2017 Volume 22 Pages 41-58
Sustainable agriculture is generally acknowledged as necessary for the continuance of modern farming, and it is usually emphasized that ecologically harmonious agriculture is one condition of sustainable agriculture. However, there are widely varying interpretations of sustainability depending on viewpoint. In Japan, rice cultivation and the lifestyles of rural residents are growing farther apart because of the rapidly decreasing number of rice farmers. This paper focuses on the fact that Japanese farmers’ own thoughts about agricultural sustainability derive from their efforts to maintain paddy fields in a Japanese rural community. The study investigates the farmers’ anxiety, which prompted a rice farming reconstruction for continuing rice cultivation in a reclaimed village on the Ariake Coast of Japan. In this coastal community, farmers had to be cautious about watering rice fields because there tends to be an irrigation water shortage in reclaimed villages facing the sea. Therefore, irrigation water was strictly controlled by the community organization. Furthermore, the rapidly decreasing number of rice farmers provoked a sense of crisis in the few remaining farmers about whether or not to continue farming. It was predicted that the farmers would worry about the change in the relationship between water and residents’ lifestyles with rice farming in decline. However, they decided to commit to rice farming through the community organization (MURA). The paper examines the fact that the farmers’ reorganization in order to continue rice farming was due to environmental difficulties resulting from the decline in rice farming by water use history analysis. The results show that the residents lost almost all their familiar connections with water by modernizing their everyday water and irrigation systems, and the paper presents a discussion of the consequent implications for rice farming. The study concludes that local farmers thought it was important to maintain rice farming through a village organization in their coastal community, and one influence on their decision was the environmental degradation of the water quality in the Ariake inner bay, which meant higher level water resource management was needed.
