Session 110: Ecology and the Industrial State: The Beginnings of Environmentalism in Modern Japan

Organizer and Chair: Gregory Golley, University of Chicago

Discussant: Julia Adeney Thomas, University of Notre Dame

The presenters on this panel propose to trace the beginnings in modern Japan of what we might term today "ecological" consciousness." They approach this topic in the context of social and cultural history as well as from the standpoint of the history of science.

Covering a period from the mid-Meiji to the postwar period, the panelists hope to provide a synthetic view of a topic that has been somewhat neglected in Japanese studies in North America and Europe.

Robert Stolz, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Chicago, will present ongoing research on early conservationist Tanaka Shôzô (1841–1913) whose late Meiji activism, Stolz argues, demonstrates the emergence of the new category of "environment" that transcends the space of the nation-state. This new understanding of nature-as-environment becomes a "guarantor of social justice" through which could be launched critiques of the "ideologies of capitalism, race, empire and war."

Brett Walker, an associate professor at Montana State University at Bozeman, proposes to present an examination of the infamous mercury poisoning catastrophe of Minamata "from the vantage point of the history of science and technology, as well as the history of medicine and the environment." Through the details of this incident, Walker will trace the contours of postwar industrial science, connections between the plastics industry and pre-modern East Asian alchemy, as well as parallels between modern ecology and traditional Japanese obstetrics.

Gregory Golley, an assistant professor at the University of Chicago, will present on the early impact in Japan of Darwin’s biological model of evolution, often overshadowed by the enormous influence of Herbert Spencer’s "social Darwinism." Darwin’s much-neglected notion of organic and inorganic "interdependence," Golley argues, served as the structural foundation of the anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist valences recognizable in the early ecological writings of Oka Asajirô (1868–1944) and Imanishi Kinji (1902–1992).

All three panelists are committed intellectually and politically to environmental issues, though they have approached the problem from different angles. The panel’s discussant, Julia Adeney Thomas (associate professor at the University of Notre Dame), has contributed remarkably to the field of Japanese history on this topic, having traced the history of "nature" as an ideological category in her 2001 book Reconfiguring Modernity: Concepts of Nature in Japanese Political Ideology. The panelists are confident that Professor Thomas will provide the depth and insight of a synthetic overview to their presentations.

Revisiting Japan’s Minamata

Brett L. Walker, Montana State University, Bozeman

Today, the name Minamata is synonymous with industrial pollution. Starting in the late 1950s, fishers living in hamlets near Minamata City developed symptoms of a "strange disease" that was later diagnosed as methyl-mercury poisoning. Given the importance of this poisoning, Minamata has attracted widespread scholarly attention, primarily by those interested in the social, political, and legal processes whereby the fishers gained meager compensation and the pollution victims belated justice.

This study examines industrial pollution at Minamata from the vantage point of the history of science and technology, as well as the history of medicine and the environment. First, it highlights connections between the development of Japan’s postwar mass culture and the invention of industrial technologies and chemical processes that made available cheap disposable goods, such as those made from plastics, to Japanese consumers. Second, it investigates inorganic mercury’s catalytic role in the making of these plastics and how the deadly heavy metal was transformed into its more toxic organic cousin once in the environment, but also the historical interest of East Asian scientists, from Taoist alchemists to Japanese obstetricians, in mercury’s metamorphic and medical properties. Third, because many of the victims of "Minamata disease" developed it congenitally, this study will flesh out our skeletal understanding of the parallels between the ways that both modern ecology and traditional Japanese obstetrics viewed the "organogenesis" of the fetus and how "pollution"—both in the form of traditional moral "pollution" and modern industrial effluent—retarded fetal development.

In short, this study will expose the historical interplay between imported Western science and Japan’s pre-modern technological, scientific, and medical legacies in the context of our attempts to explain dramatic environmental upheaval.

Nature over Nation: Tanaka Shôzô’s Fundamental River Law

Robert Stolz, University of Chicago

Tanaka Shôzô (1841–1913) is well known in Japan as an early conservationist who fought the Furukawa zaibatsu’s Ashio copper mine that was polluting the Watarase River in Gumma and Tochigi prefectures bringing sickness and crop failure to the agricultural communities. Shôzô receives a paragraph or two in most junior high school textbooks highlighting his extraordinary failed attempt to rush the Imperial carriage with an anti-mine appeal in 1901. This, more than anything, has cemented his reputation as a solitary and tragic hero—Japan’s last peasant martyr. Shôzô then serves as a pre-modern indictment of the unintended consequences of Japan’s industrialization, pollution being the most important. His invocation in the Minamata struggles and by the anti-Narita airport farmers in Sanrizuka in the 1960s–70s seems to attest to this. But doing so flattens the nature of both Shôzô’s thought and the meaning of his resurrection in post-war democratic movements.

