Invisible landscapes. Winds, experience and memory in Japanese coastal fishery

Drawing on a series of ethnographic cases of some fishing communities, the article explores the role of meteorological winds in Japanese coastal fisheries. In particular, it is argued that Japanese fishermen’s ecological knowledge is strictly connected to memory that coexists with other institutional knowledge, such as meteorology, in a complex scenario of contestation and negotiation. The article stresses also the idea that fishermen’s memory is implicitly subversive to the dominant native discourses on knowledge proposed by Japanese folklore studies, focused on its epistemological hierarchization (folk and scientific knowledge), or on the individualization of the intergenerational discrepancies between traditional and contemporary knowledge. It will attempt to show how the method of interpretation traditionally adopted by this academic discipline offers a vision of fishermen’s ecological knowledge that is more susceptible to local and static evocations, and which is far from reflecting the complex relationship between coastal fisheries, memory and knowledge.