Internal and external perception in conceptualising home landscapes: Japanese examples

InTernAL AnD eXTernAL percepTIon In concepTUALIZInG HoMe LAnDScApeS

© The author 2014Geografiska Annaler: Series B © 2014 Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography

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INTERNAL AND ExTERNAL PERCEPTION IN concepTUALIZInG HoMe LAnDScApeS:

JApAneSe eXAMpLeSby

Kati Lindström

LInDSTröM, K. (2014): ‘Internal and external perception in con-ceptualizing home landscapes: Japanese examples’, Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography 96 (1): 51–65.

ABSTrAcT. employing the conceptual pair external–internal, the present article traces how meanings and ideals are generated in landscapes. It analyses the dialectics between the firsthand land-scape experiences acquired in the course of everyday life activi-ties and externally created models of value and meaning that have been adopted by the locals, replacing or dominating over the for-mer ones. With rice and reed fields at the banks of Lake Biwa in central Japan as a backdrop, this phenomenon is described at per-sonal, community and cultural level.

Keywords: landscape, Japan, phenomenology, semiotics, land-scape socialization, practice

PrologueIn 2005, as a phD student in anthropology at Kyoto University, I set out to do fieldwork on landscape perception and representations at Lake Biwa. Lake Biwa is the largest freshwater lake in Japan (around 670 km2), located in Shiga prefecture (Fig. 1), at the crossroads of many important traffic routes through-out the history, conveniently close to the old capital, Kyoto, and at the same time celebrated for both its natural beauty and cultural heritage. Today, Shiga prefecture has a population of about 1 400 000 peo-ple, most of whom live in the southern and south-western banks of the lake. The idea was to study landscape preferences and images from the pre-modern period to nowadays by using historical land-scape representations and conducting interviews with both local inhabitants and visiting tourists, thus five neighbourhoods with historically famous landscape legacy were chosen for interviews. The five neighbourhoods, Ishiyama, Seta Karahashi, Miidera, Karasaki and Katata, which were cho-sen for the study were loci famous for their scenic beauty during the pre-modern feudal period, canon-ized in the form of eight Ōmi landscapes (also re-ferred to as Ōmi hakkei or eight views of Ōmi). once independent and fairly distant townships they have now been almost swallowed by the ever-extending

rurban sprawl. However, at the height of their fame, they all enjoyed a high political and cultural status that no doubt contributed to their inclusion into the canon instead of many other places of scenic beauty in the area. The other three locations included in the original canon of eight Ōmi landscapes were ex-cluded from the study because two of them, Awazu and Yase, currently have almost no residential pop-ulation, have completely lost their earlier political

INTERNAL AND ExTERNAL

PERCEPTION IN CONCEPTUALIzINg

HoMe LANDSCAPES

Kati Linsdtröm GAB201010-5final2_e

Figure 1. Lake Biwa.Lake Biwa forms the centre of the present-day Shiga prefecture (historically: Land of Ōmi) and is located in central Honshū, ex-actly at the crossroads of the historical highways from the old cap-ital Kyoto to edo (present-day Tokyo) and northern regions, and of the maritime route between the north Sea and the pacific coast. Five neighbourhoods chosen for fieldwork (dots on the blow-up in the lower right-hand corner) are (from the right) Seta Karahashi, Ishiyamadera, Miidera, Karasaki and Katata, all forming a part of the historical eight Ōmi landscapes canon. Stars indicate the oth-er three places included in eight Ōmi landscapes where fieldwork was not carried out: Mount Hira on the left map and Awazu and Yase on the right one. Map image made by carlos Zeballos for this publication.

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and economic function and have undergone a seri-ous modification through landfills on the lake shore during the twentieth century. Mount Hira is a moun-tain that evidently has always been admired from distance and therefore a survey on its aesthetic value cannot be carried out in the place itself. After some time, my enthusiasm was replaced by bewilderment: the locals and tourists gave almost identical answers and both of the groups actually sounded like environmental protection programmes on the radio. Why was that? part of the problem might have been linguistic: the word “landscape” (keikan) in Japanese is normally associated with of-ficial discourse and protection policies, whereas for their immediate landscape surroundings, people use many other words (keshiki “scenery” or “light + col-our”, fūkei “scenery” or “wind + sunlight”, fūdo or “milieu” or literally “wind + land”, etc.) that rep-resent a more phenomenological idea of being in the world.1 If in both normal and academic speech, keikan is used mostly to imply the artificial and hu-man-made character of a given landscape (such as in the context of landscape engineering or planning), then keshiki is used to describe traditional Japanese rural landscapes, often with nationalistic or personal overtones as a harmonious landscape of one’s per-sonal memories (Gehring and Kohsaka 2007). Fūkei is more poetic in its use. While answering to the offi-cial part of the interview about landscape values, my respondents would stick to radio-like keikan. At the same time, there also seemed to be a cer-tain discrepancy between public image and every-day life. It was when speaking about home and their everyday environment that the informants showed most attachment (and here the respondents would speak about keshiki or even fūkei when giving po-etic descriptions on the beauty of the places), but none of this love and care figured in the “official” part of the interview. Surely a great part in it was played by the fact that I was a big other for them: outsider in their community, a european foreigner and an academic from one of the most prestigious institutions of the country. This definitely prompted “politically correct” answers but also started me off on thinking of the ways how internally and person-ally perceived landscape and public or others’ im-ages of the same place combine in conceptualization of one’s home landscapes. What follows is an anal-ysis of the different ways of how private or personal landscape experience and a public or alien image in-tertwine in conceptualizing one’s own home. How does an imagined vision of the other structure the

