Community resilience to a developmental shock: a case study of a rural village in Nagano, Japan

Resilience, 2013 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21693293.2013.797662

Community resilience to a developmental shock: a case study of a rural village in Nagano, Japan Daisaku Yamamotoa* and Yumiko Yamamotob a

Department of Geography and Asian Studies Program, Colgate University, 13 Oak Drive, Hamilton, NY 13346, USA; bDepartment of Geography, Colgate University, 13 Oak Drive, Hamilton, NY 13346, USA This paper offers a historical case study of rural community response to a ‘developmental shock’, by focusing on the controversy over a golf resort project in the forested alluvial fan area of a rural agrarian village in Japan during the 1970s. At a glance, the controversy seems to represent a story of well-coordinated local social/ resident movements, led by a local leader with foresight and connections to non-local resources, which successfully countered the externally imposed project. Our study reveals that behind the overt form of resistance, critical agency to facilitate both the resistance and resilience of the community arose from ‘local outsiders’ (i.e. new settlers to the village) whose voice was legitimised through traditional local institutions of communal decision-making. The case study also highlights a subtle, but critical role of embodied cultural capital of local actors that kept the community from serious social divides through the controversy, further contributing to high community resilience. Keywords: Japan; community resilience; social capital; cultural capital; governance

Introduction One of the main characteristics of the post-war Japanese developmental state has been its distinct ‘developmental redistribution’ mechanism, where interregional disparities arising from rapid economic growth were countered by mini-growth projects in rural peripheries.1 These mini-growth projects take various forms, including large-scale public infrastructure, industrial park and leisure resort projects, often under the mantra of ‘helping backward regions’. These developmental projects and accompanying discourses strike communities in rural peripheries as externally originated ‘shocks’, and community residents are usually forced to react to them. These developmental shocks have been replicated in many rapidly growing economies today. In the recent decades, resilience, originally popularised in ecological research, is ‘rapidly gaining ground both as a targeted process of societal development and as a research topic in its own right’.2 Our primary focus is community resilience, a subset of social resilience, defined as ‘the ability of groups or communities to cope with external stress and disturbances as a result of social, political and environmental change’.3 Local *Corresponding author. Email: [email protected] 1 Yasusuke Murakami, An Anticlassical Political-Economic Analysis: A Vision for the Next Century (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999); Daisaku Yamamoto, “Repositioning Regional Inequality Research From the Geographical Political Economy Perspective,” Annals of Japan Association of Economic Geographers 58, no. 3 (2012): 227 – 36. 2 Geoffrey Alan Wilson, Community Resilience and Environmental Transitions (New York: Routledge, 2012). 3 W. Neil Adger, “Social and Ecological Resilience: Are They Related?” Progress in Human Geography 24, no. 3 (2000): 347.

q 2013 Taylor & Francis

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communities facing developmental shocks then present suitable cases for research on community resilience. Indeed, in the sociopolitical environment where resilience ‘may be beginning to replace “sustainability” as the buzzword of political and policy-making rhetoric’,4 there is an urgent need for empirically grounded case studies before the concept becomes widely and carelessly applied in policy. In the effort to articulate conditions and processes that underlie community resilience, Wilson proposes to conceptualise community resilience as a function of various forms of capital (economic, social and environmental), and points to the particular significance of social capital.5 High community resilience, he suggests, is associated with such elements of ‘strong’ social capital as tight-knit communities, leadership, open-mindedness and a democratic governance structure.6 Indeed, though it has become an integral part of the lexicon of dominant development policy discourse, social capital is one of the most highly contested and criticised notions in the social sciences today.7 One of the criticisms is targeted at a universalising tendency to presume the appropriateness of participatory, inclusive and democratic governance structures, perhaps supported by strong local leadership and mutual trust in the community. Recent geographic literature advocates, rather, the importance of examining ‘how social capital is embodied through individuals’ encounters in particular “places” which are specific, unbounded, moments in broader sociospatial relationships’,8 suggesting the place-specific nature of critical elements of social and cultural capitals. In addition, recent literature on sustainable livelihood also cautions against the limited focus on what may be considered overt expressions of strong social capital such as social movements and public protests.9 Instead, it urges us to examine ‘the local, everyday practicalities of making a living and how people defend these’,10 a less visible form of agency,11 and to understand actually existing decisionmaking processes rather than presuming the supremacy of idealised participatory democratic processes. With these considerations in mind, this study examines the historical experience of a rural Japanese village community that responded to a golf resort project – a developmental shock – during the 1970s, in complex ways, including both a modernstyle grassroots environmental movement, and less visible forms of resistance and resilience. After five years of strife, the project ultimately stalled – most directly because the developer company went bankrupt, and also, as our investigation has made clear, because of significant local resistance that kept the project from having been quickly realised prior to the bankruptcy. At first glance, this case seems to represent a story of an effective, modern social/resident movement, which was particularly empowered by a talented local leader who was well connected to non-local resources, charismatic in 4

Wilson, Community Resilience and Environmental Transitions, 1. Ibid. 6 Ibid., 28 – 9. 7 Louise Holt, “Embodied Social Capital and Geographic Perspectives: Performing the Habitus,” Progress in Human Geography 32, no. 2 (2008): 227 –46. 8 Ibid., 236. 9 Byron A. Miller, Geography and Social Movements (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000); Marc Edelman, “Social Movements: Changing Paradigms and Forms of Politics,” Annual Review of Anthropology 30 (2001): 285– 317; Louise Amoore, The Global Resistance Reader (New York: Routledge, 2005). 10 Sarah Turner, “Making a Living the Hmong Way: An Actor-Oriented Livelihoods Approach to Everyday Politics and Resistance in Upland Vietnam,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 102, no. 2 (2012): 404. 11 James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak (New Heaven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985). 5

