An Illustrated Japan / Miyazaki / Culture & Tradition
Also written: 椎葉村の焼畑農業 · 椎叶村的烧田农业
A traditional swidden (slash-and-burn) farming practice, the last of its kind in Japan. It draws interest from international researchers and ecotourists as an example of sustainable mountain-village culture.
Shiiba Village in Higashi-Usuki District, Miyazaki Prefecture, is a mountain village covering 537.29 square kilometers with only about 2,150 residents, ranking as the fifth-largest village by area in Japan and counted among Japan's three great unexplored regions due to its location deep in the Kyushu Mountains, where elevations range from one thousand to seventeen hundred meters. Most of the territory is designated as Kyushu Central Mountain Quasi-National Park, with habitable land accounting for merely four percent, and hamlets scattered along river valleys and mid-slope terraces. In the Fudono and Omukai districts of Shiiba, the only households in Japan still practicing traditional slash-and-burn agriculture, known as yakihata or swidden, continue a cycle believed to date back to the Jomon period. Cattle is not pastoral but a forest-farming system: trees on steep slopes are felled, dried, and burned to suppress pests and diseases and to return mineral-rich ash to the soil; then mixed grains such as buckwheat, barnyard millet, foxtail millet, proso millet, and soybeans are sown in the following spring. After about four years of cultivation, the plot is left fallow for more than twenty years to regenerate into forest, creating a mosaic of fields and secondary forest that supports biodiversity. This method was highly evaluated when the Takachiho Township and Shiiba Mountain Area, covering five municipalities including Takachiho, Hinokage, Gokase, Morotsuka, and Shiiba, was designated as a Globally Important Agricultural Heritage System by the FAO in December 2015. The village is also a member of The Most Beautiful Villages in Japan association, where yakihata is listed as a registered regional resource alongside Shiiba Kagura and the preserved townscape of Tonokawa. The practice is sustained by local groups like Yakihata Soba Kurabu led by Shiiba Masaru, who explains that ancestors without scientific knowledge devised a sustainable rotation that modern ecology now validates. In December 2025, marking ten years since GIAHS inscription, the group hosted an anniversary event gathering about sixty members and local residents, with impromptu participation by hikers from Kumamoto who expressed interest in joining future burns. Migrants such as Sasaki Satsuki, who moved from Kagoshima nine years ago, now play essential roles in fire setting and processed food production, while Masaru's son Tatsuya studies the technique with an eye toward succession. Challenges remain as depopulation and aging reduce agricultural successors, yet the GIAHS recognition has broadened involvement, attracting ecotourists, international researchers, and product developers. Private firms like Sugimoto Shoten collaborate with House Foods Group to cultivate sansho pepper as an alternative income source to shiitake, developing new items like sansho butter sand cookies showcased at the tenth-anniversary symposium. The Shiiba Village Community Hub Katerie, opened in July 2020 with Japan's first lens-free library codes and a digital woodworking lab, serves as an information base for such initiatives. Alongside 26 districts transmitting Shiiba Kagura, designated important intangible folk cultural property, the usudaiko drum dances, the Heike fugitive legend, and giant trees like the 800-year-old Hachison Sugi in Tonokawa, the slash-and-burn landscape offers a model of satoyama sustainability where forest and farming coexist.
