Young organic farmers in Japan: Betting on lifestyle, locality, and livelihood

ABSTRACT

This analysis of Japanese organic farmers in their 30s and 40s gains insight from Lyng’s framework of ‘edgework’—a transgression of life/death boundaries by sports practitioners. Young farmers emerged in qualitative fieldwork as ‘occupational edge-workers,’ crisscrossing binaries such as urban/rural, mind/body, and economic/moral. They manage risks and navigate uncertainties of natural forces, traditional village practices, neoliberal pressures to be entrepreneurial in the market, and judgment of older, purer organic farmers. With goals of living in harmony with nature, intimate others, and community, they create lifestyles in marginal rural localities by which they can make selves that are alternative to the neoliberal narrative, yet act as entrepreneurial subjects that risk bringing their version of morality to the market, via delicious, organic food sold to self-creating consumers. Claiming normality and spurning ideas of organic as a movement, their alterity is partial and practical as they exploit the potentials of this risky border zone. Conducted in 2012 and 2014, this research contributes to investigating alternative lifestyles in Japan, exploring the changing nature of alternative food movements in the neoliberal era, and understanding active agency for self and the environment in the neoliberal situation of entrepreneurial subjectivities, edgy self-making, and historical traditions.

KEYWORDS:

• Japan
• risk
• organic agriculture

Introduction

Organic farmers in Japan operate amidst flux in food, agriculture, personal values, market, and governance. This study analyzes experiences and perceptions of organic farmers in their 30s and 40s and their struggles to navigate the risks and uncertainties of organic agriculture in neoliberal Japan.

I propose that young organic farmers practice ‘edgework,’ a concept developed to explain the perceptions of extreme sports practitioners taking chances at the edges of life and death in an era when the pressures to become consumer–entrepreneurs are strong. Edgework is ‘work carried out on ourselves by ourselves as free beings’ (Lyng, 2005, p. 45). In this sense, young organic farmers practice ‘occupational edgework’ that plays with normative boundaries (Lyng, 2005, p. 26) such as mind/body, nature/culture, urban/rural, and economic/moral. As educated urbanites doing hard field labor using traditional, organic techniques in dispossessed rural areas, they transgress neoliberal truths of the ideal, privileged citizen, not so much rebelling as breaking free of binary rigidity by crisscrossing boundaries (Foust, 2010). Organic farmers are positioned on the in-control end of the edgework framework, creating lives in the boundary zone of dominant and alternative logics, sensitive to their environments as they connect morality and reason (Milavanovic, 2005).

In this border zone, their agency transgresses various binaries—binaries that have shaped these farmers’ perspectives throughout their upbringing, education, and adulthood; these binaries stem from public discourses on sociocultural aspects of the postwar political economy, the contemporary consumer market, local village traditions, and the organic agricultural movement itself. As this paper shows, young farmers flow fluidly through these binaries that appear as contradictions. For example, although they are passionate about using the forces of nature against the degradations of industrial agriculture, they reject monolithic protest against market and government practiced by their forbearers in the organic movement. They wed rational knowledge of science and market with emotional beliefs, straddling strategies of neoliberal consumer–producers and ideals of pioneer organic farmers. They spurn crass consumerist values, yet they desire enjoyment in work, community, and food. They disdain postwar, corporate-defined roles, and in some ways are champion neoliberal subject–entrepreneurs, yet they rebuff neoliberal entrepreneurship for profit only, preferring independent livelihood earned with nature, family, and human relations. They accommodate aging farmers and their traditions in rural villages while scanning for channels and networks in the larger neoliberal world where they were raised.

Thus, these young farmers employ flexible, hybrid approaches that pour across normative lines established by various forces. In the ‘neoliberal situation’ of Japan, privatization, market, and government monitoring make subjects responsible for themselves, yet discourses alternative to the social conditions of neoliberal economics, such as creative self-making, are articulated. Japanese historical values for cooperation and selflessness are active along with global values of individuality and entrepreneurship (Takeyama, 2010). Discursively and materially, these farmers bring together past traditions, neoliberal subjectivities, and edgy self-making.

Young organic farmers perceive organic farming as a way to make selves in neoliberal society—to exceed being subjects of a consumer imperative by making spaces and activities to try to construct themselves as subjects (Leitner, Sheppard, Sziarto, & Maringanti, 2007). Search for self and experience of ambiguity or uncertainty around this is found among many people in Japan (Rosenberger, 2013). Organic farmers take a firmer, more alternative trajectory than most, refusing the company life of winners and the so-called loser life of temporary work that a third of workers now do (Honda, 2006). Through organic farming in Japan’s margins, they create subjectivities and lifestyle occupations with the potential to include nature, emotion, sociality, and freedom of a kind different than that offered (Rose, 1999). Theirs is an uncertain life, but they negotiate boundaries consequential to humans (Lyng, 2005).

This research is an exploration into the following questions: (1) Based on conversations and observations with young organic farmers, what do their thoughts, experiences, and actions offer to our understanding of contemporary Japanese life? And (2) how does edgework as an active approach to risk and uncertainty increase our understanding of their alternative approach to life, occupation, and self?