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mobilising core local supporters and adept at articulating objectives in the language of science.12 In other words, it seems like a classic case of strong social capital at work. Yet the reality of the conflict was far from that simple, and this study demonstrates the crucial roles played by (1) traditional, indigenous institutions providing a less-than-democratic basis of resistance; (2) recent settlers who were nevertheless strongly locally grounded (‘local outsiders’) and (3) embodied cultural capital of local actors and subtle behavioural ‘customs’ that valued ambiguity and sympathy, which contributed in combination to high community resilience. These findings suggest that there is a need for a more nuanced and culturally sensitive understanding in place of the assumptions about social capital, leadership and forms of governance in the community resilience literature. Conceptualising the conditions and process of community resilience Community resilience Community or regional resilience, where ‘communities’ are understood as ‘the totality of social system interactions (i.e. an affective unit of belonging and identity and a network of relations) usually within a defined geographic space’,13 has been gaining currency in the sustainability science and regional development literature. Not surprisingly, there have been debates over the definitions, measurability and utility of this emergent notion that has its roots in ecological science.14 Rather than engaging with such debates, we use the notion to highlight two aspects of systemic responses to disturbances. Using the terminology of systems theory, our focus is to observe how a focal system (in this case, a geographic community) behaves when it nears the edge of a basin, due to some disturbance, in a phase space diagram (Figure 1). At this precarious position, the system state can easily move into the neighbouring basin, and once the threshold is crossed, recovery to the previous stable basin is difficult or impossible. The response of the system depends at least on two properties. First is the ease or difficulty of altering the system (resistance or robustness), which is related to the depth of the basin of attraction. Second is the degree to which a system can be stressed before losing its ability to recover and function (latitude or ecological resilience), which corresponds to the width of the basin of attraction.15 Growing interest in resilience in recent social scientific literature is particularly concerned with latitude as defined here. In this article, we use the term latitude as a more restricted definition of resilience in order to distinguish it from other resilience-related concepts. In the context of our study, we are interested in how a local community, a rural Japanese village (focal system), responded to the golf resort project (disturbance) in the 1970s. In 12 Indeed, this appears to be how the present-day local residents of the village seem to ‘remember’ the conflict. A local newspaper article, written about 20 years after the conflict, captures this collective memory: ‘In 1972, a golf course project by a private company was cancelled by the opposition of the villagers’ [author’s translation]. The Oito Times, October 13, 1991. Although references to the conflict are not part of daily conversation of the local inhabitants, those who do recall it portray affirmatively the termination of the project as an almost inevitable outcome of a village-wide resident movement. 13 Wilson, Community Resilience and Environmental Transitions, 8. 14 Daisaku Yamamoto, “Regional Resilience: Prospects for Regional Development Research,” Geography Compass 5, no. 10 (2011): 723– 36. 15 There are other properties of systemic state and response such as the distance to the thresholds or the edges of basins ( precariousness or vulnerability) and the speed of recovery (engineering resilience). For further explanation, see Brian Walker et al., “Resilience, Adaptability and Transformability in Social-Ecological Systems,” Ecology and Society 9, no. 2 (2004): 5; Yamamoto, “Regional Resilience: Prospects for Regional Development Research.”

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Threshold

Resistance

Precariousness

Basin of attraction A Basin of attraction B

Figure 1. Stability landscape: two basins of attractions are shown. The dot indicates the current position of the system. Source: Yamamoto (2011) modified based on Walker et al. (2004).

particular, we examine, first, the process in which the community acted against the project and prevented the completion of the project (resistance). Second, we are interested in the process that helped to maintain ‘normalcy’ amidst the distress emanating from the project (latitude).16 This indicates that we are conceptually concerned with the community dynamics in two distinct phase spaces. The first encompasses two possible stable states, the physical presence and absence of the golf resort (along with the other changes that its presence would have brought). We examine the resistance of the community in this phase space. The second phase space pertains to the social aspect of the community, where one stable state is a socially integrated community (i.e. ‘normalcy’ is maintained) and the other is a socially disintegrated community, and reflects our interest in community latitude. This aspect can be easily overlooked, especially if we focus solely on active social movements and on the tangible and immediate outcome of the event, but attention to the system’s capacity to absorb and cope with a post-event is also crucial.17 After all, most local residents – unlike more ideologically driven external actors who can ‘pull out’ or remain only partially attached to the place18 – must live there whatever the outcome of the controversy is. Whether the community during and at the end of a divisive issue can maintain its ‘normal’ life is thus a critical issue. The above conceptualisation implies that a community can be socially divided even if the developmental shock is warded off (e.g. if the golf course is not built after all). Various journalistic and scholarly accounts of the effects of golf and ski resort projects in rural peripheries of Japan have shown that fissures from these projects could leave lasting social problems in local communities even if those projects were not realised, because the process of negotiation and decision-making tended to generate corruption (and distrust of politics), suspicion of nepotism and favouritism and antagonism among different strata of local residents (e.g. landholders and non-landholders).19 Therefore, it is worthwhile to examine 16 By ‘normalcy’, we mean that the community members are not deeply and fundamentally divided so that they can still carry out their everyday lives despite difference in opinion and conflict of interest in some aspects of their lives. It does not, however, presume the presence of strong bonding or unity among the members. 17 Susan L. Cutter et al., “A Place-Based Model for Understanding Community Resilience to Natural Disasters,” Global Environmental Change 18, no. 4 (2008): 598 – 606. 18 Peter Klepeis and P. Laris, “Contesting Sustainable Development in Tierra Del Fuego,” Geoforum 37, no. 4 (2006): 505– 18. 19 Kakushin Matsui, Gorufujo Haizanki [Records of Destructions by Golf Courses] (Tokyo: Fujiwara Shoten, 2003); Kazunori Matsumura, Chiiki Zukuri To Supotsu No Shakaigaku [RegionMaking and the Sociology of Sports] (Tokyo: Dowa Shoin, 1993); Kazunori Matsumura, ed., Sanson No Kaihatsu To Kankyo Hozen [Development of Mountainous Villages and Environmental Conservation] (Tokyo: Nansosha, 1997).

