Mountain villages in Tokushima, Shikoku, Japan—designated as a GIAHS site in 2018—sustain life on unstable, landslide-prone slopes through dense constellations of human and non-human actions. Drawing on ethnography, landscape reading, and historical materials, this paper traces how everyday small-scale interventions interact with geology, infrastructure, and markets to produce landscapes over time. This article shows how centuries of tobacco cultivation and the state monopoly system linked isolated mountain hamlets to national revenue structures and plantation-like modes of production; how post-1950s landslide-prevention projects, materials, and demographic aging reconfigured soil and water practices; and how folk notions such as zareru (surface collapse) and jigurui (ground shift) organize vigilant, iterative maintenance in a terrain assumed to be constantly moving. These practices reveal that contemporary agriculture in Nishi-Awa has shifted from commercial crop production to “life-making agriculture,” sustained by elderly residents whose everyday interventions stabilize collapsing soils and maintain semi-natural grasslands. Rather than isolated “heritage” or an imagined “original Japan,” these villages are active sites where geological time, capitalist ruins, and local labor co-produce livable niches. Reframing care as a multispecies, material landscape process clarifies why “dynamic conservation”—rather than static preservation—is essential for sustaining GIAHS landscapes. It also highlights the need for place-based synergies: Slow Food, Geopark, and OECM together support the long-term viability of collapsing mountain landscapes and their agrarian systems.
Keywords: GIAHS, dynamic conservation, unstable mountain landscapes, steep-slope agriculture, multispecies care, institutional synergies
Mountain villages in Tokushima, Shikoku, Japan—designated as a GIAHS site in 2018—sustain life on unstable, landslide-prone slopes through dense constellations of human and non-human actions. Drawing on ethnography, landscape reading, and historical materials, this paper traces how everyday small-scale interventions interact with geology, infrastructure, and markets to produce landscapes over time. This article shows how centuries of tobacco cultivation and the state monopoly system linked isolated mountain hamlets to national revenue structures and plantation-like modes of production; how post-1950s landslide-prevention projects, materials, and demographic aging reconfigured soil and water practices; and how folk notions such as zareru (surface collapse) and jigurui (ground shift) organize vigilant, iterative maintenance in a terrain assumed to be constantly moving. These practices reveal that contemporary agriculture in Nishi-Awa has shifted from commercial crop production to “life-making agriculture,” sustained by elderly residents whose everyday interventions stabilize collapsing soils and maintain semi-natural grasslands. Rather than isolated “heritage” or an imagined “original Japan,” these villages are active sites where geological time, capitalist ruins, and local labor co-produce livable niches. Reframing care as a multispecies, material landscape process clarifies why “dynamic conservation”—rather than static preservation—is essential for sustaining GIAHS landscapes. It also highlights the need for place-based synergies: Slow Food, Geopark, and OECM together support the long-term viability of collapsing mountain landscapes and their agrarian systems.
Keywords: GIAHS, dynamic conservation, unstable mountain landscapes, steep-slope agriculture, multispecies care, institutional synergies