And the rate is increasing, with 2012 marking the steepest drop ever for the second straight year, with deaths outpacing births by 205,000. For the first time, the proportion of elderly 65 and over surpassed the number of youths age 14 and under, in all 47 prefectures.

The near and medium term implications of this change are mounting. With elderly farmers dying off and those remaining having more difficulty being alone, there continues a flight to urban centers. Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya now host nearly half the entire population. If government agricultural subsidies are cut from passage of the TPP trade agreement, it is sobering to think of what that will do to the remaining small farmers and their land. The government already spends over a third of its income supporting the elderly. But can this huge outlay continue?

After all, in 1965 there were nine workers paying taxes for every retired person. Now there are just two.

Everywhere one looks across society there are impacts to be seen, economic, social, environmental. To be sure, a falling population will require less energy and consume fewer resources, but one wonders what kind of infrastructure will meet the remaining demand. Hopefully it will be a relatively soft landing, but the risks of it being hard, or at least turbulent, are huge.

In any case, the scale and nature of this demographic transition is unprecedented in the world. I believe this is the first time a highly industrialized country has faced such a persistent and profound decrease in population. And when taking into account all of its attendant challenges and implications, it is an open question whether this unfolding could possibly result in a resurgence of satoyama spirit – albeit decades hence, when the population returns to Edo-era numbers. One can only hope.

Credit: Japan for Sustainability

Eleven years later I happened to meet Azby when Helena Norberg-Hodge invited him to present at the March 2012 Economics of Happiness conference in Berkeley. When I mentioned to him about my enjoying his first book, his jaw dropped and he said I was perhaps the only person he’d ever met who had read it! Little did he know that it has often been trotted out over the years to show house guests about my love for Japanese design.

Now, Azby has written a concise essay summarizing some of the simple but profoundly important lessons in sustainability he elaborated upon in Just Enough. His essay, titled Living with Just Enough, appears in the newly rebranded, content-rich and visually lush Global Oneness Project website, another effort close to my heart. Indeed, I’m grateful to Global Oneness Project for allowing me to share the essay here in full (but reading it there is worth the click for many reasons, only one of which is the visual framing of the words).

While Azby’s essay resonates closely with this blog’s thesis, it does not go so far as to suggest (at least explicitly) that undergirding Japan’s pre-industrial aesthetic is a worldview of oneness, from which so many further manifestations (such as satoyama landscapes and the culture that sustained them) flowed and evolved. Nonetheless, it provides powerful and highly practical illustrations of the subsequent manifestations or expressions given rise to by such an interconnected worldview. And for that I am very pleased to share it here:

Living with Just Enough

Artist and designer Azby Brown offers simple lessons in sustainability from the Edo period of Japan.

By now we are all extremely familiar with the litany of challenges we face as a global species, the threats of scarcity which pit state against state and community against community, problems manmade and visible in nature: growing population, increasing urbanization, deforestation, damaged watersheds, overconsumption of resources, energy shortages, waste, pollution….All of us could easily add to this list. We know there will be no easy fixes, no panaceas, but nevertheless as we try to set priorities and search for the most promising ways to approach these problems, many of us find ourselves looking to different cultures and to earlier eras for inspiration. In this regard, the Edo period of Japan has a lot to teach us. We could in fact use it as a model of how to flip impending environmental collapse into sustainability, primarily by allowing a rich and insightful mindset rooted in centuries of experience and wisdom to guide our decisions.

The Edo Period began in 1603, at the close of 200 years of civil war, and lasted two and a half centuries, coming to an end in 1868 as the country opened to the world and was first exposed to the fruits of the industrial revolution. Most of what we think of as “traditional” Japanese design comes from this era, when shoguns ruled and society was a strictly delineated hierarchical pyramid with samurai at the top, merchants at the bottom, and farmers and craftsmen, the bulk of society, in the middle. During this time the population rose to about 30 million, roughly comparable to Canada or Peru today, and the city of Edo — renamed Tokyo in 1868 — was home to over 1.3 million residents. At the beginning of the Edo period, the people found that they had deforested their mountains and were suffering from a cascade of ill effects, such as damaged watersheds and decreasing agricultural productivity. Most resources, such as iron ore and potential fuel sources, were scarce; firewood itself was at a premium. Even more significantly, there was very little arable land, and by the mid-18th century all the land that could be used for farming was already utilized. The period began with shortages and famine, but after two or three generations of wise regeneration, the large population was enjoying a quality of life arguably higher than in any contemporary European country. The forests had been saved, agricultural production had increased manyfold, and culture and literacy were on the rise.

The specialization that so distinguishes our culture and technology today — the very productive mental tools we have developed that enable us to break problems down into elements that can be worked on in isolation — would seem very odd, even incomprehensible, to a Japanese of the Edo period. True, the society was rigidly stratified and in that sense specialized, and people worked for years to master specific trades. A miso shop was unlikely to sell kimonos. But the culture as a whole was pervaded by a sense of time in which outcomes were measured in centuries, and in which it was nearly impossible to plan even simple tasks without a broader awareness of chains of consequences that would emerge from one’s actions, or of the origins, destinations, and connections among the people and things which supported human life like a vast web of interconnected spirit. As is the case in so many pre-industrial societies, people were trained from an early age to be generalists, to be multi-competent, and to always be aware of the big picture. Religion, particularly Zen Buddhism, but also Shinto and Confucianism, acted as a balanced bed of “common sense” which encouraged such thinking. Through the influence of these values, reflected in both commoner’s proverbs and in the writings of the cultured elite, problems were defined in such a way that the need for long-term thinking, conservation of energy and resources, the need to work with instead of against natural forces, and the importance of providing meaningful work for everyone instead of endlessly seeking to minimize labor, became requirements so well understood they rarely needed to be explicitly stated.

Consequently, a farmer planning an irrigation channel would find it impossible to do so without relying on his understanding of the forest, the seasons, and the wildlife that would be affected. A carpenter planning a temple would begin at the mountain from which his timber would come, analyzing the wind and watershed there. A blacksmith forging a hoe blade knew that the fuel he gathered for his fire would remain adequate to his needs only if he did not damage the forest while gathering it, and designed the blade to be repairable and replaceable as well. By nature and by training, at every level of society individuals learned to identify important nodes amid the myriad relationships they encountered in the natural world, little fulcrums, so to speak, where applying the right amount of effort would reap the greatest mutual benefit. Water and fuel were both precious, for instance, so Edo Japanese considered hot water nearly sacramental, transforming both tea drinking and bathing into important rituals; everything that produced and used hot water was designed to achieve the greatest economy of fuel and fresh water use. The visual appearance of these things — stoves, kettles, bathtubs, cups — could be robust, elegant, fantastic, or even all three at once, but if it did not also perform the “magic” of efficient and waste-free operation, of being either recyclable or able to be used for generations (and then recycled), it would be considered a poor design, an ugly thing to own and use. And this, I think is one of the best-kept secrets of traditional Japanese design: beauty depended upon how well a thing helped people fulfill a host of unstated requirements that lent life its meaning and purpose and helped sustain it indefinitely into the future.