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why Matsukawa, the village in focus, successfully resisted the golf resort project and avoided those lasting social problems seen in many other rural communities of Japan.

Social and cultural capitals Wilson asserts that the accumulation of different ‘capitals’ conditions community resilience.20 Social capital is arguably the ‘trickiest’ of the three capitals: economic, social and environmental. Putnam defines it as ‘social organization such as networks, norms and social trust that facilitate coordination and cooperation for mutual benefit’,21 or Magis as ‘the ability and willingness of community members to participate in actions directed to community objectives, and to the processes of engagement’.22 Different kinds of social capital have been identified, including social capital as a private good/asset (social networks that individuals and organisations access and use to achieve their goals), as a public good/asset (trust and norms of the society to which all of its members belong) and as a club good/asset (trust and bonding, often involving reciprocal relationships, among specific members of the society). Wilson offers examples of more specific indicators of strong and weak social capital (Table 1), and summarises ‘strong social ties, wellestablished trust and participatory, inclusive and democratic processes’ as key elements of strong social capital enhancing community resilience. 23 The notion of social capital, especially as drawn from Putnam’s work, has gained wide currency, yet it has also been a highly contested concept. Within geography, ‘many human geographers, following endeavours to operationalise social capital, have decried the concept as having only limited, if any, explanatory value’.24 Nevertheless, rather than rejecting the notion of social capital altogether, we confine our criticism to some universalising tendencies in the way in which it has been used, consider (some) social capital as a proximate explanatory factor (rather than an ultimate cause), and critically investigate whether the ‘standard’ notion of strong social capital, such as close social ties and well-established trust, can adequately capture the source of community resilience in our case study. We postulate that a social crisis (e.g. golf resort project) can by its very nature be socially divisive. Rather than seeking ‘standard’ social capital to explain community resilience, we argue that it is more productive to identify factors that somehow ‘hold the community together’ despite weak social ties and eroding mutual trust. Our case study suggests that one of the key such factors was the set of subtle, yet powerful behavioural ‘customs’ of local actors that value ambiguity and sympathy, rather than scientific logic and ideology. The notion of embodied cultural capital, which inculcates the dispositions and manners that facilitate the type of appropriate social behaviour in a particular

20

Wilson, Community Resilience and Environmental Transitions. Robert D. Putnam, “Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital,” Journal of Democracy (1995): 67. 22 Kristen Magis, “Community Resilience: an Indicator of Social Sustainability,” Society and Natural Resources 23, no. 5 (2010): 407. 23 Wilson, Community Resilience and Environmental Transitions, 23. 24 Holt, “Embodied Social Capital and Geographic Perspectives,” 229; James DeFilippis, “The Myth of Social Capital in Community Development,” Housing Policy Debate 12, no. 4 (2001): 781 – 806; Sarah A. Radcliffe, “Geography of Development: Development, Civil Society and Inequality – Social Capital Is (Almost) Dead?” Progress in Human Geography 28, no. 4 (2004): 217 – 27; Giles Mohan and John Mohan, “Placing Social Capital,” Progress in Human Geography 26, no. 2 (2002): 191– 210. 21

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Table 1. Examples of strong and weak social capital. Strong capital Close interaction between people (tight-knit communities, e.g. knowing neighbours) Ability to rely on neighbours at times of crisis Availability of skills training and education Good health and sanitation Availability of multiple services Low levels of corruption Good communication between stakeholder groups Female empowerment/empowerment of ethnic/ religious minorities Open-minded communities (ability to accept change) Good and transparent land ownership regulations (control over means of production) Stakeholders in control of development trajectories Strong governance structures at multiple geographical scales (democratic participation)

Weak capital Outmigration of young people (greying of rural communities) Service deserts Lack of leadership Mistrust of neighbours Lack of control over destiny of community High death rates and low life expectancy Poor communication between stakeholder groups High levels of corruption Female dependency/gender or ethnically/ religiously based lack of self-determination Weak land ownership patterns (e.g. high levels of tenant/dependent farmers) General dissatisfaction with community pathways Poorly managed public spaces (weak governance)

Source: Based on Wilson (2012): pp. 28–9.

setting,25 probably comes closest to what we are trying to capture, although our empirical findings and argument are suggestive rather than conclusive in this regard.26 Governance and local institutions The recent literature on community resilience, and sustainable development in general, typically prescribes participatory, inclusive and democratic processes (e.g. locally elected councils, public forums and peaceful demonstrations) as a desirable institutional form of governance and decision-making. At the same time, the literature on resilience often hints at the importance of locally rooted institutions, including more indigenous forms of governance. In reality, various institutions of governance with different roots are present simultaneously in most local communities. Our purpose in our case study is to examine how these different institutions of governance exert differential influence and interact, and to evaluate their relative strengths and weaknesses. On the basis of his extensive fieldwork, primarily in Japan, sociologist Hiroyuki Torigoe asserts that ‘mutual non-understanding’ even within a relatively small community is the norm, and that this non-understanding often derives from gaps in feelings/emotions among actors (i.e. lack of sympathy), rather than from gaps in ‘rational’ thinking

25

Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” in Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. J. Richardson (New York: Greenwood Press, 2013), 241 –58. 26 Holt (2008), in an effort to synthesise Bourdieu’s notion of capital and performative theorisations of identities, has recently proposed ‘embodied social capital’ to emphasise ‘how bodies are components of broader sociospatial relationships, which become differentially imbued with value as they are subjectified along a variety of axes of difference’ (p. 242). We think that this notion could be theoretically related to our case study, but we do not elaborate on the connection in this study.

