Changing Coastal Commons in a Sub-Tropical Island Ecosystem, Yaeyama Islands, Japan - Island Futures: Conservation and Development Across the Asia-Pacific Region - page 135

From information collected so far, TSWs are either community owned or
managed by particular individuals and kin groups. In the former case, TSW used to
be treated as local commons, and any catch was distributed among community
members. In the latter case, each TSW structure has been maintained by extended
family groups. It is however amply evident that, in both cases, the maintenance and
repair of TSWs requires considerable joint effort. How to integrate people's
participation toward the goals of resource management and sustainable livelihood
remains a pressing challenge, and would benefit from successful examples of “good
practice”. Shiraho could provide an important example and model for a promising
future of responsible resource co-management, both ecologically and culturally.
The fringing reef has been the important location providing sustenance to the
local population. In spite of the existence of legal claims to coastal waters autho-
rized by national fishery legislation, local people should not lose complete entitle-
ment and be excluded from access and the sustainable use of shallow reefs for their
own livelihood.
As it turns out, local perceptions and practices about how to use the reef system
for local sustenance are quite widespread. Claims to inoh (reef flats inside the surf
break) have historically been maintained in succession over many centuries, as
evidenced from local knowledge on Iriomote. According to a local leader, the sea
inside the reef is generally called sunah . Deep sea beyond the surf break is termed
ubutuh . Local community members recognize that sunah is the zone where
community members have what they consider to be an equal right to access marine
resources; whereas ubutuh is the zone where full-time fishers are entitled to harvest
(Ishigaki, 2009, personal communication). In the coral reef environments of the
Yaeyama Islands, such a recognition to divide the land and sea into local commons
and another commons allowed for outsider access provides a valuable insight into
the use of coastal waters as sato-umi commons in the future.
Discussion
Formal and Informal Fishing Rights
As mentioned earlier in this paper, sato-umi as a new concept explaining the local
commons in Japan becomes a key to understanding local engagement in marine
resource management at the community basis.
Modern Japanese fisheries law distinguishes between several different coastal
areas. The first category of communal fishery rights concerns fishing grounds that
serve for harvesting benthos such as sea-weeds, sea-urchins and shellfish. Fishing
rights are exclusively given to members belonging to relevant FCA. The area for
aquaculture of sea-weeds, shellfish and fish is the second category of demarcated
fisheries rights. The third category deals in those fishing rights given to the small-
scale and large-scale set net fisheries as described above (Akimichi and Ruddle