Land Stewardship is IPI’s ongoing initiative exploring how relationships with land are formed, maintained, and passed between generations.

Rooted in the satoyama landscape of Fujino, the program works with local farmers, land stewards, craftspeople, and community members to engage directly with forests, bamboo groves, farmland, and other cultivated landscapes.

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In Fujino, land has long been shaped through relationships between people and place—through cultivation, forestry, food, craft, seasonal practices, and forms of collective care. Much of this knowledge is embodied in everyday practice and transmitted through working alongside others.

Through hands-on land care, shared work, observation, and exchange, IPI explores how these forms of knowledge might continue to evolve while opening new ways for younger generations and people from outside the region to participate in the long-term care of the landscape.

Materials and resources that emerge through this process—such as bamboo, thinned wood, tea, and yuzu—also become part of the inquiry. Rather than treating them simply as by-products, IPI explores how they can circulate through craft, food, making, and other forms of local use, reconnecting land management with everyday culture.

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Land Stewardship considers care for the land not as a separate environmental activity, but as an ongoing relationship between ecology, knowledge, culture, and community.

Beginning in 2027, IPI will expand this work across several sites in Fujino, working with local landowners and practitioners to support ongoing stewardship and build a foundation for longer-term care of the land.

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