To answer the question of how a new plate is created, this study examined the process of prototyping in a Peruvian contemporary cuisine restaurant, focusing on the process of combining ingredients and cooking methods in the search for "deliciousness." Contemporary cuisine is a cooking style that attempts to create an avant-garde expression of the nature and culture of the place where the restaurant is located. At Central, a Peruvian contemporary cuisine restaurant, the cooks try to create new dishes daily. Anthropologists have wondered how new cuisines are made, but the process of creating a new dish has not been sufficiently investigated. To reveal the process, following the literature, we asked the following two questions: （1） Although the process of creation has been exemplified in fragments as a bricolage, what is the process as a whole? （2） What is the process of improvisation that can realize "deliciousness" while responding to the nature of the ingredients? This research sought to answer these questions through an ethnographic investigation of the process of prototyping at Central.

This paper explores how "significant otherness" emerges between Japanese lacquer （urushi） trees and humans. For thousands of years, people in Japan have collected the sap of urushi trees for lacquerware-crafting bowls, furniture, Buddhist statues, and more. Even though urushi is an important material within Japanese culture, the industry is shrinking with cheaper imported lacquer from other parts of Asia. Based on fieldwork in two small villages in Kansai, Japan, I trace how people are trying to revitalize traditional methods of urushi tree cultivation and sap collection. The process must be done with care because touching and breathing in the sap can also be toxic to humans. Drawing on Feminist STS （Science and Technology Studies） scholars, I trace three scales of "fractal involution" between humans and the trees:"satoyama" revitalization movements as the macro scale, caring for trees as the middle scale, and transforming immune systems as the micro scale.

The purpose of this special issue is to clarify how accumulated activities and their linkages to humans, heterogeneous organisms, and materials have generated mountain village landscapes in Japan's industrial capitalist society and to present new methodologies for understanding their historical dynamics and appropriate interventions from an anthropological perspective. To this end, specialists in geology, anthropology, architectural history, history, and area studies collaborate to provide an ethnography/ ethnohistory of mountain village landscapes in Japan since the early modern period.

Several of Japan's mountain village landscapes may be more appropriately regarded as "ruins" than as places that remain unaffected by the state or industrial capitalism. Adopting this perspective, we approach the present mountain village landscape not as a place that is removed from the logic of the state and capital but rather as a historical space in which these influences have accumulated. The papers in this special issue examine the triad of plates, soils, slopes, and other material environments; crops, including millet, paddy rice, mountain tea, cedar, tobacco, and other species; and the people associated with them within a long-term historical scale （i.e., longue durée） since the early modern period, placing them within their broader political and economic contexts.

This paper aimed to gain insight into the dynamics of mountain village landscapes, which have unique material characteristics, through collaboration involving cultural anthropologists and geoscientists involved in landscape production. To this end, the project starts with the theory of "feral landscapes," a landscape ethnography/history, which is a collaboration between geoscience （geomorphology） and cultural anthropology focusing on different time scales and different types of information. We aimed to show that the mountain village landscapes of contemporary Japan, which may appear to be "escapes from the state" or representations of "the past," are, in fact, "landscapes of the future" linked to the state and global capitalism, created through the interplay of state, industrial capitalist forces, and the exogenous influence of residents. Specifically, this paper describes how mountain village landscapes of Western Tokushima have emerged through interplay between times of the earth's tectonic plate movements, tobacco plantation production in mountain villages that have taken place since the early modern period, and daily practices that continue to operate repeatedly on the crumbling earth.

Referencing the rich body of anthropological and historical research on mountain societies in mainland Southeast Asia and Japan, this article seeks to elucidate the relationship between mountainous districts and low-lying plains districts by examining the interrelationship between landscape, livelihood, and political power. Specifically, it focuses on the formation and structural transformation of the mountain landscape of early modern Kitō Village in the mountains of eastern Shikoku. The patchy mountain village landscape created by early modern Japanese slash-and-burn farming was born out of a complex entanglement between internal and external factors, including the early modern cadastral survey and tribute systems, familial and social land use structures that emerged in relation to those systems, the commodification of goods produced on the idle fields created by the slash-and-burn process, and the circulation of those goods. It was shaped by the fact that shogunal and domainal systems of rule treated mountain villages as distinct social formations and the commodification of agricultural products produced on slash-and-burn fields developed in response to early modern urban demand.

In this paper, we explore the dynamics of mountainous landscapes, including national forests in Japan by examining the history of landscape transformation in the Yanase-Mountain, through the recent landscape anthropological approach that focuses on the dynamics of material forms of landscapes consisting of both natural and artificial components. Yanase-mountain, a famous forestry area in the Edo period, became a national forest in the Meiji era, and a forest railway was introduced to transport timber overland in the late Meiji era. In this paper, we describe the dynamics of the Yanase-mountain landscape over a period of about 200 years, focusing on entanglements of "inherent times" between human and nonhuman such as topography, hydrological environment, various trees, and forest railway. Through this historical description, implications of this paper's approach for contemporary issues in landscape anthropology is discussed.

This paper examines the dynamics of the formation of the mountain village landscape in the Shikoku Mountains, focusing especially on wild tea, while comparing its attributes with landscapes in the highlands of mainland Southeast Asia. According to the evergreen forest culture theory, common cultural properties are shared between southwest Japan and the highlands of mainland Southeast Asia. In this context, tea production in the Shikoku mountains is considered proof of the transplantation of the original Japanese culture from Southeast Asian mountains in ancient times. However, historical records and government statistics show that the landscape of the Shikoku mountains was a result of wild tea coexisting within the shifting cultivation practiced in the days of the early modern state control of peripheral areas and the penetration of cash economy into the mountains during that period. Therefore, the wild tea landscape of the Shikoku mountains is presented as a tool for comparing it with its Southeast Asian counterparts by connecting the findings of the evergreen forest culture theory and those of premodern statecraft.

This article attempts to regard architects, urban designers, and farmers equally as "making beings" embedded in landscapes. It reveals a structure of "generatively chained reliance" in the process of landscape formation, in which various human and non-human actors, including making beings, rely—often coincidently—upon others' capabilities, systems, and infrastructures. The article begins by revisiting architects' and urban designers' evolving attitudes towards urban and rural landscapes since the 1960s. Next, cases of sustainable agriculture taking place in terraced paddy fields on Sado Island, Japan—revolving around the conservation of the endangered Japanese crested ibis—are examined diachronically. The results explicate how a structure of generatively chained reliance is created by the farmers' efforts to continue sustainable agriculture, and reveal a parallelism within this structure among architects, urban designers, and the farmers. The article concludes that the generative structure per se acts as the dynamism of landscape formation.

Focusing on the view that the interaction between the "design" of the pachinko machine and the player shapes the experience of playing pachinko, this article discusses some new aspects of players' experiences. It shows that players repeatedly play because the "predictability" of winning attracts them. This is assumed based on the numerical data presented by the pachinko machine manufacturers or the design of data-related presentations around the pachinko machine. This article also focuses on the belief and practice of "Okaruto" which players spontaneously create and find enjoyment with. Finally, it concludes that pachinko players are not only enticed by the seeming predictability but also hold their ways to find excitement from the unpredictability of betting.