Asia-Pacific; Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University. Durham; London: Duke University Press, 2014. xi, 269 pp. (Table, figures.) US$24.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-8223-5699-8.
The environmental history of Japan has flourished in recent years with a blossoming of strong English-language scholarship from established figures (like Brett Walker) and a younger generation of newcomers to the field (including the author of this volume). Despite all the critical environmental topics and themes as of yet untouched by historians, a great deal of this research has clustered around a relatively limited range of subjects, notably industrial pollution incidents, the idea of nature in Japanese thought, and environmental activism. Robert Stolz’s Bad Water: Nature, Pollution, and Politics in Japan, 1870-1950 is part of this scholarly pile-up on turf already well-trod in Japanese environmental history. Happily, Stolz brings to his study fresh and important perspectives on familiar events, intellectual trends, and individuals as well as introducing heretofore little-known (but significant) thinkers and narratives to the Western scholarship.
At its core, Bad Water is a critical reassessment of the thought and intellectual influence of Tanaka Shōzō (1841–1913), the Meiji politician, journalist, and activist celebrated (and even lionized) in the historiography as Japan’s first conservationist, a principled crusader against an authoritarian state and irresponsible corporations, and an agrarian conscience in a nation (and a landscape) being transformed by rapid industrialization. Tanaka, who was elected to the Diet in Japan’s first general election of 1890, had all the makings of a pioneering and heroic environmentalist: horrified by the widespread devastation caused to farmland and villages by the toxic effluvia washed downstream from the Ashio Copper Mine in his native Tochigi Prefecture, Tanaka was relentless in his efforts to stir public opinion and spur government action. Although he and his fellow protesters were able to win some redress from the corporate owners of the mine and incremental policy concessions from Tokyo, Tanaka eventually despaired of a political solution, resigning his seat in the Diet, withdrawing to live in Yanaka (one of the villages hardest hit by the Ashio pollution), and devoting himself to reflection and writing.
Although often cast as a backward-looking champion of the peasant soul of a Japan already lost to capitalism, industry, and the pursuit of empire, Tanaka emerges in Stolz’s book as a more creative, progressive, and influential thinker. Through a careful and compelling re-reading of Tanaka’s career and writings, Stolz reveals Tanaka as a complicated figure, transformed by the horrors of industrial pollution from an archetypal Meiji liberal (who cherished the abstract vision of an autonomous subject divorced from his/her surroundings) into an impassioned spokesman for a new environmental politics. In what Stolz describes as his “environmental turn,” Tanaka came to recognize the folly of humans’ (and the modern state’s) attempts to control or contain nature; instead, he took as his environmental and social ideal the notion of “flow” (nagare), a liberated and healthy condition for rivers and people alike. Thus, in his mature writings Tanaka not only articulated a profound critique of Meiji political philosophy and the inherent ecological contradictions of capitalism but also crafted a powerful environmental vision of what he called “true civilization.”
Stolz’s book is not simply an intellectual biography of Tanaka, however, as he also explores at length the lives and work of three other Japanese environmental thinkers: Matsumoto Eiko, a radical journalist whose ethnographic work on pollution informed Tanaka’s thought; Ishikawa Sanshirō, an eccentric anarchist and nudist influenced by Tanaka, who proposed an ecological alternative to industrial modernity based on the rhizome; and Kurosawa Torizō, who founded Snow Brand (still one of Japan’s largest milk and cheese companies) and aimed to create a Danish-style community of environmentally sustainable dairy farms in Hokkaidō. In these four unusual individuals, Stolz reveals four potential paths for progressive environmental activists under prewar Japanese authoritarianism: escape (as Matsumoto emigrated to California not long after publishing her work on Ashio), engagement (modelled by Tanaka through his life of protest, community organization, and advocacy), withdrawal (Ishikawa sought self-sufficiency and privacy on a small farm west of Tokyo), and utopianism (in Kurosawa’s quest for a socialist dairy paradise in Japan’s farthest hinterlands). As these cases demonstrate, the options for forward-thinking environmentalists in the highly circumscribed political landscape and inalterably capitalist socio-economic order of imperial Japan were extremely limited.
For all the strengths of Bad Water, the volume is not without its flaws. Frustratingly, especially for a rigorous intellectual historian, Stolz does not define or clearly differentiate the English terms nature, environment, or ecology, nor does he unpack the meanings of ten, a Japanese word he seemingly interchangeably translates as “heaven” and “nature.” At times, Stolz’s narrative reads like a quaint search for “resistance” in Japan before and immediately after World War II, a longstanding project of left-leaning historians that today seems dated and unnecessary. And Stolz’s conclusion, which is the only part of the book too heavy on jargon, is painfully dark, indeed almost nihilistic in its hopelessness for those of us who perforce live in capitalist societies and retain a shred or two of faith in liberal subjectivity. In this regard, Stolz participates in what now seems like a curious “race to the bottom” among historians of the Japanese environment, as scholars like Brett Walker paint Japan’s ecological past, present, and future with almost unremitting bleakness.
Although the conclusion of Bad Water almost assures that readers will finish the book with an anguished frown on their faces, Stolz’s contributions to the environmental and intellectual histories of modern Japan—from his timely reinterpretation of Tanaka Shōzō to his fascinating story of Snow Brand’s trajectory from Danish inspiration to fascist mobilization to recent tainted food scandals—are undeniably substantial.
William M. Tsutsui
Hendrix College, Conway, USA
pp. 437-439