3) AOMORI CITY 青森市 – Rassera, Rassera: The Story of the North

A voyage to Aomori, Part 3 of 5

From the sanctuary of Osorezan I crossed back to this world of artifice and illusions. A two-hour descent from the Shimokita Peninsula by train brought me to Aomori City (青森市), the capital of Aomori Prefecture and my base for a few more days of northern exploration.

Aomori. It is a name synonymous in the Japanese imagination with scallop-fishing, apple-growing, and above all the Nebuta Festival.

The city perches at the south end of Mutsu Bay, at almost the geographic centre of the prefecture, where it brings together the diverse cultures, histories, trades and forces of nature of a land whose present form is of very recent construction. Most of Aomori City as we know it today was built upon the wreckage of World War II, while the concept of Aomori Prefecture as a coherent unit is scarcely a century old. Let's take a look at the story of the north end of Japan.


The First Peoples and the Japanese Conquest 

If we speak of illusions, we should do away with one of this country's most popular: that is, the myth of the homogenous nation. The closer you actually look at Japan, the less escape there is from the hollowness of those claims that this is a land of one people, one ethnicity and one culture.

Get on a bus at Aomori Station and within twenty minutes you come to one of Japan's most interesting archaeological excavations, right there in the suburbs of Aomori City. The oldest finds at the Sannai-Maruyama site (English website here) date back almost 6,000 years, to the world of the earliest known inhabitants of this region.

Rhossili, Gower - Ancient Winds of Wales

Look closely at the west coast of Britain. Notice how the land reaches out, extending, fragmenting, as though desperate for release from the island's core.

So for people as for land. Overseas, the red buses and telephone boxes and royal family in England may well be synonymous in popular imagination with “Britain” or the “United Kingdom”, but over half of the UK's territory is in fact home to heritages and identities foreign to the English. Indeed, for most of their history, the Celtic peoples of Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and even Cornwall, have struggled against ruthless English conquest and oppression. These nations were some of the very first to experience the bloodshed and cultural vandalism of what became the British Empire, whose search for people to plunder and terrorize soon took it beyond its own neighbourhood, and on to the Americas, Africa and Asia.

But these are tenacious cultures, who in spite of hundreds of years of this struggle, still retain their own sense of themselves, although only Ireland – most of it – has won complete independence. The others have Welsh or Gaelic spoken alongside or instead of English; compete in their own teams in international sport, passionately expressing themselves in football and rugby; and have continued to struggle for political autonomy within the UK, or outright separation.

This uncomfortable history feeds straight into Britain's current mire of socio-economic repression and collapsing ethic of care. The country is now in deep subjection to the Conservative Party's austerity programme, which has involved the systematic dismantling of the welfare state, the removal of measures protecting the vulnerable and poor, the deliberate cultivation of popular ignorance and prejudice of all stripes, and the concentration of resources and influence in the hands of political, financial and big business elites, effectively selling out the country to thugs, thieves, and the acolytes of a renewed and remorseless cult of the market.

This process's regional dimensions have been obvious. A privileged, insulated, hankering southeast has become a tentacular Laputan monstrosity, siphoning off resources, jobs and dreams from Britain's north and west, to further service the coffers and egos of the London elites while leaving behind the rest of the country in suffering, stagnation, and a constant bombardment of brazen southeastern contempt. The debates surrounding Scotland's coming independence referendum have become as much about an opportunity to claw back a paradigm of socio-economic fairness and political accountability, not to mention basic human decency; that is, to say no to the campaign of national cannibalization orchestrated from Westminster, over and above questions of Scotland's geopolitical interests or long historical grievances.

And then there is Wales.

Subjected, often brutalized, by England for 700 years, Wales now has its own national assembly with considerable autonomy over its own affairs. More thoroughly integrated into the UK than Scotland, its present independence ambitions are more muted, though one wonders how a positive outcome in the Scottish referendum might affect this.

Wales, like Scotland and Ireland, is a land of wild and beautiful landscapes. Unlike England it actually has mountains, and its moors and coastlines carry that same sense of distinct direction as Wales's culture: that freedom of remoteness, whose systems and secrets, not like those that call themselves British, make themselves known beneath your footsteps.

Here, then, are some landscapes and themes from the Gower Peninsula, an outstanding region of natural beauty just out of Swansea's back door.

