BIOREGIONING, JAPAN, POSSIBLE FUTURES
Growth as the fermentation of culture and cultures: Kohei Saito’s ‘Slow Down’ and Kagoshima’s possible futures
Degrowth or slow growth? Bioregionalism or global systems? How Kagoshima reveals possible ‘double movements’ as Japan flickers between moonshots and moments, and how narrative settings might articulate possible pasts, presents and futures
(Ed. Context for this piece is here.)
The macguffin in 2022 film Unrueh (Unrest) is ostensibly Peter Kropotkin, and his visit to the Swiss Jura mountains in the late 19th century. Yet director Cyril Schäublin’s poised camerawork appears rather more interested in lovingly re-creating the everyday infrastructures of the Swiss watchmaking cooperatives that Kropotkin lived amidst.
Such details stays with the viewer, whether the ‘balance wheel’ of the watches that the title evokes, a steady state mechanism derived from constant flickering movements, or the multiple timezones — municipal, local, factory and church time — running simultaneously and unsynchronised in these small villages. The timezones indicate the ‘everyday complexity’ of bioregional economies, still just about in tune with their material world and natural environment, local craft traditions in concert with (then) advanced technologies. Other timezones reflect the globalised economy that had been running for several hundred years by this point, largely coerced into being by British gunboats. The rituals associated with this life, moments before their remnant systems float into air, suddenly have an awkward, almost farcical air.
The following century saw cooperative practices and bioregional economies pushed to the margins. Yet something is stirring. British anarchist Colin Ward’s writing, drawn from Kropotkin’s mutual aid and the ‘Switzerisation’ of federated regional governance, was the subject of the final Bristol Festival of Ideas last year. Zürich’s cooperative housing, as with related initiatives proliferating across Europe, is seen as a model that might scale, spreading from New York to Melbourne. Industrialised agriculture is triggering decarbonising farming co-ops. Architectural practices like Material Cultures are researching the biomaterial possibilities in Brandenburg’s wetland-based ‘paludiculture’, based around transitioning industry via local strawboard cooperatives.
More broadly, city governments from Barcelona (under Ada Colau) to Bogotá (under Claudia López) have recently led highly progressive, often cooperative-based policies. The first female mayor of Suginami ward in Tokyo, Satoko Kishimoto in 2022 shares similar perspectives and practices.
And in Japan, the philosopher Kohei Saito, who calls Kishimoto a friend, has something of a “surprise hit” (The Guardian) on his hands with his new book about the radical commons. We should be clear: while building on his earlier ‘Capital in the Anthropocene’, which sold over half a million copies, ‘Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto’, may only be a hit within that niche of the population interested in applying Marx’s marginalia to today’s climate breakdown.
Still, that Saito, a philosophy professor at the University of Tokyo, can sell that many books and be profiled in the New York Times, says something. For ‘Slow Down’ is a serious book, drawn from new research efforts refreshing the parts of Marx’s writing that other researchers have not reached, excavating Marx’s environmental thinking from within and around the margins of his better known works.
Upon this almost archaeological research work, repositioned as a clear warning from the past, Saito constructs an engaging case for entirely radical societal change, powered by the engines of the multiple interconnected crises we are living through. He draws from Ulrich Brand and Markus Wissen’s concept of an “Imperial mode of living” as well as the unlikely combination of Slavoj Žižek and Elinor Ostrom, alongside the welcome addition of non-Western names, such as Hirofumi Uzawa and his ideas of ‘social common capital’.
It’s a convincing story of extractive capitalism, colonialism, and climate breakdown, and Saito’s analysis is as deeply referenced as you might expect. It’s difficult to disagree with much of it. Indeed, for what it’s worth, a broad idea of slowdown seems to me to be the only viable path, given our predicament. As Saito writes, cheekily appropriating Thatcher, “there is, in fact, no alternative.”
Beyond Saito’s emphasis on Marx, the arguments will be familiar to those who have read Eswazi anthropologist Jason Hickel’s Less is More (2020), a book that Saito largely endorses and builds upon. They both return to the ‘metabolic rifts’ that continues to spoil our soil, and now course through our widespread biodiversity degradation. Similarly, the paradox that William Stanley Jevons first articulated in 1865 — that more efficiency leads to more resource use, not less — now returns to explain why blunt technology-led ‘green deals’ will not work. In other words, we simply do not have the resources for supply-side mass electricification — of vehicles, appliances, energy, housing—without first addressing demand, just as we have no evidence of any ‘absolute decoupling’ of emissions growth from economic growth.
