Feral Living through Poetic Immersion in the Satoyama
This spring, Makery co-produced issue 6 of the occasional newspaper The Laboratory Planet. This issue imagines a peasant and neo-peasant future, invented by global peasants, organised in diverse territories, cultivating biotopes that are more heterogeneous, more democratic and therefore more habitable. In this text, Leila Chakroun tells us about her experience in a satoyama, a Japanese mountain village, community-based and agroforestry, whose design and spatial and human organization are intimately linked to its natural environment.
It’s 6:30 a.m. A Japanese voice crackles out of the loudspeakers, intermingling with the morning songs of cicadas and bush warblers, and with the metal clang of pots and pans in the kitchen. Sunlight warms the walls of the house, which had remained cool all night, thanks to an informed choice of materials: raw earth, bales of straw and charred wood. A dense forest of Japanese cypress (hinoki) invaded by bamboo surrounds the dwellings, leaving part of the rooms in shade.
The smell of curry announces the start of breakfast. The small community, a sort of chosen family, sits down and chants a little prayer addressed to the Earth and earthly creatures, human and non-human, who together have made possible this savory blend of flavors and textures, being present here this morning, allowing our bodies to remain in motion. Almost everything is produced on site: vegetables, rice and spices (coriander, ginger, turmeric). Rapeseed oil and cheese were exchanged with a neighboring farm, located further down the valley, not far from a former metropolis, now depopulated.
Each person speaks in turn, sketching out the plan for the day little by little. There is no fixed leader here, as we experiment with horizontal governance and fluid work management by temporary leaders. Today is the day we harvest the rice. In addition to planning the different stages, equipment and storage, we also need to organize our work to include the people from a neighboring village who will come to lend a helping hand. We experience this seasonal repetition of common gestures as a celebration of a way of life that is still possible, despite everything. Despite the demographic decline, where some houses no longer light up after nightfall. Despite the exhaustion from working on steep terrain and during increasingly frequent heatwaves, even in early autumn. Despite the large population of monkeys, wild boars and deer, with whom farmers must share the harvest, whether they like it or not. Despite the soil, which, even after being cultivated for decades using natural farming practices, still retains traces of toxic clouds and excessive chemical fertilizers.
But each morning, the rural soundscape reminds us that it’s possible to resist and survive the cacophonic frenzy of the big cities. If rurality persists, it will surely be through perpetuated and reinvented “musical scores” of gestures [1].
Musical scores of common gestures and multispecies landscapes
These multi-sensory and multi-species scores are at the heart of the Japanese philosophy of satoyama. The now-ecological term “satoyama” originally designated mixed landscapes, composed of small mountain village communities and the adjacent forest that they cultivated for subsistence. The Japanese concept 里山 is composed of the kanji 山 yama (mountain), and 里 sato (village). The play on words dates back to the 18th century Edo period, when the kanji for 山里 yamazato (mountain village) were inverted. Satoyama literally designates the mountain of the village, or perhaps more poetically, “the village mountain” – thus reversing the proprietary logic by subsuming the human settlement to the ecosystem that hosts it. It’s a forested mountain that lives through and with “its” humans. In a progressive semantic shift, satoyama now designates forested farmlands on the outskirts of villages in the mountains or countryside. The concept wasn’t a part of common Japanese vocabulary until the early 1960s, when it was proposed by Shidei Tsunahide, a forestry ecologist who wanted to give a name to these landscapes that he saw “silently” disappearing. Satoyama landscapes have been deeply affected by the social, territorial and economic dynamics that followed Japan’s modernization – beginning with the Meiji restoration in 1861, then even more dramatically after World War II. The nation became largely urban, structured around metropolises, to the point that today, 92% of Japan’s population of 126 million lives in cities (2024). With fewer people living in rural areas, there are also fewer farmers – only 2% of the working population is involved in agricultural production. This net loss of the workforce and of the community ties that once maintained satoyama is exacerbated by the lack of renewal and subsequent aging population of rural regions.
The disintegration of satoyama highlights a particular understanding of agrarian and agroforestry landscapes, which diverges from the patrimonial and backward-looking vision that has underlain discourses on environmental protection. It is indeed the collapse of community dynamics and the absence of human residents that has accelerated the demise of these landscapes and many of the non-human creatures that populated them. Satoyama have become the symbol of a possible coexistence between humans and non-humans, in Japan and internationally2, the living proof of a terrestrial future that does not exclude humanity, but rather carries it through an ethos and praxis of care. Several studies have identified the biocenosis that constitutes the satoyama, i.e., the multi-species agroforestry community, which includes 350 species of trees and plants living in forests, rivers and fields, fungi such as the (too) much-loved matsutake, fish, frogs, ducks and herons, as well as small rodents and their predators (hawks, sparrowhawks) [3].
Today, satoyama stand to benefit not only from their traditional countryside esthetics – dense forest, village hamlet, terraced rice paddies – but as physical and territorialized manifestations of what some have called the “bioregional hypothesis”4. Etymologically, the bioregion refers to a “territory of life” – not only the place that we occupy during our lives, but a place that hosts various forms of life and interactions among them.
