Paper short abstract:

I present preliminary results of the analyses on linguistic data collected from farmers in central Japan. The analyses explore the impacts of cultural models of nature on the farmers’ perceptions of climate change.

Paper long abstract:

While Japanese islands have been prone to a variety of natural disasters throughout the history, the magnitudes of some of these threats seems to have increased in recent years. My informants, farmers in two neighboring cities in central Japan, for example, anecdotally spoke of perceived increase in the temperature throughout the years. The relatively cool rainy season which lasted from the middle of June into July, which used to require heating equipment, turned into "wet summers." Yet the informants appeared relatively nonchalant about the effects of these changing climates: no one spoke of climate change as an eminent threat to farming. What could be some of the reasons? By informally analyzing prominent themes from my linguistic (interview) data, I hypothesized that the informants believed that nature can be "humanized" to enhance human endeavors particularly in the areas of self-cultivation and associated interpersonal relationships. Using this cultural model works as a buffer against and around which to circumvent the perceived and real harms of raw, untamed nature. I then conducted secondary analyses of the linguistic data, which included a gist analysis, a key words analysis, a reasoning analysis, a causality analysis, and a metaphor analysis. I will report some of the preliminary results of these secondary analyses in conjunction with the aforementioned hypothesis about the informants' perceptions about the climate change.