Agriculture and food productioncompleted in 1873, at the request of the mayor of Takayama. The old province of Hida corres-
ponds to the mountainous region around present- day Takayama city in Gifu prefecture, situated
at 1,000 meters in altitude. This monograph describes in detail the agricultural and artisanal
products of 415 villages that had a population of 92,600 people. According to Matsuyama’s
calorimetric estimates, the villagers of this area lived 46 percent from their own grain farming
and purchased another 15 percent of grain foods from neighboring counties. But they also gained
as much as 39 percent of their nutritional needs from gathering. One can notice the high signifi-
cance of the biodiversity of plants in the villagers’ lives.
A similar proportion can be seen in another report, the private diary of one Yamashita Tadajirō,
who lived in Shiramine on Mount Hakusan, Ishikawa prefecture, in the 1850s. According to Chiba
Tokuji, the Yamashita family lived on swidden- field crops and commercial products, such as silk-
worm rearing, cryptomeria (sugi) wood, and charcoal. They lived on chestnuts for two to three
months every year. In the various seasons, they also collected two types of bracken, royal fern,
angelica udo, butterbur, thistles (azami), yams, lilies (yuri), pueraria roots, a vitaceae (yamabudō),
akebia, lotus, foxnuts (onibasu), and potatoes. These reports are but two examples of the Edo period
local monographs that came down to us in great numbers, but they represent the lives of hundreds
of villages situated in the mountain chains that stretch from the northeast to the southwest of the
Japanese archipelago, and provide knowledge on the practices of food production of early modern
Japan.^22 As the topographical environment was unchanged through the centuries, these documents
should be considered as valuable references for premodern Japanese practices of food acquisition.
Local monographs from the Edo period also show that the plant gathering and swidden farming
were joint practices of food acquisition in the mountainous milieu.
Swidden farming
Shifting cultivation—and especially swidden or slash- and-burn farming—is an agricultural
system in which plots of land are cultivated temporarily. It has long been one of the most wide-
spread forms of agriculture. Slash- and-burn farming consists of cutting down a patch of forest,
burning the wood, and sowing the ground for one or more years before abandoning it once more
to the forest. This system continued in Europe up to the nineteenth century and it is still prac-
ticed today in tropical and subtropical countries of South America, Central Africa, and Southeast
Asia. According to the FAO, the world population of swidden farmers was two hundred million
in 1950, and the area of swidden fields 36 million square kilometers.^23
In Japan, swidden farming was practiced into the twentieth century. The anthropologist
Sasaki Kōmei carried out systematic field research in the 1950s. As he describes it, trees were
felled in July or early August on a plot of land on a mountain slope that was intended for growing
buckwheat as the first crop. Sowing and planting were carried out among the ashes. Cropping
continued for four years. After cropping, the field was abandoned for a reforestation period of
twenty to thirty years. In the hamlet of Kajiwara at Itsuki- mura, situated in the mountains of
Kumamoto in Kyushu, for instance, the farmers did not grow any rice. They lived a self- sufficient
existence from swidden farming, gathering, and a few permanent crops of millet. Ethnographic
field research in other Asian countries shows that many mountain villages in Southeast Asia live
until today by plant gathering and swidden farming. For example, Laos traditionally shared with
Japan the botanic laurel- forest zone of evergreen forests and, like Japan, more than two- thirds of
the country is covered by steep mountains featuring a high biodiversity. Hundreds of villages in
Laos still live by swidden cultivation, gathering of wild plants, and small orchards today.^24
In premodern Japan, swidden cultivation had a thoroughly private character, and was ignored
by the public registers. It therefore is very poorly documented in written sources. We nevertheless