In the Pines

With the spring-like weather we've been having lately, it seems impossible, but about a week ago I received a call from Y-san, asking if I was free to go ice-fishing. I was in the middle of lunch, and had research I COULD work on, but ice-fishing sounded vastly more interesting, and research can wait--besides. . .it's all fieldwork! I walked to Y-san's place near the center of town. He looked over my clothing. . .I was lacking nagagutsu , long rubber boots ubiquitous in many rural Japanese communities. I had also come wearing jeans. . .ski pants would be preferable, I was told by Y-san. We dropped back by my place so I could change and then headed down to a section of the Otaki river where the flowing water begins to be held back by Makio Dam. I parked my car in an area above the river. Looking down I saw several small figures encircled by a dark patch of slowly melting ice. The chunk of ice the men sat at the center of was not much larger than a baseball diamond, wi...

Last week I made a short presentation about my fieldwork during an anthropology seminar at Kyoto University. The paper I presented covers some of my early thoughts about thinking of landscape transformation in the context of resource extraction. Resource extraction and landscape transformation in Otaki Today, many of Japan’s rural areas are in a state of crisis. Rapid depopulation, lack of capital investment, and the withdrawal of government assistance have left rural communities with few options; many have amalgamated with neighboring municipalities under a program meant to simplify the national bureaucracy. Those communities that have been unwilling or unable to amalgamate have, for the most part, been left on their own to maintain basic services while trying to find sustainable paths into the future. The situation has left these communities economically and politically disadvantaged, as well as environmentally and socially vulnerable. The historic presence of these asymmetric r...