Bad Water by Robert Stolz

8/12/2019 Bad Water by Robert Stolz

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Asia-Pacific , , Editors: Rey Chow, Michael Dutton,H. D. Harootunian, and Rosalind C. Morris


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Nature, Pollution, and Politics in Japan, 18701950

Robert Stolz

Duke University Press Durham and London 2014


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2014 Duke University Press All rights reservedPrinted in the United States o America on acid-ree paper

ypeset in Arno Pro by Westchester BooksDesigned by Courtney Leigh Baker

Library o Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataStolz, Robert, 1970Bad water : nature, pollution, and politics in Japan, 18701950 /Robert Stolz.Pages cm (Asia-Pacic: culture, politics, and society)

978-0-8223-5690-5 (cloth : alk. paper) 978-0-8223-5699-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Environmental protection Political aspects Japan.2. Pollution Political aspects Japan. . itle.

. Series: Asia-Pacic.187.5. 3 76 2014

363.730952'09041 dc23 2013050759


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Te Studies o the Weatherhead East Asian Instituteo Columbia University were inaugurated in 1962 to bringto a wider public the results o signicant new researchon modern and contemporary East Asia.


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Acknowledgments ix

1

A Decade of Leaks 19

Pollution and Peasants at the Limits of Liberalism 51

Nature over Nation anaka Shzs Environmental urn 85

Natural Democracy 117

The Original Green Company Snow Brand Dairy 159

Bad Water, a Theoretical Consideration 191

anaka and Ktokus Appeal to the Meiji Emperor207

Notes 211 Bibliography243 Index 259


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Golley, William Sewell, Dan Magilow, and Chad Black. I also want to thankKen Wissoker, Jade Brooks, and Liz Smith o Duke University Press ortheir enthusiasm and support in bringing this book to press.

In Japan I am orever grate ul to Anzai Kunio, who welcomed me to Waseda on two occasions. ogether with Kanai akanori, he shared his im-mense knowledge o Meiji history and the jiyminken und. Kanai was alsoincredibly patient in walking me through the ner points osrbun starting

rom scratch. Igarashi Akio at Rikky University, Nakahara Junichi and thestaff at the Kurosawa oriz Kinenkd at Rakun Gakuen daigaku, Kom-atsu Hiroshi at Kumamoto daigaku, Eto Shigeyuki o the ekireikai, the East union members who let me join them in replanting the hills around Ashio in 2002, and members o anaka Shz daigaku in ochigi and okyo,

especially Fukawa Satoru and Akagami akashi, all welcomed me and gaveme access to their collections and expertise.Federico Marcon deserves special thanks or not only reading and com-

menting on large sections but also being willing to debate nearly every pieceo the project. With Federico, others who were always ready to organizemeetings and panels to discuss and argue over the ner points o capitalismand ecology include Ken Kawashima, Katsuya Hirano, Gavin Walker, Kat-suhiko Endo, Ian Miller, Brett Walker, and Julia Tomas. Many more col-leagues in Chicago, ennessee, Virginia, and Japan contributed and deservespecial thanks here: Jim Bartholomew, Celia Braves Jeremy Butler, JulieChrist, Alon Conno, Daniel Corl, Bruce Cumings, Chris Hebert, IwasakiMasaya, Patti Kameya, Sho Konishi, Fabio Lanza, Maezawa Bin, MakiharaNorio, anya Maus, rent Maxey, Jeri McIntosh, Christopher McMorran, Allan Megill, Christopher Oakes, Brian Owensby, Albert Park, Sam Perry, John Person, Zac Pessin, Rob Sklenar, Sugai Masur, David ompkins, Al- berto oscano, Umemori Naoyuki, Michael Wert, and Mikael Wol e.

Resources and time to complete this project were provided by a JapanSociety or the Promotion o Science ( ) and Social Sciences ResearchCouncil ( ) Fellowship at Waseda, a University o Virginia Arts,Humanities, and Social Sciences Research Grant, the UVa East Asia Center,a University o ennessee Pro essional Development Award, a Fulbright( ) Graduate Research Fellowship, and a University o Chicago Center

or East Asian Studies Writing Fellowship. Te nal version has also bene-ted rom comments rom aculty and students at Amherst College, theUniversity o oronto Department o East Asian Studies, and the Depart-

ment o Japanese Studies at National University o Singapore. Earlier ver-


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sions o parts o chapter 3 were published as Nature over Nation: anakaShzs Fundamental River Law, Japan Forum 18, no. 3 (2006): 41737.

Lastly, I would like to thank my amily or their support and understand-ing over this long process. For all their help, I thank my parents, Robert andClaire Ann Stolz, my sister Suzanne, my brother Peter, nieces Nicola, Pippa,Riley, and Katrina, and nally and most importantly Kimberly, who notonly read and helped with the manuscript and images but also, or better or worse, was there rom the very beginning.


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Nothing to Fear Here

In the eighth lunar month o 1868, amid the collapse o the okugawa samu-rai government even as civil war raged in the Northa pamphlet ap-peared in Edo (modern-day okyo) assuring its readers that BenjaminFranklin had made them sa er: In the past, devoid as it was o scientists(shikisha), it was endlessly repeated that lightning was the scolding o anangry god, an object o awe, something to be eared. But ever since a mannamed Franklin came into the world there is no one who would explainlightning this way. He has even built the device by which this disaster may be avoided peoples joy is truly boundless. So beginsenpen chii (Te Extraordinary Workings o Heaven and Earth), by Obata okujir (18421905). An eleven-page work divided into eight chapters,enpen chii was

dedicated to subdu[ing] the strange (ki o osaeri), . . . showing that neitherdoes Heaven act strangely nor Earth go mad. One by one Obata attacks the

Questions like Where is nature? or What is nature? have long lost anyresidual probity or innocence they may have had (or pretended to). . . . Te pointhere is not that nature has become cultural; one might as well argue that culture

has become eral. . . . Rather, the point is that nature has become political. ,Signs o Danger


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alse wisdoms o the past and explains the true principles at work behindseemingly strange natural phenomena. In turn, lightning, earthquakes,comets, rainbows, sunspots, lunar haloes, shooting stars and reballs,and cold res (inka) are revealed as wholly knowable, predictable, andavoidable.

