Cultivating Concrete Utopia: Understanding How Japan's Permaculture Experiments are Shaping a Political Vision of Sustainable Living

Résumé 0

While the Japanese culture has long fascinated because of its respect for nature, this did not prevent Japanese society from significantly fueling some of today's most burning agro-environmental issues. More recently however, in reaction to the increasing recognition of the problems posed by the industrial agriculture model, diverse alternative models of food production have emerged throughout the country. Within these alternative models, the case of permaculture is particularly interesting, as it merges internationally shared targets for sustainable agriculture with socio-cultural features of sustainable living. Indeed, permaculture was originally constructed from the terms "permanent," "agriculture," and "culture" and it has spread rapidly as a social movement promoting ways of living that tackle sustainability through the nexus between nature, culture and agriculture. Building on the data collected through participant observation and semi-structured interviews with Japanese permaculture practitioners, this paper gives an overview of the vision of sustainable living shared and conveyed by Japan's permaculture movement, and attempts to show from where this vision is experimented. In order to spell out the double bind in which the permaculture movement seems to be caught, I use the concept of "concrete utopia," which refers to concrete experiments with sustainable living that, while localized in time and space, nevertheless carry within them the seeds of a possible-but still utopian-generalization. I thus show how the Japanese permaculture movement seeks sustainability within Japanese culture. The Japanese case highlights how cultural and environmental sustainability mutually reinforce each other and thereby enriches the concept of concrete utopia.