- In Japan, satoyama are rural landscapes with natural attributes that have also been shaped by centuries of human activity.
- Tokyo’s satoyama provide habitat for many kinds of animals, including ecologically sensitive amphibians.
- A recent study examined a satoyama conservation initiative in Tokyo, finding that it succeeded by prioritizing mutual trust and collaboration — an approach the study defines as “gentle power”.
- Yet, some say this approach, which is based on volunteer participation, can stagnate as the volunteers are typically older, leading to the challenge of “how to pass this on to the younger generation.”
The Zushi-Onoji Historical and Environmental Conservation Area nestles among Tokyo’s sprawling western suburbs. The area provides habitat for endangered species and a space to pass on traditional ecological knowledge of satoyama, Japanese rural landscapes that have been shaped by centuries of human activity. A recent study of a conservation initiative in Tokyo, Japan, explores how citizens and local government can adapt existing frameworks to maintain traditional landscapes rich in biodiversity.
Coining the term “gentle power” to denote “influence based on mutual trust and collaboration,” the paper was published in March in the journal Frontiers in Water. It chronicles the contentious beginnings and eventual collaborative transformation of the Zushi-Onoji Historical and Environmental Conservation Area, nestled among Tokyo’s sprawling suburbs.
The area provides habitat for endangered species and a space to pass on traditional ecological knowledge of satoyama, Japanese rural landscapes that have been shaped by centuries of human activity.
Today, satoyama landscapes are widely valued for their biodiversity, as many of Japan’s plants and animals have adapted to satoyama over the centuries. However, both urban development and shifts away from traditional land uses have led to a decline in satoyama — and the organisms that call them home — since the mid-1900s.
To stem this decline, Japan’s national and local governments have invested in satoyama conservation. However, the “gentle power” study cautions that top-down conservation initiatives may see limited success if they lack community input and don’t adapt accordingly — a pattern seen in Japan and around the world.
Traditional knowledge taking the lead
Written by Mikiko Sugiura, a professor at Sophia University’s Graduate School of Global Studies, the “gentle power” paper examines the Zushi-Onoji Historical and Environmental Conservation Area, first designated for conservation in 1978 in response to rapid urbanization in Tokyo’s western suburbs. The area includes rice paddies nestled among small valleys, in addition to historical ruins. It is home to many species whose populations have declined in Tokyo, including amphibians such as the Tokyo Daruma pond frog (Pelophylax porosus porosus), Japanese fire-bellied newt (Cynops pyrrhogaster) and Tokyo salamander (Hynobius tokyoensis).
Sugiura told Mongabay that through her participation in conservation activities at Zushi-Onoji, she came to realize how “gentle power” had enabled successful collaboration among local farmers, citizen volunteers and local government to maintain the site.
Originally, Tokyo hired outside contractors to manage the area. However, local farmers could see that the contractors lacked the traditional knowledge necessary to maintain the site’s specific type of satoyama ecosystem. In the 1990s, the farmers formed their own association and successfully proposed to the Tokyo government that they take over the management contract instead. Today, the association cares for the site, maintaining the surrounding satoyama environment and growing rice, with the help of volunteers.
In her analysis, Sugiura identifies three integrated functions through which “gentle power” operates: knowledge integration, institutional transformation and adaptive sustainability.
She uses the term “gentle power” to describe an approach that, “rather than relying on top-down control or purely voluntary participation, works through mutual trust and collaboration to find a middle ground where institutional support and local autonomy reinforce each other.”
“This inevitably involves questions like who gets to voice their opinions, who makes the decisions, who holds the information, and how it is disseminated,” she adds.
Suneetha Subramanian, a research fellow and academic associate at the U.N. University Institute for the Advanced Study of Sustainability (UNU-IAS), calls Sugiura’s study “timely,” as the concepts it discusses are well-established but have been slow to be taken up in practice.
“The linkages between different elements of nature, social well-being, and the need to strengthen collaboration through deliberations and trust-building partnerships between different decision-makers on the ground cannot be overemphasized,” Subramanian tells Mongabay in an email.
A history of satoyama
Sugiura says she felt it was important to record the Zushi-Onoji initiative because not all public-community conservation projects have seen similar success.
Satoyama conservation activities led by citizens began spreading across Japan in the 1980s and ’90s. In the 2000s, national and local governments began incorporating satoyama conservation in their environmental policies. At COP10, held in Nagoya, Japan, in 2010, the Japanese government and UNU-IAS launched the Satoyama Initiative to further promote understanding and conservation of ecosystems defined by human-nature interactions.
However, government-led satoyama conservation efforts that rely on citizen volunteers — a trend since the 2000s — have not always proven effective, notes researcher Masaharu Matsumura in a contribution to the multi-author volume Adaptive Participatory Environmental Governance in Japan. Citing Forestry Agency data, Matsumura highlights that volunteer organization numbers have stagnated since 2012, with the majority of participants in their 60s or older.
Searching for the next generation of conservationists
Even for relatively successful public-community collaborations, the future can hold uncertainty.
In the Zushi-Onoji initiative, the members with traditional knowledge of satoyama management, the farmers, are aging. The oldest members are in their late 80s. As of 2023, on a national level, the average age of a farmer in Japan was nearly 70. “It’s really a challenge figuring out how to pass this on to the younger generation,” Sugiura says.
The Zushi-Onoji project team doesn’t sell the rice it produces at the conservation site, perhaps owing to the small volume, Sugiura says. Some of the farmers produce vegetables and flowers for sale. Using Zushi-Onoji’s satoyama landscape to make a living is “clearly not feasible,” she says. “I think the only way forward is to involve people who are genuinely interested in environmental conservation or who are drawn to approaches like traditional ecology.”
Cases across Japan may differ, however. The country has seen growing numbers of social entrepreneurs and new farmers who use satoyama to create jobs. Matsumura writes that the impetus for this change can be traced to people re-examining their urban lifestyles following the 2008 financial crisis and the 2011 tsunami and nuclear accident. He posits that such businesses may have greater potential to contribute to satoyama conservation than volunteer work.
They may also provide fruitful models for further research on environmental governance approaches. In her paper, Sugiura notes that her analysis of the Zushi-Onoji initiative is naturally limited by a sample size of one and that her ideas about gentle power could be further developed through comparisons with other initiatives in Japan and overseas.
UNU-IAS’s Subramanian highlights that satoyama conservation initiatives take place in highly diverse socio-ecological contexts, which shape decision-making on nature conservation, resource exploitation and equity.
Members of the International Partnership for the Satoyama Initiative, an international consortium of organizations aimed at helping harmonize humanity and nature, have demonstrated the effectiveness of approaches that allow for inclusive participation by different actors in decision-making and implementation activities, she says. “The principal messages are common across contexts, but implementation nuances vary,” Subramanian says, adding that this also implies “that solutions can be found in any context.”
Banner image:Tokyo’s satoyama landscapes provide habitat for many species, such as the Japanese fire-bellied newt (Cynops pyrrhogaster). Image by Σ64 via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0).
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Citations:
Sugiura, M. (2026). How gentle power enables community-based conservation: Hydrosocial practices and institutional support in Tokyo’s satoyama. Frontiers in Water, 8. doi:10.3389/frwa.2026.1759412
Matsumura, M. (2022). The Satoyama movement and its adaptability: Beyond ideology and institutionalization. Adaptive Participatory Environmental Governance in Japan, 67-92. doi:10.1007/978-981-16-2509-1_5