For Obata, Franklins discovery means that lightning, rather than a ormo divine punishment, is nothing more than the same electricity (ereki) thatexists in more or less amounts within all substances. o prove this to hisreaders, Obata invites them to rub a ew pieces o paper together in a dark-ened room, producing their own spark o static electricity. Afer establish-ing this sa e, mundane essence o lightning, Obata declares atmosphericlightning to be the mutual stimulation o heaven and earth, the yin ereki o

one meeting the yang ereki o the other. Having reduced lightning rom divine punishment to a parlor trick, Obata produces a Kantian separation othis natural phenomenon rom politics and morality, assuring his readersthat all the lightning and thunder they see and hear acts according to itsown independent principles, with no relationship to their personal situa-tion. Obata lays out the mechanics that keep them at a sa e distance: be-cause the gap between the lightning ash and the thunderclap is the resulto the differing speeds o light and sound, i they can count to three or our between the ash and the clap, they may sa ely conclude the bolt strucksome 700800 ken away. In act, i you do not immediately hear the thun-der ollowing the ash, you have absolutely nothing to ear.

In contrast to its title, then,enpen chiis opening sentence makes clearthat Obatas project is to prove that the extraordinary workings o Heavenand Earth are, in act, quite ordinary. Only the alse wisdom o the past hasobscured this liberating insight. Te rst sentence o the Franklin chapterdenies the past any scientists (shikisha) whatsoever, making no allowance

or the wisdom some past sage (seijin) may have had. Each section oen- pen chii begins with a repetition o common wisdom linking natural phe-nomena to the gods, ollowed by a survey o Western scientic break-throughs that reveal natures true, earthly principles. And each sectionculminates in an assurance that, with the true workings known, there isnothing to ear. In Obatas text, previous knowledge o the workings o na-ture was not only awed but also caused people to ear the wrong things. Worse, peoples vague understandings o the underlying principles (ri) be-hind phenomena rendered their outdated knowledge useless or avoiding

uture disasters. For Obata, Franklins greatness is not his discovery thatlightning is electricity but his invention o the lightning rod. Franklin


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showed that the way to protect onesel rom lightning was not to hopeand pray to avoid it, but to attract it with a copper rod placed at the highestpoint o a building. (Te accompanying illustration in Obatas text shows achurchlike European structure with six rods, one on each gable.) People,not gods, would now have the power to make lightning go where they want. According to this new worldview, no longer would natural phenomena suchas earthquakes and comets oretell Heavens political dictates, as they had

rom the Mencius to the recent Ansei earthquake (1855). Obatas cometsexchanged their political roles or scientically predictable and stable or- bits with a periodicity wholly determined by themselves (mawari kuru jikoku wa mizukara kimari ari). In sharp contrast to the politically activenature o the 1850s and 1860s, the nature o the 1870s existed outside

politics.enpen chii appeared just months afer restorationists seized control othe court in Kyoto and issued the ve-point Charter Oath, point 4 o whichread, Evil practices o the past shall be broken off and everything basedupon the just laws o nature. Troughout the 1870s and 1880s, all inheritedthought was ruthlessly scrutinized and brought into agreement with a re-gime o knowledge known as civilization and enlightenment (bunmei-kaika). Civilization and enlightenment was an optimistic intellectual, so-cial, and political reorganization that sought to bring Japanese practice intoalignment with those just laws o nature most ofen dened as the West-ern, rational, scientic worldview. According to this new regime o knowl-edge, humans, armed with absolute scientic principles, stand outside theirenvironment and are able to manipulate a material nature operating accord-ing to knowable laws. In other words, human manipulation o nature basedon knowledge o true principles can remove the unpredictability, random-ness, and earsomeness rom nature itsel .

It is important to notice that the epistemological and physical separationo humans rom nature in Obatas text is also the construction o the individual, autonomous, modern Japanese subject. Te indifferent comets andlightning o enpen chii echo the equally disinterested Heaven o Meiji natu-ral rights theory (tenpu jinken), in which Heaven neither played avoritesnor chose anyone to be lord or master over another. Here we need look no

urther than Obatas Nakatsu colleague and ounder o Kei gijuku (enpenchiis publisher), Fukuzawa Yukichi, whose hugely in uentialGakumonno susume ( An Encouragement o Learning , 1873) opens with the amous

lines Heaven makes no person superior to another, nor does Heaven makeany person in erior to another. All are born o Heaven and, as such, all are


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alike. Under natural rights theory, the Meiji subject was a world untohim- or hersel , entering only consciously chosen, voluntary relations withthe outside world. Freely chosen contracts, either economic or social variet-ies, were the liberal model o interaction. Obatas separation o nature rompolitics was in no way a simple Japanese story. As we shall see in chapter 1,this separation o the individual rom nature and nature rom politics was,and is, undamental to the theory o the liberal subject, making a repolitici-zation o nature explored in this book a point o particular concern or lib-eral political theory. Indeed, in the European context, Marx had alreadynoted sarcastically how remarkable it was that Darwin rediscovered hisown bourgeois society at work in nature inTe Origin o Species. We couldsay something similar o Obata, who in investigating the extraordinary

workings o Heaven and Earth discovered sel -determining comets to bethe complement to natural rights theorys bourgeois social relations o dis-crete, equal individuals operating and interacting according to their owninner principles. enpen chiis radical attack on superstition and traditionmetaphorically, and as we shall see in some cases literally, cleared theground or a Meiji subject separated rom its surroundings.

