumers draw on these spectacles to assuage feelings of angst, alienation, and/or dislocation. Meanwhile, governments too draw on and even produce their own images of nature that can be simplified or otherwise manipulated to bolster claims of legitimacy over physical environments that are complex and chaotic (Scott 1998).

Through these spectacles of nature, the long hypothesized contradictions of economic growth and environmental destruction under the capitalist mode of production go more and more unseen. Instead, human/environment interactions are increasingly mediated by

28 fetishized natures, which are consumed and reproduced to fulfill desires for engagement with a seemingly separate “natural” world.

In the current work I employ the concept of spectacle in two senses. The first, which I refer to as “the Spectacle” describes a now globalized set of social relationships rooted in a mode of production aimed at the accumulation of capital, reinforced by a legitimizing worldview that has itself emerged from it. However, the Spectacle is more than the sum of its parts; its ideational qualities also invade and shape the material world.

Guy Debord, who theorizes the Spectacle in his monograph, Society of the Spectacle

(1994), suggests that:

The spectacle, grasped in its totality, is both the result and the project of the existing mode of production. It is not a supplement to the real world, an additional decoration. It is the heart of the unrealism of the real society. In all its specific forms, as information or propaganda, as advertisement or direct entertainment consumption, the spectacle is the present model of socially dominant life (Paragraph 6).

In this broad sense, the Spectacle is in congruence with the “dream-filled sleep” of capitalism theorized by Walter Benjamin (Hanssen 2006: 207-211).

The second sense of spectacle that I use is linked to the first; it involves specific productions and deployments of images and discourses that, I argue, both draw meaning from and work to bolster the broader global Spectacle. In the current work, I look at spectacles of forest nature, their institutional production, and their deployment within contemporary Japanese society. I locate these productions primarily in the institutional assemblage of national forest governance in modern Japan, which is centered in the national Forestry Agency. Here, my central argument is that within institutions of forest governance in Japan, spectacles of forest nature are produced and deployed in order to

29 obfuscate gaps in knowledge and construct “forests” and associated frameworks of governance that convey both plausibility and authority. These deployments occur through a variety of media, including: internet websites, e-mail magazines, as well as pamphlets , brochures, and other publications.

In particular, I suggest that the work of nature spectacles is accomplished largely through appeals to powerful symbols of the Japanese nation (kokka) and the conceptual rationale of resources (shigen). National forests (kokuyūrin) are constructed as kokumin- no-mori (national citizens’ forests) or minna-no-mori (everyone’s forests), images that draw on strong senses of national identity propagated throughout post-war Japanese society (Slater 2011). What is more, as I explain in chapter II, Japanese national identities are often rooted in rural/forested places, mythic “hometowns” (furusato) where the heart

(kokoro) of Japan is imagined to reside (Ivy 1995, Yano 2002). Spectacles of national forests, therefore, also operate to reproduce and reinforce subjectivities of national citizens by linking them to lands symbolically imbued with notions of “Japaneseness.”

Interestingly, in a study of the development of the resource concept in Japan, Jin

Sato (2007) notes early uses of the concept within military settings and the colonial projects of Japan’s imperial government, who sought to increase the land-base of their

“resource-poor” nation. He concludes that prior to World War II resources were sought to strengthen the military and the nation and that, “the resource concept was brought about by awareness of the “finiteness” and shortage of means, notions that were both attached to national, not local, interests” (156). However, after the war and Japan’s turn to democratic principles, ““resource” was suddenly assigned a symbolic meaning as a

30 means to serve the people” (158). In other words, as noted above, in modern iterations of forest nature spectacles, resources are presented as “national,” meaning that they simultaneously belong to everyone and to no one.

In both of these senses, forests in modern Japan have become spectacular. In the broader sense of the Spectacle of late capitalism, what Anna Tsing (2005) has labeled the economy of appearances, in which “Dramatic performance is the prerequisite of [. . .] economic activity” (57), Japan’s forests (like most global biological material) are constructed as “resources” with value ascribed through the potential environmental services they possess (most recently, carbon sequestration). This has gone a long way in helping to support the image of Japan as midori-no-rettō (the green archipelago), an

“ecological success story” (Diamond 2005: 277-308) and environmentally friendly nation

(Kalland 2002: 146) that “has already solved its own domestic environmental problems” (Taylor 1999: 541). The image, of course, carries a certain clout in realms of geo-politics (Taylor 1999). Within Japan, spectacles of forest nature are symbolically linked to the welfare of the nation and its citizenry. Despite the fact that Japan now imports 80% of timber consumed in the country (Sato 2007: 152, footnote 3), national forests, which make up 20% of Japan’s total land area, are fetishized as kuni-no-zaisan

(national treasures) that must be protected and managed by the government. Communities located within national forests, like Otaki, and the people who dwell there become erasures within these spectacles of nature. Their ways of life and their visions of forests are largely unseen in contemporary Japan’s broader spectacles of nature and society, and

31 their continuing decline and even extinction are, though lamented, recognized as adverse effects of economic and social modernization.

NOTES ON APPROACH AND METHODOLOGY

The prevalence of national forest land in the Kiso Region, and Otaki in particular, sets the areas apart from others in Japan, where the majority of forestlands are privately or communally owned. Otaki itself is entirely surrounded within national forests, which makes it an appropriate venue for exploring questions of national forest governance and relations between local communities and the state.

Beginning in April 2008 I lived and conducted fieldwork in Otaki for a period of twenty-four months. I went to the village with a plan to study community participation in forest resource governance. However, it became apparent early on that community members participated little in the governance of national forests. Therefore, as is often the case, the questions to which I sought answers changed. I began to wonder why local residents do not or cannot actively participate in the governance of the forestlands within which they live. This question was sparked by a conversation I had with two women in the first week of my fieldwork.

I was taking my first walk around Otaki and introducing myself to any and all people I encountered. I came across the two women at rest on a raised berm of dirt dividing a pair of dry fields. The day was pleasantly warm and many of the older

(meaning in their sixties or seventies) residents of the village were at work preparing their fields for planting. After introducing myself to the women I attempted to explain my

32 research and the main question I sought to answer: why don’t village residents have any input over the governance and management of the national forests that surround them?

The women conferred with each other and exchanged perplexed looks before reaching a consensus that it was a difficult question. The older of the two explained that because the forests belong to the government (kuni no mono) there was no way for villagers to have control. People in Otaki used to work in the forests cutting timber, she explained, but suggested that there was not much connection to peoples’ lives now. Looking back on my fieldnotes for that day the following sentences stood out:

Everyone I talked to also had little thought about forests here in Otaki. I suppose because there is such a long history of not being able to use forests that no one considers it an option really.

The central question that I address in this dissertation arose our of these initial conversations with village residents, which is: what are the processes by which forests in

Japan are produced as “national forests” and what implications do these have for the lives and lifeworlds of actors dwelling within forest landscapes?

Accordingly, my selection of methods was based on a desire to comprehend the

Otaki landscape as perceived, experienced, and constructed in two different contexts: one institution-based and the other community-based. The analysis I present of institutional productions of forest nature spectacles comes mainly from investigations of digital and print media published by the Forest Agency, its regional office, the chubu-shinrin-kanri- kyoku or Central District Forest Management Office (CDFMO)6, as well as other offices.

6 This office was established in 1999 through the amalgamation of various local forest offices known as eirin-sho.

33 However, this is supplemented by interviews and informal conversations with officials from the CDFMO and its field office in Otaki.

Another aim of the present study is to counter dominant images and discourses that tend towards essentialized and homogenized visions of Japanese forests and Japanese people, by giving voice and making “visible” the unique culture and landscape of the

Otaki Valley. Much of this dissertation, therefore, consists of ethnographic accounts of life in the village of Otaki, collected through interviews and participant observation.

I began my fieldwork with a series of semi-structured interviews in order to identify common themes concerning life in Otaki and perceptions of the landscape. Thus, my questions (see Appendix A) meant to elicit responses from participants concerning feelings about the environment, as well as positive and negative aspects about living in

Otaki. Interviews lasted from around thirty to sixty minutes and took place mainly at the homes of participants. In total I conducted fifteen interviews. Early interviewees were purposively selected from among acquaintances based on their willingness to participate.

However, selection of subsequent interviewees was done through “snowball” sampling based on recommendations and introductions from initial interviewees. One key informant in particular, a well-respected lifetime resident and member of the village council, was instrumental in helping me to select appropriate interview participants.

While in the field I transcribed five interviews in their entirety and, using Nvivo 7 software, coded them to identify common themes. These common themes became the basis for a generalized model of the Otaki landscape as experienced by local residents.

While recognizing the shortcomings of such a generalization in its ability to represent the

34 complexities of any given landscape, my purpose in constructing it was to guide the latter half of my fieldwork. In other words, the model served simply as a tool to guide further ethnographic inquiry. I presented this model to interviewees at two separate group discussions. At times the various themes that had emerged from early interviews sparked debate, but also fostered agreement, which added both depth and clarification.

In addition to interviews and group discussions, three key informants also produced hand-drawn maps of Otaki landscapes, which added a visual component to my analysis. My instructions for the maps were intentionally vague, so as not to hinder the creative process of informants. Later, elements from the hand-drawn maps were transferred to a larger topographic map. On this “master” map I also kept track of trails and points of significance that I visited along with village residents during the course of my fieldwork. During group discussions I asked collaborators to verify and add information to the map. My intention in using maps was not to produce a definitive community map, nor a “counter-map,” which are practices that have been shown to produce “ironic effects” (see Chapin, Lamb, and Threlkeld 2005, Fox et al. 2005 ), but rather to allow opportunities for informants to think about and talk about the landscape and to convey to me and to one another their own senses of its significance and importance.

The majority of my time and efforts in Otaki were spent engaged in participant observation. This entailed participation in a variety of activities, from learning to cook local culinary specialities to walking the faint outlines of old mountain trails, but it was the act of observing that held these disparate activities together as modes of study. With

35 the themes developed in early interviews as points of reference, through my observations

I noted similarities, differences, contradictions, and commonalities. My intention for using a “grounded” approach was for this research to be inductive; never did I intentionally seek to “cram” something I observed into a preconceived theoretical framework or model (though, of course, my own biases influenced my perceptions). To the extent possible, I allowed my knowledge and experiences to be shaped and whittled away like ice in the early spring flows of an Otaki stream. Finally, in addition to these primary sources, I also consulted secondary sources, in both Japanese and English, to inform historical accounts of the Otaki landscape. I also examined statistical data primarily from the rinya-cho (Forest Agency), which prior to 1945 was the teishitsu- rinya-kyoku (Imperial Forestry Office).

OVERVIEW OF THE DISSERTATION

In order to give an account of the work of forest nature spectacles in modern Japan I tack back and forth between different contexts and mediums of experience. Specifically, I switch between analyses of media produced within the primary institutions of forest governance in the Kiso Region (the CDFMO and its parent organization, the Forestry

Agency) and the thoughts and experiences of Otaki residents gathered through ethnographic research. It is my hope that by doing this the reader will get a sense of the various loci of negotiation over forest natures that exist in contemporary Japan.

I begin, in chapter II, by offering a generalized account of the cultural meanings that forests hold within Japan. The contemporary production of forest natures is heavily

36 informed by these broader meanings, and thus a accounting of them is important for understanding the ways in which notions of nature, citizenship, and the nation coalesce to create Japanese forests.

I follow this in chapter III with an account of the use of spectacles in the creation of governable “forest natures.” In particular, I trace the production of nature as “natural resource” within CDFMO and Forestry Agency publications and consider conceptual linkages to ideas of the nation and national citizens. I argue that these forest nature spectacles work to enforce a human/nature separation in which localized relations between forest landscapes and human actors are obfuscated, legitimizing institutional conceptions of homogenous national resources and making forests “unseen” at various levels.

I shift my focus in chapter IV to the local level and offer a grounded account of these “unseen forests.” Using walking and movement as both methodological tools and conceptual devices I explore forests in Otaki as sites of embodied experience where human relations, labor, and community are given meanings that are expressed within and through local landscapes. Moreover, I suggest that these forest landscapes are enlivened through emotive experiences that emerge through movements of human bodies in ways that are quietly resistive to higher level conceptualizations of national forests represented in spectacular forms, such as official maps and publications.

In chapter V I address the development of water resources in Otaki through dam- building and other infrastructural projects, and argue that these entail a further extension of the resource landscape. Backed by ideologies of modernization and democratization, I

37 suggest that conceptualizations of “water resources” have worked alongside monumental transformations of the physical environment to reconfigure Otaki forest landscapes, simultaneously suturing them to the national body and marginalizing them as peripheries.

I conclude that, through these material and ideational reconfigurations, forests are distanced from local actors who feel increasingly alienated from landscapes. This results in the emergence of new subjectivities by which actors see themselves as national citizens, disconnected (like their urban counterparts) from nature and obliged to participate in urban-centered modes of production to the detriment of local landscapes and communities.

My focus in chapter VI are acts of revelation of and resistance to spectacles of forest nature and their related subjectivities at the local level in Otaki. My intention is not to suggest that resistance is ever a completed project, but rather to illuminate the unsettled nature of forest politics in Otaki today. Specifically, I look at the roles that political and economic crises have played in casting critical lights on contemporary forms of forest governance. Questions concerning the value of landscapes and how these are defined, I suggest, remain unsettled in Otaki. Residents continue, through their movements in and perceptual experiences of landscapes, to draw forth and emphasize relationships, meanings, and significances that often run counter to the higher level conceptions and discourses of forest nature as national resource. I conclude by arguing that these articulations between actors and landscapes continually offer frictions through which alternative natures might emerge.

38 I conclude in chapter VII with a call for a new politics of nature, both in Japan and elsewhere, that calls into question what have become globally ubiquitous, seemingly settled ideas of Nature as non-human resource amenable to scientific management.

Nature conceived as such, I argue, has been produced through the use of spectacles that gain their logic from and help to reinforce the Spectacle of capitalism that has captured humankind’s collective imagination for at least the last three centuries. I conclude that, as evidenced by the contested forests of Otaki, our desires to govern, manage, repair, and/or restore natural environments are intimately intertwined with our perceptions of those environments and that attempts to construct natures that are amenable to those desires always leave large parts “unseen.” I end by looking at reverence as a virtue that is developed through affective experiences of dwelling; one that holds the potential to create alternative natures through new forms of collectivity.

39 CHAPTER II Meanings of Forests in Japan

Japan is known as the “green archipelago” (midori no rettō) because of the lush forests that cover roughly two-thirds of its land. And yet, for much of the population, forests are not a part of everyday life; they are little contacted, and presumably little thought about.

Forests in Japan remain the distant horizon of contemporary life, the blue hillsides that linger in the far-away hazes of evening. Due to an uneven topography, the majority of forestland in Japan is located on the often steep slopes of hills or mountains. Thus, the correlation between forest and mountain is strong and often the term yama, is used to refer to both mountain and forest (Knight 2003c: 29). Though they are by no means devoid of human activity, in general terms yama are not recognized as places of long- term human occupation. They stand in contrast to the village (sato), an increasingly reified concept that can refer to settlements of any size, including metropolises. Sato is the nexus of social life, human endeavor, cultural achievement, political power, and economic activity. Yama, in contrast, are strongly associated with nature (shizen or tennen), and in this regard they are akin to the sea. They are deep and vast, teeming with life that humans can benefit from, but are also places of magic and mystery, the realms of gods and thus of potential danger. Not all may enter freely. In the past, the task was often left to specialists--foresters, hunters, or ascetics--who possessed the knowledge required to navigate the terrain. Today, modern hiking and climbing technology means that both forests and mountains are accessible to many more people, and yet anxieties about the potential dangers therein still abound.

40 My own first direct experiences with Japanese forests came while working as an

English teacher near the city of Matsumoto in Nagano prefecture. The area is commonly referred to as “the roof of Japan” (nihon no yane) or the “Tibet of Japan” (nihon no chibetto) because of the three central mountain ranges that converge there--the Hida,

Kiso, and Akaishi (today known as the North, Central, and South Alps, respectively).

During those first two years in Nagano my weekends were often spent in the foothills and peaks of the Hida range, which rise steeply up from the floor of the Azumino basin.

There, I visited many of the temples and shrines that sit at the edge of the mountain forests, helping to define a spiritual-ecological boundary between the wild (yasei) and uncultivated (mikōsaku) forest and the cultivated (kōsaku) village.

These early experiences in the trees taught me that not all forests in Japan are

“uncultivated.” Early on, I was fascinated by the trees I encountered during walks in the hills and mountains of the Azumino plain. They stood straight and seemingly uniform, and reminded me of the custom in Japanese cities of queuing to board trains. Perhaps, I wondered, the trees were simply like the people. I could not have been more wrong. The trees had, I learned later, in fact been cultivated. First, seedlings had been planted in great numbers, which, according to one forester I talked with, to encourage greater competition. Later, when the seedlings had gotten a bit taller, they were thinned to create enough space for them to grow. When the trees got bigger, they were carefully pruned and trimmed, sculpted to have long, straight trunks with a small crown of green. In Japan, producing a good tree, like producing a good person, I now realize, requires effort

(doryoku).

41 Cultivation means that the categories of forest and village (nature and culture) are not mutually exclusive, nor are the boundaries between them always clearly delineated

(Kalland 1995). Moreover, at a national level the meaning and significance of forests is relational and depends on proximity. “For the majority of the Japanese population,”

Knight notes, “the yama appears a distant place, essentially beyond the sphere of human habitation. But the people who actually live in upland areas see the mountain forest in a more differentiated way” (2003c: 30). What he alludes to are the distinctions that upland people tend to make between forests located near habitation sites (often referred to as satoyama) and forest located deeper, or higher, in the mountains, away from settlements

(called okuyama). I discuss both of these concepts in more detail later, but for now it suffices to note that in Japan a perceptual difference tends to exist between rural and urban populations in regards to forests.

Understanding how forests are perceived, and the meanings they hold for

Japanese requires looking at them as spaces produced within larger networks of political, economic, and social relations. Specifically, it is useful to look at the production of forest spaces alongside the production of what is referred to as “Japan.” In other words, an ideological construct that references a topography, a population, a set of institutions, a corpus of beliefs and customs, and an identity. This reading of “Japan” incorporates

Marilyn Ivy’s (1995) idea of the “national-cultural” imaginary, in which her aim is to

“indicate the inextricable linkage of culture with the idea of the nation, such that it is misleading to talk about Japanese “culture” without immediately thinking of the question of the nation” (3-4). However, within this linkage of culture and nation I also want to

42 implicate, and emphasize, the use of environments as solid “places” to stake down ideological frames. French theorist Henri Lefebvre asks, "What is an ideology without a space to which it refers, a space which it describes, whose vocabulary and links it makes use of, and whose code it embodies" (1991: 44). What, I want to ask, is the ideology that references forests in Japan? What do forests mean; and what does it mean that they mean that?

In this chapter I take up these questions and examine meanings that forests hold in the national imaginary of contemporary Japan. I do not pretend to speak for every

Japanese, nor do I suggest that my account fits the thinking of every, or even most,

Japanese. Rather, I aim to paint broadly a picture of forests as they are presented within nationalized discourses that appear to speak on behalf of all Japanese and to convey something inherently “Japanese.” In addition, my intent is not to speak here in any ontological sense about forests as physical environments, though these will be referenced; rather, my focus is on the dominant and sometimes shared significances and meanings that forests hold in Japan. My aim in outlining common lines of thought concerning forests and the ways that they come together to form a broad conceptual palette is to explore, in later chapters, the ways in which institutions like the Forestry Agency are able to access this palette to paint their own visions of forests.

GEOGRAPHY OF FORESTS

In a geographical sense, forests occupy the central parts of Japanese communities imagined at various scales. At local and regional scales, forests, which are often located

43 on hills or mountains, seem to float like islands in the center of seas of rice paddies and urban sprawl. At a national scale as well, it is the spine of forested mountains, which runs north to south on the main island of Honshu and makes up the Japan Alps (nihon arupusu), that are considered the geographic center of the country. Thus, forests in Japan might be considered the “interior” (uchi) of a particular region, or of the nation as a whole. In addition to interior spaces, like one’s home, the term uchi is also used to express close kin and social relationships, including family, friends, co-workers, and class-mates. Thus, in their uchi positioning, Japan’s forests take on a certain power and mystique; they are the inner sanctuaries of the nation, where Japanese traditions--perhaps even an ethos--are rooted. “In a forest,” suggests philosopher of aesthetics Masahiro

Hamashita, “we generally experience something that leads us to an original memory of our childhood home” (2005: 206).

Somewhat paradoxically, as uchi, forests also occupy the oku (back) of geographical imaginaries; a positioning that carries both good and bad connotations.

People in Otaki, for example, often spoke of their village as being yamaoku (deep in the mountains, or in the back of the mountains); “konna yama oku ni kite kurete arigatai” (I’m thankful that you’ve come all the way to the deep mountains), was a phrase I often heard offered to guests. This was a way of self-effacing, as yamaoku might also be translated as “the sticks” or the “the boonies;” marginalized, out-of-the-way places where little goes on. Taken as such, upland communities in Japan are seen as being estranged, or perhaps the better word is “untouched,” from the domains of modernity, cosmopolitanism, and high culture. Otaki and the Kiso Region, for example, are centrally

44 located between the old capital of Kyoto, now considered the heart of Japanese high culture, and Tokyo, the present-day capital and center of all things modern. In fact, during the Edo Period (1600-1868) the Kiso Region was part of the Nakasendo (path through the mountains), which was one of two major roads connecting Kyoto to Tokyo (then called

Edo). In the past, its high, forested mountains made the Kiso Region a place between; a space travelled through to reach destinations where economy, society, culture, and other things of import were to be found. Viewed as “oku,” Japanese forests are peripheral spaces in relation to lowland centers of human endeavor (i.e. urban areas), which serve as hubs of high culture, cosmopolitanism, and economic and political activity.

In an interesting contradiction of meanings, forests in Japan are both centers and peripheries; focal points, but also margins; out-of-the-way inner spaces that make up the back of the nation. Through these conceptual juxtapositions, forests take on qualities of sacrosanctity. In particular, within Japanese religions traditions, forests and mountains are considered the realms of gods, spirits, and buddhas. Their sacred spaces are demarcated by shrines and temples that both mark and maintain spiritual boundaries apart from the

“dusty world” of human activity (marked by money, work, desire, and competition), which prevents people from recognizing their true natures and achieving satori

(enlightenment). Oku spaces tend to be private, unseen, and somewhat peripheral to social life, which means that they are also pure, sacred, and true. Among Shinto shrines, for example, including those that dot the Otaki landscape, those located in the oku are considered closest to the gods and thus the most powerful. On mountains, the oku corresponds to higher elevations. For example, on Ontake-san, the volcanic mountain that

45 dominates the Otaki landscape, oku shrines are located on or near the summit. Even within individual shrines, the god or gods reside in the oku. Indeed, because many shrines are located at the base of forested mountains and often include a sacred grove, the forest itself is thought of as the shrine’s true oku (Domenig 1997). In an article examining landscapes as doctrinal representations in Japan, Matsuoka Hideaki (2005) notes philosopher Tada Michitarō’s idea of “the feeling of getting to the inner part” (322) to argue that movements into interior spaces is a fundamental feature of Japanese sacred places. Due to their oku status, in Japan forests take on meaning as places apart from the everyday. They are, in Knight’s words, “distant place[s], essentially beyond the sphere of human habitation” (2003c: 30).

Oku is, however, relative. When viewed from Tokyo, an entire prefecture, like

Nagano, which is heavily forested, might be referred to as oku. However, when viewed from a village that sits on the edge of a forested area, it is likely that only forest higher up on a mountain would be referred to as oku. This is because the forests near villages or towns are often privately owned or owned communally by local governments. Though the practice is decreasing now as many upland communities continue to depopulate and age, in the past forests near settlements were maintained through a variety of silviculture techniques so that they could be used for lumber, firewood, cultivating mushrooms, and so on. At a local level, forests of this kind, which bear the marks of human cultivation, tend not to be referred to as oku. They act, both literally and figuratively, as a buffer between the worlds of nature (deep, uncultivated forest) and culture (the village).

Compared to unmanaged forests, which can often be quite overgrown and dark, managed

46 forests are usually open, airy, and full of light. For the most part, these managed forests in the “front” (mae or temae) of the mountains are where humans encounter forest “nature.”

Thus, the aesthetic of forests in Japan is very much tied to human cultivation and the village itself.

In Japan, conceptual distancing from forests (whether imagined as physical or spiritual) means that forests are also thought of as non-capitalist spaces. In other words, either they are too far away to be, or too sacred to be, utilized for capital gain. And, with the drop in domestic timber prices in Japan since the 1960s, along with a decline in

forestry work, the physical realities of forests tend

to add legitimacy to this line of thinking. There is,

as historian Thomas R.H. Havens describes it, a

“new forest culture,” in which, “public woodlands

should benefit the people, not merely extractive

industries” (2011: 163). Such thinking has, in

recent years, led some institutions, most notably

the national Forestry Agency, to begin focusing

more specifically on the public benefits of forests

in Japan. In Forestry Agency publications, for

example, forests are now rized as minna no mori

(Everyone’s forests) (Figure 4). Figure 4: CDFMO brochure with the phrase minna no mori/kokuyūrin (everyoneʻs forests/national forests) What this suggests is a shift in the meanings (Chūbu shinrin kanri kyoku (Central District Forest Management Office)) of forests that has accompanied Japan’s larger

47 demographic shift, during the post-war era, to densely populated urban centers.

In Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord (1994) argues that urbanism entails the seizure and reworking of human and natural environments to meet the needs of capitalism.

Harkening back to Lefebrve’s question posed earlier, capitalism requires space in which it can ideologically stake itself down. If, under capitalism, the city is where history is created, and where freedom and the promises of modernity are rooted, than rural communities and upland environments, including forests, must be subdued and made sovereign to this vision. Debord describes this process as the reemergence of “the rural” within the growth of state bureaucracy in which “apathy” must be historically manufactured and the “natural ignorance” of the population (of their ability for independent action) replaced by spectacle. He writes that:

The “new towns” of the technological pseudo-peasantry clearly inscribe on the landscape their rupture with the historical time on which they are built; their motto could be: “On this spot nothing will ever happen, and nothing ever has.” It is obviously because history, which must be liberated in the cities, has not yet been liberated, that the forces of historical absence begin to decompose their own exclusive landscape” (Paragraph 177 [emphasis in original]).

In Japan, the subduing of the non-urban through its construction as a place where

“nothing will ever happen” occurs largely through the lens of nostalgia (kaikyū) and its intimate intermingling with nationalism and the production of a national-culture. Forests, along with the rest of the rural, become part of “a Japan that is kept on the verge of vanishing, stable yet endangered” (Ivy 1995: 65). As with other aspects of the rural, the forest, as that which is socially, politically, and economically oku--back and therefore

48 peripheral--is made culturally central; it is manufactured as being uchi, that which is inner and closest to home--an enduring space of rootedness.

FORESTS AND THE NATION

On April 20, 2011, just a few weeks after a massive earthquake and tsunami had wreaked havoc on the east coast of Japanʻs Tohoku region, The New York Times (2011) published an article about a stone tablet that stands in a forested hillside in the small village of Aneyoshi. Written on this and the many other stone tablets located along the

Tohoku coast, explains reporter Martin Fackler, are warnings concerning the dangers of tsunamis. On the stone in Aneyoshi, for example, are carved words of caution: “Do not build your homes below this point!” All eleven households in the village, Fackler notes, remained out of reach of the tsunami waves, which stopped some 300 feet below the stone. “Hundreds of so-called tsunami stones,” he writes, “dot the coast of Japan, silent testimony to the past destruction that these lethal waves have frequented upon this earthquake-prone nation.” However, noting that many communities were not as fortunate as Aneyoshi, he goes on to note that, “[. . .] modern Japan, confident that advanced technology and higher seawalls would protect vulnerable areas, came to forget or ignore these ancient warnings, dooming it to repeat bitter experiences when the recent tsunami struck.”

The tragic events that began unfolding on March 11, 2011 have jarred the people of Japan, leaving many wondering, yet again, about their relationships to the land, to the sea, to the nation, to technology, and to one another. Disasters tend to have such effects,

49 and Japan is no stranger to disasters. In fact, the ability to persevere (gaman) has been cited as a central feature of a Japanese ethos, said to be shaped in large part by its unique environment. Julia Adeney Thomas (2001) cites the 1937 edict, Kokusai no hongi

(Cardinal Principles of the National Polity), published by Japan’s Ministry of Eduction, which she describes as an “odd bricolage of ultranationalist propaganda” (179), as a pivotal document in the state’s attempts to explicate a national character through reference to the environment. The author of the document admits, Thomas notes, that

“natural calamities (shizen no saika) occur in Japan, but the Japanese people respond to such disasters with fortitude, never with fear or despair. Indeed, the people repay nature’s destructive rampages with ever-greater devotion, unlike “the West,” which mythologizes its clashes with nature” (180). Here in the United States, we have heard over and over that when the earthquake hit on March 11, many fled immediately to high ground as they had learned to do. As the black waves roared in from the ocean, people watched from the safety of the forests, perhaps even standing beside the “ancient” stones that warned of nature’s potential fury, as buildings, boats, cars, vending machines, electric poles, shopping carts, and postal boxes churned and swelled alongside the bodies of those who either did not or could not heed the warnings. When the waters subsided, the land had been scrubbed, leaving flat plains of rubble--a long, dreary mosaic of modern life set in the dark muck left by the tsunami. The uchi of the forested mountains--the yama-- however, remained.

What came into focused contrast to the destruction of March 11, most immediately in the Tohoku region where the earthquake struck, but also nationwide as

50 images of the disaster almost instantaneously filled the screens of TVs, computers, and cell phones, were the forested highlands of the interior, which remained unscathed above the utter devastation of lowland coastal areas. This juxtaposition highlighted a cultural understanding of Japan’s geography that recognizes coastal areas as being urban, commercial, modern, and perhaps even “Western,” and upland forested areas as being, rural, moral, traditional, and decidedly non-Western. As an example of this conceptual dichotomy, when listening to a piece of Japan’s popular enka music, with its wistful lyrics that are often about love and longing, more often than not it is a rural place far from urban “centers” that is (or at least should be) conjured in one’s mind (Yano 2002). In these varied, seemingly contradictory ways, rural areas, and particularly yama, exist simultaneously as uchi and oku; they comprise the interior, and embody the heart

(kokoro) of the nation.

At a more basic level, we might say that Japanese culture and civilization emerged from forests. As narrated in the Nihonshoki (Record of Japan) and the Kojiki (Record of

Ancient Matters), the islands and people of Japan were literally stirred into being when the gods Izanagi and Izanami dipped the tip of their naginata spear into the briny waters of the sea. Though not stated specifically, we might assume that the islands brought forth by the gods were forested. Anyway, regardless of the myth, various data suggests that the archipelago was forested at least by the last glacial maximum (Tsukada 1985). Though it appears that humans were present in Japan much earlier, the first cultural group for which there is significant archaeological evidence, the so-called Jōmon people, are said to have been forest dwellers--hunters and gatherers whose activities did not greatly influence the

51 ecologies of native forests. However, this situation changed with the advent of wet-rice agriculture among people labeled Yayoi (Bleed and Matsui 2010). Forest began to be cleared for the growing of rice and other crops, and this is a process that has continued until today (Totman 2000).

It is the people labeled “Yayoi,” not the “Jōmon,” that are typically referred to as the forebears of modern Japanese culture. Thus, in ways both real and imagined, Japanese civilization has been carved out of the forests that once blanketed the islands. Forests, then, constantly hold the potential to overrun civilization, and there is a need, therefore, for continued human endeavor, coupled with care, to ensure a balance between nature that is “cooked” and nature that is “raw” (Kalland 1995). Ideas and images of an original balance or harmony between the Japanese people and nature have emerged alongside notions of the nation (as a form of social and political order) to help conjure, make comprehensible, and reinforce the naturalness of an entity known as “Japan.” I suggest that forests, both imagined and real, have become central loci for anchoring “Japan” and giving it shape as a nation with a culture and environment that is unique from the rest of the world.

Finding balance or harmony in relationships is a primary cultural ideal in Japan. It is an ideal that applies not only to relations between humans, but also to relations between humans and nature, and even between humans and the supernatural. These relationships are often marked by and maintained through ritualized exchanges of gifts or money that help to foster bonds of interdependency (Doi 1973, Hendry 1987, Rupp

2003). In regards to nature, maintaining harmonious relations is often expressed through

52 acts of cultivation--caring for or showing appreciation for nature, so that it might provide something in return. As anthropologist D.P. Martinez puts it, the Japanese vocabulary,

“reveals an attitude to nature as something which must be worked on to be acceptable, something that is acted on, trimmed, shaped, appeased even, but never truly experienced in its raw form” (2008: 188). Much has been written about representations of nature in

Japanese arts and design, such as landscaping, poetry, and painting, where the ideal is mimicry, something akin to creating a simulacrum, in which the essence of nature is revealed through human endeavor (Hendry 1997, Stibbe 2007).

Relationships with nature are also central in Japan’s two major religious traditions, Shinto and Buddhism. Very often Shinto shrines will include natural features-- rocks, trees, water--that are designated as being sacred and are often demarcated using special rope made from rice straw, called shimenawa. A fair number of shrines also include groves of trees as part of their complexes. Within many Buddhist sects, particularly Shingon, Tendai, and Zen, interaction with natural environments is emphasized as a pathway towards spiritual development and ultimately nirvana. Even in the mundane spaces of everyday life, it is not unusual to see Japanese praying to natural features, such as mountains, the sea, or even the moon. It is appropriate to consider, therefore, that there is within Japanese culture, and among many Japanese, a sense of awe and reverence towards nature. However, it should also be noted, as Arne Kalland (2002) has, that this orientation towards nature has not prevented the Japanese from degrading in serious ways the natural environment of the island nation. In fact, as Martinez later

53 argues, the aesthetizing of nature may be part of what makes it possible “for many

Japanese to ignore the destruction of their and others’ environments” (2008: 196).

Forests are often represented in conjunction with, and as part of, villages, and thus mark a generalized and homogenized “rural Japan.” This linked representation is most fully expressed in the concept of satoyama, which has become popular in recent decades.

Two Chinese characters are used in writing the word: one meaning village (sato) and the other meaning “mountain,” “hill,” or “forest” (yama). The term references a rural land- use pattern said to have been prevalent in the past. Satoyama are landscapes thought to embody the harmonious relations of humans and nature. They represent nature shaped by human effort.

Ideally, satoyama are comprised of rice paddies bordered by woodlands made up of planted trees that are beneficial for providing food, fuel, and fertilizer (in the form of leaf-litter) Figure 5: Satoyama model (based on Takeuchi et al. 2003)

(Figure 5). No matter the historical prevalence of satoyama as an actual land-use practice across Japan, the concept has become valorized in modern Japan as an embodiment of harmonious ecological

54 relations, as well as a landscape aesthetic that is thought to express a particularly

Japanese disposition towards nature.

As a landscape aesthetic, satoyama is largely a post-war phenomenon, emerging from and accompanying a nation-wide push for tourism starting in the 1970’s meant to

Figure 6: Screen capture from the film Tonari no Totoro (http://www.totoro.org/images-totoro.shtml [Accessed 04/19/12]) sustain rural economies by encouraging urban residents to “discover Japan” (Ivy 1995:

34-48). However, because of Japan’s relatively small landmass and high rate of urbanization, “discovering” rural areas has become more and more difficult. Writing about the recent trend of creating tourist destinations in forest areas, Knight notes that,

“the era of the megalopolis heralds the disappearance of rural Japan, and this ongoing

55 urbanization has the effect of valorizing remoter, upland areas as the new site of the

Japanese pastoral” (2000: 341). I suggest that the forest-farm-community aesthetic of the satoyama has emerged within this trend of discovery. In post-war Japan, forests are, at a national level, expected to be something more than sites of resource extraction. They have become spaces of desire where a Japan that is “vanishing” can still be touched, smelled, heard, and felt.