In an environment such as this, what kind of thought had to enter the design process in order to produce successful designs, which would continue to be used for a long time? Of course the item has to perform the function for which it was intended. The material of which it is made must be abundant and collectable without using much energy besides sun, water, gravity, and human power. Wood, bamboo, straw, and earth satisfied these requirements best in most cases, and this was reflected in the low cost of most items. Similarly, the manufacturing process had to use a minimum of external energy. Because of this, iron and steel were quite expensive, and used sparingly. Beyond these basic requirements, the economics of reuse came into play as a set of secondary virtues. In particular, because wood was relatively scarce and its cutting was carefully controlled by law, a design that allowed wooden material to be reused would be very attractive. I don’t want to give the impression that traditional Japanese craftsmen and artisans consciously subscribed to a set of theories that promoted functional, sustainable design. Instead, the people who made these things were supported by a society for whom these values were givens. As designers, they gave form to their users’ expectations.

This way of thinking was stimulated by the scarcity of resources during this period, but even without scarcity as a motivator, this kind of awareness can undoubtedly lead people to a better life. Can design alone lead to a sustainable society? Probably not. But it can affect what we want, what we find attractive to own and use, and help initiate positive shifts in attitude. Once we start expecting everything we buy and use to embody less water and energy in its production, to be made from abundant and renewable materials, to be easily reused, reconfigured, and transformed into new items when worn out, and to see all this reflected in its form and appearance, then we will have planted the seeds of an Edo-like sensibility.

There is more to it, however. Edo society was literate and informed, and one of the government’s major roles was the protection of the environment, which it did through forestry ordinances, waterworks, and promoting good agricultural practices by sponsoring how-to manuals and almanacs. This was not through altruism or for the spiritual advancement of the rulers, but to ensure the safety and security of the realm and the longevity of the regime. Intriguingly, government policy was most effective when the goals and principles were laid out by the central bureaucracy and each region was encouraged to develop local solutions. In many ways, this local thinking and responsibility lay at the heart of the success of the program to achieve self-sufficiency and sustainability on a national scale. Though a very active national trade network existed, each of the dozens of fiefdoms into which the country was divided was encouraged to be as self-sufficient as possible. Each village in a fief was encouraged to do the same, as was each family in a village. The result was what we might call a “mosaic of economies,” in which government and trades people were the most dependent on the cash sector, while villagers could meet most of their needs without every touching money, utilizing a “gift economy” in which surplus goods were circulated as reciprocal gifts until every household had pretty much what it needed. Ironically, most low-ranking samurai, whose fixed incomes –paid in rice — failed to keep pace with inflation, found themselves increasingly dependent on the same “gift economy” system. Unable to buy enough to eat, little by little they converted their urban pleasure gardens into vegetable plots, and, forbidden from selling their produce on the market, secured what they needed by circulating their surplus through a network that included their neighbors and relatives.

Edo period Japan was extremely fertile creatively, and extraordinarily inventive. It was a nation of makers and inventors. The importance of the cross-fertilization and innovation that emerges when most people in society are designers and practitioners of crafts is often overlooked. In the case of Japan, every household could be expected to have expert weavers, masters of straw crafts, fermenters, carvers, horticulturists and gardeners. They used very little of what we would call “machinery,” depending instead on hand processes; you might say that Japanese training and experience produced a quality and consistency of production using handwork that the West only attained with machinery. Beyond this, the ethics of the professional craftspeople — carpenters, potters, blacksmiths, papermakers, and dozens of other trades — established a personal bond between maker and user, the former expected to keep an item in good working order for the duration of its useful life, the latter expected to show appreciation through small gifts and remembrances. The making of a thing in most cases was the beginning of a long-term connection between people, and that connection was cause for celebration and acknowledgment. If nothing else, our society suffers from a lack of this kind of connection, and the fact that many of us are now willing to pay a high premium to possess handmade items whose maker is known to us shows that the hunger for these connections remains.

Changing design sensibilities both reflect changes in values and encourage them. A shift in what people find desirable to own and use, like the one I describe, might seem radical or unlikely, but historically we have experienced similar conversions time and again. The shift to mass production and consumer society over a century ago, rooted in a new appreciation of machines and the machine-made, was as complete as it was unanticipated. At the same time it has never gone unquestioned, and handmade, locally produced items have never entirely disappeared. Most of us bought in to the mass-production aesthetic long ago, even if we are barely aware of it. Cars, iPods, furniture, appliances, kitchenware, tools, bathrooms — none of them would look the way they do if what was once called the “machine aesthetic” had not been rendered approachable and familiar by good designers during the last century. Those designers cribbed a lot of their best looks from traditional Japanese design. Those who know the story of the emergence of Modernism in art and design know that when Japan opened itself to the world in 1868, creators of every stripe in the West were stunned by what they saw, and every artistic field absorbed Japanese influence, whether it was composition and color in the visual arts, low rooflines and open space in architecture, or structures made of simple, unadorned elements in furniture. True, there were a lot of lessons Western designers might have learned at the time from Japan but didn’t, such as energy efficiency, design for reuse, and how to use enzyme-based biological processes such as the ones which make traditional lacquer and washi paper possible. But it was the Japanese who first taught us how to see beauty in function. I would like to suggest that we are on the threshold of a new aesthetic shift fed by an altered awareness of our dependence on the environment and the importance of healing and preserving it that will permanently alter our sense of beauty. It might be going too far to call this an “Edo” aesthetic, but the values embodied in Edo culture will undoubtedly form a large part of its DNA.

The writer’s compelling analysis aside, the links alone make the piece worthwhile (see, for example, Antony Boys’ pioneering and thorough analysis of the relationship between agricultural productivity and energy scarcity written in 2000 – a paper that long ago helped shape this blog’s theses).

But what is especially interesting – vis-á-vis Satoyama Spirit’s notion of Japan’s eventual return to a resilient lifestyle based on harmony with nature – are the as-yet-unread-by-me views of Eisuke Ishikawa, a prominent author who writes about the Edo Period. The Our World 2.0 article says:

Under present trends, the food supply problem will evolve and significant difficulties will emerge. Boys himself refers to the work of Eisuke Ishikawa, a writer on the Edo Period economy, who talks about the state of Japan in 2050 (“2050 is the Edo Period”, Kodansha, 1998) and essentially describes something like a “slow crash” — dwindling imports, falling exports, economic and population decline. (While there is no English translation of this book, you can read similar works by Ishikawa on the Japan for Sustainability website.)

Ishikawa’s work (at least those translated into English, care of JFS’s above link) are undoubtedly on my short-list of anticipated readings. Hopefully, they will provide the impetus for a future post (or posts!).

For all of its promise, however, I would argue that its worth is really as a “bridge concept” – an advance to be sure – but nonetheless just a stepping stone on our longer path toward a greater awareness of our proper relationship to Nature. To arrive where we really need to go we must expand our awareness in ways that are not easy for those of us embedded in the modern world. Toward that end, I am offering the following (lengthy) email dialogue in the hope that it might contribute to progress on our individual and collective journeys.

The thread begins here, with a post I made on a Great Transitions Initiative thread discussing “Premises of a New Economy”. The concept of ecosystems services had been presented as an important contribution and I offered my critique of the term:

28 October 2011

“As this is the time to give candid feedback I’m going to go ahead and provide my own. I have a quibble with the term “ecosystem services.” Of course, I understand its utility in this discussion as it represents a marked improvement over the status quo failure to recognize value in (or even recognize at all!) that which we cannot monetize.

