ABSTRACT
This paper considers the problem of wildlife encroachment in depopulated rural Japan as a form of peripheralization. It does so by adopting an “energetical” approach to depopulation in upland areas (focused on the changing human relation to the land) and applies this approach to three examples of diminished environmental activity—cutting (vegetation), picking (fruit) and chasing (animals)—associated with wildlife crop-feeding. This waning human activity regime can become associated with the demise of the village as a human space and even its reclamation by the forest. There is, however, an alternative possibility: that, despite the fall in its residential population, the upland village’s activity regime can be at least partially reconstructed and villager frictions with wildlife alleviated. This possibility is considered by describing attempts to fill the three environmental activity gaps that rely on help from an assortment of actors, nonhuman as well as human, along with greater efforts from the remaining villagers themselves.