Edgework as explanatory framework

Edgework arises in studies of voluntary risk-taking. A release from Marx’s alienated labor and Weber’s iron cage, edgework goes beyond the seduction of Baudrillard’s (1994 [1981]) hyper-consumption into intense experiences of body and mind flowing together. Edgework draws on Foucault’s limit experience of lived bodies, no longer docile but transgressing boundaries, ‘confronting the limits of power-knowledge arrangements’ (Foucault, 2006 [1961]; Lyng, 2005, p. 47). This framework fits people doing boundary negotiation, drawing on ways of thinking and acting that are sometimes stable and mainstream, sometimes unstable and edgy, thus leading to meanings and identities that are unique because they are fluid and in-between (Milavanovic, 2005).

Edgework thrives in ‘risk society’ where man-made dangers nurture subjective perspective on risk and uncertainty (Beck, 1992). Risk implies that dangers are calculable and can be managed through risk strategies such as health insurance or government inspection of nuclear plants (Dean, 1999). Uncertainty focuses on incalculability—chaotic, a ‘fluid art of the possible […] requiring vision’ (O’Malley, 2004, p. 5); precautions may be found, but life is pregnant with unpredictabilities, innovative possibilities, or failures (Samimian-Darash, 2013). Drawing on Giddens’ (1990) sense of the potential creativity in manufactured uncertainty, Lyng (2008, p. 109) calls edgework a ‘general theory of uncertainty seeking’ in which, rather than passively calculating risks and rewards, people create themselves through risk experiences, reflectively pursuing the unknown potentials of existential uncertainty.

Edgework logic is an ‘expression of agentic qualities demanded by risk society’ (Lyng, 2008, p. 130) to be creative, dependent on oneself, and open to risk and uncertainty. It is an agency of governing self in small, practicable reworkings of the everyday world (Foust, 2010; Melucci, 1996). As an explanatory framework, edgework is important because it allows the viewing of alternative food practitioners, such as organic farmers, as people who are not simply following the entrepreneurial discourses of the neoliberal market or the dictates of the organic movement as lived by their predecessors, nor the values of traditional village or even those of their individualistic generation. Rather the framework of edgework makes visible that young organic farmers are performing a purposive tight-rope walk, one that both takes on risk and uncertainty as a way of life and uses this in-between place as a kind of strategy to cope with the uncertainties of environment, food, family, and self-making in neoliberal Japan.

Organic agriculture in Japan

Although various ideals of organic agriculture exist, such as no use of chemical fertilizers or pesticides, subsistence off the land, or refusal of market participation, the definition of organic agriculture varies among laws, movements, and individuals. Here, the aim is to understand organic agriculture in context from the viewpoint of these young organic farmers. The risk of living with forces of nature from soil quality to weather and climate change is at the core of organic farmers’ occupational edgework. Although there is little room to make self outside of institutional shaping of individuals in neoliberal society, direct, embodied practice with the earth is one arena that opens a gap for creativity (Berking, 1996; Foust, 2010). These organic farmers bend their bodies to the forces of the earth, collecting chicken dung and fallen leaves to make compost, weeding and harvesting by hand.

Young organic farmers are acutely conscious of the hazards of production-oriented agriculture to the environment and people. Some realized this in university, others while working abroad teaching industrial agriculture to Africans or Filipinos. Many voiced the idea that organic agriculture is a risk strategy that will allow people to survive on earth. However, organic agriculture itself carries risks and uncertainties: not only its vulnerability to radiation from local inputs (Rosenberger, 2016) but also everyday hazards of organic techniques such as slow-growing or failing crops and livelihood risks such as lack of consumers. Farmers run the double jeopardy of surviving socially and economically in rural villages, and as a man from Ibaraki laughingly expressed it: ‘It took us 5 years to feed ourselves. We thought we might starve!’

In 2012 and 2014, I interviewed 43 farmers, joining in farmwork and attending conferences with the Japan Organic Agriculture Society (JOAA) to which all farmers were loosely connected. I conducted interviews on farms located from south of Tokyo to Northern Honshu. In my study, organic farmers in their 30s and 40s, raised in wealthy, consumerist Japan, emerged as a unique group. They had established independent, organic farms for 10 plus years, and most lived fully from farm profits, unlike many new farmers who work part-time (Shiomi, 2011). Most were raising children who needed education through to university and thus faced the ultimate question of how to be both morally and economically effective in their organic farming.

