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commonly found in Japan, Luciola cruciata and Luciola lateralis, have larvae that live
in water, where they feed on snails, while dragonfly nymphs are completely aquatic
(Mori 1988:80). Not all projects to introduce fireflies have been successful, and, as
in Yokohama, dragonflies have sometimes been used in their place. The presence of
dragonflies is regarded by naturalists as a good indicator of the conditions and
diversity of animal and plant life. In Yokohama, the designation of dragonfly ponds
and similar natural habitats began in 1981 and was officially incorporated into
municipal policy in 1986. The city now has an extensive network of over thirty
ponds and other small nature places, nearly all of which have water as a central feature,
using dragonflies and fireflies as symbols of nature resurgent. These include ponds
in parks and school yards, rivers, water treatment plants and set-aside fields. Two
associations have been formed, principally to interest children, around the city's
dragonfly ponds (tonbo ike), and annual national dragonfly summits are now held.
The Yokohama project represents an attempt to break down barriers of space and
of time: of space, by (re)fashioning natural corridors and nature spaces within the
city where all sorts of insects, as well as frogs and other small animals, can live; and
of time, by re-creating the experiences of animal life enjoyed by an older generation
of people now in their fifties and over, who grew up before or during the early
stages of rampant post-war urbanisation. More generally, the spaces being evoked
are those agricultural landscapes of wet-rice farming that the urban dweller has left
behind, flooded fields and streams and irrigation ditches where fireflies and
dragonflies once lived in abundance. The rice fields are but one prominent example
of a whole series of features associated with memories of childhood and with an ideal,
stereotypical rural landscape. In recent decades, partly because of the growing
proportion of the population born in big cities and partly because of the steady
transformation of rural landscapes and the decline of rice farming, this landscape
has assumed an aesthetic and moral significance, one that has been promoted by the
state, as an embodiment of traditional Japanese values (Robertson 1998:117). City-
dwellers have in growing numbers been drawn to these ordinary landscapes of rural
areas, and some have become involved in a variety of forms of agro-tourism (Knight
1998). At the same time, a reappraisal is underway of the ecological value of
agricultural landscapes, and especially wet-rice farming. Rice, fish and silkworms
form a 'self-sustaining ecosystem' that has been exploited for centuries in east China
and south Japan (Bray 1986:132). Waterways can be seen as serving the function of
bringing the ecosystems of rural areas, especially those based on wet-rice farming,
into cities; they were, and perhaps will become again, ecological corridors.
Over the centuries, insects and other forms of small animal life have been
celebrated in Japan. Fireflies appear in some of the earliest collections of Japanese
poetry, including the eighth-century Many sh , as well as in the Tale of Genji . They
were poetic symbols for the heart burning with longing and desire. Firefly hunting
(hotaru-gari), an aristocratic pursuit in the Japan of Genji's day, had become a
popular pursuit by the time of Tokugawa shogunal rule in the seventeenth, eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries (Nihon F zoku Gakkai 1979:599). Around the imperial
capital of Kyoto and the shogunal capital of Edo were a number of places famous
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