Nonetheless, I believe the term falls short in that it perpetuates elusive aspects of old paradigm thinking we’re needing to move beyond by continuing to frame the environment as an object that exists for human benefit.

So long as we maintain the story that we’re separate from Nature – and that it is here to serve us – we’re not seeing the roots of our dilemma, and nothing we create or innovate will be adequate to the task of finding authentic sustainability. We can mitigate, we can extend, but we will not solve, as we’ll be tragically attempting to grow solutions on inherently illusory roots.

Rather than go into it here, I offer to anyone interested the following brief web article (I wrote) published earlier this year on the UN University site, Our World 2.0: “To Serve the Ecosystems that Serve Us“.

As [the previous commenter] properly pointed out, adjustments are a necessary component of a paradigm shift, and using the term ecosystem services is certainly an incremental step in the right direction. I offer the above not necessarily as a vote for banishing the use of this term, but in the spirit of further expanding this group’s capacities to find solutions genuinely adequate to our task.

One commenter responded as follows:

At one level it’s easy to agree: if we ‘sell’ sustainability only on the basis of profit, sooner or later the sales pitch will fail. This is no matter whether the ‘profit’ is in ecosystem services or social responsibility or whatever.

I’m still trying to get my head around ecosystem services as currently applied/ used, so I forwarded your mail to a group working with urban sustainability on an ES basis. They reply:

“What is the message? That the ecosystem services approach is wrong, or not enough?

“Contrary to what it says, ecosystem services approaches often strive to incorporate ‘aesthetics, complexity, integrity, cultural wisdom’ so that they don’t end up as externalities. If not they certainly don’t aim to replace those values but rather complement them. Of course quantifying ‘soft values’ is not easy and one has to be very careful when trying to elicit total values of natural systems rather than marginal changes in them.

“The text also says that the values of the satoyama landscapes are the result of ‘co-creation’ through the activities of ancient cultures. My guess is that this co-creation was to a large extent a result of historic demands for certain ecosystem services from that landscape.

“I would be interested to know more about the particular aspects of satoyama culture that could help us ‘discover the forgotten secret to a harmonious existence and, indeed, a meaningful life’. Maybe there are insights that can be implemented in today’s society.”

There is another Japanese word we might take inspiration from, at least if I’ve understood it correctly: mottainai, or (something like) contentment, enjoying ‘what is’ rather than hankering for ‘what is not’, moderation/frugality… Anyone know Japanese?

Finally, I wrote the following:

Elaborating further, with your colleague’s questions and concerns in mind, my concern with the term “ecosystem services” is that while it – importantly – takes the very necessary step of incorporating previously ignored externalities (indeed, explicitly including at times intangibles such as aesthetics and culture), it nonetheless does so under the assumption that the value of something is derived from the recognized service it provides. It still applies, or implies, a monetary value, akin to an actuary assigning value. It becomes a convenient abstraction but in doing so insulates one from the recognition that we exist inextricably within a complex whole whose value transcends the sum of the parts. Necessarily, it cannot take everything into account, because not everything is perceived to provide a service. In a world of valued parts, who speaks for those parts left out of the ES value proposition?

In other words, it fails to go far enough in that it doesn’t start from an assumption of implicit value of all of Nature, recognized as providing a service or not.  As such, it still leaves open the possibility that what isn’t factored into – and recognized by – the ecosystem services equation is not of value because it isn’t seen or understood. Those parts remains outside, marginalized, and are thereby at risk for conscious or unconscious devaluation, with unrecognized consequences, thereby perpetuating the problem of misunderstood cause-and-effect relationships.

Having such a worldview of parts with relative values leads us, by logical extension, to seeing the value of the world as simply the sum of its component parts. It is an extension of a mechanized worldview, a dead universe comprised of dead matter, whose value is discerned on the basis of our human constructs. This narrow vantage point of modernity remains ubiquitous but is obsolete and begs to be recognized sooner than later if we are to recover our right relationship to the Earth from which we’ve sprung. We need what might be called an ecological consciousness.

While ES is moving us, crucially, in the right direction, and is thus necessary…my point is that it should not be mistaken as being sufficient, as it can’t ultimately get us where we need to go, which is the recognition that we humans are not separate from nature, but embedded as one with Nature, and that being human does not entitle us to exploit the environment – any part of it – for our benefit. Our relationship to Nature becomes participatory rather than exploitive, given to stewardship rather than entitled, indeed reverential rather than purely rational. One with rather than one over.

The key aspect of satoyama culture – the “forgotten secret” – your friend inquires about is this very consciousness of oneness, of reciprocity, of the inherent sanctity of Nature, and the respect this gives rise to when participating with this understanding. It is ancient, and was left behind in our rush to apply the scientific method of separating the world into conceptual silos. Indigenous cultures still have a deep, intrinsic understanding of this. In the West and in industrialized cultures, we have forgotten it to our peril, and in forgetting it we have created institutions and value systems that prioritize and value some things over others and fail to see we’re inextricably part of a vast systemic web of balance and cyclical harmony where all things contribute and nothing is wasted, where exploitive behavior has unavoidable, if unseen, cause-and-effect relationships, many of which defy easy recognition or rectification. Thus, we’ve become highly out of balance and haven’t understood why. We use our highly-developed rational minds to see the symptoms and attempt to create ways to rebalance and adjust, technical fixes to attempt to restore or enhance or mitigate, but without an underlying recognition that more of the same application of our rational minds isn’t what is ultimately needed.

I’m not advocating losing the rational mind or its attributes…not at all. These are hard-won evolutionary attributes with profound value. Rather, I am saying that we need to expand our individual and collective identities to move from “me” to “we”. Ultimately, this is the Great Transition I believe we’re all bound to be making.

The Japanese term “mottainai” is wonderful, and speaks directly to the qualities of life that can flow from this “just enough” attitude toward Mother Earth.

But what I hadn’t anticipated until recently is the possibility of Japan shutting down all of its nuclear reactors within months. Yet it is a real possibility, and if it does happen it will propel Japan far ahead of other industrialized countries in transitioning to a more harmonious relationship with nature.

Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan was recently quoted as seeing the country as a nuclear-free nation. But unlike similar pronouncements from Germany, which pledges to be nuclear-free by 2022, Japan may become nuclear-free literally within a year.

That would be quite a feat for a country that only five months ago relied on nuclear plants for about 30% of its electrical power.

By some measures, the country is already two thirds of the way to becoming nuclear-free. Thirty eight of the country’s 54 reactors are currently shut down, and there are no dates set for their return to service.

Aside from the irretrievably damaged reactors at the Fukushima power plant, reactors have been shut down across Japan for maintenance checks. The only problem is once the nuclear plants are shut down, none have been restarted as local governments have balked against their reopening.

By law, all Japanese reactors must be temporarily shut down for maintenance every 13 months. All of currently operating reactors have maintenance scheduled by next spring. As a result, if the present pattern of indefinite shutdowns after maintenance inspections continues, Japan could effectively be nuclear-free by next spring.

In the meantime, it is painful to watch the day-to-day suffering of everyone involved (e.g., here and here) in the still-unfolding Fukushima nightmare as widespread and growing contamination continues to be revealed, along with varying degrees of malfeasance (a serious example here). The struggle in Japan between those desperate to maintain the nuclear status quo (certain industries, certain government agencies and certain academicians, etc.) and those who are calling for fundamental change and a return to more sustainable power generation mirrors in many ways the emergent conflicts between the old and new paradigm seen elsewhere in the world.

