End of Tradition, Reworking of Custom: Re-assembling Satoyama Woodlands on Tokyo’s Urban Fringe

Abstract

Has the discontinuation of traditional management practices and cultural severance in the landscape led to the end of tradition? Or is the end of tradition an opportunity for a new beginning? Through an analysis of satoyama woodlands in Japan, this chapter suggests that while older traditions may be coming to an end, new common traditions are being reassembled from the fragmented pieces. Traditional forms of common ownership and management of satoyama woodlands have been largely extinguished. Until recently, these woodlands were less exemplary of a commons, than of the anti-commons: a situation where fragmented ownership leads to resource underuse. The concept of the anti-commons provides an institutional basis for understanding why satoyama woodlands are under-managed. However, it provides little assistance in explaining why new commoning traditions are developing between urban residents and private satoyama woodland owners on the urban fringe. Since the 1990s in particular, thousands of volunteer groups have formed to restore management to abandoned satoyama woodlands, reclaiming these privately owned woodlands as local commons. To understand this reinvention of the commons, we must, integrate analyses of the institutional basis for successful collective action, with accounts of the interconnections between the historical fluidity and shifting symbolic significance of the commons. Such an integrated framework helps to explain why the anti-commons tragedy plaguing satoyama woodlands is being resolved through common solutions. It also suggests that the end of tradition is indeed an opportunity for re-assembling the commons.