These manifestations are buried in the interstices of territories, whose liminality allows room for experimentation and divergence. Satoyama can be seen as these interstices in a number of ways: they are located on the edges, far from major urban centers, intermingle the essences of plant and animal, forest and farm, thus blurring the boundaries between wild, cultivated and inhabited spaces. The abandonment of these landscapes and the lack of human intervention have only reinforced the fluidity of these boundaries. Currently in the process of being de-domesticated and re-wilded, satoyama have become living examples of feral life, which we must urgently learn to inhabit [5]. They teach us that, in the face of extractivism and desertification, becoming feral is the best thing that can happen to us, if not the only possible condition for our humanity. It is precisely because these socio-agro-ecosystemic dynamics are partially “liberated” from industrial farming practices and culturally dominant esthetic standards, that they support budding precious liminal spaces to imagine, collectively and corporeally, novel lifestyles and renewed connections with ourselves and with others, human and non-human.
Becoming feral opens, even forces, new possibilities. As daily gestures are performed in a multi-species community [6], new landscapes emerge, and with them existential and political nourishment to subsist and resist within the entanglements and sympoieses of the Cthulucene [7]. In the shadows of these depopulated countrysides, we can see the light of other cosmologies.
Toward a neo-peasant, agroecological, bioregional and multispecies future
In Japan, satoyama have spearheaded a form of sustainability that embraces human existence, along with the landscapes that accompany it and give it meaning. Considering the plethora of actors, permaculture and natural agriculture movements are among the few to venture beyond the discourse of coexistence to truly experiment with possible ways of inhabiting these landscapes – by allowing themselves to transform them, and perhaps taint some of their romanticized clichés.
In addition to re-inhabiting the spaces, these actors rehabilitate them through public events. In 2019, Permaculture Center Pamimomi and Satoken Association organized a public meeting under the slogan “Satoyama Repair” to discuss potential methods for repairing and caring for satoyama using permaculture design and natural farming techniques. Among the proposed social and ecological innovations was a workshop given by Pamimomi on their rice fields. The paddies are entirely cultivated – or precisely “not cultivated” (耕さない田んぼ tagayasanai tanbo) – according to Fukuoka Masanobu’s principles of non-action: the soil is not turned over or limed dry, no fertilizers or chemicals are applied, the rice grains come from the previous year’s harvests, transplanting is done by hand, submersion of the rice fields is limited in time to encourage tillering, harvesting is done collectively and with a sickle, bunches are tied with straw and dried on structures made of local bamboo, then the grains are separated from the ears of rice using a pedal threshing machine (千把扱き senbokoki), activated by continuous foot movement. Through these gestures, which resonate with both tradition and new ecological demands, it becomes possible to “repair” the satoyama. This is less about returning it to a previous state than a novel experiment in neo-peasant, multi-species and agro-ecological subsistence.
If only the nurturing, landscape-based philosophy of the satoyama could infuse our imaginations and narratives, it could set in motion the impetus for a neo-peasant future. Instead of patrimonializing and replicating traditional Japanese agrarian landscapes, we could irrigate contemporary agro-ecological gestures and landscapes with the past, infra-, intra-, inter- and trans-species convivialities that have enabled earthly creatures, including humans, to subsist until now.
Satoyama teach us what it can mean to “coexist” in the context of imminent collapses and limited resources, while at the same time urging humility and creativity, stratagems and poetry. A haiku written by a woman from the Pamimomi collective sets the tone:
パミモミは (pamimomi wa)
世界を変える (sekai o kaeru)
秘密其地 (himitsu kichi)
Pamimomi is
a secret hideaway
that changes the world
Notes
(1) The idea of using a musical “score” to qualify a succession of gardening gestures is borrowed from Joanne Clavel and Lucile Wittersheim (2023), Gestes sonores: enquête au cœur de la récolte maraîchère, Galaad Edizioni, pp.121-134.
(2) As demonstrated by the International Partnership for Satoyama Initiative in 2010, which aimed to increase the value of “socio-ecological production landscapes”.
(3) Kuramoto N, Sonoda Y. 2003. “Biological diversity in satoyama landscapes”. In: Takeuchi K, Brown RD, Washitani I, Tsunekawa A, Yokohari M, editors. Satoyama: the traditional rural landscape of Japan. Tokyo: Springer-Verlag ; p. 81–109
(4) Mathias Rollot, (2018), Les territoires du vivant: un manifeste biorégionaliste.
(5) Anna L. Tsing, Jennifer Deger, Alder Keleman Saxena and Feifei Zhou, (2021), Feral Atlas, The More-Than-Human Anthropocene, Stanford University.
(6) Centemeri, L. (2018). Commons and the new environmentalism of everyday life. Alternative value practices and multispecies commoning in the permaculture movement. Rassegna italiana di Sociologia, 64(2), 289-313.
(7) Donna Haraway, (2016), Le Manifeste Chthulucène de Santa Cruz, La Planète Laboratoire N°5, 2015