ways we see or live our landscapes both on an in-dividual and collective level? And why would ex-perience and practice-based perception of home be sometimes consciously replaced by a distant public narrative that has no experiential relations with the landscape it talks about? Throughout the article, I will be using exam-ples from my fieldwork in the Shiga prefecture dur-ing the three years 2005–2008. I carried out short closed-structured interviews with randomly chosen tourists (52 interviews) and locals (80 interviews) and 15 long semi-structured interviews with ran-domly chosen locals who showed a stronger con-nection to the topic. In addition, I participated in many public events such as hikes and tours, camps of environmental education and cherry-blossom viewing. I also surveyed different types of land-scapes and land use throughout the Shiga prefecture in my numerous field trips around the area – many of the observations also used for this article come from spontaneous conversations with people attend-ing these events or met during my travels. However, even though the original method of data collection was related to anthropology, in this article I would depart mostly from the perspective of semiotics to achieve a better insight into the process of meaning generation in landscapes in an interplay of individ-ual and collective, bodily and mediated. Therefore it might be that some details common to anthropolog-ical research will be omitted in this discussion.

Living the landscapesMost of what I call here internal perception of land-scapes would some decades ago not actually have fitted into the framework of landscape studies, as the earlier geographic scholarship concentrated mostly on the visual representations of landscape on one hand and manifestations of power-related socio-economic phenomena on the other. Suffice it to recall here only the famous definition by Daniels and cosgrove (what they later abandoned as too narrow) that a ‘landscape is a cultural image, a pictorial way of representing, structuring or sym-bolizing surroundings’ (Daniels and cosgrove 1988, p. 1) or cosgrove’s Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape (cosgrove 1984) that gives a splendid analysis of the correlations between socio-economic and landscape structures. Although these studies are themselves a counter-reaction against earlier focus on ‘localized material expressions of land and life’ (cosgrove 2008, p. 1), which saw landscape mostly



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as a physical realm, many of these studies (and es-pecially those influenced by Marxist ideas) thought of landscape structures as something externally im-posed onto the inhabitants that these submit to in their obedience to the power relations of the soci-ety. As such, it can be almost oppressive – consider, for example, the early quote by W. J. T. Mitchell in the ‘Introduction’ to Landscape and Power (2002, pp. 1–2): ‘Landscape, we suggest, doesn’t merely signify or symbolize power relations; it is an instru-ment of cultural power, perhaps even an agent of power that is (or frequently represents itself as) in-dependent of human intentions’. considering the strong entrance of the landscape concept into protection programmes and national-ist discourse, and the appearance of, for example, european Landscape convention, it is clear that the power- and politics-related aspects of landscape are still very much on the research agenda, but the atti-tude towards the landscape as a contested terrain of power relations has become somewhat more subtle. A good indicator of this is the ‘preface to the Second edition of Landscape and Power’ (Mitchell 2002, p. vii), which now states that ‘If one wanted to con-tinue to insist on power as the key to the significance of landscape, one would have to acknowledge that it is a relatively weak power compared to that of ar-mies, police forces, governments, and corporations. Landscape exerts a subtle power over people’. This change of attitudes is partly due to over-all tendencies in social sciences and humanities, where the understanding of power has changed sub-stantially and become more processual and practice bound. The focus has shifted to landscape being a polity, an ‘embodiment of differing forms of energy and labor’ (olwig and Mitchell 2009, p. 144), in which political and cultural entities manifest them-selves through social practices and get eventually bound by laws (see e.g. olwig 2002). However, this change has been occasioned by writings in landscape phenomenology by authors like relph (1976), Tuan (1977, 1990), Tilley (1994) Abram (1996) and Ingold (2000), to mention some outstanding works. Inspired by Merleau-ponty, Heidegger and Husserl, landscape is seen more as a holistic phenomenon perceived with all senses and the whole body (hearing, smells, etc.). perceptive processes and intellectual mechanisms (that is mind and body) are not separated: we are our body who lives the landscape, taking in its cues and being in inter-action with all its semiosic2 processes, thus kind of endowing subjectivity to surrounding forms.

note, as Merleau-ponty says, that ‘we must there-fore avoid saying that our body is in space or in time. It inhabits space and time’ (Merleau-ponty [1958] 2002, p. 161). Thus people live the landscapes, in-stead of living in the landscapes like a grain of sand in a bottle – as being in always implies that some-thing is outwards, meaning that the two entities are ontologically separate. Landscape as lived is not a ready-made physical entity that awaits the perceiving subject to take it in, or worse, imposes itself as a harness upon the per-ceiving mind. As Tim Ingold (2000, p. 193) puts it in his explanation of his ‘dwelling perspective’,

If the body is the form in which a creature is pre-sent as a being-in-the-world, then the world of its being-in presents itself in the form of land-scape … body and landscape are complementa-ry terms: each implies the other … The forms of landscape are not, however, prepared in ad-vance for creatures to occupy, any more than are the bodily forms of those creatures independent-ly specified in their genetic make-up.

and (in Ingold 2000, p. 153)

the world continually comes into being around the inhabitant, and its manifold constituents take on significance through their incorporation into regular pattern of life activity.

