Japan Anthropology Workshop Series. London and New York: Routledge, 2022. 204 pp. (B&W photos, illustrations.) US$160.00, cloth. ISBN 9781003261254.
This thought-provoking book explores the invention of a concept (satoyama satoumi) and its implementation as a tool for the revitalization of rural Japan. Rooted in the eighteenth century, satoyama (lit., village mountain) entered the popular lexicon in the 1960s, and in time came to denote a system of sustainable resource use in lower, mountainous areas. By century’s end, the Japanese government had appropriated the term, then later paired it with the more recently coined satoumi (lit., village sea) to capture the country’s allegedly distinctive relationship with all rural areas.
Today, Thelen observes, the ill-defined term satoyama satoumi operates as a “floating signifier” covering four sets of distinct but overlapping perspectives, or Foucauldian “gazes”: cultural interpretations of rural Japan based on nostalgia for the traditional hometown (furusato); the nationalist quest for the essence of “Japaneseness” (Nihonjinron); and two sets of internationally generated, environmentalist discourses. The problem, Thelen argues, is that none of these perspectives accurately reflects the hard realities—shrinking and aging populations, declining economic opportunities, environmental degradation—of rural Japan. They instead operate as discursive vehicles for projecting a politicized and idealized image both at home and abroad of a nation at one with its natural surroundings.
Be that as it may, satoyama satoumi became an official focal point for the implementation of rural revitalization projects. Thelen demonstrates how this works in Ishikawa Prefecture’s Noto Peninsula, a remote but historically significant corner of the country along the Japan Sea coastline. Buoyed by the 2011 UN designation of the peninsula’s satoyama satoumi as a Globally Important Agricultural Heritage System (GIAHS), the prefecture has applied one or both of these terms in the renaming of a regional airport and several local landmarks and roads, reintroduced the iconic crested flying ibis to a regional zoo, and launched a special fund to support local businesses in their promotion of satoyama satoumi. The ultimate aims of these and related programs are to deepen regional identities, facilitate the branding efforts of local businesses, and attract national attention and tourists to the area.
But few, if any, of the supposed benefits of these discourses, designations, and government initiatives have reached local stakeholders. To support this claim, Thelen conducted interviews in the iconic communities of oyster farmers at Nanao Bay and female ama divers on Hegura Island. Both groups of aging workers—and the ama divers in particular—face successor shortages, declining stocks caused by environmental changes, and a host of other challenges. None of his interviewees, however, had benefitted from government initiatives to promote tourism or local branding in their communities, while at least one ama diver dismissed official subsidy programs as meager and inconsequential. More tellingly, none professed more than a vague awareness or understanding of satoyama satoumi in any of its guises. Satoyama satoumi, Thelen concludes, has amounted to little more than an empty signifier for the very people who populate it.
Why, Thelen asks, do Noto residents continue to participate in “revitalization initiatives” when there is so little to be gained from them? The answer has to do with the positioning of local communities and stakeholders in multi-tiered networks of knowledge dissemination and power. Encompassing actors from the grassroots, national, and international levels, and with prefectural actors—e.g., the Ishikawa government and regional universities—functioning as intermediaries that interpret national and international discourses for local audiences while allegedly relaying local voices to the centre, these networks operate as mechanisms of top-down domination comparable to those depicted in (post)colonial scholarship. Concepts are imposed on the locals, who are “obligated” (e.g., 160) to embrace them, while the complicated and often uncomplimentary lived realities of those locals remain all but silenced. These are, in sum, “hegemonic hierarchies” that contribute to the peripheralization of rural areas by disseminating stereotypical “half truths” (158) in service to national political agendas.
Thelen’s depictions of rural revitalization efforts in the Noto Peninsula through the lens of satoyama satoumi are a new and fascinating addition to the extant scholarship on Japanese rural decline and centre-local relations. They also offer compelling reminders of how otherwise well-meaning policy makers at the national and even prefectural levels can be deaf to the distinctive circumstances of local Japan. But some of his arguments do not fully convince. For example, the claim that local oyster farmers and ama divers are “obligated” to conform with hegemonic discourses is more assumed than proved. I also question the comparability of rural Japan to the underdeveloped societies analyzed in (post)colonial studies. While it stands to reason that the retreat of hegemonic networks from the latter would help unleash latent local energies in support of meaningful development, can the same be said of rural communities in developed societies that have long passed their peak? Given the lousy options facing rural Japan, might it be even worse off had those networks and the social mobilization and national awareness of rural areas they helped generate never existed?
In his introduction and conclusion, Thelen asks whether decision makers should simply accept the decline of rural Japan as an “inevitable but not necessarily negative change” (10). After exploring arguments for and against acceptance, Thelen refrains from staking a firm position on this question, and rightly so; the answers are riddled with too many unknowns and trade-offs. Rural Japan faces a deeply precarious future, and it appears the best decision makers and stakeholders can do is put up the good fight—however ineffective—to help preserve the dignity of those left behind. And it is a fight that must be led by the communities themselves.
Patricia L. Maclachlan
University of Texas, Austin