Most did internships with or received help from older ‘pioneer’ farmers whose organic movement protested Japan’s rapid industrialization (Moen, 1997). The Japan Organic Agricultural Association (JOAA) was started in 1971 by organic farmers and consumers concerned with the effects of agricultural chemicals on farmers and consumers; the reduction of full-time farmers, rural villages, and agricultural land through rice reduction laws and industrialization; and the loss of Japan’s political and economic independence to the United States. JOAA opposes direct participation in market or government, and although they actively pressed for the Japanese Agricultural Standard (JAS) for organic certification, which passed in 2001, few JOAA farmers seek accreditation. Moreover, they helped to fight for a policy to promote organic agriculture, which was announced in 2006, but they refused to sit on a government committee with large organic producers whose organic principles were more lenient than theirs. Members operate on trust with consumers with whom they form teikei (consumer groups who pay dues, receive food boxes, help distribute food, and meet for political, social, or cooking events). The JOAA’s membership is decreasing, but they stick by their tenets of: (1) face-to-face consumer relations as in teikei-type groups who help farmers and interact, (2) no use of agricultural chemicals, and (3) self-sufficiency among farmers. Young organic farmers’ participation in the JOAA varies, with some locally active, others active only in the younger farmers’ group, and some with nominal or lapsed membership.¹

Young organic farmers in my sample have various characteristics. The typical example is a married couple, both raised in nonfarm environments, being trained in organic agriculture either in university or internships, and having two to three children. However, the sample also includes several single men and women, and several women married to salarymen. All started by renting land, and some in villages have bought land; only one inherited land. Most are open to limited use of the market for practical reasons, but to various degrees. Most used consumer groups, but none adhered strictly to participatory teikei groups. Geography appeared to differentiate them in this area. Many face difficulties farming poor soils of mountainous villages while fewer farm fertile, flat lands. However, all grow rice and a large variety of vegetables with simple machines and manual labor, and many raise chickens for egg sales. Those who live farther than 2–3 h from Japan’s megalopolises have less market access, although distribution companies collect food throughout Japan and overnight delivery is available everywhere.

The rural context for young organic farmers affords more opportunities and uncertainties than the situation that pioneers faced in the 1970s. In the last 40 years, the local, diverse food system in Japan has mostly died, killed off by government policies (Mulgan, 2006). Japan’s self-sufficiency was 39% in 2014—the lowest of all developed countries (Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, 2015). Small farms survive, but dying agricultural villages with aging, part-time farmers without heirs proliferate. Young organic farmers help revitalize dying villages and agriculture, but the future of agriculture in Japan faces stiff international competition.

The organic market is small, although growing slowly and steadily. In 2011, .24% of the domestically grown food produced in Japan was organic (Gain Report, 2013), with 11,859 organic farms reported by MAFF in 2010 (I-foam, 2014). Young farmers feel ‘organic’ is known, and that their occupation is not viewed as strange, but their food faces competition. Organic food is available in mainstream supermarkets, much of it imported. Large delivery companies and natural food stores feature organic food along with food made with low—or limited-agricultural chemicals. ‘Local’ (jimoto) food is also popular after scares of poisoned imported foods (Rosenberger, 2009) and is sold in supermarkets and direct sales stores along highways.

Young organic farmers face uncertainties of how to make a living while maintaining their desired lifestyles and thus confronting the economic and moral risks of entrepreneurship in the market. The next three sections will discuss lifestyle, locality, and livelihood in more detail, drawing on the interview material, and giving details of the occupational edgework of young organic farmers in Japan.

Lifestyle (kurashi)

The latitude to make selves is central to the neoliberal project of performing ‘me.’ If creating subjectivity through relationship with nature and other humans in the margins of Japan is the central aim of organic farmers’ edgework, operationalizing this in a lifestyle (ikikata) is the process they focus on.

Young organic farmers see their occupation as transformative for themselves, their families, and a small swath of earth that reaches out via its food to others (Starr, 2010), yet they insisted that they were normal, not resistors like the pioneers. Theirs is a politics of engagement rather than of contestation (Escobar, 2001; Gibson-Graham, 2006).

‘It is the life (kurashi) that we love. We’ll only do it as long as we enjoy it,’ stated an organic farmer in his late 30s with a wife and two young children in Ibaraki. His wife agreed. They lived in a drafty old farmhouse, worked hard while children were at day care, and had little money. That day, they dried daikon radish on a wood platform they made outside. Raised urban, they enjoyed learning rural, historical foodways from local farmers.

Active, embodied doing and making in a network of things and people is central to the farmers’ making of selves in this lifeworld (Day, 2004). Working in nature, they create things others must shop for, engaging mind and body as well as old and new techniques. In Iwate, a farming family produces electricity from tunneled human and pig feces. With neighbors, she makes miso and natto (paste used as a base for soup and beans eaten over rice, both made from fermented soybeans) and they also make honey from Japanese bees and noodles made from their soba crop. This lifestyle partakes of nostalgia for old farming techniques and openness to new organic techniques such as chains across the rice field to catch weeds. They are neo-traditionalists who look into the past in order to make a life that stems the uncertainties of the future.

Farmers regard their lifestyles as giving them the opportunity for ‘a simple life’ compared with urban life. Their ability to live close to nature via organic agriculture is the key here. The appeal of this was reinforced by others in their generation. An Ibaraki woman aged 39 commented: ‘It’s a rich life (yutaka na seikatsu). Our university friends are jealous of us living in the country and feeding our children fresh food.’ She felt that urban friends were eager to visit with their children, their parents wanted to help, and their online consumers watched reports of their life with fascination. Two women who farmed near Tokyo found city people hungry to come dig in the soil with them. ‘They want to get their hands dirty. People have this need.’ Furthermore, they see their life as being free from direct authority. A Nagano farmer said, ‘I don’t have the stress of a salaryman. I can decide for myself.’ He laughingly added that this was ‘half-hobby’ in the sense that he lacked money, but he ‘wouldn’t trade it.’

