Hunting For A Stronger Community?
Emergence of game meat business in a Japanese mountain village
“I think Shika deer is not too smart, but wild boars (shishi) are really smart,” said Toshiyasu Kuroki, who is an experienced trapper living in Nishimera, Miyazaki prefecture. Mr. Kuroki continued, “Some wild boars can detect the traps 20cm ahead of them. The clever ones would dig in front of the traps to remove them. They even cover the spot with lots of branches to make sure other shishi don’t go in there. No Shika deer would do that kind of things.”
In May 2017 when I visited Nishimera for the first time, Mr. Kuroki was a member of the Vermin Task Force there. Mr. Kuroki and other 5 experienced hunters were employed by the village municipality. They were supposed to go out hunting or trapping more than 15 days a month to cull the wildlife considered as “vermin.” In this context, they were catching mainly Shika deer and wild boars, which increasingly caused serious damages to rice paddies, fields and conifer plantations in the village.
In this article, I report on a nationally emerging trend of intensified monetization of culled wildlife for the purposes of alleviating wildlife-related economic damages and of empowering local economies. In so doing, I focus on the example of Nishimera, Miyazaki prefecture, which operates one of the 34 nationally recognized game-meat processing facilities. Local hunters and trappers like Mr. Kuroki are increasingly incorporated into this growing trend of game meat business, backed up by governments both local and national levels. I have conducted ethnographic fieldwork in this community since 2017, and this article is based on the information obtained thereby.
Let me start with the big picture. Nishimera is not the only municipality that suffers greatly from the damage caused by wildlife. It is becoming a common problem in many parts of rural Japan. Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fishery (MAFA) estimated that around 15 billion Japanese Yen was lost nationally due to wildlife-related damages in the 2022 Fiscal Year.
Most prevalent explanation for this “vermin problem” is that decreasing number of hunters and extinction of Japanese wolves in 1905 (in late Meiji period) created an environment where these animals were left unchecked, while recent depopulation and aging in rural areas made it difficult for the people to push back growing wildlife populations into the forests. Moreover, rapid development of conifer plantations during the post-war era depleted food sources for them, whereas they had been much more abundant in deciduous forests. As a result, growing numbers of wild animals desperate for finding food began to venture into rice paddies, fields and even residential areas and become a “vermin.”
Nishimera residents’ recollections seem to validate (at least part of) the above-mentioned explanation. Norinaga Kai, a Shinto priest and hunter, told me that Shika deers used to live deep in the mountain around 30 years ago and that even hunters did not see them frequently. When somebody caught a Shika deer, he went to see it because it was a rare occasion by then. Likewise, Kazuo Nakatake, who has 40 years’ experience of hunting, said that it was close to the top of the mountain when he saw Shika deers for the first time in his earlier hunting trips with his uncle. They used to run away from humans, but nowadays, they were accustomed to people and did not escape when they saw him, he added.
In contrast to the situations more than 30 years ago, wild animals began to come down to the village in more recent years. If you ask the villagers, they can tell you about endless cases of wild animals stealing crops, weakening yuzu citrus tress, an important cash crop for the villagers, and even decimating a field or rice paddy just in one night. Damages by wildlife are also a concern for the farms that grow local specialities such as iseimo and itomaki-daikon (a kind of taro and raddish indigenous to the region).
In 2014, local residents and hunters in Nishimera started their game meat business with a support by the local municipality. Takenori Kosai, who owns a local liquor store, became the head of the game meat processing facility. The jibie (from gibier, French word for “game meat”) business was set to purchase high-quality fresh venison and boar meat from local hunters, process them in highly sanitized facility and sell them to different parts of Japan including Tokyo. Like similar initiatives in other parts of Japan, Nishimera’s jibie business aims at encouraging culling to balance wildlife populations as well as empowering local economies through the processing and selling of wlid animal meat products.
Those who brought venison and/or boar meat would be paid by their weight and quality and also receive bounty of 8,000 Yen. For example, if a hunter brings in 40kg of Shika venison and 60 kg of medium-quality boar meat to the facility, he/she would receive 15,000 Yen and 32,600 Yen respectively (based on the calculation scheme in 2018, which has changed over time). According to Mr. Kosai, 80 percent of the game meat brought to the facility was caught by members of the Vermin Taske Force because they were encourage by the local municipality, their employer, to do so when the situation permits.
As a commercial operation dealing with wildlife products, maintaining hygiene in the facility is a priority. They only purchased the animals gutted less than 2 hours before. The meat needed to be in high quality, which mean that they should be killed by head-shot and leave the gut undamaged. Those animals bitten by hunting dogs were also removed from purchase due to hygiene and quality concern.
While these regulations seem necessary for a business in contemporary Japan where consumers take food safety seriously, they brought forth some barriers to gun hunters. In Nishimera, there are both trappers and gun hunters. My interviews with Nishimera residents left me a clear impression that trappers were more eager to sell their catch to the facility than gun hunters were. Some even changed their method of hunting after jibie processing facility began its operation. Let me discuss the example of (aforementioned) Mr. Nakatake in detail.
Mr. Nakatake told me that he used to join a group hunting team in which gun hunters shoot the game animal with the help of hunting dogs. The particular group is now inactive because the leader of the group hunting was not able to go out hunting any more due to his advanced age. In the meantime, he was appointed as a member of the Vermin Task Force. Mr. Nakatake told me that he began to trap much more often after the appointment. As a reason for the change of hunting method, he mentioned that he needed to bring the meat to the village faster after jibie business started.
