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To Manage Nature’s Unpredictabilities: Concerns over Population and Resources in Postwar Japan
Organizer and Chair: Eric G. Dinmore, Hampden-Sydney College
Discussant: Margaret A. McKean, Duke University
As Japan recovered from the devastation of World War II, social scientists, politicians, engineers, and public intellectuals agonized over demographic and natural resource issues. Although the so-called “population problem” (jinko mondai) and “resources problem” (shigen mondai) had long been concerns in modern Japan, these perceived problems loomed particularly large over postwar debates on the country’s future. Depending on who was making the argument, the population problem could refer to an imminent Malthusian crisis, mounting unemployment, or concerns that Japanese women were not stepping up to the duties of motherhood. Similarly, the resources problem could imply anxieties over raw material security, the loss of overseas colonial resources, inadequacies in the domestic infrastructure, or outright environmental catastrophe. Despite these evasive definitions, two broad areas of consensus emerged in these postwar discussions. First, most commentators conceived of human beings and the natural landscape as “resources” essential for socioeconomic development. Second, they viewed resolution of the population and resources problems as a national objective requiring careful policymaking by trained authorities. This panel will explore postwar Japanese debates on population and natural resources as topics of intellectual, environmental, and even cultural history. Papers will present social scientific ideas as discourses shaped by the postwar sociopolitical context. They will also emphasize conceptual linkages between the population and resources problems, explicitly bringing these topics together for the first time at a major conference. The presentations and discussion should offer compelling insights into how human and natural resource management became a central facet of modern thought.
Eighty Million People on Four Small Islands: Population Growth and Resource Anxieties in Occupation-era Japan
Eric G. Dinmore, Hampden-Sydney College
This paper will examine how Japanese public intellectuals and American consultants working for the Allied Occupation diagnosed and proposed to avert a demographic disaster in Japan immediately after World War II. The phrase “the eighty million” featured prominently in early postwar Japanese social and economic policy debates. This referred to the number that the population was reaching in the late 1940s, and it captured the uncertainty many felt about Japan’s future. The Allies had stripped Japan of its vast overseas empire, abruptly ending the wartime quest for self-sufficiency in raw materials and food. Food rationing continued long after August 1945, and the urban population hovered near the brink of starvation. Trade restrictions and calls among the Allies for reparations payments to victims of wartime aggression opened to question Japan’s future as a major industrial power. This gloomy environment rekindled pre-World War II fears that Japan faced a Malthusian crisis. The mass media somberly predicted that wretched living standards and the loss of imperial resources would spawn economic depression and political instability. Rather than emphasize birth control, emigration, or other measures aimed at controlling population growth, most commentators on this so-called “population problem” believed economic growth and full employment were the only workable solutions. They worried, however, that economic growth would consume massive amounts of industrial raw materials, which were particularly scarce in post-imperial Japan. In this manner, they linked the population problem to modern Japan’s ongoing quest for secure supplies of natural resources.
Are Babies a National Resource or a Family Affair? Interests, Ideologies and Outcomes in the Intimate Realm of Reproduction in 20th Century Japan
Tiana Norgren, Columbia University
Over the course of the 20th century, Japanese elites have often conceived of reproduction in nationalist or statist terms as something that individuals should either engage in or refrain from in accordance with larger political or economic goals. Imperial expansion dictated the need for more, better quality babies; total defeat in war rendered those babies burdensome; and rapid economic growth and rapid aging again focused attention on the need for human resources. The goals have changed over time, but the notion that couples should make childbearing decisions based on the national interest has remained constant. The average Japanese person, however, has generally not seen things the same way. He or she usually has much more parochial concerns about childbearing, centering on his individual family’s standard of living or her individual health and well-being. “Who would have children just for the good of the nation?” wrote a Japanese feminist in the 1970s. Through the lens of debates over abortion and birth control, this paper examines the convergence and divergence over time of popular and elite interests and ideologies, and their effects on reproductive outcomes. These outcomes—as seen in abortion rates, birth control and sterilization usage patterns, birth rates, and average age of marriage and first childbirth—suggest that policies flowing from statist elite ideologies are only effective when they happen to coincide with popular interests and ideologies. Otherwise, the intimate realm of reproduction has proven far less amenable to social management than many other areas of everyday life in Japan.
Plotting the Future: Population, Growth and the Idea of Limits in Late Twentieth-Century Japan
Scott O'Bryan, Indiana University
Planners and policy makers in Japan after 1945 quickly revived an old modern obsession with population size as they attempted to set a course for the post-defeat nation. Indeed, population fears became an enduring feature of social, economic, and cultural debate during the following postwar decades--and continue so today. Yet declarations by specialists about just what they believed the so-called population problem to be swung widely over the half century after 1945, at times predicated on the idea that there were simply too many people in Japan, and other times that there were too few. This paper examines two phases of this shifting postwar discourse on population, both marked by fear of “overpopulation” yet each of which generated quite different remedy proposals. During the first, from the end of the war through the 1950s, planners proclaimed that a swelling Japanese population represented the “weak link in the chain” of national fortunes and, in response, articulated a vision of rapid economic growth for the nation now stripped of its former empire. In the second phase examined here, a period beginning in the late 1960s into the 1970s, fear of population growth returned as Japanese researchers played important roles in the rise of an ecology movement that used computer models to support a heretical vocabulary of limits to global human activity. Growth was now the problem, not the remedy. Long an icon of mid-century growthist success, Japan by the 1970s came to be seen by systemic environmentalists as a potential testing ground for proposals to achieve “stationary states” and zero population growth as the means to avoid global collapse.
Logging the "Dark Valley": Japan's Forest Resources in War and Peace
William M. Tsutsui, University of Kansas
This paper will explore how Japan's forests were sacrificed first for the demands of World War II, and then for the demands of peace. Wartime and postwar mobilization—military, economic, political, and spiritual—transformed forestry practices, silvicultural communities, and the landscape in Japan. This paper will examine how mass mobilization drives, like the desperate "pine root oil project" of 1944-45, which aimed to produce motor fuel from the resinous roots of evergreens, were responsible for widespread clearcutting, massive forest destruction, and disruption of traditional woodland management practices. It will also discuss the ironies of defeat, and specifically the fact that accelerated postwar demand for wood products, combined with American Occupation land reform policies that incentivized rapid clearcutting, meant that the devastation of Japan's forests continued unabated into the early 1950s. Finally, the paper will evaluate the long-term consequences of wartime and immediate postwar deforestation, especially as reflected in the contentious postwar debates over forestry and water management policies, and in the decline of traditional forest villages and their stewardship of Japan's woodlands. This transwar perspective will reveal often overlooked continuities in the utilization of Japan's timber resources and the politics of exploitation in Japan's mid-twentieth-century forests.