Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2017. xi, 318 pp. (B&W photos.) US$65.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-6713-3.
Transnational Japan in the Global Environmental Movement is a meticulously researched book that brings fresh perspective to Japan’s well-studied environmental movement. Avenell’s transnational historical approach breaks new ground in examining how the movement was shaped by transnational contacts, but perhaps even more significantly, the impact that the movement had outside Japan. The multiscalar analysis adds a spatial dimension that enriches the temporal analysis and connects the local and global by focusing on the centrality of local experience while situating Japan’s environmental movement, and its civil society more generally, in a global context.
The analysis centres on Japanese activists’ development of an environmental injustice paradigm. Environmental injustice is a highly contextual, or situated, concept that one would not expect to have much traction outside of localized individual experience. The centrality of this paradigm would suggest a parochial movement limited in scope and relevance. Yet, one of the most valuable contributions of Avenell’s study is tracing the development of this concept, and how it traverses the local and the global in a way that enriches, not diminishes, the value of local experience. The concept travels with rooted cosmopolitan movement actors as they engage audiences outside Japan, first as a way to share experiences of Japan’s pollution crisis in the hopes of preventing such injustice in other places. As the movement in Japan and abroad develops and a global environmental movement emerges, the transnational contacts proliferate, challenging the concept and the movement’s commitments.
Structuring the book to analyze Japanese environmental activism at multiple scales of activity—local, regional, and global spaces—captures and conveys the complexity of transnational phenomena. This approach is more than an examination at three levels. It is a rich and dynamic multiscalar analysis that conveys the richness of activism at each scale, the challenges that engagement at each scale presented and how these challenges, and activist responses to them, served to strengthen transnational relationships while transforming the local origins of the environmental injustice paradigm in ways that enriched and empowered situated knowledge. Indeed, the local itself transformed from potentially limiting and parochial to essential to transnationalism.
Avenell examines six “scalar iterations of environmental injustice” that spanned the time frame from the emergence of the paradigm in the 1960s during Japan’s pollution crisis through the global-scale environmental problems that were the focus of two international conferences in the 1990s. Organizing the analysis around various scales of activity adds dynamism. Without this innovation, we would miss the central contribution of Avenell’s work—that is, how the concept of environmental injustice travels, how the encounters challenge and then reinvigorate local knowledge and experience, and finally, how these contribute to movements outside Japan.
The environmental injustice paradigm grew out of the need to understand how Japan’s development, which was framed as beneficial to the entire nation, could be the cause of so much suffering across the country. The severe pollution and its consequences for the lives and health of victims did not fit the national narrative and its related discourse of Japan as a major international economic player. Indeed, making sense of what was happening meant disaggregating the nation and recognizing that the results of industrial development had differential, often negative effects on the lives of those who were already on the margins of society.
This realization was only possible because of the dedication of rooted cosmopolitans—epistemic communities of activist scientists, citizen scientists, and other activists—who brought their scientific expertise to bear on the problem but who realized that a full understanding required social scientific analysis as well. The second scalar iteration, activists’ travels to and engagement in struggles in North America and Europe in the late 1969s to mid-1970s, is the focus of chapter 2. This chapter introduces the idea, developed throughout the rest of the book, of the significance of translocalism for Japan’s environmental movements. Translocalism invites us to view local spaces not as nationally bound in a geographical hierarchy in which the national dominates the local. Instead, there is a view that local areas are connected across national borders, with local experience and attachment as the basis for transnational action, instead of a hindrance to such connections. The local becomes a site for generating universal understanding of environmental injustice and universal visions of how to achieve environmental justice.
In chapter 3, Avenell makes a singular contribution to studies of environmental movements and Japanese civil society. The third scalar iteration examines the role of Japanese activists in emerging environmental globalism by analyzing their participation in the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in 1972. Japanese activists’ commitment to the locally situated environmental injustice paradigm shaped their opposition to emerging global discourses that threatened to abstract away from the human experience by moving toward a shared world approach. Activists insisted on retaining a human focus based in local experience. This approach significantly impacted the developmental trajectory of global environmental discourses.
The fourth and fifth iterations of the environmental injustice paradigm take place at the regional level, involving Japan’s Asian neighbours and interactions with Pacific Island nations. These two iterations seem the most challenging for the locally situated environmental injustice paradigm; thus, they do much of the work convincing us of the generative nature of transnationalism. Interactions with Thai and South Korean activists—where Japanese companies were exporting pollution—and with Pacific Islanders, especially activists in Palau, where Japan planned to dump nuclear waste off the coast, forced Japanese activists to confront their country’s imperialist past and their own compatriots’ narrative of victimhood. Interactions on this regional scale advanced the environmental injustice paradigm, enhancing its power and complexity.
The final iteration of the paradigm focuses on how it continued to shape Japanese activists’ approaches to the global environmental agenda that began in the late 1980s. This chapter demonstrates how a new generation of environmental activists and NGOs in Japan continued to draw on a paradigm informed by concerns with justice and human rights.
The result of this careful research is a book that documents and demonstrates Japanese civic organizations as transnational actors that are shaped by their interactions with outside actors. That these organizations significantly shaped environmental activism at the local, national, regional, and global scales is an even more important contribution. The innovative methodology that examines the development of the Japanese movement’s environmental injustice paradigm across time and space situates the environmental movement within a historical trajectory of civil society organizations. The trajectory can be traced to its roots in the 1960s student movements, and connections to anti-war movements of the 1970s, with the reinvigorated civil society of the late 1990s as its legacy.
Petrice Flowers
University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, Honolulu, USA