o be sure, when the true principles o nature were themselves quitedangerous (as in the case o a comet striking the earth), Obata could notcompletely separate the Meiji subject rom nature. Nonetheless, in theseinstances he was still able to subdue the real powers o nature by resortingto rational calculation o the enormous odds that any individual subject would ever be so unlucky as to have nature intrude on his or her li e: Teuniverse is an enormous place; as or something as incredibly small as theearth moving through it, even though there are countless comets, thereshould be no ear that there would ever be a collision. It is like a ew leaves

oating on the enormous expanse o the ocean. Earthquakes and volcaniceruptions, too, are earsome and destructive, but the orces that mightdestroy any given town or village (ikka kuni wa ikka mura no nangi) are thesame orces that produced the land, mountains, and islands that orm the basis o human li e. When viewed rom this perspective, truly thinkingand eeling people (kokoro aru hito) cannot bear any grudge againstHeaven or these [localized tragedies]. In Obatas world, there really isnothing to ear. For in this new understanding o the human-nature rela-tionship, rational calculation proves power ul enough to erase even actual,lived disasters.

But by 1900, just thirty years afer Obata had banished them rom mod-ern experience, disasters once again seemed to be everywhere. Seemingly


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understood, accounted or, and controlled in the 1870s and 1880s, naturespower reasserted itsel in the 1890s, most spectacularly in the massiveamounts o copper, arsenic, mercury, and a host o other pollutants un-leashed into the Watarase and one watersheds by the Ashio Copper Mine. With Ashio, Japans rst experience with industrial-scale pollution, the cer-tainty, optimism, and ambition characteristic o the natural and social sci-ences during the rst two decades o Meiji began to alter and ail. Un ortu-nately or Obata, by 1900 it seemed the earth could indeed go mad.

In one o the rst responses to the emerging environmental crisis in 1890,Kawashima Isabur, writing in what would be the rst and last issue o the journal Ashio Mine Pollution , warned the residents o the Watarase and

one watersheds that the mine had undamentally changed their world and

that they could no longer rely on the natural laws that had sustained the li eo the valley or generations. Across the polluted regions, Obatas separa-tion o nature and politics was coming undone as rural liberals eared thatthe growing environmental crisis was eroding the political gains o the pop-ular rights and liberty movement o the 1870s and 1880s. By 1902, writing atthe height o the Ashio Incident, the ormer Progressive Party (Kaishint)member anaka Shz anticipated the current concept o ecocide andsignaled a breakthrough in environmental thought when he openly ex-pressed the ear that Japan was creating a second nature o oul rocks andpolluted soil that wholly penetrates the [river] water. . . . Once this processis complete, he warned, there will be no saving anyone. Later, resh rom battles in the Ashio Incident and the slaughter o World War I in Belgium,the anarchist Ishikawa Sanshir used the reciprocal relation o humans withtheir environment to ormulate a critique o industrial society and Darwin-ian natural selection, even developing a dispersed social ecology based onthe rhizome. Another anaka disciple, Kurosawa oriz, ear ul o the cor-ruption o the environment wrought by money and politics, ed to Hok-kaido in search o a social model that explicitly did not rely on [polluted]distant mountains and rivers. Convinced that only amily-operated dairy

arms could save Japan rom simultaneous ecological and social degrada-tion, he ounded Japans original green company, a producers cooperativethat became Snow Brand Dairy (Yukijirushi)until a 2003 merger Japanslargest dairy company. By the time postwar thinkers took up Minamata dis-ease (methylmercury poisoning), it seemed that no discussion o human

reedom was even possible without considering the environment. As all o

them asked in their different ways, Just how ree can one be in a toxic land-scape? Clearly something greater than a literary nostalgia or a lost agrarian


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past or an Orientalist environmental ethic was at work in the decades ol-lowing Japans rst experience with industrial pollution.

So what had changed? Put simply, in the 1890s nature became politicalagain. Afer Ashio, Japanese thinkers and activists came ace to ace with thereality o modern nature: that or the rst time in history, human practicehad the capacity to trans orm nature itsel into something antithetical tohuman health and reedom. Industrial-scale pollution showed how easily andofen nature permeated liberalisms supposedly autonomous, sel -contained,individual bodies, and the environmental degradation o the Watarase and

one watersheds showed how vulnerable nature was to modern humanpractice. By orce ully reasserting the mutual penetration o humans andnature, industrial pollution not only eroded Meiji ideologies o a nature in-

different to human practice, itbiologically and politically contaminated theautonomous liberal subject on which Meiji political philosophy was built.Te emergence o industrial pollution revealed that nature and society, which Meiji neo-Kantian ideology had considered to be two separate sys-tems, were in act a poorly understood, indeed ignored, totality. Put another way, Ashios pollutants mapped Japanese society in ways political philoso-phy had not yet grasped. As the growing links between the body, society,and nature were revealed in the 1890s, thinkers and activists rom PopularRights and Liberty leaders such as anaka Shz to socialists like KtokuShsui, and radical journalists like Matsumoto Eiko, realized that a signi-cant part o human health and reedom existed outside the individual subject. As the subject was penetrated by an increasingly toxic material natureleading to sickness, poverty, pain, and sometimes death, it became clear tomany that even i nature had lost its autonomy, it clearly had not lost itsagency. Te discovery in the 1890s o an inescapable ecological part o theabstract liberal subject set off a rantic search or a reintegration o theenvironment into Japanese social and political theory. In the ollowingdecades, Con ucian benevolence and moral economy, socialism, anar-chism, and even ascism were marshaled in the search or new theories oa modern political subject and or a social organization adequate to theenvironmental crisis. Tis book is about that search or what might becalled an environmental unconscious at the base o modern politicaland social thought; more specically, it is about Japans environmentalturn, a broad historical moment when Japanese thinkers and activists ex-perienced nature as alienated rom themselves and were orced to rebuild

the connections.