4) Pangagawan Cave, Kiangan: The Heaven Below

Ifugao harbours many ancient secrets. Another legend, whose details escape me, tells of a group of Ifugaos who were travelling through the mountains and forests of Pangagawan, in the south of Kiangan, perhaps hunting or gathering plants. Apparently, they happened upon a deep cave, and upon exploration, discovered a passage to the Skyworld within.

That cave is now becoming established as a special tourism asset, and if you're the adventurous sort, then this is not something you will want to miss. You too can delve to a whole other world a hundred metres beneath the surface: a realm made of darkness and limestone, shaped and contorted over thousands of years into vast and surreal formations; and so too of subterranean rivers and waterfalls, which weave through the darkness and churn from depths of stone.

Appropriately, an expedition to those depths is serious business, and the journey to get there alone will test your worthiness to enter. You would certainly be wise to stay the night at the lodge in the forest over there, due to the distances, energy requirements and rain patterns involved; and the cave passages twist and project in all imaginable shapes, which will certainly bend, bruise and cut you as you contort yourself to negotiate them. Fortunately, the local guides will provide you all the oversight, equipment and support you need to explore them safely; and you will emerge, at last, with experiences you will not forget any time soon.

Oh, and remember to bring toilet paper.

3) Tourism Comes to Ifugao

Ifugao's cultures and landscapes have drawn visitors for centuries. However, it was in the 1970s, after President Ferdinand Marcos decreed the rice terraces as Philippine cultural treasures, that tourism emerged as itself a major narrative force in the long Ifugao story.

With the Philippine government actively promoting tourism in Ifugao, visitors began to pile into the mountains in unprecedented numbers. Many were Filipinos, but with the rise in the rice terraces' international profile, especially with UNESCO World Heritage attention in the 1990s, these were joined by an accelerating influx of foreigners from all over the world.

This new invasion, a fair bit more complicated than those before, descended upon the municipality of Banaue. The town was to become the ground zero of tourism in Ifugao, with a whole new industry and its infrastructure springing up to accommodate, feed, guide and merchandise to these visitors.

It was a reactive process, and one which has not especially pleased the inhabitants. One of them wryly remarked that the rice terraces in Banaue town have become "house terraces". A UNESCO report in 2008 elaborated:

From a pristine valley of rice terraces, healthy muyongs (forests) and clustered hamlets bisected by a clean river, Banaue has been transformed into an unattractive town blighted by spontaneous and uncontrolled development. Structures have been built randomly everywhere. Large areas of muyong have been destroyed, causing erosion, and the river has been polluted with industrial and household waste. Modern music blares from most houses and the noise and pollution from vehicles has made the place less liveable.

At the same time, this invasion has not been without some benefits. With Ifugao now renowned across the world, awareness grows of the robust eco-cultural way of life that has sustained its people through challenges – human and environmental alike – that have broken civilizations the world over. Through the curiosity this stirs, tourism offers quite some opportunities to help strengthen and conserve that impeccable heritage.

To harness the tourist invasion; to make it their own, on their own terms, and direct what it brings for the benefit of their communities while warding themselves against its hazards. Such is the challenge of tourism that the Ifugao communities rise up to today, closely monitoring the lessons of what we might call the “Battle of Banaue”.

2) The Enduring Terraces

In 1995, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) added five clusters of the Rice Terraces of the Philippine Cordilleras to its World Heritage List: those of Batad and Bangaan (in Banaue), Nagacadan (in Kiangan, above), Hungduan, and Mayoyao.

In the international imagination, these landscapes frequently are the Philippines. There is far more to them than their stunning beauty however. These formations are the product, and living embodiment, of a complex system in which food production, scientific knowledge and technical mastery, religious devotion, social cooperation, economic durability, ecological balance, and attunement to the climate and seasons are all bound together into a singular way of life of spectacular sophistication.

It is by this, the rice terrace system, that the Ifugao peoples have made the high rugged slopes of the Cordillera Central their homes: and the system's tenacity more than rose to the tests of time, enduring shock after shock, resisting some threats, absorbing others, adapting to others still. Today, the farmers of Ifugao work the terraces much as they have for countless generations.

1) Kiangan - At the Epicentre of History

If you are contemplating a trip to Ifugao, you will likely have your sights set on the rice terraces of Banaue Here however I present the case that Kiangan, the cornerstone of the Ifugao story from prehistoric times to the present day, should be at the top of your itinerary.

