Many parents of small children will have seen Miyazaki’s classic animated film My Neighbour Totoro about Totoro, a forest spirit, who befriends two young girls. Totoro inhabits a beautiful agricultural landscape known as Satyoyama. Satoyama is a Japanese agricultural landscape that combines small scale agriculture and forest – if well managed it can be a multi-functional agriculture landscape that provides provisioning, regulating, and cultural ecosystem services. Satoyama is an iconic Japanese cultural landscape that has been destroyed in Japan by development and rural out-migration, however is now being promoted in Japan and by the Japanese government for the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) meeting in Nagoya.
In honour of the CBD meeting in Japan, The Kyoto Journal (issue 75) has a special issue on Biodiversity that includes a large section on the ideals and reality of satoyama. The table of contents for the section on the Worlds of Satoyama is:
- Satoyama: the Ideal and the Real — Brian Williams
- Smothering Streams & Habitats — Brian Williams
- Nature, Inhabited — Winifred Bird
- Satogawa: River Arteries of Life — Brian Williams
- Fireflies — Winifred Bird
- Restoring a River Quickly and Cheaply — Fukudome Shubun
- Satoumi: Wise Use of Coastal Zones — Winifred Bird
- Invaders of Lake Biwa — Komori Shigeki
- Paddy Ecosystems: Diverse or Despoiled? — Winifred Bird
- Japan’s Abandoned Satoyama Forests — Jane Singer
- Born of Despair, a Beautiful Forest — C.W. Nicol
- Myopic Forest Policy = Weepy Eyes — Jane Singer
- Aflame and Alive: Managed Grasslands in Japan — Winifred Bird
- Denuded Hillsides: Satoyama’s Other History — Sugiyama Masao
- Room for Us All — Jane Singer and Winifred Bird
UN university is conducting research on satoyama, and has a number of online resources (1, 2, and 3).