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Third, the lack of abstract ideals, of essences abstracted from the phenomena of
everyday life, encourages the use of analogy and models (Callicott and Ames 1989:
15). This fondness for analogy is extended and embroidered into a use of symbol, of
metaphor, and in particular of synecdoche, as is suggested in several of the cases
studies examined here. On a relatively undifferentiated ontological plain, one
manifestation of nature, one species of animal, indeed one animal, can be taken
without prejudice as representative of the infinitely varied but otherwise
undifferentiated totality.
Last, and following on directly, we find a relative lack of prioritisation of the human
situation in the natural world. The absence both of abstract ideals and of a vision of
a transcendental plain and the emphasis on the immediate context bring an
instinctive directness to human contact with the environment (Berque 1982). The
human situation is not privileged, thus creating the conditions for what today might
be defined as an ecocentric approach to the environment. The hemispheric
congruence of dualities (as opposed to Western dichotomic, absolute opposites)
encourages the identification of mediatory presences, often on liminal terrain. Thus
foxes, appearing at the edge of agricultural land or along the skirts of hills, act as
messengers for the rice deity Inari and then as actual embodiments of the god.
Monkeys have been cast in a similar role as mediators; they are considered not in
terms of a simian, animal Other to the rationalising human, but as 'simultaneously
similar, yet distinct from, humans' (Ohnuki-Tierney 1987:22; see also Asquith
1995). The absence of a privileged position for the human, the lack of a hard line
drawn between human and animal, encourages the sort of animal
anthropomorphism that has been identified as a particularly strong feature of
Japanese attitudes towards animals (Kellert 1993).
In the short accounts that follow, these features of the Japanese ontological
landscape appear in various guises, each one that much further stretched to
accommodate new thought and practice. In the first of these, salmon are removed
both from their original symbolic home and from their normal habitat to be released
into Tokyo's main river and treated there as symbols of nature recrudescent. The
aim of the exercise is cast not in the terminology and conventions of new ecological
thought, however, but rather in a more explicitly anthropocentric idiom. Fireflies
play a much more central place in the history of a traditional relationship with animals,
but, as is shown in the second of these stories, along with changes in the context of
human life in Japan, this role is being transformed to reflect a rapid shift in human
priorities and style of living. New ecological thinking involves a reworking of the
human relationship with other animals. As the third of the following case studies
shows, the setting aside of areas as 'natural' animal habitats represents a clearly
articulated attempt to introduce and put into practice ideas drawn from the lexicon
of new ecological ideas and practices. Starting with the Komatsugawa stream, each
project represents a more substantial re-definition of traditional practice than the
last.