Crossing the Internal Frontiers - Agri-culture: Reconnecting People, Land and Nature - page 179

it. At the end of the 1980s, he saw that there was a connection between
the sea, forest and river, and he began to talk to people. He travelled up the
watershed - a fisherman out of water. He encouraged the other fishermen
of Karakuwa town to organize and reflect, and then begin discussions in
upstream villages. Residents of upland Murone agreed to cooperate, and
this led to the fishermen themselves providing money and labour for
reafforestation of the watershed with deciduous trees. Hatakeyama met
people in order to talk about common problems, exchange information
and share in replanting. They say the fisheries are now more productive;
perhaps more importantly, the fishermen have, with remarkable foresight,
become educators. They invite schoolchildren from the top of the mount-
ains to visit the bottom, and take their children upstream to plant trees.
The forests have now been gloriously renamed Forests of Oysters. They
are so successful that similar activities are being attempted elsewhere in
Japan. The Okawa poet Ryuko Kumatani captures the deep connections
with the following poem:
The Forest lives a long way off the Sea.
The forest, regarded as blessing of the heaven,
Is nurturing a love from far away, longing for the Sea.
Forest is the lover of the Sea. 15
What these fishermen, foresters, villagers and poets have done is to claim
a whole watershed as a common. It is a region in which they each act to
make a difference. Effectively, this has revived an important Japanese
tradition - that of the common lands, or iriaichi . Each of Japan's 70,000
traditional villages once had carefully controlled and managed commons,
with horizontal kumi associations to manage them and set locally appro-
priate rules and norms. Margaret McKean indicates: 'These thousands of villages
managed their common lands for several centuries without experiencing a single tragedy
of the commons. . . I have not yet turned up an example of a commons that suffered ecological
destruction while it was a common'. 16 It is only in recent times that there has been
steady attrition, with commons appropriated by the state or sold off for
alternative uses. For centuries 'villagers themselves invented the regulations, enforced
them, and meted out punishments, indicating that it is not necessary for regulation of the
commons to be imposed coercively or from the outside'. Now, these traditions, rights
and responsibilities are being reclaimed in the Forests of Oysters.
The Cotton Women
Dalby is a small linear town on a distant crossroads on the Darling Downs
in eastern Australia. Like many similar rural settlements, the whole