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The Politics of Permeable Bodies

o say that environmental politics emerged in Japan only afer 1900 is not tosay that pollution itsel was newit was not. Nor was pre-Meiji exploita-tion so small that there was no ecological damagethere was. Te Ashiomine itsel had been exploited since at least the late sixteenth century. In the Ashikaga and okugawa Eras, armers downstream rom Ashio, Kamioka,and other early modern mines requently drafed petitions complaining obad water (akusui) rom the mines that damaged their crops. Tere werealso many other peasant protests against other environmental problems, suchas those caused by the opening up o new areas to cultivation and numerouslarge okugawa River projects, including those on the one River supervised by the Con ucian scholar Kumazawa Banzan in the eighteenth century. Tere

were even petitions and protests against garbage and ood poisoning. Fur-ther, Conrad otman, Brett Walker, and David Howell have shown the signi-cant changes that took place in the early modern period in orestry, shing,and the ecology o okugawa trade with Ainu.

o say that an environmental politics emerged around 1900 is also not tosay that Japanese discovered that nature is nite, that its ertility may be exhausted. Tis had already been grasped by okugawa orestry. More broadly, it is also obviously true that humans have always and everywhere been altering their environment. o say that an environmental politicsemerged is to say that it was not until the development o industrial capital-isms terri ying nature-altering capacity that basic material practice becamean urgent political, even existential issue. Tis con uence o the ecologicaland the political in pollution, means much more than that the concept othe environment was discovered in its moment o crisis. It means the envi-ronment was discoveredas crisis.

What drove this urgency was only partly the scale o the problem. Inother words, the environmental problem in 1890s Japan was much morethan a case o bad water becoming really bad water. Such a quantitativeunderstanding o the problem might suggest a purely technological x. In-stead, the 1890s activists emergent understanding o the human body aspermeable to an increasingly polluted environment undermined the sel -contained, autonomous, individual subject o Meiji liberalism. Contrary toKurosawas hopes, it turns out that human health and reedom do rely ondistant mountains and rivers. And this realization required a much deeperand wider examination o the whole o nature- body-society interactions

and mutual penetrations. Under the early Meiji rationalist (neo-Kantian)


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model, nature was the study o act lef to the materialist methods o naturalscience, while history was the creation ovalue , especially as mani ested inmorality, politics, and culture. But nature could not ail to be deeply trans-

ormed in complex interplay o new power relations arising rom capitalistproduction and the making o the Meiji state, both o which created thematerial and ideological networks that allowed industrial pollution to con-taminate social, cultural, and political realms in unprecedented ways. Tepoverty, the disease, and the loss o suffrage due to tax relie or poisonedelds that seemed to ollow in pollutions wake reestablished nature as anactive orce in human history. With the environmental crisis, nature andhistory needed, once again, to become a totality. Built as it is on the neces-sity o the complete autonomy o the individual body, the liberal Meiji

subject and, because we inhabit the same political imaginary, our ownsubjectivity as wellis deeply vulnerable to anything that insists on an in- voluntary interaction. Te materiality o the air, ood, and water that mayhave been adulterated or even poisoned by negligence, accident, or politicslocated ar away and in some other time only to be later taken in to thehuman body is perhaps the most basic blind spot o liberal political philo-sophy. Tis vulnerability o the liberal subject was noticed by Marx in the

Manuscripts: [External] Nature is mans inorganic body, that is to sayin so ar as it is not the human body. Man lives rom nature, i.e. nature is his body, and he must maintain a continuing dialogue with it i he is not to die.

o say that mans physical and mental li e is linked to nature simply meansthat nature is linked to itsel , or man is part o nature. Estranged labour notonly . . . estranges nature rom man. [It also] estranges man rom himsel ,

rom his own active unction, rom his vital activity. As we shall see in chapter 1, the attempt by Meiji liberalism to completely

transcend nature led to the massive project o building physical and meta-phorical boundaries between the human body and the environment. Brett Walkers recent work on industrial disease in Japan,oxic Archipelago (2010),tracks the permeability o the human body to its environment and sub-sumes all o the incredibly complex interactions between Japanese bodiesand nature under the most notable and most personal concept o industrialproduction: pain. As such the Meiji project o separation was immediatelythreatened by the discovery o the porousness o the human body to out-side agents as the modern Japanese subjects ate, drank, and inhaled theirnew world. Building on Walkers work, I will show how the pain suffered by

the permeable bodies o nineteenth- and early twentieth-century pollution victims became the signal that the neo-Kantian separation o nature ( act)


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rom society (value) that underwrote the liberal model o bodies and theenvironment, however elegant, was missing something important.

Te par ticular political addition to the environmental problem I want toexplore in this book came with a realization by Japanese antipollution activ-ists that the nature o modern Japan was both alienatedand alienating . Bythis I mean that the original severing o the majority o the population romtheir means o subsistencetheir connection to the land was now com- bined with the new problem that nature had been so altered by industrialcapitalism that a simple reconnection with a now polluted nature was prob-lematic. In other words, Meiji Japanese had discovered that permeable human bodies are always already embedded in what Linda Nash called inescap-able ecologies. Being part o an inescapable ecology also meant that hu-

mans were not only thesubject o evolution but also itsobjects. As the radicalecologist Gregory Bateson put it,

Let us now consider what happens when you make the epistemologi-cal error o choosing the wrong unit [o the survival o the ttest]: you end up with the species versus the other species around it or versus the environment in which it operates. Man against nature. . . . When you narrow down your epistemology and act on the premiseWhat interests me, or my organization, or my species, you chop off

consideration o other loops o the loop structure. You decide that you want to get rid o the by-products o human li e and that LakeErie will be a good place to put them. You orget that the eco-mentalsystem called Lake Erie is part o your wider eco-mental system andthat i Lake Erie is driven insane, its insanity is incorporated in thelarger system o your thought and experience.

