For the past year, Japan's Environment Ministry and Tokyo-based United Nations University have been aggressively promoting the satoyama model for "realizing sustainable rural society living in harmony with nature." Satoyama are hybrid landscapes that are produced through management of forests on the outer edges of mountains. While they have been around since the beginning of the 17th century, today satoyama are understood as being a "mosaic" of forests, rice fields, grasslands and water systems working together to produce a number of different habitats for a number of different species.

According to the U.N. "Satoyama Initiative," the satoyama model is promoted internationally as a model of sustainable living that is increasingly under threat from increased "urbanization, industrialization, and rural population increase and decrease" throughout the rice belt of Asia.

In Japan, satoyama are hard to come by and have been on the retreat from the turn of the century. Their disappearance is often juxtaposed to the disappearance of "biodiversity," which is another casualty of industrialization and urbanization. For conservation biologists and popular writers engaged in promoting the idea of "biodiversity," which was a neologism first coined in the mid-1980s, the disappearance of global biodiversity is connected to the increasing poverty of linguistic and cultural biodiversity as well.

This loss of diversity certainly is not a good thing, but I would suggest that most of the concern for this disappearance is coming from places far removed from rural Japan.

It seems to me that satoyama communities are metropolitan Japan's pastoral. From a distance, farming looks great. Tourists travel to the countryside to rediscover the "Lost Japan" that they read about in guidebooks. People go looking for the Japan that cannot be experienced inside the Tokyo Metropolitan area and lament its disappearance when they cannot find it.

Viewed from Tokyo, Osaka or Nagoya, satoyama provide the needed space from the existence that most urbanites wish to escape. The satoyama is a mirage that can only be seen from the waste of our urban being. And just like any mirage, the hallucination disappears the closer we get.

When city people talk about the "good life" in satoyama, in concert with the mountain ecosystems in which they are entangled, I can understand the appeal. However, my feelings are mixed. I agree that agricultural labor without pesticides, power machinery and genetically modified seeds is a legitimate, and intimate way of engaging with "nature." But I think that people have a lot of trouble seeing the dirty details of this work from a distance.

The fantasies people have about reproducing "traditional" satoyama are only possible because they do not know what it is like to live in a rural community. The distance allows for the fantasies to continue. So I would encourage them to get a little closer and get their hands dirty.

Take it from a guy who has cleaned pigsties, dehorned cattle and cleaned out ditches by hand: There's nothing romantic about farm work. It's a pity we can't replicate its sounds, sights and smells up close. Farms squeal, squirm and reek of manure. It's about as organic as you are going to get.

I'm not suggesting that we need to dump the idea of satoyama. Nor am I suggesting that farm work is not a legitimate form of labor. What I am suggesting is that we need to appreciate the hard work that goes into maintaining the hybrid landscape of the satoyama and recognize that there are a number of reasons why people don't want to live in them.

The writer lives in Japan and is completing his Ph.D. in history.