These organic farmers feel joy in their transgression of binaries: work and enjoyment, production and consumption, past and present, bosses and employees, urban and rural. This is a holistic life of forests, greenhouses, and small fields that spills organic vegetables into their houses and into boxes for consumers. However, perspectives of risk and uncertainty also entered interview conversations—economic, educational, familial, gendered—as well as risk strategies through interns, grandparents, and fellow organic farmers. These farmers try to live self-sufficiently, often with little cash income. However, although they do not want luxuries, they want fundamentals of middle-class life such as house, education, and extracurricular activities. They never mention poverty, for they have redefined a rich life in terms of nature, food, family, and community. Most desired, and many helped to build, modern houses, airtight with up-to-date kitchens and plumbing. One family’s house burned down and they lived in low-income housing until they gathered money and bought land to build. Their house was typical: sparsely furnished with table and chairs for eating, TV, floor pillows, desk, computer, and futons.

Married farmers preferred two or three children, but it was difficult for them to afford quality high school and university education that would allow their children to compete in contemporary Japan, especially with the need for private tutoring or cram school preparation for entrance exams. These farmers are themselves university-educated and will not sacrifice their children’s future. Parents also want to provide extracurricular opportunities from activities such as theater groups to soccer clubs. Indeed, they themselves do hobbies such as softball or folksinging.

Farmers find strategies to manage this socioeconomic risk. Farmers train yearly interns in part to gain extra hands for production and income. Not a few receive help from their parents to educate the grandchildren. One scoured the country for scholarships and sent a child to an island high school far away. A few take other jobs—working for a nearby organic farmer or working winters in a sake factory. Young farmers also nurture more enterprising selves, a topic explored more in detail below. However, uncertainties remain: lack of employment opportunities, grandparents who do not contribute to grandchildren’s education, low quality of local education, lack of nearby cram schools for exam preparation, and nearby nuclear plants.

Farmers often speak of the need to reinstate human relations in Japanese family life, but their lifestyles both facilitate and obstruct this. Children know their parents’ occupation lifestyle intimately and parents are always somewhere near, although perhaps at fields several miles away. Fathers and mothers are home more than urban working parents. The risk side is that in certain seasons, the amount of work is staggering and parents hardly have time at home. Young children are usually put in day care early so parents can work in the fields while older children take on household responsibilities. Parents rationalize that children acquire both aspects of their lifestyles: individual responsibility and relationality.

Gender risks exist for women farmers. The lifestyle as far as I witnessed it is heteronormative, but criticism of male-headed hierarchy as in the JOAA or local organizations occurs. Single women and women married to salarymen have authority over their farms, although when working with family members they must make efforts to sustain this (Rosenberger, 2014). Married couples are usually both trained in organic farming and intend to share equally in decisions and work, both in field and house. However, in interviews and an online discussion among organic farmers who are wives and mothers, the extra responsibilities of household and childcare falling to the wife were revealed. As children grow, volunteering in schools becomes another responsibility, shared by men but often falling to women. Accordingly, in many cases the husband specializes in agricultural techniques and computer communication, while the wife, although part of the larger decision-making, helps only during midday with fieldwork or packing.

Relations with other organic farmers are highly valued and provide both social and economic risk strategies for men and women. Farmers want a nakama (group of like-minded friends) without which their lives can be isolated and uncertain. They frequently gather with neighboring organic farmers and try to get others, particularly local interns, to settle nearby. As edgeworkers, they are like mountain summiteers who travel together with mutual care, all summiting together in a kind of ‘individual solidarity’ (Simon, 2002). They laugh and tell me that they do not need to be competitive because plenty of untapped organic consumers remain. For example, a group of women farmers from various parts of Japan gather for emotional support and exchange goods to supplement their consumer boxes—pork from Iwate, rice from Nagano, and lotus root from Chiba. A group of men farmers have formed an online group who share techniques as well as their uncertainties about productivity and economics.

Interviews revealed tolerance for other farmers’ ways of dealing with the risks and uncertainties of organic farming. Young farmers, for instance, pride themselves on being more open to difference in approaches than their elders. They avoid criticism, wishing to follow the neoliberal principle of transgressive groups that come together as necessary but are free to define their individualities (Foust, 2010). However, organic farmers have simmering conflicts, particularly around the purity of organic techniques or participation in the market.

Relational lifestyle extends to farmers intentionally taking risks for the sake of social justice. They break with the neoliberal labor practices of using only those who are abled (Harvey, 1996); several have taken on the uncertainty of training and employing those with physical or mental weaknesses. A woman farmer in Kanagawa employed a local man and woman who worked as we sat on hay bales talking. She praised his brawn and her attention to detail, only wishing she could pay them more. Others were disabled relatives. Social justice concerns do not include getting organic food to low-income people as in the US. Some engage in political activities opposing nuclear power or remilitarization, but emphasize that these are personal preferences.

