Detachment from conventional agriculture in rural Japan: An analysis of embedded antifragility in satoyama communities

The thesis examines how socioeconomic and socioecologic changes in rural Japan have affected the embedded antifragility of rural satoyama communities. These communities have traditionally had a high degree of self-sufficiency and been detached from input systems based on synthetic agrichemicals and debt. I spent a month in the Hida region of Japan, where I interviewed villagers in a small mountain village, representatives from the local municipality and observed the conditions for satoyama in the area. Theories from neoclassical and institutional economics, political ecology and the concept of antifragiliy from the works of Nassim Nicholas Taleb was used to analyze my data