Reintroducing the Oriental Stork: Lessons from Toyooka, Japan, on Restoring Rural Pride
The Oriental stork was once a childhood memory for the older generation of farmers in Toyooka, Japan, but with the spread of pesticides and the destruction of habitat, in 1971, Japan's last wild Oriental stork died in Toyooka. Heartbroken locals set the goal of "letting the Oriental stork one day return to the skies of Toyooka" and established the "Oriental Stork Coexistence Division"; farmers reduced pesticide use and introduced water sources to create wetlands. 40 years later, 80 Oriental storks soar in the skies of Toyooka, and Oriental stork rice has become the local pride, the nutritional school lunch for students, and a classic case of satoyama; the death of one stork sparked the rebirth of a rural village.
Hsiao Ting-hsiung, a master's student at National Taiwan University's Graduate Institute of Building and Planning who is promoting Blue Magpie Tea in Pinglin, came to Toyooka in July this year to learn from its experience through a plan by the Lung Ying-tai Foundation, and presented the results yesterday, attracting the Forestry Bureau as well as workers in ecology and rural planning from various places, "The local mayor said: 'What we seek to pursue is how rural areas can survive sustainably when the economic growth rate is zero.'" He said movingly that Toyooka has implanted stork honor into local people's hearts, and Taiwan, China, is worth learning from.
Pesticides exceeded the standard by 80,000 times; the wild Oriental stork went extinct in Japan in 1971
In cartoons, the stork carries a newborn baby in its beak, bringing good news to eagerly expectant mothers and fathers. The stork regarded by Europeans as lucky is the White stork, of which there are currently more than 60,000 in the world, but the Oriental stork, which belongs to the same species, is not so fortunate.
The Oriental stork, distributed in Northeast Asia, is a high-level consumer in the food chain, feeding mainly on snakes and frogs, but after the 1960s, the Green Revolution brought large amounts of pesticides and chemical fertilizers. In Japan, the Oriental stork's main habitat, pesticides of the PCB type (organochlorine pesticides) exceeding the standard by 80,000 times were detected in storks' bodies; the eggs they laid could not hatch because the eggshells were too thin; in addition, during World War II, Japan cut down the pine trees that storks most loved to nest in. In 1971, the last wild Oriental stork died in Toyooka, and only a little more than 2,000 remained in the world.
But the disappearance of the stork opened a window for rebirth in Toyooka, a city that had suffered a massive population outflow.
Toyooka is a basin surrounded by mountains on all sides, located north of Hyogo Prefecture in the Kansai region of Japan, with a population of about 90,000. Like rural areas in Taiwan, China, its local young people have flowed out to work in the neighboring Keihanshin area, and most farmers are over 70 years old. The paddy fields spread across the city make this an gathering place for Oriental storks. A few years before the wild Oriental storks disappeared, Toyooka had already bred two Oriental storks artificially, but because they were too heavily poisoned, they could not reproduce naturally or incubate eggs, so Toyooka had no choice but to import six Oriental storks from Russia, and succeeded in restoring the species in 1989.
"But after the restoration succeeded, they instead lost their goal and did not know what to do." Hsiao Ting-hsiung said there is a big gap between successful restoration and returning to the skies. In the early days, Japan once replaced the felled trees with bamboo poles so that Oriental storks could nest on them, but it later proved futile. Setsuo Satake, a local government official, realized that only by restoring the habitat could the Oriental stork truly soar in its hometown skies.