Locality

Young organic farmers create lifeworlds within localities that shape their perspectives of risk and uncertainty. Japanese small farmers are marginal to the neoliberal enterprise of market growth. With few inheritors, aging farmers become unable to maintain irrigation channels and without specialization, farming itself has faltered—the postwar era’s formula of part-time rice farming through mechanization and rice subsidies has shifted (Mulgan, 2006). Attempting to carve social and physical space for organic lifestyles, young organic farmers are marginalized within the margin. Willing to endure inconveniences of rural life (Mock, 2006), they often end up in narrow valleys where land and houses are more available because inheritors are less likely to return and farmers are less able to coalesce lands into broad flat fields to become globally competitive—as mandated by the central government in the face of the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP). Rural Japan is largely dispossessed in neoliberal capitalism, yet space is a major object of contestation, and global corporations want into fertile areas (Harvey, 2005). Organic farmers argue that these mountainous areas may be too marginal for corporations to claim.

Uncertainties abound for everyone in rural Japan, but these places also give latitude for innovation. This urban-to-rural move is risky for young people who are labeled by neoliberal economy and politics as being on the move in the global economy. Yet, spatiality and locality have special significance in neoliberal times (Escobar, 2001), especially when educated young people cross boundaries into depopulated hamlets to make lifeworlds that resignify space into places of innovation and hope (Leitner et al., 2007). They bring a vision of revitalized social, economic, and physical landscapes in which small-scale agriculture can survive in tiny hamlets. In the process, they smuggle in organic techniques and lifestyles.

Before visions can be tolerated or communicated, however, organic farmers face uncertainties of integrating into local life. Postwar agricultural techniques of chemical fertilizer and pesticide use are firmly entrenched and sold by the Agricultural Cooperatives (JA) that has supported government policies throughout the postwar period (Mulgan, 2006). Organic farmers report that neighbors are at best curious about organic methods, but often irritated with weeds and complaints from organic farmers about dispersed chemical spraying. Yet the largesse and cooperation of neighboring farmers is necessary to survive.

Renting houses and land is difficult because local farmers fear losing land or houses to the lessee under long-term lease laws. Building trust between organic and conventional farmers is the key. One risk strategy is to move near an older organic farmer with local trust who gives introductions to rent house and land. One’s own family land is easiest, but few younger organic farmers have this; relatives can serve as go-betweens but even that takes time (Rosenberger, 2014). One woman in Saitama had to visit 10 different farmers whose small plots she ‘rented’ informally, delivering monetary gifts (o-rei) at the end of the year. Regular rental relationships are developing, but owners can retract painstakingly developed land anytime.

Risks can switch to benefits as organic farmers become rooted and relationships deepen; farmer deaths and lack of inheritors can lead to land ownership. An Iwate couple who originally entered through the introduction of local government officials, befriended conventional farmers across the road, discussing old farming methods and exchanging food. When the neighbor man across the road died, his wife asked them to buy the farm, giving them adequate land for rice, buckwheat, and vegetables to supply themselves and their consumers.

Organic farmers find ways of gaining trust and lessening uncertainty by joining organizations and activities of the hamlet. A husband in Nagano spends many evenings practicing military-like drills with the local fire brigade. In coastal Shizuoka, a husband had to leave his wife and children after dinner to run around the neighborhood, ringing the fire bell to caution people about fire. Such activities fit hamlet and organic lifestyles that both value relationships and communal solidarity.

As trust builds, local farmers appreciate youthful help and camaraderie. One young farmer in Nagano endured interviews and written applications before he was accepted, but now helps the hamlet council with computers and labels for their local sake. In Fukushima, a couple invites their urban friends for the hard physical labor of cleaning irrigation channels. In Ibaraki and Nagano, organic farmers drink with young conventional farmers, sharing affection for the area.

A gendered subtext of uncertainty remains, however, for while men participate in shrine or hamlet groups as househeads, married women are not welcomed even as substitutes. They live with ambiguous status as farmers. Single women are perceived as strange househeads, often marginalized. Some women farmers make traditional foods with the local women’s group and befriend neighbors, but many shrink from sustained interaction with older women whose values around gender roles differ from theirs. However, if women have children, they integrate into the locale through hamlet and school activities, running bicycle safety classes, making snacks for sports activities, or volunteering in classrooms. Thus, they are accepted through middle-class mothering activities, not their roles as farmers.

Facing the risk of small-scale agricultural demise, organic farmers join conventional farmers to fashion risk strategies to save the hamlet (Rosenberger, 2016). In Iwate, a man organized his neighbors into a cooperative growing and selling group that obtained government subsidies for biodiversity, sustainability, and cooperation. He convinced them that organic soba would bring extra money, and eight brought small fields together. He drives the tractor but all work and share in profits. Young organic farmers cross boundaries between organic and conventional because alliances contribute to survival of their village and small-scale agriculture overall.

