“Lost in the Fields”

Wayfinding and Disorientation Within a Japanese Agrarian Landscape

Abstract

In this paper I examine experiences of disorientation for farmers in an upland village in central Japan, drawing on anthropological literature on wayfinding and path-making to understand the ways in which rhythmic movement in and between fields, an emergent property of farmers’ continuous perceptual engagement with their surroundings, is disrupted. I argue that the differential mobility of people, through migration and in transit, creates a "frictionless" landscape in which the ability of farmers to perceptually engage with their variously textured surroundings, and attune themselves to its movement, is undermined, within the context of a changing social landscape of field ownership and management, and the "flattening" of the material landscape through farmland rationalization. These contradictory movements, and the different perceptual realities that they imply, are argued to be resolved by farmers within their day-to-day activity, as they shift between different modes of perceptually-oriented movement.