Both climate breakdown and Covid-19 are powerfully explained as products of capitalism, and Saito is direct in his proposition that, “the era of neoliberalism is over. Free markets, austerity and small government cannot cope with the multistranded crises of capitalism, democracy and ecology.” His conclusion is that only in a deliberate and equitable slowdown, based on “reclaiming the commons”, do we find a meaningful, thriving future, oriented around a “radical abundance” rather than an artificial scarcity.
Yet the problem, perhaps, with ‘Slow Down’ does not lie with the analysis (why things are how they are) but rather, with the synthesis (what they could be instead).
For instance, this sentence of Saito’s may be broadly accurate, depending on your predilections — “Since capitalism is the ultimate cause of climate breakdown, it is necessary to transition to a steady-state economy” — but it is immediately followed by this one: “All companies therefore need to become co-operatives or cease trading.” Really? It may or may not be difficult to imagine the end of capitalism — there are many versions of that out there — but it is quite hard to imagine, say, Apple as a cooperative. Saito’s language often sounds a little too certain which, ironically perhaps, renders his proposals unconvincing. So while Saito has an ear for the aphorism, there is not much of a hand to sketch out the details.
But perhaps that is not really Saito’s role here. The philosopher articulates a theoretical lattice in such a way that it might allow for new forms of knowing and being — and might then allow other disciplines and perspectives to adumbrate the rituals and materials of everyday life; to articulate what we can call the ‘dark matter’ of new institutional organisations, codes, policies, and regulations; or to devise the possible theories of change that would motivate and steer such a transformation.
Indeed, this is where design, and particularly the combination of design research, speculative and strategic design, can contribute. One of design’s tasks, for instance, is to help close the gap, just a touch, between ideas and things. For instance, Future Observatory’s recent exhibition ‘How to build a low-carbon home’ (2023–24) gave us an evocative glimpse of material qualities perhaps suited to degrowth’s milieu. Yet transformational load-bearing structures are social, cultural, and economic as much as physical.
In this respect, although Saito’s work is global in both ambition and referencing, his vantage point is particularly interesting. Danny Dorling, in his equally intriguing 2020 book that shares almost the same name as Saito’s, ‘Slowdown’, notes that Japan is effectively the first major industrialised nation to reach deep into the population slowdown, due primarily to social and economic shifts rather than environmental or material. This ‘population degrowth’ must relate in some way to other forms of degrowth. Indeed, Nomura Research Institute predict that at least 30% of households in Japan could become vacant by 2033 which is, admittedly, one way of achieving low-carbon homes.
But far from sliding towards it, Saito describes his degrowth goal as a “grand plan to transform the economy to a model that prioritizes the shrinking of the economic gap, the expansion of social security and the maximization of free time, all while respecting planetary boundaries”.
Of course he sees no sign of this in Japan’s official national policies, strategic goals, and innovation priorities like their science-led ‘moonshots’ programme. He concludes, “Japan is far from being in a ‘leadership position’ regarding degrowth. All that’s happening is capitalism’s long-term stagnation.” Saito says this will lead to “the ‘hard landing’ of slowed growth”, rather than an equitable transition.
What if we looked in different ways at places like Japan, and through the lenses of design researchers as well as philosophers? Beneath the statistical cloud cover, might there be alternate patterns of hope being carefully pieced together? Such patterns are likely to be composed of little more than knots in threads, far from any “grand plan”. Yet they might still allow for different kinds of societal fabric to emerge. Would examining, and working with, these threads help us imagine what such a society would actually look like, how it would work, what would it feel like?
As opposed to the cold abstractions of plans and projections, which appear to be having little positive effect anyway, perhaps staying with these realities as they emerge may be a far more generative activity.
Eat Local Kagoshima
Last December, I visited Kagoshima prefecture in the far south-west of Japan, for a short field trip culminating in the Circular Design Week conference organised by the Japanese design firm Re:public. Every day, we visited traces of alternative economies working within today’s economy, apparently emerging because of slowdown, not despite it.