Seeing Shôzô as a peasant voice requires overlooking decades of involvement in the Peoples’ Rights and Liberty movement and his later engagement with socialism and anarchism—practically if not always textually. This paper will attempt to inject this neglected discourse on political philosophy into the Shôzô narrative to highlight the emergence of new networks of ideas and social movements that, it will be argued, should be called ecological. Through an examination of Shôzô’s appeal to the emperor in 1901, the seemingly most straightforward expression of a peasant logic, it will show that this text exploded the contradictions of Peoples’ Rights ideology which proved incapable of dealing with industrial pollution. The dramatic failure of this appeal to the office and person of the emperor would lead to a search for a new guarantor of social justice—nature as the environment. Finally this examines Shôzô’s fundamental river law (konponteki kasenhô) developed during extensive walking tours of the Watarase and Tone River watersheds from 1902–10. Although articulated in a Neo-Confucian vocabulary of principles (ri) and essences (sei) reminiscent of 18th-century agronomy and political economy, Shôzô’s law breaks from this tradition in identifying poison/pollution (doku) as both a conceptual and historical intervention into the discourse on nature as the key for understanding Japanese modernity. A materialist emphasis on the nature/poison dichotomy as the key for understanding Japanese modernity allowed Shôzô and his circle, Arahata Kanson, Ishikawa Sanshirô, Kinoshita Naoe, Arai Ôsui, Henmi Onokichi, Shimada Sôzô, Kurosawa Torizô (founder of Snow Brand Milk Products), and others to marginalize both emperor and nation in favor of a life-giving material nature-as-environment from which they could launch a critique of the ideologies of capitalism, race, empire and war.

This environmental conception of nature reveals a spatial scope for leftist political action that is neither the space of the nation-state nor the international proletariat but defined by ecological relationships. It is this aspect of the Ashio struggle that is picked up in post-war environmental protest from Minamata to Sanrizuka and anti-globalization movements today.

Darwinism in Japan: The Birth of Ecology

Gregory Golley, University of Chicago

First introduced to Japan in the 1870s by the American zoologist Edward Morse (1838–1925), evolutionary theory is often remembered by historians of Japan not for its influence as a biological model but rather for its loose association with Herbert Spencer’s ideas about social struggle and survival in the theater of human history. In spite of Spencer’s undeniable influence, molecular biologist Shibutani Atsuhiro has warned against confusing the content of social Darwinism with "the original Darwinian version" so crucial to the development of the life sciences in Japan’s twentieth century.

In fact, Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection had a profound, if quieter, impact upon the natural sciences in Japan. This impact expressed itself most significantly in the ethics and politics of what came to be called "ecology" (seitaigaku) after Ernst Haeckel’s (1834–1919) newly coined term. Haeckel’s ecological vision, disseminated through his widely read The Wonders of Life (translated into Japanese in 1904 as Seimei no fukashugi), operated explicitly within the framework of Darwin’s theory of evolution. It was this framework, in fact, which accounts for ecology’s fundamental departure from the human-centered view of the world, and its eventual move toward what would today be termed a "biocentric" approach." Despite the tooth and claw image that characterizes popular notions about On the Origin of Species, Darwin’s ideas operated fundamentally by the logic of interdependence. For Darwin, suffering, pain, and death were the conditions of nature not as a battlefield defined by conquest and defeat, but as an arena of subsistence involving both competition and mutual dependence. His conceptualization of the infamous "struggle for existence" grew out of a seemingly non-Darwinian insight: that "plants and animals remote in the scale of nature, are bound together by a web of complex relations."

The consequences of this approach expressed themselves most forcefully through the popular writings of the late Meiji Darwinian biologist Oka Asajirô (1868–1944), whose Lectures on Evolution (Shinkaron kôwa, 1904) helped introduce Darwin’s theory to the popular reading audience, and the early-Showa ecological treatise of Imanishi Kinji (1902–1992) The World of Living Things (Seibutsu no sekai, 1940) which presented itself (problematically) as anti-Darwinian. This paper will examine the popular writings of these two natural scientists in the context of an incipient ecological consciousness in early twentieth century Japan. While the holism of early ecology prefigured the organicist logic underlying the quasi-spiritual ideologies of race and empire, its Darwinian character stood to derail the very logic of ethnic nationalism and racial solidarity that it might otherwise have enhanced. I will argue, in fact, that the popular enthusiasm in Japan for Spencer’s misrepresentation of Darwin’s biological model suggests an intuitive recognition among Japanese progressives of something in Darwin’s biological theory running deeply counter to the modernization program.