What is interesting to observe is how this struggle in Japan is playing out within the government power structures and between the government and the public. Top-down calls for setsuden, or power conservation, are being impressively embraced by the mainstream, while certain branches of the government, such as the Ministry of Agriculture, Forests and Fisheries (MAFF), are engaged in promising and highly constructive endeavors, like promoting the revitalization of satoyama, or managed socio-ecological systems.

Here is an example of a mainstream unique-to-Japan view that goes beyond simple acceptance and gaman (gritting one’s teeth) and speaks to a marked and growing yearning for a long-lost simplicity:

Mitsuharu Taniyama, 73, the owner of a small insurance business, has directed his staff to dim the lights at their office on the second floor of a small building in Yokohama.

“As you can see, our office is surrounded by windows, so after dark people walking outside would notice if it was all lit up inside here,” Mr. Taniyama said. “Now I would feel guilty.”

Like some Japanese of his generation, Mr. Taniyama said the current national campaign reminded him of restrictions on the use of lights during World War II. To avoid becoming the targets of nighttime air raids by American warplanes, families huddled around a single light bulb while making sure that no light was visible from the outside.

Behind the current enthusiasm for conservation, Mr. Taniyama also saw a rethinking of postwar Japan’s single-minded focus on economic growth. Many, he believed, were ready to renounce nuclear power even if that meant “time travel to the lifestyle that Japan had when it lost the war to America.”

Toward that end, the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture, Forests and Fisheries has been partnering with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in support of Japan’s sustainable agricultural systems, designating two sites in Japan for inclusion in a growing worldwide initiative, the Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems (GIAHS), whose aim is to “boost food and livelihood security and agri-’cultural’ survival.” These two select sites, Sado Island (Niigata Prefecture) and Nodo Peninsula (Ishikawa Prefecture), were recently featured in an inspiring article, well worth reading, in the UN University’s OurWorld 2.0 web magazine.

While Japan’s internal struggles may be emblematic of similar struggles everywhere between old paradigm thinking and more evolved ways of being in the world that are gradually emerging into awareness and acceptance, I am particularly heartened by the possibility that Japan may set a critical example by exiting the nuclear power generation business well in advance of other industrialized countries, and if they succeed in doing so it will surely be a result of a continually evolving cooperation between the government, industry, and the public in making energy conservation, environmental safety and ecological harmony top priorities while ensuring the culture’s wellbeing.

In the midst of – and to some degree a result of – the enormous challenges facing the country, Japan’s satoyama spirit is showing clear and promising signs of renewed vigor across the sectors and strata of society.

When I began musing about the revitalization of satoyama culture it was not at all clear how we might get “from here to there”, given the inertia and entrenchment of our current paradigm of separation, but if there is any silver lining to be discerned from the horrible dislocations of Japan’s still-unfolding tragedy, perhaps it is that the Japanese people are not letting this crisis go to waste in terms of using it as an opportunity for reflection. Many observers are recognizing that Japan is undergoing a profound transformation – starting even before the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster tore its societal fabric – and now the potential for real change across seemingly disparate sectors is being revealed in increasingly practical terms.

For years I have been following one of Japan’s small but influential organizations through their newsletters and website. Japan for Sustainability has always taken a leading role in showcasing the many ways – from industry to education – that the country is creatively responding to the realities of finite resources and the need for conservation and environmental sustainability.

In keeping with Japan’s current and beneficial self-reflective zeitgeist, this month the JFS website goes deeper than usual with a thoughtful article, Coexisting with Nature: Reflections after the Devastating 2011 Earthquake in Japan, written by JFS’s founder, Junko Edahiro. In it she contemplates how her country is being called to reexamine its modern assumptions about controlling nature and asks whether it is time to consider alternative ways of being in and relating to the natural world – alternatives that, from this blog’s perspective, closely resonate with the values and ethics of Japan’s ancient traditions of satoyama culture and spirit.

The following are extended excerpts of Edahiro-san’s reflections written after her recent visit to the Tohoku region:

The experience of personally seeing damaged sites and hearing what had happened provoked a lot of thoughts, one of which was about humanity’s “coexistence with nature.” Being a land of frequent earthquakes, Japan has experienced many huge tsunamis in the past. Typhoons also hit it as many as 10 times a year sometimes. As it is located in the monsoon climate zone and nearly 70 percent of the land is covered with steep mountain forests, the country often experiences natural disasters such as floods and landslides caused by heavy rains.

Ishinomaki had a solid embankment built along the shore. The city and its residents believed that it would provide sufficient protection against a tsunami, but this time the tsunami was much higher than the embankment and it devastated the area, leaving behind massive damage. I keenly felt the weakness of humans and human- made things in the face of natural threats like earthquakes and tsunamis.

We often use the expression “coexistence with nature.” It’s often found in the corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports of companies, and it definitely becomes a topic when discussing town-building activities. After seeing the situation in Ishinomaki, however, I began to think the expression is used merely superficially and is too optimistic. I think we refer to coexistence with nature when we establish a natural environment around us as something we can appreciate, which would never attack us, as if it were a miniature garden.

Most Japanese towns, including Ishinomaki, were planned and built based on the idea of combating threats from nature with technology. In this case it was to establish a solid embankment that could withstand a tsunami, but at Ishinomaki the embankment was destroyed because the tsunami was much bigger than people using modern technology had predicted. What do we need to do now? Is a more fortified and higher embankment the solution? The city of Kamaishi in Iwate was also badly damaged as the tsunami surged and overflowed its embankment. It had built a huge one after learning lessons from the earthquake and tsunami in Chile in 1960, but it was still useless.

The city of Miyako in Iwate also suffered considerable damage from the tsunami, but in contrast the people from the city’s Aneyoshi region were all found safe. This region was once destroyed almost completely when it was hit by the Meiji Sanriku Tsunami in 1896 and the Showa Sanriku Tsunami in 1933. The number of survivors from these tsunamis was said to be two and four, respectively. There is a stone tsunami marker erected on a mountain path about 500 meters away from the shore, on which warnings are inscribed to be passed on to descendants to remember the importance of having houses on a hill. People from the region have kept in their mind the warning on the marker: “The tsunami reached here.” “Do not build houses below this point.” “Be cautious even after years have passed.” Every house in the region is built on sites above the marker, so no damage to people and houses was reported here.

Open floodplains used to be found in many monsoon regions in Asia. Although heavy typhoon rains cause flooding and overflowing rivers, they also contribute to bringing nutrients from upstream, which in turn help boost crop harvests. I learned that people in the old days didn’t try to stop flooding. They left spaces open for flooding on the floodplain in case of any overflow and avoided living there. People were adjusting their own activities to natural rhythms. As the population has continued to grow and people thinking that they can build houses anywhere they want as long as they pay for them, they began building houses on flood plains and ended up suffering from greater damage caused by typhoons and flooding. For people living by a river with a high risk of flooding, it is now normal to expect engineered high embankments to contain the enormous threats from nature.

“All life, including human beings, is sacred and kept alive by everything in the universe.” This is an eastern idea. The concept means that we live in a web woven of all that exists, both animate and inanimate. The ancient Chinese philosophies of Laozi and Zhuangzi include the basic concepts of “naturalness” and “non-action,” suggesting that instead of trying to manipulate or resist nature, fitting ourselves into the natural world is the most appropriate attitude.