Meaningful units in the landscapes are created through interaction with other entities (both living and non-living) in the landscape and through one’s bodily action, through routines and practices (e.g. Ingold’s taskscape; see Ingold 2000, pp. 189–208). As one’s everyday activities are recorded in the physical space either through visible marks or invis-ible mental constructions, it is natural for a person to develop a liaison of identity with the landscape. In recollections, artworks and other materials rep-resenting landscape, the image of home is often vis-ualized or recalled namely through the everyday bodily experience of it. More than visual cues, it is the bodily movement, rhythms of human activities and natural phenomena, bodily perceptions of tex-ture and smell, but also sounds that form the nexus of mental landscape construct. By taking in the ex-ternal rhythms and codes, the perceiving subject enters a process of autocommunication and recon-stitutes oneself (see Lindström 2010). It is because landscapes are primarily lived and

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not something external that in the informal part of the interviews many of my informants recalled different everyday practices connected with Lake Biwa: like bringing water for tea straight from the lake in their childhood, playing in the rice paddies, or the habitual angle under which one is normally looking at the Ukimidō temple, built on the lake wa-ter at Katata (Fig. 2). All of these stories abound with details referring to full bodily perception, lights, tastes and sounds. And when asked, what was spe-cial about the landscape around Lake Biwa, one of the informants answered: ‘Lot’s of ions’. Ions was the fashion-word in Japan at the time and basically everything was marketed by saying that it had neg-ative ions somewhere. For me, it is a quintessential

example of landscape as lived: there is something that is special about my home. I perceive it with every one of my pores, it is in the atmosphere, eve-rywhere, but I have no verbal or logical (that is, of-ficially recognized by authorities) expression for it. So it must be the ions.

Landscape socializationIt is important to note that landscape as perceived is not necessarily a solipsistic individual phenomenon. It can be individually and corporeally lived, but at the same time it is necessarily a socially conditioned phenomenon and a locus for power conflicts, as we saw before. It is a contested terrain, where many

Figure 2. Ukimidō temple in Katata town is built on the water.Being a place famous for its scenic beauty, it has been depicted in many works of art through history, but the classical view is directed from the lake towards the banks, as it would have been seen by those travelling on the boat. nowadays, the most usual perspective is from the em-bankment, under an angle similar to this photo. An informant, living 100 metres from the temple, was telling of a year of draught when the water line receded around 100 metres and one could walk into the lake, looking back towards the temple and the embankment. This consti-tuted a totally new experience for the person.Source: photo by the author, 2006.



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interests meet, but nevertheless, most of the public realm of the landscapes is not external structures, but something internally lived and experienced. When a child is born into a society or when we become a member of a new group, we gradually un-dergo a process of what I have called landscape so-cialization, a term coined after eviatar Zerubavel’s (1997, p. 87) mnemonic socialization. We develop what relph has called a selective vision (relph 1976, p. 123). We learn to appreciate right or wrong of the landscapes, the beautiful and the ugly, the dos and the don’ts. Under normal circumstances it is a gradual process through which we become absorbed in the subjective reality of the group and take over their spatial codes and meaningful landscape divi-sions. When a child comes from a walk and his/her mother asks what they have seen and the father urges the kid to answer: ‘Tell her we saw a BIG church’ (and not a small ant or a colourful graffiti), then we are teaching the child what landscape elements are worth noticing and what are not. The very existence and perseverance of the power-related landscape structures (as well as power-independent ones) depends on everyday practices, as it is through adopted activities, postures and movements that memory of the past and social relations are continually re-enacted (connerton 1989). A church is perceived as a holy place and con-tinues to function as such only as long as the people encountering it continue repeating certain bodily ac-tions like making a cross-mark on the chest, pray-ing, removing a hat when entering and so forth. A path can exist only as long as its existence as a path is reconfirmed by people who walk on it. The power-shaped world is reconfirmed by spatial practices, in de certeau’s pedestrian speech acts (de certeau 1988, p. 98):

First, it is true that a spatial order organizes an ensemble of possibilities (e.g., by a place in which one can move) and interdictions (e.g., by a wall that prevents one from going further), then the walker actualizes some of these possi-bilities. In that way, he makes them exist as well as emerge.

For a person, who has already been educated and is a fully acceptable member of the community, the col-lective perception of landscape is equally lived and acted as is the individual one. In fact, it is part and parcel with it and to separate these two levels is ex-tremely difficult, if not impossible.

