Organizer: Richard H Okada, Princeton University

Chair: Takazaku Yumoto, Research Institute for Humanity and Nature, Japan

Discussant: Julia Adeney Thomas, University of Notre Dame

Human life as we know it faces environmental crises of monumental proportions. Examples include the complex and controversial effects of global warming, depletion of energy sources, crises in waste management, degradation in air quality, rampant deforestation, lack of safe drinking water, exploitation and extinction of animal species, media pollution of public airspace, mass homogenization of subjectivity, and serious questions regarding the future quality of life. It is high time that we who teach and do research on Japan incorporate ecological issues as an integral part of our daily life, labor, and learning. What might it mean to go about doing this in relation to the study of Japan? That is the question central to this panel.

Awareness in the academic world of the importance of actively engaging with ecological issues has been steadily increasing from the late seventies and eighties. Building on early works like Rachael Carson’s classic, Silent Spring (1962), William Bateson’s, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972), as well as studies by literature-oriented ecocritics beginning with William Rueckert’s celebrated, "Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism" (1978), the amount of material in books, journals, and online available has grown exponentially in recent years. This panel seeks to ask ecological questions as they relate to Japan and beyond. The four panelists, who work in literature, history, and cultural studies, will address human-animal interactions from theoretical and historical perspectives (Marran and Tsutsui), the relation of ecology to Japanese popular culture (Okada), and ecological issues pertaining to premodern setsuwa texts (Komine). A common thread is that all the papers will deal explicitly with issues surrounding representations of plants and animals. The panel composition ventures outside commonly accepted divisions of knowledge (modern-premodern, high culture-popular culture, human-animal, disciplinary boundaries) and subscribes to Barry Commoner’s first law of ecology, "Everything is connected to everything else." The hope is that the presentations will elicit serious thought and reflection on how our work as scholars can affect attitudes towards things ecological. We will strive to keep the presentations short to provide a maximum amount of time for discussion.

Kazuaki Komine, Rikkyo University, Japan

From the 15^th century on, in the genre known as otogizoshi, stories were created that personified plants and animals, or classified them by name. As was the case with exhaustive lists (monozukushi) or poetry competitions (uta-awase), divided them into Right and Left sides according to their individual characteristics, and placed them in competition against each other. One can imagine that behind such activity lay the profound environmental changes that occurred after the civil strife of the Namboku-cho period. The activity also is evidence of a transformation in the way that plants, animals and life itself was viewed as well as of a change in attitudes towards the environment. Foundational to the transformations were new developments in traditional herbalism (honzogaku) and natural history (hakubutsugaku). In this paper, I plan to interrogate otogizoshi and setsuwa images and texts from that point of view.

William M. Tsutsui, University of Kansas

Modern Japanese imperialism is usually figured as a purely terrestrial affair. The narrative of Japanese expansionism from the late nineteenth century through the Second World War is almost invariably based on chronologies of territorial expansion, the acquisition of "dry" land, its populations, and its natural resources. Even in studies of Japan’s colonization of the islands of Micronesia and the South Pacific, the role of the ocean as a conduit for - and, just as importantly, as the site of - Japanese expansionism have been largely overlooked.

This paper will argue that Japanese imperialism in Asia in the early twentieth century cannot be understood adequately without considering Japan’s incremental "colonization" of its surrounding seas and, eventually, of much of the Western Pacific Ocean. Focusing specifically on the development of Japan’s deep-sea fisheries and state fisheries policy, this paper will demonstrate that Japan’s economic exploitation of the seas paralleled the nation’s economic and military advance on the Asian continent. Moreover, the growth of Japan’s "pelagic empire" was propelled by many of the same political and economic forces - and pursued under the same ideological aegis - as Japan’s continental expansion.

This paper will survey the expansion of Japan’s deep-sea fisheries in the early twentieth century, Japan’s conflicts with other nations over fishing rights and grounds, and the associated public discourse in Japan. This paper will also examine cartographic depictions of the Japanese empire to gauge how both domestic and overseas observers perceived Japan’s growing pelagic sphere of influence.

Christine Marran, University of Minnesota

The concerns to be addressed in my presentation are two-fold. One goal is to ask how animal welfare activism can best be pursued in a national and international context via a discussion of the annual six-month dolphin-slaughter in Taiji, Japan. I hope to illustrate the ways in which a concern for the environment and animals can have predictable as well as unanticipated positive effects for the environment and humans. The Taiji hunts are a problem for dolphins, but there is a way in which helping the dolphins will have positive effects for humans and this argument can be extended to other examples of animal treatment. These examples will illustrate the incredible complexity of ecological systems of which humans must be considered a link.

The second question posed is how and even whether theoretical concerns are useful in actualizing change with regard to animal welfare. Typically, essays by thinkers such as Derrida and Agamben examine the status of the animal as the representative place where the boundaries of human as ontological being are drawn. In ecocriticism, the politics of the representation of animal has been engaged in a limited way to speak to human concerns of race, gender, and transnationalism, but how does this forward the situation of the animal, if at all? This presentation attempts to connect activism with intellectual thought to examine how one can inform the other; and to differentiate between those theoretical approaches that address the status of the animal for the purpose of addressing the status of the human and those that specifically address or can be extended to address animal welfare in the way that other theories do not.

Richard H Okada, Princeton University

One of the central lessons of ecology is the interconnectedness of everything, from environmental matters to interpersonal relations to conceptual thinking to scholarly disciplines, areas, and research to scientific findings. This paper aims to examine the relations between ecological thinking (specifically in terms of the representations of human-animal relations and the question of indebtedness) and works of Japanese popular culture, paying particular attention to the ways that associations and connections, both explicit and implicit, can be delineated. In order to appeal to a wide audience regarding the importance of incorporating ecological issues into our daily thinking, it may help to address material that produces the greatest impact for our current historical period. For students interested in Japan, that material comprises popular cultural items such as anime, manga, live-action films, and contemporary fiction. After incorporating ecological issues into two recent courses on Japanese popular culture, I have found that students are extremely receptive to the call to think the two together. Beginning with a brief reflection on the issues involved, I will examine several popular cultural works that either do have an obvious environmental or ecological component, like Heisei tanuki gassen, pompoko, by Takahata Isao, and The Bears of Nametoko Mountain, by Miyazawa Kenji, or that do not, like Kasha, by Miyabe Miyuki, and Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi, by Miyazaki Hayao.