C. von Verschuer
and other anthropologists in 1993, was meant to “revise the image of Japanese culture itself ”
(Nihon zō o toinaosu). Nevertheless, in this conference, Ōbayashi Taryō, while on one hand deplor-
ing the biased rizicentric arguments and also raising the issue of the shortage of rice in food
throughout history, did, on the other hand, focus on the predominance of rice in the religious
rituals and implicitly in Japanese culture. Although from the 1990s, the diversity of crops has
become widely acknowledged by scholars, the place of rice in Japanese culture still remains a
subject to debate. A four- year research project published in 2014 by the National Museum of
Japanese History advanced the idea of a “composite Japanese culture” (Nihon bunka no tagensei)
with multiple practices of food acquisition.^20 This perception might receive more support from
now. As an example we turn now to the archeo- botanical and anthropological points of view on
some other agricultural practices that promise to enhance additional interdisciplinary research in
the future.
A mountainous environment and biodiversity
Two other aspects of food production have not, to this day, received much consideration in
historical research: shifting cultivation and plant gathering. The latter, although a major topic in
archaeological research on the early hunter- gatherer societies, has hardly received any treatment
in historical studies on classical and medieval Japan. The same is true for shifting cultivation,
which has been ignored in the history of the classical and medieval periods. In contrast, both
shifting cultivation and gathering practices are discussed in anthropological and historical studies
on Edo Japan.
The two acquisition techniques are closely linked to the geographical environment. Today,
about 70 percent of the Japanese archipelago is covered by mountains and its forest coverage is
among the highest in the world (third, after Finland). Before the colonization of Hokkaido, in
the Meiji period, and prior to modern reclamation campaigns, mountains with steep slopes
covered more than 75 percent of the country, while plains and the plateaux represented only a
tiny part of the country’s total area. With such a topography, most of the Japanese landscape was
thus an unfavourable environment for irrigated rice cultivation, as even the gentlest slope requires
terracing.
In fact, the mountainous areas were always a privileged milieu of biodiversity. Japan registers
4,000 plant species today. From the Neolithic period, wooded mountains offered an abundance
of plants available for collecting and gathering across the archipelago. In autumn, nuts were plen-
tiful in the various environments. The northeastern Beech/Fagus zone of deciduous forests pre-
sented acorns of nara oaks, beechnuts, walnuts, horse chestnuts, and sweet chestnuts. The
southwestern laurel- forest zone of evergreen forests provided acorns of kashi and shii oaks, kaya
(seeds of the torreya fruit, or Japanese yew seeds), and other fruits such as the persimmon kaki
and the akebia. Spring offered gatherers plants, such as brackens and angelica, with edible parts.
Mountain inhabitants extracted nutritious starches from the roots of lilies, yams, pueraria, and
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walnuts, torreya seeds, and pinenuts—provide up to twice as many calories. The mountains, in
other words, provided many opportunities for obtaining plant foods.^21
Gathering wild plants
Life in the mountain areas has been studied by anthropologists, who have analyzed local docu-
ments from mountain villages. Two reports from the nineteenth century might serve as refer-
ence for medieval practices. Matsuyama Toshio examined the Hida monograph, Hida gofudoki,