Perhaps no other work of art expresses this desire in contemporary Japan more than the Miyazaki Hayao film, Tonari no Totoro (My Neighbor Totoro). First released in

1988, the animated film has achieved monumental status in Japan, both as a technical masterpiece and as a work that captures an essential quality of the Japanese relation to nature, which it accomplishes largely through use of the satoyama motif. The film follows two sisters, Mei and Satsuki, who move to the countryside along with their father to be close to a hospital where their ailing mother resides. The girls are able to run around outside, discovering the marvels of nature, which are all meticulously drawn by hand, creating a bucolic world that harkens to rural environments of the past. However, the sisters also begin to discover a host of beings that only they, as children, can see. They first see soot sprites, little black beings, which their father, a scientist, explains as being caused by their eyes adjusting to bright light. Later, they encounter a large, furry monster with claws, which the younger sister calls “Totoro” (a mispronunciation of torōru, the

Japanese literation of “troll,” the forest creature of Norse mythology). The Totoro, their father later explains, is most likely a forest spirit that lives in the roots of a giant camphor tree near the family’s home (Figure 6). With magical powers, the Totoro helps the girls to

56 further experience the environment around them; through ritual they raise a forest from planted acorns and, holding tight the Totoro’s thick coat of fur, they are whisked across rice fields and forest as if they were wind.

The landscapes of Tonari no Totoro, which viewers are invited to gaze upon and take part in via Mei and Satsuki, as well as through short vignettes showing common occurrences (such as rain drops in a puddle) are the landscapes of a rural Japan that Ivy

(1995) argues are, “explicitly entangled in rhetorics of loss and recovery” (12). They are landscapes constantly vanishing within the increasingly urbanized spaces of modern

Japan. For urban dwellers, forests and rural landscapes continue to offer a possibility to kaeru, to “return” to (and perhaps recover) something original, pure, and true--something distinctly Japanese. “[Tonari no Totoro is] for children and their parents to watch together,” states Miyazaki in a 1988 interview, “it’s about Japan; it’s about the place that they live in, and it’s a film which allows parents and children to communicate together” (Miyazaki 1988, quoted in Stibbe 2007: 472). This suggests that the encounter with nature in Tonari no Totoro is about more than experiencing and sensing an environment; it is about feeling connected at a level that incorporates other humans, nature, and the nation in a way that surpasses the alienating processes of modernity. In an interview included on the DVD version of Tonari no Totoro released by Disney in 2010,

Miyazaki states that his desire was to create a world of purity and innocence in order to show the beauty of Japan. “The village in the movie,” he goes on to say, “was how a city kid would view a village”7 (Miyazaki 2010 [translation in original]). Through the visual

7 あの映画は町の子が見た田舎の世界です。

57 representations of nature in Tonari no Totoro, Japanese (and presumably others) are able to recover, return to, and reconnect with a place that they have likely never been to, but that feels familiar all the same. Noting a similar phenomenon in the Japanese popular musical form, enka, Christine Yano draws on the work of Henri Lefebvre to suggest that places become more than just land areas as elements of social practice are projected onto them, noting that:

Regional spaces, once individuated through sometimes minute differences, have been incorporated into the national project of homogeneity and majority making . . . . In defining the meaning of these spaces, provincial regions. . .have been generalized as center(s) of a “true” national identity and particularized as the idiosyncratic periphery of the nation-culture. These spaces are at once core and periphery, internal and exotic, whole and part (Yano 2002: 18).

In the social production of Japanese forests, therefore, it depends little on where exactly a forest is located in space and time, as it is always glistening, even if somewhere far off, with the shimmer of a quintessential Japaneseness.

If it was Commodore Perry’s kurofune (black ships) that “opened” Japan to the

West and brought industrialization and modernization to its shores, it is the forested mountains deep in the interior of the country that continue to retain something pre- modern, non-Western, and uniquely Japanese. Such thinking is key to the concept of fūdo

(climate), which was forwarded by one of Japan’s most preeminent philosophers, Watsuji

Tetsurō as a fundamental component of cultures. According to Watsuji, it is not the dialectic of history that cultures emerge from, but rather the repetition of natural cycles, which make up a region’s fūdo. Thus, each culture is flavored through the timeless progressions of its environment. Watsuji suggested that in contrast to the West, in which

58 “one senses the subjugation of nature by human beings,” in Japan there is “a deep harmony between humanity and nature” (quoted in Thomas 2001: 202).

Conceptions of an essential harmony between Japanese people and nature can be found not only in art and philosophy, but also in scientific discourses. Take, for example, the following passage from the introduction to an edited volume entitled Satoyama: The

Traditional Landscape of Japan, which is meant to address the ecological benefits of the satoyama model.

Over the centuries, a pattern of land use emerged in rural Japan that was sustainable over a long period of time. The satoyama landscape system was a harmonious relationship between humans and nature. The nature of the satoyama landscape was managed, and both humans and nature benefited from this management. [. . .] The system was devised, through trial and error, as a means of surviving on small mountainous islands in a monsoon climate. Japan is a land of natural disasters. Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, torrential rains, and typhoons are all normal occurrences. The natural environment of Japan developed under these conditions. As a consequence, many of the native species are naturally tolerant to disturbance, human or otherwise (Takeuchi et al. 2003: 1-2).

What is suggested in the passage is a fundamental and original harmony between humans and forests in Japan. The loss of satoyama, therefore, marks the loss of something essential to Japan; that is to say, its very essence. As Takeuchi notes in the preface to the book, the causes of satoyama loss are pressures linked to development, and solutions for the future, the authors argue, can be found by “looking back” (2003: 1). The past, in other words, promises harmony and connection to nature, while “development” (and modernization) threaten disconnection and disharmony.

59 DREAM FORESTS

On a trip to Tokyo for a conference in November 2009 I got off the train at Shibuya, one of Tokyo’s (and Japan’s) largest and most famous stations, to look for a forest. Earlier in the year a middle-aged woman from Tokyo had visited Otaki. A former anchor person for

Japan’s national broadcasting corporation (Nihon Hōsō Kyōkai, or NHK) she had started an NGO focused on the environment and sustainable development. Prior to meeting with the woman, Otaki’s mayor had told me that the she was interested in creating a some kind of partnership with village, but that he did not have a clear idea of exactly what she was proposing; “she said they were gonna do this or that” (nantoka kantoka yaru tte itta).

Apparently things went well, because a few months later on August 4, 2008

Otaki’s mayor was in Shibuya for a special tree planting ceremony (shokujushiki). Also in attendance was the head of the NGO as well as the mayor of Shibuya and Yamada Yū, a famous fashion model who was representing “Tokyo Girl’s Collection,” a biannual style event meant to showcase Japanese fashion. The event included the planting of three trees from the Kiso region. Before the planting, the head of the NGO explained that, “it’s three trees, so we end up making a forest”8 (san bon desu kara, mori wo tsukutteshimau koto ni narimasu). She was referring to the fact that the Chinese character for forest (mori) is written by repeating the character meaning tree (ki) three times. “This is an odd tree planting ceremony,” she went on to explain, “in that, while we plant a forest in the city,

[we’re thinking] let’s also make well the deep mountain forests, which send us oxygen”9.

8 三本ですから、森を作ってしまうことになります。

9 都会に森を植えて同時に、私たちに酸素を送ってくれている山奥の森も元気にしようという変 わった植樹祭です。

60 With trowels and watering cans in hand, and with red and white ribbons attached to their breasts, the guests huddled together to ceremoniously plant the trees while posing for pictures.

After exiting the station and searching around a bit, I found the Shibuya “forest.”

However, I saw only two trees. A small Japanese cypress (hinoki) and a Japanese umbrella pine (kōyamaki) that had been planted during the ceremony were there, supported by a thin bamboo frame, but between them was a gap. Apparently, one of the trees--a Nikko maple (megusuri no ki)--had not survived. Sadly, in the way that the head of the NGO had explained its symbolism, minus one tree the “forest” was no longer a

“forest” (interestingly, using her logic of Chinese characters, it could still be considered a

“grove,” which is written using two of the characters for tree). I learned later that a replacement tree--a mizunara (an oak variety indigenous to Japan)--had been planted in order to restore the “forest.”

The two trees stood in a planter alongside other vegetation, and thus did not really stand out as extraordinary. Also, there was no placard or sign telling about the NGO,

Otaki, or the “+1 forest,” as this particular project had been dubbed. Above my head, beyond the trees was a large billboard for a cell phone manufacturer that featured the members of Arashi, a popular boy band. Other billboards, with other celebrities, covered most of the buildings that towered all around me. People moved quickly on their way to jobs and appointments, unaware and uninterested in the little, beautiful Kiso trees.

The concrete planter box holding the “+1 forest” sits wedged between one of the world’s busiest train stations and one of its busiest intersections. For those who know it is

61 there, the forest serves as a kind of simulacrum; a clone, in a sense, of the Kiso forests that it references, but also part of a larger dream forest that offers reassurances that something perhaps purer and truer still exists beyond the human-made artifices of the city. The dream forest has many faces and helps to create in Japan “a new forest culture,” (Havens 2011: 162-165) in which woodlands are fetishized and valorized as places of beauty and magic. They are imbued, as I have noted, with mythic qualities, and serve, therefore, as tangible elements in the “dreaming sleep” of capitalism, much like the

Passages couverts de Paris discussed by Walter Benjamin. “Capitalism is a natural phenomenon,” states Benjamin, “with which a new dream-filled sleep came over Europe, and, through it, a reactivation of mythic forces” (quoted in Buse 2006: 56). The dream- filled sleep has also come over Japan, conceptually transforming forests into inverses of the urban where reside longings for escape from the often unfulfilled dreams of the city.

Drawing on Benjamin’s work, Lisa Leung Yuk Ming (2003) suggests that, “The countryside is refuge for the tired urbanites, as it provides the space (both geographical and psychic) that is lacking in the city” (91).

Take, for instance, the Totoro Forest, a 3500 hectare wooded area located about 40 kilometers from Tokyo’s central metropolitan area along its border with Saitama prefecture. In response to rapid urbanization and the conversion of rural lands, particularly satoyama, in April of 1990 the Totoro’s Hometown Foundation (Totoro no

Furusato Kikin) was established with the help of Tonari no Totoro creator, Miyazaki

Hayao. In 1991 the foundation purchased its first piece of what is originally known as the

Sayama Hills and gave it the nickname “Totoro Forest #1” (Totoro no mori daiichi

62 gōchi). Since that time the foundation has purchased 10 more pieces of land for protection. On the foundation’s website we read that the Totoro Forest is mostly mixed forest and that it is not “nature as is” (shizen no mama), but rather secondary forest that has been shaped through human activity. “In the mixed forest” the website continues, “is also seen the value of the historical and cultural heritage that has come into being alongside the history of the lives of the Japanese people. And, for us modern people too it is a place of profound affection that brings peace and tranquility”10.

Indeed, many see in the Totoro Forest a model for a new form of “rurality,” capable of overcoming the challenges of Japan’s continuing urbanization (Kikuchi 2008), or as a tool for teaching Japanese children about not only the environment of Sayama

Hills, but also about the harmonious history of human-environment relations that shaped the area (and mush of the rest of Japan) as satoyama (Kadouch 2003). Moreover, this can all be done with the help of Totoro, the round, furry forest spirit whom nearly all people in Japan are familiar with. The Totoro Forest, like the +1 Forest in Shibuya, exists as a simulacrum. It both represents and mimics, but also itself becomes “forest,” a representation that precedes and determines the real. Or, as Baudrillard (1994) describes it, “a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal” (1). It is a physical forest that draws meaning and significance from a hand-drawn forest in a movie, which was inspired by the physical forest. The real and the simulated have collapsed into one another. For the

Totoro Forest, this collapsing of meaning and realities has been productive in terms of

10 雑木林は日本人の生活の歴史とともに生きてきた歴史遺産・文化遺産であるという点でも、そ の価値が見出されています。そして、現代人の私たちにも親しみ深く、心の安らぎを与えてくれ る場所でもあるのです。 [http://totoro.or.jp/intro/totoro_forest/index.html accessed 01.29.12]

63 protecting the area through community action. More broadly, however, we might, as I do in later chapters, question the effects of of such conceptual maneuverings.

DARK FORESTS

On May 23rd, 1979 two women went missing after having gone into a forested area in

Nagaokakyo, a city just outside of Kyoto, to gather bracken (warabi). The bodies of the women were found two days later. One woman had been choked and the other stabbed; both had been badly beaten. All of their possessions were accounted for; nothing had been taken. Inside one of the women’s backpacks was found a receipt from the supermarket where they both worked, scribbled on it was the following:

“we’re being followed please help us this man is a bad person”

No one was ever arrested in the case, which reached its statute of limitations on May

24th, 1994.

I became familiar with this event (known as the warabi tori satsujin jiken, or

“bracken-gathering murder”) during a conversation with my wife over breakfast. She is originally from the area and was a young girl when the murders occurred. She recalls the fear that gripped her when, as a member of her high school track and field club, was made to run along streets that wind through the dark forest where the incident took place.

Large signs indicating that the general area where the murders had occurred were posted along the way, presumably as a warning to others entering the forest, which was a popular picnic spot. The conversation with my wife had started when I asked her what

64 forests mean to her. “They’re scary” (kowai), was her response, and she went on to tell me the gruesome story.

In contrast to the meanings discussed above, forests in Japan are not always recognized as benevolent places, but can also induce feelings of anxiety and fear. Often it is okuyama (“back” or “inner” mountains) that carry such associations, due to the fact that they are uncultivated, remote, wild, and unfamiliar. Knight suggests that, “The okuyama is a quintessentially wild space that retains much primary and secondary forest

(and relatively few timber plantations) and is associated with wild animals (as well as ghosts and demons). It is viewed as a dangerous and frightening place where people can easily get lost” (2003c: 31). I suggest that these “dark” qualities are significant in defining forests as spaces of power. In Japan’s Shinto tradition it is often the unknown that produces feelings of awe and thus garners attention in the form of ritual. Put differently, it is the unseen and the indescribable that inspires a sense of mystery and reverence. In this regard, the darkness, remoteness, and wildness of the yama, and particularly the okuyama, are antithetical to the familiar spaces of the village, making them extraordinary.

Consider Japan’s infamous “suicide forest” at Aokigahara. Located at the base of

Mt. Fuji, the area has become popular as a place to commit suicide (jisatsu). This popularity is due in part to the novel Nami no Tō (Tower of Waves) by Matsumoto

Seicho, in which a pair of lovers commit suicide in Aokigahara’s “black sea of trees” (kuroi jukai). The well-known novel was made into a movie in 1960 and has since been serialized as a TV drama several times over. Aokigahara has also been featured as a

65 site of suicide in other novels and TV dramas, and is described in the 1993 best-selling book “Complete Manual of Suicide” (kanzen jisatsu manyuaru) as an ideal place to die.

The number of suicides in the forests of Aokigahara have risen dramatically since the last decades of the 20th century, with the bodies of 108 individuals found in 2004 (Gilhooly

2011). On signs posted throughout the area is written the following message:

Your life is a precious thing received from your parents One more time, try quietly thinking about your parents, siblings, and children. Don’t suffer alone, please talk with someone11.

Below the appeal for reconsideration is the number for a volunteer suicide prevention group that can help with a variety of issues, such as debt, which appear to be driving factors in many suicides.

In considering Japan’s forests as dark (kurai) places, we can again refer to their peripheral/central status as both “back” (oku) and “inner” (uchi). Here, two other linked concepts--ura and honne--are useful. The former can be translated as “background” or

“underside,” while the later refers to one’s inner, true feelings (Sugimoto 2003). As representations of something “real” or “true,” forests in Japan also take on meaning as ura places where murder, suicide, and other dark deeds might occur in contrast to the

“front side” (omote) of Japan as modern nation, economic giant, and global purveyor of

“cool.” Likewise, we might characterize forests as places of honne where true feelings of anger, lust, or despair are allowed to take root and branch out in full expression. For some

Japanese, forests, in their pure naturalness, might become spaces of non-sociality where

11 命は親から頂いた大切なものもう一度静かに両親や兄弟、子供の事を考えてみましょう。一人 で悩まずまず相談してください。

66 the bonds of human relations can be fully broken. In a short documentary on Aokigahara,

Hayano Azusa, a geologist and forest ranger who works in the area wonders aloud, “Why do people kill themselves in such a beautiful forest?”12 (Vice.com 2011 [translation in original]). Though he says he still has no answer, earlier in the film, after speaking with a man he suspects is there to kill himself, Hayano states that often after talking to people their spirit seems revived. At another point he suggests that the people who come to die in

Aokigahara have been tormented by society (Vice.com 2011). In this regard as well,

Japan’s forests have in a sense become “dream forests,” places of escape or refuge from the unpleasantness of the city and the larger “dream-filled sleep” of modernity. They are ambivalent spaces that offer respite, but also cover, from the modern world.

CONCLUSION

The forests of Japan, like the people, foods, and cultures, exhibit variation in a multitude of ways. However, this variation is obfuscated through sets of interconnected discourses that operate to construct and continually reconstruct a “Japaneseness” that appears as tangible as it is enduring. Thus, it is possible to speak, as I have here, of “Japanese forests” as a shared reality among many in Japan. In other words, my goal in this chapter has been to outline what I see as common themes in the ways that forests are represented in Japan, rather than to suggest any common characteristics of the forests themselves

(though these surely exist as well). My intention is to point to the roles that nature plays in defining who humans are and how they relate to one another, as well as how, within

12 何でこんなきれいな森で自殺しちゃうんだろう

67 the specific social milieus of modernity, this interweaving of nature and culture becomes a critical part of constructing and reconstructing notions of nation and national identity. I agree, therefore, with Thomas (2001) who suggests that, “A nation’s sense of nature [. . .] bespeaks its sense of collective and individual possibilities” (3). This is true in terms of

Nature broadly defined as the state and characteristics of a situation, as in “the nature of something,” but also in terms of specific natures, such as forest natures.

Of course, concepts of differing natures--forest, mountain, river, sea, animal, human--are intertwined with concepts of Nature with a capital N, as well as with specific environments and the organisms (including humans) that dwell therein. Conceptions both of Nature and of forest natures, therefore, inform the ways that Japanese think about and interact with environments. Thus, the ecological connections that weave together environments with both human and non-human bodies become the terrain upon which the cultural politics of nature(s) are played out. Seen in this light, the separation of human bodies from forest environments in the name of protection, conservation, and management, which I discuss in later chapters, is intimately tied to relations of power, processes of governance, and the building of institutions. Moreover, it says something about cultural beliefs in Japan concerning the nature of humans, the nature of nature, and the nature of society. If one stirs a bit, starts to toss and turn, and begins to awaken from the dream-like sleep to find themselves trapped in Weber’s “iron cage”, away from nature--their own and that of the Earth--a fear and panic may set in. A fear of isolation and a panic of loneliness, followed by a desire to return (kaeru); to go back to the garden; to escape from the coming wave into the safety of the forest; to defy the cold concrete of

68 the city by planting a forest; to create in the real world a forest seen in a movie; to experience the true fear of the dark forest; to reconnect, somehow, to the world by exiting it and going to the forest to die.

There is a scene in the film Tonari no Totoro where the younger sister, Mei, gets lost while following two small creatures into the forest. She falls through a hole in an large ancient-looking camphor tree and there discovers the furry forest spirit, Totoro, peacefully asleep. She climbs onto his heaving chest and herself falls peacefully asleep.

A contrasting scene in a June 26, 2011 The Japan Times article entitled “Inside Japan’s

‘Suicide Forest’” features a photograph of Aokigahara forest and the body of a man who committed suicide there. The reporter, Rob Gilhooly, describes the scene: “In a small hollow, just below a tree, and curled up like a baby on a thick bed of dead leaves, lies a man, his thinning gray hair matted across his balding cranium” (2011). Looking at the startling photograph, I could not help but remember the image of Mei curled up and sleeping like a baby on the chest of Totoro in a hollow below a tree. Forests, it seems, have come to represent something oppositional to the stresses and anxieties of modern life in an increasingly urbanized Japan. They have become, therefore, markers of something original, natural, pure, and innocent--spaces of escape that embody the promise of return.

69 CHAPTER III Nature, spectacles, and governance

It was a cool morning in April 2008 and I was walking the narrow streets that lead between the houses and fields located near the center of Otaki. I had been in the village for about a week and thus was in the liminal period of fieldwork, not sure exactly how to begin. I encountered residents at work preparing fields for planting in anticipation of warm weather and the short summer growing season. I approached a few people and nervously introduced myself. Most everyone I approached seemed to think I was the new

English teacher at the local school, so when I tried to explain something about my research, I was met with confused looks and tentative nods, which I interpreted as feigned understanding. After a few tries, I was not feeling confident, but trudged on. The sky was a striking blue and arced down in a dome shape towards the rounded forms of the ridge- lines above me. Though the deciduous trees on the hillsides were still leafless and skeletal, large sections of pines stood out in rich green tones. The landscape was new and unbelievably beautiful; I could not keep my eyes from feasting.

Descending into the hamlet of Nakagoshi I came across a pair of women at rest on a berm of dirt separating two dry fields. I nervously asked if I could borrow a bit of their time and made my way over to where they were sitting. The younger of the two was a woman in her fifties. A year later I would teach her daughter English while working as a teacher at the village school and learn that she and her family still make and sell tofu at a small shop connected to their home. Also, she would invite me over to see her family’s wooden mill and waterwheel (likely the last one still functioning in the village) that she

70 still uses to grind rice flour around the new year’s holiday. The other woman I guessed to be in her early seventies, though I never had much contact with her after that day and so never confirmed her age.

I introduced myself and babbled something about my research and my institutional affiliations. The women looked at one another and then back at me. “So, what are you inquiring about,” the older one asked. I crouched down to get closer to where they sat. Bumping into the limits of my Japanese, I tried to explain my research and the questions I was hoping to find answers to. Specifically, I told them that I wondered why local people had no control over the national forests in Otaki. “Ah, that’s a hard question, isn’t it,” the women agreed. The younger one suggested that because decisions about the forests are made higher up, there is really nothing that local people can do. Before, she explained, people worked for the Forestry Agency cutting trees and hauling timber, but that was just work. The older woman concurred, suggesting that, kuni no mori dakara, shikata nai (“because they are the nation’s forests, there’s nothing that can be done”).

I found the women’s answers lackluster and discouraging, as well as perplexing.

In preparation for fieldwork I had spent the past several months scouring literature on natural resource governance and community-based management. I felt I had a firm understanding of these things, and yet what these women were telling me did not fit the vision of community level environmental relationships that I had been thinking about while crafting my research. I thanked them for their time and as I got up to leave, the older woman suggested talking to people at the local Forestry Agency office. There are

71 some really beautiful forests, both agreed, and specifically mentioned two forests, the

Seto-gawa and Akazawa. I bowed and thanked them again for their time, then walked on between unplanted fields full of dark, loamy soil until I came to a steep drop off. From there I gazed out over the Otaki River and the forested hillsides that fanned out across the hillsides above it. The leafless broadleaf trees offered a contrast to the pine varieties, creating a landscape patchwork that, I would later come to understand, begin to tell the story of forest use in Otaki. I thought about what the women had said and wondered how it fit into this story. Later on during my fieldwork, I would on more than one occasion visit both of the forests that the women suggested I see—the Seto-gawa forest and the

Akazawa forest—and continue to think about why it was those places that they had mentioned as good examples of forests.

This early conversation raised other questions for me as well; questions that occupied my mind for the two years that I lived, worked, and studied in Otaki, and that I have continued to contemplate even since leaving Japan in April of 2010. This seemingly endless array of questions stem from a set of deceptively simple ones that became apparent to me in those early days of fieldwork. Why did the women I spoke with refer to the forests as kuni no mori (the country’s forests)? In other words, why and how did they, as well as other local people, understand the forests as being “national forests” (kokuyūrin)? Conceptual complexities are embedded in the term itself, arising from the socio-cultural meanings embodied in the categories of “national” (kuni no or kokuyū) and “forest” (mori or rin), as well as from the sets of social, political, and economic relationships that underlie the marrying together of these categories.

72 “National forests,” in other words, are not solely natural phenomena, but rather are fundamentally social in nature. This is not to say that they are entirely conceptual, since they obviously exist in the material world; in Otaki one can drive to national forests, stand at their boundaries, and enter them. Yet, it is only through the perceptual engagement of human actors that forests and national forests exist, and they are shaped through these engagements. That which informs actors’ perceptual engagements with forests and other environments, therefore, is of fundamental importance in terms of how they comprehend, interact with, use, and modify the physical world.

What is it that informs our perceptual engagements with the world? Of course, it is in one sense impossible to answer this question definitively at a general level, as there are myriad historical, cultural, social, political, and experiential contingencies that color how any one actor perceives her environment. At the same time, groups of people draw on common meanings, logics, and rationales (what anthropologists label “culture”) to make sense of themselves and the world around them. Today, however, people in different locales around the world are increasingly exposed to and able to access a common set of meanings, logics, and rationales that have emerged, and continue to emerge, within global capitalism, and which circle globally along grooved pathways of accumulation. I suggest that within this common “culture of capitalism” forests and other natures are imagined, perceived, and valued as ‘resources.” In this sense, they are spectacular forms that reflect and reify the dominant mode of production from which they emerge.

As spectacles, forests appear natural while simultaneously serving to naturalize

73 the sets of relations from which they spring form, saying “nothing more than ʻthat which appears is good, that which is good appears” (Debord 1994: Paragraph 12). Anna Tsing labels this world of spectacles the “economy of appearances” and suggests that it is marked by “frictions” as people and institutions at various levels conjure images of value or profitability in order to direct flows of capital. “Friction,” she clarifies, “is not a synonym for resistance. Hegemony is made as well as unmade with friction” (Tsing

2005: 6). In other words, while, on the one hand, local actors accept and participate in maintaining (though perhaps unconsciously) the world of spectacle, frictions also always exist.

I argue that in the forests of Otaki frictions arise from differences in perception.

Local experiences of forests do not always (perhaps more often than not) mesh with spectacles of national forests. Yet, as my conversation with the Otaki women revealed, there is recognition that a majority of the trees that blanket the hillsides surrounding the village are kuni no mori: the nationʻs forests. In other words, spectacles of forest nature do not only appear, but appear real. However, these spectacles are not the totality of local experiences of forests in Otaki. Though frictions may not be synonymous with resistance, they should not be equated with acceptance either. In this chapter I look at forests as sites of contestation that are both real and spectacular in order to frame later discussions of what I label the “unseen forest” and the sensual engagements of Otaki residents that give it form.

74 NATURAL RESOURCES AND GOVERNANCE

When I tell people that I am an anthropologist and that I study forests in Japan, I am often met with the question, “Do anthropologists study forests?” The answer that I have begun to formulate through my thinking about forests in the Kiso Valley is, I am afraid, not very satisfying, and yet it is quintessentially anthropological: yes and no. Yes, as an anthropologist I do study forests in that I am interested in how people use, think about, and interact with forest environments. Thus I am interested in the physical and ecological qualities of forests and the influential role that humans play in shaping these. But, the answer is also no. I am first and foremost concerned with forests as spaces of meaning and sites of social production. In the present study I focus on how forests in the Otaki and the broader Kiso Region are produced through, reinforced by, and in turn reproduce social relationships. In other words, at any given time and in any given place the object of my study may or may not be physical forest environments themselves, but my aim is always to understand why a place is or is not recognized as “forest.” What are the processes of human thought, behavior, and institutional organization that contribute to shaping and defining forests? Put simply, the goal of the present work is to offer insights into how forests are constructed?

In his seminal work, The Ecological Transition, John Bennett (1976) describes a historical trend in human-environment relationships in which, “Nature [is incorporated] into human frames of purpose and action” (3), ultimately suggesting that, “. . .man’s use of Nature is inextricably intertwined with man’s use of Man. . .,” (311). Nature, in other words, is fundamentally social. It is social not only in the sense that it is ascribed

75 meaning (though this is significant as well), but social in much more profound and subtle ways as something both produced by and productive of human relationships.

The conversation I had with the two women in the field that spring day in Otaki was reflective of these productive processes. Where our conversation took place was an initial frame that shaped our view of the forests. From the field we sat in, we looked out at trees standing on steep hillsides that rose up from the bottom of a valley running perpendicular to us. During our conversation, when we made mention of forests we gestured our hands away from ourselves and motioned off towards the tree filled hillsides in the distance. We understood that we were not, in one sense, in the forest. Yet, perceived differently, we were in a forest, as one always is in Otaki, since forests comprise more than 99% of village land. In other words, the way we talked about forests reflected our position in the landscape; we were inside the forest, but at the same time our language and gestures suggested we were outside it. The forests we referenced in our speech and motioned to with our hands were spaces “out there;” ever-present, but, it seemed, somewhat intangible at that particular moment.

Our conversation also reflected, as well as reinforced, a set of social relationships that exist around forests in Otaki. As I left, the women told me that I should go to the local office of the national Forestry Agency. Though I did not fully realize it at the time, the message implied in their suggestion is clear to me now: if you want to know about forests go to the agency that is in charge of forests. As the older woman had suggested, national forests are kuni no mori “the nation’s forests.” Though 87% of forests in Otaki are designated as koku-yū-rin (national forest), the woman was not, I imagine, referring

76 specifically to all of these forests. Rather her reference was based on a generalized idea of

“national forest,” which on that day was embodied by the green hillsides on the opposite side of the valley from where we sat. How did she come to recognize that forest as being kuni-no-mori, a forest belonging to the nation? How does a forest become a national forest; and how do human actors come to recognize it as such? Moreover, what are the implications of such recognition in terms of how people view forest nature, as well as their own beings in relation to it?

“NATURES” Governance first requires the creation of something to govern. One of my concerns in this dissertation is the governance of forests in Otaki, so the first step is to gain an understanding of the nature of forests, or, as it were, forests as nature. Nature, or the

Japanese equivalents: shizen and tennen, are tricky concepts in that, as concepts, they imply timelessness and stability; or, in a word: naturalness. However, by adding an “s” and conceptualizing a plurality of natures, we can begin to understand the dynamic processes that lie behind the seemingly immovable nature monoliths that are invoked in political ways to denote that which is unquestionable—the “nature” of something

(Thomas 2001). Thus, when it comes to the governance of biophysical environments and the resources therein, “nature” becomes not only the object governed, but also an ideological frame capable of producing a normative subjectivity of governance.

I am concerned here with spectacles of nature and their employment within governmental institutions tasked with managing natural resources in Otaki and the larger

Kiso Region. I argue that spectacles of nature are ideological constructions that are

77 deployed through various media and linked to physical environments in ways that gives legitimacy to governing assemblages and normalizes the broader political ecology that

“natures” and “resources” are enmeshed within. I begin by explaining nature in three senses: first, as a defined object of value in need of management and governance (i.e. natural resources); second, as a political and ideological concept used to demarcate states of being, including the legitimacy of governing assemblages; and finally, as a contested space of subjectivity. Next, I focus my attention on uses of nature as spectacle in forest governance. Finally, I touch briefly on forests as contested spaces of subjective formation among local human actors.

NATURE AS NATURAL RESOURCE

Natural resources are not, as Tsing reminds us, “God given,” but rather, “must be wrested from previous economies and ecologies” (50). Often, though not always, such “wresting” entails a physical manipulation of biophysical components of an environment—oil is drawn up from beneath the ground; minerals are chipped, dug, and exploded out of earth; and trees are felled. However, the activity of resource extraction is always preceded and continually framed by a “conceptual wresting.” Indeed, natural resources are not god given, which is also to say that they are not “natural,” but rather entities summoned forth by human needs, desires, and intention. Marx (1981) notes that, “We presuppose labour in a form in which it is an exclusively human characteristic” (283). What humans label

“natural resources” (shizen shigen or tennen shigen in Japanese), therefore, are reflections of human purposes and the political-economic relationships within which they are

78 embedded. In other words, the efforts of human bodies directed towards physical environments.

Ideological extractions of natural resources begin with what political geographer

Derek Gregory (2001) calls “enframing,” a conceptual separation of world from viewer.

Enframing “involves a ‘staging’—an artful ‘organization of the view’—by means of which an audience is persuaded that the representations made available to it provide a privileged (or ‘truthful’) access to the real” (92). Humans see in nature a vision of their purposes made authentic and legitimate or, in other words, made natural. Enframing of nature occurs in myriad ways across actors and within insitutions, yet there exist broad historical formations of discourses and narratives that influence in subtle and largely unrecognized ways the representations that dominate human thought and discussion about nature.

In his study of the U.S. Dust Bowl of the 1930’s environmental historian Donald

Worster (1982) argues that within capitalist culture nature is viewed as capital, which humans have the right (or even the obligation) to exploit for self-advancement, and that this is something the social order should encourage. With the historical development of the global market economy, desire among nation-states to secure and control natural resources has necessitated the mapping of territory (Winichakul 1994), as well as the ability to locate, define, and assert authority over resources (Scott 1998). The idea being that in capitalist societies the value of nature comes only from its ability to be converted into commodities—things that can be used or exchanged. However, arguments of

“nature-as-capital” overlook the fact that not all nature must be converted in order to gain

79 value. In late capitalism, Nature has also become a resource in and of itself—“nature-as- resource”. By this I mean something qualitatively separate from “nature-as-capital,” or natural resources, which are conceived of as materials or energy located in nature. Within the perspective of “nature-as-resource,” on the other hand, nature itself is viewed as a resource, something to be saved, or conserved, rather than put to use. Nature-as-resource has become a globally dominate perspective, accompanying the practice of conservation and new forms of governance that have reworked human-environment interactions in fundamental ways (West 2006b, West, Igoe, and Brockington 2006).

The conceptual apparatus of nature-as-resource has its origins in Western societies and cultures and was articulated most prominently during the last century by environmentalist writers in their calls for nature conservation. Early voices of conservation arose in the U.S. in response to what were perceived of as the horrors of environmental degradation under industrialized capitalism. In his volume, Man and

Nature, first published in 1864, George Perkins Marsh famously wrote that, “. . .man is everywhere a disturbing agent. Wherever he plants his foot, the harmonies of nature are turned to discords” (1867: 36). A half century later, in an article originally published in

Outdoor Life, Aldo Leopold (1990) suggested the following concerning industrial society and nature (wilderness):

For unnumbered centuries of human history the wilderness has given way. The priority of industry has become dogma. Are we as yet sufficiently enlightened to realize that we must now challenge that dogma, or do without our wilderness? Do we realize that industry, which has been our good servant, might make a poor master? (160).

In her masterpiece, Silent Spring, Rachel Carson (2002 [1962]) draws on similar themes

80 of balance and disturbance, writing that:

The history of life on earth has been a history of interaction between living things and their surroundings. To a large extent, the physical forms and the habits of the earth’s vegetation and its animal life have been molded by the environment. Considering the whole span of earthly time, the opposite effect, in which life actually modifies its surroundings, has been relatively slight. Only within the moment of time represented by the present century has one species—man— acquired significant power to alter the nature of his world (5).

Though visions of pure, unspoiled nature developed in Western art and literature quite early, in particular within the works of Romantic writers (Glacken 1973, Nicolson 1997), views of nature as a thing of inherent value apart from humans was largely formalized in

U.S. environmentalist thinking beginning from the late 19th century. The concept of

“nature-as-resource” was perfected in the concept of wilderness, which was made into policy and put into practice in the U.S. through conservation legislation and realized through the creation of national parks and wilderness areas (Nash 1970).

Beginning from the Meiji Period (1868-1912), as the new Japanese nation began to be opened to trade and intellectual exchange, Western concepts of nature and conservation began to diffuse to various parts of Japanese society, including literature, philosophy, and geography. Always conscious of the gaze of the West (gaiatsu), Japanese scholars and intellectuals toyed with ideas of nature and attempted to craft a distinctive nihon-no-shizenkan (Japanese view of nature) (Nakashima 2002). In the first part of the

20th century, this search for a “Japanese nature,” combined with a growing sense of nationalism, led many thinkers, including philosopher Tetsuro Watsuji, who I mentioned in the previous chapter, to suggest that Japanʻs unique climate and landscape instilled in the Japanese people a unique sense of nature. Similar to how “wilderness” had come to

81 represent nature in the U.S., in Japan ideas of shizen came to be associated with villages, which were seen as being antithetical to the modernization and industrialization that was transforming urban landscapes. Such thinking prompted geographer Taro Tsujimura to label urban areas as “immature” and to suggest that, “Japanese villages are beautiful because they don’t have such coarse things as cities” (Tsujimura 1937: 15-16, quoted in

Nakashima 2002).