Batesons own pre erence or psychological eedback loops likely needs to be better grounded in the material relations and processes discovered bythe sciences. But the impulse is correct and important, and I will ollowsomething o this method.

While not specically concerned with environmental politics, JuliaTomass Recon guring Modernity (2000), on the ideologies o nature inmodern Japanese political philosophy, identied the 1890s and early 1900sas a key period or developing a political theory o the environment. Aferher examination o natural rights theory and social Darwinism in the 1870sand 1880s, Tomas reports a sudden lack o invocations o nature in Meiji

political documents beginning in the 1890s. I have already suggested thatthis is no coincidence, or it was precisely in the 1890s that nature, altered by


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human practice, began behaving in strange and unprecedented ways. Na-tures loss o normative status in the 1890s is there ore the key point ocontact between Walkers bodies in pain and Tomass history o modern Japanese political philosophy. In what ollows I will combine environ-mental history with political philosophies o the subject in order to explorethe extremely rich and still urgent search or a orm o political subjectivityand social organization adequate to the environmental crisis o capitalistmodernity.

What anaka Shz and his ollowers realized was that because o hu-mans new relation to nature, not all contact with material nature could be seen as benecial. Any contact must be care ully chosen and organized. What Nash, Tomas, and Walkers work shows denitively is that nature is

never transcended, only reconceptualized. So what sort o conception onature can be the basis o a new politics adequate to the environmental cri-sis? Tis is the question the thinkers examined in this book have asked. Andtheir question remains our question. While the thinkers examined here haddiverse understandings o the cause and solution to the problem o an alien-ated and alienating nature, they are united not only by a connection to thecrisis o the 1890s, but also by a belie that when attempting to reintegratenature into a theory o human health and reedom, it was the specic prac-tices o nature that mattered. For these thinkers, an external nature outsidepolitics simply didnt exist anymore.

Throughline and Structure

One trend in environmental history, a way to talk about the nature-societymetabolism historically, is to periodize based on different modalities o thatrelationship. InHumanity and Nature: Ecology, Science and Society (1992), Yrj Haila and Richard Levins use the concept o eco-historical periods toexplain the complex, changing specicity o the human coevolutionary rela-tion to nature. Beginning in the 1980s withTe Green Archipelago , Conrad

otman has increasingly made the human-nature relationship the basis ohis periodization o Japanese history. Echoing Haila and Levins, his A His-tory o Japan (2000) and Pre- Industrial Korea and Japan in Environmental Perspective (2004) takes the nature-society metabolism as a method o peri-odization. So i we were to ollow these examples and look at Japans mod-ern trans ormation afer the all o samurai rule in 1868 rom the perspective

o humans relationship to nature in the 1870s and 1880s, we would see thatthe dominant way thinkers and policy experts described that relationship


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specic historicity o the environmental crisis that I am afer. For with-out a strong historical analysis and historical sense, the environmentalcrisis is too ofen universalized, leading either to the atalism that it hasalways been thus and there ore nothing can be done or, just as unhelp-

ully, to the conclusion that what is needed is a return to a premodern oreven prehistoric hunter-gatherer society seen in much recent radicalecology.

Still I believe there are connections with and , especially in work such as Michelle Murphys Marx-inspired readings o technology. AsI will develop throughout the book and argue explicitly in the conclusion,I believe that Marxs concepts o subsumption (both ormal and real) olabor and nature under capital accumulation provides one o the best theo-

retical apparatuses or unpacking the current problemthat industrial cap-italist production represents a specic social technology with immense im-plications or understanding the environmental crisis. Troughout the text,and more theoretically in the conclusion, capitals, or capitalisms, attemptto render both human labor and the environment as a wholly abstract baseo innite accumulation not only makes it hugely interventionist into bod-ies and nature, but also dooms it to ail precisely because o the inescapabil-ity o both the materiality o the laboring body and the nite environmentthat are the necessary base o its expansion. Like Obatas depoliticized na-ture, a nature subsumed under capitalist production, too, is one that mayhave lost its autonomy but, given the inescapable ecologies o li e itsel , cannever lose its agency. Tus to say that an environmental politics emerged in Japan only afer 1900 is to say that the environment cannot become the basis o a new politics until it has rst been discovered which is to saythat it must be experienced as a discrete object, or, ollowing Lukcssthoughts on labor in capitalist society, it must rst be alienated and reied. Te commodication o human labor-power achieves this or Lukcs. In Japan I argue something similar happened to the environment in the 1890s with the irruption o modern pollution at the Ashio Copper Mine. What was new in the 1890s was not only the sudden realization that humans werealienated rom naturesomething that was grasped by political econo-mists in the destruction o traditional usu ruct (iriaiken) and the establish-ment o absolute property rights and the land tax re orm in 1873. New wasthe realization that with the emergence o a second [toxic] nature, natureis not only alienated, but also alienatingthereby highlighting its role in

human health and reedom. In many ways this book is an exploration oenvironmental theorys insistence that, in the words o David Harvey, all


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social choices are at the same time environmental choices, and vice versa. Starting rom the initial moment o realization in the Ashio crisis, this bookis about detecting the ofen veiled environmental basis o modern Japansseemingly abstract social, cultural, and political ideologies.