Gun hunting involves going into the mountain forest, and hunters do not have a control of where they can catch the animals in many cases. On the other hand, people nowadays set their traps along the road system that penetrates the forest. They can keep checking the traps while in a truck. Thus, gun hunters need to retrieve their kill, transport it to the facility and come back again into the forest, while trappers can check all of their traps in one trip. It is apparent that trapping is much more efficient way to catch animals if they are supposed to bring back the meat to the village in 2 hours.
Mr. Nakatake also mentioned it is difficult to do a perfect headshot every time. Years ago when trappers used “trunk snares” (dou-kukuri-wana), the snares often ended up suffocating and killing the animal before they were found by the trapper. Accodring to Mr. Nakataka, wana-jishi, or boars caught by trappers, used to be considered as having lower quality than boars killed with a gun when he was younger. As a (former) gun hunter, he remembered people were happy to buy boar meat from him. However, in Mr. Nakatake’s opinion, the advantage of gun hunting over trapping diminished when people started using “limb snares” (ashi-kukuri-wana), which immobilize the game by holding their limb, not their neck. Now, hunting regulation forbids the use of so-called “trunk snares” (or ones with a loop diameter larger than 12 cm).
Mr. Nakatake’s example clearly suggests there is a social dynamics that favors trapping over gun hunting in the context of jibie processing. It is probably true that jibie business has the potential to encourage local hunting practices. However, what is left unnoticed all too often in this kind of discourse is that you cannot talk about hunting as one entity. Since gun hunting and trapping involve very different processes and practices of catching animals, we should be more aware of the changing social dynamics that is affecting local hunting practices after the emergence of jibie business.
I mentioned this ethnographically informed observation to a microbiologist who visited Nishimera for her research. She told me that it became now clear why she always met much more trappers than gun hunters when she collected samples of Shika deer blood from Nishimera’s jibie processing facility. As jibie increasingly becomes a target of governmental support and control, natural science surrounding processing of game meat (e.g. nutitional value of game meat, parasite prevention, and so forth) is emerging and developing. In this background, I believe social science counterpart is also needed.
Mr. Kuroki said to me, “Hunting used to be fun. We hunted, ate, and enjoyed ourselves. On the other hand, it’s like, ‘you have to catch them’ nowadays.” This is exactly when I began to realize the importance of social science perspective in the debate surrounding the promotion of jibie. He was referring to the excitement and fun of group hunting, which was more common long time ago.
Group hunting are usually done by a group of 5 to 7 hunters, who are divided into seko (chaser) and mabushi (gunners). The group tends to be formed along blood lines, such as brothers and uncles/nephews. Seko owns hunting dogs and is considered as a leader of the group. While the seko and his dogs chase the game, mabushi wait at their pre-assigned spots for the game to come nearby. After a successful hunt, the game is butchered, and an after-hunt party begins. Unlike many Western sports hunters who value trophies more than anything, hunting here has held a significance as a valuable way of food procurement. Wild boar meat, or shishi-niku, is considered as traditional food. During the after-hunt parties, people indulge themselves in such dishes as wild boar soup, grilled boar meat or deer loin sashimi as well as drinking lots of imo-jochu (liquor made out of sweat potatoes). That is, there is a sense of community in this type of hunting.
On the other hand, Mr. Kuroki was catching animals exclusively with traps nowadays. Trapping tends to be a solitary endeavor. Unlike group hunting where several hunters cooperate among each other, another trapper in your trapping territory means a competitor. Of course, there is seldom an after-hunt party with fellow trappers. When Mr. Kuroki said “it’s like ‘you have to catch them’ nowadays,” he was clearly aware that what he did felt more like a mundane job rather than an exciting and fun pursuit with his close relatives.
I also would like to note that the presence of jibie processing facility contributed to revival of drums made by Shika deerskin. In Nishimera, Shika deerskins were traditionally used to make taiko drums, which were one of the musical instruments of their kagura traditional dancing. As the taiko made of commercially tanned cowhide became available, they replaced the traditional ones.
When the jibie business started in Nishimera, Yasuyori Nasu, a retired hunter who lives nearby the processing facility, began to work for it to help butchering the animals. Though venison was made into various products, Mr. Nasu felt uneasy for the deerskin to be wasted. Eventually, he got the idea of making drums out of the deerskin that are collected in the jibie processing facilities. He has been making deerskin taiko drum since 2016 and received an award in Elder Club’s art exhibition. It is interesting to note that the jibie processing facility, whose main purpose is to produce game meat products for sale, unexpectedly brought forth the revitalization of deerskin drums.
In this article, I have described how local hunters and residents responded to the emergence of jibie business in their community. When the so-called “vermin problem” is discussed in the context of policy-making, it seems to me that numbers, not people’s voices, proliferate in PowerPoint slides (e.g. how much Yen was lost due to “vermins”? How many people get hunting licenses this year?). I admit these numbers are important to set national, prefectural and/or even town policies.
However, if you look at the problem in much longer time span and think of it in light of long-term survival of local ways of living (e.g. rice cultivation, hunting and slash-and-burn agriculture, with which itomaki-daikon used to be grown), the voices of the people are what matters most. My purpose for this article is NOT to criticize the jibie business or those who are involved in them. I write this article because the kind of social dynamics I described tend to be ignored outside of the community and invisible to those responsible for making policies.
Over the past years during my fieldwork, I have met chefs, local municipality workers, and consultants in Miyazaki prefecture and elsewhere who are passionate about bringing Nishimera’s high-quality jibie to consumers. Just like those supporters, I hope my article would reach to those who are interested in the lifeway of Japanese mountain villages and incite more discussions on the current situations they face and how we can be useful to them (if they ever need any help).