As I explained in the previous chapter, concepts of Nature in Japan also became associated with mountains, which due to their steepness and forest cover are incapable of supporting urbanization like that found on Japanʻs broad flood plains. This has led some in Japan to equate forests with Japanese culture. In his 1996 book Shinrin, nihon bunka toshiteno (Forests as Japanese Culture), forestry expert Satoshi Sugawara offers the following passage, which draws on common themes of the degradation of nature under modernization:

This traditional “forest as Japanese culture” has been utterly transformed under the modernization of Japanese society. As the modernized viewpoint of nature imported from Western Europe regards nature as a heartless “thing,” forests artificially transformed in scientific ways based on the modernized viewpoint of nature has become just a “thing” and the spiritual ties between forest and human has been disconnected, and traditional ‘forest as Japanese culture’ has begun to be destroyed (quoted in Nakashima: no page number given).

Whether conceived of as pristine wilderness or bastion of traditional culture, the ideological frame of nature-as-resource stands juxtaposed to processes of modernization and industrialization, and is thus given symbolic power as a thing in a perpetual state of loss. The prescription, therefore, is conservation--attempting to save that which can never be reclaimed.

82 Globally, nature-as-resource discourses emerged alongside capitalist modes of production, and so the conservation policies and practices these discourses inspire have journeyed alongside flows of capital and humans’ seemingly inexhaustible desires for resources. Since the 1970s, non-governmental conservation organizations have followed close behind (and increasingly alongside) trans-national corporations, staking out claims over nature-as-resource and in the process becoming one more set of actors within the novel social milieus that foment around resource development and exploitation and include local, national, and international politicians, corporate officials, and local community members. In an expression of the extent to which nature-as-resource ideologies have globalized, in the post-WWII world, protected areas have emerged as the major governing framework for environmental conservation. The number of protected areas began to increase rapidly around 1970, peaking between 1985 and 1995. Currently there are an estimated 105,000 protected areas worldwide covering approximately eleven percent of the Earth’s terrestrial land (West, Igoe, and Brockington 2006). In name, protected areas are intended to be areas ascribed a protection status through which the environment can be conserved. However, anthropologists like Paige West (2006a) remind us that protected areas are not only sites of environmental conservation, but also of social practice, meaning they are constructed spaces nested within existing forms and patterns of social activity.

In Japan, NGOs play limited roles in the creation and maintenance of protected areas, though there are exceptions to this. For the most part, protected areas in Japan,

83 which include 30 national parks, 56 quasi national parks 13 , and 7,600,000 hectares of national forest (about 30% of total forest area in Japan)14, are administered by the national government. In the case of forests, it is the national Forestry Agency (part of the larger Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries (MAFF)) that is the responsible governing organization. This institutional difference, however, does not mean that the globalized discourses of nature-as-resource and conservation are absent in Japan; in fact, quite the opposite. As I explain below, Japan’s Forestry Agency is adept at employing these globalized discourses, while at the the same time localizing them to create a sense of forests in the archipelago as something quintessentially and uniquely Japanese.

NATURE AS IDEOLOGY

At the same time that Nature in Japan came to be conceived of as an object governance, it also began to operate as an ideological apparatus capable of normalizing political- economic relations and legitimizing governing assemblages. In her book-length treatment of the topic, Thomas (2001) argues that ideas of nature are defined through particular historical moments and that, “Whoever can define nature for a nation defines that nation’s polity on a fundamental level” (2). She goes on to explain that in Japanese political ideology around the Meiji Period, nature turned from that which must be investigated (i.e. the objective view of nature-as-resource explained above) to that which Japan is. Nature thus came to be envisioned as a timeless and immutable truth, which could then be

13 Ministry of the Environment, http://www.env.go.jp/en/nature/nps/park/doc/files/np_3.pdf [Accessed 03/26/12]

14 Forestry Agency, http://www.rinya.maff.go.jp/j/kokuyu_rinya/welcome/what.html [Accessed 03/26/12]

84 fastened to the nation itself as a way to assert legitimate authority.

It is not coincidence then that it was at this time that the Meiji government began to assert claim over forestlands across the nation, including large swaths in Otaki and the rest of the Kiso Region. Except for those in Hokkaido, forests claimed by the Meiji government were known as goryōrin and administered by the Imperial Household

Ministry as property of the imperial family. Later, after Japanʻs defeat in WWII, these forests were designated “national forests” and placed under the authority of the newly established Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry’s san-rin-kyoku (Mountain Forest

Department), which was later renamed rinyachō (Forestry Agency).

From their Meiji Period foundations, ideas of Nature in Japan became both the object and the substance of governance. Today, the Forestry Agency draws on this ideological foundation in presenting itself as the natural governing body of national forests. The categorical designation of “national forests,” however, is not presented as such; rather, national forests are talked about in terms that echo the “forest as culture” discourses of the past. In media produced by the Forestry Agency, national forests are often referred to as kuni-no-zaisan, meaning the inheritance, possession, wealth, or even spiritual substance of the nation. At the same time, this naturalized ideological apparatus of forest-national government is further deployed to encompass the people of Japan themselves, constructing them as subjects who naturally recognize the category of

“national forest,” while simultaneously internalizing the subjective category of “national citizen.” This apparatus materializes, for example, in a seemingly innocuous pamphlet

(Figure 5) produced by the CDFMO. On the the pamphlet’s cover in bold letters,

85 highlighted with orange shadowing, is the phrase minna-no-mori: kokuyūrin (Everyone’s

Forests: National Forests). Here, nature as object (pictured on the pamphlet as a stream running through a green forest) merges with nature as an ideological concept and opens a subjective space in which the reader is invited to complete the project. I will return to the pamphlet in a moment, but first I will look more broadly at the notion of nature as subjective space.

NATURE AS SUBJECTIVITY

On the CDFMO website15 is a map depicting the forests of the Kiso District (Figure 4).

The map is a kaleidoscope of seemingly random colors. Only a key in the corner offers conceptual orientation; by matching the colors together you can gain an understanding of the categorical scheme being depicted. Light green sections are forests for storing water, dark green for slope stability, while orange and yellow refer to different types of recreation forest. Within the map forests exist as demarcated spaces, objectively (and scientifically, one presumes) categorized based on their functions and the environmental services they provide. In his book, The New Nature of Maps, J.B. Harley (2001b) reminds us that behind the mapmaker lies a set of power relations that make maps inherently political. Omissions, for example, can hide alternative views, perspectives, and experiences, thereby paralyzing the dynamic processes that enliven spaces. Maps, to one extent or another, obfuscate the multiplicitous subjectivities of nature, creating spectacles of the world that shine with auras of authenticity and objectivity.

15 http://www.rinya.maff.go.jp/chubu/kiso/index3.html [Accessed 09/24/11]

86 In the modern world, as much as Nature is thought about and discussed as a thing apart from humans, or as an abstract ideal state (the nature of things), our presence as sensing beings in the world means that we also encounter nature. In this sense, nature is not a thing, but rather a reticulum-like web of spaces and places produced through the sensual engagements of human actors. An understanding of nature as space requires that we plant our feet on the ground and attempt to take up a perspective in which the world

(nature-space) both enfolds us and unfolds before us. Tim Ingold (1993) labels this a

“dwelling perspective” and suggests that it, “sets out from the premise of people’s active, perceptual engagement in the world” (abstract). A dwelling perspective allows us to recognize nature-space as something more than an open container in which action occurs.

Rather, nature-space becomes a medium, something involved in and unable to be divorced from, activity (Tilley 1994). In this sense, place is dialectical to space. Humans give meaning to and modify spaces through their bodily activities, as well as perceptual and emotional engagements so that, “What begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value” (Tuan 1977: 6).

On a clear spring day in May 2008, I joined a bus load of Otaki residents for a study trip to Sawadotōge, a low mountain pass just a few miles down canyon from

Otaki’s village center. Most of the time when walking or driving in Otaki, the hillside forests are above you or off in the distance. The forests’ green canopies (or in winter, patches of bare deciduous trees) is all that you see. The hillsides seem constant, like theatre backdrops, always there, but rarely fully acknowledged. Even driving alongside a forest edge, the depth of your gaze is limited by the crowds of trees. Indeed, during my

87 first few weeks in Otaki the forests for me were undefined spaces. I of course appreciated their beauty--the way the low angled light of the evening drew forth subtle textures in the treetops, the wisps of clouds that hid out in gullies and ravines, and the melodic sway of pine trees--but my mind had no place to go beyond the forest’s edge.

The micro-bus we rode in rocked and swayed as it staggered up a narrow, unpaved road. My wife nervously pondered if everything was OK--“Daijōbu kana.” The elderly women around us replied with gusto, “daijōbu da yo” (it’s fine!). We disembarked about mid-way up the mountain and set off into the trees. For a while we walked along the dirt road. Men and women from the village stopped frequently to admire flowers or pick wild edibles. Each time they would proudly tell my wife and I the name of the particular plant or flower they were holding, as well as whether or not it could be eaten, and how best to prepare it. When we asked about particular flowers everyone would rack their brains and ask one another, ”nandattake” (what was it?), until someone summoned the answer. “Sou da. Sou da” (That’s it! That’s it!), they would all confirm. In my notebook I wrote, “I’m amazed by everyone’s knowledge of mountain plants and flowers.

As we walked along people gave the names of various plants and flowers and suggested to Aki and I that we try eating several different kinds.” Later, I confirmed the names of the plants with one of the men: enreisou (Trillium tsuonoskii), yama shakuyaku (Paeonia japonica), tara no me (Aralia elata), itadori (Reynoutria japonica), and others. I realized that my lack of floral knowledge had meant that I literally walked through a different space.

A couple of hours walking up a mostly dry river bed brought us to Hachibandaki,

88 a waterfall site that in the past had been used by pilgrims traveling to the sacred mountain, Ontake-san, to which Otaki serves as an entrance. Standing before the waterfall, I jotted down the following:

Looks like there is no more water running here, but in the past this waterfall was used for ascetic purposes. The waterfall was made, in part at least, by humans. On top of a natural rock formation there are stacked rocks and at the top a carved “V” shape where the water used to flow. Looking up at the waterfall, to one’s left is a stacked rock wall—I wasn’t entirely sure of the purpose of this. At the base of the waterfall is a small 神棚 [kamidana, meaning “god cabinet;” a small wooden box with doors where a god or spirit resides] and to the right of that some stone monuments; one of these read八幡滝 [Hachibandaki]. Directly above the waterfall is another stone monument that reads 御岳神社 [ontake jinja: name of one of the main shrines on Ontake-san].

As I moved through the spaces around the waterfall, Hachibandaki emerged as a place, just as it surely had for the pilgrims whose hands helped create it. Even now I can conjure sensory memories of the cool dampness of the place, the rough texture of the rock there, and the tinkling sound of a small brook that ran nearby.

Several people, including an older man who was an amateur historian, went around to various stone statues and monuments and cleared away moss and dirt so that they could examine the dates and other Chinese characters inscribed. Because they knew well the local history associated with Ontake-san, Hachibandaki was pregnant with connections to the past and thus colored their senses of place, as I imagine it did their senses of their village community, the wider environment, and themselves. By explaining this history and pointing out its material markers in the landscape, the more knowledgeable among us helped the rest to conceptually bring forth Hachibandaki as place from the nature-space that surrounded us. Places like Hachibandaki exist all over

89 the wider Otaki landscape. For those who know these places and their significance, nature-space is subjectively very different. A distant hillside might be more intimately known as, “the place where. . .” and a map may take on meanings beyond what the mapmaker had intended.

Hachibandaki (as well as innumerable other places) is not represented on the

CDFMO’s online map of the Kiso District. The area is part of a light green patch denoting part of a large swath of forest identified by its function of water conservation.

Though I, as well as others who have visited, can estimate the location of Hachibandaki, on the map, it otherwise exists only as space. Or, more bluntly, it does not exist. In the mind of the CDFMO mapmaker, places are of little import, as the aim is to demarcate space and indicate function. Within the subjective frame of the natural resource manager nature-space is configured as nature-as-object. Resources are imagined and then imaged.

Through maps they are conceptually pinned onto geographical space and referenced to the real world, making the subjective nature they represent appear real, true, objective, and “natural.”

Nature as subjective space is contested nature. It is nature that is intertwined with human thoughts and actions and thus positioned on uncommon ground. It is a nature that, as William Cronon (1996) explains, becomes “less natural and more cultural” (36) and into which people put “all their most personal and culturally specific values: the essence of who they think they are, how and where they should live, what they believe to be good and beautiful, why people should act in certain ways” (51).

Returning to the CDFMO pamphlet I introduced earlier, we can ask what the

90 cultural values are that underlie the forest nature presented. On the first pages (Figure 7) is a collage of photographic images of forest nature: a patch of low shrub plants below craggy peaks spotted with snow; a rock ptarmigan; a flowing mountain stream; delicate wildflowers growing from the cracks of rocks. Interspersed are photographs of people in forests: a large group hiking in a boulder-strewn valley; a group of children and adults playing a game in a campground; three girls posing among the large roots of a tree that

Figure 7: Inside page of CDFMO brochure (Chūbu shinrin kanri kyoku (Central District Forest Management Office)) towers out of frame. At the top of the page in large lettering, the theme of the pamphlet is

91 reiterated: “Kokuyūrin” ha watashitachi minna no shinrin desu (National Forests: Each one of our’s forest)16. In a panel at the upper left is the following passage:

Within these “national forests” primeval forests are widely distributed, included in these is a lot of forest that is academically important as rich habitat for wild plants and animals. Also, in forests where beautiful forest scenery or walking in the forest can be enjoyed, we see the changing faces of the four seasons, which soothes our hearts.

Moreover, the wood materials that are produced from [the forests]--the houses and furniture, the paper and so forth--are indispensable for our lives; about 3 percent of the domestic wood supply is provisioned by “national forests.”

Forests, and “national forests,” which give us all these various benefits are our irreplaceable treasures 17.

Employed throughout this passage is the term watashitachi, meaning “we,” “us,” or

“our.” Coupled with the label, “national forest” (which is always bracketed to denote that it is just that, a label) watashitachi references a national Japanese identity that, although contested, continues to be rooted in notions of racial purity and cultural homogeneity

(Sugimoto 2003: 2-5). National forests are described as Japanese forests--“our forests”-- and thus citizens are implicitly encouraged to engage forests as “Japanese.”

This subjective formation, what we might call a “national forest-national citizen subjectivity,” pervades everyday discourses and practices in Otaki, yet does so in layers

16 「国有林」は私たちみんなの森林です

17 これらの「国有林」には原生的な森林も多く分布し、豊かな野生動植物の生息地として学術的 に重要な森林も多く含まれています。また、景観の美しい森林や森林浴の楽しめる森林では、四 季折々に表情を変え、私たちの心を和ませてくれます。 さらに、そこから生み出される木材は、住居や家具、紙など私たちの生活に不可欠で、 国産材供給量の約３割を「国有林」から供給しています。 このように様々な恩恵を与えてくれる森林、そして「国有林」は、私たちのかけがえの ない財産となっています。

92 of subtle complexity. The elderly woman whom I spoke to in the field recognized much of the forest in Otaki as kuni no mori (the nation’s forests) and suggested a disconnect

(kankei nai) from the lives of village residents. Such recognition is, on one level, widespread in Otaki. Residents concede that very little can be done on their part in terms of managing national forest lands. In one sense, the Forestry Agency is accepted by community members as a part of the socio-natural landscape and officials are regularly invited to participate in a variety of events, such as village festivals and religious observances related to Ontake-san, which I explore further in chapter VI.

At the same time, Otaki’s residents are in no way passive subjects, but rather actors who actively engage with, both contesting and affirming, and ultimately shape the subjective formations that conspire to define them as actors alongside objectified forests.

This engagement takes places in even the smallest minutiae of daily life. For example, a walk in the woods offers sensual engagements with sights, sounds, smells, and tastes of the forest that deepens one’s experiences and knowledge in ways that representations of nature in media cannot; a neighborly chat about gathering wild vegetables highlights and solidifies national forest boundaries as commonly known place names are referenced; and the presence of uniformed Forestry Agency officials at village festivals reinforces the social and political relationships that fortify concepts of national forests. As subjective spaces, forests exist as sites of contestation where images and institutional discourses of nature and citizenship come into friction with the thoughts and actions of actors, producing and reproducing subjects and subjectivities, and inscribing, erasing, and reinscribing them into the landscape in a constantly negotiated dialogue between

93 discourses, bodies, and environment.

SPECTACLES OF NATURE AND GOVERNANCE

In modern societies, writes Guy Debord (1994) in his first paragraph of Society of the

Spectacle, “all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles.

Everything that was directly lived has moved away into representation” (Paragraph 1).

The implication is not that material reality has been transformed into images, but rather that material reality has come to be “invaded by the contemplation of the spectacle” (Paragraph 8), which is “both the result and the project of the existing mode of production” (Paragraph 6). In other words, for Debord the Spectacle is both the full deployment of the capitalist mode of production, its purpose and logic. History, selfhood, morality, law, time and space are produced within the Spectacle, and in turn are productive of it. Nature too, in the various senses described above, is also a product of the

Spectacle; a contemplative reflection of the world as it is.

In the essential movement of the spectacle, which consists of taking up all that existed in human activity in a fluid state so as to possess it in a congealed state as things which have become the exclusive value by their formulation in negative of lived value, we recognize our old enemy, the commodity, who knows so well how to seem at first glance something trivial and obvious, while on the contrary it is so complex and so full of metaphysical subtleties (Debord 1994: Paragraph 35).

Nature, in this sense, like all commodities, has no intrinsic value. Its value comes only when it takes form and is presented as spectacle. Media is the mode of this presentation and Nature is increasingly known through media.

Fully realized as spectacle, nature “invades” material reality through contemplation; spectacles of nature become nature and mediate interactions between

94 humans and environments. In an article exploring uses of spectacular natures within the field of conservation, Jim Igoe (2010) reveals the mediating power of spectacle at the global level in collaborative productions of Youtube videos and other media between

NGOs and corporations like Nike, Wal-mart, and McDonalds. He argues that incursions of spectacular natures produce their own world and logic by continuously referring back to themselves, meaning that without alternative forms of knowledge, viewers are slave to these spectacles. “We must be further mindful,” he concludes, “of the ways in which the mediation of relations by images influences and limits people’s conceptions and imaginings of the world” (389). How do we stay mindful of spectacles? What are alternative forms of knowledge? Where are they located? How do they develop? How can they be fostered?

Though NGOs have increasingly become producers and purveyors of nature imagery, particularly in countries where governmental institutions are under-developed, the creation and dissemination of spectacular natures in industrialized countries has, to a great extent, been a governmental practice. For much of the post-war period, within

Japan’s Forestry Agency, spectacles of nature have taken form in various media, including bulletins, magazines, pamphlets and interpretive signs. However, increasingly the spectacle is also digital and exists in the electronic spaces of the internet where it effervesces in the blue glow of myriad devices (computers, cell phones, tablets, et cetera).

Websites and an email magazine are new features of the forest landscape that are crafted within the institutional spaces of the Forestry Agency. In July of 2009, the CDFMO published its first electronic newsletter, or me-ru magajin. The once monthly newsletters

95 are based on articles from the officeʻs print publication and are meant to, “Offer news about information related to forest-making (mori zukuri); information related to the conservation of great nature, scarce resources, and so forth; and information in the form of reports from various regions”18 (Chūbu shinrin kanri kyoku (Central District Forest

Management Office) 2009).

Spectacles of nature in electronic media are made powerful through their reference to real-world environments that correlate to and physically confirm their virtual-counterparts. In other words, those who have the opportunity to “ground truth” a particular electronic image of nature are likely to encounter a physical landscape that verifies the image; the story told through the spectacle becomes reality through its being anchored to a specific place. These anchor points, in turn, serve to stake down the broader narrative of nature that is being presented. In Otaki, the Akazawa-birin (Akazawa Beauty

Forest), which the two women I spoke with that morning in April had urged me to go see, is one such anchor point.

The Akazawa forest is actually part of Agematsu, a town located in the main Kiso

Valley, about a 25 minute drive from Otaki. The forest itself, however, is located just over the mountains to the south. Officially, the forest is known as akazawa-shizen-kyūyō-rin, which on road signs leading up to it is translated as: “Akazawa National Recreation

Forest.” However, the characters that make up kyūyō mean “rest” or “break,” so “rest forest,” or “relaxation forest” might be a better translation. In fact, Akazawa is also touted

18森林づくりに関する情報や優れた自然や希少種等保護に関する情報や各地からの たよりなどの情報を提供いたします。

96 as a shinrin-serapī-kichi, a “forest therapy base.” Pamphlets from the visitor center explain about shinrin-yoku, the practice of walking through forests as a form of therapy.

Akazawa, we learn, is Japan’s first location for the scientific analysis of the benefits of forest therapy.

When I walked in the area in April of 2008, I understood the appeal. Thick hinoki cypresses towered overhead, each wrapped in exquisite reddish-brown bark. A network of streams cut through the area, tinkling with snowmelt waters that were clear enough to see the many fish sliding through the currents. In my notes jotted down while reflecting about the experience were the following ponderings:

I was struck by the beauty of the area around the forest and wondered about how it had developed. Is this forest a naturally occurring area? Has it been created through social and political decisions? Or, most likely, a combination of both? Therefore, what I’d like to ask: why this area? Why has the forestry agency chosen to preserve this area? Why? What impacts would such an area have for Otaki? If the citizens here [in Otaki] wanted to, could a plan be created to manage some of the forests in this area [Otaki] in that way? Would there be funds available for doing that?

The naïveté of my questions hints at the power of Akazawa Forest as an anchor-point; a place embodying a nature with the power to deny itself as anything less than natural. In other words, of course Akazawa was in part created through social and political decision- making and actions, however, this is not the history conveyed in the forest spectacle.

The power of spectacles for governance lies in their ability to label; to designate a particular space as some thing with some value and some purpose. For the Akazawa

Forest, this value and purpose is recreation. Other forests in the Kiso Valley are variously designated as: “watershed forest,” “resource recycling forest,” and “human and forest co- existence forest.” These labels, of course, are not located on the ground in physical space,

97 but rather are to be found in an assemblage of published materials, both paper and electronic, produced by the Forestry Agency. Here, labels are defined drawing largely on discourses of environmental services where the target audience is a generalized national citizenry with common needs and desires. In this way, a national subject is assumed vis-

à-vis national forests. The emergence of these national subjects, however, takes place at different levels; it is, to an extent, geographically bounded and related to proximity to national forests. For residents of Otaki, national forests are a constant part of life and thus their subjectivities as national citizens are continuously reinforced through the landscapes they inhabit.

THE UNSEEN FOREST

Debord (1994) characterizes the Spectacle as “separation perfected,” in which “one part of the world represents itself to the world and is superior to it” (Paragraph 29). In their spectacular forms, national forests in Otaki also create separation. Within assemblages of national governance, local forest environments are removed from their native ecologies and reconfigured as nature and natural resources; they become spectacles within the broader economy of appearances and their value is ascribed accordingly. This separation is perfected within actors to whom spectacular forests are presented, through the use of various media, as kuni no (the nationʻs), where it masquerades as unity when the same actors recognize themselves as national citizens vis-a-vis national forests. This accounts for the disconnections expressed to me by the two Otaki women I spoke with in the field that day.

While separation is a dominant theme of human-environment interactions in

98 Otaki, it does not convey the whole story. The separation engendered by spectacles, “is that which escapes the activity of men, that which escapes reconsideration and correction by their work. It is the opposite of dialogue. Wherever there is independent representation, the spectacle reconstitutes itself” (Debord 1994: Paragraph 18). Apart from the independent representations of forest nature in Otaki are the “unseen forests,” where a woman feels the wet kiss of low hanging clouds while searching for matsutake mushrooms; where a group of hunters gathers to offer prayers to the souls of dead bears and boars; where the skin of young children tightens as it comes into contact with the frigid waters of a snow-fed stream; where a father and daughter take in the last drops of sunlight on a winter day. In next chapter I turn my attention to these unseen forests and explore the meanings they have for local residents as sites of social and cultural production where identities, relationships, and ideas of community are crafted and affirmed. In later chapters I look at articulations between unseen forests and forest spectacles and explore points of contestation and resistance.

99 CHAPTER IV The Unseen Forest

. . .the forester’s charts and tables, despite their synoptic power to distill many individual facts into a large pattern, do not quite capture (nor are they meant to) the real forest in its full diversity (Scott 1998: 76)

Amongst the managed trees that line the northern edge of the village of Kashimo in Gifu prefecture sits a small stone statue depicting

Kannon, the bodhisattva of compassion and mercy (Figure 8). Deeper in the forest sits another similar statue, with only slight variations from the first. Yet another statue rests deeper still, where the uniform pines begin to give way to unmanaged tangles of broadleaf trees. Within the forest there are 33 Kannon statues altogether, Figure 8: Kannon statue (photo by author) spaced along a trail that winds northward over the mountains and into the Otaki Valley on the other side. In some sections, the trail is wide enough only for a single individual, but elsewhere it merges with wider forest roads capable of accommodating small pickup trucks.

I walked part of the trail on a drizzly afternoon in June 2009 with a group of residents from Otaki. Our guide was a man in his sixties from the village of Kashimo. He was part of an amateur historical society that had taken an interest in the trail and the

Kannon statues. The group was actively working to locate all of the statues and restore

100 the trail. Referencing a text from the time, the man explained that during its heyday in the late Edo Period (roughly 1750-1868), when travel and pilgrimage rose in popularity, the trail was wide enough to accommodate several people walking side by side. Today, as it did then, the trail leads to Takigoshi, a small hamlet located in the back of the Otaki valley. In the past, travelers and pilgrims would have had a chance to rest in one of

Takigoshi’s guest houses before moving on to climb Ontake-san, the sacred mountain that presides over the local landscape.

Reaching Kashimo from Otaki by car requires driving down out of and around the mountains that separate the two communities. In other words, in the age of paved roads and automobiles, the mountains have become barriers to be circumnavigated. However, in the past these same forested hills appear to have been points of connection. Interaction between Otaki and Kashimo, our guide told us, were frequent and included the exchange of marriage partners. Indeed, a few kinship relations endure as I learned when we visited the home of an elderly man in Kashimo who still had relatives in Takigoshi. However, with the advent of modern modes of transportation, patterns of exchange and interaction shifted. Train lines built in the early 20th century to haul timber out of the Otaki Valley, encouraged communities in Otaki to orient themselves down-mountain towards

Agematsu and Kiso-fukushima, towns that served as commercial hubs for timber operations. This reorientation meant that the pathway connecting Takigoshi and Kashimo, like so many others than run through the area’s forests, were used less frequently. The

Kannon statues sat unvisited and uncared for, some toppled over or were washed away in mudslides, and parts of the trail were claimed by the forest’s vegetation.

101 Today, the forest that encompasses the trail between Kashimo and Takigoshi is labeled “national forest” on official maps, a designation it received after the creation of the Forestry Agency in 1949. Prior to this the forest belonged to Japan’s imperial family, which had claimed it from local daimyō (feudal lords) and shūraku (peasant communities) after gaining power in 1868. The forest’s function, according to current

Forestry Agency maps, is to maintain soil and water resources.

Under the sovereignty of the Japanese state, this and other forests in the Kiso

Region have been reconfigured and reconceptualized as natural resources and reoriented to the needs of the government and its citizenry. People began to move less and less through such forests, and sensations and experiences at the ground level all but ceased.

The forest, made “resource,” became empty space; a vessel into which government officials could pour their visions of management. Perception was shifted to the “bird’s eye view” of cartographic imagination and mediated through map images where the forest could be seen alongside other landscape elements as part of a broader, managed environment. The forest between Kashimo and Takigoshi, which had long been moved through, perceived, sensed, and experienced became “unseen.”

QUIET MAPS

“In the cartographic world,” suggests Tim Ingold, “all is still and silent” (2002: 242). By this he means that artifactual maps are only representations (or, misrepresentations) of a lifeworld that is made up of and experienced through the movements of human (as well as non-human) actors. The conceptual top-down perspective of the cartographer, he

102 insists, is something created, whereby “the world it describes is not a world in the making, but one ready-made for life to occupy” (2002: 235). Ingold’s aim is to point out the social and political situatedness of mapmaking, and thus of maps. Historian of cartography J.B. Harley (2001a) also notes interconnections between maps, knowledge, and power, and suggests that behind the mapmaker lies sets of power relations. The purposes and roles of maps and mapmaking, these thinkers suggest, are less about representing the reality of the world and more about presenting a “reality” that is attuned to particular intentions, motivations, and desires.

As is true of other parts of the world (see, for example, Winichakul 1994), in

Otaki and the rest of the Kiso Valley, cartography and formal maps are phenomena that emerged alongside state formations. Looking broadly at Nagano, the prefecture in which the Kiso Valley is located, geographer Karen Wigen outlines the social and political contestations that surround not only the making of maps, but the production of geographic scales, most notably “regions.” She explains how at the time of the Meiji

Restoration, which began in 1868, Japan’s newly formed national government set about crafting and creating the domestic architecture of the Japanese nation by adapting the kuni (domains or provinces) of the previous era and formalizing them as ken (prefectures)

(Figure 9). Mapped onto the ideological space of the nation, the ken were, as Wigen puts it, “a new set of political instruments that better suited the needs of the modern state” (2010: 12). As with other nation-states, these needs included demarcating units of governance (in large part for the purposes of taxation), dividing economic activities, and securing access to resources. By clarifying, indexing, and labeling the world, maps also

103 served to stabilize the newly born nation by “quieting” the heterogenous movements of people and presenting an image of Japan as a united and comprehendible whole. In other

Figure 9: 1907 map of Nagano prefecture by Ando Rikinosuke, with detail of Kiso Valley and Otaki Village (Ando 1907) words, the Meiji government strove to naturalize a new political order in Japan through what Ingold labels “the cartographic illusion,” in which the process of making maps,

“creates the appearance that the structure of the map springs directly from the structure of the world, as though the mapmaker served merely to mediate a transcription from one to the other” (2002: 234). In the early years of the Japanese nation, cartography, in other words, offered tools of state-making whereby symbolically powerful representations of reality (maps) quietly, subtlety, and yet powerfully, conveyed the world as it was (or, at least, how it was meant to be).

104 In Otaki, and across Japan, maps produced by the state continue to play prominent roles in producing and maintaining landscapes that correlate to broader conceptualizations of the Japanese nation as whole. Through mapmaking, forests are made subjects of governance, and maps produced by Japan’s national Forestry Agency play quintessential roles in constructing them as national resources--objects of state management. As mentioned previously, national forests in the Kiso Valley are labeled in

Forestry Agency publications as “mina no mori” (everyone’s forests), a conceptual move that works to produce geographical scale at which trees and forests, like rivers, lakes, and mountains, are part of a national architecture that is meant to be solid, stable, and enduring. Through their appearances as representations of objective realities, state- produced maps function to crop out the messy complexities of local ecologies and lived practices to create a world where all is still and quiet.

WALKING

Walking on walking, under foot earth turns Streams and mountains never stay the same. -Gary Snyder19

There is no public transportation in Otaki. Cars and trucks tend to be the mode of travel employed by most residents. As in rural communities throughout Japan, kei-tora, or K- truck, small two-seater trucks with flat-beds and 750 cc engines, are favored. These

19 Snyder G. 1996. “The Mountain Spirit.” From Mountains and rivers without end. Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint. Pages 140-147.

105 miniature trucks are well suited to the needs of small farmers in that they are capable of hauling tools, soil, harvested vegetables, dogs, crates of beer or sake, bundles of newspaper for recycling, and even the occasional person.

During my time in Otaki I did not own a K-truck, though I did have a small car.

The car was useful for the thirty minute trip down valley to buy groceries in Kiso-

Fukushima, the nearest town of any size, and for trips to visit in-laws in Kyoto. The car also came in useful for hiking excursions in more remote parts of the village or for jaunts to the village hot spring that sat at the end of a long dirt road, as well as for outings to meet friends for dinner on cold, mid-winter nights. However, for day to day affairs I found walking to be much more pleasurable and productive. When running errands or going for meetings, my wife and I would usually walk the twenty minutes it took from our house to the village center.

Looking back on my time in Otaki I realize that walking provided me a perspective that, as much as anything else, informs my ethnographic accounts of life there. The dwelling perspective (Ingold 1993) that develops through walking is particularly apt, I suggest, for ethnographers, who are in the business of documenting the subtleties of life. Of course, acts of walking are much more than a methodology. Walking, as I argue later, is also a social practice with implications for how actors engage with and relate to the environments around them. In many ways, walking is an act that challenges the stillness and stability suggested by cartographic maps. Even if one consults a map during a sojourn, the terrain encountered is, “continually taking shape around the traveller even as the latter’s movements contribute to its formation” (Ingold 2002: 223). In other

106 words, the world encountered when walking is a world coming into being, in which vistas of possibility continually arise within the perceptual and experiential relations that link together actor and environment.

I will address this latter point further on. For now, I would like to take you, the reader, on a walk through Otaki village. I will serve as your guide. I will point out aspects of the life and environment of the village that had (and have) meaning for me. Where I deem it appropriate I will complement my descriptions with relevant information in order to contextualize a particular activity or object. In this way I hope to share a sense of my dwelling perspective, the way I perceived Otaki. Taking this walk will allow me to situate my analysis of national forests in Otaki within the village’s local history and environment, but also within Japan’s broader political-economy. In addition, by pointing out places in the village that have meaning for me, my biases will in part be revealed. It is my goal to put these out into the open so that readers can question why certain places, things, and activities drew my attention in regards to the broader themes and messages addressed in this work. Where possible, I try to be explicit about such things. However, as an ethnographer I do not pretend to offer pure objectivity, nor a clear and penetrating enough reflexivity to reveal the meaning of all that is or is not captured in my moving frame of analysis.

Another aim in taking this walk is to talk about Otaki as a place. Borrowing from the concise language of Paige West (2006b: 30), I consider place to be “the fixing of a process in time and space, but not necessarily an enduring one.” In other words, Otaki exists today as the product of a multitude of continual processes, which I cannot capture

107 fully through my ethnographic lens, which itself was constantly “moving.” It has been nearly two years since I left Otaki, so the descriptions I offer here suffer from the time- lag that is inherent in most anthropological work. Still, I do wish to convey a sense of my experience of Otaki as a place. Through walking, I hope to do so in a way that allows you, the reader, some access to this experience of place, which, I contend, is as critical, if not more so, as having an intellectual understanding of it.

Ingold and Vergunst (2008) describe walking as a social activity that is central to the ways in which humans inhabit their environments. Looking back on my time in Otaki

I realize that walking provided me a perspective that, as much as anything else, informs my ethnographic accounts of life there. For me, the rhythm and tempo of walking were well suited to the Otaki lifeworld. At a slow pace I was attuned to the presence and movements of other organisms in the environment: a fox (kitsune) darting across a roadway, or a pair of Japanese serow (kamoshika) standing deadly still in a grove of

Japanese larch (karamatsu). When walking, sounds too enlivened the environment around me, whether the buzz of a distant chainsaw or the rising call of a Japanese Bush

Warbler (uguisu).

The process of developing a dwelling perspective is particularly valuable for ethnographers, who, as newcomers to new contexts (social, cultural, and environmental), are in unique positions to observe, monitor, and document their own practices of walking and how these change over time. Unfortunately, as Ingold and Vergunst (2008) also note, walking is overlooked by ethnographers in favor of happenings that occur at “point A” and “point B.” In anthropological engagements with Japan, the preoccupation with

108 locations is perhaps most fully articulated in Ian Condry’s (2006) concept of the genba as, “a ‘place where something actually happens, appears, or is made’” (89). The essence of genba, he suggests, is performativity and location; the idea being that significant happenings always occur some place.

In contrast to Condry, my aim in taking up the topic of walking, is to open the ethnographic gaze beyond fixed locations, in order to take into account the movements, sensations, and perceptual experiences that continually weave together the locations that we depart from, return to, and visit. Ingold and Vergunst (2008) argue that, “the ways along which we walk are those along which we live,” and that, “Social relations [. . .] are not enacted in situ but are paced out along the ground” (1).

Walking, along with speech, is one of the hallmarks of humanity and, like speech, its variations attest to the breadth of diversity among our species. At a primitive level, we learn and experience the environments we dwell in as we move through them and make them landscapes. Though we may use maps when walking, these do not correspond directly to the practice of walking and to our experiences of the world. Rather, landscapes unfold in conjunction with our movements through them. Moreover, landscapes are not only seen, they are also heard, felt, tasted, and smelled. In addition, there are affective qualities to our experiences of landscapes, and these are significantly informed by our subjective positions vis a vis any number of contingencies (personal history, knowledge, interpersonal context, et cetera). Thus, even if we follow the same path day in and day out, the world we encounter is never the same. Walking, therefore, entails a practice that constantly threatens the quiet stillness of a mapped world.