A urther benet o the Marxian approach to the emergence o environ-mental politics is that it suggests ways o grounding the amous culturalist(and Orientalist) discourse o Japanese cultures special relationship to na-ture. By ocusing on the subsumption o nature and labor in the specicrelations o capitalist production, the Marxian approach possesses tremen-dous theoretical and analytical resources or exploring the implication othe simultaneous deployment o multiple temporalities. It thus has the po-tential to undo the absolute opposition o premodern nature and modern

industry that is the culturalist theorys very condition o possibility. Afer Ashio, nature was never more ideological than when it was being invoked asoutside history, capable o serving as a norm or society. At the same time,my approach points the way to integrating Japans environmental turn intoa global history o modernity. Wherever capitalism has been establishedacross the globe, the separation rom nature in the creation o the liberalsubject veiled that inherently ecological side o human existence. But in Japan, because there was a readily available tradition o nature as an ethicalnorm neo- Con ucianism, nativist studies (kokugaku) the post- Ashiodiscovery o the interconnections between the human and the environmentmeant that any reconnection, though taking place across the industrialized world,could appear to be an especiallycultural move. Tis is to say, in giving anaccounto the culturalist turn toward nature as outside capitalism, a Marxianattention to simultaneous temporalities can also account or this move.

In other words, cultural nationalists (and contemporary radical ecolo-gists) grasped modern natures inability to adjudicate human social andpolitical disputes both capitalisms contradictions and the negotiationsand compromises o political liberalism only to re-rei y it by once againseparating it rom those struggles in a return to an imagined stability opremodern nature. Unlike the attempt o the Meiji theory o civilizationand enlightenment to separate human culture rom a dangerous nature,later theories o the human-nature metabolism, rom aish vitalism (sei-meishugi) to agrarian undamentalism (nhonshugi), ollowed the reversecourse, identi ying nature as a separate realm where the parasitic effects ocities, money, and class war did not obtain.

Chapters 1 and 2 explore the relationship o the Meiji liberal subject to thematerial environment, rom the early attempt by Meiji liberals to separate


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the two to the growing diffi culty in maintaining that separation in boththought and practice during periods o industrial pollution. In chapter 1 Iexplore the establishment o the autonomous individual as the unit o poli-tics based largely on a neo-Kantian division o act and value, or science andpolitics. But with the emergence o toxic ows that repeatedly penetratedthis body, the separation o nature and politics that had been essential orthe civilization and enlightenment attack on superstition became a weakpoint o Meiji liberalism, because liberalism had also removed the modernpolitical subject rom the space it occupied. As the chapter moves romthe 187080 invention o the autonomous individual subject to the growingleaks between this subject and the material exterior, the autonomy o theindividual became harder and harder to maintain. Te rst signicant attempt

to deal with the new toxic threat came romwithin Meiji liberalism. As Ashiotoxins revealed hidden connections between people, places, and things, lib-erals would try to augment the autonomous subject with voluntary associa-tions between individuals in an effort to grasp the social-level problem oindustrial pollution, but without discarding the hard- won popular rights.Te chapter ends with perhaps the most important investigation o the pollu-tion problem works by the journalist Matsumoto Eiko. Her 19012 exposon the ravages o pollution in Gumma, ochigi, and Ibaraki was a key momentin the abandonment o the liberal model o the subject on the cusp o Japansenvironmental turn.

Chapter 2 includes a major reconsideration o Japans amous rstconservationist, anaka Shz (18411913), especially the invocation o theseventeenth-century peasant martyr Sakura Sgo in anakas appeal to theemperor in 1901. Chapter 2 sees anaka not as Japans lost agrarian con-sciousness, but as a dedicated Meiji liberal whose environmental thoughtonly developedafer the exhaustion o Meiji political philosophy in the Ashio Incident. Tis reconsideration o anaka is necessary because theiconic narrative o anaka as a residual peasant martyr is not only inaccu-rate (he was deeply involved in liberal and utilitarian politics or decades), but the peasant narrative also reconstitutes the ideological continuance opremodern agrarian consciousness in modern Japan at the level o biogra-phy. I argue that what is actually going on beneath the seeming continuityo anakas use o peasant imagery and tactics is a major rupture betweenpreindustrial and industrial society. o do so, I ocus on Meiji liberals ex-tremely interesting and extensive use o Sakura Sgo as a model o amodern

Japanese subject. Nonetheless, as the initial optimism that the ideology andtactics o liberalism could be applied to the pollution problem waned, and


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as the early trouble in the Watarase River turned into the social problem,the uses and connotations o Sakura also morphed into a contradictoryimage o ree individual subjects who nonetheless had need o Con ucian benevolence rom their government. In an extended examination o anakaand Ktokus dramatic appeal to the Meiji emperor ( jikiso) in 1901, I arguethat this contradiction was pushed to its limits and nally brokea movethat I argue signaled anaka and Japans environmental turn.

Chapter 3 takes up anakas post- jikiso lament: I have nally awakenedto the olly o appealing to this government. Tere is nothing lef but to ap-peal to Heaven (ten , nature) itsel . From 1902 on, anaka threw himsel intoan investigation o the multiple interactions between humans and naturethrough what he called river pilgrimages. It was on these pilgrimages that

he developed his theory o the real powers o the land and water (chi noikioi, mizu no ikioi), which cannot be transcended, only managed. Te realpowers o the land and water acknowledge the existence o a material natureexternal to humanity that is nonetheless still implicated in human practice by the concept o ows or material exchanges, a metabolism o humansand nature, building rom these exchanges to a monistic ecological philoso-phy o (benecial) ow (nagare) and (harm ul) poison (doku). From here,I argue, anaka made a key breakthrough in environmental thought whenhe argued that humans could neither transcend nature nor completely con-trol it. Worse, attempts to do so would result in the ormation o a second,toxic nature o doku, a system o matter in motion that, like a cancer co-optsthe bodys own capacity or growth but now distorts it, leading to an accu-mulation o death instead o li e. anakas move to Yanaka in 1904 was anattempt to thwart the Meiji states plans to reengineer the Kanto plain accord-ing to its (in anakas view) alse belie that the environmental problem wassolvable through engineering. Instead anaka developed a socioecology hecalledYanakagaku , which he believed pointed the way to a true civilizationo material ows that ostered human health and reedom.