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(e.g. maximising one’s utility) or even those in ideologies.27 The presence of ‘mutual nonunderstanding’ may justify (the imposition of) participatory and inclusive democracy in principle,28 but the latter (i.e. democracy) does not always solve the problem of the former (i.e. mutual non-understanding) in real life. This does not mean, however, that local communities without full-fledged participatory and inclusive democratic institutions cannot effectively solve the problems at hand (e.g. environmental crisis). Works of Japanese environmental sociologists point to the importance of examining how local communities actually handle these problems, even if ‘mutual non-understanding’ persists and formal democratic decision-making fails, by mobilising or modifying existing local institutions, or what Kizaemon Aruga called ‘life organizations’.29 A case in point of such institutions is the jichikai system, a type of Japanese neighbourhood community association. The jichikai, literarily translated as ‘selfgoverning association’, is called by different names in different parts of the country, including chonaikai, burakukai and ku. In rural parts of the country, the boundaries of jichikai often loosely resemble those of ‘old’ villages (mura) prior to the Meiji Restoration (around 1868). Although these ‘old’ villages no longer exist officially, they continue to influence the mentality and actions of rural inhabitants in Japan. Torigoe summarises the distinct characteristics of the jichikai as follows: (1) it has clear geographical boundaries; (2) households (as opposed to individuals) are the basic constituting unit; (3) membership is nearly mandatory and (4) it is a legitimate representative of the community.30 The jichikai is often portrayed as a cultural legacy of Japanese society, and as something to be replaced by more desirable forms of governance such as the ‘new public’ or civil society (e.g. non-governmental organisations (NGOs)).31 However, it has been pointed out that the jichikai has by no means lost its significance; rather, it has co-evolved with the emergent forms of governance, such as local environmental NGOs and other voluntary associations.32 Because our case study focuses on a rural Japanese village in the 1970s, the role played by the jichikai is expected to be even greater. In particular, we highlight three main ways in which the jichikai played critical roles in our case study. First, the institution of jichikai legitimised the voice of ‘local outsiders’ (i.e. new settlers to the community) who would have been most affected by the developmental project due to their geographic location, but who did not have strong political capital in the community. Second, it also provided a more enduring and politically viable foundation of resistance to the developmental project than a voluntarily organised social movement would have. The latter, despite its crucial role at the early stage of the controversy, had difficulty in retaining a broad interest of the community in the issue, and faced the risk of being sidelined as merely the voice of a few activists. Third, 27

Hiroyuki Torigoe, Kankyo Shakaigaku No Riron To Jissen: Seikatsu Kankyo Shugi No Tachiba Kara [Theory and Practice of Environmental Sociology: Perspectives of Life Environmentalism] (Tokyo: Yuhikaku, 1997). An example is the conflict of opinion over nuclear energy. Often at the root of different opinions are different levels of receptivity to nuclear power (i.e. fear), rather than gaps in knowledge of logically derived risks or in ideological foundations. 28 Amartya Kumar Sen, “Democracy as a Universal Value,” Journal of Democracy 10, no. 3 (1999): 3 – 17. 29 Kizaemon Aruga, Mura No Seikatsu Soshiki [Life Organizations of Villages] (Tokyo: Miraisha, 1968). 30 Hiroyuki Torigoe, Chiiki Jichikai No Kenkyu [Study of Regional Self-Governing Associations] (Kyoto: Minerva Shobo, 1994). 31 Andre´ Sorensen and Carolin Funck, Living Cities in Japan (New York: Routledge, 2007). 32 Torigoe, Kankyo Shakaigaku No Riron To Jissen; Yosuke Maeda, “Creating a Diversified Community: Community Safety Activity in Musashino City, Japan,” Geoforum 43, no. 2 (2012): 342 – 52.

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the jichikai system provided a means of articulating and dealing with the ‘unusual’ event (the golf resort project) within the ‘normal’ institutional framework. Unlike the first two functions, which essentially pertain to the community resistance capacity, this function enhances community resilience in that it mitigates and absorbs potential social distress arising from disagreements over the project and from the opposition movement itself.

Matsukawa village: geographical and historical settings Matsukawa village, the case study site, lies in the Azumino basin at the foothills of the Northern Japan Alps. Most of the current 10,000 village inhabitants live on the eastern edge of the village, from which one can observe snow-capped mountains into early summer. The western half of the village is mountainous and forested (Figure 2) and the Ashima River has formed a gently sloped alluvial fan, overlooking rice paddies intermingled with scattered houses (Figure 3). This forested alluvial fan area, named Godohara, was the site of the golf resort project. From the mid 1950s through the late 1960s, Japan experienced double-digit economic growth fuelled by industrialisation along the Pacific manufacturing belt.33 A young labour force moved from rural to urban areas. This movement and resulting rural decline became a major political issue. To counter this trend, ‘mini-growth’ projects were promoted in disadvantaged regions, often under the mantra of ‘alleviating regional disparities’. One such developmental project, The Act on New Industrial Cities (1962), was a statesponsored project intended to spread manufacturing industries to selected ‘local core cities’ outside the Pacific manufacturing belt. In 1963, the Matsumoto-Suwa region of Nagano Prefecture was designated as one of the new industrial cities by the central government. The village of Matsukawa is located on the remote edge of the designated area and had little hope of capturing any new industrialisation, but promoting leisure and tourism seemed like a realistic path to diversify its rice-dominated local economy.34 The number of golf courses in the country, for example, increased from 74 in 1957 to 263 by 1961. Hotaka town, Matsukawa’s southern neighbour, opened a golf course in 1972. Under these circumstances, it is not surprising that the forested area of the Godohara alluvial fan area, no longer used for small-scale timbering and firewood collection, now represented ‘empty’ land available for development. To gain insights into how the ensuing developmental project unfolded in this rural village during the 1970s, our fieldwork was conducted in and around the village between 2011 and 2012. It included archival work with local historical documents and 27 interview occasions with 24 local residents and non-local informants who had good knowledge or involvement with the golf course development.