109 SENSE OF OTAKI

I recognize that in one sense, what I am proposing is a setting of the ethnographic scene, which is a trope that normally comes earlier in anthropological works. However, I agree with Kondo’s (1990) critical assessment of the “setting trope,” which she suggests is, “a narrative convention both shaping and shaped by experiences of fieldwork,” which more often then not takes the form of, “a journey, more or less linear, where order and meaning gradually emerge from initially inchoate events and experiences” (7). Setting tropes are often employed by anthropologists in a rhetorical fashion to help “map out” the locations of their studies and to stake out spheres of authority, and also to convey a sense of the process of gaining one’s footing in a landscape--of beginning the journey of fieldwork. The setting trope is fundamental to ethnographic work, but also fundamentally problematic, and should thus be embraced and engaged. My decision to employ this device at this somewhat late point in the present work was based on a desire to limit the totalizing and authoritarian tone of my own voice. My hope is that by deploying the setting trope at this point the reader will recognize in my voice a grounding that is informed by a dwelling perspective.

Still, because of the realities of fieldwork, the “voice” that I present here, though now contextualized in the broader experiences of my research, is one that first emerged in the pre-contextualized spaces of my early encounters with the Otaki landscape. A reflective passage that I wrote in my field notebook after my first walk in Otaki reveals, to my embarrassment, some of the intellectual preconceptions, assured thoughts, and points of hubris that dominated these initial encounters.

110 04.23.2008 My impressions of today are that people here are somewhat reserved and a bit reluctant to talk with strangers. That will change of course as I become less of a stranger.

Everyone I talked to also had little thought about forests here in Otaki. I suppose because there is such a long history of not being able to use forests that no one considers it an option really. People also seem somewhat fatalistic about the prospects of the village, though I also had a sense that not much comprehensive thought has been given to it. So, perhaps a chance to think about such things together will have an impact. So, indeed it will be valuable to hear what it is people feel they need or want in their village. Once that is done everyone can start thinking of concrete ways to actualize those thoughts. There’s a notion of inevitability surrounding the decline of villages, but I don’t think the reality reflects that—I hope it doesn’t. Anyway, I think there is room for my research.

It is clear that this experience was very much framed through my intellectual faculties and a confidence that my research had a role to play in bettering or improving the community that I was new to. Moreover, in this passage it is almost exclusively people that I document--people disconnected and decontextualized. One could say my focus on people was fitting for an anthropologist, but as I write this my lack of perceptive attention to the broader landscape of which the people were part feels like a gross oversight.

Fortunately, in a passage from a couple of days later, I can begin to see my gaze widening and my sense of dwelling beginning, ever so slightly, to deepen. The walking I refer to in the following passage was done with my wife, and more for pleasure, which seems to have made all the difference.

04.25.2008 Aki and I took a couple of walks today. First we walked northwest from our house, up a valley towards Ontake. There are several homes located in this section of town. Each sat on a fairly large piece of land, with adjacent fields—the plots were perhaps half acres. No crops appeared to have been

111 planted yet, but the soil has been prepared—it’s dark and loamy, looks like good soil. Small groves of hinoki located near the homes and on the side of the road appeared to be being cared for—perhaps privately owned.

On the same day (April 25th, 2008), my frustrations from my initial attempts of trying to talk with village residents led me to the village shakyo (Health and Welfare Center) to

Figure 10: Ontake-san (photo by author) inquire about volunteer activities. The later part of my notes from that day express my naive joy at recognizing the importance of participating in the community that I hoped to observe --a further deepening of my sense of dwelling.

04.25.2008 Very good day today. Being proactive and showing that I, and Aki, are willing to be a part of the village life seems to be a very encouraging sign

112 to other village members and will surely lead to some great opportunities for interaction, learning, and cooperation. I’m very pleased with this development.

I am getting ahead of myself. Allow me to back up and recount my initial contact with the village.

I first visited Otaki in the fall of 2007. Having arrived in Japan just a month earlier, I was living near my wife’s family in Kyoto, working on arrangements for fieldwork. The village was holding its annual fall festival and so I went to explore the possibility of living and studying there. The drive to Otaki from Kyoto takes about four and a half hours. Leaving Kyoto and the Kinai Basin one cuts east, straight across the

Nobi Plain, tracing the outskirts of Nagoya. From there, in what amounts to a wide left turn, one heads north and begins an ascent towards the vertical world of the Japanese

Alps, commonly referred to as “the roof of the nation.”

Otaki sits within a narrow valley on the southern flank of Ontake-san, Japan’s second highest volcano. Long considered sacred, Ontake-san would come to play a central role in my research, as I discuss in detail later. The valley comprises a single watershed and is latticed with a network of shallow streams that flow into the larger Otaki

River. Steep mountains surround the village and keep the days short. In the mornings the sun struggles up the backside of the eastern hills, finally spilling over and pouring its rays into every available space of the valley. The scene resembles a cubist painting, with large chunks of light and shadow filling the valley bottom and the tree-filled hills. Evenings, by contrast, are much more subdued. The sun, having traveled its arc across the sky, slips effortlessly behind the mountains, leaving a soft glow of pink and purple hues that

113 envelopes the land. In the summer, small birds flitter in the twilight, diving for insects.

Depending on the season, the mid-day sky is a deep azure blue from which the sun casts down strong rays that make your skin tingle, but the heat is never oppressive, like it can be in other parts of Japan.

Entering the village on a small, two-lane road, I caught my first short glimpses of

Ontake-san. Whereas the Alps are uplifted massifs, created from the millennial grinding of the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates upon which the island of Honshu sits,

Ontake-san is a compound volcano formed through the workings of magma. The mountain squats like a rock in a Zen garden, surrounded by radiant waves of stone, an unmoving force in the landscape (Figure 11). Over the 24 months I would spend in Otaki,

Ontake-san would remain a constant presence in my daily life and in my conversations with residents.

Until that first day I had only encountered Otaki from above, maneuvering through digital representations in Google Earth. So I spent the day walking the village’s narrow streets, exploring forested areas, and chatting with residents. Though Otaki’s boundaries encompass a total area of over 300 hectares, the central part of the village where most residents live comprises less than five hectares. Five hamlets comprise the village center, while 7-8 others are scattered up and down the valley; the farthest is 12 kilometers away. Hamlet boundaries are marked by wooden pillars from which hang braided lengths of rice straw and small planks of wood upon which are written Buddhist prayers. Homes in Otaki are mostly made of local woods and many appear to be quite old, perhaps three to four generations. The structures are built low and wide to resist the

114 winds that roll hard off Ontake-san’s slopes. They have wide, sloping roofs that are sturdy enough to hold the heavy snows that winters can bring. Small, cylindrical stove pipes jut from the roofs of many homes, and in the cold months they burp smoke and fill the air with the sweet smell of burning wood. One enters these older homes through a set of sliding wooden doors that lead into what is often a wide entry way (in the past livestock were kept in these spaces, which accounts for their size). Past the entry way are large main rooms with a central hearth where the stove sits and large, exposed beams that have blackened from years of absorbing wood-smoke. It is common to find a kamidana

(literally, “god-shelf”), an alter for Shinto gods adorned with various talismans associated with local shrines and Ontake-san, located on a shelf built into one side of the ceiling.

Beginning in the early spring, when much of the forest is still leafless and brown,

Otaki begins to bloom in a multitude of colors and shades. Yellow fukujusō (Adonis ramosa) are the earliest to appear, popping up in small patches from beds of dry leaves.

These are followed by several other varieties before trees—plum, cherry, and peach— join in the symphony, each with their own brilliant chords. During this time I often saw women carrying self-made bouquets; some of them (my wife included) would meet at the village community center to practice ikebana (flower arrangement) together. I also often saw bunches of flowers placed in the running waters that flow between houses through a network of concrete ditches.

Water is a ubiquitous presence in Otaki and in the center of the village I could almost constantly hear the gurgling of its flowing. The water flows directly from hillside streams that are fed by snowmelt from Ontake-san, so it is cool, clean, and crisp. The

115 sweet tasting tap water was always a treat for me, as well as a point of pride for residents; better yet was water from one of the many springs in the village. The water that is carried out of the mountains and into the village through a maze of channels allows it to be diverted from nearby streams for use in the rice and dry fields.

MOVEMENTS OF LABOR

Walking among Otaki’s fields is where I made many of my first contact with residents. I would stop and begin conversations by asking about varieties of vegetables being grown, or about fertilizer usage for rice cultivation. Later on during my time in the village, it was not uncommon for a walk to turn into a three hour conversation over tea and snacks when someone would invite me to their home. People in Otaki, especially the older women I encountered, love to chat, and I learned as much from impromptu sessions of participant observation over tea as I did through interviews and other techniques.

Other times a short chat on the edge of someone’s field would end with me carrying home an armful of fresh produce: tomatoes, daikon radish, corn, Chinese cabbage, green beans, potatoes, zucchini, cucumber, green peppers, onions, edamame, and other varieties. One woman, Tamura-san, who became a close friend, borrowed land located near my home in the village, so we often bumped into one another when I was walking to or from the village center. She was a mother of two in her late fifties.

Although married, Tamura-san’s husband lived in another prefecture for work, so I never met him. Her children too were living outside of the village. Tamura-san lived together with her elderly mother in a newer house. In the mornings, I would find her hard at work

116 tending to her field, often pulling weeds. She was fond of reminding me that her produce was “munōyaku” (pesticide-free), which partly explained why she was constantly battling weeds.

“Good morning,” Tamura-san would say enthusiastically in English. She would continue, “Today is a sunny day,” changing the adjective to “rainy,” “cloudy,” or “cold,” depending on the situation. Tamura-san attended a weekly English conversation course that I taught at the community center, so as time went on her attempts to speak in my native tongue got more and more elaborate. Later, we would switch to Japanese and

Tamura-san would talk about her field and the different varieties of vegetables and flowers she was growing.

During the two years I spent in Otaki, Tamura-san and I had many impromptu, informal conversations, which I never recorded, so here I paraphrase. One day Tamura- san invited me into her field and pointed to a raised berm of dirt covered by a blanket of small, green seedlings and explained, “these are all red turnips” (kore zenbu akakabu desu).

“There are so many” (ōi desu ne), I replied.

“Yeah. When they get a bit bigger, I will pull out the smaller ones. Actually, I will pull out the majority. That way the best ones will have space to grow.” (sou desu. mō chotto ōkikunattara, chīsai no wo toru. mō hotondo torimasu. sōshitara, supēsu wo tsukutte ii no ga chanto sodatsu.)

“I see” (naruhodo).

“I will give you some later, when they are ready” (atode, dekitara agemasu ne).

117 Table 1: Census of Otaki Farming Households 1985-2010

Total Farming households by economic type Population of farming number of households Year farming households Primary Secondary Side- Household Total Male Female business business business use

included in 1985 173 8 7 158 “side- 626 286 340 business”

1990 122 3 2 32 85 431 197 234

1995 116 -- 12 27 77 394 179 215

2000 79 1 3 28 47 258 121 137

2005 74 -- 4 15 55 220 100 120

2010 70 1 4 12 53 41 18 23 Source: Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries (MAFF) Census of Agriculture and Forestry in Japan http://www.maff.go.jp/j/tokei/census/afc/index.html [Accessed 9/25/12]

In Otaki, Tamura-san is a bit of an exception--in terms of age--when it comes to farming, which is an activity almost exclusively engaged in by elderly residents.

Moreover, most do so only for household consumption. According to a Ministry of

Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries survey from 2010, only 23 residents listed farming as their main occupation. Of the 23, 20 were 65 years or older, which is beyond Japan’s national retirement age (see Figure ). It is likely then that most of these “full-time” farmers also received some monetary assistance (such as a pension) from the national government. In the same 2010 survey only 53 households out of 414 identified

118 Figure 11: Population of Working Farmers in Otaki by Age and Sex, 2010

15 N=13

12 N=10 9

6

3

0 Men Women

Age 15-34 Age 35-64 Age 65-85+

Source: Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries (MAFF) 2010 Census of Agriculture and Forestry in Japan http://www.maff.go.jp/j/tokei/census/afc/index.html [Accessed 9/25/12] themselves as “farming households” (nōka), meaning that the majority of residents no longer rely on agriculture as a primary source of income. To be sure, because of Otaki’s mountainous terrain, extreme climate, and paucity of arable land, farming has not, in recent years, been a primary industry, if it ever was. When the topic of agriculture was raised among several residents during a group discussion, everyone confirmed that most produce is grown for and and consumed within the household. One participant emphatically explained, “Whether for tourism or whatever, in any case even if there is a market, you can’t do farming [as a business] in Otaki. The scale is too small. There is too little agricultural land,” (kankō ni demo, nann demo yatte, izurenishitemo shiba ni uru tte iu are, nōgyō ha dekinmonde ōtaki de ha. kibo ga mō chīsasukigru. nōchimenseki ga sukunasugirun da yo ne). Still, the fact remains that whether as a business or for

119 household consumption, in Otaki the practice of agriculture continues to decrease with time (Table 1).

Though, on the whole, vegetables, rice, and the occasional fruits raised by Otaki residents contribute little to household income, agriculture continues to be of significance to many residents as a means of relating to the land and to one another. One woman I interviewed who had moved to Otaki ten years previously spoke about her experience of growing vegetables for the first time. She expressed her gratitude (arigatasa) for the joy of experiencing the daily changes in her garden (mainichi mainichi no henka ga sugoku tanishii) and for the peace of mind that came with eating chemical-free vegetables

(nōyaku mo tsukawazu ni anshin shite tabereru tte iu). In terms of relationships with other people, in Otaki farming was often a communal practice. Groups of men and women would come together to prepare, plant, and harvest one person’s field and then switch to another’s. Breaks between work were filled with home-made foods, hot or cold tea, and plenty of conversation.

Agricultural products themselves also had social lives. Many practicing farmers I spoke with told me that though a lot of the produce they grew was consumed within their household, much was given away to family, friends, and neighbors. On more than one occasion while enjoying a meal at the home of a friend/collaborator, we were interrupted by a visitor who had come by to drop off some vegetables, freshly caught fish, or game meat. Others I talked with explained that they even sent boxes of fresh vegetables to friends, children, and other relatives via the Japanese Postal Service, as a way to offer a

“taste” of Otaki to people outside of the village. As is the case with “gifts” across Japan

120 (see Rupp 2003), there was invariably an expectation of reciprocation tied to the giving of agricultural products. I myself honed my skills at bread baking while in Otaki, so that I would have something to offer in return for the many vegetables and other foodstuffs I received. There is, in other words, a moral economy at play in Otaki that is often articulated through exchanges of agricultural products. Due to its small-scale and intimate associations with this moral economy, farming as business was a tenuous proposition in

Otaki. One resident went so far as to suggest that to sell her produce would be embarrassing (hazukashii).

Two exceptions when it comes to the economic role of farmed goods are tomorokoshi (corn) and akakabu (red turnips). Modest efforts were made by different village groups to sell these to larger markets. Corn grown in Otaki is recognized by villagers for its sweetness, which is a result, I was told, of the major daytime/nighttime temperature fluctuations experienced during the growing season. This temperature regime is said to be similar to that of Hokkaido (a place also famous for corn). In the weeks following the fall corn harvest, groups of growers would get together and, with the help of the village office or the JA office, travel to Nagoya or Tokyo to sell their produce at various events. This, however, was the extent of their marketing efforts.

Akakabu, on the other hand, has been the focus of much more attention in terms of creating a marketable product. The local varieties of red turnip (which are actually more of a purple color) grown in Otaki have a long history that stretches back at least to the middle of the Edo Period (around 1700). Akakabu are harvested in late October and early November, after the first frosts have arrived in Otaki. Not a single part of the plant

121 goes unused. The green leafy tops are removed and tied into bunches in order to make sunki, a type of tsukemono, or pickled vegetable, unique to the area. Sunki may have origins in the old capital city of Kyoto, where a similar kind of pickled vegetable is known as sugunki. However, what makes Otaki sunki unique is that it is made without the use of salt, which is the hallmark of other kinds of tsukemono. Instead of salt, residents in

Otaki use tane, which are bunches of sunki reserved from the previous year that contain

lactic-acid, which works to ferment and

preserve the fresh turnip stalks.

Each fall sunki is made by residents

throughout Otaki, with each household

employing unique tane reserved year after

year. A researcher from Chubu University

in Nagoya studying the active agents in

sunki estimated that about 90% of

households in the village continue to make

it, meaning that a variety of tane (and thus

sunki) still exists in Otaki. Because the Figure 12: Two women preparing sunki (photo by author) temperature must be cold to make sunki, I often encountered residents (again mostly older women) hard at work preparing turnip stalks on frosty November mornings. The leaves must be boiled before they are combined with the previous year’s tane, so most households own contraptions that look like large steel pots welded onto stoves. Wood or gas is used to fire the stoves and boil water into

122 which the prepared bunches of leaves are dunked before being placed in pickling barrels with the tane (Figure 12). The pattern is a layer of fresh leaves, followed by a layer of tane, followed by more fresh ones, and on and on until one barrel is full. Completed barrels will then be left to ferment at least for a few weeks. Enough sunki is made each fall that it never seems to be in short supply over the coming months when it is used to make everything from pizza, to croquette, to fried rice, to soup, or simply eaten on its own.

Although there have been some attempts to market sunki to the broader public, it is very much an acquired taste, one that is definitely not acquired by all (residents were astonished that I, a foreigner, loved the stuff). In this regard, the unique pickled vegetable has become a significant marker of local identity for actors in Otaki. And, because of the differences in flavors that are said to be a result of variations in tane and methods of preparation, often the expectation is that one will cherish the sunki made within their natal household more than any other. In other words, sunki has the affective power to summon thoughts of home and of the village. What is more, because sunki preparation requires the use of tane that is reserved from the previous year’s batch, it is intimately tied to notions of community, history, familial ties, and the life of the village. While talking about sunki one interviewee, a woman in her mid-eighties who was considered something of an expert on the topic, suggested that younger people in the village tend not to like sunki because their palates have become attuned to outside foods. She went on to link the inability to appreciate traditional Otaki foods to trends in depopulation and the failure of many young people to appreciate and care for their furusato (hometown).

123 In contrast to sunki, the bulbous roots of the akakabu plant have a much wider appeal among the Japanese public. Akakabu roots are also pickled, but are done so employing the method common throughout Japan of using salt as a pickling agent. When pickled, akakabu blush and turn a wonderful color of pink, which adds to their appeal among consumers. Several groups in the village had moderate success in packaging and marketing akakabu-dsuke, as the pickled variety are called. However, though the specific varieties of akakabu grown in Otaki are unique to the region, the species itself is not, meaning that pickled akakabu is widely available across Japan. Therefore, specialized brands, such as those produced in Kyoto, enjoy a much bigger part of the already limited market. As a result, the marketing of akakabu-dsuke made in Otaki brings only a small amount of profit, and is seasonal at that. Still, for a village with few other economic options, these products appeared as potential moneymakers and were therefore often the focus of attention during different community events, JA sponsored lectures and workshops, and other efforts at “branding” the village.

The fact that farming is an activity that primarily elderly residents engage in is not surprising when we look at Otaki’s demographic situation. In recent decades, while overall population has declined the village’s elderly (residents 65 years of age and older) population has risen steadily. In 2010 the elderly rate stood at 35.2% (Figure 13). This trend of “gentrification” is one that continues not only in Otaki, but across Japan. Thus, at the time of fieldwork, farming among many households was less of an economic strategy

(see Francks 2005) and more of a way to keep elderly parents and grandparents occupied.

On top of this, as mentioned previously, farming allowed people both inside and outside

124 of the village a sense of connection to the land, culture, and community through their consumption of produce (Jussaume Jr. 2003).

Figure 13: Otaki Population Change 1980-2010 2000

1500

1000

500

0 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010

Elderly (65 and older) Under 65

Source: Otaki Village homepage, http://www.vill.otaki.nagano.jp/aboutus/data004.html [Accessed 9/13/12]

With farming designated as a pursuit of mostly elderly residents, one might ask what forms of employment working-age (15-64 year old) residents in Otaki engage in.

For much of the village’s modern history, as state-sponsored industrial forestry emerged in the late 19th to early 20th century, forestry-related work was a staple of local livelihoods. Otaki men worked in a variety of capacities: as loggers, as cooks or other support staff, and as train engineers, to name only a few occupations.

These men were employees of the Imperial Forestry Office (teishitsurinyakyoku), which after WWII became the Forestry Agency (rinyachō). Timber varieties from the

Kiso Valley, particularly hinoki cypress (Chamaecyparis obtusa), were known in Japan for their tight grain, which produced quality lumber, and thus were in high demand in the early part of the 20th century. Timber harvesting in the Kiso Valley was a boom for the

125 imperial government, often accounting for well over half of income from all imperial forests (see Figure 14). With the expansion of state-sponsored industrial forestry in the

Kiso Valley, employment opportunities for both local and non-locals remained plentiful.

In Otaki, the number of forestry workers was plentiful enough that the area of the village where they lived with their families was considered a hamlet and referred to as eirinsho-

Figure 14: Income from Timber Extraction in Kiso Valley Imperial Forests 1897-1935*

1897 1899 1901 1903 1905 1907 1909 1911 1916 1919 1922 1924 1926 1928 1930 1932 1934

0% 20.0% 40.0% 60.0% 80.0% 100.0%

Percentage of Total Imperial Income Percentage of Income from All Imperial Forests

Source: (Oura 1992) *Some data unavailable for certain years ku (Forest Management Office Hamlet). I was told that in the past forestry workers and their families would represent their hamlet in village sports competitions, festivals, and other events, just like other residents. One interviewee explained that in the hamlet there

126 was a train station that was busy throughout the day with trains hauling timber. “The families of those people [forestry workers],” he added, “also came with them, so among my school friends there were those from other villages and towns who had come to Otaki.

There were a lot of those families” (sōiu hitotachi no kazoku mo mata, isshoni kimashita kara, gakkō no tomodachi no naka ni mo yoso no mura ya machi kara ōtaki he kuru, sōiu kazoku ga ippai atta wake desuyo ne).

Forestry remained a booming industry in Otaki and the rest of the Kiso Region until the middle of the 1960s when importation of foreign timber into Japan increased in order to meet the needs of the rapidly urbanizing and increasingly affluent nation (Knight

2000). Domestic timber markets became depressed and, in the Kiso Region, the massive cutting operations that had been the norm for the greater part of the 20th century began to wind down. Forestry Agency employment numbers in the Kiso Region dropped dramatically. In the Otaki office of the Forestry Agency, the number of employees dropped from 540 in 1976 to 180 in 1991. As of 2011, the Kiso Forest Management

Office (kisoshinrinkanrisho), which oversees all national forests in the Kiso Region, including those in Otaki, had only 44 full-time office staff, of which 7 were administrators, and a scant 35 forestry workers, many of whom were temporary and/or part-time. In March 2009, when I spoke to the head of the Seto River Forest Management

Office (setogawa shinrin kanrikyoku), which overseas national forests in Otaki, he told me there were only eight employees. He added that among those employees there was probably only one “real local person” (hontō no jimoto no hito), but that person was

127 transferred to Otaki and likely go somewhere else in a year or two, as is the norm in many Japanese institutions.

The physical remains of state industrial forestry remain strewn across the Otaki landscape. Empty buildings, once Forestry Agency offices and the homes of forestry workers, now sit lifeless on the edge of Nakagoshi, one of Otaki’s central hamlets.

Railroad trestles and bridges lay rotting within the misty confines of forests. On large swaths of land that were previously clear-cut, juvenile pine trees struggle to survive against bamboo grass and other fast-growing flora. These things, and others, remain, but the activities of forestry work have all but disappeared.

In recent years, the majority of Otaki residents increasingly have made their livelihoods in tertiary industries (Figure 15) that revolve around tourism--skiing in the winter and mountaineering in the summer. This sector of Otaki’s economy includes a village-owned ski resort and its associated restaurants, inns, and rental shops; ryokan

(Japanese-style inns) that cater to religious pilgrims who come to climb and worship on

Ontake-san; mountain-huts that serve both recreational hikers and pilgrims; gift shops; and a golf course in the neighboring town. Accordingly, residents tend to work as cooks, servers, shop attendants, maintenance workers, housekeepers, lift operators, and so forth.

During my time in the village, I tried my hand at working in a ryokan and at the ski resort

128 Figure 15: Transition of Otaki Population Based on Industry 1960-2010 100%

75%

50%

25%

0% 1960 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010

Tertiary industries Secondary industries Primary industries

Source: Otaki Village homepage, http://www.vill.otaki.nagano.jp/aboutus/ data004.html [Accessed 9/13/12] as a lift operator. Meanwhile, my wife worked as a server and cashier in a restaurant at the ski resort. The work was low-paying, menial, and seasonal. As most work at the ski resort lasts only through the winter months, many of the people both my wife and I worked with took on different jobs during the summer months.

Sadly, tourist numbers in Otaki are also in decline (see Figure 16), which was cause for a great deal of anxiety among my co-workers at the ski-resort. Many spoke of the “bubble times” (baburu jidai) in the 1980’s and early 1990’s when there was a “ski boom” (sukī būmu) that brought thousands of people to the village-owned ski resort. My co-workers at the ski resort spoke of days when parked cars lined the road leading up to

129 the resort because parking lots were full. They spoke of long lines of vehicles winding their way out of the Otaki Valley into the evening after a day of skiing. Also, they spoke of garbage bags full of large bills from sales of lift tickets. However, these same co-

Figure 16: Numbers of Visitors, Ontake Highlands (Ontake-kōgen) & Ski Resort 1993-2011 1000000

750000

500000

250000

0 1993 1995 1997 1999 2001 2003 2005 2007 2009 2011

Source: Otaki Village homepage http://www.vill.otaki.nagano.jp/aboutus/data004.html [accessed 09/30/12]

workers spoke worriedly about the future of the ski resort, often commenting on whether or not a certain parking lot was full, or about how many tour buses had arrived on a particular day. As I discuss later, these anxieties had come to the fore in 2004, when it was revealed that the village government had accrued an enormous amount of debt because of the ski resort. My co-workers felt that the ski resort was one of the village’s last economic options, but they also knew that its viability was questionable.

These “movements of labor,” from primary industries like farming and forestry to tertiary industries based on tourism, reflect a broader national trend, which William Kelly has characterized as the making of “regional Japan.” By this he means that in the post- war (or Showa) era rural communities have been made peripheral and subordinate to urban cores through reorganizations of agricultural activities, offering of subsidies to

130 garner political support, widespread acceptance of a mainstream consciousness, and sentimental appeals to rural nostalgia (Kelly 1990: 211). In Otaki, processes of regionalization have intersected with and helped to reinforce institutional shifts within the

Forestry Agency in which the status of national forests has changed from “resources-to- be-used” to “resources-to-be-conserved.” National forests in Otaki are now presented as a

“wealth of the nation” (kuni no zaisan); they have been emptied of working bodies, so that they may be offered up as “nature” (shizen) for consumption by the national citizenry.

Indeed, moving through Otaki, the forests often seem eerily empty and devoid of human activity. Gates or chains block vehicular access to national forests and there is a general sense that the spaces are off-limits. Much human labor is directed at and limited to serving tourists who come to the Otaki Valley to climb or ski on the sacred mountain,

Ontake-san. Some tourists spend a night or two in one of the village’s many ryokan or guesthouses, but the vast majority remain only a few hours and largely by-pass the village-proper, which can be quickly skirted as one makes their way up and onto Ontake- san. And yet, I do not want to suggest that Otaki is not only part of a region that is completely beholden to Japan’s broader political and economic forces. There is community in Otaki; there are relationships that connect humans to one another and to the forests, mountains, and streams. However, this community and the broader human- environmental ecology of which it is part, are not perceivable at the quick pace that marks much modern life. Walking, I again suggest, opens vistas of perception where the nuances that comprise life in marginal places--like Otaki--can be experienced and

131 appreciated. Many times this requires a deliberate effort to both slow-down and direct one’s movements to such places.

DELIBERATE MOVEMENTS

While I am speaking in this chapter of movement, and specifically of walking, I must note a paradox that I previously glossed over, which has to do with the ways in which residents of Otaki themselves move through the environment. Earlier, I mentioned that most people in the village own small trucks (K-trucks), which they use to get around. It should be noted that for many Otaki residents automobiles are almost exclusively their mode of transportation. An extreme example was elderly man who, to his son’s constant embarrassment, repeatedly throughout the day made rounds in his K-truck at a snail’s pace. He was slow enough that I, and others, always made conscious efforts not to get stuck behind him. Meanwhile, an elderly woman whom I often passed by on my way to the village center would use a motorized scooter to travel the short distance between her home and her vegetable field. I found this quite amusing, but must admit, that it did cut her travel time down from about the three minutes it would take on foot, to less than thirty seconds.

There was, and is, I believe, a stigma attached to walking in Otaki. Or, perhaps it would be more appropriate to label it as jōshiki (common sense). Why walk when you can drive? I imagine this would also be the case in rural communities elsewhere in Japan where manual labor is still a part of daily life for some and walking for pleasure is something only city-folks (or foreign anthropologists do). Still, my wife and I were most

132 definitely not the only ones walking in the village. However, for many in the village walking was often a deliberate practice, one done in a group as part of some larger activity.

Walks in forests, in particular, were often deliberate, intentional, planned, and organized. Many were done as gakushu-kōza (study courses) with the aim of offering opportunities for residents to learn more about their village, its history, and environment.

Walking was a practice that was frequently linked with acquiring knowledge; the purpose was to experience and sense the landscape in order to gain a greater appreciation and understanding of it. Walking in forests--watching the changing light, noticing the brilliant colors of wildflowers, feeling the damp of wispy spring clouds, hearing the rustle of autumn leaves, smelling the sweetness of ripening berries, feeling the unease of a unknown clamor up ahead--transformed them from unknown spaces to places of shared experience, meaning, and affect; places dwelled in and linked to a common lifeworld through movement.

On the morning of October 18th, 2008 my wife and I joined a group of Otaki residents for a walk through the Setogawa Forest located in a side canyon just south of the village center. A gated forestry road allowed easy access to the canyon for a few kilometers, but it was a narrow foot path following a gully that provided access to

Setogawa. As we started into the forest, columns of sunlight cut through the canopy, giving shape to plumes of mist rising up from a network of small creeks that run like latticework through the forest. Noda-san, an older man in his sixties who used to work for the local branch of the Forestry Agency, served as our guide. Several children from the

133 village, ranging in age from 10 to 13, also walked with us. In fact, the walk was intended for them. A fifty-something year old woman who had moved to Otaki about thirty years earlier from the southern island of Kyushu, had orgnaized the walk as part of the village’s kodomo-no-kai, or “children’s club.” The aim was to allow the children a chance to experience one of Otaki’s most admired and revered forests. Walks like this one were almost exclusively local community initiatives, carried out through the village’s kodomo- no-kai, rather than through the elementary or junior high schools, which are under the direction of the national Ministry of Education.

The rhythm of our walking was brisk, but frequently interrupted by Noda-san who would stop and explain how to distinguish between sawara and hinoki (two varieties of cypress) trees by examining the backsides of their leaves.

“Do you know the Roman letters X and Y,” (romanji no X to Y ga wakaru) he asked the children. They all nodded in the affirmative. Turning over the sawara and hinoki leaves he held in his hands, Noda-san pointed out small white Xs and Ys running up the lengths of the leaves. The children gathered around his hands to gain a better view.

“If it’s Y, it’s hinoki. X, it’s sawara” (Y dattara, hinoki. X dattara, sawara). Each of the children went in search of their own specimens to confirm what Noda-san had told them.

At other times Noda-san stopped to point out a slab of ryumongan (a type of volcanic rock), or to encourage us to sample the sweet spring water flowing out of a cliff face. The pages of my notebook from that day are filled with drawings and descriptions of a variety of natural features. Walking with Noda-san, I recall, was at once a history in ecology, geology, history, and folklore. Later, while walking with him in another forest,

134 he had expressed to me his hope that local people would continue to learn more about the ecology and history of Otaki forests. He suggested that residents should play a role in forest management, but they need to make sure they know about the environment.

Further into the Setogawa forest, we saw the crumbling remains of wooden bridges that had once carried trains loaded with freshly cut trees on their way to sawmills down canyon. We also encountered hundreds of years old hinoki cypress trees and felt their thick barks. The children joined hands too see how many bodies were required to encircle the biggest tree. The air was cool and damp, and the earthy smell of moss filled my nostrils. There were small foot bridges to cross and steep sections to ascend and descent, which slowed our pace a bit.

Spirits were high and as we walked along children joked and played with the adult members in the group. The adults also joked with one another. Many people in Otaki have known one another since they were young, so their relationships are deep and very close. This interpersonal context created an atmosphere in the forest that was light and jovial; I felt as though I was strolling with friends down a familiar street. This sense was heightened by Noda-san’s expert reading of the landscape. It seemed that every plant, every tree, each new vista that opened to our view held a story or piece of information that he was able to draw forth and present to us. More specifically, he offered bits of knowledge to the children who walked with us. Among other things, we heard about sleds that were used to haul timber out of the forest before the forest railroad was built at the beginning of the 20th century, and learned that the leaves of the hō-no-ki (Japanese whitebark magnolia, Magnolia obovata) help to prevent bacteria from growing on food,

135 which is why they are used to wrap various local foods. On both this and other excursions, the care and concern with which Noda-san and others conveyed their knowledge of the forest with children is testament to a common feeling that forests are a fundamental part of the lifeworld of the village. In other words, there is an understanding among many village residents that knowing about and engaging with forests is a critical part of dwelling in Otaki.

After walking for about two hours we reached a pass that gave us a view into the neighboring valley. There we turned around and headed back the way we had come. On our return we walked the same pathway. Some parts of the forests were familiar--a tricky step or a waterfall that roughly marked the halfway point--but others seemed strangely new, as if rereading an old book.

In all, I walked the Setogawa Forest trail four times during my two years in Otaki.

Sitting in my office in Hawai’i, I wonder how familiar the forest would look if I were to walk it again tomorrow. Some people in Otaki have walked the same trail countless times, and I can only imagine what a different forest it must be. I often wonder about the children who walked with us that day in the Setogawa forest. When they leave the village, as most young people do these days, what kind of place will the forest become? If the perceptual experiences of humans are removed, will it cease to be a place; or, will it simply become a space denoted on maps--an unseen forest.

136 OFF THE MAP

A topographic map of Otaki hangs on my office wall. On it I have made notations of the many pathways I walked and places I visited. A thin line, traced in green colored pencil, marks the pathway that leads into the Setogawa Forest. Since the forest and the trail leading through it are unmarked on the original map, my notation is meaningless for most. However, for me it denotes a site of power and beauty; a site of shared experience; a site of potential and possibility; a site still moved through, sensed, and perceived; a site, perhaps, of contestation and resistance; a site that continues to be seen and experienced, even if only by a few.

Ingold suggests that cartographic maps (like the one on my office wall) tell “white lies” (2002: 242) that would have us believe that the world is a surface that we can know from a distance. Such a world--one that offers an all encompassing view--is the dream of technocrats, which Foucault (1979) so brilliantly expressed in the image of the panopticon. States, in order to achieve this encompassing view, as James Scott (1998) has so masterfully argued, engage in projects of simplification meant to create order out of that which is unordered and that maps are often one expression of such simple order. In this chapter I have suggested that through their deliberate movements and engagement with environments, actors in Otaki create and link themselves to a lifeworld full of meaning and significance; constantly creating and recreating landscapes.

Viewed as manifestations of interactions among human, non-human, and other physical actors in an environment, landscapes are embodied ecologies, which are made and remade in somewhat predictable, but never certain, ways. Novelty and

137 unpredictability are always parts of the process. Movement, such as walking, entails engaging with environments. Engaging through movement involves both perception and reaction. Light changes and the eyes adjust; the ground is uneven and feet adapt; a rustle in the bushes and the heart leaps; a grand vista opens and a feeling of awe settles in. In this way, walking simultaneously occurs within and is productive of landscapes. Ingold

(2002) tells us that:

To find one’s way is to advance along a line of growth, in a world which is never quite the same from one moment to the next, and whose future configuration can never be fully known. Ways of life are not therefore determined in advance, as routes to be followed, but have continually to be worked out anew. And these ways, far from being inscribed upon the surface of an inanimate world, are the very threads from which the living world is woven (242).