In these small towns, the patterns of enterprise seemed more redolent of the biological processes of fermentation, as with the local koji, than the normative extractive language of start-up and scale-up. Indeed we started the tour by examining koji in a shōchū distillery, which may have been a cleverly orchestrated performative pun from Re:public, as the koji mould is also ‘the starter’ for miso, mirin, shōyu, and more besides.
We moved on to Kagoshima City, where the owner of two successful kindergartens is now acquiring a vacant elementary school offered up by the municipality, filling the latter with the kids from the former. Risa-san works with local farmers who provide school food — which is also food for education, as the kids learn how to make miso, how to ferment, and also how their food waste goes back to the farmers as compost in tight circular loops — as well as running a farmers’ market and café (EAT LOCAL KAGOSHIMA). She tells me 50% of the food’s ingredients comes from around the city, and the other 50% from the wider prefecture. This is vertical integration (of schools) and horizontal integration (of food systems), and yet with no misplaced ambition to turn into McDonalds. This works because it stays local, woven from personal relationships supporting culture, learning, food, agriculture.
In Hioki, a former Deloitte consultant from Tokyo has found a new life helping rebuild the local fishing industry, exploring how to cultivate the traditionally-farmed delicacy of moon scallops yet working within sea waters whose rising temperatures and decades of overfishing have denuded ecosystems, and with an ageing industrial workforce. It’s immensely innovative work. Elsewhere in Hioki, a local entrepreneur is locating and re-opening vacant houses, or ‘akiya’, and connecting to super-local networks of energy microgrids and electric buses. He’s moved his business into the town, constructing a new headquarters in timber, adjacent to a small community centre largely made of cork, which is made available to locals for free. Elsewhere again, a closed factory creates space for an olive farm, with oil and cosmetics business, the first in Kagoshima region. We visit the tireless advocates for circularity in Osaki Town, the municipality with the highest domestic recycling rate in Japan. Re:public have themselves created a pop-up bamboo construction workshop — ‘RE:STORE’ — in a vacant storefront in downtown Satsumasendai, the accessible touchpoint of a broader ambition to reboot the maintenance of neglected forests surrounding the town.
Deep in the woods near Minamikyushu, another abandoned elementary school is transformed into a thriving community arts centre, Riverbank, activated by a hugely popular annual music festival running on-site — “Good Neighbors Jamboree” — and flanked by a network of Endor-like buildings and walkways newly threaded through the forest, constructed by and with local people and local trees. Everything here is impeccably realised and maintained, yet also relaxed by the vernacular loose-fit assemblages typical of Japanese everyday spaces.
Rather than seeing these vacant schools, shops and akiya as half-empty, perhaps we see them as half full? Half-full of memories, of culture, of networks based on the propinquity of existing infrastructures — what Keller Easterling would call their ‘distinction’. Half-full of materials, and thus embodied carbon, and of nature. Japanese urban planners speak of the ‘spongification’ of cities created by these akiya. Yet each of these holes is a possibility; an incomplete city is one that can adapt.
The possibilities are precisely in these patterns of slowness, patience, resourcefulness, ‘staying with’ complex systems, building health, pleasure, long-term thinking and inclusive action, and reciprocal stewardship relationships with nature and culture. They are examples of how to Make Do With Now, to borrow the title of the latest ‘new directions in Japanese architecture’-style compendium, an excellent guide to the practices that have emerged after the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake (Yuma Shinohara and Andreas Ruby. Make Do With Now: New Directions in Japanese Architecture. Christoph Merian Verlag, 2022). According to curator Shinohara, the starting point now is to “perceive the plenitude that comes with sufficiency, the creative flourishing that follows when we recognize that we already have enough”.
But none of this is degrowth. Instead, amidst the koji and kindergartens, we see another dynamic. Perhaps growth as in a forest, rather than a Tesla or an Exxon. A forest grows without destroying everything around it. It grows by continually re-creating conditions conducive to life, after Janine Benyus, in symbiosis with everything around it. But it still grows. This is an organic growth, a slow growth, and as Suzanne Simard has shown, the forest is a far more complex and ambitious idea than anything modernity has yet realised. The growth is more akin to the fermentation, of culture and cultures, that sits underneath those Kagoshima stories.