Internal and external, Self and OtherInevitably not all the landscapes can be lived and ex-perienced in person. There is always a landscape that we have not perceived through our daily practices, but we can nevertheless have an experience of it as passing visitors or develop experience- independent mental constructs, based on the external knowledge that is not acquired through immediate perception. (By experience independent I mean here not de-pending on the experience of this very landscape, since of course any mental construct depends on some earlier experience.) Therefore, there is an ob-vious necessity to draw a distinction between the in-ternal and external conceptualizations of landscape, and sure enough no real-life landscape experience would fall exactly onto one of the two poles, but would locate somewhere in the gradation between them, depending on the level and the variety of ways of participation in the landscape (textual knowledge, visual experience, all senses, regular work, leisure walks, etc.). However, it is important to make clear that less participation does not automatically mean less valuable or less true landscape construct, as an outside expert can sometimes have a more varied and profound appreciation for different aspects of the landscape than its inhabitant. Tim Ingold has discussed the difference be-tween these two landscape perceptions in several of his works (Ingold 2000, 2009; Ingold and Kurttila 2000). He defines it as the difference between map-ping and knowing; between inhabitant knowledge and facts; between wayfaring, where one dwells in the landscape in constant movement, and transport, where one goes from point A to point B without par-ticipating in the landscape in between. In a similar vein and partly relying on Ingold, Kenneth olwig (2008) differentiates between performing upon landscape and doing the landscape (olwig 2008). Performing upon landscape is characteristic of per-ception that reduces landscape from a central view-point to a flattened and distanced scenic surface; it is a possessive attitude: eyed gaze of a surveyor or tourist. Doing the landscape, however, implies a binocular vision that is created through action (in-cluding walking), adding other sensory material and sensing landscape as a topological realm of contig-uous places: it creates a feeling of belonging (olwig 2008, pp. 84–85). Analogical division into living with and looking at landscape has been drawn by David Lowenthal (2009). When talking about internal and external per-ception, both of these terms should be understood

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in double meaning, referring simultaneously as they do to bodily perception versus external (i.e. coming from outside of the body) knowledge of an individ-ual, and to Self (internal) versus other (external) as a social division. In fact, Self–other can be consid-ered as one of the most important landscape inter-faces (sensu palang and Fry 2003). This can be said both on the individual level as an individual person versus some other persons or a group; and on the collective level as one socio-cultural group versus some other group. Although Self–other interface is not listed by palang and Fry, it is an implicit under-lying principle, for example in their culture–culture and expert–lay person interfaces. Why Self–other and not just individual–collec-tive? It is because from the semiotic point of view on how meanings are constructed in everyday land-scapes, the border between Self and other is much more important and semiotically loaded than the division individual versus collective. At the same time, this boundary is much more flexible than the boundary between individual and collective, allow-ing for the same person to be sometimes included in the internal sphere (Self) and sometimes to repre-sent an external vision (other). For example, from the point of a nuclear family, grandmother is an out-sider, but as soon as the colleagues step in, grand-mother becomes a part of Self.3 That is, depending on the context of interaction, the Self–other bound-ary can move to include smaller or larger groups as well. According to Juri Lotman (1990, 2009), the bor-ders of semiotic units are the most semiotically ac-tive areas. It is the borders that act as translation mechanisms between two distinct semiotic systems, whereby parts of the other are incorporated into one’s own system. As the elements of the other be-come more and more assimilated and accepted, they are gradually shifted from the periphery of the se-miotic unit towards its core (that is, they start to oc-cupy a more prestigious and dominating position in the unit). The transfer across the border between the two systems that at least partially share their codes results in the birth of new information and is the ba-sis for development. This holds true for landscape systems as well. Two different systems of perceiving landscapes can mutually influence each other, translating and ab-sorbing the elements of the other, as a result of which the absorbed elements quickly lose their otherness. We may acquire a new way to perceive and struc-ture the landscape if we learn to distinguish between

the species, for example. originally external infor-mation about species was absorbed, became “mine” and restructured my perception of reality. The new semiotic structure may or may not bear a marker “al-ien”, but from the moment it is fully appropriated, I start to live my landscape accordingly. At the same time, landscape systems also keep excluding elements that they have previously cher-ished, once these have exhausted their semiotic po-tential. First, this “semiotic garbage” is pushed towards the periphery and the border, and when it ceases to be useful for the system, it is completely excluded. Subsequently, it may be absorbed into a new system or left to oblivion. Thus, when one ac-quires a new landscape perspective by learning to distinguish between the species according to univer-sity botany, the former folk denominations and di-visions that were used before are abandoned. If the process of incorporating new information is gradual and/or if the source system is very prestigious, we call it learning. Another important thing to note is that each se-miotic unit also has its correspondent portrait of the other, according to its possibilities to comprehend the world, but not necessarily congruent with the ob-jective reality or with the subjective reality of this other semiotic unit. What is most interesting is that sometimes, in certain contexts, the inhabitants might opt for a foreign or other way of understanding the landscape (at least the way they imagine it) that is not in concordance with their own lived and experi-enced subjective reality. In what follows, I will ana-lyse four different cases where external perceptional superstructure replaces the experience-based land-scape perception on individual, community and cul-ture levels.

Mie: appearances as external superstructureMany Western and Japanese anthropologists (start-ing with ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, Benedict [1946] 2005) described the Japanese society as based on the feeling of embar-rassment and shame which endows the division line between Self and other with heavy semiotic load. very strict divisions between the inside circle and the outside circle, or Self and others, are drawn in everyday behaviour and language, but at the same time the Japanese “Self” can be very ambiguous and the borderline between inside–outside can vary greatly according to the situation and context.4 It is very important for the inside people not to lose face