Acts of walking eschew the “white lies” of maps. Even if an individual employs a map in the act of walking, the landscape she encounters will be much more complex and nuanced than the representation she holds in her hand. This point may be all too obvious, and yet maps (as well as other media) continue to contribute much to our visions of the world.

As I explore further in the chapters that follow, in Otaki, the making of national forests has occurred in large part through the deployment of spectacles that speak of forest landscapes as resources belonging to the state. Drawing on global discourses of environmental conservation ideologies, Japan’s Forestry Agency has, in the latter half of the 20th century, transformed national forests in Otaki into “storehouses of the nation” (kuni no zaisan). One part of this transformation has been a movement of labor

(as described above) outside of forest environments. This, in turn, has resulted in a more

138 generalized decline in human-forest interactions among Otaki residents. In other words, national forests are less accessible and people move through them less often. And it is this trend of restricting human movement in forests that have compelled some in Otaki to make more deliberate movements, specifically organized walks, within national forests.

POLITICS OF MOVEMENT

I end with the beginning of a discussion concerning politics of movement, which I will pick up again in chapters VI and VII. In the present chapter, I have addressed some of the forms of movement that help produce and maintain the Otaki landscape. Specifically, I have described walking as an act that is intrinsically involved in the making of landscapes, due to the perceptual and sensual relations between human and non-human actors that the act enables (or perhaps compels). When, where, and under what conditions movements, such as walking, take place have implications for the ways in which humans perceive, sense, experience, understand, and ultimately relate to the world around them.

Restrictions of movement--whether these be regulatory, violent, or ideological--have the power to shape human relations to, experiences of, and knowledge about environments. I argue that in Otaki, shifts in patterns of movement away from forest environments is both implicit in and complicit with deployment of the resource landscape and the solidification of national forests as a framework for environmental governance by the state.

Otaki’s forests are mapped environments, bolstered by an ever evolving assemblage of images and discourses meant to convey them unequivocally as national resources. In this sense, national forests in Otaki are politicized spaces that embody and

139 express the power of the state. They operate, in other words, as manifestations--not unlike monumental architecture or police cars--of the state’s power and its monopoly on violence (which, of course, these days is rarely physically deployed in the context of environmental governance). With the creation and maintenance of “national forests” as an ontological category in Japan we are witnessing what David Graeber (2009) calls an

“ideological naturalization” (512), in which power is projected onto the material world and made invisible so as to appear as if it always was. We are dealing then, with the

“shadow of the state” (510).

What, then, does resistance to these expressions of state power look like? My experiences in Otaki have led me to conclude that resistance can take form in many different activities, and that walking is particularly cogent among these. It is so because of reasons discussed above. Walking disrupts the quiet stillness of landscapes in spectacle-form (maps and other media) by allowing for direct engagement between a variety of human and non-human actors. A landscape encountered while walking will, of course, exhibit qualities that correspond to spectacle-forms; there is a reality that one experiences. However, novelty also abounds, and becomes the content of one’s interaction with the world as it unfolds along with her movements. Graeber (2009) suggests that revolutionaries break the subjective frames that institutions impose, thereby

“creating new horizons of possibility,” and that these are acts that allow, “a radical restructuring of the social imagination” (531-532).

I would not venture to guess that anyone in Otaki considers himself a revolutionary. However, I would label some of their acts, such as walking (in some

140 cases), radical, in that through such acts people are attempting to connect with landscapes and ways of being in the world that are, in many ways, opposed to the broader national institutional frameworks in which they are enmeshed. Movement within a particular landscape is an act filled with affective potential. The sensual experience of movement may compel one to smile, laugh, cry, or scream. The scream (though one can imagine other responses), Susan Ruddick (2010) tells us, “makes the terrain of struggle visible. It cannot determine an outcome, but it marks something that can no longer be contained, a horizon and a threshold, or passing into something new” (39).

I look more closely at politics of movement and terrains of struggle in chapters VI and VII, but first I return in the next chapter to a higher scale of analysis and examine the role that water has played in the deployment of the resource landscape in Otaki.

141 CHAPTER V Making the spectacular real: forests, water, and democracy

Otaki is most easily accessed via a two lane highway that snakes through the twists and turns of a narrow branch canyon of the Kiso Valley. Entering Otaki via this road, one is

Figure 17: Makio Dam (image courtesy of http://blog.livedoor.jp/damudamu1/archives/51211052.html [Accessed 10.16.10]) soon face to face with the imposing form of Makio Dam (Figure 17). The rock-fill dam towers 100 meters over Futago-mochi, a hamlet made up of a small factory, a gift shop and restaurant, and a smattering of newer homes. The road forks below the dam. Go right, and you wind your way along a prefectural road that traces the northwestern side of

Ontake-ko (literally “Ontake lake”), Makio Dam’s reservoir. This side of the canyon is

142 latticed by a series of streams that flow down from Ontake-san, so the road is full of tight curves that follow the contours of the stream beds. The road on the other side of the reservoir (the one reached by making a left at the dam) is maintained by the Otaki village government. It is much more of a straight shot and therefore easier to drive, except in winter when the canyon walls block the sun’s rays and the road ices over. For me, the possibility of slipping from the roadway into the icy waters a few meters below was anxiety-inducing enough to keep me on the plowed prefectural road with its slow, monotonous curves.

Whichever road one takes, Makio Dam and Ontake-ko together serve as an introductory frame for Otaki. The first time I brought my wife to the village in April of

2008 Ontake-ko was less than half full. The exposed slopes of the reservoir were jagged and barren, reminiscent of images from the surface of Mars. I knew the move to Otaki was going to be a difficult one for my wife, who was born and raised in the western city of Kyoto. As we drove, I anxiously monitored my wife’s facial expressions; I sensed waves of shock and bemusement. Since exiting the freeway at the city of Nakatsugawa, I had been offering manageable blocks of time (30 minutes, 20 minutes, 10 minutes) in response to her queries of how much longer before we arrived; it is not that I was lying, only that my earlier experience of the drive had been colored by my excitement and awe at the beautiful land. My wife was not as enthusiastic, and the exposed mud and rock of the half-filled Ontake-ko wasn’t helping.

Interestingly, Ontake-ko is often the focus of photographs featured prominently in publications produced by the Otaki village office. Pictures of the sacred mountain

143 Ontake-san reflected in the still waters of Ontake-ko are often featured in pamphlets, websites, and annual new year’s postcards. Thus, in an aesthetic sense, the reservoir has gained a certain prestige in the local landscape. On many mornings during my time in

Otaki, the waters of Ontake-ko created a mirrored surface that reflected an identical version of the world above. At times the waters were so clear, in fact, that I wondered which world was the original and which the copy.

Makio Dam has altered the Otaki landscape in ways that go beyond physical modifications of earth and water. The dam emerged from a specific set of historical processes, as part of a larger ideological trajectory through which the Japanese nation continues to be imagined, oriented, and pieced together, and in this sense has served as a thread in the monumental project of suturing together a Japanese nation. Its modifying effects in the Otaki landscape have been multiplicitous, both subtle and overt, like radiating cracks in winter ice.

In this chapter I follow along some of these cracks and trace them back, not to their origins (which I believe is impossible), but to their point of contact with the Otaki landscape. I am interested in the broad patterns of power, economic relations, and human organization that enabled the building of dams like Makio in Otaki, as well as in how these same shifting patterns continue to shape the landscape, particularly forests. My analysis focuses on both political and historical ecologies, with the intent of erasing any distinction between the two. I hope to show the weight with which dams sit in the Otaki landscape in order to reveal the power of their histories to produce forest natures by reorienting human perceptions.

144 DAMS AND PERIPHERIES

Waterworks, including dams, have a long history in the Japanese archipelago. It has been reported that the construction of irrigation ponds stretches back to the 3rd century, and they are also mentioned in the Nihon-shoki (Chronicle of Japan) and the Kojiki (Record of Ancient Matters) (Japan Commission on Large Dams 2009), two ancient texts often cited as accounts of the mythical beginnings of Japan. The Sayama Pond (Sayama-ike), for example, which is located in the city of Osaka and is still in use, is said to have been built in the 7th century. However, apart from these early waterworks, the first modern dams in Japan were built in the Meiji Period (1868-1912) using western techniques. An epidemic of cholera combined with a lack of drinking water in the port city of Kobe spurred the building of Japan’s first concrete dam, Gohonmatsu (also known as Nunobiki)

Dam, in 1900 (Japan Commission on Large Dams 2009). Later, in the post-war years, national land development projects and agricultural reforms brought a flurry of dam building to the island nation. Currently, Japan is home to roughly 2,700 operational dams.

Typically, each dam is said to serve one or more of three purposes: 1) electricity generation; 2) flood control; or 3) water storage.

Large dams are not built for, nor by, members of the communities in which they are located. Rather, they are situated within broader landscapes and longer histories of resource development and use. Dams are not purely feats of engineering, but also products of human relations and interactions. They are parts of ecologies, in the broadest sense, that are shaped and patterned along lines of power. Thus, as Johnston and Donahue

145 (1998) note, “Systems for controlling resource access and use typically reflect the ways in which society is organized and thus recreate and reproduce the inequities in society” (3). I would add that the organization of environments, the ways they are physically modified through time, as well as the ways they are perceived and thought about as landscapes, also reflect and reproduce formations of power. Moreover, dams are never arbitrarily located; rather, their positions reflect sets of power relations, ideological frameworks, and movements of capital. Often, the building of dams both reflects and helps to produce peripheries. Therefore, the construction of dams is intimately linked to the ideological construction of scale. In addition to creating disruptions and disconnections at the local level, dams create new connections and novel patterns of order at regional, national, and international scales.

I argue that more often than not dams in Japan (Otaki, in particular) are conceived of, operate at, and help to reproduce a national scale. Moreover, within this national scale, the landscapes and communities within which dams are located are continually recreated as peripheries, pushed to the margins while being firmly grafted onto the centers. One node of this process in the Kiso Region has been the emergence of discourses concerning environmental services, which work to paint trees, forests, people, and communities as components of a national public good that is linked intimately to notions of progress and democracy, as well as to the whirring of global capitalism.

ELECTRICITY AND EARLY DAM CONSTRUCTION IN THE KISO REGION

146 Given this politics of scale, it is not surprising to note that spurts of dam construction in

Japan have accompanied periods of “nation-building,” specifically the Meiji Period

(1868-1912) and the two decades following Word War II (1945-1965) (Takahasi and

Uitto 2004). In this regard, the history of dam construction in the Kiso Region, and in

Otaki specifically, is illustrative. The Kiso River, along with the Ibi and Nagara rivers, make up the Kiso sansen, or the “three rivers of the Kiso.” The rivers tumble from the steep and rugged highlands of the Hida and Kiso mountain ranges and then meander across the Nōbi Plain, where they converge, before emptying into Ise Bay near the city of

Nagoya.

The Kiso sansen have long created both problems and possibilities for people living on the Nōbi Plain. Their waters allow for irrigation and farming, but their unpredictability due to variations in winter snow pack make them prone to floods.

Modest efforts were made throughout the Edo Period (1600-1868) to control flooding, but dams were not built until after the Meiji Restoration in 1868 and the subsequent establishment of the Japanese nation-state. Dutch engineer, Johannis de Rijke, who surveyed the Kiso sansen in 1879 at the behest of the imperial government suggested that siltation was a major causal factor for flooding. As a preventative measure he looked upstream to the mountain forests of the Kiso Valley and elsewhere, and prescribed strict management. This was a prescription, however, that the Meiji government was not yet ready to follow, as heavy deforestation continued into the post-war period.

At the turn of the century, water was a sought after commodity for the production of electricity as well. Japan’s first water-powered electricity generating station was

147 completed in 1911 in the town of Yaotsu in Gifu Prefecture. The waters of the Kiso River were used to power turbines and produce electricity, which was transported to the city of

Nagoya. The station was built by Nagoya-denryoku (Nagoya Electric) and was the brainchild of Fukuzawa Momosuke, the companyʻs president. This station was followed by the building of Japan’s first dam-linked electric power station, Ōi Dam. This dam, located in the town of Ena, Gifu prefecture, was also built under the direction of

Fukuzawa (though with another company, Daidō denryoku (Daidō Electric)). Fukuzawa, who is now referred to as Japan’s “king of electricity” (Komatsu 2011), had developed a working philosophy that he called ikkasen hitokaisha--literally “one river, one company,” or “one river for one company.” Under this ideological banner, Fukuzawa, who was also active in government, worked his way up the Kiso River, completing dams and electricity generating stations one after another. Today, Kansai denryoku (Kansai Electric), the last company founded by Fukuzawa, owns and operates a dozen dams and many dozen more electric generating stations along the Kiso River and its tributaries. Among these, four are located on the Otaki River, in or near Otaki Village.

Two of these dams are located in the small hamlet of Takigoshi, which lies some twelve kilometers up valley from the center of Otaki Village. Today, Takigoshi has only about 16 full time residents, the vast majority of whom are over 80 years old, effectively meaning that the hamlet literally teeters on the edge of extinction. Takigoshi is surrounded by national forests and in the past the community had thrived with a booming timber industry. Beginning from the early part of the 20th century, trains for hauling timber connected the quiet hamlet to the broader world beyond its mountainous borders.

148 Children rode the train into the village center to attend school and their parents had access to goods brought by merchants. Today, however, Takigoshi is only accessible by car along a narrow, pot-holed road that winds through a deep gorge carved by the Otaki

River. This difficult access, so legend has it, is the reason a defeated samurai clan first settled the area to hide from enemies.

Takigoshi’s isolated location, however, may well have been what garnered the interest of Fukuzawa and government officials, who in 1910 conducted the first of several surveys to find suitable locations for hydroelectric projects. Takigoshi was chosen as a suitable location partly because of the large areas of imperial forest (goryōrin) located there (Horikawa and Itoh). After the initial 1910 survey in which Takigoshi was selected as a hydroelectric dam site, a series of back-room political maneuverings took place to help ensure that the project would move forward. Water rights were one issue that had to be settled. Usually these were held at the prefectural level, however due to the fact that much of the Otaki Valley watershed was comprised of imperial forest lands, the imperial government was able to take jurisdiction. Another concern was that the building of the dam would disrupt forestry work in the area, which relied on river ways for transporting logs, which were floated downstream, a technique called mokuzai ryūsō, (Figure 18).

However, the imperial forestry office had already begun building a forest railway system for hauling timber and had visions of expanding it. Thus the office gave assurances that the building of the dam would not be a burden. Just to make sure, an agreement was reached that Fukuzawa’s company, Kiso denki kyōgyō, would pay 18,000,000 yen over the course of twelve years to support the expansion of the forest railroad network and

149 Figure 18: Artist’s rendition of mokuzai ryūsō (Makino and Mitsuo 1953)

would subsequently pay 150,000 yen annually to the forest management office to assist with upkeep (Horikawa and Itoh).

In January 1923 Takigoshi residents petitioned the Ministry of Internal Affairs

(Naimushō, abolished in 1947) asking that the location for the dam be reconsidered. In response to the petition a separate survey was conducted in 1931 and a location about ten kilometers up valley from Takigoshi was selected as a new site for the reservoir.

Ancestral graves of the Miura family, the founding clan of Takigoshi, would be submerged, but the hamlet itself would be spared. Applications for construction permits had already been submitted in 1929, prior to the selection of the new site. Approval came in 1935 and construction began on the dam in 1935. Miura Dam was the last project that

Fukuzawa was involved with, and though he died prior to the beginning of its construction, the political and economic framework he helped to build ensured the dam’s

150 completion in 1942. Even without his presence, his company was able to draw on political connections to cheaply acquire Korean and Chinese laborers from the imperial government. In addition to constructing the dam itself, these laborers dug by hand a tunnel that runs through the mountains comprising the northern limit of the Otaki Valley.

The tunnel intersects each major stream on that side of the watershed. At each point of intersection sit water intake stations (shusui jo), where water is drawn from the streams.

These collected waters are transferred to the far eastern end of the valley where they drop about 200 vertical meters out of the mountainside through a large pair of tubes, providing force to spin turbines at an electric generating station before being expelled back into the

Otaki River. Today Miura Dam and its associated network of water intake and electric generation stations are still owned by Kansai Denryoku and are used to produce electrical power that is consumed in cities in western Japan (Osaka, Kobe, and Kyoto). The company also operates several other hydro-electricity stations in the Kiso District.

This history of hydroelectricity development in Otaki and the rest of the Kiso

Valley begins to reveal the linkages between resource (shigen) concepts, capitalism, and the nation, as well as the power these have to envision and impose landscapes and to physically transform material environments. Electricity was, and remains today, a valued commodity in Japan, as it is in all industrialized nations. It also holds significant symbolic value, not to mention the ability to restructure human relations at all levels.

Reader and Tanabe (1998: 172-176), for example, note the god-like qualities that were attributed by some in Japan to Thomas Edison as an early purveyor of light and electricity.

151 Of course, the advent of electricity is also equated with modernism and progress.

In early 20th century Japan, modernization was a national project; one that Sato (2007) notes was linked to the development of the resource concept, which was accompanied

“by awareness of the “finiteness” and shortage of means, notions that were both attached to national, not local, interests” (156). Within this ideological context, sacrificing forestlands for the development of water resources that could be used to produce electricity was considered a noble undertaking. And, at a national scale, the loss of forestlands in a peripheral community like Otaki and its small hamlet of Takigoshi were justified.

FORESTS, WATER, DEMOCRACY

The social and political ground for developing water resources in the Kiso Valley was prepared through a long history of forest use. A fundamental shift came after 1868, when the Meiji government claimed forestlands in the valley as the property of the imperial family. What had been familiar landscapes rooted in local sets of human relations, memories, and movements were ideologically transformed into unified swaths of resources and spatially reconfigured as parts of the new Japanese nation. Institutional frameworks of management established by the imperial government, along with infrastructural investments and material incursions into physical environments, solidified these transformations; an imagined landscape of resources was crafted bit by bit into a tangible reality. Water resource development in the Kiso Valley also occurred within this emergent reality of the resource landscape. The construction of dams--acts that drew

152 meaning at a national scale--were said to be for the benefit of the national citizenry and thus took precedence over the concerns of local people. Waters and forests, had become national resources and were conceptually linked to a newly imagined national citizenry.

Through the production of a landscape of national resources in the Kiso Valley, therefore, local people too came in some senses to recognize themselves as subjects of the state--as national citizens. I argue that in this respect the development of water resources in Otaki, exemplified by Makio Dam, created spaces in the landscape in which both national forests and governmental institutions could be redefined in ways that allowed for the further deployment of a subjectivity within which the Kiso Valley was conceptualized at a national scale as a landscape of resources.

Since they were not part of post-WWII land reforms, forestlands in the Kiso

Valley were a sizable and valuable asset for the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry

(Nōrinshō) (established in 1943 and later renamed the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries (Nōrinsuisanshō) in 1978). Though timber exploitation remained steady after the war, the importation of foreign timber beginning in the 1960’s quickly reduced demands for domestic wood. Forest conservation and the protection of water resources emerged as buzzwords for the ministry and its Forestry Agency. Makio Dam in Otaki was born within this milieu and the ideals of a post-war Japan still working into a new democratic identity. The dam was the capstone of the Aichi Yōsui project, which was funded by the World Bank and modeled on the Tennessee Valley Authority as a way to foster river basin democratization (ryūiki minshuka) by bringing water to communities south of the Kiso Valley. In addition to Makio Dam, the project also entailed the

153 construction of a 112 kilometer long canal to allow diverted water to be transported to the

Chita peninsula and other drought prone areas in

Aichi prefecture (Figure 19).

With the completion of Makio Dam in

1961, the waters of the Otaki River began to rise.

To make room for the reservoir, 235 homes were dismantled, displacing over 1100 residents.

Ultimately, four hamlets were completely lost, along with significant portions of three others.

Sixty-six hectares of agricultural land were also eventually submerged. Otaki residents were acutely aware of the potential impacts of the dam, and hantai-undou (opposition movements) took place in the village throughout the project planning process. In response to a March 4th,

1952 newspaper report that World Bank funds had been secured for the Aichi Yōsui project, the Figure 19: Preliminary sketch of the Aichiyōsui project. The Kiso Valley is at the top and the Chita peninsula is at the bottom head of Otaki’s futagomochi damu kensetsu (Takazaki 2010a: 14) hantai kisei doumei kai (Association to Oppose the Construction of Futagomochi Dam (later renamed Makio Dam)) stated that:

The fact that foreign capital is being introduced for the construction of Futagomochi Dam means that prospecting for the capital required for construction has commenced; this is a grave matter for us. We have for some time now been circulating petitions in the affected districts, and we

154 plan to continue the line of absolute opposition until the bitter end, no matter what happens. Development that benefits only downstream Aichi prefecture and for which there is no positive [benefit] whatsoever for local areas cannot be called integrated development. I will wait for detailed investigation results about the foreign capital and then I want to make a new counter-plan (quoted in Takazaki 2010b: 12 [translation by author]).

“Foreign capital” refers to World Bank funds that had been secured for the Aichi Yōsui project. In addition to the global scope of its funding, because the project was originally inspired by the Tennessee Valley Authority, U.S. engineers were brought to Otaki as technical advisors to oversee the construction of Makio Dam. Thus, an imposing aggregation of capital, political power, and technological means had fomented around the project, drowning out the voices of protest coming from Otaki’s residents.

The construction of Makio Dam was a shocking and painful experience for residents. A monthly bulletin published by the village office during the construction of the dam carried small passages in which people expressed their mixed feelings concerning the process. One person wrote:

水没という運命―部落解散式 Fate of submersion--Hamlet dissolution ceremony

On the day we separated いかに執着があろうとも 土地・家 from the soil, the homes, そして幾百年の歴史からも and the hundreds of years history ・・・・・離れる日、 to which we have so much attachment; 愛着と新生の門出と混ぜあう心、 there were hearts mixed 皆んなのほほに、光る涙と、 with affection and the beginning of a new life, 慟哭があった。 on everyone’s cheeks, tears glistened, and there was lamentation.

155 Another offers the following:

水没!とうわさがたって以来 Submerge!, it has been 8 years and some months since the rumor started; the もう8年の歳月、反対運動も過去となり opposition movement has become a thing of 現実に工事場は、水没地区の人々の尻に the past; and the real construction site has come to look as if fire has been lit under the 火をつけられたみたいになった。 asses of the people in the submersion zones. 何はともあれ、他に永住の地を求め、 At any rate, other permanent residences have その場から離れなければならない。 been purchased, and they must go away from here.

2月1日の三沢区をトップに田島は Misawa is first on February 1st; Tajima is February 23rd; Futagomochi, March 2nd; 2月23日、二子持3月2日、淀地は3月9日、 Yodochi is March 9th; Kuzushigoshi, 崩越3月25日 March 25th; a hamlet dissolution ceremony is held in それぞれに部落解散式が開催された each.

(同上、昭和33年3月25日(第8号)。 March 25, 1958 (No. 8)

Yasue Chikako, a student at Otaki’s elementary school, contributed a poem:

詩 <ダム> Poem “Dam” th 六年 安江 千賀子 Yasue Chikako, 6 grade

私は家の回りがダムになると聞いておどろい I was surprised to hear that around my house た。 would become a dam. こんな家がたくさんあるところを ダムにしなくてもよいのに There is no reason to make the dam since there are so many households like mine; I hated the ダムにすると決めた人がにくらしかった。 people who decided to make the dam. 毎日、毎日、くしゃくしゃしていた。 しかし今はちがう。 Everyday, everyday, I was all messed up. 向こうには But, now it’s different. 水が足りなくて 困っている人々が Over there, Are many people 大勢いるのだ。 Who are in trouble だから私は喜んで出ていく without enough water. ここをダムにすれば So, I will be happy from now on みんなよくなる。 If they make a dam here 私ばかり、わがままをしてはいられない。 Everyone will be better みんなのために I can’t be selfish and think only of myself It’s for the benefit of everyone (『王滝』33年1月25日(第6号))。 “Otaki” January 25, 1958 (No. 6)

156 Makio Dam and the larger Aichi Yōsui project emerged from ideological spaces that were pregnant with notions of the nation, democracy, and modernity. We can see from the final lines of the young girl’s poem that these sentiments swirled around the project, giving it a sense of legitimacy and destiny, and demanding a sense of national duty even from those who were to be most impacted. What was labeled as “river basin democratization” was for the good of the nation, and as national citizens, residents of Otaki were asked to accept the havoc that Makio Dam wreaked on their tiny village.

In Otaki and the rest Kiso Valley water development projects like Aichi Yōsui marked a further deployment of the resource landscape, in which forestlands were reconceptualized as “source-water land” (suigenchi). Since the 17th century, if not earlier, there had been an understanding among downstream residents that the forests of the Kiso

Valley were vital for maintaining slope stability and flood prevention. However, with the development of water resources for use in downstream communities, a landscape emerged in which waters, forests, and human communities were linked together under the banners of development, modernization, and democracy.

In her book, The Malleable Map, Wigen (2010) analyzes maps and mapmaking pertaining to Nagano prefecture (where the Kiso Valley and Otaki are located) to trace geographical thought across what is generally thought of as Japanʻs feudal/modern threshold from the Edo (1600-1868) to the Meiji (1868-1912) eras. She notes that throughout both eras ryūiki (watersheds) appeared on maps and were recognized as geographical units with social, political, and economic significance. In fact, particularly on late Edo and early Meiji maps, it was not ryūiki per se that were represented, but

157 rather rivers and the names of adjacent villages, which gave visual shape to the watersheds that they were part of. In other words, on one level the maps depicted the socio-spatial organization of communities that followed hydrologic features. Such maps

(called kuniezu), Wigen points out, often conveyed a “local perspective” by employing a

“neighbor’s-eye view” in which place names and other features tended to be oriented inward towards basins, as if one were standing inside looking out. “Given the extent to which watersheds in fact bounded the sight horizon of people dwelling in an upland landscape,” she suggests, “this is one of the most important ways a local perspective was insinuated. . .” (2010: 82). However, she goes on to point out how maps made during the

Meiji period increasingly emphasized the ken, or prefecture, status of the area being depicted (in this case Nagano) in line with desires within the government to communicate a settled domestic architecture for the newly conceived Japanese nation (see Figure 10, pg. 104). Through the imaginative power of maps, watersheds and other geographical features, along with the communities that they helped to define and characterize, were bracketed by and bound to the national body.

By the time two men from the Chita Peninsula began dreaming up the Aichi

Yōsui project, ryūiki like the one Otaki sits in had come to be conceived of as parts of broader regions. In turn, developing resources in order to “democratize” them across such regions had become a national imperative. The ideological fires propelling the Aichi

Yōsui project were further fueled by the writings of David Lilienthal who had served as director of the Tennessee Valley Authority and was one of the greatest champions of the democratic ideals it embodied. In particular, his book, TVA: Democracy on the March

158 (1944), which was translated into Japanese, proved inspiration in conceiving Aichi Yōsui as Japan’s first multiple use water development project. Otaki was no longer conceived of as an isolated upland basin, but rather a ryūiki; a watershed linked by rivers to unseen places downstream. Watershed democratization, therefore, meant drawing resources from upland communities and doling them out to lowland communities for the betterment of the region and ultimately the nation. This was the intent behind the building of Makio

Dam, and it remains the ideological footing upon which it stands today. Makio sits with an enormous weight in the Otaki landscape, pulling unto it both trees and people, and painting them with the colors of national identity, rational management, and governmental control.

TREES FOR THE NATION

Now, perhaps the most important points laid out are what we call functions for the public good; what we might call the foundations that allow national citizens to live safely. Things like headwaters--protecting the land around headwaters. If there is runoff, if soil and sand flow into the rivers, dams will become filled in and they will lose their function; then there will be a loss of water that is used for drinking and growing rice. The function of the dam itself will be lost. So we do our jobs in line with this most important point--maintaining forests so that sand and soil doesn’t flow down--forest maintenance to create those kinds of forests.20

20 まあ計画を立てるにあたってはですね、おそらく今一番重点を置いているのは、公益的機能っていって、 その、なんていうんですかね、国民が安全に暮らせる基盤を作るっていうか、それは水源管用っていって、 水源地の水の確保とかですね、土砂流出、、土とか土砂が川に流れ込んでくると、ダムが埋まっちゃって今 度はダムの機能が失われて、田んぼや飲み水に使う水が失われてっていうことがありますよね。ダムの機能 そのものも失われてしまう。そのために土とか土砂がいっぱい流れてこないための森林整備っていうか、森 林整備っていうかそういった森を作るっていうかですね、そういったことを一番重点においてこの仕事を やってるんですけど。

159 This was how, during a 2009 interview, the head of the local Forestry Agency office in

Otaki described the office’s mandate in terms of the management of the roughly 24,000 hectares of national forest that blanket most of Otaki’s hillsides. In this official’s assessment, which mimicked agency policies, it was made clear that the role of forests is to protect dams so that they can provide water for the public good and the safety of national citizens. Today in Otaki the majority of forests are labeled “water and soil conservation forests” (suido hozen rin), which, according to a pamphlet published by the

Kiso regional office of the CDFMO, function to “provide abundant water and purify the air, which we cannot live without” (kiso shinrin kanri sho (Kiso Forest Management

Office)).

A second function ascribed to water and soil conservation forests is providing slope stability. Indeed, the steepness of Japan’s mountainous interior makes slope stability a critical issue and, as I have noted in this chapter, the threat of landslides has long been a reality. This is true in the Kiso Valley and Otaki as well, which was tragically exhibited in 1984 when a large earthquake dislodged an enormous chunk of Ontake-san’s southern slope that slid to the valley bottom claiming the lives of twenty-nine people. In light of this tragedy, conserving forests to help ensure slope stability is of course a worthwhile project, however the conceptual lumping together of water, trees, people, and nation that takes place through the label of suido hozen rin is somewhat dubious. This is due to the label’s amnesic qualities--its power to erase a long history of forest and water resource exploitation, as well as its own conceptual emergence from that history.

160 Prior to being conceived of as watersheds, Otaki’s forest landscapes were largely thought of, and utilized, as storehouses of timber. Few would argue that Japan’s modernization and industrialization since the Meiji Era have not profoundly impacted the ecology of forest environments in the Kiso Valley. This political ecology continued through the “dark valley” of World War II when, according to historian William Tsutsui

(2003) “The scale of [. . .] wartime cutting was staggering, and it was clear by the time the Allied Occupation forces arrived that Japan's forest resources were dangerously depleted” (300). Since the end of WWII and the birth of Japan’s modern Forestry Agency, conservation and wise-use have become dominant ideological corner-stones, with governance and management directed at the public good of the national citizenry. I argue that this has not, by and large, been accomplished by fundamentally changing management practices with resultant improvements in local ecologies. Rather, I suggest that in Otaki and the greater Kiso Region water has become an element of conceptual integration, weaving together soil and tree, upland and lowland, basin and plain, village and metropolis, as well as government and subject; and that much of this work has been done through the production and deployment of nature spectacles.

LOCAL & NON-LOCAL FLOWS

During my time in Otaki, residents often talked of water. When I asked about positive aspects of village life, water ran through many people’s answers. They spoke of how clean (kirei) and delicious (oishii) it is. When hiking with friends from the village we frequently came across springs of water flowing from rock faces. Using a leaf as a cup or

161 a trough, we would drink in the cold, crisp water; “ah, it’s sweet” (wa amai ne) was often the response. Otaki water is also thought to have healing qualities. I often saw pilgrims and adherents of Ontake-kyo (a sect devoted to worship of Ontake-san) and other sects filling jugs with spring water that flows from a large rock face inside of the main shrine on the Otaki side of the mountain. Water from five ponds located atop Ontake-san were also renowned for healing qualities, especially the third pond (san no ike). One interviewee, a sprightly man in his sixties who had lived his whole life in Otaki and also had children and grandchildren living in the village, told me about these waters during a conversation in his home. A couple of years prior to my coming to Otaki, the man had been diagnosed with throat-cancer. Water from Mt. Ontake’s third pond, he told me enthusiastically while showing me a plastic jug of the stuff, had helped cure him. He asked if I would like to try it. I did and found the taste fairly off putting. “The fresh stuff is better,” he insisted, noticing my underwhelmed expression. Drawing water from the top of Ontake-san is not a small ordeal and usually requires an overnight stay. The man told me that his friend brought it to him regularly while he was struggling with cancer.

In Otaki water is almost never considered a commodity. It flows freely, and this is what makes it valuable. This was never mentioned to me specifically by people I talked to, but I imagine this is simply because it is so ubiquitous as to be commonplace. Walking through Otaki one is almost constantly accompanied by the sounds of running water, whether from one of the many small streams that flow down the hillsides, or from the network of ditches that line many of the streets. In the past, one elderly woman told me, each hamlet had one or two troughs from which households would gather their water.

162 This was a trying task in the winter, she added, one that was often left to young girls.

Today many individual homes have small troughs in front of them, which people use to wash vegetables, scrub tools, or to momentarily store a freshly picked bouquet of flowers.

However, the value of water does not come only through flowing in the landscape, but also through what are recognized as inherent qualities, as I have noted above, such as taste and the ability to heal.

Prior to the building of dams in Otaki, the valley’s major river (the Otaki River) flowed freely to its confluence with the larger Kiso River. Today, the waters slow and pool in spots where they are restricted by dams. The largest of these reservoirs stands behind Makio Dam. As mentioned previously, it was given the name Ontake-ko (Lake

Ontake) after the mountain whose reflection often sits upon its surface. The non-flowing waters of Ontake-ko, which stretch from the village center to the dam about five kilometers away, are something of an anomaly in a valley otherwise enlivened by vertical movements of water. No boats are allowed on the reservoir and for the most part its waters sit undisturbed. During the winter, fishing is popular on the thick ice that forms near the village center at the confluence of the Otaki and Seto rivers, but apart from this the reservoir is devoid of human activity. It is as if somewhere along the way, at some invisible threshold, the water flows out of the Otaki landscape and into another that is linked to the lives and livelihoods of landscapes far downstream.

Among downriver beneficiary communities, Makio Dam and the Aichi Yōsui project have been successful in achieving the aim of “river basin democratization,” and urban and industrial expansion has continued in the larger Nagoya metropolitan area over

163 the past fifty years. Definitions of success, however, depend on the matrices being employed. For downriver communities, water from Makio Dam is transformed into industrial expansion and urban growth, creating jobs and enabling livelihoods; it has, in other words, turned into economic value. For residents of Otaki, on the other hand, circulations stop at Makio Dam, so that flows of water beyond the dam, along with the values these hold, are often hidden from view.

In addition to the many disruptions caused by dam-building, these projects have brought limited economic benefit to Otaki residents. As part of the Aichi-Yōsui project and the building of Makio Dam, the Otaki village government received an initial compensation payment of 210 million yen, which was a sizable amount of money for the time. The funds were used to develop a ski hill and other tourist infrastructure on the slopes of Ontake-san in hopes of securing a prosperous economic future. Though initially successful, this development ultimately caused debt, financial crises, and social instability in the village (I describe these further in the next chapter). However, I suggest that the most significant impact of dam-building in Otaki, particularly the construction of the monumental Miura and Makio dams, has been the role it has played in extending spectacles of the resource landscape and claiming, both materially and conceptually, forests as national resources.

NATIONALIZING THE LANDSCAPE

On a cool October morning in 2008 I stood on a roadside overlooking the Makio Dam reservoir, Ontake-ko. The water was placid, forming a mirrored surface, which reflected

164 the variegated patterns of the hillsides that were flush with fall colors. Above stood the imposing form of Ontake-san. The surface of the lake flawlessly reflected the mountain, which glittered under a dusting of snow. It was as if two scenes had been cut from a single piece of paper that was now unfolded before me. I looked closer at the waters of the lake and began to discern movements. Curved lines writhed across the surface. These were the front edges of currents, expressions of larger movements taking place in the depths of the lake where masses of colder and warmer water worked themselves around one another. The tensioned transitions, however, were barely visible at the surface, which remained for the most part glassy and undisturbed.

A few days prior to the morning I spent contemplating the waters of Ontake-ko, I had joined residents for the first ever chiiki gakushū kai (district study meeting) held in

Otaki. The meeting consisted of a moderated panel discussion, the theme of which was written on a large white banner that hung vertically from the ceiling of the meeting hall: aichi yōsui makio damu wo tsūjita jōgeryū kōryū ni tsuite (concerning upriver/downriver interactions through Aichi Yōsuiʻs Makio Dam). The meeting was held in a small room of Otakiʻs “Social and Welfare Center,” a newer building used primarily for elderly care.

