Kumi Kato

Community, Connection and Conservation: Intangible Cultural Values in Natural Heritage—the Case of Shirakami‐sanchi World Heritage Area

Intangible cultural heritage, according to a UNESCO definition, is ‘the practices, representations, expressions as well as the knowledge and skills that communities, groups and in some cases individuals recognise as part of their cultural heritage’. Using a case study of Shirakami‐sanchi World Heritage Area, this paper illustrates how the local communitys conservation commitment was formed through their long‐term everyday interactions with nature. Such connectivity is vital to maintaining the authentic integrity of a place that does not exclude humans. An examination of the formation of the communitys conservation commitment for Shirakami reveals that it is the communitys spiritual connection and place‐based identity that have supported conservation, leading to the World Heritage nomination, and it is argued that the recognition of such intangible cultural heritage is vital in conservation. The challenge, then, is how to communicate such spiritual heritage today. Forms of community involvement are discussed in an attempt to answer this question.

Prayers for the Whales: Spirituality and Ethics of a Former Whaling Community— Intangible Cultural Heritage for Sustainability

Kayoiura, located at the most easterly point of Omijima Island, Nagato City, Japan, is a small fishing village where community-based coastal whaling took place from late 1600 to early 1900. Today, more than 100 years since the end of whaling, the community maintains a number of cultural properties, both tangible and intangible, dedicated to the spirits of whales, including prayers for the whales given daily by two elderly Buddhist nuns. This article suggests that these cultural properties convey the former whaling communitys ethics and spirituality with a strong sense of reciprocity that acknowledges the undeniable human dependency on other lives. It is argued that such spirituality has an important implication for our understanding of sustainability. Whaling is no doubt one of the most contentious issues in todays environmental debates, where divisive arguments collide over a wide range of issues. Although any study on whaling would play a role in the debate, this articles intention is elsewhere: to acknowledge the importance of ethics and spirituality as intangible cultural heritage and their role in sustainability debate.

Maintaining the momentum in Japanese language teacher education

This article will focus on primary and secondary schooling of Japanese into the 2000s. On this topic, we are fairly confident that our predictions will be those of other readers who are practicing in the pre‐tertiary area or have an interest in LOTE (Languages Other than English) policy or teacher education. The trends of the mid 1980s will continue with sporadic leveling and bursts of enthusiasm.