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with the others – and that means that elaborate im-ages of the other are created in order to comply with the rules that are (thought to exist) outside one’s own system. For the sake of appearances, a lot can be sac-rificed inside. This creates a series of interesting phenomena in the Japanese everyday landscape, where different borders and passages between Self and other have to be demarcated. In households, but also in office buildings and even in hospitals, the passage from the outside space to inside is marked with the “rite of slippers”. At the entrance of the house, everybody is supposed to take off shoes and change into a special type of guest slippers. Getting more inside, into the tatami-floored living room, slippers are left behind the door and everybody is barefoot (in socks). The most private space of the house, that is, the toilet, has its own special type of slippers. It is interesting to see how this most private space is also mentalized as the dirtiest and the slippers used there are a special “dirty room” type. Similar gradation can be seen, for example, in hospitals. even nowadays, many smaller hospitals make you take off your shoes at the entrance and put on special slippers, whereas toilets and procedure rooms are equipped with spe-cial dirty room slippers. needless to say that objec-tively taken, the procedure rooms must be the most aseptic spaces of all in the hospital, but are never-theless conceptualized as dirty inside spaces. Many european foreigners who arrive to Japan are first surprised about how clean the streets, public toilets and other public areas are. At the same time, “in-side” spaces, including family houses, but also in-side the offices, hospitals, bar kitchens and so forth, can be in breathtaking disorder. In many ways we can see how special efforts are made for the appear-ances of the outside, at the cost of comfort inside. Mie, literally “appearances”, is how this princi-ple of shame is called in rural rice cultivation land-scapes. For many historical reasons that we cannot go into here, rice is high-prestige produce in Japan and Self is identified with rice on many social levels from the national self-projection to local communi-ties (ohnuki-Tierney 1993). Therefore, it is proba-bly not surprising that rice paddies are the dominant feature of village organization and have tradition-ally occupied the central part of the agricultural area, whereas other crops that are nutritionally equally important (like soy) are planted in the rear fields. As such, rice cultivation becomes a highly regulated ac-tivity with many implicit and explicit social norms that the social selves (in this case, households) have

to follow. As olwig (2005) says, habit first becomes a custom, then morality and law. Take, for example, the story told by an informant (a woman in her late fifties) who lives in a mountain village close to Lake Biwa. She was born in the city and is married to a man from the village. Moving to the village, what shocked her most was exactly mie in rice cultivation. The moral image of a household depended on nothing other than on how straight the rice was planted (Fig. 3). It was of crucial impor-tance to get the lines very straight and the new bride was not allowed to plant rice in the fields seen by the others (the rest of the village) until the family saw that she could do it perfectly. For the growth of rice it made no difference even if the lines were a lit-tle curvy, whereas imagining the look of the others, it became a reflection of morality. of course, this is not only a Japanese phenomenon: whenever we feel proud of our gardens or when a neighbour comes to scold us for not having mowed the lawn, we con-front the viewpoint of the other as moral.

Reed cultivation and kabata: accepting Other on the community levelKabata is the name of the water system tradition-ally used in some villages at Lake Biwa. each house-hold draws its drinking water from the springs that run behind the houses. The spring water flows into the first floor of the house, where several tanks are located: a smaller freshwater tank for drinking wa-ter and a bigger one for washing vegetables, dishes and so forth (Fig. 4a). Used water goes to an osmotic cell behind the house where carp fish are kept that then eat the rest of the food (Fig. 4b). cleansed wa-ter joins the main river flow. While this was not the only water system at Lake Biwa since many commu-nities who did not have access to springs or streams were using wells for their freshwater supplies, such kabata systems were still fully functional and fairly common in the 1980s. Since then, they have virtually disappeared (Furukawa and onoda 2007, p. 173). According to the data displayed on the official web-site of Shiga prefecture, 99.4 per cent of the popula-tion in Shiga prefecture has switched to tap water.5

reasons for this change are manifold but one important factor has definitely been the negative campaign from the central government. Drinking water from sources other than taps has been stigma-tized and pictured as non-hygienic and backwards. As most of the villagers started to cover up their kabata and stopped using them, the water indeed

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became more polluted for the others, because the orally transmitted regulations for water use were now ignored and forgotten by many. Yearly clean-ing of the riverbed and carp raising are just some examples of the lost customs that guaranteed clean water. Also, we have to admit that an open and run-ning stream that passes through the house is cold and somewhat uncomfortable to use (you have to bend down to use it). The change in the state of affairs was brought about almost single-handedly by photographer Imamori Mitsuhiko,6 who has popularized the use of kabata in his photos displayed in many exhibitions and published in numerous books, but also in a doc-umentary Satoyama: Japan’s Secret Watergarden (2004) aired by nHK and the BBc.7 In Harie vil-lage on the north-eastern shore of Lake Biwa there are about 230 houses, of which roughly 100 have ka-bata. When Imamori started his photo series about the fisherman Sangorō – one of the few people who had no tap water in the house and was sticking to tra-ditional fishing methods – there were only a couple

of functioning kabata still left. everybody else had covered the water tanks and were mostly using tap water. However, nationwide and international inter-est brought about by the nHK documentary com-pletely changed the locals’ perspective on their home landscapes. Most of the kabata have now been reopened (although they are still cold and uncom-fortable to use) and are used simultaneously with tap water. At the same time, tourists from all over Japan are pouring into the village and there are 30 volunteers in the village who guide them into peo-ple’s kitchens to see kabata. An almost extinct land-scape feature that was seen with contempt has been revived only thanks to the outsider’s eye and has be-come a synonym for a sustainable and environmen-tally friendly lifestyle and ancient folk wisdom. Similar tendencies can be seen in respect to reed fields, once a very typical landscape feature on Lake Biwa. Before modern embankment works and land reclamations started, reed fields were covering large areas of Lake Biwa and smaller side lakes, function-ing as the major pillar of local ecosystem and water

Figure 3. In Japanese villages, planting rice in straight lines is part of the public moral where an imagined attitude causes action from the subject’s part.Source: photo by the author, 2007.