As the edgework of young organic farmers literally and figuratively cultivate localities, they also change communities, bringing rhizomatic movement into rooted rural areas as they bridge urban–rural and international boundaries. They attract young interns who may settle; one intern married a local man, a boon to brideless rural men. Organic consumers are urban-centered with organic farmers usually delivering by mail to the cities, but organic farmers bring mothers and children, volunteers, and in one case, disabled urban people to their farms.

Young organic farmers use past international experiences to bring Filipinos to their farms—not as the cheap labor of neoliberal agriculture but as fellow farmers with whom they develop fair trade relationships for their consumer groups. Several farmers interviewed even took WWOOFers from all over the world.² Finally, organic farmers import ideas from national and international organic conferences. These examples can raise uncertainties about their difference locally, yet refresh their own ideals of transgressing borders.

Living an organic life in rural Japan is uncertain, a contingent process of earning trust by finding commonalities, adapting to differences, and introducing change. Within this, organic farmers live out visions of nonnormative edgework, but their innovation is fluid, fragmentary, and transitional (Wilson, 2013), tacking between engagement and disengagement with past traditions and present ideals, localities and beyond. They live with uncertainties, but if accepted, they offer youthful vitality to dying villages. As a Nagano farmer said, ‘If there is going to be change in these agricultural villages, it will come from the organic farmers.’

Livelihood (seikatsu)

‘We want this to be a normal occupation, not a mission like the pioneer farmers,’ an Ibaraki farmer explained, ‘but now our two children are in middle school and I only make one-quarter of what a 45-year-old company worker my age makes!’ He stared at me in disbelief. ‘We sell half of our vegetables now to a wholesaler who sells to vegetable shops and high-end restaurants. The restaurants don’t care about organic, they just call it delicious.’

While performing occupational edgework, organic farmers need a viable livelihood. As many said, ‘We must develop business plans. Otherwise, young people will never join us.’ This requires negotiating an uncertain edge between Japanese organic ideals of non-monetized relationships with nature and consumers, and neoliberal ideals of competition, efficiency, and profit growth (Ogawa, 2009). Both carry risks because consumers are no longer politically committed to helping farmers in membership groups, whereas neoliberal institutions are hungry to permeate everywhere for profit. Many young farmers’ answers are to transgress established binaries and make an entrepreneurship that lives in the border-zone between economy and morality by marketing for profit to organizations who respect high-quality food with organic as part of their range, while maintaining nonmarket groups and shunning the general wholesale market.

With no sense of escape from the neoliberal situation, they accept the uncertainty of creating with what is at hand, crossing between the formal and informal and using market and government to perform their own ethics, albeit unevenly. They do not see market, government, or political movements as monolithic powers but as multifaceted, permeable forces that work through networks and change over time. Farmers assume that their desires, lifestyles, values, and goods are forces that can participate in government and market, linking with consumers who want alternatives that are similar to their own (Kirwan, 2004; Wilson, 2013).

A couple who farm in Nagano give an example of negotiating livelihood as they worry about educating three children and building a house. They unabashedly accept subsidies from the government for biodiversity, organic farming, and cooperation, even regretting that they missed beginning farmer subsidies. They hope to develop an organic section in the local Agricultural Cooperative, a bastion of production-oriented agriculture in postwar Japan. Abandoning the politically loaded teikei (consumer membership groups that give help and participate in events together) label of the older generation, this couple sells to 100 personal customers in a ‘consumer group’ that they admit is their best means to profit. They know few of their consumers, sending their weekly boxes by overnight mail and maintaining relationships through an active website and blog that relates their adventures and challenges in field, family, and rural Japan.

They have formed a production group with four other organic farmers with whom they sell vegetables to a company that delivers not only organic food but also food grown with limited or low agricultural chemicals to people’s doors. I spent a morning busily weighing and packing spinach and cabbage with their two local part-time workers in order to meet the company truck at the appointed time. He also ran an online group of organic farmers who studied scientific techniques such as measuring soil quality or the need for organic fertilizer, rejecting his elders’ ways as ‘mystical.’

Organic purists who trained these folks would object to specialization, part-time labor, digital communication, and the compromised delivery company, but they defended themselves. The man said, ‘Why should we do everything? I am good at growing. Someone else is good at marketing. Let them do it.’ The woman stated that the part-time women who do repetitive work appreciate such work in this rural area. They felt a connection to their consumers: ‘They see us as relatives. They like to know what our family does and how we live.’

He also showed me a book called A theory of agriculture with pretty things removed (Kirei goto nuki no nōgyō ron) by a young organic farmer, Hisamatsu Tatsuo. He laughed, saying: ‘This guy says that organic isn’t necessarily the safest or the most delicious. It all boils down to practical techniques’—such as planting and harvesting at the right moment, the type of plant, and getting the food to the consumer quickly. In this practical, flexible style of organic agriculture, ‘it’s fine to have employees as long as you treat them well.’