A village revitalization group, known as Zukudaso ōentai21, had put the meeting together, and the head of the group began the event with a short speech.

The foot of Ontake-san is the home of Aichi Yōsui’s water source. It is also the theme for today’s seminar. The water, without which we cannot live, is nurtured through the upstream/downstream interactions and deep

21 Zukudaso is a local expression meaning, “let’s get together and get it done!” And, ōentai, means “support group” or “cheer group”. The goal of the Zukudaso ōentai, which was formed in 2006, is village revitalization through a variety of activities and events.

165 mutual understanding and cooperation between upstream and downstream residents that has come through Makio Dam and the Aichi Yōsui project.22

His remarks expressed the theme of the meeting and, along with the meeting itself, invoked a sense of cooperation, mutual respect, and reciprocity between Otaki and the downstream communities who are the beneficiaries of the Aichi Yōsui project and Makio

Dam.

Panelists at the meeting included business owners from Nagoya (the major metropolitan area served by the Aichi Yōsui project) and employees of the Aichi Yōsui sōgo kanri sho (Aichi Yōsui general management office), which oversees the operations of the project’s dams and waterways. Meanwhile, the mayor of Otaki was the only

“upstream” panelist. The employees of the Aichi Yōsui general management office spoke first and discussed a new midori netto program. The program’s name means “green network” (the word “green” comprised of three characters meaning “water,” “soil,” and

“village”), and its goal was to educate school children in downriver communities about the source of their water (i.e. the Kiso District, Otaki Village, Makio Dam, and the Aichi

Yōsui project). In their respective comments other panelists echoed the sentiments of

“networking,” “connection,” and “education.” In fact the great majority of speeches during the meeting were rooted in ideas of interdependency, obligation, and reciprocity; concepts that are not unfamiliar to most people in Japan (Rupp 2003).

22 御嶽山麓は愛知用水の水源の里であります。本日の学習テーマにもありますが、愛知用水牧尾 ダム通じた上下流交流。そして上下の、もっと近いその理解と協力にあげまして、私たちの生活 にかはつこともできない水を＿＿＿でくれます。＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿水源の森作りを行動した地 域作りは使用ではないかというふうに考えます。

166 Eventually, it came time for Otaki’s mayor to speak. From previous interactions, I knew the mayor to be a man of seemingly natural leadership qualities who always spoke directly and frankly, something generally frowned upon in Japan. However, he always did so with humor, wit, and rough sort of grace. This demeanor had endured the mayor to many village residents, but he definitely had his detractors as well. At the meeting he spoke with his regular candor about the long history of resource exploitation in Otaki. He mentioned the heavy impacts of forestry, as well as the limitations of the national forests that now dominate the village. He also talked about the century long impacts of dam building and water resource development, stressing that the building of Achi Yōsui’s

Makio Dam was a turning point for the village. In the end, however, he ultimately reinforced ideas of reciprocity by suggesting that the village relies on the support of downriver communities. Perhaps he really believed this, but my guess (I never asked him about it) is that he was more skilled at the intricacies of Japanese rhetoric than he let on.

He had been able to present a strong critical commentary on Makio Dam and highlight its impacts on Otaki while ultimately couching this in language that conveyed a sense of harmonious upstream/downstream relations that left the surface of the meeting wholly undisturbed.

In their focus on the dam as a locus of circulation, both of water and social forms, participants in the district study meeting drew on and reinforced sentiments of reciprocity and interdependence, working to produce a sense of harmoniousness that belied the unequal political-economic relations that mark patterns of water resource development in

Otaki and the greater Kiso District. Downriver organizations and the residents that

167 comprise them, for their part, regularly articulated a sense of kansha (thankfulness) towards upriver communities and invoked culturally meaningful concepts of duty and obligation in their efforts to express their kansha through a variety of acts. Despite complaints and contestations, Otaki residents continue to work with the downriver beneficiaries of the Aichi Yōsui project to promote its benefits and to foster and maintain upriver/downriver relationships between residents of communities located at both sides of water flows. As a result, much like the movements of water in Ontake-ko, tensions over

Makio Dam (and, to a lesser extent, Miura Dam) and the development of water resources find only the faintest expression as ripples within a broader expanse of practices and discourses through which an undisturbed surface harmony is produced.

The building of dams like Makio and Miura and the expansion of water resource exploitation in Otaki has, in addition to modifying the physical environment and reinforcing the resource landscape perspective, created new connections between distant and disparate communities, giving rise to tensions and anxieties over the inequalities that are inherent in resource development at the nation-state level. At the same time, sets of novel discourses and practices that revolve around dams and other material incursions, particularly Makio Dam and the Aichi Yōsui project, have arisen among actors and institutions in upriver and downriver communities. These are fueled by notions of democracy and a common national identity, which intersect with conceptualizations of water (and by extension forests) as resources and dams as modern technologies, as a means of producing harmony within the novel sets of social relations that water resource development has given rise to. Put differently, the development of water resources in

168 Otaki has created new landscape scales through which run lines that link together communities in novel ways, with implications for how actors think about water, forests, and citizenship in the modern Japanese nation-state

Upstream flows of social activity, like the district study meeting mentioned above, are forms that highlight, but also temper the tensions and anxieties that mark unequal development and utilization of water resources along the Aichi Yōsui corridor. Gift- giving too serves as a way to grapple with the inequalities of water circulation. Befu

(1968) suggests that the motivational force behind gift-giving in Japan is the concept of giri (450). Contained in the giri concept is a sense of duty (Befu labels it a “moral imperative”) towards one’s group, however that group may be defined. In other words, by receiving a gift one is obliged to return a gift. This sense of obligation is called in

Japanese on, and it is something that can never be fulfilled. Therefore, the act of gift- giving takes on a patterned quality and in this sense is similar to other kata that must be performed (Yano 2002). Gifts in Japan are often given with the understanding that the act is done with a sense of katachi dake de, meaning “only in form.” The purpose of such exchanges is to maintain social harmony and cohesion within a group; to ease tensions and discharge one’s giri, though never one’s on.

Gift-giving allows for the continuation of social relationships by masking anxieties and tensions that threaten to tear them apart. Social activities and gift-giving centered on Makio Dam too fit this pattern in that they are meant to harmonize upstream/ downstream imbalances related to circulations of water. Identification as national citizens by both upstream and downstream residents, along with conceptualizations of water as a

169 right of all Japanese citizens sets the stage for reciprocal relationships that are capable of normalizing circulations of water across rural/urban divides.

The implications for the Otaki landscape are far reaching. The democratic meanings with which water has been imbued within discourses of ryūiki minshuka have worked to further entrench the resource landscape as both a subjectivity and a material reality. Protecting water resources has become the giri of Otaki residents, demanding that they recognize both their status as national citizens and the status of local forests as national resources. The conceptual linking of the Otaki landscape to the larger national body through the status of “watershed” also works to legitimate the authority of the

Forestry Agency as a governing and management institution. Thus, the local is subverted to and becomes defined through the needs and desires of the national, which are reflected back to the local, through spectacles of nature, as common needs and desires. In this way, both forests and human actors are made national subjects.

WATER WAYS

On a cold evening in January 2009 I gathered with a group of village residents on the second floor of Otaki’s community center for a presentation about Makio Dam. In a long, open room on the second floor, two large kerosene heaters buzzed, fighting back the cold that seemed always to seep in through the walls and windows of the worn down community center. The evening’s program began with a presentation of film footage shot during the construction of Makio Dam. The footage included scenes of families preparing for relocation. Many of the faces that flashed on the screen were familiar to the mostly

170 elderly residents who sat around me watching. Audience members vocalized their reminiscences with “oohs” and “ahs,” and asked each other the names of faces they could not remember. They also recalled places--a bridge that had once spanned a river in the hamlet of Mizawa or a store they once visited. Later in the film, footage of a statue of

Jizō, a bodhisattva and protector of children and travelers, being covered by rising waters brought laments of “poor thing” (kawaisō). Reactions were similar when images of surveyors working amidst the large stone tablets of family graves appeared on the screen.

A few months earlier, in October 2008 I attended a ceremony in the small hamlet of Takigoshi, where

Miura Dam is located. The Figure 20: Miura Daifu ceremony (photo by author) ceremony, known as Miura

Daifu, is held in order to pay respect to members of the Miura clan, the ancestral founders of Takigoshi (Figure 20). Today in Takigoshi, most residents still carry the last name

Miura, signifying that they are descended from the foundational clan. Thus, maintaining ancestral connections through ceremonies like the Miura Daifu remains an important component of community life in the hamlet.

171 The skies were a striking color of blue that morning in October as my wife and I scrambled up a small hillside to a platform erected in front of a small shrine. When we arrived, a priest from Ontake Shrine (ontake jinja) (one of the main shrineʻs associated with Ontake-san) was kneeled before the alter chanting prayers. In a half circle behind him kneeled nine participants. Most were residents of Takigoshi, but representatives from the Otaki Village office, the local branch of the national agricultural cooperative (Nōgyō- kyōdō-kumiai, or “Japan Agriculture” (JA) for short), and the Setogawa Forest Field

Office (setogawashinrinjimusho) (a branch office of CDFMO located in Otaki) were also present. After finishing his initial chants, the priest invited participants to come forward and offer sakaki branches.23 In a pattern common to Shinto rituals, each participant came forward, clapped his hands twice, laid a sakaki branch before the alter, offered a prayer, and then clapped once more. Following the offering, the priest again began to chant and, with the help of an elder Takigoshi resident, made offerings of vegetables, rice wine

(nihonshu), and dried fish. Each of the offerings sat atop a small wooden table, called a sanbō. Finally, after the priest had finished his chanting, the ceremony was brought to a close with all of the participants partaking of the rice wine, which, because it had been blessed, was now considered omiki (sacred rice wine).

The Miura Daifu ceremony takes place each year on this small hillside overlooking Takigoshi because it is the location of the ancestral graves of the Miura clan.

As mentioned previously, they were relocated to the hillside after the decision to build

Miura Dam was finalized in 1935. The graves original location, which had long been a

23 Cleyera japonica, a flowering evergreen native to parts of East Asia. In Japan, the Chinese character is comprised of two radicals: one meaning “tree” and the other “god.” Within Shintoism sakaki branches are considered purifying agents and markers of sacredness.

172 sacred site to members of the local community, was, along with a large tract of prime forest (that was first cut), submerged as the dam filled.

As these two examples illustrate, dam-building in Otaki has had implications far beyond physical modifications of the land. If we recognize human actors and the landscapes they dwell in as integrated phenomena, as I do throughout this work, than it is impossible to speak about changes to the physical environment without also addressing changes in human relations, cultural meanings, and patterns of livelihood. Modifications of the movement of water through the Otaki Valley have transformed the landscape there in profound ways, creating in the process human subjects who continually recognize themselves as dwellers in that landscape. As modalities of subject formation, water and forests continue to inform subjectivities in Otaki. Thus, the deployment of a resource landscape, which has been furthered through the development of water resources and the building of dams, is complicit in the deployment of a subjectivity through which local actors are compelled to recognize themselves as national citizens living in a peripheral region of nationalized resources used to support urban cores. For younger generations of

Otaki residents, this subjectivity has always been. As an elderly participant in a group discussion put it:

In general terms, Otaki’s nature has become all messed up; if you compare it to when we were kids. . .well, there’s no comparison. It was all lost to the dam; the best parts were lost to the dam. Say, the river, or the water. . .these things we had become accustomed to are completely gone. And then there’s the landscape that was made by humans; for those born

173 earlier than us. . .well for those born around 1950 the dam has been there from the start. 24

CONCLUSION

The development of water resources in Otaki, particularly the construction of Miura and

Makio dams, are acts that have claimed, both materially and conceptually, the landscape as a space of nationalized resources. Under the ideological banner of “river basin democratization” the resource landscape has been further deployed in the Otaki Valley.

Within the Forestry Agency, forest landscapes have been conceptually reconfigured to align with the water needs of the nation, so that the majority are now labeled as “water and land conservation forests” rather than as “timber forests.” In redefining forests, the

Forestry Agency has also transformed itself into an institution of conservation tasked with governing resources in order to meet the varied needs of the nation, which is a much more tenable position within contemporary environmental politics. Thus, the production of forest categories based on concepts of environmental services has allowed the agency to solidify its governing authority and extend its control over forestlands, while at the same time reducing its physical presence in the landscape. Put differently, in an incredible display of the power of nature spectacles, the conceptual realignments that accompanied the development of water resources in Otaki have etched into the landscape a new way of

24 一般に言えばその、おおたきの自然ってのはもうめちゃくちゃになってしまったっていう、まあ我々が子 供のころと比べれば、もう比較にならんぐらいのものなんですよね。ダムでなくなってしまった、一番いい とこがなくなってしまった、川というか水というか、まあそういうものが今まで馴染んでたものが一切なく なってしまった。ほいで、人間がつく、作られた風景がもう、我々より、もうなんだ、えー、１９５０年生 まれくらいの人たちは、もう最初っからダムがそこにあるわけ。

174 envisioning what were for a long time over-exploited timber forests into areas of conservation.

175 CHAPTER VI Revealing the Spectacle

On December 28th, 2005 the small white radios located in each Otaki home, which are used for announcements from the village office, crackled to life. A chime sounded--bum, bum, bum--followed by the voice of the mayor, Kobayashi Masami. “The part of me that wants to work to make a new village and has taken seriously meetings with the new village council feels betrayed,” he said in a heavy-hearted tone. “But I will be happy if by removing myself, the village council and administrators will be able to create a good coalition and the village will be able to come together”25 (quoted in Tojo 2006

[translation by author]). With this, Mayor Kobayashi announced his resignation, which was to go into effect the following month.

Six days earlier, on December 22nd, the village council had given the embattled mayor a vote of no confidence. The trouble had started the year before, in October, when

Otaki had lost a bid to amalgamate with neighboring municipalities because of an excessive amount of debt. As the reality of Otaki’s financial troubles came to light, it was the village-owned ski hill, located on the southeastern slope of Ontake-san, that came to be recognized as main culprit. Stories of mismanagement of funds and questionable loans to fund infrastructural projects began to circulate through the village. A citizens group was formed and they eventually called for the dissolution of the existing village council and for the resignation of the mayor. During an interview at the meeting where he

25 「新議会との話し合いを重視しながら新しい村づくりに取り組みたいという私どもの姿勢自体が裏切ら れた思い。私が身を引くことにより議会と行政が良好な協力体制を築くことができ、村内が一丸になれれば うれしい」。

176 announced his retirement, Mayor Kobayashi was asked, “Looking back on it, what do you think is the biggest cause of this trouble?” He answered, “Isn’t it that we, myself included, couldn’t get rid of a sense that we are a blessed village”26 (quoted in Tojo 2006

[translation by author]).

Like the building of Makio Dam in the early 1960s, which gave an account of in the last chapter, the 2005 dissolution of Otaki’s village council and the recall of its mayor were seminal events that raised questions concerning the future of the village; the state of its environment; and the relationship of its government and citizens to the broader nation.

Though rather distant in time, these two events were, in a variety of senses, intimately connected and help bring into focus a larger trajectory of intertwined social, political, and economic processes that have shaped the ecological relations that link together people and environments in Otaki. As an ongoing process involving social, political, and economic shifts, as well as changes in cultural meanings and environmental phenomena, the construction of Makio Dam continues to transform the Otaki landscape. For residents who were witness to the awesome efforts involved in building the dam, and the display of powers capable of completely altering environments--not only dirt, water, and trees, but also homes, livelihoods, and people--it must have felt as if the world had shifted. In a

2006 newspaper article, Otaki’s ousted mayor, Kobayashi-san, recalled the statement of a colleague in the village office where he worked at the time on the occasion of Makio

26 「振り返ってみて、混迷の一番の要因は何だと思うか」。 「私も含め、恵まれた村という意識が抜けなかったことではないか」。

177 Dam’s completion in 1963: “There’s gonna be a lot of business from now on”27 (quoted in Tojo 2006 [translation by author]).

The Otaki government received a compensation payment of 210,000,000 yen, which was more than ten times the village operating budget at the time. Hoping to capitalize on a growing market in Japan for tourism, Otaki’s government used the funds to develop a section of Ontake-san as a ski-hill and to construct a road leading up to the mountains seventh stage at about 2,300 meters. For years the investment paid off. Japan was in the midst of a post war “high economic growth period” (kōdokeizaiseichōki) and was experiencing a “ski boom” (sukī būmu). It was a lucrative time for Otaki. Friends in the village told me of days when the ski hill’s two large parking lots would quickly fill to capacity and that the narrow road leading to the hill would be lined with cars. They also spoke, with some hyperbole I imagine, of garbage bags being stuffed with 10,000 yen notes and taken back to the village office.

Extravagant and rather careless spending became the norm in Otaki, which, because of its new found income, was no longer eligible to receive funds from Japan’s central government. However, with the economic bubble burst (baburu hōkai) in 1991,

Japanʻs ski boom soon fizzled out. The number of visitors to Otakiʻs ski hill peaked in

1993 at 667,600 people and continues to fall; in 2008 the number was around 57,00028.

As the throngs of customers thinned, the flow of cash into the village slowed to a trickle.

At the same time, large investments in the ski hill along with other expenditures (for example the village used to fund the junior high school’s annual class trips to Australia)

27 「これから事業がたくさんあるぞ」

28 Otaki Village homepage http://www.vill.otaki.nagano.jp/aboutus/data004.html [accessed 02/20/12]

178 had put the village government deeply into debt. It was this debt that prevented the village from amalgamating with neighboring municipalities in 2004, which lead to political crisis the following year. Addressing an audience of Otaki residents at the time of the failed amalgamation, Mayor Kobayashi conceded that:

Perhaps if there wasn’t a ski hill in this village we could have sufficiently become independent. But, because all of us followed this path from the time the dam was built, from here on out all there is to do is make this [ski hill; tourism] our core29 (quoted in Tojo 2006 translation by author).

I begin this chapter by looking at the catalytic role that the economic and political crises of 2004 and 2005 played in prompting Otaki residents to reconsider the present state and future of their village, its community and its environment. This reconsideration,

I suggest, has in turn led many residents to reevaluate the Otaki landscape and to rediscover and reaffirm elements and linkages that hold significance and value outside of economic frames of valorization. I ask, what is the value of a particular landscape? What is the value of the fields, cultivated over time by human hands; of the homes built and maintained; of the bonds of kinship and friendship that bring and hold people to one another; of the emotions inspired by and reflected back onto the land; of the pains and the joys and the sorrows that are experienced and expressed therein? Perhaps the more relevant question is: how are we to recognize the value (or, more appropriately, values) of landscapes?

Drawing on the work of David Graeber, I argue that anthropologists, through their comparatives studies of societies and cultures, are in a good position to offer answers to

29 「もしこの村にスキー場がなかったら、『自立』は十分にできたのかもしれない。しかし、私たちみん な、ダムができたあの時から、この道でやってきちゃったんだから。これからも、それを核にやっていくし かない 」。

179 such questions. Or, better yet, to not offer answers, but rather to further complicate the topic by suggesting, through specific accounts, the multiplicitous ways in which value is created and recognized. As Marx long ago revealed, within the capitalist mode of production objects are valorized through their equivalence to a standard sign of value

(money), and thus their use-value often has little bearing on the value they garner through acts of exchange (Marx 1981: 138). In a broader sense, the use-values of objects are subsumed by the logics of a particular historical development of relationships rooted in the needs and desires of those with the capital to control the means of production. Thus, within the bounds of the historical development known as capitalism, the answer to the original question, “What is the value of a particular environment,” might well be, “how much you willing to pay?”

The more important work of this chapter is to explore differing conceptions of value and how they arise within the human and non-human ecological relations that comprise and are expressed in Otaki’s forest landscapes. And then, to suggest the ways in which actors might work through these differences to reveal, both to themselves and to others, the ephemeral qualities of spectacular forms that constantly work to convince the world of their truth and realness. To accomplish this I pick up on one of the main themes of this dissertation--resources (shigen)--and examine the fundamental role this concept has played in informing socio-cultural orientations towards Otaki’s environments, and creating what I have labeled “resource landscapes.” Also, through ethnographic accounts of life in Otaki I look at localized conceptions of landscapes and the senses of value they engender, which I suggest often counter domineering discourses of value that run through

180 governmental institutions and national imaginaries of forest nature that are materially expressed within forest environments.

My aim is not to present these landscape orientations as completely oppositional to those landscapes (namely the “resource landscape”) that are most intimately linked to the capitalist mode of production and modalities of power. Rather, following the lead of

Anna Tsing (2005), my intent is to show the heterogeneity of capitalist forms and to revel how these forms are “continually made and unmade” (76). In other words, my intention is not to paint Otaki as a primitive or pristine community/environment constantly threatened by an impinging capitalism. At the same time, it is also not my intention to suggest that capitalist forms have at all been benign in terms of relations between humans, non- humans, and the environment in Otaki, nor that people in Otaki have wholeheartedly embraced the capitalist mode of production. My aim rather is to give account of how linkages between global capitalism, institutionalized forest governance and management, and conceptions of the nation have become part of the ecological fabric that binds people together with one another and to the environment in Otaki. Furthermore, as I have argued throughout this dissertation, I see these linkages and their expressions in human- environment relations as being increasingly mediated through spectacles of nature that thwart many attempts at analysis. Thus, in this chapter I also note the social practices that allow people in Otaki to gain glimpses and insights into their landscapes that allow them to continue revealing and pushing through spectacular forms that rely on and help to reinforce nature/culture dichotomies.

181 CRISES

Otaki’s failed bid for amalgamation in 2004 and the political crisis that followed were jarring enough events to raise profound questions among residents concerning the state of their village and its future. The project of turning Otaki into a nationally renowned ski area, which had been wildly successful for a time, had now been revealed as a colossal misstep; one that had led the village into massive debt. A 2008 Asahi Shimbun article named Otaki as the number one most debt-ridden municipality in the nation (Itō 2008), while a documentary that aired the previous year on Japan’s national broadcasting network, NHK (nihon hōsō kyōkai) labeled Otaki “a cornered village” (oitsumerareta mura) (Sugiura and Yamada 2007). Fear and anxiety about the future gripped residents and there was much suspicion and accusation about mishandling of funds and the failures of government. For a village with a population at the time of just over 1,000, the politics of the event were pervasive, and always personal.

Prior to the recall, Mayor Kobayashi and his government put together a plan to repay the village debt. Employees of the village office, including Kobayashi-san himself, visited Otaki’s nine hamlets to explain what was labeled the “independence plan” (jiritsu keikaku). They were met with a considerable amount of anger, accusation, and suspicion.

In Takigoshi, Otaki’s smallest hamlet, an 83 year old native of the area was asked by the mayor for his opinion on the situation. “If you speak of a connection between the ski hill and this hamlet [Takigoshi], which is separated from the village center and full of old folks, there isn’t one. How did things get like this”30 (quoted in Tojo 2006 [translation by

30 「村の中心から離れ、年寄りばかりのこの集落に、スキー場は関係ないといえばなかった。なぜこう なってしまったのか」。

182 author]). The ensuing conversation brought no definite answer. Indeed, throughout the village, answers were hard to come by.

In 2006, Otaki residents elected a new mayor and village council members. The new leadership set to work developing a plan of austerities to address the village’s enormous debt. There were pay reductions for village employees and cuts of a wide range of social services. When I arrived to Otaki in 2008, things were rather grim. With no funds to pay for a regular doctor, the village clinic was only able to open two or three times a week when a doctor from a neighboring town was available. Bus service to

Takigoshi had been eliminated, meaning that the sixteen full time residents there, most of them elderly, were largely cut-off from the rest of the village. And, funds for forest and road maintenance were unavailable. Otaki’s future was uncertain. The plan of the newly elected mayor, Seto Hiroshi, was to get out of debt as quickly as possible in order to again make a bid to join the four other municipalities that had amalgamated in 2004.

Doing so would at least guarantee basic social services. However, it would also, as many residents began to recognize, relegate Otaki to a marginal position within a much larger municipal bureaucracy.

Post-2005 anxieties in Otaki were enmeshed within broader national concerns with trends of depopulation (kasoka) that have been a reality of village life for at least the last forty years in Japan. According to Otaki’s website, its current (February 2012) population is 922 individuals, down from 1,768 individuals in 198031, a decrease of 48%.

What is more, the aging of the population (kōreika) contributes to feelings of unease as

31 http://www.vill.otaki.nagano.jp/index.html [accessed 02/09/12]

183 young children and teenagers are increasingly not present. In 2005, the percentage of the population over the age of 65 was 32% and growing. For the two years (2008-2010) that I lived in Otaki, the student population of the combined elementary and junior high school was just over eighty students, and about fifteen of these were exchange students who mostly came from metropolitan areas to live in the village for one or two years at

Kodomo-no-mori (Children’s Forest), a privately run non-profit organization. Also, because there is no senior high school in Otaki, children commute to school from the age of sixteen. This lack of youth in the village, many people told me, creates a sense that

Otaki has no future (mirai ga nai).

During group discussions with residents in the fall of 2008 the topic of children leaving the village was one that solicited a lot of opinions. “After kids graduate [from high school],” suggested one participant, “they leave [the village]” (gakōsotsugyō shichau to kodomotachi deteicchau kara); other participants affirmed the comment. This led to a conversation about children who do live in the village, but lack understandings of the environment and how to make use of it. “The environment is really great, but I guess the kids just canʻt, or donʻt, enjoy it,” was how one participant assessed the situation.

“What are they doing? They’re in their homes playing video games and using computers.

There are those kinds of things, so their attention is drawn that way.”32 The perception of disconnections between young people and the village environment was intriguing and I decided to investigate it further.

32 環境はすごく良い環境ではるんだけど、なかなか子供たちがそういうのをこう、楽しめ、楽し まないというかさ、んで何やってんのって言ったらうちでゲームやってたりさコンピュータやっ たり、ああいうのがあるしさ今、やっぱりそっちに興味もある

184 With the help of residents whom, through my experiences with them, I considered to be knowledge concerning different aspects of the culture, history, and environment of

Otaki, I composed a test and administered it to village junior high school students. The students (n=31) scored best on questions concerning Ontake-san. Their average correct response rate (64.9%) was on par with that of four adult respondents (65%). This is likely due to the prominence of Onake-san in the life and landscape of Otaki, as well as to an excursion that second year junior high school students make to the mountain, which follows a period of focused study. On average, students scored lowest on questions concerning village history (28.3%), followed by questions about local flora (41.4%). The test also revealed gaps in the students’s knowledge compared to the four adult respondents who varied in age, sex, and length of time living in Otaki. The largest gaps occurred in sets of questions regarding history, flora, forests, wildlife, and to a lesser extent, gathering of wild foods. There was much less of a gap in relation to questions regarding agriculture, and almost none regarding Ontake-san.

Though the results of this test (dubbed the ōtaki kentei, or “official Otaki test,” by the junior high school vice-principal) does not reliably denote the breadth or depth of environmental knowledge among junior high school students, it does affirm the common perception among interviewees and group discussion participants of a disconnection between young people and the culture, history, and environment of their village. In particular, the results suggest a lack of experiential knowledge: knowledge gained through practical experience. Indeed, it was my observation that many village youth did not often engage in subsistence activities in the forest, such as gathering wild foods,

185 fishing, or hunting. These were, however, prominent activities among adults. Young people also did not spend a lot of time walking or hiking in Otaki’s forests and mountains, though there were some exceptions. This lack of active engagement with forests was particularly pronounced among Otaki’s junior high school and high school students. Like students across Japan, junior high school students in Otaki were often busy with club activities and preparing for high school entrance examinations. High school students had similar commitments and also spent time commuting to the nearest school, which was a 30-40 minute bus ride away, so often they did not get back to Otaki until around seven or eight at night.

The creation in Otaki of a resource landscape has fostered a growing disconnection between human bodies (particularly those of young people) and forest environments, which has increasingly led to the emergence of new human subjects.

Writing about U.S. national forests in New Mexico, geographer Jake Kosek (2006: 113) suggests that, “To commodify the forest as resource is not to take an object out of a system of meanings but to infuse it with a specific set of meanings. These meanings define specific sets of relations to others and, depending on their definition, distinguish possessor from thief, landowner from trespasser” (113). Otaki residents are not, in a legal sense, possessor’s of the land around them; what they do own, small agricultural plots and modest swaths of communal forestland, are minuscule compared to the thousands of hectares of national forest that comprise the Otaki Valley. However, in my experience they are also not thieves (i.e. I never observed or heard about illegal felling or gathering) or, for the most part, trespassers. And, though it was permissible to enter national forests,

186 it was not a common practice. Thus, forests remained outside the everyday experience of many local residents, fostering an subjectivity of alienation.

Years of control, management, and exploitation by the national government have hewn Otaki forests into nationalized spaces, inscribed with meanings and embodied with expressions of power framed at a national scale. They are painted as minna no mori

(everyone’s forests) that, the logic goes, belong to everyone and to no one, which places them under the purview of the national government, and have, in this sense, become non- local spaces that call forth national citizen subjectivities. “Those are the government’s forests,” an elderly woman, whom I first mentioned in chapter I, remarked to me early in my fieldwork, “so they don’t really have any connection to us” (seifu no mono dakara, watashitachi ni amari kanekei nai).

The landscapes we dwell in evoke emotion--longings, desires, and fears--that help to define who or what we are both as individuals and groups (Kahn 1996); often, particular places or landmarks inform our thinking and become part of our vocabularies and conversations (Basso 1996). National forests in Otaki have become markers of the village’s status in the broader national landscape: a marginal place where resources are drawn, put to use, and made valuable. Similarly, bodies in Otaki, especially those of young people, are made resources and oriented towards urban spaces where value is produced and livelihoods are found. Without solid rooting in the forest landscapes, it is all too easy, and sensible, to leave Otaki.

Crafted as a space of nationalized resources, the Otaki landscape located within

“Japan,” a nation-culture with a particular set of agendas and institutions. As a place,

187 therefore, Otaki takes on a set of meanings that differ from those associated with its situatedness at regional, local, or other scales. In line with the false dichotomies outlined in chapter II, at a national scale Otaki is made okuyama (back of the mountain). It is coded as pure, natural, and idyllic, but also as backwards, poor, and uncivilized.

Educational, economic, and social opportunities are to be found in lowland urban areas. It is in these places that youth can fulfill their potentials (individual, but also economic) and be “successful.” The village, along with its mountains and forests, on the other hand, offers no such opportunities. Young bodies located in the village, we might say, are potential wasted. When I asked Otaki’s class of first year junior high school students if they wanted to live in the village when they got older, eight out of the ten answered,

“no.” The reasons they gave were because there are no stores in Otaki; that there are too few people; and that it is inconvenient. When I asked where they wanted to live, the few that replied offered simply, “Tokyo.”

This points to the emergence within the resource landscape of nationalized subjects among Otaki’s youth, whom are also made resources. Like in many rural areas, in the past, the cultivation of children in Otaki was very much a familial and community undertaking, and the result were adults who could take on the role of producers within the village. Even with the development of industrialized state-forestry in the early 20th century, which began to draw laborers from within the village, production remained largely localized and children stayed in and remained connected to the village. A variety of post-war structural changes, including broad land-reforms and lightening fast modernization and industrialization changed the situation across the nation (McDonald

188 1996a, McDonald 1996b). Farmers (as well as foresters) became factory workers and education became the focus for children who now had the chance to join a growing middle class (Vogel 1963). In the forests of Otaki, which were not subject to the same reforms as agricultural lands and thus remained under government control, a declining domestic timber market was bringing an end to industrialized forestry. The rise of conservation (itself a new form of resource “use”) in Otaki has turned national forests into spaces of non-production, devoid of human activity. Indeed, this is an odd effect of conservation globally (West, Igoe, and Brockington 2006).

RECOGNIZING THE RESOURCE LANDSCAPE

The sense of turmoil caused by the revelation in 2005 of Otaki’s financial debt led some village members to search for answers in the history of resource use and environmental transformation, which they felt had brought them to the point of crisis. One afternoon in late 2008 this topic came up during a conversation I had with Otaki’s former mayor (who had resigned in 2005 because of the financial crisis). We talked while sipping green tea and snacking on dried persimmon, pickled vegetables, and rice crackers at his home in the hamlet of Kami-jo. He wanted to know about my research, and after I explained to him that I was interested in how people in the village think about and interact with forests his face brightened. There were three things, he told me, that I had to account for if I was going to understand my topic. First, the long history of forestry and timber extraction in the village; second, the building of Makio Dam; and third, tourism development and the building of the ski hill. What he offered, I have come to recognize, were three waypoints

189 that help to trace a pathway of intensive resource use that many people I talked with perceived as having had seriously and detrimentally impacted Otaki, its environment and human community.

As I have suggested throughout this dissertation, it is largely through a history of resource extraction that Otaki has been constructed as “resource landscape.” The resource landscape is, as I conceive it, largely an abstract conceptualization that is substantively comprised through the deployment of spectacles of “nature as resource” that correlate to physical environments, a process that draws attention away from their spectacular qualities, making them seem everyday, normal, and, yes, natural. I see the emergence of resource landscapes (not only in Otaki, but also globally) as being embedded in the broader development of capitalism and thus suggest that the value of resources defined within these landscapes is largely determined based on “free market” logics. In their spectacular forms, national forests in Japan are presented as discrete objects that provide services to a national citizenry (kokumin), which itself has a phantasmic existence (Ivy

1995: 16-26). As spectacles, national forests can stabilize land; store water; provide timber; clean the air; sequester carbon; and offer peacefulness and tranquility. In their spectacular forms, the value of the forests, in other words, resides in their potential usefulness for a national citizenry that is spatially and temporally dislocated from them.

Put differently, national forests like those in Otaki are valorized for their ability to be transformed into something else of value: a secure hillside, water, timber, air, or recreation.

190 Imagined as forests of use-values, the Otaki landscape is placed within the larger national, as well as global, political-economy of natural resources where no “unvalued” thing may exist. “Resources are made by “resourcefulness”. . .,” notes Tsing (2005) and the work of creating resource landscapes, what she labels “frontiers,” “is to make human subjects as well as natural objects” (30). In other words, the production of new political subjects is part and parcel to the creation of resources and resource landscapes--the two are intimately intertwined and work to make one another invisible. At this point, we might return to the question posed at the beginning of this chapter: what is the value of a particular environment? However, perhaps the more appropriate question is: how is one to recognize its value?

Speaking at a meeting focused on Makio Dam and relations between Otaki and downstream water-users Otaki’s current mayor identified the same three processes listed by the former mayor (industrial forestry, dam building, and tourism development) to contextualize the situation in the village. He did so in order to convey a sense of the role of resource extraction in shaping the Otaki landscape. At the same meeting, a lifelong

Otaki resident who grew up in one of the hamlets now submerged by the dam, stood and asked about promises made to transfer ownership of lands near the dam to the village government. Though the broader topics raised in these speech acts were not further addressed in the meeting, which had the purpose of conveying an overall sense of harmony between upstream and downstream residents, the acts gave voice to a growing unease with the social and environmental impacts of the dam. At a broader level, these kinds of uneasy feelings worked as catalysts to renew people’s interests in Otaki’s unique

191 cultural and environmental dimensions, giving rise to a variety of social practices capable of fostering connections across the community and the landscape.

MAKING VALUE

In his book Toward and Anthropological Theory of Value, David Graeber (2001) argues for the importance of actions in understanding the creation of value. Distinguishing between “value” as economic price-mechanism and “values” as conceptions of what is desirable in a given community (78), he elicits the work of Nancy Munn and Terence

Turner to suggest that humans recognize what is valuable through the use of “value templates” that exist as parts of larger totalizing frameworks of meaning concerning life and society (82-83). These totalizing frameworks, what we tend to label “societies,” consist of the process of coordinating all human activity, and value is the way that actors ascribe meaning to their own actions within it (76). Value, in other words, arises from, becomes embedded in, and is expressed through, human actions.

Graeber suggests that in our current capitalistic system, production (and the production of value) occurs in two spheres--the workplace and the household--that are mediated by the market. Regarding these two spheres, he writes:

One primarily concerns itself with the creation of commodities; the other, with the creation (care and feeding, socialization, personal development, etc.) of human beings. Neither could exist without the other. But the market that connects them also acts as a vast force of social amnesia: the anonymity of economic transactions ensures that with regard to specific products, each sphere remains effectively invisible to the other. The result is a double process of fetishization. From the perspective of those going about their business in the domestic sphere, using commodities, the history of how these commodities were produced is effectively invisible. Therefore, objects—as Marx so famously observed—appear to take on

192 subjective qualities. Perhaps in part, too, because they are also turned there to the fashioning of people (79).

