Whose memory of the hills: The Biei Eco-museum's vision of landscape and life in Biei (1980s-1990s)

Whose memory of the hills: The Biei Eco-museum's vision of landscape and life in Biei (1980s-1990s)
From the late 1980s to the 1990s, the hills of Biei became known throughout Japan as the original landscape typical of Hokkaido. TV commercials and photo books were shot one after another, and the number of tourists continued to increase. However, the beautiful landscape is the scene of farmers' daily lives as they cultivate, nurture, and change the colors of the landscape with the seasons. While the area has been in the limelight as a tourist destination, tourists entering the fields without permission and photo troubles have been increasing, and the local people have been both happy and worried at the same time. At a time when regional development, which was heavily focused on tourism and development, had reached a turning point, Biei chose the eco-museum concept.
An eco-museum is an idea that regards the region itself as a museum without a roof, where nature, culture, and lifestyle are rediscovered by the residents and passed on to the future. This concept, which was born in France, was adapted to the challenges that Japan was facing, such as the loss of regional individuality, the standardization of tourism, and the limitations of boxed government. Biei applied this concept to the rural landscape of the hills, and transformed the Biei-cho Art Museum, the Northwestern Hill Observation Park, and the old Japanese National Railways building into a base for telling the story of the region. These were not just tourist facilities, but functioned as windows to share how the hills were formed, what kind of crops were grown, and what kind of history has been accumulated.
It should be noted that Biei has positioned its residents as researchers, storytellers, and curators. Local curator training and study groups were created, and a system was put in place for residents to unravel the meaning of the landscape and communicate it to visitors. This echoed the citizen-participatory town planning that was spreading in Japan at the time, and presented a new form of self-governance in which the town could decide for itself.
This movement later led to the creation of the "Union of the Most Beautiful Villages in Japan," which Biei called for. The idea that the landscape of the hills is not a tourist resource but the crystallization of agriculture, lifestyle, and climate, and the very culture of life that should be preserved, spread throughout the country. The Biei Eco-museum was an attempt to treat the landscape not as a commodity but as a shared heritage and to put it back into the hands of the residents.