OPENING · BEFORE EPISODE 01Prologue · The former nursery and abandoned paddies above the aquifer
This small yato watershed includes woodland, a former communal nursery, neglected fields, and especially abandoned paddies above an important recharge area. In the past, maintained bunds and channels, together with seasonal filling and draining, held rain for a time and passed part of it into the ground. The Soil-Reading Guild will examine soil firmness, inflow, outflow, and water levels, then test whether careful paddy recovery can reconnect local water retention, groundwater, living systems, and work.
The client is a fictional downstream semiconductor plant that uses the same groundwater. To share responsibility for sustaining that water, it funds abandoned-paddy recovery, monitoring equipment, local care work, and public dialogue. Land decisions remain with residents and rights holders. What the plant receives is not a promised volume of water, but a shared record of water levels, infiltration, and the timing of downstream outflow.
Build a modern satoyama through work and circulation.The region aims to build a modern satoyama through a regenerative bioeconomy. It raises local-provenance seedlings, safely passes prunings and fallen leaves into new work or soil, repairs abandoned-paddy bunds and channels, and tests seasonal inundation. Water-level and biodiversity monitoring also remain local work. Prosperity is more than selling biomass: recharged water, wetland life, sustainable care, and local livelihoods must grow in one plan.
The guild keeps a before-restoration record and an unchanged comparison, then restores one small abandoned-paddy plot. It remeasures water level, infiltration rate, the time from rain to downstream outflow, soil moisture, living organisms, and care time before and after seasonal inundation and after heavy rain. Only evidence observed here moves into the next design, and only a completed process unlocks the next episode.
- 01Protect yato woodland and parent trees
- 02Carefully restore abandoned-paddy bunds and channels
- 03Compare before and after seasonal inundation
- 04Measure water level, infiltration, and downstream timing
- 05Connect downstream water use, living systems, local work, and consent