Godohara golf resort project In December 1972, Tokyo-based Sankyo Kaihatsu Co unveiled a proposal to build an 18-hole golf course and five nature park zones in the Godohara area. Inconspicuously, 61 hectares of the land had already been acquired by Sankyo through regional real estate agents. After the turn of the year, Ichiro Takada, the mayor of Matsukawa, expressed an 33 K. Matsuhashi and K. Togashi, “Locational Dynamics and Spatial Structures in the Japanese Manufacturing Industries: A Review on the Japanese Industrial Restructuring Process of Leading Sectors,” Geographical Review of Japan [Series B] 61, no. 1 (1988): 174 – 89. 34 Village of Matsukawa, Koho Matsukawa, no. 85 (August 1970).

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Figure 2. Matsukawa village, Nagano.

Figure 3. Godohara alluvial fan area at the foot of Mt. Ariake (2268m: pictured left) with Matsukawa village in the foreground, view from Ikeda. Source: author.

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approving stance on the project. Members from key local organisations, including the village council, the committee on agriculture, the chamber of commerce and the agricultural cooperatives, formed the Commission on Natural Environment Conservation (CNEC). After visits to golf courses in nearby municipalities, meetings with Sankyo and consultations with other relevant government offices, the CNEC submitted a list of recommendations to the village office. The list included guidelines for forest conservation (at least 40% to be preserved), drainage treatment, flood prevention and road construction/ maintenance. On the basis of these recommendations, the golf project was modified and accepted by Sankyo. Upon this acceptance, the village followed a normal protocol of consulting with ‘affected districts’, the four districts (i.e. jichikai) adjacent to the proposed site of the golf resort. This consultation is a convention that is still followed scrupulously whenever important village-level decisions need to be made. As discussed below, this practice, which gives a relatively strong, autonomous power to (only certain) jichikai rather than equal power to all individual residents, played a pivotal role in the process of the controversy. At these consultations, of the four ‘affected districts’, the Nishihara District and the Godo District opposed the project, and the Nezumiana District and the Minami-Godo District supported it. As a result, the project was not about to move forward quickly. Resident movement: its success and limitations When the village office was going forward with the project, a resident-driven movement against the golf course project surfaced in the village. Led by Matsukawa native, Takashi Tada (pseudonym), a mountaineer, the Matsukawa Nature Conservation Society (MNCS) was formed on 11 January 1974. Confident and charming Tada was able to mobilise dedicated friends and followers to advance this movement. The MNCS worked closely with the residents of the Nishihara District. Tada also took advantage of his personal connections and invited experts from outside the village on issues such as ground water pollution, flood risks and damage to the cultural heritage of the area that might arise as the result of a golf course development. The MNCS collected 2919 signatures opposing the golf course project in less than a month. In the village of 6636 people then, the number clearly represented a majority of eligible voters. After receiving the petition from the MNCS on 31 January, the mayor concluded that the village would not allow the golf resort development, noting that the majority of the local residents and two affected districts were against it. The resident movement achieved an important victory in a short period, but this was far from the end of the story. As of September 1974, the mayor’s attitude seemed unchanged, as expressed by his comment during the regular council meeting, ‘I think that it would be very difficult for the village to promote tourism, considering the geographic and climatic conditions of our village. Therefore, we have no plan to promote tourism at this point. Even if private companies propose tourism development, we will not go forward with it unless the village residents approve it’ (authors’ translation). However, Sankyo went on the offensive around this time, and started negotiations behind the scenes with the affected districts, including offers of ‘cooperation money’, and of preferred employment opportunities for their residents, as well as lobbying of village officials and council members. On 16 March 1975, 13 months after the mayor had declared the project dead, Sankyo submitted a memo to the mayor and the local council head, restating its interest in developing a golf resort. The memo conveyed the company’s stronger commitment to environmental protection including (1) guaranteeing water supply from the company’s deep

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well in case of depletion of water in surrounding districts, (2) guaranteeing compensation for any damage to agricultural products from drainage and (3) the cancellation of cottage development by the golf course. During the interpellation session of the regular council meeting in April 1975, several council members expressed a positive view of the golf course development. Sensing the change in the mood, the MNCS put pressure on the mayor not to change his negative position. However, the move to approve the golf course project was accelerated when the Nishihara District changed its stance and proclaimed an ‘approval with a proviso’ for the project on 27 May 1975. The surprising turnaround of the Nishihara District requires explanation, but for now, we focus on the actions of the local council. On 2 June, the mayor formally stated that all affected districts now approved the proposal, and the village was now ready to authorise the golf resort development (by this time, the Godo District had also given approval). After the mayor’s statement, the actions of the local council were swift, and in the eyes of those who were against the project, deceitful. The council formed the Special Committee on the Golf Course, held another round of hearings with Sankyo and the MNCS, paid visits to several nearby golf courses and concluded that the committee approved the project. On the basis of this decision, at the extraordinary council meeting on 12 August 1975, the project was approved 13 to 1. A new round of consultations with the affected districts was held in order to seal the pact. The MNCS did not stay idle after the mayor and the local council shifted to approve the project. In July 1975, it submitted a letter of complaint to the village government, and in August, it held an emergency meeting after the special committee’s decision to approve the project. Even after the local council’s final approval, the MNCS continued to voice its concerns on the possible adverse effects of the golf course development and continued its educational campaign among the residents and a wider public. A symbolic moment came when the MNCS asked the village community centre to provide a booth space at the annual village cultural festival in November to present the potential adverse effects of the golf course. The community centre office first declined the request, saying that it was inappropriate to present opinions against the decisions of the village and the council at a public occasion. But residents voiced their concerns about the violation of the freedom of expression and the importance of social education, and finally, the booth was granted with a condition that the political overtones be muted. Despite these continuing efforts to raise public awareness of the issues, the reality was that the MNCS did not have the direct leverage to control the fate of the project at this point. Although it could not directly control the outcome, the MNCS did have a significant effect in this controversy; it certainly raised awareness of the project among village residents and had a visible impact on the mayor’s decision to hold back from the project, at least temporarily. In particular, charismatic Tada played a significant role in mobilising supporters, drawing on external resources (e.g. professors from Shinshu University), and being able to phrase concerns in a scientific language. In many ways, the MNCS had the classic ingredients for a successful modern-style social movement enabled by ‘strong’ social capital (e.g. local and non-local networks, strong leadership and participatory democracy). Without this movement, the construction of the golf resort might well have been started before Sankyo filed for bankruptcy. Furthermore, the fact that this movement was led by a Matsukawa-born resident, not, for example, by amenity migrants from Tokyo, made it easier for the village community to support, or at least tolerate, the movement. In other words, the local leadership was a factor that contributed to community latitude as well as to effective opposition.