The double movement of moonshots and moments
This version of Kagoshima doesn’t feel planned. These are simply moments, experiences, possibilities, projects. The official plan for Japan relies partly on the national ‘moonshots’, the mandated pathways out of their predicament, capital-intensive high technology plays which actually continue to perpetuate existing modes, just as the very name ‘moonshot’ harks back to a Mad Man mid-century modern. Kagoshima’s ‘moments’ described above are essentially the opposite; they are equally inventive, yet are humble, careful, and grounded, feeling for the edges of possible futures outside of the official narrative. These moonshots and moments are unconsciously countering each other, a combination redolent of Karl Polanyi’s “double movement”, in which economies embedded in the social relations of place counter those that are disembedded — particularly now that the latter are now freewheeling around destructively in global flows of capital.
I ask the Hioki fisherman whether he gets any support from the national government for his super-local innovation work. “No”, comes the answer, with a smile and a shrug. Similarly, speaking with the government’s moonshots team in Tokyo a year before, I detected little engagement with the fertile reality on the ground amidst the kurozu black vinegar factories, akiya, shōchū distilleries, and bamboo fabricators of Kagoshima’s towns.
As Saito suggests, without actively reframing our ideas of economy and politics these two opposing engines will begin to shear each other apart. Polanyi, were he around, perhaps might suggest incremental experiments and prototypes to more carefully and consciously guide these double movements. This would include slowly recalibrating national and regional governance, salvaging what works in the state, whilst ensuring these local commons-oriented shoots can take root and flourish. In this more complex mode, we recognise, as Saito does, that the ‘moments’ above must still rely upon the work of the Japanese state, in terms of universal healthcare, good infrastructure, and social support structures, just as everyone I spoke with also leans on Apple and Sony laptops and projectors, global wifi protocols and national point-of-sales terminals, and the like.
We must also recognise that making the ‘bold strategic plans’ of moonshots is actually less ambitious, less challenging, than the hard yards of fostering the genuine inclusion of acting, as Latour put it, down to earth whilst also recognising that we are still actors within planetary scale systems. The theory of change as to how we might braid this alternate patterning, rather than simply observing the shearing apart, is largely missing from Saito’s book. Again, his certainty of outcome leaves little room for the necessary ambiguity and openness we will need to address complexity, and there is little definition of the qualities and capabilities with which to do so.
Complicating matters usefully
So what kind of practices must be brought to bear, and how? Perhaps there’s another double movement here, a more deliberate organisation of art and science.
As with Schäublin’s Unrest, there’s a scene towards the beginning of Francis Spufford’s historical novel Golden Hill, set in New York in 1746 when its population was a mere 7000 people, where the rich complexity of a bioregional existence is implicitly conveyed. The protagonist Smith’s ‘London gold’ guineas must be exchanged for local currency, which requires dipping into both the global flows of the European colonial powers topped-up by the super-local regional flows of this burgeoning New World colony:
“I believe I could offer you a hundred and eighty per centum on face, in New-York money. Which, for four guineas, would come to — ’ ‘One hundred and fifty one shillings, twopence-halfpenny.’… Lovell opened a box with a key from his fob chain and dredged up silver — worn silver, silver knocked and clatter’d in the battles of circulation — which he built into a little stack in front of Smith. ‘A Mexica dollar, which we pass at eight-and-fourpence. A piece of four, half that. A couple of Portugee cruzeiros, three shillings New-York. A quarter-guilder. Two kreutzers, Lemberg. One kreutzer, Danish. Five sous. And a Moresco piece we can’t read, but it weighs at fourteen pennyweight, sterling, so we’ll call it two-and-six, New-York. Twenty-one and fourpence, total. Leaving a hundred and twenty-nine, tenpence-halfpenny to find in paper.’ Lovell accordingly began to count out a pile of creased and folded slips next to the silver, some printed black and some printed red and some brown, like the despoiled pages of a prayerbook, only of varying shapes and sizes; some limp and torn; some leathery with grease; some marked only with dirty letterpress and others bearing coats-of-arms, whales spouting, shooting stars, feathers, leaves, savages; all of which he laid down with the rapidity of a card-dealer, licking his fingers for the better passage of it all…. ‘Fourpence Connecticut, eightpence Rhode Island,’ murmured Lovell. ‘Two shilling Rhode Island, eighteenpence Jersey, one shilling Jersey, eighteenpence Philadelphia, one shilling Maryland …’ He had reached the bottom of the box.”
