Understanding Wild Ayu (Plecoglossus altivelis) and Semi-Natural Fish Cultivation Methods as History

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  • 天然アユと近自然工法
  • テンネン アユ ト キン シゼン コウホウ

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Abstract

<p>This paper looks at changes in interactions among ayu, rivers and people, and attempts to examine the meanings of “nature” and “wild” that are created by uninterrupted history and culture through the changes of people-to-people relationships.</p><p>In the process of modernization, dams have been constructed across many Japanese rivers for the development of power sources and agricultural water utilization. The changing relationships between artificially modified rivers, ayu, a fish known as the “queen of the limpid stream”, and the people who are involved, demonstrate the modern history of human interaction with wild nature. The ayu is a very popular fish that even appears in the Anthology of Myriad Leaves written in eighth century Japan. However, the media really started to focus on the plight of the ayu when large-scale development projects and extensive public works, such as the Nagara River estuary barrage and the tidal wetland reclamation of Isahaya Bay, began to be recognized by some as the destruction of nature. Since the 1990s, environmental problems have become one of the most important issues in the world and all sorts of phenomenon have started to be understood in relation to the environment. If we see the course of this process as the “environmentalization” of public opinion, since the mid-nineties, Japan has been in the midst of environmentalization; living matter and certain objects that didn’t use to be recognized as “nature” or “wild” were reviewed continuously as “nature”, “wild” and conservation or destruction of the environment.</p><p>The examples of semi-natural river reconstruction methods and the tendency to prefer wild ayu rather than farmed fish, presented in this paper, are part of the historical events of environmentalization. Under such circumstances, rivers and ayu were protected by a conservation scheme, whereas the case study mentioned in this paper, demonstrates that both river and ayu can be left in the natural state for the large part thereby returning a once domesticated nature to a semi-domesticated state.</p>

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