A woman who was evacuated to a local temple and now takes care of dozens of evacuees including elderly people at the shelter said, “I love the sea. The tsunami hit and swept my house away, but it can’t be helped. Television broadcasts reported about people who felt betrayed by the sea or blame it on this disaster, but I have never felt like that. I live close to the sea because I love it, so I don’t blame it. I’ll live by the sea again, although I’m thinking about living somewhere uphill next time.” She reminded me of the concepts of non-action and naturalness. “Naturalness” here is a mode of being in accordance with the ways of nature. To gain such naturalness, Laozi and Zhuangzi preached that non-action is important. In their idea, the opposite of non-action is “artificiality,” attempts by people to put something natural under their control. Examples of artificiality here are trying to block tsunamis or flooding with engineering technologies.

Should humanity regard nature as an object that needs to be suppressed and controlled, or just let it go and go along with its natural oscillations? The earthquake and tsunami disaster has given us an opportunity to reconsider the relationship between humanity and nature and how we should perceive it. People in the disaster areas, including those in Ishinomaki, have started discussing and working on reconstruction plans. Some towns might choose to build higher and stronger seawalls, while others might decide to pass on the tough lessons from the tsunami disaster this time to future generations by telling them that we should not live too close to the water’s edge because it is the realm of nature. There is no single and ultimately correct answer. Yet I strongly hope that future city planning is developed with longer time perspectives to enhance resilience, not just short-term efficiencies, and that planning and reconstruction in the affected areas are carried out using the hard lessons learned from this disaster.

By Junko Edahiro, Japan for Sustainability

It is exciting and gratifying to see the concepts of satoyama and satoumi being highlighted for their potential to provide a sustainable, resilient, long-term basis for a rich and dynamic culture and thriving relationship with the natural world – not only for Japan’s rebuilding strategy but also for the world.

Japan is uniquely positioned to act as a “proof of concept” for other developed countries in finding ways to remember and draw into the present long forgotten ways of living in harmony with nature – and in the process reconnecting with those tangible and intangible qualities of interconnectedness that provide true meaning to our lives and nourish our parched spirits.

The spontaneous acts of compassion and service that arise in the immediate aftermath of great disruptions to our daily (and oft-separate) lives – from the simple act of opening one’s home to passersby walking home after the earthquake, to outpourings of love and concern from strangers across the world – are profound demonstrations that at our most human core, relationships of dependence and interdependence are natural and understood, particularly by the heart. And now increasingly by science. Across disciplines – from ecology to economics, quantum physics to the social sciences – diverse examples of connection and community are rapidly becoming recognized, and valued.

Until they were eclipsed by the rise of industry, Japan’s long traditions of satoyama and satoumi flourished as expressions of a spiritual ethic of interconnectedness that was intrinsic to the ancient worldview. Now, as our modern industrial “age of separation” cracks under the pressures of its own unavoidable contradictions, we are being pushed and pulled to find a new way of being in the world. Satoyama and satoumi are ancient in origin but their intrinsic wisdom is as vital and fresh as life itself, ever renewing and innovative, and totally adequate to the task of serving as the foundation for a promising way forward.

As this article says, the concepts of satoyama and satoumi are no panacea, but they do provide a set of eminently practical values and principles that are, ultimately, priceless for their universal promise and applicability.

May everyone inspired by this article go far in supporting and promulgating local and global expressions of satoyama and satoumi, both for Japan’s sake and the world’s.

March 23, 2011

Tight Web Saves Cut-Off Japanese Villages

By MARTIN FACKLER

However, events and other articles have overtaken my relaxed timeline for completing my draft post and I want to share some of these recent developments right away. But first, here is a preview of my draft to provide context for what follows:

Not so long ago, Japan’s economic power and drive for success gave rise to a famous book called “Japan as Number One,” a promise the country came close to but never quite succeeded in fulfilling. Now, however, Japan once again has what it takes to lead the developed world, this time by setting the example of how a developed country can return to sustainability. This time, Japan can be number one not by old paradigm standards of power and money but by the new paradigm’s demands to live in harmony with nature and each other, for there is in fact no difference. Indigenous wisdom knows that we are nature, and we are all connected as one integral whole. Japan lost sight of this truth for a dozen decades or so as they adopted an outside perspective, but down deep, they never entirely forgot it.

Keeping in mind the title of my draft I’ve been lazily composing in recent weeks, imagine my surprise when I discovered last night an article in the Japan Times about a recent symposium in Tokyo titled “Japan as Number One Revisited.” More than ten experts, from professor emeritus of Harvard Ezra Vogel – who authored the original best-seller, “Japan as Number One” in 1979 – to former Prime Minister Nakasone, participated in a discussion about Japan’s direction in coming decades.

I had high hopes I’d find mention of Japan’s fledgling international leadership in revitalizing satoyama landscapes (since Nagoya’s COP10 biodiversity conference just ended a few days ago) but the upshot was simply that despite downward trends, the panel concluded the country still retains strong points in geriatric health, food culture and technological prowess. Well then. Is that all? I think Japan has much more important things than those to contribute.

Meanwhile, I’m discovering my bullish prognostications on Japan are finding anecdotal support albeit in unlikely places. For example, take yesterday’s “Dreaming of a new Edo era” opinion piece written by a French economist in advance of this week’s Group of 20 meeting in Seoul. The author laments Japan’s resigned acceptance of its decline in world stature and supports his argument with an example that, to my mind, instead contains hints of promise:

More strikingly, stagnation has found its promoters in Japan itself. A leading public intellectual Naoki Inose, who is also Tokyo’s vice governor, has declared that “the era of growth is over.” When Japan was threatened by Western imperialism, he says, the country had to open up (in 1868) and modernize. This process has been completed. Japan is now ready to reconnect with its own tradition of social harmony and zero growth.

Referring to the 1600-1868 period, Inose calls this future the New Edo era: “A smaller population will enjoy the sufficient wealth that has been accumulated, and, from now on, it will invest its creativity in refining the culture.” The first Edo collapsed when the United States Navy opened up the Japanese market with the arrival of Commodore Perry’s “black ships” in 1853.

It isn’t surprising that Inose’s assertions come with a whiff of nationalism, and that will remain a danger during whatever transition occurs. One thing we can count on is that issues and arguments in coming years will not be black or white, but will instead be a multi-hued reflections of society’s complex fabric of light and shadow. Competing interests and forces – and their ambivalent aspirations and fears – will come to the surface and must be reconciled. It will take wise discrimination and critical thinking to sort through them and respond constructively, rather than succumb to prejudice and reactivity.

Another perspective is provided by long-time Japan resident, Roger Pulvers, in his new Japan Times article, “Color me upbeat despite the pessimism now sweeping the land.” He feels that despite clear reasons for pessimism – ambitious China next door, dependence on the US military, deflation, and the loss of societal fight, hustle, and hunger for success – the future of Japan isn’t necessarily dark. I quote at length as he mirrors many of the underlying ideas of this blog:

Yet I remain an optimist, though these days I often feel like that weird guy in a cinema with a big grin on his face watching a horror movie — while everyone else is scared out of their wits.

Where do I get this optimism from? The answer lies in two qualities of Japanese life that, I believe, will see the country through the present morass.