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purification. In the pictorial representations of the pre-modern era, the reed fields were a clear marker element for Lake Biwa (Fig. 5). post-war develop-ments saw extensive landfills (most of the side lakes have been filled), water control, dam construction

and embankment fortifications, coupled with the de-struction of the reed fields. Local use of reed also declined, with the reed roofs being replaced by metal and cheap chinese reed replacing local reed in domestic usage. As many locals had transferred

Figure 4.(a) Kabata from inside the house. Small round well in the lower left-hand corner is for clean spring water which is drawn into the house through the pipe.

(b) coloured nishiki carps in the osmotic tank of the kabata. The osmotic tank is called ikesu and is half inside and half outside of the house; the fish can swim freely in out.Source: photos courtesy of Imamori Mitsuhiko.

Figure 5. reed fields drawn around Ukimidō temple.Source: Geese descending at Katata, one of eight views of ömi, by woodprint artist Utagawa Kunitora in edo period (courtesy of ötsu city Museum of History).

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to remunerated work independent of the lake eco-system, they would not be directly influenced by the deteriorating lake environment and would instead demand better access to the lake shore for recrea-tional purposes. reed was conceptualized as an ugly and non-desirable element. recent decades have seen heightened ecological awareness among the locals as a result of intensive popularization work by ecologists. Several npos have been established to reintroduce reed into areas where it had been uprooted and reed planting and maintenance campaigns are taking place. reed fields are considered by inhabitants as one of the most im-portant aspects to be returned to the landscape of Lake Biwa. Among those who answered my ques-tionnaire, nearly 20 per cent thought that reed fields should be restored to Lake Biwa (the most popu-lar answer after ‘I don’t know’). The everyday task-scapes of these inhabitants have not changed and are not connected with the use of and care for reeds that would need the efforts of specialized groups to be maintained. The reed fields continue to hinder ac-cess to the lake and reduce the recreational possi-bilities of the landscape. nevertheless, the grand majority have accepted the ecological narrative that endows reeds with the positive role of ecosys-tem saviour and strives for their preservation despite their own personal experience. on this occasion, it is the prestige of an expert group that prompts the ap-plication of the external superstructure on the lived landscape.

Eight Ōmi landscapes: external vision on culture levelThe application of external perception on one’s do-mestic landscapes is not always limited to protec-tion and direct authority issues. It can be much more subtle and related to general cultural prestige and can even happen on the level of culture, rather than on the local community level. neither is this phe-nomenon historically new, as might be suggested by Ingold’s distinctions where modern european aca-demic practices have been used as examples. The history of Lake Biwa’s visual representations, par-ticularly the canon of eight Ōmi8 landscapes, is a good example here. eight Ōmi landscapes is one of the many land-scape lists that the Japanese are so fond of. even though the idea of listing landscapes is of chinese origin itself, it was very eagerly accepted by the Japanese public and is still a thriving tradition.

other examples include Three great views of Japan, including Matsushima islands, Itsukushima Shrine in Hiroshima and Amanohashidate peninsula; Three great gardens; and the sets of hundred (known to the West by Utagawa Hiroshige’s One hundred famous views of Edo); thirty-six (for example, Hokusai’s and Hiroshige’s famous 36 views of Mount Fuji); twelve, ten or eight landscapes in numerous places around Japan; recently, by the way, also Imamori’s 100 satoyamas. The canon of eight Ōmi landscapes includes eight locations at southern Lake Biwa (see Fig. 1), or to be more exact, not mere geographical locations, but eight space-times with a certain desig-nated atmosphere: returning sails at Yabase; autumn moon at Ishiyama temple; sunset glow at Seta river (at Seta Karahashi); clearing sky at Awazu; evening bell at Miidera; night rain at Karasaki; descending geese at Katata; and evening snow on Mount Hira. one of the best known visual representations of the idea is Utagawa Hiroshige’s eight views of Ōmi from 1857 (Fig. 6). There is confusion about who exactly was the very first person to mention eight Ōmi landscapes, but what we know for sure is that the tradition de-rives from the chinese beauty canon of eight Xiao Xiang landscapes on Lake Dongtinghu in Hunan province, which was established in Song dynasty (960–1279) poetry and painting. The eight Xiao Xiang landscapes that served as the basis for Ōmi model consisted of eight landscape elements, which were in fact not connected to any particular place at the lake but were rather supposed to render the cel-ebrated beauty of the lake region in general: even-ing bell from a distant temple; night rain over Xiao and Xiang rivers; mountain village after storm; re-turning sails off the sea; fishing village in sunset glow; autumn moon over Lake Dongtinghu; wild geese descending to sandbar; and Jiang Tian moun-tain in evening snow. Xiao Xiang landscapes were well known and loved in Japan in Zen poetry and painting in later Middle Ages, but remained always markedly alien as an ideal landscape and were never transferred to the domestic context. The legend goes that in 1500 Konoe Masaie Hisamichi was invited to Ōmi and on his trip he composed the first waka po-ems that projected this chinese model onto the land-scape of Lake Biwa. As there is no evidence that he actually visited Ōmi at that time, this legend does not probably hold true, and most probably the verses were written by Konoe Sakihisa or his son nobutada in 1562 (Horikawa 2002). Whoever it was, he established a completely new



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Figure 6. eight views of Ōmi, by Utagawa Hiroshige (1857).From the above left: autumn moon at Ishiyama temple; night rain at Karasaki; evening snow on Mount Hira; evening bell at Mii temple; descending geese at Katata; sunset glow at Seta river; returning sails at Yabase; clearing sky at Awazu.Source: reproduced courtesy of Kanagawa prefectural Museum.