To make that case, here is a brief a synopsis of that history. Watch Kiangan's significance expand, and with it the profile of Ifugao itself. From the local, a house by a river in a valley; to the national, an unconquerable highland which protected its ways as the Philippines changed around it; to the international, as the final stand of imperial Japan's colonial armies; and now the truly global, as the first cultural landscape onto the UNESCO World Heritage List, and a recognized foremost example of human adaptability, ingenuity and resilience.

Ancient Kiangan: The Cradle of Ifugao

It is told in the legends that long ago, Wigan, greatest of the Skyworld gods, looked down on the fertile valleys of Ifugao. "What a shame," he declared, "that so rich a land is unpopulated!" And so he came up with a plan to do something about it.

He built a house; equipped it with rice and chicken coops, chickens and pigs; and placed his sleeping children inside: his son Kabbigat, and his daughter Bugan. Then he sent it down to the most fertile valley below: Kiyyangan.

The Philippines - A Journey to Ifugao

In the north of Luzon, the largest island of the Philippines, high in the mounatains of Cordillera Central, lies the heartland of the Philippine indigenous peoples. Of these, the province of Ifugao has gained renown far past its borders: for the unshakeable tenacity of the Ifugao peoples' ways of life in the face of wave after wave of incursions, over centuries; and more recently, for the recognition of their legendary rice terraces as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The rice terraces and their communities are bound together in a complex system of social relations, rituals and spiritual practices, agriculutral ecosystems, seasonal cycles, ancestral skills and knowledge, intricate geo-engineering, land management, pest control, and sheer hard work that together have produced some of the most resilient societies on Earth. Over hundreds of years they fought off or absorbed Spanish conquest, American colonialism, and Japanese invasion, experiencing each in ways quite distinct from the rest of the country and emerging with their Ifugao identities intact; altered, perhaps, but still fundamentally their own.

I travelled there as part of a research team, studying how that resilience could be still improved. Why? Because today a new set of challenges has encroached on these mountains, more insidious than all the precedents combined. As of the twentieth century, the globalization of the capitalist world order has penetrated Ifugao; and its implications for life there, whether physical or social, climatic or spiritual, are weaving complex, confounding new threads into these venerable livelihoods and landscapes.

Threats and opportunities; continuities and change; adaptation and courage; Ifugao's situation in may ways mirrors that of the indigenous peoples of Guyana, on the opposite side of the Earth. And just as with them, we would do well to look from the other side of the equation, and respect and learn from a civilization that can still assert itself, intact and with dignity, where many others have not been so fortunate. What have the Ifugao retained that is lost to those nations which, boasting of "development", have scarcely yet realized what it has cost them?

The remoteness of the Ifugao highlands was apparent just in the ordeal of getting there. After my colleague's Serbian passport broke the immigration computer system in the Ninoy Aquino International Airport, Manila, it was an all-day trip by road up through the home provinces of Pampanga and Tarlac, the ricefields of Nueva Ecija, and the forests and hills of Nueva Vizcaya. We arrived in Ifugao well after midnight, whereupon our drivers got lost, and we staggered into our first destination – Banaue – at three in the morning.

However, the opening of flights to a nearby airfield should make Ifugao more accessible in due course, especially for travellers and tourists. These tourists are a major theme in Ifugao's present-day challenges and opportunities, and it is my hope that this forthcoming series of posts will encourage you to go there for yourself, and offer you advice in this regard; just as it reminds you of the epic story you join as a character if you do so, and of the contingency of your role therein on your own choices.

This series, to be updated over the next few weeks, will cover a range of themes across a small handful of Ifugao's communities. The province is diverse, with each portion having its own distinct culture and grappling with challenges unlike the others'. Unfortunately there was no prospet that a single research trip could cover all of them; but those looked at here stand out among Ifugao's most iconic. Such as Banaue, the ground zero of tourism...

...Batad, also in Banaue municipality, the secluded rice terrace amphitheatre town...

...and above all: Kiangan. A historical centre, not only for Ifugao, as the first of its towns...

...but for all of East Asia, as the site where World War II came to an end in the Philippines.

And as if there was not enough astonishment to be found on Kiangan's surface, what secrets await 100 metres beneath it?

Watch this space for much, much more to follow on one of the most enduring indigenous civilizations in the world, beginning with the hundreds of years of high history that resonates in Kiangan to this day.