One is austerity. Japanese are not averse to austerity, and indeed it is considered a virtue — practically a goal in itself. Despite the gross excesses of Japanese consumerism seen in the 1980s — on balance, a very short span of time for an outburst of national greed — Japanese people remain as they have traditionally been, quite at home with less. Paucity itself and the stark absence of adornment have always been at the heart of this culture, from the less-is-more nature of the tea ceremony and the ceramic arts to the sleek minimalism of much contemporary architecture and design. Being satisfied with little is a core feature of the Japanese lifestyle.

There has been, for instance, a marked and well-documented decline in interest in cars, particularly among the young. They are just not buying them like they used to, and for them this is a deprivation of choice. Japanese people don’t mind giving up things. Maybe at some date in the future they will feel able to afford these things, maybe not. The deprivation doesn’t faze or frighten them. There is no inalienable right of consumption.

Another feature of Japanese life that remains intact despite the emergence into the public consciousness of a kakusa shakai (class-structured or economically inequitable society) is people’s basic civility.

…

As Japanese in their teens and early 20s go out into the world of the second decade of the century, I see no impediment to optimism if they energize, as entrepreneurship, their native ethos of austerity in the direction of resource conservation, and if they apply their shared civility to foster universal welfare and tolerance for the rights of others.

In the coming years, both China and the United States may face implosive socio-economic problems on a grand scale, and both countries may turn inward to concentrate on putting their own houses in order. Both countries, too, could profit greatly from adopting Japanese social civility and economic austerity — not as obligations imposed by force of law from above, but as virtues firmly grounded in the soil from which all else grows.

Thank you, Roger. This last sentence bears repeating [italics mine]: “Both countries, too, could profit greatly from adopting Japanese social civility and economic austerity — not as obligations imposed by force of law from above, but as virtues firmly grounded in the soil from which all else grows.” Beautifully stated.

Finally, I think it is interesting, if not somehow telling, that for all its woes, Japan remains attractive to the world’s young people. Check out this week’s headline, “Youths want to move to Japan, Singapore“, summarizing a recent Gallup study. Who knew? Surely it isn’t the promise of wealth or lifetime employment they find attractive. Could it perhaps be something more subtle and elusive beckoning our younger generation?

The International Satoyama Initiative formally launched at this week’s COP10 Biodiversity Conference in Nagoya, Japan, provides an important boost to preserving traditional forest and farmland (“satoyama”), and seaside (“satoumi”) ecological production landscapes around the world and restoring a balanced and sustainable harmony between humans and the natural environment.

But is the proposed cure for satoyama’s current degenerative state – assigning such biodiverse landscapes value in direct proportion to their “ecosystem services” provided to humans – adequate to the task? Or does viewing nature in such a calculated way – and justifying its preservation for the “services” provided – simply perpetuate obsolete, if widely-held, myths of human separation from nature and nature existing for our benefit?

By recognizing the value of “ecosystem services,” it’s hoped society will be motivated toward their protection and preservation. To be sure, satoyama and satoumi environments the world over are in real danger of being lost, diminishing both biological and cultural diversity, so any efforts toward properly recognizing their value are much needed. And it can be argued that we must start where we are, and where we are as a society is we perceive value in that which we can quantify and monetize, so let’s start there. But can we afford to rely upon such a constricted view of the world?

Undoubtedly, Einstein was correct in saying that we cannot ultimately solve problems at the same level of consciousness at which they were created. As such, we can’t revitalize endangered satoyama landscapes and culture by applying “more of the same” of our contemporary worldview of separation from nature and each other. By relying upon the calculus of economics to ascertain value we implicitly relegate other more abstract but critically important intangibles to the margins. Intangibles such as aesthetics, complexity, integrity, cultural wisdom, and the like end up becoming unappreciated externalities. Failing to comprehend the whole, such a fragmented and distorted worldview fosters the very societal and personal ills which have led to satoyama’s, and the world’s, current predicament.

Better, then, that we retrospect (“look again”) at the origins of satoyama itself, at the roots of the ancient culture which birthed satoyama in the first place. For in doing so we will discover the forgotten secret to a harmonious existence and, indeed, a meaningful life: When we recognize our true, embedded relationship with nature, we value it and treat it like we want to be treated ourselves. With respect, love, cooperation, reciprocity…in short, a gift culture.

It is clear that indigenous cultures didn’t happen upon satoyama landscapes and populate them. They co-created them, working collaboratively with nature’s gifts and each other to slowly craft sustainable lifeways spanning generations. Their underlying worldview of embeddedness in nature, of oneness with the environment, is clearly what undergirded and made possible the establishment and evolution of these original satoyama socio-ecological landscapes.

Significantly, the Satoyama Initiative recognizes that proper maintenance of such rich biodiverse landscapes requires a “crucial human touch.” When young people flee rural environs for more fast-paced lives in the cities, for example, the carefully managed satoyama landscapes, and the culture that sustains them, become neglected and biodiversity suffers, perhaps counter-intuitively to those who might assume humans inevitably foul their environment.

This required “human touch” is stewardship in action. It cannot be harsh and exploitative. Rather, it is gentle and respectful, reflecting an ethic of giving, concern, mutuality, reciprocity and respect, for the past, present, and future, which flows between us and our natural environment, and between all members of the ever-widening circles of our community.

It is time to move beyond the obsolete term “ecosystem services” and instead put the emphasis on service – on stewardship and giving back – on living by the Golden Rule of treating others, including nature itself, as we would like to be treated. For in the end, it is both a spiritual insight and a scientific fact that when it comes to relationships, whether with our neighbor or with nature, what we do to another we do to ourselves.

Japan’s ancient culture and legendary technological innovation has given the world many things. But perhaps in many ways Satoyama may prove to be among the most important exports of Japan to a world still searching for sustainability.

On a related note, OurWorld 2.0, a profoundly important webzine, just posted a selection of their short films about satoyama and biodiversity, each one exquisitely produced by the United Nations University. This selection was featured at a film festival associated with the COP10 conference in Nagoya on October 17, 2010. Do check out these “Stories from a Biodiverse World“!

The concept of ecosystems providing a valuable service to humanity, and thus being worthy of protection, is a key proposition in the Satoyama Initiative’s quest to protect biodiversity. My feeling is that justifying the preservation of nature because it provides a service we recognize as valuable is adequate as far as it goes, but it’s nonetheless an old paradigm response. I’m re-posting my comment here:

I believe payment for ecosystem services is a good idea given the circumstances.

It is, to be sure, not an optimum solution but it is a step in the right direction in that it achieves two things: it maintains biodiversity while mitigating carbon emissions, and it increases people’s awareness, if incrementally, about the need to do so.

The very concept and terminology of “ecosystem services” is based, however, on an obsolete assumption at the root of our unsustainable, endless-growth, consumption-based paradigm: By thinking of nature as providing humans a “service” it perpetuates the myth that we are separate from nature and that nature exists for our benefit. Both are patently false.

With that false assumption in place, we have arrived at where we are: facing an ecological and civilizational abyss as the effects of this false worldview build toward a crash.

So, establishing a payment system for ecosystem services can at best decrease the severity of the coming impact, but it doesn’t change our trajectory.

Waking up to our authentic identity as being one with nature and each other, and living from that awareness, is the service that is truly called for at this time.