Many young organic farmers engage in a new, flexible economy that is developing within the neoliberal situation. They are prosumers, both producers and consumers, farming for self-fulfillment and enjoyment—not unlike digital content creators who do their work for little economic benefit (Ritzer & Jurgenson, 2010). Rather than efficiency, mass production, and competitiveness, they focus on effectiveness, quality, and a sense of abundance. Farmers often work together, commenting that there are plenty of consumers to go around because 99% of Japanese do not yet eat organic. They sell to companies, restaurants, and consumers that value the food for its quality. However, exploitation and independent creation coexist. Companies understand that quality comes from leaving farmers alone but also profit from them. Younger people accept this partial politics of participation, risking cooptation by market and government and reduction of organic agriculture to neoliberal production terms. Their edgework is supported by faith in their own desires and values, their food, and their fellow consumers.

Enterpreneurship can be seen as a kind of edgework that pushes the envelope as a way toward productive self-making (Zaloom, 2004) and gradual change (Calas, Smircich, & Bourne, 2009). Extending neoliberal individual-making, organic farmers are entrepreneurial in that they discover, evaluate, and exploit opportunities by developing moral economies in niche markets (Schwartz & Halegoua, 2015; Wilson, 2013). This process not only brings economics into morality but also brings morality to the market.

Farmers use the new economy to create selves for both themselves and their consumers. As prosumers, farmers create online selves or ‘spatial selves’ for themselves and their family, leveraging lifestyle images of rural Japan on their blogs and websites. Schwartz and Helagoua (2015, p. 1645) point out, ‘Harnessing place to performance identity’ creates networks, in this case a narrow network in which the images can be finely honed and audience interpretation imagined. They project images of enjoyment and work around field, food, and village life with dramas of challenges and successes for themselves and their children—stories that the author Hisamatsu (2013) advises brings enjoyment to consumers and leverages farmers’ profits.

Farmers implicitly ask consumers to understand that farmers are also consumers with needs and wants in the neoliberal world, not only enjoying organic food but also needing a ‘normal’ livelihood. This expectation became clear after the Fukushima disaster when some consumers deserted farmers who reported more faithfully than stores on the exact amounts of low or ‘undetectable’ radiation in their food (Rosenberger, 2016). Farmers realize that they need consumers who care not only about their own health but also are devoted to farmers as people who deserve enjoyment and ease. The Nagano farmer who showed me the book believed that his consumers comprehend this aspect of value: ‘The consumers understand that they are paying more in order to support the farmer.’

The reshaping of the relationship with consumers is at the heart of the shift in organic agriculture in Japan. While purist, usually older, organic farmers avoid consumers who they do not know personally, practical organic farmers respect the experience of consumers who may only be names on a computer but, in consuming their food, partake of the lifeworld of the farmers. Raised as consumers and delighting in consuming the food they grow, young farmers risk having faith in unknown consumers as engaged bodies and living beings who are self-reflectively finding self-fulfillment and taking individual responsibility through consumption—just as they themselves are. Young organic farmers gamble on connections built through the affective work of images. They understand that they must develop a ‘capacity to appeal’ (Takeyama, 2010) by offering what self-making neoliberal consumers want in the neoliberal situation, namely (1) health, vitality, and well-being; (2) the ability to provide healthy food for themselves and their families; and (3) a sense of making themselves as subjects by linking with the forces of nature and cooperative human relations represented in organic agriculture and rural Japan. By eating this food, they can have individualized urban lives while drawing on nostalgic representations of idealized rural Japan and on images of an environmentally and socially sound future.

Farmers also bet on connections built on the intimate, bodily experience of taste, not spurning this momentary sensory enjoyment, but using it as a channel to communicate values (Starr, 2010). The author Hisamatsu advises organic farmers to make ‘delicious’ food according to the ‘natural organization (shikumi) of living things,’ arguing that consumers will understand the value of the food first through taste—‘erotically delicious’ (ero-umai) food with a ‘wow’ factor (Hisamatsu, 2013, p. 127).

Japanese highly value the shared experience of savoring taste, freshness, seasonality, and uniqueness, epitomized in declarations of ‘delicious’ (oishii) at home and on media, as eyes close and heads nod with appreciation. Younger organic farmers gamble on this powerful experience of bodily consumption and thus accept selling their food as delicious, rather than specifically organic. Although this may lead to consumers partaking of their food more lightly, it cunningly generalizes the idea of ‘organic,’ an idea that contributes to the normalization of their occupational edgework.

A woman farmer living in a city south of Tokyo believes that ‘organic’ should no longer be kept for a privileged group of people who live a certain way in a movement, but rather shared more broadly. She sells her vegetables as delicious, local food from an unmanned cart in the railroad station through which thousands of people pass when visiting graves at the huge cemetery in her town. ‘It is time for organic to be generalized,’ she commented. ‘They will taste my food and think it is delicious and come back. Slowly they will figure out about organic.’ Thus, ‘organic’ has shifted to include normal people, just as the occupation of organic farming itself hopes to be normal. This occurs not through politics but through the sharing of the enjoyment of good food from the earth. People will learn ethical values not through discipline of the modern productionist era but through enjoyment of the body in the consumerist era.

