Iriai forest commons
Village mountain forest in Japan, held by households rather than people, where the last rung of the sanction ladder is not a fine but being cut out of the village's mutual obligations.
- Place
- Central Honshū, JP
- Founded
- 17th century
- Status
- Enduring
- Duration
- c. 426 years and counting
What is held
The village's mountain — timber, fuelwood, thatching grass, mushrooms and grazing, on land held by the community rather than by any household in it.
Who is in
Membership of the village household register. The right attaches to the household, not the individual, and historically passed with the house rather than with the family that lived in it.
Who decides
The village assembly, through its headman and elected officers. Which offices exist and how they are filled varies between villages, and this draft does not generalise past that.
How the rules are made
The assembly, by custom and by written village codes. Since the Iriai Rights Modernisation Act of 1966 many holdings have been converted to registered associations or municipal ownership, which moves rulemaking outside the village that made the rules.
How cheating is caught
Access is seasonal and announced — the opening of the mountain sets the day cutting may begin — so anyone on it beforehand is visible as an offender rather than as a neighbour going about their business.
The sanction ladder
- A warning from the assembly
- A fine, or forfeiture of what was taken
- Suspension of access for a season
- Murahachibu — exclusion from all but two of the village's mutual obligations
4 rungs, in order of escalation, for Iriai forest commons.
What happens in a bad year
unknown. This draft has not established how an iriai commons allocated in a year of shortage, and a plausible-sounding answer invented here is exactly the failure this project exists to undo.
Notes on the account
Iriai is in this gallery partly for what it governs and partly for the vocabulary it governs with. A gallery of commons drawn only from Europe and North America produces a reader who thinks governance means elections, minutes and written bylaws. Iriai has all three in places, and in other places has none of them and works anyway.
The last rung of the ladder is the one to look at. Murahachibu — literally “village eight parts” — cuts a household out of eight of the ten forms of mutual aid a village owes its members, leaving only firefighting and funerals. It is not a fine and it is not exclusion from the forest. It is exclusion from everything except the forest, which tells you what the sanction is actually priced against.
What is not settled in this draft
Row seven says unknown, and it stays that way until someone who knows says
otherwise. The century given for founding is the period from which village
codes survive in quantity, not a date of origin. Whether the Western framing of
rows two to six distorts iriai is the question HC-004 asks; a “no, this frame
does not fit” is a more useful answer than a correction.
Sources
- Management of Traditional Common Lands (Iriaichi) in Japan — Margaret A. McKean, in Making the Commons Work, ed. Daniel W. Bromley, ICS Press, 1992.
- The Japanese Experience with Scarcity: Management of Traditional Common Lands — Margaret A. McKean, Environmental Review 6(2), 1982.