In Otaki these two spheres are intimately linked through the medium of forests, which in their spectacular (fetishized) form work to naturalize, and therefore conceal, a politics of difference through which the categories of “resource” and “citizen” are called forth and reassembled within the ideological frame of the Japanese nation, free market capitalism, and global regimes of conservation.

People in Otaki are caught in a seemingly impossible bind: as national citizens located in what are constructed as marginalized spaces there is great pressure to participate in valorizing local forests as national resources that are open to various kinds of exploitation. At the same time, as active dwellers they recognize values in the forests that reflect their senses of home and community. Similarly, while residents have strong desires to offer village children educational opportunities that will allow them to be economically successful, they also convey a sense of sorrow about the reality that most children will leave Otaki (dete iku) lacking a strong sense of the values that the forests hold. In Otaki, the “value” and the “values” that Graeber distinguishes are intertwined with one another and constantly negotiated across people, households, and institutions.

REVERENCE

Every year in July people gather at the summit of the holy mountain Ontake-san to

“open” it for the summer season through a regiment of rituals. In 2008 when I first climbed the mountain for the event, among the people present were worshipers dressed in white; officials from the Otaki Village office, including the mayor; Shinto priests from

193 local shrines; Forestry Agency officials, including the head of the local office; the heads of Otaki’s inn-keeper’s association and hunter’s association; and the president of a local tour company. All were gathered to give prayers and offerings to the gods of the mountain to appease them and gain their good favor through the summer season.

On the morning of July 10th, I set out for the summit of Ontake-san to witness first hand these rituals, which are collectively known as kaizanshiki (mountain opening ceremony). A parking lot built along with the village ski hill as part of tourism development sits at about 2300 meters, the seventh of Ontake-san’s ten stages, and this is where one begins the climb to the summit. Otaki village itself comprises the first stage of the mountain at around 950 meters. Thus, before roads were built, climbing Ontake-san was at least a multi-week affair. Shouldering my pack in the cool morning air, I anticipated that the climb would not take more than ninety minutes. The trail leading to the summit from the Otaki side (ōtaki guchi) begins at Ta-no-hara, a wide, flat butte covered in a forest of haimatsu (Pinus pumila), a high-altitude pine that grows short and stout. A large stone torī gate marks the entrance to the trail, which starts off wide and flat.

Though it was summer across most of Japan, the chilly morning air reminded me that there on the flank of Ontake-san it was still spring. The dark sky blushed in pink and orange hues, while birds sang in anticipation of sunrise. As I emerged from the trees and onto a rocky ridgeline leading up Ontake-san’s southeastern face, daylight washed over the mountain. I soon hit my stride and broke my first sweat. My mind tuned to the rhythm of my footsteps and the world around me fell away. I did not notice immediately, therefore, when I came upon a man climbing in front of me. On his back he carried a

194 shoiko, a wooden frame with a small shelf to which luggage can be strapped. When we both stopped for a rest, I saw that it was a man I knew from the village. He was an older man (in his seventies) and small with a thin face and kind eyes upon which sat two bushy eyebrows. His shoiko was stacked full. I asked what he was carrying. Objects for the ceremony, was his reply, including bottles of sake. “Wow” (sugoi), I exclaimed, amazed

(and a bit embarrassed) that a man his age was able to climb with such a heavy load.

“Well, I’ll see you at the top. Take Care” (ja mata chōjō de. ki wo tsukete kudasai), I said as I climbed on ahead. Above my head the sky stretched out in a deep azure blue. Below, the land unfolded in massive folds and creases, like the robes of a Buddhist monk.

The annual undertaking of kaizanshiki (and in September heizanshiki, or

“mountian closing ceremony”) on Ontake-san are acts that symbolically express, in ritualized form, the connections between the mountain environment and the humans who dwell within it. Graeber (2001) suggests that it is not such ritualized actions in and of themselves that create value (in the same way that bills or coinage do not necessarily carry any inherent value), but rather because these modalities, “often have a tendency to become models, representations in miniature, of the broader forms of creative action whose value they ultimately represent. . . .they are in their own way microcosms of the total system of production of which they are a part, and [. . .] they encode a theory of creativity that is implicit on the everyday level as well, but is rarely quite brought into the open” (81-82). In this sense, the creative actions of the kaizanshiki ritual entail a dramatization of the social, cultural, and economic linkages that enliven Ontake-san and give value to its landscapes and communities.

195 Around 10:30 A.M. the ceremony began in the shrine of the Otaki summit (ōtaki chōjō), which is located a little over a 100 meters below Ontake-san’s true summit. I stood among a group of people who had gathered in the shrine’s entry hall (haiden).

Three priests dressed in long, pastel-colored robes entered and took their place at the front of the hall, their ceremonial black hats stiff and tall on their heads. Just beyond the entry hall was a set of stone steps leading to the main hall (honden). Interestingly, the main hall, which was made of stone, was much smaller than the entry hall--there was just enough space to fit a single person, if that person tried hard enough. Like most shrines in

Japan, the main hall was covered by a pitched roof made of wooden slats topped with round pegs that stuck out at 45 degree angles from either side to form a series of V-shapes at the roof’s pinnacle, like a set of interlocked fingers.

The priests positioned themselves at the front of the entry hall and began a series of rhythmic chants (Figure 21). After a time, one of them climbed the stone steps to the main hall. After opening the hall’s small doors he made a series of subsequent trips to deliver offerings of fruit, sake, and fish. As the ritual progressed, the priests’ chanting grew in pace and pitch. After these initial offerings had been made, the priests invited the various attendees to come forward. After each person was called by name and title, he

(noticeably, no females made offerings) approached the base of the main hall; there he bowed, clapped his hands twice, and then offered a sprig of sakaki (Cleyera japonica), an

196 Figure 21: Shinto priests at kaizanshiki (Mountain Opening Ceremony) on Ontake-san, July 10th, 2008 (photo by author)

indigenous plant considered sacred within Shintō. The mayor of Otaki Village was the first to come forward, followed by representatives from the national Forestry Agency, the local association of inn-keepers, a local tour company, the village hunting association, and several other groups. The ceremony ended with more chanting by the priests and the removal of the offerings, this time in reverse order. At the end, the door of the main hall was again closed.

The patterning of the mountain opening ceremony on Ontake-san is not much different from Shinto ceremonies that occur across Japan, whether at a neighborhood shrine or within an individual home. In each instance, the focus is on making offerings

197 and saying prayers to ask for good favor. In other words, a symbolic exchange is performed. Offerings of food, drink, and money (basic elements of everyday life) are given with the hope that the gods (kami) will offer something in return, whether this be protection, fortune, prosperity, good health, or a more specific request. These ritualized exchanges mimic the everyday exchanges that occupy the lives of most Japanese. The value generated through these exchanges are, put simply, the value of life itself, which is maintained through a never-ending cycle of exchange. Whether working to produce a human being or to produce an object, the value of that person or thing comes through its interactions with the larger world in which conceptions of value differ across groups.

Thus, at the heart of frictions among varying conceptions of Otaki landscapes is a politics of value in which the ultimate stakes are, “not [. . .] the struggle to appropriate value,” but rather, “the struggle to establish what value is” (Graeber 2001: 88, italics in original).

Following the ceremony, the other participants and I filed into a nearby mountain hut. We sat on the floor at low tables. A variety of foods including dried fish, pickled vegetables, and steaming bowls of miso soup were spread out before us. The head priest, who had led the ceremony, stood and thanked us for our participation. In his greeting he emphasized the importance of Ontake-san for the well being of Otaki. Specifically, he spoke of the recent years of anxiety and worry over the financial state of the village, but suggested that as he climbed the mountain that morning he had felt a sense of calm, realizing that if the villagers took good care of Ontake-san, everything would work out fine. With that he led us in a toast of o-miki, sake that had been ritually sanctified during the ceremony. The morning quickly sank away into drinking, eating, and conversation.

198 Later that evening, many of those who had attended the ceremony gathered at

Taki-ryokan, an inn associated with the Otaki summit shrine and run by the family of the head priest. We were treated to more food and alcohol. A greeting was again offered by the priest, as were short speeches by guests of honor. The group was almost exclusively men. We ate, drank, and talked for about two hours, while outside stars burned bright holes in the summer night.

The annual kaizanshiki on the summit of Ontake-san offers a window into a

“value template” that exists among Otaki residents in conjunction with their relationships with the mountains and forests in which they dwell. We might label such a template an

“ontological orientation” that works to shape people’s perceptions and experiences of their environment--their conceptualization of that environment--or, in other words, their landscape. I argue that in Otaki there are multiple ontological orientations at play among human actors and that these orientations make contact with one another, causing frictions that continuously produce novel cultural forms. In particular, I note two major ontological orientations that I believe are significant for the current discussion.

Borrowing from the work of Philippe Descola (2006: 139) and his four types of human/ nature ontologies, I suggest that one of these orientations is characterized by animism and the other by naturalism. The later is generally associated with Western modernity and the development of global capitalism, which was explored in chapters II and III. Here, I focus on the former and suggest that activities such as the annual kaizanshiki on Ontake- san and their broader significances in the lives of Otaki’s residents are in large part framed by, draw meaning from, and produce value through an ontological orientation in

199 which a sense of reverence for connections that transect the conceptual boundaries of humanity, the natural, and the supernatural are fundamental.

Ontake-san’s sacredness emanates from the pantheon of gods that are believed to dwell within specific locations on the mountain from its summit to its foothills. At the top of the pantheon, as well as the mountain, sit three creator gods. The first is

Kunitokotachinomikoto, the creator of everything in heaven and earth. The second,

Ōnamuchinomikoto, is a god of medicine who helped create the lands of the Japanese nation as well as the rules governing them. And, the third is Sukunahikonanomikoto, who is also a god of medicine that helped created the lands of the nation, as well as methods for curing human ills and avoiding calamities (e-mail to author, Y. Sawada. June 19,

2011). Throughout the Ontake-san landscape, material markers--shrines (jinja), statues

(zō), and spirit stones (ireihi)--mark the presence of gods and spirits.

In her work on spiritual labor and mountain asceticism in the Tsugaru region of northern Japan, Ellen Schattschneider (2003) draws on the work of Japanese anthropologist Masao Yamaguchi in discussing the importance and the widespread practice in Japanese society of mimesis, “the production of tangible simulacra of visible and invisible forces,” through which, “an actor performatively constitutes a productive link between mortal worshipers and immortal divinities” (7). Actors who present prayers and offerings during the mountain opening ceremony on Ontake-san also produce such links while serving as representatives of a variety of institutions that occupy social, political, and economic roles within the Otaki landscape. The ceremony, therefore, serves as a dramatic representation of an ontological and ecological orientation in which the

200 world of human activity and knowledge is subjugated to the pervasive powers of the mountain gods.

It is through the creative work of humans, Schattschneider notes, that the gods enter into the worlds of humans. “In principle,” she adds, “all subsequent mundane labor undertaken by worshipers in other domains of their lives--in rice fields, kitchens, or factories--can be reorganized to partake of these efficacious mimetic functions” (7).

Among Otaki’s residents, there are few who would take on the label of

“worshiper” (gyōja), which generally refers to those who come from outside the village to do ascetic training (shugyō) on Ontake-san. And yet, I argue that, like the worshipers described by Schattschneider, the significance of Ontake-san, which is made overtly visible in the mountain opening ceremony, penetrates almost all aspects of life in Otaki.

Here I return to the concept of “dwelling,” which I discussed in chapters III and IV. The experience of dwelling in an environment produces what Ingold (2002: 19) labels “an ecology of life” in which a series of relations unfold within the dynamic interactions of various organisms and non-living (I would also add unseen) elements in a landscape. In this sense, ecologies are sets of embedded elements in an environment that are integrated through human activity, or a “poetics of dwelling” (Ingold 2002: 26). In Otaki, a sacred landscape centered around Ontake-san and the forested hills that surround it is continually crafted through a poetics of dwelling.

The ontology that is expressed through these poetics and subsequently woven into the sacred ecology that both Ontake-san and Otaki are parts of, is premised on, and works to reproduce, values that counter, to different extents, a dominant political ecology

201 informed by the global political-economy and its accompanying regimes of natural resource governance and conservation. Central to this alternative ontology, I suggest, is a sense of reverence that threatens institutionalized discourses of resource governance and management by questioning ideas of absolute and perfect knowledge and positioning human actors as fallible organisms subject to the movements of a “deep ecology” (see

Merchant 1992) composed of various seen and unseen forces. The mimetic performance of the relations that connect humans to these varied forces during the kaizanshiki on

Ontake-san reinforces the reverential position that human actors should take on within the ecology that sustains them. Everyone, including Forestry Officials, are expected to bow before, make offerings to, and ask for good favor with the mountain gods that inhabit

Ontake-san. The gods, and the mountain, one is made to realize, will endure the ebbs and flows of the human world as they wash over the landscape.

In his novel, Before the Dawn, celebrated writer and Kiso Valley native Shimazaki

Tōson (1987) depicts the upheavals caused the Meiji Restoration in 1868 and the deleterious impacts that Japan’s rapid modernization had on the communities and environments of the Kiso Valley. When one of the novel’s characters takes a trip to

Ontake-san, Shimazaki describes the sensation of gazing upon the mountain’s summit from afar:

The mountains stood in rank upon rank of superimposed triangular forms, each with its own steepness and pitch and with Tsurugigamine, the “sword peak,” soaring up at the apex of the awesome mass. In the hidden fastness were solitude and calm. Here people could gaze up at the form of a great mountain that would prevail amidst the endless changes of the human world. It was said that the bones of early climbers such as the twelfth- century priest Kakumyo Gyoja were buried at the edge of the precipice at its summit (191).

202 Shimazaki’s description of a mountain prevailing “amidst the endless changes of the human world,” as well as his mention of the priest’s bones buried at the summit, articulates an encompassing ecology in which the activities of humans are etched into Ontake-san’s enduring form. I suggest that this encompassing ecology, in which the lives of human actors are woven together with forest and mountain landscapes remains a key feature of Otaki life that is most often enunciated through reference to the sacred Ontake-san.

OYAMA

Residents of Otaki refer to Ontake-san as O-yama. The term, which translates as “the mountain” or “the honorable mountain,” is not generally used by people outside of the village and conveys a sense of familiarity and closeness. Part of a passage from the cover of a 2001 publication produced by the Otaki village office is illustrative. In the passage, the characters for Ontake-san are written with the reading “O-yama” included above.

御嶽山の雪どけ水が 清冽に流れていきます。 は今日もそこにあります。 静かに私たちを見守っています。

Oyama no yukidoke mizu ga seiretsu ni nagarete ikimasu. Oyama ha kyō mo soko ni arimasu. Shizuka ni watashitachi wo mimamotte imasu.

The snowmelt water of O-yama flows cool and clear. Again today O-yama is there. Silently watching over us.

203 Several parts of the passage reference the significance of Ontake-san in the lives of residents. The first and second lines, for example, describe the cool and clear snowmelt water of Ontake-san that is ubiquitous throughout Otaki. Water is significant, as noted in chapter V, not only because it feeds both crops and trees, but also because of the role that water resource development and dam construction have played in shaping the Otaki landscape.

The third and fourth lines reference Ontake-san’s presence in the landscape as something alive and familiar, but also powerful and enduring. The phrase soko ni arimasu, for example, can be translated literally as “is there,” but also conveys a kind of closeness that might be better translated as “is just over there.” Most homes and buildings in Otaki are positioned within the folded slopes and ridgelines that comprise the greater

Ontake-san massif, which means that the summit of the mountain--what is often distinguished as the whole mountain--is often unseen. Depending on one’s own movement in the landscape, Ontake-san at times seems to suddenly appear from behind the crest of a hill or from the bottom of a ridge saddle; its rounded form “pops out” with almost childlike qualities. On several occasions I heard residents use the phrase hotto suru when speaking about the experience of seeing Ontake-san emerge from the hills surrounding the village. The phrase conveys a sense of relief, happiness, or joy. “When I catch a glimpse of Ontake-san, for some reason I feel at ease,” (ontakesan ga patto detara, nanka hotto suru) was the way that one resident (a thirty-something man who had moved to the village from the nearby city of Nagoya about a decade earlier) described the

204 sensation. As these examples illustrate, Ontake-san is a central feature not only in the

Otaki geography, but also in the lifeworlds of many residents.

The phrase kyō mo in the third line of the poem translates as “again today,” and suggests a sense of Ontake-san as an enduring element of the landscape. Meanwhile, the phrase mimamotte imasu in the final line, translates as “watching over” and is often used in Japan in reference to one’s parents, a teacher, or some other guardian or mentor. Along these lines, residents often speak of Ontake-san as a stable, benevolent, and even guiding entity; one that requires the attention and interventions of human actors to help care for it.

In addition, people in Otaki often spoke of landscape elements, including the village itself, in conjunction with Ontake-san, as Ontake-san no--the particle no meaning

“of” or “belonging to.” Thus, I often heard Ontake-san no sato (village of Ontake-san) in reference to Otaki; or Ontake-san no mizu (water of Ontake-san) when regarding rivers, streams, or even tap water in the village. Much like the mountain opening ceremony, these various phrases and expressions work to convey and help to reinforce a sense of belonging and connectedness between the mountain environment and the human actors who dwell within it.

Media produced by local residents are another expression of this connectivity and work to affirm Ontake-san’s constancy in the village landscape. For example, during the two years of my fieldwork, New Year’s postcards (nengajō) created by a village revitalization group featured photographs of Ontake-san. Similarly, a blog maintained by the village office since February 2008 contains 427 posts featuring Ontake-san, almost

205 twice as much as the second highest topic at 266 posts33. Through these and other media materials depicting Ontake-san, residents expressed a sense of connection—economic, social, and cultural, but also physical, emotional, and spiritual—to the mountain.

Indeed, the term “connection” seems contrived when trying to convey the relationships between human actors and Ontake-san, in that it implies a fundamental separation that is bridged only through explicit acts, such as those noted above. However, in spite of my conceptual and semantic choices, I contend that the lifeworlds of many, if not most, Otaki residents are in many ways seamlessly woven together with the landscape--with the forests, rivers, hills, and with Ontake-san. At a basic and profound level, the landscape is the community and its people. There is, in other words, no separation from which to posit “connections.” Among Otaki residents, even when expressing emotions, things quintessentially human, often it is Ontake-san that springs forth, as if from within a person’s own being. On the occasion of my departure from

Otaki, one participant, an energetic woman of about seventy years of age and a dear friend, hand wrote a short haiku that she presented to me. It read:

ふたせの 別れを惜しむ 嶽の春

hutase no wakare wo oshimu take no haru

Two full seasons lamenting farewell Spring on Ontake-san

33 http://blog.livedoor.jp/otaki_maki/ [accessed February 18, 2012]

206

REVELATIONS

Whether we label it “reverence” or something else, the orientation towards the environment found among many, if not most, people in Otaki is marked in part by a set of relations that are qualitatively different from those expressed through the regimes of resource management and governance exemplified by the national Forestry Agency. This is not to say that all Otaki residents are benign in their interactions with the environment; nor is it to say that interactions are solely informed by this orientation. To be sure, this orientation does not exist in any objective sense, it is simply a heuristic tool that I have employed here to point to what I suggest is an underlying set of relationships, attitudes, and beliefs about nature and humans that is in tension with other, more dominant modes of thinking.

As Tsing argues, frictions between more and less prominent orientations towards nature and environments are ubiquitous in the world today and, through their expression in the material forces of capital accumulation, are constantly producing new forms with social, cultural, economic, and political dimensions. Similarly, Graeber (2001) concludes that how these orientations, “. . .knit together—or don’t—simply cannot be predicted in advance. The one thing one can be sure is that they will never knit together perfectly” (88). He also reminds us that:

For Marx, of course, it is our imaginations that make us human. Hence production and revolution are for him the two quintessentially human acts. Imagination implies the possibility of doing things differently; hence when one looks at the existing world imaginatively, one is necessarily looking at

207 it critically; when one tries to bring an imagined society into being, one is engaging in revolution (88).

I argue that the dramatic revelations in 2004 of Otaki’s dire financial situation, followed by a critical reassessment of processes of resource exploitation, environmental transformation, and economic marginalization, served as catalysts for novel imaginings of the Otaki landscape. It is in this sense that I use the phrase “revealing the spectacle,” by which I mean an ongoing process of revelation, reevaluation, and revolution that I witnessed among Otaki residents.

As the cause for much of Otaki’s financial troubles was revealed to be the mismanagement of the village-owned and operated ski hill, the question posed by the elderly man in Takigoshi--“How did things get like this?”--was on the minds of many.

However, even as the question was being asked, there was a sense that the answer could largely be found in the long history of resource exploitation in Otaki. That this history had not been more overtly linked through public discourses to social and economic marginalization and environmental transformation in the village hints at the complexities of forest politics in contemporary Japan. It also speaks to the intimate intersections of discourses of nationalism, capitalism, and neoliberal governance and their expression through spectacles of nature, as well as to the power these wield to shape communities, landscapes, and material environments.

For the last few hundred years, the people of Otaki were offered visions of the lush green forests surrounding them as elements of broader socio-political landscapes linked into structures of power. In the Edo Period (1600-1868) Otaki’s forests were the tomeyama (Lord’s forests) of the Owari Clan and provided the raw materials for a rush of

208 castle construction in urban centers. With the restoration of the Meiji Emperor in 1868,

Otaki and Kiso Valley forests became the property of the imperial family, resources to be used in modernization projects and imperial ambitions. Railroads and trains came in the early part of the 20th century, so that trees could be cut and transported more efficiently.

The end of WWII brought new economic prosperity to Japan, as well as new visions of a democratic society. Otaki’s forests were nationalized and, with foreign timber imports easing the demand for domestic timber, revamped as ecological storehouses that provide a variety of services for citizens. Dams were built to take advantage of forest watershed functions and to spread, in true democratic fashion, the benefits of these beyond the Kiso

Valley. Confronting such major changes to their landscape and livelihoods, Otaki’s residents chose to pursue tourism as a way to keep their community viable in the new post-war economy. They turned to the sacred Ontake-san and cut through forests and fields to build ski hills and roads, which they hoped would attract Japan’s growing urban middle class.

This history of resource exploitation has been accompanied by the formation and deployment of a conceptual apparatus and subjective orientation--the “resource landscape”--that emerged from and is continuously woven into practices of resource use and governance in Otaki. While village residents have at times been complicit in this deployment, and while some have actively engaged in it through their labor or political activities, often it has been vehemently resisted. In other words, the development of a resource landscape in Otaki is a process laden with frictions in which the minutiae of everyday life always carry the possibility of effecting larger shifts.

209 (R)EVOLUTIONS

In Western discourses concerning socio-political change, revolution has come to mean the creating of a new order through drastic, perhaps even violent, actions. Indeed, the word took on its current usage alongside the rise of, and specifically within socialist responses to, capitalism. In this sense, “revolution” stands in contrast to “evolution.” It is active and intentional social change rather than passive, processual change (Williams

1985: 273). In its older usages, revolution also carries the meaning of cyclical or repetitive motion, such as the movement of planets around the sun. There remains in the concept, therefore, a persistent sense of rise and fall, or climax and release, that informs a wide range of Western academic discourses from ecology to the social sciences (as well as attempts to bridge studies of natural and social phenomena). And the idea that both species and societies improve through series of booms and busts remains stubbornly axiomatic. The newest variant of this (r)evolutionary logic can be found in resilience thinking, which draws on complex systems theory to offer models of systemic behavior in which dynamism and change are key characteristics.

The systemic cycle theorized in resilience thinking consists of four phases (Figure

22). The r phase, during which elements of a system are growing, exploiting resources, and making connections, is followed by a K phase of conservation in which the system, now relatively connected, works to maintain itself in that state. Inevitably, at some point this is followed by the Ω phase in which the system’s organization begins to collapse and elements revolt against one another. Finally, the system enters an α phase during which

210 elements begin to re-organize themselves with greater potential for new elements and

new variations to appear or

e m e r g e . T h e a i m o f

resilience thinking is to gain

insights into how systems

work in order to discover

ways to either keep them

operating in a K phase or to

force them to enter a Ω

Figure 22: the adaptive cycle (Gunderson and Holling phase. The latter, forcing a 2002: 34) system to change, can of course be characterized as revolutionary--an attempt to remake a system. The former, working to prevent a system from changing, is commonly referred to as “resilience.”

In resilience thinking, sets of phenomena conceptualized as “complex adaptive systems” are theorized as being more complex and stochastic than the models used to explain them. Though the centrality of change in systems is, for the most part, recognized within resilience thinking, I suggest that there remains among many environmental scholars and resource managers an underlying, and undying, faith in the abilities of humans to comprehend, predict, and exert control over these “systems.” All that is required is better science and better management (see Acheson 2006). In its early iterations resilience thinking presented critiques to this view, as expressed in the

211 following quote from C.S. “Buzz” Holling, one of the conceptual founders of the approach:

A management approach based on resilience ... would emphasize the need to keep options open ... and the need to emphasize heterogeneity. Flowing from this would be not the presumption of sufficient knowledge, but the recognition of our ignorance: not the assumption that future events are expected, but that they will be unexpected. The resilience framework can accommodate this shift in perspective, for it does not require a precise capacity to predict the future, but only a qualitative capacity to devise systems that can absorb and accommodate future events in whatever unexpected form they may take (Holling 1973: 21).

Ultimately, however, resilience thinking stands as a contemporary articulation of notions (originally Western in origin, but now generalized across the globe) of natural, as well as social, phenomena as displaying cyclical patterning characterized by phases of persistence and change. Markets, for example, are said to be stable or volatile, as are nations; societies are considered to be in order or disorder; and ecosystems are thought of as being balanced or disturbed. In an ever-changing world, Nature (with a capital N) that invokes some kind of constancy is regularly established as a base-line from which to measure deviations. However, as I have argued throughout this work, as have political ecologists and others for some time now (Escobar 1999, Forsyth 2008, Latour 1993),

Nature is as much constructed as it is real, and it thus partakes in a larger politics of envisioning in which the stakes are, “the fundamental ordering of meaning and power that situates individuals, communities, and their environment in relation to each other” (Thomas 2001: 4).

Scholars within resilience thinking have attempted to address the conceptual dilemma of ecological and social systems that are constantly in flux by introducing the

212 concept of stability domains or stable states, which are often described using a ball and basin analogy (Figure 23) in which the ball represents a system’s stability and the basin represents the same system’s capability of maintaining that stability (Gunderson

2000: 426-427, Walker and

Salt 2006: 36-37). Each system, however it may be defined, is capable of Figure 23: Ball and basin heuristic depicting a multiple stable states, and system’s multiple stability regimes (Gunderson 2000). the aim of resilience thinkers is to understand (often through modeling) a system’s capacity for resilience within a given stable state in order to encourage or discourage potential change.

A major critique of resilience thinking that has been launched from within anthropology and other social sciences, is the lack of emphasis within the approach on phenomena described as being “social” or “cultural,” and in particular a lack of accounting for operations of power. For example, during a 2008 symposium on resilience thinking held at Sussex University, Frans Berkhout suggested a reluctance on the part of resilience thinkers to recognize normative aspects of resilience in the context of multiple resiliences for different groups or actors. He also noted a tendency for resilience thinking to be conservative with a focus on the persistence of systems (Leach 2008: 11). Similarly,

Walker and Cooper (2011) note correspondences between resilience thinking and

213 neoliberal economics in positing turbulence as norm and adaptability (resilience) as a marker of success. They suggest that, “The appeal to ecological security is often invoked as a means of distinguishing those who are sufficiently resilient to survive as dignified participants in a globally integrated world. . .” (156). In short, within resilience thinking we find a reworked, though no wholly new, Nature that can be (and increasingly is) used to normalize the current conditions of late capitalism by suggesting that cycles of climax and release are inherent to ecological, social, and other systems, and that science

(particularly modeling) and effective interventions are the proper pathways to resilience, adaptability, and ultimately survival.

One possible avenue towards injecting a sense of politics into resilience thinking is through Gramsci’s concept of the historic bloc. In fact, we might borrow the heuristic device of stability regimes as a way of talking about historic blocs, which, according to

Sklair (2000), “are fluid amalgamations of forces that coagulate into social movements to deal with specific historical conjunctures, reflecting concrete problems that have to be confronted by different social groups. In the struggle for hegemony, historical blocs form and dissolve and reform” (no page given). In other words, in light of work in political ecology and other social science approaches, rather than positing turbulence or change as inherent systemic qualities, it is more productive to think about competing stability regimes within which both notions of and conditions of resilience are constantly negotiated among actors and groups. In this sense, resilience thinking has the potential of being a useful framework for thinking about formations of power and of resistance to such formations.

214 DWELLING, AFFECT, AND MOVEMENTS OF RESISTANCE

Along with transformations of the physical environment, the deployment of the resource landscape and the category of “national forests” (kokuyūrin) in Otaki has resulted in the production of political subjectivities. Primary among these is the identity of “Japanese national citizen,” a corollary to national forests that works to define human actors as subjects who share a common set of cultural values, experiences, and perspectives. In particular, the extensive deployment in recent years of the phrase minna no mori

(everyone’s forest) in Forestry Agency media has the dual effect of smoothing out differences and normalizing (and naturalizing) a singular sense of what it means to be

“Japanese.”

In taking account of the contradictory effects that subjectivities associated with the resource landscape have had on local actors in Otaki, Lefebvre’s work on productions of space is worth considering. In what Edward Soja (1996: 53-82) labels a

“trialectics of spatiality,” Lefebvre envisions three aspects of spatialization. In simple terms, the first is perceived space, which refers to everyday or commonsensical perceptions of space; the second, conceived space, is theoretical space promulgated and employed by professionals such as cartographers and planners; the third, lived space, is space dwelled in and experienced by human actors (Shields 2011: 281). Using the language of spectacles, I suggest that in Otaki spectacles of nature produced by the

Forestry Agency help to create conceived space, which is consumed by Japan’s general

215 public and feeds into the larger Spectacle that comprises perceived space. Lived space, then, refers to the dwelling perspectives of human actors living in the Otaki environment.

In reality, these three analytical “spaces” are intertwined and produce spaces in which human subjects (and in turn natures) are continually produced in complex and often contradictory ways. Thus, at different times and in different spaces an actor in Otaki may hold disparate subjective views of herself and her surroundings. Accordingly, it is entirely possible, and even probable, that individual actors will simultaneously recognize themselves as sharing, but also not-sharing a common Japanese national identity.

Similarly, while walking in a forest designated “national,” an actor might see that forest both as a national resource and as a part of the local landscape associated with a particular story, event, or activity.

The annual mountain opening ceremony, described above, is illustrative of the capriciousness with which spaces, subjects, and landscapes are made and remade in

Otaki. On the one hand, the centrality of common Shinto rituals in the ceremony, as well as the presence of Forestry Agency officials, places it squarely in the frame of a generalized Japanese identity and the Japanese state. Yet, on the other hand, the status of

Ontake-san as a sacred part of the local landscape, along with the fact that all are expected to display reverence and pay homage to local gods that are peripheral in the larger pantheon of what remains effectively state-sponsored Shinto, make the ceremony quintessentially local in scope and significance. I argue that within these unsettled spaces, where subjectivities and natures are continually contested, occur frictions that cause

216 cracks and fissures, which always threaten to grow and widen with revolutionary possibilities.

Moreover, in Lefebvre’s conception, space is not only produced, it is also productive. Put differently, space is not only the result of actions, but also the medium through which they unfold. Thus, whether in Otaki or elsewhere, in the politics of landscape, movement matters. In this respect, dwelling in a landscape--spending time in it, moving through it, sensing it, experiencing it--becomes a critical act. As such, it is in the banalities of everyday life that landscapes, such as forests, are produced, contested, and reproduced.

In the past, when forestry work was abundant in Otaki and the village government worked alongside the local Forest Management Office (eirinsho, now the Forestry

Agency), interactions with various forest environments was a common occurrence for many residents. However, today with a minuscule domestic timber market and the rise of forest conservation as a management priority, Otaki residents spend a great deal less time in forests, especially national forests, which has fostered a sense of disconnection. This was expressed during an October 27, 2008 group discussion by several participants who stated that they felt little connection to (amari kankei nai) and had not much interest in

(kanshin nai) the national forests that make up much of the Otaki landscape.

For a long time, this growing disconnection appears not to have caused much concern in Otaki. As I described in the last chapter, declines in state-sponsored forestry after WWII were accompanied by the development of water resources in the village and the building of Makio Dam. This event marked not only a fuller extension of the resource

217 landscape in Otaki, but also a turn towards tourism as a primary source of income for the village and its residents. During interviews, many participants explained to me that with a steady flow of cash coming into the village, the feeling was that Otaki was part of Japan’s post-war “high economic growth period” (kōdokeizaiseichōki). During this time business was booming at the village-owned ski hill, providing jobs and income for many, as well as the opportunity to open and operate pensions or other kinds of guest-houses for many more. It was easy, therefore, for Otaki residents to be dazzled by the “economy of appearances” (Tsing 2005: 57) and to embrace the logic and practices of the resource landscape. It was not until the crises of 2004 and 2005 that residents began to question the path of tourism development and to recognize the effects of the resource landscape on their lifeworlds. However, by this time “national forests” and their institutional counter- part, the Forestry Agency, were entrenched parts of the landscape, so much so that even for local residents many of the forests in Otaki had become “unseen.” Mayor Seto

Hiroshi explained it this way: “We are blessed [with forests], but they are not something that we ourselves created. Therefore, villagers aren’t seeing the forests” (Tojo 2006: no page number given).

CAPITAL N AND CAPITAL R

In Japan and across the globe, “resource” has become a universalized concept for thinking about and evaluating environments. Although variant in localized expressions, the resource concept has emerged from and continues to draw meaning from what Tsing

(2005) labels “capital-N Nature,” itself a globally generalized “universal,” which she

218 describes as an “awe-inspiring, lawlike systematicity of the cosmos and of life on earth” (88). She continues:

Nature and the globe have helped make each other. Today’s most powerful claims about the nature of the globe refer us to global Nature: If universal laws of Nature can be established, then the globe forms an orderly part of them. The globe is a node for the expression of universal logic. Scale- making, in turn, is a foundational move in establishing the neutrality and universalism of Nature; only if observations are compatible and collapsible across scales can they be properly described by a universal logic (88).

Conceptions of “Nature” and “Resources” (which I also capitalize) have been constructed and deployed through global networks of corporations, governmental institutions, and non-governmental organizations at multiple scales. In a

Gramscian sense, the concepts have become hegemonic, meaning that the agenda of a particular group is being imposed over a multiplicity of values and understandings (Gramsci 2001: 450-462). In the contemporary world, both the hegemonic agenda and the hegemonic group can be described as being capitalistic, which many argue to be fundamentally antagonistic to ecological health, so that “the prospects for an ecologically sound capitalism [. . .] seem problematic at best” (O'Connor 1994: 156). The dilemma inherent in, but also resolved within, the Spectacle, therefore, is to make both “Nature” and

“Resources” compatible with and acceptable within the capitalist economy. Igoe, et al (2010) suggest that this continues to be accomplished through, “a currently dominant ideological context where it is believed that the attribution of economic value to nature and its submission to “free market” processes is key to successful conservation” (488). This is why, as I suggested in chapter III, Nature must be

219 turned into resource by “revealing” its economic value (i.e. a service it provides, such as carbon storage or recreation).

This ideologically informed crafting of natural resources limits the scope of humans’ relationships with environments, and places them squarely within a framework that has developed alongside notions of modernization and the accumulation of capital.

Or, in other words, within an almost purely economic framework. Doing so erases the depths of human experiences in and of environments, thereby reinforcing a false sense of separation between humans and nature. As I have argued, through their dwelling in environments human actors in Otaki construct landscapes that embody a broad range of affective qualities. The emotional bonds that tie these actors to one another are often the same that tie them to their landscapes. Actors’ life experiences, and ultimately their lifeworlds, unfold within and are woven into environments. However, within the

Spectacle, as well as the individual spectacles of nature that are bound to it, these experiences are devalued and considered inappropriate for the tasks of environmental management and governance, which labor under the focused aim of accumulating capital and “growing the economy.”

