ABSTRACT
In Northern Tokachi the growing dominance of industrial mega fāmu [mega farm] dairy production has resulted in a concomitant spike in a revamped and reimagined practice. This chapter explains how and offers some reasons why deer hunting has become a local for-profit enterprise. Over the last three decades the rapidly growing dairy industry has produced a “global countryside”, seen, for example, in domestic yōshoku [foreign food] production, the local influence of global products and markets, as well as steady rise in the migration of domestic and international labor required to produce milk in the current climate of “forced cosmopolitanism”. However, the expansion of diary output has led to a meshing of abundances beyond milk; an abundance of reverting pasture land, an abundance of healthy retired farmers, and having had natural predators eradicated for the farms to start, an abundance of deer. From the apex of modernist global agriculture several elderly retired dairy farmers have opted to become semi-commercial deer hunters fighting what has been framed the “deer problem.” In-so-doing, these local “Old Boys” highlight how this particular place is concomitantly linked to global practices and underscore how what might be seen as “premodern” practices, hunting or reciprocal non-profit exchange for example, emerge from the limits of modernity. In conclusion, this chapter questions the reliance on a core verses periphery discourse regarding the “peripheralization” of rural places and suggests, for example, that relations framed in terms of “assemblage”, “shatter zone,” or “heterotopia” could prove a comparative and productive foundation for inquiry into practice and place.
