Originally published via InTheKnowTraveler: August 8, 2022: People ask me here sometimes, as they often do of foreigners everywhere, where I’m from. “America,” I reply. Then they ask about the state. They usually offer guesses like California or New York. I disappoint them.
Thanks for the shout-out to the pig nightmare story.
When I lived in Japan, it was in an area about as rural as I do now, with outlying areas that were even moreso and reminiscent of your photos here.
It was pretty normal for small holders to let livestock roam like you observed. Over one summer, I got a job bringing in a rice harvest, and the guy's wife gave us lunch in the house. She explained to me that it was common in the area that someone would own thousands of undeveloped or undevelop-able land because of ancestral claim and it was too far from cities for developers to want to chop up and buy. It was also the case that large sections of undeveloped space between villages were owned by NO ONE, and existed in a kind of legal no-mans-land state because there was no one paying taxes to the prefecture for it but it wasn't really up for sale, either.
Anyway, at the risk of going on and on, it has tacitly been the case since Meiji land reformation laws that people would just graze the land in common, since it was way more than would get over-grazed by a couple dozen people's goats or horses, and all of these animals (not cows) are smart enough to find their way home even over pretty long distances. If you had crops you didn't want free range animals getting into, you fenced them. It allowed everyone to access a lot more graze than they would ever be able to personally own, and made everyone take shared responsibility for things like predator management and water sources.
The main reason this is wholly unlike the US is twofold- the interstate highway system developed in the WW2 period introduced high- speed traffic to places it wouldn't normally be an issue, and the claim-staking system of the westward expansion period (coupled with the rise of the Bureau of Land Management) meant that there really isn't ANYWHERE in the US where land doesn't technically belong to SOME entity with an active interest in it.
Thanks for the shout-out to the pig nightmare story.
When I lived in Japan, it was in an area about as rural as I do now, with outlying areas that were even moreso and reminiscent of your photos here.
It was pretty normal for small holders to let livestock roam like you observed. Over one summer, I got a job bringing in a rice harvest, and the guy's wife gave us lunch in the house. She explained to me that it was common in the area that someone would own thousands of undeveloped or undevelop-able land because of ancestral claim and it was too far from cities for developers to want to chop up and buy. It was also the case that large sections of undeveloped space between villages were owned by NO ONE, and existed in a kind of legal no-mans-land state because there was no one paying taxes to the prefecture for it but it wasn't really up for sale, either.
Anyway, at the risk of going on and on, it has tacitly been the case since Meiji land reformation laws that people would just graze the land in common, since it was way more than would get over-grazed by a couple dozen people's goats or horses, and all of these animals (not cows) are smart enough to find their way home even over pretty long distances. If you had crops you didn't want free range animals getting into, you fenced them. It allowed everyone to access a lot more graze than they would ever be able to personally own, and made everyone take shared responsibility for things like predator management and water sources.
The main reason this is wholly unlike the US is twofold- the interstate highway system developed in the WW2 period introduced high- speed traffic to places it wouldn't normally be an issue, and the claim-staking system of the westward expansion period (coupled with the rise of the Bureau of Land Management) meant that there really isn't ANYWHERE in the US where land doesn't technically belong to SOME entity with an active interest in it.