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Nevertheless, the case of the MNCS demonstrates the potential limitations of resident movements.35 First, it is difficult to keep up the interest level of supporters. It was difficult for village residents who lived outside the immediate project area to ‘care’ very much after a while. Second, unlike jichikai, voluntary organisations such as the MNCS are not considered legitimate representatives of the residents, and face a constant risk of being dismissed as a ‘bunch of activists’. In this respect, our interview revealed that key members of the MNCS maintained close relations with some residents of the Nishihara District throughout the controversy, and provided the district with knowledge and resources that informed and supported the district’s opposition. In this sense, the power of the MNCS was realised indirectly through its connection with the Nishihara District.

Local institutions and local outsiders: Nishihara District The Nishihara District is located at the tip of the Godohara alluvial fan area, directly below the proposed golf resort site. It is not difficult to imagine that the district would strongly oppose the project. However, as mentioned above, the district switched from opposition to approval, albeit with proviso. Why did the Nishihara District change its position? Furthermore, the role of Nishihara also raises a question about how the jichikai influenced both the resistance and latitude of the community in this controversy. To answer these questions, it is first necessary to understand the district’s unique history. In 1945, as part of the country’s post-war reclamation project to increase food production and to defuse potential social discontent among the young population, labourers aged 15– 19 years were sent to Matsukawa village to convert the land, forested with red pine trees and filled with granite boulders, into wet rice paddies. By 1972, when the Reclaimed Land Agricultural Coop of the village was ‘progressively dissolved’, the district had 42 households of a uniquely young demographic profile. Very few people were older than 60 years at the time of the golf resort controversy. In the eyes of long-term village residents, these young settlers were considered ‘outsiders’, reinforcing the young people’s strong bonding. The district also had a relatively large number of Japanese Communist Party members. Perhaps most crucially, many of these young residents were the second or third sons of their families, which meant they had ‘no place’ in their hometowns because the first son was traditionally expected to inherit the household. For the young residents of Nishihara, there was little choice but to make a living off the land in Matsukawa; paradoxically, they were locally rooted outsiders. We cannot understand their strong opposition to the golf course without appreciating their position in the village community and their emotional attachment to the land. Although we were unable to find any written records to explain why the residents of Nishihara reversed their earlier opposition to the golf course on 27 May 1975, interviews with several long-term residents unveiled the story. It started with a change in the Nishihara District’s chairperson. By convention, this district rotated the chairperson among the household heads on a regular basis. The new chairperson was a moderate man, not a strong leader. He was not particularly acquainted with the controversy, not being on the special golf resort project commission formed by the district. (The head of the commission had been working closely with Tada, the head of the MNCS.) 35 We also point out that strictly from the vantage point of today, with village residents more or less content not having a major development project in the Godohara area, the village council’s majoritybased approval of the golf resort project was a ‘wrong’ decision, showing the limitations of this type of governance structure.

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Sometime in April or May, a village official visited the new chairperson at home and persuaded him to sign a document without reading it. The document announced the district’s approval of the golf resort project. When the unintentional decision was discovered, a district assembly, instead of blaming the new chairperson, who was understandably embarrassed and ashamed of his action, decided to add unrealistically tough conditions to the approval. The most notable of these conditions was the demand for construction of a massive 200-m wide mudslide-control dam along the Ashima River to protect the district from possible flooding. The locals called the proposed dam ‘Nishihara’s Great Wall’. The assembly decided not to request monetary compensation because they would have to relent as soon as the company offered the requested sum. Affected districts Godo and MinamiGodo demanded monetary compensations, which totalled 40 million yen (about 133,000 US dollars at that time). Little headway was made in the negotiations for the golf resort project from the fall of 1975 onward. Mayor Takada resigned because of illness (rumours suggest it was partly due to the excessive strain from the strife). On 7 March 1976, new mayor Tomio Ota was elected. He worked aggressively to mediate the negotiations and by 1977 Sankyo had accepted most requests from the affected districts except those of Nishihara. Finally, a village-sponsored study by an engineering professor at Shinshu University concluded in January 1978 that the dam was not necessary for the purpose of flood prevention. With this verdict, all obstacles were removed and the project was about to go forward. In effect, Nishihara’s request for the ‘Great Wall’ delayed the project by two additional years. Their opposition was supported by MNCS, thus its effect on the project cannot be evaluated in isolation; however, certain points from this episode can be highlighted. First, the protocol of assigning disproportionate political capital to ‘affected’ jichikai gave Nishihara significant power. Without the jichikai and its associated practices, the voice of the ‘local outsiders’ who typically had limited social capital in the village would not have carried as much weight as it did. Second, the jichikai system ultimately provided a more enduring and politically difficult-to-ignore basis for community resistance than the voluntarily organised resident movement, led by the externally well-connected local leader, could. In other words, the knowledge and resources of the MNCS were effectively utilised, through its working relations with the Nishihara District, whose political legitimacy was protected by the jichikai system. Third, while the above two points focus on how the jichikai system empowered the resistance movement, we can also interpret the role of the jichikai with respect to community latitude. That is, the presence of the jichikai made it easier for the local community (including the vast majority who were not actively involved with the issue) to articulate the ‘unusual’ event (i.e. golf resort project) as well as the opposition movement as ‘normal’ local affairs along with other ordinary and recurring issues (e.g. repairing damaged walking paths and planning for the next village festival).36 This lowers the risk of alienating the actors of the opposition movement in the community. This function is particularly important in a small community, where openly expressing their individual opinions on a particular issue could cause unnecessary distress or mistrust with their 36 Drawing on the case of a coastal village of Tohoku that was hit by the devastating tsunami on 11 March 2011, Ueda and Torigoe show that even this once-in-a-century event was ‘normalized’ through indigenous community rituals along with other, more frequent sea-related disasters and casualties. In their case, too, institutions to transform the ‘unusual’ to the ‘usual’ are seen as a key to community resilience. Kyoko Ueda and Hiroyuki Torigoe, “Why Do Victims of the Tsunami Return to the Coast?” International Journal of Japanese Sociology no. 21 (2012): 21 – 9.

