The purpose of this paper is to examine the effectiveness of daily practice in bringing about social change through efforts by each of three women in Shimane who have been linking agriculture, food, and body. This study is based on the fieldwork and interviews with the women, which were conducted from September to December 2014, as well as their blogs. The author tried to elucidate how the three were linked, what kinds of effect the link had on them and their families or people around them, what the place of Shimane Prefecture and a semi mountainous area meant, how the link affected the social movement of organic farming, and what the link suggests about the way of life after the Great East Japan Earthquake and the Fukushima nuclear accident.

This study has three key words: getting physicality back, rootedness, and looseness.

To link agriculture, food, and body allows us to remake our body physically and to remake the social phase about our body. Even if there are a lot of people, resources, history, and natural features in a region, it is common they are not organized. It is important that there are some people who know those features and recognize and link them. If one succeeds in linking them, it will generate a business, making a profit by selling and buying, create new culture and value, and construct daily life. These three cases are exactly the ideal types.

There is a deep meaning in the fact that the cases are located in Shimane and a semi mountainous area.

Although this area has been suffering from a negative image─peripheral, outer boundary, remote region, and isolated district─for a long time, in the three cases it has a positive image, for example, making a special relationship in the world of proper nouns, not an anonymous world. After 3.11 disasters, it is a big question how to live in this world; we could find the suggestion for the answer in the three cases.

Radioactive contamination of farmland and crops is a matter of public concern in Japan after the catastrophe of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant occurred in March 2011. In this study, three organic (unfertilized) and one conventional soybean fields in Minamisoma City, Fukushima Prefecture, were selected in collaboration with local farmers, and soil and soybean (Glycine max) samples were collected at the harvest in 2014. Radioactive cesium (Cs) concentration of the soybean samples was then measured and the relationship among soil chemical properties and radioactive Cs contamination in the soybean samples were investigated. Soil radioactive Cs concentration (¹³⁴Cs+¹³⁷Cs) was ranged in 510-1,100Bq/kg-dry soil (ds). Radioactive Cs in the bean samples collected in the unfertilized fields showed 12-60Bq/kg-dry weight (dw), while that from the conventional field was 2.8Bq/kg-dw. Transfer factors (TFs) were calculated as the following formula : TFs＝(soybean ¹³⁷Cs [Bq/kg-dw]/soil ¹³⁷Cs [Bq/kg-ds]). The TFs of the bean samples collected from the four fields were 0.007-0.054, which were comparable with the known values. Significant hyperbolic correlation between TFs and soil exchangeable potassium (K) concentrations were found. Soil exchangeable K concentrations in the unfertilized soybean fields were less than the desired values proposed by the Fukushima Prefectural government; therefore, application of appropriate K fertilizers into the fields may be necessary to reduce radioactive Cs uptake in soybean.

Insight into environmental changes is necessary for developing climate-adapted cultivation system in organic agriculture. To offer useful meteorological information for promoting such ability, agricultural lores (AGLs), which were traditionally handed down by Japanese people, were selected and compared with recent meteorological data. One hundred and eighty-two of AGLs, which have been recorded in the Showa period in Japan, were categorized according to prefectures, crops, agricultural operations, and varieties of indexes. These AGLs were dispersed across the country, most of AGLs were indexes of cereals mainly involving rice, and more than half of AGLs in each crops were indexes of seeding and planting operations. AGLs of flowers, birds, and trees accounted for 67.7% of whole AGLs. Blooms of cherry, Kobushi magnolia, and Japanese wisteria accounted for 46.9% in AGLs of flowers. These AGLs were indexes for planting operations of rice, sweet potato, hemp, eggplant, soybean, Japanese barnyard millet, foxtail millet, and cotton. First calls of common cuckoo, oriental cuckoo, and lesser cuckoo accounted for 58.5% in AGLs of birds. These AGLs were indexes for planting operation of soybean, foxtail millet, rice, Japanese barnyard millet, proso millet, adzuki bean, and hemp, and for harvesting operation of tea and wheat. Leaf etiolation of ginkgo and young leaf size of persimmon accounted for 26.3% in AGLs of trees. AGLs of ginkgo and persimmon were indexes for planting operation of wheat and for planting operation of soybean and edible burdock, respectively. The range of daily minimum temperature and the normal values of last frost observation day and phenology observation day were calculated from the data for 59 years of 10 meteorological observatories in Japan. Analysis of daily minimum temperature for 30 days before and after the observation of two phenology, bloom of Japanese wisteria and first call of common cuckoo, indicated that the risk of frost damage were relatively high in the period before the observation days of these phenology. The normal values of these phenology observation day were later than those of the last frost observation day in all meteorological observatories, and moreover annual comparison of these observation days showed that the index of first call of common cuckoo was more effective to avoid final frost damage in spring season.