Surviving modernization: State, community, and the environment in two Japanese fishing towns

This dissertation builds on and aims to contribute to the anthropological understandings of the commons, natural resource management, and modernization. Through a historical and ethnographic investigation based on two coastal fishing towns in Japan, the dissertation demonstrates that the ways in which people interact with common natural resources are dynamically constructed within a complex web of shifting political, cultural, and ecological conditions. With growing concerns, largely since the 1970s, regarding the environment, few argue that managing natural resources is unnecessary, but there is a heated debate regarding the proper methods. In order to improve the poor outcomes of “command-and-control” natural resource management schemes and planned development, policy makers and scholars have worked to promote “community-based natural resource management” and “co-management” as new conservation strategies accentuating the role of community. Japanese coastal resource management has often been celebrated as a success story that shows the relevance of traditional communities, and even used as a model for promoting conservation strategies in other countries. Other scholars have pointed to the problems that these strategies, particularly when based on romantic images of traditional communities, can create. This dissertation argues that even in these two Japanese fishing towns, the actual practices of resource management are also much more complex than simplified or romantic discourses of communities would suggest. And this should prompt us to reconsider “traditional” and “modern” methods for achieving collective action for the management of common natural resources. The “traditional,” like other closely related social categories such as “modern” and “backward,” is temporally constructed and malleable, and has been produced in part through state modernizing projects. These too have varied over time and are hardly linear, and they often masquerade the complexities and ambiguities of the contemporary culture of the commons. In Surviving Modernization, I wish to highlight two major findings. Contemporary Japan’s coastal resource management is part of the state’s modernization project, which has survived as a grand theme for the last sixty years. At the community level, however, the ways in which people respond to the state’s modernization project are deeply associated with their survival as fishing families.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical referencesIncludes vitaby Satsuki Takahash