In other words, there is a politics of affect and a politics of nature at work both in

Japan and globally that would have us believe that we should leave it to poets, artists, philosophers, and mystics to express our emotional attachments to the earth, as such things would otherwise only get in the way of the tasks at hand: sustainability, resilience, or some other improved form of environmental management. However, what remain persistently unquestioned are assumptions about the aims of our interactions with

220 environments, which are veiled by notions of progress and the hopes of a “green economy.” Unseen within the global Spectacle of Nature are the intimacies of local human-environment relations and the intricacies of the unique landscapes they engender.

In Otaki, for example, are located forested mountains where humans dwell; where they labor and sweat while tending trees or gathering mushrooms and wild vegetables; where they gaze and daydream; where they erect shrines for the gods that they worship and pray to; where they raise their children, laugh with their neighbors, bury their relatives; and where they feel senses of awe, reverence, and inspiration. In Japan, these “unseen” forests are disappearing, changing as the demands of a global economy give rise to and help sketch out a new cosmopolitan Nature.

THERE IS A CRACK IN EVERYTHING

Thinking through the mechanisms by which global conservation has come to be dominated by a narrow set of ideas and agendas, Igoe et al (2010) draw on Gramsci’s notion of the historic bloc, which they define as, “a historic period in which groups who share particular interests come together to form a distinctly dominant class. The ideas and agendas of this class thus come to permeate an entire society’s understanding of the world” (489-490). These authors go on to note the significances of Gramsci’s notion in terms of a contemporary politics of nature: first, the historic bloc obfuscates relations of production through presentation of a naturalized view of these relations; second, this obfuscation works to conceal, by “smoothing over,” contradictions, paradoxes, and

221 differences within these relations (490). In this regard, the Gramascian historic bloc is synonymous with the Spectacle as I have described it throughout this dissertation.

Debord (1994) reminds us that:

What the spectacle offers as eternal is based on change and must change with its base. The spectacle is absolutely dogmatic and at the same time cannot really achieve any solid dogma. Nothing stops for the spectacle; this condition is natural to it, yet completely opposed to its inclination (treatise 71).

The Spectacle, as I conceive of it in this dissertation, is a hegemonic order that functions through the work of a multitude of spectacles to present a naturalized and largely universalized vision of the world, especially Nature, “as it is.” In the case of Otaki, I characterize the “resource landscape” as a localized articulation of the Spectacle that takes the form of a top-down perspective of forest environments linked to governing agencies and premised on a dichotomy between humans and nature where the former must effectively manage the later as resources in order to sustain both. I contrast the resource landscape with localized dwelling perspectives, which I suggest are diverse and rooted in experiences of intimacy and affect connected with acts of human bodies moving within forest environments.

By tacking back and forth between these two perspectives I am essentially tracing out what has long been a central problematic in the social sciences: the influence of social structures on the agency of individuals. In his study of ritual as a mechanism of social negotiation in a Japanese upland community, Scott Schnell (1999) explains theis problematic as, “the capacity of individuals to shape the course of their own destinies as

222 measured against the deterministic influence of the social system that encompasses and constrains them” (5). If, as I argue, in Otaki the resource landscape has become hegemonic, imposing a specific perspective and orientation onto local actors and environments, how can the situation ever change? And how, if at all, is agency expressed by actors?

I propose that the answer to these questions is to be found in the seemingly banal activities of daily life. The “unseen” forests of the Otaki landscape are, by virtue of their invisibility within the nature spectacles that inform the resource landscape, ambiguous spaces where, as Igoe et al (2010) phrase it, “There will always be people, things and processes that cannot be co-opted by and/or excluded from a prevailing historic bloc” (505). The historic bloc of late capitalism, neoliberal governmentality, and scientific resource management, as well as the Spectacle presented within it, in other words, is not at all settled. Rather, it is riddled through and through with cracks.

And yet, despite these cracks--despite contradictions, paradoxes, and conflicts-- the Spectacle remains. It remains as “the existing order’s uninterrupted discourse about itself, its laudatory monologue. It is the self-portrait of power in the epoch of its totalitarian management of the conditions of existence” (Debord 1994: Paragraph 24). It remains through a constant re-centering of itself away from dissenting voices, which it dismisses as lacking legitimacy (Igoe, Neves, and Brockington 2010: 505). As exemplified in the historical shifts that have marked the production and deployment of nature spectacles in Otaki, forests are continuously made and remade to strategically position Japan’s Forestry Agency as purveyor of knowledge, expertise, and technological

223 skill. Doing so has required a continual and consistent reification of the resource landscape and its key premises of Nature as apart from humans, and Nature as resource.

However, precisely because it is hegemonic--meaning that it must be affirmed to at least some extent by a majority of actors--the possibility of resistance is constant within the multiple layers of the Spectacle. Debord explains that the Spectacle is

“separation perfected,” noting that:

As a part of society it is specifically the sector which concentrates all gazing and all consciousness. Due to the very fact that this sector is separate, it is the common ground of the deceived gaze and of false consciousness, and the unification it achieves is nothing but an official language of generalized separation (treatise 3).

I take this to mean that through its ability to attract the gaze of human actors the

Spectacle is able to deny its fractures and present itself as a unified whole. Recognizing the Spectacle requires, therefore, recognition of its separatedness so that novel forms of unity and collective action can emerge. The lyrics of Leonard Cohen’s song Anthem come to mind: “There is a crack, a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in.”34

Borrowing from the work of Gilles Deleuze, Ruddick (2010: 37) suggests that moments of anger, hatred, fear, or sorrow--what Spinoza calls the “sad passions”-- brought on in spaces of constraint or oppression have the potential to break open individual concerns and offer modes of engagement where new subjectivities and political commitments can arise. In Otaki, deployment of the resource landscape has created such spaces of constraint within which have grown feelings of anger, hatred, fear,

34 Cohen, L 1992. “Anthem” from the album The Future. Sony.

224 and sorrow. These “sad passions” came to the fore in Otaki as economic, political, and social crises arose and residents were left distraught, feeling like they, “couldn’t see ahead”35 (Tojo 2006: no page number given [translation by author]).

The crises of the mid-2000’s have served as catalysts for engagement among

Otaki residents. There is a growing feeling in the village that the way forward must involve a renewed interest in evaluating the significance of the Otaki landscape and devising mechanisms for empowering residents, especially young people, to experience, learn about, and protect it. The sacred Ontake-san has become a central focus in these efforts. During my time in the village I witnessed a plethora of lectures, events, and exhibits related to the mountain, its history, and contemporary meaning in village life.

Walking too, which I explored in chapter IV, has become a primary practice for reengaging with the landscape and opening spaces of intimacy and affect. Though these seemingly innocuous practices constitute what Gramsci described as a war of position in which politics is played out in civil society through counter-hegemonic forms. In Otaki, as elsewhere, direct sensual engagements with landscapes, insofar as they are often

“unseen,” are critical to the production of a new politics of nature.

35 「先が見えない。」

225 CHAPTER VII The terrain of forest nature politics in Japan

On a crisp morning in mid-March 2010, Otaki’s junior high school’s class of thirty-two students filed into the school’s gymnasium. The walls were wrapped in red and white striped curtains, a signifier of momentous occasions. Rows of folding chairs occupied the front of the gym and arrangements of potted flowers created a pathway leading from the back doors to the stage, which was austerely decorated with a large wooden podium flanked by a bonsai tree. Directly above the podium hung the Japanese national flag--the

“rising sun” (hi-no-maru)--with a school flag and a village flag at its sides. Hanging above the flags were large pieces of paper with the phrase sotsugyō omedetō

(congratulations on your graduation) written in a bold blue. After the students had been seated, the vice-principal stood and began a long and drawn out performance of etiquette, the kind that makes ceremonies in Japan agonizingly long. She bowed to a section of esteemed guests, turned, bowed to the teachers, moved to the stage, stopped and bowed, moved to the podium, bowed to the crowd as a whole, proclaimed that the graduation ceremony was now underway, and then repeated the series of bows in reverse. Next, we all sang the school song. On that day one line in particular stuck out in my mind: kiyoki no sugata no waga reihō, kiyokiha warera no kokoro nari (The pure form of our sacred mountain; that purity becomes our heart).

March is always a time of impending change in Japan. The school year comes to a close, students graduate and move on to the next steps in their educational careers. In

Japan, graduation ceremonies (followed by entrance ceremonies in April) are considered

226 very significant and are therefore, at least from an American perspective, done with much pomp and circumstance. However, in Otaki the ceremonial pageantry surrounding graduation seemed called for, as the weight of the transitions being ritualized was always profoundly felt. When students in Otaki graduate junior high school it is, more often than not, their first step towards exiting the village. In April, many of the graduated students would begin commuting daily to the town of Kiso about forty minutes by bus to attend high school. Upon completing three years of high school many would leave the area to attend university somewhere outside of the prefecture, perhaps in Tokyo or another urban area.

Rural depopulation is not, of course, a phenomenon unique to Japan, but rather one seen in industrialized, and increasingly even in “developing” countries worldwide. In an environmental sense, the argument could be made that rural depopulation is positive in terms of ecosystem health--when humans leave, a sort of “re-wilding” might take place.

However, among the people I knew in Otaki this logic did not seem to hold. Neither, I argue, is it often invoked within the wider Japanese society. More common, at least among Japan’s general populace, are discourses centered on the concept of satoyama, which I discussed in chapter II. The image of the satoyama (village by the mountain) harkens back to a golden-age in which human management of nature was presumed to be sustainable over the long-term. Brown and Yokohari (2003) suggest that:

The satoyama landscape system was a harmonious relationship between humans and nature. The nature of the satoyama landscape was managed, and both humans and nature benefited from this management. As human populations continue to grow, and people move into previously unsettled areas, we need successful prototypes like satoyamas as patterns for the

227 development of settlements that will allow both people and nature to survive (1).

In the case of Otaki, however, neither talk of “re-wilding” nor of “satoyama” are entirely tenable. The reason being, both discourses ignore fundamental aspects of human well-being by presuming a fundamental split betweens humans and nature, where the value of the later is premised on its utility to the former. In other words, within such discursive arrangements, relations between humans and nature are stripped bare of the affective qualities that were always a profound component of such relations in Otaki. In this sense, continuing depopulation in Otaki due to outmigration of youth to urban areas entails more than a demographic shift based on economic necessity. At a more fundamental level the movement of human bodies out of the Otaki environment marks an ongoing loss of a landscape comprised of complex sets of relations between human and non-human actors. With the looming threat of extinction for the local human community in Otaki, depopulation also marks the near complete deployment of the resource landscape as a set of relations premised on ideologies of neoliberal capitalism, capital N-

Nature, and global resource management.

The reality is that Otaki is a community on the verge of extinction. Solutions to the many complex dilemmas confronting the village--an almost non-existent economy, massive depopulation, and changing ecological conditions--are not easy to come by.

Equally difficult to ascertain is what, if any, benefits would come from a revamping of structures of forest governance, whether this include greater participation in decision making, local institutions of governance, dissolution of state management agencies, or any other possibilities. However, what certainly is existentially threatening to Otaki and

228 the livelihoods of its residents, is a continued willful ignorance of localized experiences and perspectives of the landscape. If the Otaki landscape is only to be evaluated at a national scale in terms of resources, without accounting for the lives of the people who dwell there, the local community and landscape will disappear and the spectacle of the resource landscape as a space of resources peripherally linked to urban cores will become a full-fledged reality.

NATURE OF THE SPECTACLE

In this dissertation I have examined the politics of forest nature in contemporary Japan.

To do so I have focused my analysis at two primary levels: institutions of forest governance (Japan’s Forestry Agency) and the highland community of Otaki. Institutions of forest governance, I have argued, rely on the use of media spectacles to construct forests as nationalized resources that require high-level management to meet the needs of a conceptualized homogenous national citizenry. Furthermore, I suggest that spectacles of forest nature produced and employed by the Forestry Agency are informed by and derive their ideological thrust from a broad set of globalized discourses and images that, borrowing from the work of Guy Debord (1994), I label the “Spectacle.” Debord describes the Spectacle not as a collection of images, but as “a social relation among people, mediated by images” (1994: Paragraph 4). The Spectacle, in other words, consists of social relationships rooted in the capitalist mode of production and reinforced by a legitimizing worldview, which itself emerges from it. The Spectacle is, in Debord’s

229 words, “the existing order’s uninterrupted discourse about itself, a laudatory monologue” (1994: Paragraph 24)

In chapter VI I described Nature (with a capital N) as powerful, overarching concept that is both invoked by and disseminated within a global network of corporations, governmental institutions, and non-governmental organizations, often through the deployment of spectacular forms. Garland (2008) labels this emergent form of Nature as itself being a mode of production, “one which lays claim to [. . .] intrinsic, or natural, capital,” and valorizes it, “through various mediations, and ultimately transforms it into capital of a more convertible and globally ramifying kind” (62). This Nature has become implicit within and complicit with the global Spectacle and is increasingly articulated through conceptualizations of “resources” and practices of resource management and conservation.

As I explained in chapter II, today in Japan conversions of the “natural capital” of forests largely take place through the invocation of notions of “Japaneseness” that reference forest environments as pure, inner spaces untouched by modernity, making them appear authentic and traditional. This essentialized image of upland forest areas works in a contradictory fashion to “stitch” them to the national body, while simultaneously marginalizing them as backwards and subduing them to modernist visions of cosmopolitan urban cores. Upland forestlands, particularly those designated “national forests,” are described in Forestry Agency publications as minna no mori (everyone’s forests), demarcating them as nationalized spaces that belong to “everyone,” which can be read to mean all Japanese. At the local level this has fostered, as I described in

230 chapters III and VI, a subjective distancing among human actors in Otaki who often spoke of being disinterested (kanshin nai) and disconnected (kankei nai) from what they saw as “the nation’s forests” (kuni no mori).

Throughout this dissertation I have characterized the simultaneously material and ideational transformation of forests in Otaki as a deployment of what I label the “resource landscape.” In the first chapter I described the resource landscape as a top-down orientation towards the environment produced and deployed by institutions aligned with centralized structures of governmental power that entails a distanced “bird’s eye” perspective in which forests are made “visible” through processes of simplification (Scott

1998: 11-22). Along with producing forests as objects of governance, the deployment of the resource landscape also fosters the emergence of human subjectivities, as noted above. Media spectacles (pamphlets, webpages, email magazines, booklets, television programs, and so on), both locally in the Kiso Region and nationally across Japan, present forests as resources bound within and sovereign to the nation. National forests exist, these spectacles say, for the use and enjoyment of the national citizenry (kokumin)-- they are ware ware no mori (forests belonging to “we Japanese”). These spectacles call forth, therefore, human subjects as Japanese national citizens, a category that denotes a set of shared assumptions, cultural beliefs, and values.

Yet, neither the resource landscape, nor the human subjectivities linked to it, are fully completed projects. Rather, both remain contested at the local level in Otaki within what I call “unseen forests.” Otaki landscapes that are perceived, sensed, and experienced by local actors remain “unseen” because the intimate engagements and affective qualities

231 that enliven them do not always fit with broader institutional visions of nationalized resources. Often, rather, the subtle complexities that mark localized landscapes are beyond the scope of institutionalized simplifications that allow the world to be made legible. Scott (1998) notes that, “Officials of the modern state are, of necessity, at least one step-and often several steps-removed from the society they are charged with governing. They assess the life of their society by a series of typifications that are always some distance from the full reality these abstractions are meant to capture” (76). Thus, in an interesting paradox, it is the Japanese state’s attempts to “see” forests in Otaki that produce “unseen” forests. And, it is within such spaces, I argue, that seeds of resistance are continually sowed.

Given the paradoxical nature of state envisioning in which the local is simultaneously subdued to and obfuscated within higher levels, dwelling and movement, as I first noted in chapter IV and explained further in chapter VI, become acts with political implications. I agree with Igoe and his colleagues (2010: 505) that there will always be phenomena--elements, actors, processes--in the world that cannot be subsumed by or excluded from dominant forms of power. The movements of human actors, due to their inconstant originality, are such phenomena and thus are always potentially resistive, if not revolutionary. Often, however, the dwelling and movements of local actors remain silent within the larger imaginaries of nations and capitals, which are lauded by the

Spectacle in its work to maintain illusions of a stable and still world. Still, potential forms are continuously coming into being. Therefore, dwelling and movement entail practices that constantly threaten the quiet stillness of spectacular forms and the Spectacle itself.

232 The question remains, however, how can these “unseen” practices be made visible and amplified into social change?

IMAGINATION AND THE TERRAIN OF NATURE POLITICS

Disentangling and getting a read on operations of power within productions of nature has for some time now been a project undertaken by scholars in environmental anthropology, among other disciplines. Political ecology, in particular, emerged among anthropologists and human geographers in the 1970s and 1980s as a framework for thinking about power as studies of localized human-environment interactions called for greater levels of contextualization to account for, and seek linkages between, environmental degradation, poverty, and human suffering. This widening of the analytical frame initially led many scholars to look for structural causations to explain ecological effects. For example, in his ground breaking study of soil erosion in Nepal and other developing countries, Piers

Blaikie (1985) pointed to the adverse effects of capitalist political-economies on farmers and soil regimes at the local level. The work of Blaikie and that of other scholars with similar sensibilities revealed the ways in which localized ecological events are often embedded within broader sets of material relations that are structured along lines of power.

Beginning in the 1990s, political ecologists began to draw on post-structuralist theories to address topics of how human ideas about nature influence the ways that environments are thought about, perceived, and modified--or, in other words, the ways that nature and environments are produced--and the roles that relations of power play in

233 such productions. Hualkof and Escobar (1998), for example, suggest that landscapes are not only the products of materials histories, but also embody particular cultural, social, and economic conditions, meaning that the natures that humans encounter are always, to some extent, cultural. This mode of thinking has opened the door for political ecologists to address the complex and nuanced ways that power operates within ideational realms and formations of knowledge regimes within the context of human-environment interactions. In this regard, the work of Michel Foucault, with its emphasis on expressions of power within formations of knowledge, cultural customs, and social norms, provides theoretical ground from which to investigate the ways in which natures are produced and reproduced within networks of human relations.

The broader project of Escobar and other scholars has been to examine and critique global coalitions of institutions concerned with “development,” “conservation,” and “sustainability.” In particular, in his work on international development organizations, Escobar has suggested that there has emerged in recent years a regime of

“environmental managerialism” (Escobar 1995: 194) marked by a cadre of specialists and administrators. Through deployment of specific discourses and practices, argues Escobar, this regime has accomplished a series of transformations that stem from a desire to maintain the international capitalist order. Nature has been transformed to environment;

Earth to capital; and poverty into a result of destroyed environments (Escobar 1995: 202).

“More importantly,” Brosius (1999) notes, “[such institutions] insinuate and naturalize a discourse that excludes moral or political imperatives in favor of indifferent bureaucratic and/or technoscientific forms of institutionally created and validated intervention” (38).

234 In other words, within the globalized network of environmental management, biodiversity conservation, and sustainable development institutions and discourses, operations of power, along with hegemonic agendas--in other words, the politics, have been made invisible; or, perhaps we might say, made natural.

Work in political ecology has served to broaden the terrain of nature politics and to begin collapsing false categories of “culture,” “nature,” and “politics,” as well as

“material” and “ideational.” The result is a broader, nuanced terrain where operations of power are seen to be at work in a wealth of phenomena (some would say too much, see

(Vayda and Walters 1999). Within such a frame of understanding, politics are thought to be implicit in most everything humans do, rather than being relegated to the explicit realms--elections, policy debates, international meetings, and so forth--inhabited by

“politicians.” It is this broad and nuanced political terrain that I have attempted to survey in the present work, in order to reveal the ways in which processes of global capitalism, neo-liberal ideology, and nationalism come to bear on the production of forest natures in the upland village of Otaki.

I have argued that forest nature in contemporary Japan is made and remade through the use of spectacles--media images that reference the broader global Spectacle, which exists as an “omnipresent affirmation of the choice already made in production and its corollary consumption” (Debord 1994: Paragraph 6 [emphasis in original]). Of course, on the ground forests do not present themselves as “spectacles,” but rather sit with a certain materiality that compels, for the most part, unquestioned acceptance of their realness and naturalness. However, as I explored in chapter III, forest spectacles in

235 Japan are wedded to ideologies of the nation and notions of a common “Japanese” culture, historically rooted in the perspectives of lowland communities and a contemporary political-economy premised on neoliberal free-market capitalism. Thus, as I first argued in chapter IV, when actors are asked to accept the reality and nature of national forests, they are also being asked to accept the social, cultural, political, and economic “realities” and “naturalness” of the Japanese state.

It is in this sense that I describe the national forests that dominate the Otaki landscape as hegemonic forms, which constrain local spaces of human activity, limiting localized interactions with and experiences of forest environments. Indeed, people in

Otaki often have no specific reasons for regularly entering or interacting with national forests. And, even when they do, it is with recognition (if not with official permission) that they are treading on land owned by the state. Thus, the majority of forests in the village are recognized as nationalized spaces, to which local residents, despite their close proximity to them, have no more claim than any other national citizen. The situation has forged in Otaki (as similar situations have in other areas) a politics of nature in which

Japan’s dominant urban-based mode of production is normalized and upland areas continue to be marginalized and alienated. National forests operate as symbolic markers of the state apparatus to which actors belong, forcing a subjective understanding of themselves as national citizens and the forest landscapes around them as sovereign entities of the national government. Accordingly, local actors must also recognize their peripheral standing within larger national projects, in which Otaki is but one small, and ultimately unimportant, piece. The work of nature spectacles is to conceal the politics of

236 this situation by presenting nature that appears only as a reflection of that which already is. In other words, national forests in Otaki stand as physical representations of a political ontology that works to ideologically naturalize the power and sovereignty of the state

(Graeber 2009: 512).

Paradoxically, as noted above, though spaces and places located at the margins of power, like Otaki, may at first glance appear constrained, one may, upon close examination, find there sites of unfettered practice where human dwelling in, movement through, and perceptual experience of environments continually produce and reproduce ideas, feelings, thoughts, and understandings that threaten the apparent stability of spectacles; even as those spectacles continually whisper, “that which appears is good

[. . .]” (Debord 1994: Paragraph 12). In other words, actors’ engagements with environments in Otaki give rise to a range of affective qualities in which are bourn seeds of practice and action with revolutionary transformative potential. Potential to create divergent landscapes and modes of being in the environment that run counter to dominate images of nature (and conversely the dominate order of society). Such counter movements are born and grow within defined spaces wherein institutions attempt to structure and frame modes of action (how one is to experience and be in a forest). David

Graeber (2009) suggests that the role of revolutionaries is to “break those frames to create new horizons of possibility” (532). While there is no need to label every actor a

“revolutionary,” I suggest that practices of dwelling--moving in, perceiving, and experiencing environments--are always potentially revolutionary. Practices of dwelling, in other words, hold the power to redefine structures and to create cleavages from which

237 can emerge critical engagements with and active re-workings of “reality” and the established pathways of power that foster it. I forward, then, that the terrain of nature politics is never so lofty, nor abstracted, as the Spectacle would have us believe it is.

Drawing on the work of Philippe Descola (2006: 139), I suggested in chapter VI that in Otaki, localized engagements with environments continually give rise to landscapes imbued by an ontological orientation (separate from the political ontology noted above) that he typifies as “animistic.” I went on to characterize the landscape and orientation as being informed by a sense of reverence for connections that transect the conceptual boundaries of humanity, the natural, and the supernatural. In particular, I highlighted reverence as an important lens for understanding local dwelling perspectives in Otaki and note the relationships that residents actively maintain with the sacred mountain Ontake-san, which they intimately refer to as Oyama, as being indicative of this.

At a global scale, within the Spectacle and the politics of nature that it engenders,

Nature continues to be envisioned as a realm apart from humans, a set of elements and processes to be studied, understood, managed, and put to some use (Pálsson 2006). By extension, notions of “resources” have allowed the realm of Nature to be circumscribed by global economic processes. Problems with nature, or “environmental problems,” therefore are assumed to be caused by mismatches between different institutions, activities, and processes (Cunningham, Chassels, and Fox 2010). And, despite indications of widespread institutional failure when it comes to managing natural resources, there remains agreement, as Acheson (Acheson 2006: 118) notes, “that institutions are

238 needed,” but, “no agreement as to what institutions would do the best job.” I agree with this, as well as Acheson’s later assessment that the complexity of factors involved in human-environment interactions make them difficult to think through and that it is a lack of willingness or ability to solve problems of collectivity that result in dilemmas

(Acheson 2006: 128). However, I would add that what is illuminated by contemporary forest politics in Otaki, and what I have tried to highlight in this dissertation, is that spectacles, through their power to appear as “that which is good” (Debord 1994:

Paragraph 12) impose an order on the world that affirms current situations and hails actor subjectivities that are benignant to that order. Therefore, the survival of communities, landscapes, and lifeworlds like those found in Otaki calls for more than a realignment of institutions; it calls for a reassessment of the terrain of nature politics.

In chapter VI, I introduced the idea of reverence, which I characterize as informing understandings among local actors in Otaki of their relationships to landscapes.

As a way of concluding, I would like to explore reverence and its implications for contemporary nature politics in Japan and globally.

RETURN TO REVERENCE

Despite the suggestion by some of a uniquely “Japanese” love of, appreciation for, and/or reverence towards nature (Kalland 2002), today the nation struggles with many of the same environmental issues that have reached crisis status around the globe. Walker

(2010), for example, thoroughly documents legacies of industrial pollution and their effects on human bodies in Japan. Others have examined the ecological changes that have

239 occurred as a result of increased urbanization and changes in land use patterns (Fujiwara,

Hara, and Short 2005, Iida and Nakashizuka 1995), including increased wildlife pestilence in rural areas (Knight 2003c, Sprague and Iwasaki 2006). Even Japan’s abundant forests, which are often held up as markers of a benign relationship to nature, are, as I have noted in this dissertation, experienced by many upland communities as being in a state of disarray (Knight 1997, Knight 2003a). Moreover, as a “superpower” with global reach, it should also be emphasized that resource consumption in Japan continues to produce environmental issues beyond its national borders, particularly in

Southeast and East Asia (Dauvergne 1997, Seo and Taylor 2003, Taylor 1999). How then are we to reconcile this apparent paradox?

D.P. Martinez (2008) suggests that the gap between discourse and action in Japan can be explained by separating “a once elite discourse about the esthetics of experiencing nature [from] the pragmatics of living within nature” (196). I agree with this assessment, but would modify the argument in light of the material presented in this dissertation to suggest that elite discourses of nature as experienced from afar (often through spectacle) have become hegemonic and are now shaping the “pragmatics of living within nature” in upland and other rural communities. Thus, to understand experiences of nature in modern

Japan, we must first address the contingencies by which natures are continually made and remade. We must also recognize, following the work of John Bennett (1976: 311), that humans’ uses of nature are inextricably bound up in humans’ uses of one another. Put differently, “natural” landscapes are in part reflections of human organization that, through our dwelling in them, continue to inform and mediate our relations to one

240 another. There is in other words, as I have noted throughout this dissertation, always a politics of nature at work.

How are local actors in a marginalized landscape like Otaki to gain any footing upon such a lopsided political terrain? What pathways might exist for extricating their practices of living with nature--of dwelling--from the hegemonic spectacles of nature that continue to structure their landscapes and frame their lifeworlds?

I argue that for the people of Otaki, reverence, what philosopher Paul Woodruff

(2001) labels a forgotten virtue, offers a subtle point of traction within the slippery terrain of forest nature politics. Woodruff states that reverence:

. . .begins in a deep understanding of human limitations; from this grows the capacity to be in awe of whatever we believe lies outside our control-- God, truth, justice, nature, even death. The capacity for awe, as it grows, brings with it the capacity for respecting fellow human beings, flaws and all (3).

It is a dwelling perspective that fosters our senses of reverence. Encounters and engagements with otherness in the world around us--with trees, water, vistas, light, structures, rises, and mountains; as well as with other beings, both human and non-human--force a recognition of the limits of our own beings that engenders a “capacity for awe.” Thus, reverence “is the virtue that keeps human beings from trying to act like gods” (Woodruff 2001: 4).

In this sense, reverence is fostered through our encounters with alterity. During my time in Otaki, I observed (and experienced myself) the ways in which movements through landscapes allow actors to experience the linkages of their own beings to the world around them in intimate and meaningful ways. Such experiences were apparent in

241 a variety of forms and activities: from a spirit stone erected by the local hunting association to express gratitude and respect to the spirits of animals; to rituals for the benefit of mountain gods; to an excursion with young children to learn about and gather wild vegetables in the forest; to a gift of fish or fresh produce between neighbors; to festive dancing for the entertainment of mountain gods. In other words, the Otaki landscape is comprised of encounters, experiences, relationships, and connections with otherness (both human and non-human) that come together within the subjective frame of actors to present a continuous lifeworld--an “ecology of life,” if you will (Ingold 2002:

18). This continuum of connected things and experiences give rise to feelings of awe that can compel a reverential positioning by which the landscape comes to represent the community itself as something vibrant and alive. Therefore, actors in Otaki are inclined to think of the landscape as something linked to, or even part of, their own subjective beings.

Within the global Spectacle and its iterations in spectacles of forest nature in

Japan, reverence truly is a “forgotten virtue.” Through the rubric of the “resource landscape,” forests (particularly national forests) in Otaki are often conceived of and presented as knowable totalities, which humans must arrange themselves around and learn to use and manage appropriately. In this dissertation I have tried, through ethnographic descriptions of dwelling in Otaki, to show the alienating effects that this vision of forest landscapes has on local actors, communities, and landscapes. Configured as subjects who reside outside of nationalized landscapes made up of forest resources, actors’ abilities to encounter and experience forests is diminished, impeding their

242 capacities to develop senses of awe and ultimately the virtue of reverence. Therefore, the physical and conceptual removal of human actors from forest landscapes forges subjectivities that are attuned to the broader hegemony of the Spectacle where reverence remains largely forgotten.

I began this chapter with an account of a 2010 junior high school graduation to suggest that in Otaki the event holds significance in that it marks an important step for many youth who will go on to pursue further academic and professional aspirations, most likely outside of Otaki. This annual event also signifies a longer-term pattern of outmigration and depopulation (kasoka) that almost every person I interviewed noted as their biggest concern in regards to their community. Beyond the direct impacts of depopulation in terms of demographic and economic changes, I suggest that this trend is also profoundly felt among Otaki residents as a loss of dwelling perspectives and the interconnections that enliven their landscape and comprise their lifeworld. One group discussion participant expressed his feelings about the disconnections he sees between children and the Otaki landscape this way:

For me, in terms of things like sociality, there are so many things to discover, like just by going into the mountains, it [sociality] changes quite a bit. But, unexpectedly, children these days [do not go into the mountains]. . .I don’t really know, maybe their parents aren’t pushing it, or they hate it. . .anyway, I think it is really a waste.

At a global scale, contemporary politics of nature are premised on the ability of humans to know, evaluate, manage, and govern a Nature conceptualized as other. In

Japan, spectacles of nature work to create and maintain this “other,” presenting visions of forests, as well as other environments, as resources capable of fulfilling the needs and

243 desires of the national citizenry. These spectacles obfuscate the dwelling perspectives of local actors, creating “unseen forests” in which the poetics and affects of dwelling are made marginal and go largely unrecognized. It is, however, the “unseen” quality of dwelling that makes forests in places like Otaki terrains of potentiality where novelty can emerge and unexpected natures forged and solidified. Reverence, in particular, as a subjective experience capable of fostering linkages between people and environments, I conclude, remains a crucial ground from which the people of Otaki can continue to “see” their forest landscapes.

As noted above, reverence is a virtue fostered through encounters with otherness in the world that promote sensations of awe. Spectacles of nature diminish the affective qualities of such encounters by casting them as abstract illusions that can feed human desires without forcing any unwanted feelings. Under these circumstances “How,” asks

Haug (1986: 52), “can people change when they continue to get what they want, but only in the form of illusion?” One possible answer is that reverence, as a virtue that arises from the practice of encountering alterity has potential as a catalyst for emergent natures in which subjectivities based on emotional capacities for awe and respect allow for novel forms of collectivity across conceptual boundaries (culture/nature, human/non-human, etc.). In this respect, a dwelling perspective, such as the one I was privileged to observe, and in time experience for myself among the forested hills of Otaki, serves as a critical tool for engaging the political terrain of forest nature politics in contemporary Japan.

I fully realized the affective power of my own dwelling perspective during a farewell party a few days before my departure from the village. Standing in the gym of

244 the village community center before an audience of residents I explained through a stream of tears my feelings about leaving Otaki. I spoke, of course, about the pain of separating from the many friends I had made during my stay, but also expressed the deep sorrow I felt in knowing that I would no longer be able to experience the forests and rivers, and especially the graceful form of Ontake-san, things that had all been parts of my daily life. When I returned to my seat, many of my friends and colleagues offered knowing glances while those nearby placed hands on my shoulders and patted my back.

A couple of days later, my wife and I loaded up our small car with our belongings and struggled through a tearful farewell with friends. On our way out of the village we pulled onto a small forest road and got out. I felt the rough trunks of the trees nearby me.

I looked up at their boughs and watched the clouds flowing in the sky above them. My eyes warmed with tears. We got back into the car and returned to the highway. As we coasted along the edge of Ontake-ko reservoir I looked in my rearview mirror and caught a glimpse of Ontake-san. Though it was March, the mountain was still snuggled in its white winter blanket. I remembered back to my first glimpses of the mountain two years previously. As we crested a rise I looked once more at the reflection of Ontake-san in my mirror, it was the same stable mountain, but I could feel that everything had changed.

245 APPENDIX A: Interview Questions

Personal Information 1. フルネーム(氏名)を教えていただけないでしょうか。Could you tell me your full name? 2. ご職業を教えていただけないでしょうか。What is your occupation? 3. すみませんが、年齢を教えていただけますか。I’m sorry to ask, but could you tell me your age? 4. ご家族は何人いらっしゃいますか。How many people are in your family? 現在、ご自宅に何人がお住まいですか。How many of them are currently living in your home? 5. 王滝村にどのぐらいお住まいですか。How long have you lived in Otaki?

Life in Otaki 6. 王滝でのご自身(じしん)の経歴(けいれき)というか、伝記(でんき)を教えて いただけますか Could you tell me about your own life history in Otaki?。 7. ＿＿＿＿＿さんがここにお住まいになって以来、この地域はどういうふう に変わったと思われますか。In what ways has Otaki changed since you’ve lived here? 反対にどのような点が変わらずに続いていると思われますか。 What things have stayed the same?

Perspectives on the Environment 8. この地域の自然環境についてどう思われますか。How do you feel about this area’s natural environment? 例えば、良い点は何でしょうか。What are it’s good points? 悪い点もあるでしょうか。Are there any bad points? 9. この辺の自然と人間との関係についてどう思われますか？ How do you feel about the human/nature relationship of this area? 10. 王滝を囲む森林は地元の人々に所有(しょゆう)、管理されるものではな く、国有の森林ですけれども、この点についてどう思われますか。The forests that surround Otaki are not locally owned or managed, but nationally owned. How do you feel about this? 11. この地域の自然環境、特に森林、の管理や整備に対しては王滝村がどのよ うな役割を果たすべきだと思われますか。What role do you think Otaki should play in managing and maintaining this area’s natural environment, especially its forests?

246 Vulnerabilities and needs 12. 王滝村に住んでいて危惧(きぐ)される、または心配されることは何でしょ うか。Living in Otaki, what things make you feel uneasy or worried? 13. 王滝村と王滝の人々にとって重要なものは何だと思われますか。What things do you feel are important for Otaki and its people? 14. 「これがないと王滝村で暮らせない」という必要なものは何でしょうか。 What are some necessities that you couldn’t live in Otaki without? 15. この地域でこうすればいい、または、これがあればいいと思われることは 何でしょうか。What do you think should be done in this area, or that this area should have?

Otaki’s Future 16. 王滝の将来についてはどう思われますか。What are your thoughts about the future of Otaki? 17. 健全で安定した王滝村を作るために何が必要なのか、または、どうすれば いいと思われますか。What do you think is needed, or what should be done, in order to create a healthy and stable Otaki? 18. 安定した王滝村を作るのに妨(さまた)げになることは何だと思われます か。What do you think are obstacles to creating a stable Otaki? 19. 王滝村に対する願いは何でしょうか。What are your hopes for Otaki?

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