From Readable Rivers to Regulated Flows. Amphibious Labor and Epistemic Crisis in Japanese River Fishing

This article examines Japanese inland river fishing as a form of amphibious labour organized through cooperation, commons-based resource use, and situated ecological knowledge. Drawing on ethnographic and historical research on ayu (Plecoglossus altivelis, “sweetfish”) fishing in the Gōgawa River, it focuses on “reading the water” (mizu o yomu) as a practical repertoire for interpreting flow, turbidity, river morphology, and seasonal variation in order to organize work, allocate access, and manage risk. Rather than treating water-reading as symbolic tradition or mere empirical skill, the article approaches it as an operational competence reproduced through apprenticeship, embodied practice, collective discussion, and cooperative routines. It then traces how postwar dams and hydraulic infrastructures reshape not only river ecologies and resource distributions but also the epistemic and social conditions of knowledge transmission. By disrupting relations between sensory cues and hydrological processes, technical flow regulation renders rivers increasingly opaque to vernacular interpretation and destabilizes the cooperative infrastructures that sustain amphibious labour. Through the Gōgawa case, the article contributes to anthropological debates on work, commons, and aquatic environments by framing infrastructural change as an epistemic crisis that reconfigures how rivers are inhabited, worked, and known.