Untested Simplicity of the Villages, 
by Ram Dass in Voluntary Simplicity

Is the vision of simple living provided by this village in the East the answer?  Is this an example of a primitive simplicity of the past or of an enlightened simplicity of the future?

Gradually I have to come to sense that this is not the kind of simplicity that the future holds.  For despite its ancient character, the simplicity of the village is still in its “infancy”.

Occasionally people show me their new babies and ask me if that peaceful innocence is not just like that of the Buddha.  Probably not, I tell them, for within that baby reside all the latent seeds of worldly desire, just waiting to sprout as the opportunity arises.  On the other hand, the expression on the face of the Buddha, who had seen through the impermanence and suffering associated with such desires, reflects the invulnerability of true freedom.

So it is with the village.  Its ecological and peaceful way of living is unconsciously won and thus is vulnerable to the winds of change that fan the latent desires of its people.  Even now there is a familiar but jarring note in this sylvan village scene.  The sound of static and that impersonal professional voice of another civilization — the radio announcer — cut through the harmony of sounds as a young man of the village holding a portable radio to his ear comes around a bend.  On his arm there is a silver wrist watch, which sparkles in the sun.  He looks at me proudly as he passes.  And a wave of understanding passes through me.  Just behind that radio and wristwatch comes an army of desires that for centuries have gone untested and untasted.  As material growth and technological change activate these yearnings, they will transform the heart, minds, work and daily life of this village within a generation or two.

Gradually I see that the simplicity of the village has not been consciously chosen as much as it has been unconsciously derived as the product of centuries of unchanging custom and tradition.  The [villages] have yet to fully encounter the impact of technological change and material growth.  When the [villages] have encountered the latent desires within its people, and the cravings for material goods and social position begin to wear away at the fabric of traditional culture, then it can begin to choose its simplicity consciously.  Then the simplicity of the [villages] will be consciously won — voluntarily chosen.

Perhaps the key differentiator between satoyama landscapes and those elsewhere in the developed world (I say developed because I’m specifically excluding non-developed satoyama-style landscapes such as those in the Gamo Highlands of Ethiopia, etc., where indigenous lifeways still predominate) is that Japan has an ancient spiritual belief system, an amalgam of indigenous, Shinto and Buddhist beliefs, which recognizes humans as an intrinsic part of nature. From this worldview sprang the beliefs, values, behaviors and social and cultural arrangements that ultimately culminated in the evolution of the satoyama landscapes. Without that worldview of human embeddedness in nature, I don’t see how the landscapes and traditions and crafts would have manifest.

Looking ahead toward efforts to revitalize satoyama landscapes in the face of Japan’s depopulation and food self-sufficiency issues, to what degree is such a worldview a success factor?

As natural as it is to want to revitalize satoyama for the purposes of preserving biodiversity, and necessary to provide income through the careful integration of commercial activities such as the production and marketing of organic food, traditional crafts, etc., and environmental tourism to promote the satoyama lifestyle and values, how will these revitalized satoyama communities successfully interact with the people, structures and institutions that fall outside the satoyama value system?  (the assumption being that thriving satoyama communities must have a certain set of mutually agreed upon values that help instruct their decisionmaking…what are those values exactly? the questions abound…) How does interaction and exchange occur without diluting or contaminating or violating the value-system upon which the community is based?

How is community developed and maintained when this neo-satoyama culture must necessarily interact with so much outside influence? Given that traditional cultures around the world, such as Bhutan, have been compromised in so many ways by the introduction of outside influences, these new communities will surely have to establish thoughtfully-permeable boundaries, like cells, to act as gatekeepers.

Undoubtedly, practical revitalization efforts aren’t attempting to go back in time, or become isolated satoyama islands existing entirely in isolation, but are instead aiming to grow thriving and dynamic local communities that bridge the local values with global communication and reach of certain modern technologies. How will that be achieved? What are the necessary ingredients going in? What are the expected ingredients over time? What can be learned and exported to other cultures and communities outside Japan?

As revitalized satoyama communities grow, they’ll likely be populated first by disillusioned urban ‘refugees’ who self-select to come. These early-adopters will be people who, like Oliver Wendall Holmes, are pursuing the simplicity on the other side of complexity. They’ve experienced complexity and want relief, want something more authentic, grounded, and slow. They’ll want to stay connected, however, and will bring with them certain technologies they want to keep, and discard others. They’ll likely want village life with broadband. How will this be accommodated? Will the community decide together?

The development of the underlying community fabric, woven as it is with elements of spirituality, worldview, work, family, recreation, ritual, politics, etc., is fascinating. How much of this needs to be examined beforehand to improve chances of success? And how much can be left to organically develop on its own?

I am curious to compare and contrast the satoyama cultural experience with the western Transition Movement. The founder of the latter, Rob Hopkins, is now using Pattern Language as a tool to deepen the understanding of the Transition Movement, and I think applying this same model to satoyama could be instructive.

A sports analogy comes to mind: A former professional soccer player recently told me that club teams often outperform world cup teams even though the cup teams have the top players. Why? Because the cup teams don’t have the same experience of playing together as a team, so even though the club team players are not as talented, together the depth of their community experience as a team enables them to achieve a high performance level.

Thus, while the ingredients that make up a community are important, there are intangible aspects to the underlying communal fabric that make the difference between success and failure. What are those success factors for the satoyama communities in Japan and satoyama-like communities elsewhere?

Now, however, for all of the well-intentioned efforts to revitalize satoyama for the sake of biodiversity and cultural preservation, I have yet to see mention of what I believe is that glue that holds it all together. So far, I’m seeing a modern scientific worldview trying to recreate the recognizable pieces of a historically complex social and environmental ecosystem. And as we all know, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

What is that intangible quality that supersedes this piece-meal summation? What is it that is necessary for the government and NGOs to be fully conscious of if they are to succeed in their endeavors? I believe the invisible glue is the worldview of the residents themselves. A worldview of oneness, of spirit. To be sure, this worldview is ancient, but not archaic. It isn’t reflected in the modern scientific paradigm (save for quantum physics) but it is alive and well nonetheless. Growing in recognition and influence in fact.

And unless this is properly recognized as the requisite underlying reason for being of these mature satoyama landscapes, no amount of technical innovation, capital expenditure, rural revitalization efforts tied in with modern scientific knowledge, etc., will suffice in re-establishing viable, sustainable, resililient satoyama communities.

Community fabric, embedded worldview, spiritual connection to the land, and other inherently feminine qualities are largely absent from modern discussions, but for relocalization and revitalization goals to work, they must become part of the planning equation and conversation.

Of course, I’m not Japanese and I’m not in Japan, so perhaps the conversation is happening and I’m just not privy to it, or not looking in the right place. However, if the learnings of the Satoyama Initiative are going to be offered to the world in the hope that the Japanese experience can be brought to bear elsewhere, then it seems to me that an explicit discussion of worldview’s importance would be beneficial.

After lunch I took a moment to watch from our deck as the rain fell lightly onto the leaves of our persimmon tree. It struck me that so long as our decision-makers remain ensconced in their offices and meeting rooms and subways of the built world, that nature will remain an abstraction, a backdrop against which we play the game of our human project. A project whose very underpinnings are based upon such myths as endless economic growth, endless technological fixes, endless human-centered progress.

