Paper short abstract:

Early modern Japanese mountains were a contested border space affording a variety of natural resources to different kinds of actors. “Mountain disputes” (sanron) are analyzed to reveal the entanglements between resources, social structures, and legal practices.

Paper long abstract:

In Tokugawa Japan, mountains were a border space where a multitude of different interests crossed, collided, and coexisted. In contrast to arable land in the plains, which was measured and allotted for tax reasons, mountains were left vague and shifted in uses. They not only acted as borders between villages or other entities, but also accommodated forest commons, mines, and sacred sites. As a consequence, a multitude of actors – villagers, temples, local domains, and the Shogunate – had intertwining interests that needed to be negotiated. The demands posed on mountains changed with environmental transformations and production of knowledge, such as the large-scale clearing of new arable land in the 17th century and the spread of regenerative forestry in the 18th century. In this paper, “mountain disputes” (sanron) in Japan during the Edo period are analyzed to reveal the entanglements between resources, social structures, and legal practices. The dispute settlements shed light on how the extraction of resources was regulated between the actors and how different types of resources were weighed against each other, and thus add to the knowledge on local governance and power structures with regard to resources. Furthermore, practices, technologies, and visualizations are studied which show how borders were both drawn and blurred to mitigate resource conflicts.