Modernization theorists and many others have located anakas li e and work within a period o transition rom traditional to modernan excitingtime, to be sure, but one that has largely passed and has resolved into ourstill diffi cult, but largely stable, relationship between civil society, politics,and nature. O course, the idea that the environmental crisis was caused byincomplete modernity is pure antasy; I write this introduction on the onehundredth anniversary o anakas death and during the continuing crisis

in Fukushima. As I will show throughout this book, both Meiji Japansenvironmental crisis and our own are located precisely in the ully modern


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categories o the subsumption o nature in industrial capitalist production.Tus, thinking in terms o subsumption not only allows a criticism o bothMeiji rationalism and Japans special relationship to nature: it also, in a naladvantage o a Marxian analysis o the environmental crisis, will allow us toacknowledge and account or the environmental practices and damage oactually existing socialist regimes rom Stalin to Mao.

Nearly all works in English and Japanese depict anaka as a lonely cru-sader whose ate it was to be ignored. In chapters 4 and 5 I argue that thispremise is simply untenable. anaka may have been one o the most spec-tacular and celebrated antipollution thinkers, but he did not invent the environmental crisis, and as everyone would agree, the crisis did not end withhim. O course, many others took up the complicated and urgent question

o the nature-individual-society relationship afer anakas death in 1913.In the last two chapters I ocus on two thinkers, the anarchist IshikawaSanshir and the ounder o Snow Brand Dairy, Kurosawa oriz, both o whom had deep, direct contact with Ashio and anaka. Nonetheless, in ex-ploring the ways these two took up the challenge afer anaka, we glimpsemany other attempts, rom Second International socialists to aish li ephilosophers (seimeishugisha) such as Mushakji Saneatsu or the members o the Shirakaba group to ascists like achibana Kzabur and GondoSeiky, who were also working out their own theories o the problem o bodies, subjectivities, and social organization under industrial capitalism.In this way, I try hard to avoid the ate o popular history (minshshi) andsome womens history in becoming merely one more voice heard rom,adding to a amiliar national narrative. Instead I try to show environmentalhistorys potential or a larger political and cultural critique. Ishikawas at-tempt to inject ecological concerns into socialism led him to develop anextremely interesting social ecology o liberation o all living things (onethat is very close to Murray Bookchins Social Ecology). It also allowed himthe intellectual space to launch an illuminating critique o the agrarian un-damentalism o the divine soil o Japan (nhonshugi) during the 1930s and1940s.

Likewise, Kurosawa orizs attempt to nd a mode o production andpolitical economy that would ollow and not ght natures cycles led him todevelop what I call the original green company. Tough beset by theoreticaland political problems that brought it close to the wartime state and parti-cipation in the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, Kurosawas grasp o

the problem as located in production, what Marx called the real relation oman to nature, meant his urgent problematic survived the war. Even here, it


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is the soundness o Kurosawas initial diagnosis o the problem o relyingon distant mountains and rivers that allows us to see the deep continuities between Snow Brands collaboration in the 1940s and the recent taintedmilk and bee scandals o 20023, while still giving credit to its penetratinginsight.

By the end o chapter 5, I argue that the real problem that began with Ashio is revealed to have been the real subsumption o nature under capitalor that, in the need to accumulate units o surplus value, capital is drivento remake a nature that is more conducive to uture accumulation, withoutregard to any other possible valuations or temporalities, whether biological,ecological, political, or even ethical. In the conclusion I explore the implica-tions o this argument or the relationship between ecology and capitalism

and look or possible beginnings o a uture theory o the subject and anenvironmental politics adequate to our own global environmental crisis.


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1. Tis chapter covers such phenomena as swamp gas, phosphorescent light, andoxre, phenomena that produce the appearance o a ame in the absence o heat. See

Obata okujir, enpen chii.2. One ken equals 1.99 yards.3. Obata, enpen chii, 3638.4. Tis turn toward certainty ollowing a period o chaos is also the basis o Stephen

oulmins explanation or the eclipse o Renaissance humanism and rise o Cartesianrationalism afer the Tirty- Years War. See oulmin,Cosmopolis.

5. Tomas, Recon guring Modernity , 62. Te just laws o nature have also beentranslated as according to international usage: see anaka, New imes in Modern Japan , 9.

6. Tis line o thinking applies to even the most nature as subject theorists o Meijiliberalism, such as Ueki Emori. While in Uekis thought nature grants humans withrights (tenpu jinken), those rights are explained as objective and indifferent to human values or abilities: Te rights o nature (ten) are possessed by everyone . . . whetherrich or poor, strong or weak, all men are the same under heaven. Ueki Emori, quotedin Reitan, Ethics and Natural Rights Teory, 12.

7. It is remarkable how Darwin rediscovers, among the beasts and plants, thesociety o England with its division o labour, competition, opening up o new markets,inventions and Malthusian struggle or existence. See Marx and Engels, Karl Marx,Frederick Engels: Collected Works , 41:380.

