Abstract
Most Japanese people today are engaged in the service industry and are entering an era of withdrawal from agriculture, forestry and fisheries. In addition, Japan has been complaining about a declining birthrate and an aging population for a long time, and the current situation is that the population is decreasing by approximately 500,000 to 850,000 people per year. People living in rural areas in particular are aging, and the situation is moving from depopulation (a decrease in the number of households that occurred in the 1950s during the period of high economic growth) to post-depopulation (a decrease in the number of households that occurred since the 1980s), and villages are becoming increasingly vacant and dysfunctional. In this situation, wild animals have effectively taken control of the mountains and fields that were once used by people and are now abandoned. In the past, the buffer zone (in Japanese, it is called “SATOYAMA”) that existed between wild animals and human space is no longer within the reach of people, and hunting and gathering activities, which functioned as a deterrent against the pressure of animal invasion, have been shunned and weakened by the younger generation due to the wildlife protection movement, aging, and the image of physical labor. However, a small number of people are beginning to move to these areas in search of a new place to live. Among them, a small number are becoming interested in hunting and becoming hunters. In particular, the number of female hunters has exceeded 3,500 in a survey conducted by the Japan Hunters Association in 2021, and they are beginning to play an active role as a new force. This paper focuses on the social situation in which the bearers of cultural inheritance, which were traditionally reproduced in the area, are beginning to shift from local residents to immigrants. It also proposes the possibility of introducing the latest technologies such as AI into the field of wildlife control, and conceiving a support system that allows immigrants to learn local folk knowledge (hunting techniques, hunting styles, how to deal with birds and animals), which they tend to lack, and to learn at the hunting site, thereby establishing a new position as a field of visual anthropology.