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way of seeing the lake that after some time started to spread like a fire. Although after the first verses relatively few eight landscapes would be written or painted before the edo period9 (no doubt because the country was ravaged by warfare), it became an im-mensely popular subject during the edo period both in poetry, paintings, woodblock prints and even in theatre. In a Japanese context, each of the original space-times is ascribed to a definite location in real geography. Soon the first verses became an obliga-tory element in the studies of any educated person and were repeatedly inscribed on different draw-ings depicting the eight Ōmi landscapes and were even included in the texts meant for women’s edu-cation that normally would feature only the most ba-sic knowledge. The fashion of eight, ten or twelve landscapes spread quickly and soon anybody who owned a small plot of land with a pond (mostly tem-ples) desired to name and design its own eight land-scapes according to the chinese tradition. Already in the beginning of the edo period there were 37 dif-ferent sets of eight Landscapes counted (Horikawa 2002). except for Mount Hira, all the eight Ōmi land-scape spots were located on the shore with its reed fields, ships and pines and contrast with the moun-tain forms, the semiotically most active zone in the landscape. Still, I think it takes a considerable dis-tance from the subject to be able to see china while you are actually looking at Japan – such a gaze is something that is possible only if you are a tourist, someone who sees but does not participate in the landscape on a daily basis. In fact, despite the very poetic origins of eight Ōmi landscapes, it spread also thanks to tourism, since the edo period was the start of extensive travelling in Japan.10

Most pictorial images of eight Ōmi landscapes are actually so-called ezu, pictorial maps that give us a conceptual plan of the place, the place names, pic-torial images of the most important features (physi-cal relief, shops and other businesses, etc.), in some cases directions, distances between the places and some basic information, for example, which famous poems have been written about this location. That was something which an educated traveller – and the traveller usually was either a pilgrim or an educated person – would definitely have to know. Tōkaidō and chūsandō – the two main roads from present-day Tokyo to Kyoto – passed through the southern end of Lake Biwa, in fact straight across one of the eight spots of scenic beauty, the bridge called Seta no Karahashi. It appears that Konoe had not chosen

the places at random: they were all important sites that lie in close vicinity to the main road, could be seen from there or from a boat. A foreign (that is chinese) landscape structure was chosen to repre-sent an outsiders’ (tourists’) point of view.11

reasons for adopting a chinese model for de-picting one’s own landscapes were manifold, in-cluding Tokugawa rulers’ promotion of chinese confucian values, spreading of tourism and a change in the general way of perceiving landscapes. It is of course questionable how much of this cultural im-age adopted by the elite reached the lower classes who actually lived and shaped that landscape, but I think we can be certain that these cultural ideas about landscape did not remain just on the walls (or rather sliding doors) of the elite but had their impact on the practical life as well. For one, being a target of the tourist materials has a direct influence over the inhabitants of the place as they are expected to correspond to the image created and offer services that reinforce it. Thus we can expect that even if the new chinese way of interpreting the landscape re-ality did not replace the experiential perception of most local farmers, it became at least partially ac-cepted by most members of noble, warrior and mer-chant classes.

Towards a conclusion: externalizing perceptions in segregated landscapesIn previous sections we have seen four interesting cases where an external conceptualization of one’s landscape is adopted and replaces or dominates the lived landscapes. In short, the main character-istics of external perception can be summarized as follows:

– Little or limited participation in the landscape (in a geographical or perceptional sense or both): the new external system that is adopted by a group or a culture is not born from the firsthand experience of this very landscape. The percep-tion of the landscape might have relied on a limi-ted number of senses (just vision, for example), a limited number of functions (just commuting and no fishing, for example) or on the experience of just one limited geographic area.

– not sharing the context and functional processes of the landscape either partially or completely, or considering it less valuable than the external sys-tems’ context and functional processes. no first-hand experience of “becoming the landscape”



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and of the social and cultural processes that are behind certain features.

– In many cases, the external perception remains marked as the other for quite a while and is tre-ated like a quote from the other system, as was the case of eight Ōmi landscapes.