8. Obata, enpen chii, 40.9. Te protagonist in Obatas example rom Vesuvius does not survive.10. Obatas theory o earthquakes was the then current belie that they were the

result o sur ace water trickling down through cracks in the earths sur ace andcoming into contact with a hot core, at which point the resulting steam, havingnowhere to go, shook the earth. When the steam was able to make it to the sur ace,the result was a volcanic eruption, meaning that earthquakes and volcanoes aremerely different expressions o the same principle. Tis steam theory o earthquakes


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also implied that earthquakes were as predictable as volcanic eruptions. Tis theoryo earthquakes was taught by, among many others, John Milne, pro essor o geologyand mining at Imperial College in okyo, and it also appeared in an article by sudaMamichi in the Meiroku zasshi. anaka, New imes in Modern Japan , 4548. See also

suda in Braisted, Meiroku zasshi , 21920.11. Obata, enpen chii, 39.12. Te journal was immediately banned. Kawashima had already predicted this

move in the journals last pages, which called on others to take up the ght.13. ochigikenshi hensan iinkai,ochigikenshi shiryhen kingendai , 461.14. For anakas quote seeanaka Shz sensh(7 vols., 1989), 4:13738. For ecocide

see Davis, Ecocide in Marlboro Country, in Dead Cities , 3363.15. Kurosawa,Rakun gakuen no rekishi to shimei , 89.16. Murakami, Ashio dzanshi.

17. But even when these petitions called or the closing o the mine during sensitiveperiods o the agricultural cycle, this question o personal reedom was not part otheir political economy or their political rhetoric. See And, Kinsei kgaishi no kenky.For other projects see Sippel, Chisui; Shimoda, Bad Sushi or Bad Merchant?; Kelly,Water Control in okugawa Japan; McCormack, Modernity, Water, and the Environ-ment in Japan.

18. otman,Te Green Archipelago; Walker,Te Conquest o Ainu Lands; Howell,Geographies o Identity in Nineteenth-Century Japan. See also Marcon,Te Knowledge o Nature and the Nature o Knowledge in Early Modern Japan.

19. otman,Te Green Archipelago.20. Meiji voting rights were dependent on paying above a certain threshold o

national taxes, meaning that when pollution relie took the orm o tax relie , victimsofen ell below the suffrage threshold and lost their voting rights.

21. Indeed, John Stuart Mills amousOn Liberty (1859) begins to waver on thequestion o whether or not the individual be allowed the reedom to buy poison.

22. Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844), in Karl Marx: Early Writings , 328. More recently, John Bellamy Foster has brilliantly excavated the works o Marx to illuminate Marxs ecological thinking. Foster argues that Marxs writings show his awareness o capitalism as a new epoch in the human relation tonature. Historical epochs may be grasped by di erent modes o what Marx callsthe nature-society metabolism, or the material exchange (Stoffwechsel) betweenhumans and nature, mediated by the mode o production. Capitalism there ore hasits own particular orm o this nature-society metabolism. Under Marxs under-standing, the separation o city and country is marked by a plundering o thecountrysides ertility by exporting, and not returning, the produce o the soil tothe great industrial city centers. Te result, says Marx, is a metabolic rif ocapitalism that undamentally alters the nature-society exchange. Foster, Marxs Ecology.

23. Walker, oxic Archipelago.


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24. Quoted in Guattari,Te Tree Ecologies , 76n1.25. Tomas,Recon guring Modernity , 159.26. Foster, Marxs Ecology , 252.27. otman, A History o Japan; otman, Pre- Industrial Korea and Japan in Environ-

mental Perspective.28. Latour,Te Pasteurization o France.29. See, or example, Manning, Against the Grain.30. Murphy,Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem o Uncertainty.31. See Formal and Real Subsumption o Labour under Capital, ransitional

Forms, in Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works , 34:93121, and Results othe Immediate Process o Production, inCapital , 1:101938. Formal subsumption isthe process in which existing social, cultural, and economic orms are largely lefintact but their produced surpluses are captured by capital accumulation processes.Real subsumption is the re exive moment when the demands o capital accumula-tion re ect back into the social, cultural, and economic processes reorganizing them

rom the beginning into orms more conducive to accumulation. Te example givenin Capital is the difference between the ormal subsumption o handicraf work versus the real subsumption o the emergence o large-scale machinery and the

actory orm. Both orms may be simultaneously present, though Marx notes thatreal subsumption presupposes the existence o ormal, whereas ormal does notrequire real. In Marxian theory, each orm roughly has its own orm o surplus value, where ormal produces absolute surplus value, and real produces relative surplus value.

32. Lukcs,History and Class Consciousness.33. Tere is an enormous literature on this subject. See, or example, surumaki,

Kindaika to dentteki minsh sekai.34. Harvey, Justice, Nature, and the Geography o Difference.35. Further, as will be made more explicit in the conclusion, a ocus on the value

orm and capital accumulation provides or a critique o actually existing socialistpractices rom within a Marxian analysis by ocusing on the particular aspects ocapitalist production that remained even within these sel -pro essed socialistregimes. For a study o how the assumed differences between capitalist and socialistsystems do not appear in the relation to industrialization and nature, see Josephson, Industrialized Nature. Tere is also a large, i largely unknown, literature on thissubject. See or example Marcuse,Soviet Marxism , and Postone, ime, Labor, andSocial Domination. Tere is also, o course, Stalins own claim, in Economic Problemso Socialism in the USSR (1952), that the value orm did not apply to the SovietUnion. For a critique o those elements o capital accumulation that remained withinStalins vision see Mao, A Critique o Soviet Economics. And or a urther critique ohow Maos own system also ailed to rid itsel o basic capital accumulation strategiesand orms see Meisner, Maos China and Afer , and Shapiro, Maos War against

Nature.

Bad Water by Robert Stolz

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