—Excerpt from Golden Hill, Francis Spufford (2016)
In the design of currency, and the shifting rituals and practices of commercial exchange, we feel the everyday complexity of the bioregional world mapped onto shifting registers of transaction and relationship. The leathery papers’ drawings of ‘whales, stars, feathers, leaves’ implicitly ask us to imagine different forms of value drawn from nature — albeit extractively, no doubt — in a way that nonetheless seems more full of possibility and reciprocity than that deceptive contemporary phrase ‘ecosystem services’ — and yet with the precision to conjure moments in a life, a place, a culture.
Annie Proulx’s novel Barkskins produces similar insights, not least as it covers largely the same biome at the same time, whilst shuffling the narrative centre northwards, stretching the timeframe a couple of hundred years either side, and seeing from the perspective of the Mi’kmaq as much as the colonists of ‘New France’.
Woven into the text of Kawabata Yasunari’s novel Snow Country (written iteratively from 1935 to 1948) we can also discern traces of a later bioregional society and economy as the narrative’s subtle complexities move across delicate vignettes of everyday life, each quietly revealing. For example, the brief passages in which Shimamura, the novel’s dilettante-ish protagonist, reflects upon his relationship with Chijimi linen describes rhythms, practices, places, mechanisms, materials, and economies. We discover that Chijimi linen could only ever emerge from Niigata Prefecture, in part due to its particular environment, as well as its craft traditions:
“The thread was spun in the snow, and the cloth woven in the snow, washed in the snow, and bleached in the snow. Everything, from the first spinning of the thread to the last finishing touches, was done in the snow. ‘There is Chijimi linen because there is snow,’ someone wrote long ago. ‘Snow is the mother of Chijimi.’ … The thread of the grass-linen, finer than animal hair, is difficult to work except in the humidity of the snow, it is said, and the dark, cold season is therefore ideal for weaving.”
Shimamura ponders the value of what we might now call repair and care cultures, but also the quality of materials as separated from particular product lifecycles or production environments, almost as if living non-human entities, and certainly outlasting the lifespan of humans, including those of its makers. Shimamura is self-aware enough, just, to note the difference between these makers and those, like him, can afford to who wear Chijimi linen kimonos:
“Though cloth to be worn is among the most short-lived of craftworks, a good piece of Chijimi, if it has been taken care of, can be worn quite unfaded a half-century and more after weaving. As Shimamura thought absently how human intimacies have not even so long a life… The nameless workers, so diligent while they lived, had presently died, and only the Chijimi remained, the plaything of men like Shimamura, cool and fresh against the skin in the summer. This rather unremarkable thought struck him as most remarkable. The labor into which a heart has poured its whole love — where will it have its say, to excite and inspire, and when?”
The complicated logistics of circular systems are made clear in his speculations on how these practices of care might have played out. Shimamura has some knowledge of the “great deal of trouble” involved in in this — but also its poetry. Or at least its potential for poetry, as he admits his privlilege renders the actual processes rather opaque.
“He still sent his kimonos back for ‘snow-bleaching.’ It was a great deal of trouble to return old kimonos — that had touched the skin of he could not know whom — for rebleaching each year to the country that had produced them; but when he considered the labors of those mountain maidens, he wanted the bleaching to be done properly in the country where the maidens had lived. The thought of the white linen, spread out on the deep snow, the cloth and the snow glowing scarlet in the rising sun, was enough to make him feel that the dirt of the summer had been washed away, even that he himself had been bleached clean. It must be added, however, that a Tokyo shop took care of the details for him, and he had no way of knowing that the bleaching had really been done in the old manner. From ancient times there were houses that specialized in bleaching. The weavers for the most part did not do their own.”
