The Political Ecology of Coastal SocietiesMinutes

1st Network Meeting Sendai 19 February 2019

The first network seminar of the project hosted by the project International Co Investigator Prof. Hiroki Takakura at Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan. The seminar took place as part of a larger event entitled “Geological Stabilization and Human Adaptations in Northeast Asia”. That event, held on 20-26 February 2019, consists of a set of four workshops and three related events, which are exploring different aspects of climatic, geological, and human adaptation.

Preceding the Sendai network meeting, AW travelled to Tokyo to meet with colleagues at the Toyo University of. After the meeting DGA travelled to Sapporo and had meetings with interested colleagues there. These notes are also included here.

Purpose of meetingAt the first meeting we made formal introductions, where people described their affiliations and relationship to the project theme, and planned our work together in the coming months.

Summary of affiliations and interestsName Abbr Institution Role InterestsProf. David G. Anderson DGA UAberdeen Project PI (UK) No research history of working with coastal communities formally but has a broad

range of interest in political ecology and the ethnography of sea Saami regions in Norway. For this project DGA is most interested in the issue of forms of property rights in the intertidal zone in both Scotland and Japan, and how these fluid spaces are traditionally defined and regulated. He would like to do research in Scotland on this topic and find a partner in Japan who could prepare a parallel case study.

Dr. Robert Wishart RW UAberdeen UK Co-PI No formal research history on coastal communities and sees this as an opportunity to start research. He has broad knowledge of Scottish fishing societies both from direct experience and from supervising students.

Dr. Andrew Whitehouse AW UAberdeen Anthropologist with a broad knowledge of conservation issues and an interest in bird conservation. Is interested in how the relation with nature changes after a major disaster and the infrastructures placed to protect coastlines.

Prof. Hiroki Takakura HT TohokuU Project PI (JP) Anthropologist working in Siberia after collapse of Soviet Union. Siberian reindeer nomads. Working now on climate change, to do with changes in permafrost. Commissioned by local government to look at disaster survey after tsunami in 2011. Similarities with Siberian research – geographical changes and coping with the destruction of land

Dr. Alyne Delaney AD TohokuU JP Co-PI Assistant Professor based both in Tohoku and Aarbourg Denmark. Extensive experience with coastal villages near Sendai especially with their experience organizing seaweed harvesting and the recovery from the Tsunami. The communities have recently been impacted by an oil spill. Is doing research on the new seawall and how it separates communities from the sea. Has many commitments could use help to hire or pay for transcription and translation to develop the sea wall theme (impact on ecology).

Dr. Minoru Ikeda MI TohokuU Marine field station. Facility swamped by tsunami. Now in new building. Work on conservation genetics. Phylo-geography of marine organisms. Genetic aspects of why populations change.

Prof. Masakazu Aoki MA TohokuU Marine plant ecology. Interest in seaweed. Plant-animal interactions. Grazers on seaweed. Ecology of seaweed. Came to Sendai after tsunami (April 2011). Developed survey on effects of earthquake on sea. How the marine environment has changed after that. Possible interest in invasive species, Japanese species invading and Japan being invaded.

Nao Sakaguchi NS TohokuU PhD student Rural Sociology

Controversy over tsunami disaster (sea wall). Historic fishing village work. Sea wall creates separation from sea. Communities wanting to change architecture of the sea wall. Studies unique fishing style. Disaster heritage.

Prof .Taku Iida TI Minpaku Osaka Anthropologist Long research history in Hokkaido, initial interest in harvesting seaweed but more recently working in Madagascar, Malaysia, Mozambique on ecological anthropology. General interest in fishing villages. Has sent copies of his papers to share with colleagues.

Prof. Kyoko Ueda KU SophiaU Sociologist from Tokyo who loves anthropology. Work with fishing communities in Okinawa who used to do dynamite fishing. Also, Nigata and disaster affected area, interviewing livestock farmers, work near power plant. She has done social surveys on the problems of rural areas across Japan. Is particularly interested in the effect of bridges on local communities (sparked a discussion of the skye bridge).

Prof. Akamine Jun AJ HitotsubashiU Anthropologist from Tokyo. Is mostly working on whales and the local production and harvesting of whales. Is broadly interested in all coastal resources and tenure systems

Dr. Shiaki Kondo SK CAIS Hokkaido SK is at the newly formed Centre for Ainu and Indigenous Studies. Interested in indigenous use of sea resources (Athabaskan people in Alaska) and human-wildlife interactions. Also working in North Hokkaido (Rebun Island) on sea lion harvesting herring, seaweed gathering, and sea urchins. Interest in Japanese fishing villages. Brent Goose issue in Hokkaido. Eelgrass. SapporoHokkaido university has an ethnographic fieldschool on Rebun Island.

