The Purpose of the Research

This research applies a new approach to territorial history that reconsiders the concept of “terroir” academically, to understand the land and culture that was created cooperatively by human beings and nature. Terroir generally refers to the soil where crops for winemaking are planted and encompasses all the information that makes up the soil's distinctiveness, such as the geology, climate, farming practices, and ideology. This concept of terroir can also be applied to various other products that the soil yields, such as tea, bamboo shoots, and bamboo materials created through complex combinations of natural and manmade mechanisms. It can be said that these products also incorporate the various conditions that created the historical and cultural values of their particular areas. The fields where raw materials are made, the architecture for processing, the cities for exchange, the range of distribution, and the regions for consumption; this overlapping and sprawling history of space and culture can be considered the history of the regions and territories where humans have lived in conjunction with nature. This research aims to draw a territorial history of land, space, and culture, moving back and forth across large and small scales of time and space, and using the concept of the terroir as a keyword for facilitating interpretation.

　It is also essential to acknowledge that terroir contains valuable information with respect to the land and its products. As value systems differ depending on the times, regions, and handlers, it should be possible to bring forth a particular cultural region in three dimensions through the lens of its product and land value formation. By delving deep into long-standing local products, it is possible to discover the unchanging values of a particular region. The livelihoods of locals, which produced these traditional products, have been passed down through generations by regional mechanisms and can be considered to have created value in that region. Decoding the unchanging value of a region through the terroir and placing value on that land’s mechanisms is a regional perspective that also connects with its cultural landscape that function as a method of branding, and that contains further possibilities for terroir research.

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