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neighbours who shared many other aspects of their everyday lives. It is important to emphasise, nevertheless, that the latitude of the community were maintained not because of the inherent characteristics of the jichikai, but because the conflict and the resistance were articulated within the existing local institution. It was this articulation that gave legitimacy to the decision that was finally reached, even among those who felt differently. During this controversy, Sankyo was having difficulties of its own. The oil crisis shook the Japanese economy soon after the company brought the golf resort proposal to Matsukawa in December 1972. The company had grown through aggressive real estate development of second homes and, struggling with financial difficulties, was unable to pay the land-holding tax in 1977. On 20 March 1978, two months after the final obstacles to the project were lifted, the Tokyo District Court declared the company bankrupt. The golf resort project was effectively halted. The focus of the village shifted to the question of the 61 hectares of land still owned by Sankyo. For the village the worst-case scenario would have been a disorderly and fragmented transfer of the land followed by rampant development. The ideal was the purchase of the land by the village to prevent such development. Funds to acquire the land came from an unexpected source. Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) was building two large dams in Omachi City, just north of Matsukawa along the Takase River. The power lines would have to go through the upper end of the Godohara alluvial fan forest on their way to Tokyo. The mayor negotiated at least 75 million yen of compensation (apparently the village received further compensation, but TEPCO did not disclose the amount). In the end, the village used the money to purchase Sankyo’s land at 120 million yen, far lower than what it cost Sankyo to acquire it. Ironically, the five-year controversy was both started and settled by the force of developmental projects. Embodied cultural capital of the village community A large project, like the golf resort development, in a small rural community has a potential to deepen social divides, erode mutual trust and induce political corruption as a result of the strains of disagreements, conflict of interest and illicit money flows over such a project, whether it is eventually built or not. In other words, it may undermine what is conventionally thought as ‘good’ social capital. In our case study, the jichikai system provided one way in which such potential social distress was mitigated, hence enhancing community latitude. Nevertheless, our fieldwork led us to believe that there was something beyond such formal institutions that facilitated community latitude (or that somehow ‘held the community together’). Here, we think that it is appropriate to call it a form of embodied cultural capital, which cannot be easily reduced to standard social capital such as ‘strong social ties’ or ‘well-established trust’, by drawing on a few illustrative episodes. First, as mentioned above, Tada played a key role in carrying out the resident movement, by leading the MNCS during the controversy. Tada’s elder brother was a prisoner of WWII in Siberia. Like many other prisoners in the former Soviet Union, he was educated to be a devout communist. One of Tada’s friends recalls that Tada’s brother was very concerned about the proposed golf resort project, but rather than raising his own voice, he asked Tada to organise the movement, so that the movement would not have a clear ‘communist colour’. It is easy to interpret this as an act of disguise; yet, in our view, it is also possible to interpret it as a courtesy gesture, calculated or not, to other villagers, signalling that the movement was not intended to take a party line. (After all in a small community like Matsukawa, it would have been unmistakable who were behind the scenes.) Second, during our fieldwork, the role of communist members during the controversy drew our interest. Besides Tada’s connection with his brother, there were communist

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members who played key roles in the MNCS and in the opposition movement in general. It was clear that the village community as a whole did not embrace the Japanese Communist Party. Yet this controversy did not follow a clear political ideological divide. During our interviews, we encountered situations in which we essentially asked, ‘Why did you work with him even though he had a different political ideology (i.e. communism/ socialism)?’ And a typical answer was (something like) ‘Sure, he was a communist, but he was a “Matsukawa communist”; he really prioritised the village interest (over the party’s)’, indicating that residents were closely watching whether communist members were acting for the sake of the party’s interest per se, or for a wider local interest. What both episodes above indicate to us is the presence of a subtle, shared logic or habit of what constituted appropriate behaviour among the villagers, which helped to mitigate potentially deep social divides along political ideological lines precisely even when strong social ties or well-established trust were absent in the community. To the extent that these behavioural ‘codes’ are not formally institutionalised, but rather appear to be embodied in the actors’ ‘way of thinking and doing things’, we can call them a type of embodied cultural capital. In short, it is this type of embodied capital, not Putnam-style social capital (i.e. mutual trust and networks), that sustained the community latitude at the time of social crisis, and in the situation of ‘mutual non-understanding’.37 It is not within the scope of this paper to determine factors that form embodied cultural capital, and this issue requires further investigations. Nevertheless, we can offer a few speculative remarks. Rice production traditionally demanded a close cooperation of farmers across areas in sharing water, labour and in some cases equipment. Nishihara’s residents also regularly worked with farmers outside their district, which likely cultivated shared embodied cultural capital. Matsukawa is also one of the small number of towns and villages in Japan that have never experienced any municipal mergers since the Great Municipal Merger of Meiji (1889). Combined with the lack of clear internal geographic divisions (i.e. no major valleys or hills separating settlements), this history helps to cultivate a sense of unity among village residents, even across the districts that were relatively autonomous villages until the end of the Edo period. There is only one elementary school and one junior high school in the village, which also helps to foster the residents’ identity as ‘Matsukawa villagers’. The significance of ‘old’ village boundaries is clearer when one observes many other Japanese villages with relatively recent merger experience; political issues tend to quickly transform into interdistrict conflicts.