What is most curious is that at the moment the code of the other cuts into the system, the objective reality has still not changed. The subjective reality changes, and as a result, the objective reality can (but some-times is not) be modified according to the new be-lief. In the examples quoted above, first the mental landscape (sensu Keisteri 1990) changes and only then there is a change in the physical realm. Besides, the change can be limited to the mental sphere only. coming back to the prologue, it is important to note the phenomenon of externalization of the locals’ perception. It is true that speaking to an outsider, the informants felt they should give “official” answers. But it is equally true that more and more inhabitants use the language and expressions of the authoritative others for the description of their home landscape because their personal bond with it has become very limited. The problem is probably smaller in garden towns where most of the immediate surroundings have to be “worked through”. However, in bigger bed towns with higher apartment buildings, the sep-aration between the areas of everyday work activi-ties and night time is more conspicuous. Work and subsistence are not connected with landscape and it becomes just a backdrop without much personal in-teraction going on. This is exactly the case of Shiga prefecture, which has one of the fastest growing pop-ulations in the whole of Japan owing to the develop-ment of commuter towns and residential areas. At the southern tip of the lake, residential areas for people who commute daily to Kyoto and osaka have swal-lowed most of the rice paddies. When the areas of living and working are sep-arated, people have less contact in general and less varied contact with their surrounding landscapes, mostly limiting it to laboral related necessity and traffic channels. An informant from Lake Biwa area who works in a high tower less than 500 metres form the lake front says that he hardly ever takes a walk at the lake as it is out of his working area. Another informant, who works as a night-time bartender in neighbouring Kyoto, says that he hardly has time to go to the lake, but there is nowhere to go anyway, referring to the fact that big parts of the lake shore have been fenced off by the owners. This highlights

another danger in segregated landscapes: as people work and sleep in different places, their home land-scapes are often restricted for the use of somebody else for his/her work. This encourages the residents again to move out of their dwelling areas to special recreational regions, causing segregation into dwell-ing and “museum districts”. In extreme cases, the museum districts form a network of “remarkable landscapes” that are maintained and developed by specialized staff with the financing of central govern-ments, whereas the development and maintenance of dwelling areas is chaotic and neglected. Today, most of the terraced rice paddies in the Shiga prefecture need volunteer labour and external finances for their maintenance as they have become unsustainable in present economic and social contexts. All this means that a dweller-in-landscape has less and less varied contact with his/her home land-scape and perceives it through an ever smaller num-ber of meaning-generating devices (no work-related taskscape; limited access to experiences at certain hours, weather conditions, etc.), thus gradually ex-ternalizing the vision of landscape. This is particu-larly dangerous because integral knowledge of all processes, functions and forms united in each land-scape is necessary for competent development and protection plans. As stated by the Japanese anthro-pologists Torigoe Hiroyuki and Kada Yukiko in their account on water use at Lake Biwa, we have to pro-tect the everyday life of the local residents (that is, their customary living systems) in order to protect traditional environment (Torigoe and Kada 1984). or else, we might urinate in the water the others are drinking.

AcknowledgmentsThe author thanks cristian ortiz and Junzo Uchiyama for their invaluable support through-out all the stages of this research, and Imamori Mitsuhiko for the right to use his material. Special gratitude goes to carlos Zeballos for helping with the map image. This research was supported by the european Union through the european regional Development Fund (centre of excellence cecT). The author also thanks neolithisation and Modernisation: Landscape History on east Asian Inland Seas project (rIHn, Japan), Wenner-Gren Stiftelserna, Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and cultures and eTAG grants IUT2-44 and eTF9419 for institutional and financial support.

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Notes 1. In fact, fūdo, or milieu, as it has been translated by Augustine

Berque (Berque 1996, 1997, 2004) is a term that was popularized by Heidegger-influenced Japanese scholar Watsuji Tetsurō. Although Watsuji’s works have been later used by propagators of geographic determinism in a heavily nationalistic discourse, Watsuji’s attempt to show the relations of climate, land and nation from a phenom-enological perspective might be considered a forerunner to mod-ern phenomenology-oriented developments in landscape studies (Berque 2004).

2. Semiosic, i.e. related to semiosis or sign process. 3. of course, there are cultural differences that may render this exam-

ple invalid in some cultures. 4. Literature on the issues of Self in the Japanese society is very ex-

tensive and an exhaustive list of major works is beyond the scope of the present study. Some major works include Lebra (1976, 2004); Smith (1983); Bachnik and Quinn (1994).

5. Shiga prefecture (2013) home page, lifestyle, canalization. 6. All the Japanese names have been given here with the family name

first, as they are used in Japan. 7. The Japanese title of the documentary was ‘visual poem. Satoyama

II. Life revolving around water’ and it was aired on nHK in 2004. The english version featured Sir David Attenborough as the narra-tor and was aired first on BBc in 2005 in its Natural World televi-sion series. The two versions differ mostly in the narration and the way it accentuates the visual material, but also in the sequence of scenes and some footage. Imamori acted as a photographer but was also the principle force behind the whole concept. The documentary won various prizes at international film festivals, especially for its photography.

8. Land of Ōmi is a historical territorial division, roughly equivalent to present-day Shiga prefecture.

9. 1603–1867.10. coincidentally this is also the epoch when the first maps of Japan

were created, although in the beginning they were strictly for mili-tary use.

11. of course, we have to admit that tourism of pre-modern Japan and the modern Western world differ enormously in their degrees of participation in the landscape. If modern tourists are being trans-ported from point A to point B and their participation is (simplisti-cally speaking) limited to a gaze through the shutter of the camera, then in pre-modern Japan we are still talking about travellers on foot who got to participate in the landscape with the whole of their bod-ies, even if their participation was short-lived and limited to certain functions.

Kati LindströmEnvironmental Humanities LaboratoryDivision of History of Science, Technology and EnvironmentKTH Royal Institute of TechnologyTeknikringen 74DSE-100 44 StockholmSwedenandDepartment of SemioticsInstitute of Philosophy and SemioticsUniversity of TartuJakobi 2Tartu 51014EstoniaEmail: [email protected]

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Internal and external perception in conceptualising home landscapes: Japanese examples

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