Once again, UN University’s Our World 2.0 web magazine has published an outstanding essay well worth re-posting. The Future of Food in Japan, authored by the site’s editors in their usual clear-eyed fashion, touches on a host of daunting issues and challenges facing the country’s food self-sufficiency, energy security, and lifestyle in coming decades.
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!).
Satoyama Spirit 
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