Climate Change Resilience in Guyana

Here's another United Nations University (UNU) piece: my paper on resilience and the indigenous communities of Guyana, written last autumn (2011) for the Global Change and Sustainability intensive course. I am posting it here in case it is of any help for those currently taking that course, but also for general interest, especially as concerns Guyana.

The text is as it was when given to the UNU, though I've added a few pictures here to make the columns of text less terrifying. And as before, for those writing in a similar capacity now, this is here to assist and encourage thinking, not to substitute for it. Plagiarizing my stuff is a very fast way to get put in hospital. Please attribute it properly if you use anything from here, okay?

Enchancing resilience against climate and ecosystem changes in Guyana's North Rupununi region

Ai Chaobang (a.k.a. John Ashton), UNU-ISP MSc Sustainability, Development and Peace

12 October 2011

1) Resilience, Change and Sustainability

2) Enhancing resilience against climate and ecosystem changes in the North Rupununi communities of Guyana

Reducing and coping with climate change, significantly influenced by human activity, presents one of the supreme challenges of our era.¹ It is a manefestation – perhaps the foremost – of the sustainability crisis humanity must urgently address.

A frequent concept in the sustainability discourse is that of resilience, and here I seek to explore what it means in that context, as well as how we might measure and enhance it. I then apply it to the specific case of the indigenous communities of Guyana's North Rupununi region, and consider what resilience means in their circumstances and how it might be improved.

3) SHIRAOI – Return of the Ainu (アイヌ)

Today we take a closer look at Hokkaido's original people. I particularly recommend this post to my friends, colleagues and former students in Guyana, whom I encourage to consider the Ainu's story very carefully, and think about what it offers for their own communities' journey.

We touched on them previously. They were the first. Their name for themselves, 'Ainu', in their own language means 'human', and they inhabited Hokkaido, northern Tōhoku, the Kuril Islands, and even Sakhalin and the tip of Kamchatka, long before the first Japanese or Russians set foot in the area.

They developed their own culture and way of life. They hunted and fished, sported impressive beards and tattoos, and so identified with the wilderness on which they relied that it came to totally define them through their conceptions of gods, their rituals, their music, their clothing, their language, their architecture. They did not write, but their oral histories were among the longest and richest epics in the world.

 

Today, there are hardly any left. At least, any in the sense of persons of pure Ainu descent, living according to Ainu traditional culture – as far as I could establish. Japan's limited awareness of them itself attests to the scale of their catastrophe. Most people, when asked, admit how hard it is to gauge how much of Hokkaido's Ainu heritage remains in people alive today; and while estimates of numbers of these Ainu go as high in some cases as over 20,000, most it seems have been largely integrated into Japanese lifestyles, Japanese practices, and Japanese genetic heritage.

Finding out about them from afar proved next to impossible, and was one of the many reasons I long sought to travel to Hokkaido. On arriving, I was surprised just how fast their persisting influence made itself known. A huge array of Hokkaido's place names, including virtually all those I meant to visit, originate from the Ainu language. Sapporo, as we've seen; Furano, from fura-nui (“stinking flame”, a reference to volcanic sulphur); Sounkyo, from sou-un-betsu, “river with many waterfalls”; even Asahikawa, “morning sun river” in Japanese, is thought to come from a mis-interpretation of chiu-pet, “river of waves”. And so too shirau-o-i, the “place with many horseflies”: Shiraoi.

As usual, click below to see the full post.

2) SAPPORO – The Story of Hokkaido (北海道 の ものがたり)

I left Akita at 4:30am, hauled my luggage on and off trains for seventeen hours, and staggered into Hokkaido's prefectural capital long after dusk.

As with most things in Hokkaido, the first word belongs with the Ainu, the indigenous people, whom we shall return to properly in due course. Sapporo's name comes from sat poro pet ("dry, large river") in the Ainu language.

Sapporo is one of Japan's youngest settlements, with dedicated settlement only beginning in the 1860s. A century and a half later, it is Japan's fourth most populated city, prosperous and popular, and renowned for its beer, chocolate biscuits, miso ramen, snow festival, and hosting of the 1972 Winter Olympics.

Now is that or is that not a planned city?

But to understand it – and to understand Hokkaido – we have to go back further than the birth of Sapporo. Much further. 40,000 years further, in fact, to the Pleistocene epoch: far enough to make out its geo-ecological umbilical cord, which was totally separate from that of Japan's.

Notice anything major that isn't there now?