History, ethnicity, and policy analysis of organic farming in Japan: when 'nature' was detached from organic

Abstract The ratio of organic farming in Japan stagnated in terms of area and involved farmers despite the richness in history symbolized in terms such as the Fukuoka methods or the more recent Teikei. This paper first reviews the historical development of Japan’s organic agriculture from the 1930s (first epoch), regarding Japanese ethnicity and its roots and relationships to nature. Based on this analysis, we critically evaluate policy development from the 1990s (second epoch). Here, we provide potential explanation for the low ratio of organic agriculture in Japan. By combing the conceptual analysis of ethnicity and organic movements, the underpinning factors that underlie the development of organic farming are analyzed both from historical and cultural contexts. Natural farming is a separate individual practice in Japan, with its own philosophical backgrounds. This initial 1930s terminology of “natural farming” or shizen nōhō (自然農法) was translated into yūki nōgyō (有機農業) in the 1970s. This review claims that the meaning of organic agriculture got too narrow to promote organic agriculture with the governmental intervention and standardization from the 1990s. The initial phase of yūki nōgyō also had such a problem as the concept became increasingly institutionalized through government standardization and policy from the 1990s. Currently, at the conceptual level, the linkage to nature, i.e., “shizen,” is confined into “non-use of chemical components” through formal institutionalization, and the ethnic elements or philosophical and historical roots are neglected. Similar phenomena of “commodification of organic farming” are widely known in matured markets in the USA and Europe, but the discrepancy of “nature” and “organic” agriculture is particularly also observed in contemporary Japan.