Thus, many young organic farmers accept a regime of value that simultaneously valorizes their food as commodities in the market, and valorizes their own ideals for a natural cycle, self-fulfillment, and rural livelihood (Kirwan, 2004). Raised in a consumer world, young farmers have faith that their food—even as an unattached commodity, singular and active in its circulation (Appadurai, 1986)—networks and carries values. As various farmers told me: ‘The vegetables talk.’ They unabashedly claim consumer value and high-priced niches for their food, betting on the hope that high prices imply quality in food, that in turn conveys a morality of nature and humanity that outweighs the profit-seeking competition of the neoliberal marketplace. In sum, they believe that prosumption for themselves and consumption for their consumers enables edgy, moral subject-making in the neoliberal situation.

Conclusion

Young organic farmers are reshaping organic agriculture in the neoliberal era in Japan, a project that bristles with uncertainties for these moral farmers trained by purist organic farmers, yet raised and living in the era of consumer markets and entrepreneurship. Dangers lurk for them from poverty and village ostracism to cooptation of organic ideals by market and government. They engage these dangers through their perspectives of risk and uncertainty as occupational edgeworkers who transgress borders, crisscrossing binaries such as urban/rural, mind/body, nature/culture, past/future, morality/market, production/consumption, and global/local. Theirs is a hybrid politics of engagement, not of protest.

As a transgressive ‘dance,’ crisscrossing normative borders but lived as if normal, their project exists squarely in the neoliberal situation of market, consumption, and entrepreneurship, coupled with the effects of neoliberal social conditions that lead to alternative creation of selves, lifestyles, social solidarities, and relations to the earth. Because young organic farmers are neoliberal subjects, formed as subjects who perform risks of individuation, they see ways forward through this morass, not in resistance but in tolerance of hybrid ways as they establish lifestyles that stretch toward the chimera of their times: selves of morality and freedom made in the margins of neoliberal life. Living in rural Japan, itself being the nostalgic source of idealized values of cooperation with others and harmony with nature, they blend historic values with their creation of self and community in relation to neoliberal institutions of market and government.

This mixture of neoliberal economics, alternative self-making, and historical values enables new enactments of organic agriculture in Japan. For example, farmers make moral market niches and connect digitally with consumers who want enjoyment, taste, health, and self-fulfillment just like these farmers. They link arms and affect with conventional farmers who yearn for regeneration of their dispossessed villages, working to preserve agriculture in Japan as specters of global capitalism loom.

The framework of occupational edgework fits these young farmers in various ways. Like Lyng’s (2005) extreme sport practitioners, they actively take risks and set uncertainties for themselves that are unnecessary, given their privilege, in a search for limit experiences of self-making within the dispossessed margins of neoliberal Japan. Like Simon’s (2002) mountaineers, they do so in individualized solidarity with other organic farmers, and often family. Betting their bodies and minds on this experience is the thrill and the point of growth. Unlike mountaineers or skydivers, their edgework is an ongoing part of everyday life. Although these young Japanese organic farmers rarely ride the line of life and death, they constantly skate the edge of important fissures of neoliberal life and use their self-making in relation to nature, food, and other humans to make public connections that are both discursive and material. They sentence themselves to playing the gamut of the risk-uncertainty continuum, finding ways to calculate and manage risks to make themselves productive as farmers, villagers, and entrepreneurs while still maintaining the edge of uncertainty that is nonnormative. This not only leads to questionable or failed projects of organic agriculture but also invigorates alternative processes of life and self that gamble with the forces of nature, community, market, and nation.

The example of young organic farmers in Japan helps to explain the changes in the alternative food system under the neoliberal situation of marketization and self-making. In this politics of engagement, organic farmers are not focused on demanding changes in market and government. Rather, they willingly deal with risks and uncertainties that are inherent to their lives in the neoliberal world where their focus is both nearer at hand and farther away. Close-up, they put down roots in rural localities where they can rework spaces marginal to the neoliberal economic and political regime. Resignifying these spaces with meanings and performances of affective relationships with food, nature, and other humans in community, they practice embodied selves that exceed the selves of the consumer or entrepreneurial imperative. With their eyes on making an ethical lifeworld within the neoliberal situation in which people seek freedom, they take the risk of being hybrid and partial as they link with consumers and use market and government initiatives to their advantage. Creating enjoyable, moral niches in a new economy that emphasizes quality and value rather than profit or competition, their eyes focus on the possibilities and uncertainties of living in ‘the now’ according to values they nurture as their feet cross and recross normative boundaries of the neoliberal world.

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Nancy Rosenberger

Nancy Rosenberger holds a PhD from the University of Michigan and recently retired as Professor Emeritus from Oregon State University. She has written books such as Gambling with Virtue and Dilemmas of Adulthood on Japanese women’s lives, Seeking Food Rights on Uzbekistan, and various articles on organic farmers in Japan.

Notes

¹ Japan Organic Agriculture Association (JOAA) (Nihon Yuki Nogyo Kenkyukai), http://www.joaa.net (26 June 2016).

² ‘World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms’ (WWOOF) is a program that connects volunteers who offer their work for room and board on organic farms.