StrategiesHT suggested that the best way to move the project forward was to have several group meetings. At these meetings we could present papers and then go on a field excursion together. He suggested two meetings – one in Aberdeen and another in Sendai. He thought it might be impractical for the entire group to travel but that the project Co-Is should attend each meeting.

DGA suggested that we could further also finance small-scale fieldwork for individuals. The purpose of these small-scale project would be to set the scope for a future project. Small scale project work could involve travelling to meet with local community leaders and government officials, seeking support for a future project (including formal letters of support). The project could fund translation or the transcription of results.

There was a discussion on whether or not it was practical for each of us to do research in the other countries. DGA suggested that we could take on a single topic – for example a sea wall – and then do interviews in each country to collect impressions on how the structure changed the relationship of people to the marine environment. The parallel interviews then could form the basis for a comparative published paper

AD specifically mentioned a small project aimed at studying the heritage of the seawall including interviews. There was a strong feeling at the meeting that the issue of the seawall incorporated a wide range of interests. One of the marine biologists did a study of the plant communities after the Tsunami and came to the conclusion that the sea wall has a much more negative effect on kelp establishment than the disaster

PlanningDGA announced the proposal for an Orkney workshop in middle June. The content of that programme is not clear and would have to be structured around the interests of the group. The marine biologists were interested in diving in Scotland to explore plant communities there. AW suggested that visiting the croft where sheep are fed seaweed might be interesting.

Hiroki invited us to a seminar and field trip in Sendai in September/October.

Possible Research Themes Orkney situation: conflict between seaweed harvesting and renewable energy.

Potential for exchanges. Excursions and field trips. Possible events in autumn in Sendai area.

People’s relations with places lost or disrupted by tsunami. Experience of places since reclaimed. State interventions in those places. Changes to ecological relations.We have a good team who know the sociology and human history of the area as well as can write about the changes in biological diversity.

The issue of sea intertidal tenure is also a strong theme with many people interested. Much of this depends on the specifics of the Scottish situation since the Japanese sea tenure issues are very old and very complex.

The issue of eel grass came up unexpectedly and might make a good link to the bird conservation issues. The eel grass was disturbed the tsunami creating a conservation issue.

Sea-wall/Tsunami excursionAfter the network programme we had a four-hour excursion to two areas being rebuilt following the Tsunami disaster – Arahama and Yuriage. The excursion was led by Sébastien Boret a French anthropologist working at the International Research Institute of Disaster Science.

The excursion was emotionally very powerful. The design of the excursion was to visit one community – Arahama – which the Japanese state had decided not to rebuild the community. That community was represented by a graveyard and a single 4-story ruin of an elementary school that had withstood the water and served as a rescue platform. The school is now a museum with images of the community that once was. The surrounding flat area is defined by the seawall and the raised road structures intended to protect the region from future events. Nearby the state by contrast has established a rebuilding programme for the village at Yuriage. There we were taken to a community centre where survivors of the Tsunami share their experiences with young children. The centre runs programmes to help people readjust to life after the Tsunami. The account of the elder presenting was sobering. That community has a lot of different issues with the heavy sea wall infrastructure and the new multi-storey dwellings being reconstructed on site.

DGA’s memory of the experience was an interesting discussion of different words for ‘reconstruction’ and what seemed to be a debate on if one particular term evoked colonial frontier expansion rather than community redevelopment (another word). The heavy

construction atmosphere of the site communicated a clear message of top-down construction. DGA was struck by the account of Bore who spoke about how a samurai had founded the community by first building a shrine (which then attracted fishermen) in the Edo period, and the post-disaster account – which did not involve the shrine but instead various commercial industries. At the present time the site of the former village is dominated by new fish processing plants. Side-Meeting Tokyo

Meeting at Toyo University, 19th February 2019Present: Andrew Whitehouse (Aberdeen), Ayako Toko (Toyo), Kaoru Saito (Tokyo), Yasushi (masters student)

Background and interests of Japanese researchers and the Cyberforest projectCyberforest is an environmental monitoring and outreach network developed at eight sites across Japan by Kaoru Saito (University of Tokyo) and his colleagues since 1997. Cyberforest is a set of several unattended field stations comprising cameras and microphones that record aspects of the environment in different places. These have been streamed live and most material is archived online. This work has raised questions about how to develop environmental consciousness and awareness, as well as the potential of technology for creating new forms of engagement with nature and the conservation thereof. It has also revealed some of the possibilities for distinctly Japanese forms of conservation as well as the specific challenges that are faced in promoting environmental awareness and action there.

There are two coastal installations in Iwate province, one at Otsuchi and one at Yamada. The latter is an area hit particularly badly by the 2011 tsunami and has since been subject to significant coastal engineering.

Kaoru Saito is an interdisciplinary researcher from Japan who has developed the Cyberforest project since its inception. He has published on the role of digital technologies in developing environmental perception. Through his position at the interdisciplinary and outward looking Kashiwanoha campus of the University of Tokyo, and strong connections to Japanese nature conservation organisations (such as Japan Bird Research Association – integral to Cyberforest), he is ideally placed to help bring together SSH related Japanese scholars broker contact with practitioners.