It’s ironic that when we are embedded in our human-made abstraction of economic modernity that we end up viewing nature as the abstraction, but when the vast majority of our life’s ‘stuff’ is fabricated, contrived, shipped and digitalized, how could the natural world be anything other than a distant idea? And then it becomes so easy to view it as a resource, a service, an entitlement, a bounty to use and exploit.

So long as our human relationship with nature is relegated to an idea or thing to use economically or otherwise, rather than understood as the lived experience of who we really are, I’m afraid that we will continue to push the limits until the world’s true economic backbone pushes back and calls a halt.

We need a new story. A story based on what we now know to be true about the world. Such a story, embraced widely, would have radical implications for our status quo, but when the alternative is, as the article said, the possible extinction of the our human species, it may well be sufficiently compelling.

[UPDATE: A four-apart HD version is now available on YouTube. The first part is available here. The remaining parts appear on the right column. SORRY NO LONGER AVAILABLE DUE TO COPYRIGHT ISSUES]

[UPDATE - Aug 21, 2011: The complete film now seems impossible to find on the internet. I'd purchase the DVD if I could find it, but that, too, appears unavailable. If anyone knows a source, please post a comment. In the meantime, while the first of six parts remains off-limits, the subsequent five parts remain available, for now. Parts two-six are available here.]

[UPDATE - March 2012: Here is the complete film in HD, recently posted, not broken into parts: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1XNxc3CwSM%5D

This film portrays the essence of the satoyama landscape’s seamless fabric of interdependence and cyclical relationship between human and environment. Having heard about it for years, but never wanting to use peer-to-peer networks to view it, I was very pleased to finally find it available, albeit with somewhat compromised resolution.

Enjoy!

The Japanese have lived in a tightly self-sustaining interrelatedness with the ecological environment from the Jomon times through the Edo period, and this sacred interdependence is reflected throughout the culture.

This nourishing connection to the Earth has gradually diminished over the last 150 years as Western values and consumptive behavior have displaced it. Its no mistake that now, as this imported paradigm is showing its obsolescence, we’re seeing in Japan the symptoms of this alienation from the culture’s traditional roots: depression, loss of direction, disillusionment with empty acquisitions and brands, etc.

Isn’t it fascinating and cause for hope that recent polls show more and more Japanese youth are looking beyond materialism for meaning and happiness?

Even the Japanese government is seeing the handwriting on the wall as they’re developing with the United Nations the so-called Satoyama Initiative to preserve the traditional socio-ecological production landscapes. This is great news!

And for all the hand-wringing about growing numbers of herbivorous men and the loss of “animal spirits” in the younger generations, rather than a civilization going down the tubes, what if we are seeing the early contours of a new Japan preparing for its transformation into a self-sustaining land of peace and ecological harmony?

No transition will be easy or painless, but I see a tremendous future for Japan as it draws on its past with an eye toward the future, and becomes an exemplar for the rest of the world of how a developed country transitions into being a model of sustainability and resilience.

I second Roger Pulvers’s call for Japan to cultivate their “cultural entrepreneurship” but not by marketing Japanese-branded social fluff to the world, rather by forging a new identity as green society that knows how to be at one with the earth community.

What makes these semi-nomadic people so amazing to me is that they live collectively, deciding together about where, when and how to maintain the ocean resources so as not to deplete them. They carefully consider technologies, adopting some but rejecting most, in a refreshingly clear-eyed analysis that goes against our more usual knee-jerk adoption of seeing anything new as better. On Hegura Island they decided to ride bicycles and walk to get around, reserving just two cars, one for garbage collection and one for emergencies. Indeed, their whole lifestyle is governed by collectively-made decisions.

The men clearly have important roles in the community, but there isn’t the masculine-value-hegemony that is the norm elsewhere. During the annual festival celebrating the belief that the female goddess of the island travels to meet the male god of the mainland, the men dress as women. Clearly, these people are secure in their gender identification and roles.

There is no mistake to me the connection between the feminine lineage of this tradition and the maintenance of their traditional communal values and careful questioning of technological innovation.

To see the ritual for the divine feminine really underscores the qualities of balance, harmony and respect that is such a far cry from the more recent fear-based laments in the Japanese media that young people are missing the “animal spirits” necessary to maintain the competition-based consumptive paradigm.

In recent days and weeks there have been numerous articles in the Japanese media describing (and bemoaning) the growing trend away from consumerism and materialism. These are moves away from what I think of as “old-paradigm” thinking, and it is my thesis that these reflect a deep structural change emanating from within the individual and collective psyches of the Japanese people, not from a place of weakness or defeat, but in a very positive response to the needs of our time.

For example, isn’t it fascinating the Mainichi Daily’s article from last week, More Japanese children lack motivation, value inner happiness? And, today’s Japan Times piece titled Accusations about Japan’s youths lacking ‘animal spirits’ off mark?

These admittedly anecdotal pieces, when taken together with so many other signs, such as the growing interest among young people in returning to farming, all help affirm that ‘something big is happening’ that is much deeper and more profound than simply a superficial reaction to economic malaise and social stressors.

Indeed, I strongly believe that Japan is poised to once again become a world leader, not in conventional economic terms of course, and not necessarily in green technological innovation (though it probably will continue to lead the world there), but in something currently more elusive and subtle, but ultimately more important: The remembrance of a sustainable way of life on this planet, based on the understanding that we are not separate from this earth, rather that we ARE the earth.

The United Nations University and Japanese government’s Satoyama Initiative is a fantastic effort, I believe, not just for it’s promotion of biodiversity, important as that is, but even more so for its potential to preserve and revitalize the Satoyama culture. This culture of living embedded within the land, not just living on it and off of it, I believe is a key to the future.

The Japanese people are the only developed country in this world who have only recently lived sustainably for centuries (Edo period), largely in Satoyama landscapes, and while this know-how is almost disappearing with the older generation, it isn’t too late to recover critical understanding and knowledge.  But time is very short. And we need to be building practical bridges of understanding and action between the modern world of urban life and the traditional roots of sustainable Japan.

Japan is the first developed country to depopulate, and will likely be the first developed country to re-localize and transition to sustainability. Not purely out of necessity, though circumstances will likely force it, but also from a deep inner change that is happening on this planet. It is my contention that on a subtle level, those who are open-minded in the Japanese population are hearing the whisperings deep within themselves that the individual, social and cultural connections to the earth that sustained their worldview from the Jomon and Yayoi times, and which are continuing through the Shinto and Buddhist understanding of nature’s sanctity and our ultimate interconnectedness and interdependence, are once again becoming paramount. Wouldn’t it be fascinating if the essence of Shintoism and Buddhism’s ecological understandings became once again the guiding principles for Japanese society?

The Japanese opened themselves to the world in the Meiji Restoration and in the process began to lose their sacred connection to nature as industrialization took hold. This reached its zenith in the Post-War era and Bubble, but I believe Japan is now poised for what I call the Satoyama Resurgence, a return to sustainability and relocalization, and a recognition and revitalization of the spiritual nature of our existence, which has the potential to restore meaning and fulfillment to individual and collective lives, as well renew a harmonious relationship with the natural world of which we’re a part.

With memories of its ancient history of living as part of the land only recently (last 150 years) submerged in their unconscious, I believe the Japanese can and will lead the world in setting an example for a new paradigm. Toward this end I am truly excited to do what I can to further this evolutionary trend.