Balanced Diet: Preserving Development; Developing Preservation
A Case of Yui Labor System, Shirakawa-go, Japan,
Ron Carle
Born in Vancouver, Canada. Ron Carle is a postdoctoral research fellow at the National
Museum of Ethnology, sponsored by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. He
received his BA (Honours) in Political Studies from Queen's University, Canada, and his PhD
in Social Anthropology from Edinburgh University, UK. He was also a Monbusho sponsored
visiting postgraduate research student at Kyoto University. His current fieldwork is being
conducted in Shirakawa village (Gifu), Taketomi-jima (Okinawa), and Iwami-ginzan
(Shimane), studying the relationship between heritage preservation and local development
strategies. His publications include “The development and social impact of heritage tourism
in Shirakawa-go, Ogimachi,” Ritsumeikan Journal of Asia Pacific Studies, 2003; “Rising
suns, setting suns: Japan, anthropology, and pilgrimage in Santiago de Compostela (an
international encounter),” Japan Anthropology Workshop Newsletter, 1996. His research
interests include modern Japanese rural society, heritage preservation and tourism
development, traditional labour systems (supra-financial cooperative labour exchange), social
movements, and modern cultural fetishisms. email address : gasshobo@idc.minpaku.ac.jp
This paper will expand upon the symposium themes by examining the relationship between
the preservation of traditional landscapes and the transmission of local knowledge. The study
is based upon the long term social anthropological study of a renowned cultural heritage site,
Shirakawa-go, Ogimachi, in the Hida region of Gifu prefecture, Japan. It is both a nationally
designated heritage preservation district and a UNESCO World Cultural Heritage Site. As a
repository of tradition located in a modern, urbanised industrial state, it both a part of the
national society, and apart from it.
The position taken here is that the relationships between the built and natural environments,
and between preservation and development, are best examined as a matter of balance, rather
than of binary opposition; not in itself a particularly radical idea, but certainly one worthy of
emphasis. This concept is itself exemplified in the local heritage preservation society's name,
Shirakawa-go, Ogimachi Society for the Protection of the Natural Environment (known
locally as the Mamoru Kai). The society is responsible for the regulation of the heritage
environment, in this case seen as an encompassing mandate that includes both the built
environment of the village itself and the natural surroundings that provide its backdrop.
The paper will look at the issues of cultural diversity and the transmission of local knowledge
through reference to the social and technical means used to maintain the thatch roofs that are
the crowning glory of the Gassho-zukuri houses. Particular attention will be paid to the
changing continuity of the Yui labour system, a once ubiquitous form of supra-financial
labour exchange that provides the main local idiom for local social and cultural identity, and
the default mode of roof maintenance strategy. The issue of biodiversity will be examined
with reference to the increasing problem of securing a sufficient supply of the thatch
(miscanthus sinensis) to allow proper and timely roof maintenance. Here, issues of
modernisation and generational succession and rupture can be seen in plain view.
Finally, the axes of transmission and intersection of knowledge regimes are to be seen as
multiple and variegated: across generations, localities, societies and cultures, but also between
and within those categories. This is to say that transmission and intersection are both inter-,
but also intra-, the latter being an often overlooked axis that is crucial to the vitality and
development of tradition and knowledge.