Manuscript:
Bad Water: A Cultural History of Industrial
Pollution in Japan
This project connects the social to the environmental through an investigation
of Japan’s experience with industrial pollution in the late-nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries. Using scientific, philosophical, literary,
and historical texts, I examine what I call Japan’s “environmental
turn” in thought and politics after 1900. The pollution of the
late nineteenth century threatened the newly-won political freedoms during
the Popular Rights and Liberty Movement of the 1870-80s. The realization
that the environment was a necessary category of social thought undermined
the self-contained, autonomous individual of classic and Meiji Utilitarianism.
After 1900, for many thinkers, the search for new forms of social organization
started with an investigation of nature. I argue that it was the emergence
of industrial pollution that led to the reconceptualizing of nature as
an alienated material environment that, for the first time, could then
become the basis of a politics. Differing conceptions of this alienated
nature underwrote the intense political, social, and cultural struggles
of modern Japanese history, from flood-control politics, eminent domain,
political ecology, literary expression, to Taisho-era (1912-26) “vitalism” (seimeishughi),
a way of thought close to Deep Ecology. By paying attention to this history,
this project recaptures and links it to conceptualizations of post-war
pollution and high-growth economics as a way to reorganize modern Japanese
history. |