Finally, Shimamura even treats us to insights about the bioregional economy associated with Chijimi. He somewhat guiltily accepts that the hard labour conditions of the makers are in sharp relief to the luxury of their output. He leaves open the question of how a richer understanding of value must somehow have overcome a narrow reading of ‘harsh economics’ that would typically fail any ‘return on investment’ test. And yet the Chijimi continues nonetheless (and note that Chijimi is still produced in similar fashion today, almost a century after Snow Country was written.)
“He saw that the weaver maidens, giving themselves up to their work here under the snow, had lived lives far from as bright and fresh as the Chijimi they made. With an allusion to a Chinese poem, Shimamura’s old book had pointed out that in harsh economic terms the making of Chijimi was quite impractical, so great was the expenditure of effort that went into even one piece. It followed that none of the Chijimi houses had been able to hire weavers from outside.”
Clearly, Snow Country is not about bioregional economics, any more than Barkskins or Unrueh is. And yet in these novels and films we find deftly sketched traces of alternate systems and cultures, each usefully complex, unresolved but generative. Each is poised at a moment, and place, in transition, between bioregional economies and modernity, images flickering back and forth between future and past. Brian Eno has described how such narrative settings provide us with impossibly rich “simulated worlds”, loosely suggesting spaces of possibility as much as telling stories or conjuring historically-informed scenery.
So as Dougald Hine writes in At Work In The Ruins, art’s job is not to clear up confusion or communicate precise instructions, but “to complicate matters”. Design’s job is also to work similarly with that useful ambiguity and complex synthesis, but also to draw together science, engineering, arts, humanities and social sciences, as well as ‘non-disciplinary’ bodies of knowledge, in order to articulate possible futures; to capture the essence of ideas like Saito’s slowdown and bring them closer to form, to things, into experiences, situations, structures and settings in which to encounter these ideas.
What does a truly bioregional commons feel like? How might it work? Such questions force the designer to think in terms of clocks and timezones, currencies and value systems, how humans interact within the more-than-human. Saito’s book gives us structured analysis, overarching frameworks, the broad sweep of intellectual history that beguilingly sets up such questions. But we are left with careless gaps in language — ‘degrowth communism’ is unlikely to take wing as a phrase any time soon enough, whereas simply ‘slow growth’ or ‘commons’ could do, as I’m sure Saito must realise — as well as a lack of scaffolding with which to build alternative imaginings of everyday life.
Saito doesn’t really help us there, despite the examples he peppers throughout the second half of the book. But again, perhaps this is not his role. Whereas Spufford’s fiction, as it is art, can almost inadvertently serve as a form of well-researched speculative design, effectively prototyping places, times, systems. In what are no more than sidelines to the main narrative, the beguiling detail that Spufford colours his proto-New York with, as with Schaüblin’s Jura, Kawabata’s Niigata and Proulx’s Nova Scotia, is “complicating matters” — but usefully so. Learning from this, well-researched and embedded speculative and strategic design, prototyping in and with places, might also be “complicating matters”, but in doing so it may figure out a theory of change through practice, thinking through making.
I can’t say whether my observations of Kagoshima are the weak signals of a broad future or the distracting motes of a false dawn; a steady-state balance wheel or simply a brief hiatus from the “hard landing” of inexorable decline. Yet I do think that it is in places like this that we might see something emerging, if we find new ways of seeing, of engaging. This is not the grand plan of ‘radical degrowth communism’. It is more mundane, more everyday. Yet there’s a quietly complex, determined beauty to these unfolding relationships, a composting of value and a compositing of ideas, immersed in a specific sense of place drawn from both deep past and near future. It somehow feels like a more plausible future. Yes, based on forms of local commons and slow growth, but also globally-connected, vivid, alive, half-full of diverse possibility. It is up to us to begin embedding and immersing ourselves in these worlds as they are forming, by recognising the possibility of another double movement — not as if a grand plan but the glimpses of uncharted paths leading through the forest ahead.
Ed. An alternate version of this piece, focusing more on bioregioning and less on the ‘narrative settings to explore possible futures’, was first published in the inaugural Future Observatory Journal, April 2024. Many thanks to the Future Observatory team for asking me to write it. Further reports from Kagoshima will emerge soon, augmenting Re:public’s excellent and thorough conference proceedings from Circular Design Week Kagoshima.