Conclusions There is little question that some luck played a role in ‘preserving’ the Godohara area of Matsukawa. If anything, the case study shows the formidable power of the developmental regime. To be sure, ‘power’ was not embodied solely in Sankyo’s financial might, or in the state’s powerful regulatory systems. Indeed in the early phase of the project, the village and the surrounding municipalities were petitioning the Ministry of Construction to develop a grand recreational base spanning the northern Azumino basin. Mayor Takada of Matsukawa village commented, ‘because (tourism/leisure development) plans up until today were by small and medium firms, they have not been in the best interest of the village’, implying that a tourism/leisure development would have been welcome, if carried out by credible, large companies.38 After all, it was a period in which large-scale 37 38

Torigoe, Kankyo Shakaigaku No Riron To Jissen. Village of Matsukawa. Koho Matsukawa, no. 92 (August 1973): 1.

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construction projects were equated with modernity and ‘development’ all over the world. Hence, ‘power’ was also internalised, as a particular notion of ‘development’, in the minds of many local inhabitants. The golf resort project might well have been realised if Sankyo had not gone bankrupt. Nevertheless, we think that this case study usefully exemplifies a local community near the ‘edge of the basin’ and offers insights to help our understanding of community resilience. Our study shows that Matsukawa’s resilience, more specifically latitude, was a product of three combined dynamics: a modern environmental movement led by a local leader, voice of ‘local outsiders’ legitimised by indigenous institutions and a potential social strife moderated by the embodied cultural capital of the community. These dynamics enabled the village community to withstand the distress emanating from the controversy. Lacking any one of them would have risked the community shifting to a socially undesirable basin of attraction, whether the project was completed or not. In particular, we underscore several implications of the study for the existing literature on community resilience. First, our study cautions against an increasingly standardised and institutionalised notion of social capital as involving such elements as strong social ties, mutual trust and a narrow form of democratic governance. The danger of such an understanding is especially acute when a focal ‘disturbance’ is socially divisive and geographically uneven within a community. We suggest instead that more subtle forms of social capital, or perhaps more appropriately called embodied cultural capital, may play a critical role in somehow holding the community together when ‘standard’ social capital is endangered or is weak. Second, roles of ‘traditional’ or indigenous institutions, which may not fit with an idealised form of democratic governance, should not be overlooked both in practice and in theory. In our case study, the jichikai system acted to give legitimacy to the voice of those who might have been most affected by the project, but were socially marginalised and were engaging in more surreptitious forms of resistance. It is critical to emphasise, nevertheless, the source of community resistance and latitude did not emerge because of the presence of the jichikai system per se; rather, it emerged because the concerns of the ‘local outsiders’ were articulated and legitimated through the already existing local institution. Third, we should be aware of potential limitations of overt forms of resistance, as well as of local leadership. Externally supporting local resistance movements and their leaders is an oft-supported idea. However, in our case study, we can easily imagine that strong external support for Tada and the MNCS, however, crucial they were in the controversy, would have probably caused more local disarray than helping the problem because that would have defied the existing institutional order (especially the role of the jichikai system). From the vantage point of today, opposing a large-scale project in the Godohara area may seem like an obvious course of action, and that seems to be how the current residents affirmatively remember the controversy (i.e. an active and persistent resident movement put an end to the project).39 However, our study indicates that the outcome of the controversy was far from predetermined, and was in some ways a fortuitous combination of factors and circumstances (e.g. local leadership, ‘local outsiders’, traditional institutions, subtle postures/dispositions and Sankyo’s bankruptcy). One may be tempted to draw a list of general ingredients (i.e. policy prescriptions) that enhance community resilience from these findings (as the literature on social capital often ends up doing). That is not our intention, particularly because the roles and significance of these factors are

39

See also footnote 12.

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continuously changing. Rather, our modest ‘policy’ goal has been to describe a community near the edge of the basin more accurately, in hopes to provide material for the present-day local actors to reflect on the history of the community (e.g. that the outcome was not an inevitable result of a successful social movement), and to contemplate their actions for the future when their community may face another crisis.40 Acknowledgements We would like to thank those who cooperated with our interviews in Matsukawa and its vicinity, and especially Fukiko Shirasawa who helped us during our fieldwork in countless ways. We also thank Bill Meyer, Kazunori Matsumura, Peter Klepeis and the anonymous referees for their detailed and constructive advice and Janice Swain for her thorough editorial help. Financial support for this study was provided by a Picker Fellowship from the Research Council of Colgate University.

Notes on contributors Daisaku Yamamoto is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography and the Asian Studies Program at Colgate University, Hamilton, NY. He is an economic geographer with particular interests in geographical political economy and regional development. His past works include studies of industrial clusters, tourism development and regional disparities in Canada, Japan and the USA. He holds an MA from Simon Fraser University (Canada) and a PhD from the University of Minnesota (USA). Yumiko Yamamoto is a research affiliate in the Department of Geography at Colgate University, Hamilton, NY. Her past works include agent-based land use modelling of shifting cultivation in Laos, and glacier variations in the Northern Patagonia ice field (Chile). Her current research includes the study of the changing use of forests and rural development in Japan. She holds an MA from the University of Tsukuba (Japan) and a PhD from the University of Tokyo (Japan).

40

As we are writing this paper, there is a proposal, brought by a regional developer and a religious organisation, to build a large-scale cemetery park in a still privately owned part of the Godohara area. Nearby residents and districts are opposing the project.