SUMMARY

Mixed forests: Responses to landscape transformation in the central

Japanese highlands

Eric John Cunningham

Department of Anthropology, University of Hawai‘i
Kyoto University Graduate School of Human and Environmental Studies
Takako Yamada lab

The miraculous rise of the Japanese nation as an economic superpower has restructured
the social, cultural, and natural landscapes of the archipelago. While economic, social,
and political capital has pooled in Japan’s megalopolises, the nation’s natural resources
remain spread out across the archipelago. Forests, a staple resource in the past, cover a
majority of the interior of Japan. However, in post-war Japan it has become
economically advantageous to seek timber and other resources from foreign countries,
thus most forestland in Japan today remains largely untouched. This situation doesn’t
bode well for the villages that dot Japan’s mountainous interior, far from the economic
miracles occurring in the cities.

This study engages contemporary issues of social and environmental transformation in

mountain communities in central Japan by combining a historical ecology perspective
with a critical sensitivity to the pervasive influence of asymmetrical structures of power
as recognized by recent work in political ecology and an eye towards resiliency . In
order to understand the underlying causes of upland decline in modern Japan, I will
combine local ethnography with quantitative analyses of higher level processes to
identify factors driving forest change through time. Also, I will attempt to situate the
historical development of modern forest landscapes and mountain communities within
the context of larger political and economic spheres. In the end, this study aims to
suggest possibilities for maintaining the integrity of mountain communities and upland
landscapes in Japan and elsewhere.

In this research I draw on John Bennett’s concept of adaptation, which is defined as the
purposive manipulation of social and natural environments by individual actors in their
pursuit to fulfill needs and obtaining what they want. Thus, adaptation is described as a
tenuous state that emerges from interactions between actors, institutions, and the
environment. As a correlate to adaptation, this research will also focus on “resilience”　,
defined as a measurement of the magnitude of disturbance that can be absorbed before a
system changes its structure by changing the variables and processes that govern
behavior. Resilience will be measured through the existence of ecological memory,
defined as natural capital, such as biodiversity, which can be drawn on in response to
change; and through the existence of institutional memory, defined as human knowledge
capable of dealing with change, such as ecological knowledge .
Data collection will take place in four stages, focusing on four questions: 1) What are the
needs and desires defined by community members? 2) What obstacles stand in the way
of meeting these needs and desires? 3) How are these obstacles challenged? 4) What
role do forest environments play in, and how do they reflect, these social processes?
Proposed methodologies were selected based on the need to capture a range of qualitative
and quantitative data dealing with both present and past socio-natural environments in the
study area. These include: semi-structured interviewing, photo sorting, collaborative
mapping, focus groups, questionnaire, library research, participant observation, and
geographical information systems (GIS) mapping. Fieldwork will take place mainly
within a single mountain village and will involve two primary populations: a cross-
sectional sample of adults and age-grade groups of elementary and junior high school
students.

Data analysis will occur throughout the research, however, the majority will take place in
the spring of 2009. Analysis of data compiled from semi-structured interviews will be
used to develop a conceptual model of adaptation to apply to later stages of fieldwork.
Additional data gathered from photo sorting sessions will be analyzed to extract a
working vocabulary of typologies associated with land-use, which can then be used
throughout the later stages of data collection and analysis. For primary analysis, data
concerning behavior, attitudes, and beliefs gathered through participant observation,
informal interviewing, and collaborative mapping will be compiled and thematically
arranged around an indigenously defined concept of “adaptation”. Data then will be set
against that concerning broader political, economic, and social trends as they relate to
local socio-natural systems; and also compared against historical patterns of landscape
transformation. This analysis will leave me with a body of cross-referenced data
describing factors that inhibit effective adaptation in the host community. Next, these
datasets of “adaptive behavior” will be contrasted with models of resilience based on data
concerning forest ecosystems, as well as data pertaining to Japan’s political economy, to
explore the tensions inherent in socio-natural systems. Finally, when possible, GIS data
will be queried to identify historical episodes of landscape change, allowing me to begin
identifying and tracing the effects such changes have through time and their influence on
the adaptive abilities and resiliency of the host community. My analysis will result in
data that is useful in understanding the interaction of various socio-natural processes that
contribute to the decision making of individuals as they work to meet needs and desires
within the limits of a larger resiliency framework.

Studies of upland communities, which often sit at the margins of modern nation-states,
can aid in identifying the value of adaptive strategies that have persisted into the present-
day. At the same time, care must be taken to understand the forces that have served to
undermine, reshape, and produce new strategies, recognizing that these have tended to
emerge with the global patterns of resource use that have become the hallmark of modern
society. In other words, the forms of the past cannot be a solution quid pro quo for the
present or the future. However, through the cross-cultural study of human-environmental
interactions we might find ways of re-imagining our relationships with the natural world
and with our fellow humans. It is important, however, to realize that answers to the
global eco-crisis will only come through self-reflection and the moral will to adjust levels
of consumption. This study looks at localized human-environment relationships in Japan
in order to open a dialogue to these broader issues, recognizing that man’s use of Nature
is inextricably intertwined with man’s use of Man, therefore remedies for destructive use
of the environment must be found within the social system itself.