Ayako Toko is an interdisciplinary researcher based in Japan who has been involved in developing the Cyberforest project. She has worked on themes such as public participation in conservation, eco-tourism and digital media. Having worked for WWF Japan, she has a deep understanding and ample contacts with the Japanese nature conservation realm. She also has interests in natural resource management and sustainable tourism.

Research themes and prospectsNarrating place through Cyberforest. Cyberforest monitoring stations generate ongoing narratives of place that can connect with people remotely through streaming. They also provide data to researchers about the changing ecology and phenomenology of places. As such it provides a way to build relations between people and places and into wider networks. The coastal stations provide opportunities to consider the sorts of narratives of place that are generated in these environments, particularly where the tsunami reshaped the land, sea and

relations between them and where sea walls have further shifted these relations, as well as influencing the perceptual experiences of place.Comparative study of conservation in the UK and Japan (as on RCUK proposal): This could potentially be related to coastal conservation issues e.g. Brent Geese and eelgrass.Changing relations with nature across generations. What is most useful for children in modern world? Exploring environmental education in Japan. Building on existing research on children’s experience of Cyberforest. Notion of ‘calibration’: hearing themselves on recordings to say, ‘I was there’. Technological changes and their implications. How can we connect people’s listening to Cyberforest with broader experiences of listening and being in places: photographs, films, words? What possibilities will 5G bring e.g. livestreaming movies. The Kyoto University sound map project. Hypertext linking the texts, movies, photographs, sound. How to make natural narratives in cyberspace. Vulnerability of technology e.g. to loss of power, against power of nature.

Potential times for research and further meetingsAugust (particularly latter half) probably best for Japanese partners.

Sapporo side-meetingThe Sapporo side-meetings were organized within the frame of (another) seminar series organized by a tightly connected group of local anthropologists who have funding from J-ARC NetJNET – a Japanese networking programme not unlike our project. The seminar was entitled Rethinking Arctic Community Building in the Anthropocene led by Naotaka Hayashi of the University of Calgary but with a joint appointment at Hokkaido.

The main discussions in Sapporo where with Shiaki Kondo (also from our network seminar in Sendai) and Shiro Tatsuzawa. The latter was trained as a biologist but who had strong interests in community anthropological research. His main work is about studying the migration of wild reindeer with indigenous hunters in the Olenek region of Sakha republic. However he has a passionate interest in and is building a network of groups in Brent geese conservation which overlaps with that our group Shiaki Kondo is also interested in the brent goose issue and offered to facilitate a short-term field study by AW (he offered that being able to introduce AW to the community would be a good way for him to open up a new research topic).

The Brent goose falls under the category of a charismatic species which has attracted massive attention from international conservation organizations (e.g. CAFF of Arctic Council). It is a “circumpolar” species which migrates annually from high arctic places to southern coast regions. The flyways of the European populations are well-known, but the routes of the Eastern population remain a mystery. Tatsuzawa’s long term project involves placing locators on pairs of birds to follow their movements. Their eastern migration roughly links either/or Alaska and the Lena Delta of the Sakha Republic to Northern Japan and the Yellow Sea region of Canada. Japan, Russia, and China are is investing a lot of funds to understand their bird’s migrations including this species.

The Brent goose arrives in Japan (Hokkaido) in late early winter winter, goes down to South in mid winter (ie right now) in January to March. In March to April it moves northwards (Siberia). In the autumn mid-winter some populations go to the yellow sea. There are four populations. The Northern Hokkaido population nests on Konashiru Kunashiri Island where they compete for space with seals (there is UG student studying this problem). The southern population nests in a bay at the very south of Hokkaido (around Hakodate). A third population nests around Sendai in Tohoku region and a fourth (guessed) on the banks of the Sea of Japan (western side of Tohoku).The tsunami tore up beds of eel grass and created a conservation issue.

The ecology of the geese has recently become very important for Ainu cultural activists who are striving to recover and understand the role of the bird in their traditional culture. They have records of (maybe brent) geese songs and know that the feathers once were used in traditional costumes. Ainu do not hunt the birds now.

To make this project work it likely would need a further networking trip. Shiro-san tells me that there are two key people working on the issue. One with Wildlife Birdlife International based in Tokyo and another who is the head of a NGO in the Tohoku area devoted to Brent Geese conservation and who himself is an expert on cultural history of geese.. Finally there is are a number of key Ainu activists – one of whom I think is called KikoFukiko, a famous traditional ainu musician who has a strong connection with Siberia (like a goose).

Given the seasonal time frames of the migration it is likely that any study would not involve watching the birds (sorry Andrew) since they will arrive back only next winter.