Historians often observe that post-Meiji forces shaped the direction of Japanese empire, and for the most part this assertion is correct. Meiji policy-makers learned, through encounters like the ‘black ships’ and through international agreements like the ‘unequal treaties’, that empire building was an integral part of Western modernity, particularly the fostering of economic strength. Empire was a characteristic the Great Powers all shared and if Japan were to ever join their ranks, the island nation needed to construct an empire of its own. To be sure, this lesson was not entirely a new one for Japanese policy-makers. Japan had undertaken earlier colonial experiments, ones not necessarily forged in the crucible of encounters with the West, but rather ones born from encounters with Okinawans to the south and Ainu to the north. Satsuma domain had conquered the Ryukyu Kingdom (Okinawa) in 1609, turning the archipelago into a kind of protectorate. To the north, Tokugawa officials had justified the slow and incremental colonizing of southern Hokkaido not with the language of international agreements and global commerce, but with the language of Confucian customs and, more importantly, the necessity of trade. Eventually, the entanglement of early modern and modern forces provided the justification for Japanese expansion onto the continent and the creation of the ‘Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere’, where Japan’s imperial interests would clash with those of the US and its European allies.

The Tokugawa Peace endured for well over two centuries. Early on, however, cracks began to disfigure the edifice of Tokugawa rule. Over time, these cracks expanded and branched out into a complex web of problems that toppled the Edo bakufu in the mid-nineteenth century, ending centuries of samurai rule in Japan. Some of these problems were domestic in nature and included peasant uprisings, disparities between merchant wealth and samurai poverty, bizarre examples of urban millenarianism, and ideological challenges calling for a return to imperial rule. These domestic problems were compounded by external ones, which included Russian encroachment in the North Pacific and the arrival of US Commodore Matthew C. Perry (1794–1858) and his smoke-belching ‘black ships’ in 1853. Together, these domestic and international forces overburdened the Edo bakufu and it collapsed in 1868 in a relatively brief conflict called the Boshin War (1868–9).

Cracks in Tokugawa Legitimacy

Some 2,809 different instances of peasant rebellion occurred during the early modern period, in forms ranging from ‘direct petition’ and violent ‘collective action’ to ‘smash and break’ and ‘world renewal’. Though most peasant rebellions occurred for reasons more economic than political – that is, they sought to smash the houses of local wealthy merchants or peasants who had profited from the vibrant cash-crop economy – some rebellions proved politically subversive and carried aspirations of regime change. An implicit ‘moral economy’ existed in the Neo-Confucian orthodoxy of the early modern years, assuring that ‘honourable peasants’ were treated fairly by ‘benevolent lords’. When domain lords squeezed peasants too hard, as Sakura Sôgorô (d. 1653) and others in Narita experienced in the seventeenth century, they directly petitioned domain lords and, in the case of Sôgorô, even the shogun, to alleviate some of the economic hardships in their villages. They believed they were entitled to live. ‘In fear and trembling we respectfully present our statement in writing’, explained the petition that Sôgorô delivered in dramatic form to the shogun in Edo.

Japan’s environment proved much more than simply a sculptor of Japanese civilization, where wind and rain painstakingly chiselled, over the centuries, the intricate contours of Japanese life. Rather, the environment was a product of Japanese civilization. Early inhabitants of the Japanese Islands, from the Yayoi archaeological phase (300 bce – 300 ce) onward, carved, sliced, burned, and hoed their subsistence needs and cultural sensibilities into the alluvial plains, forests, mountainous spine, and bays of the archipelago, transforming it, like some colossal bonsai tree, into a material manifestation of their needs and desires. This is the most profound disjuncture between the Jômon archaeological phase (14,500 bce – 300 bce) and the Yayoi: the introduction of East Asian culture and its transformative effect on the archipelago. This chapter explores the emergence of the earliest Japanese state, and how state development was intimately connected to environmental transformation.

Early Foragers and Settlers

The Pleistocene Epoch, about 2.6 million to 11,700 years before present (ybp), witnessed the first wave of early hominid, non-human animal, and incidental plant migrations across Eurasia and onto the Japanese archipelago. Japan was not an archipelago at the time, however. Rather, it was connected to the continent at both the southern and northern sections by coastal lowlands that formed a terrestrial crescent with the Sea of Japan serving as what must have been an impressive inland sea. Whether modern hominids came from Africa and displaced earlier hominids, or the earlier arrivals evolved into modern hominids, is still debated, but by 100,000 ybp many palaeolithic foragers roamed Eurasia, and some of them wandered onto this terrestrial crescent in pursuit of game and other foraging opportunities. The 1931 discovery of a left pelvic bone first suggested palaeolithic habitation of the terrestrial crescent, but air raids destroyed the bone during the Pacific War (1937–45) and the bone’s discoverer was only vindicated with the later unearthing of other palaeolithic remains throughout Japan.

With the emergence of the Yamato state and the advent of its imperial line, Japan entered the Nara (710–94) and Heian periods (794–1185). The fledgling imperial regime’s history shares much in common with other nascent monarchies around the world: frontier war and conquest, implementation of judicial and administrative bureaucracies, capital planning, elite monopolization of surplus, and the flowering of a rarefied court culture. In Japan, this courtly age served as the domain of the fictional Prince Genji, a literary creation of writer Murasaki Shikibu (c.978–1014). A fictional master of his artful age, Prince Genji writes exquisitely learned poetry, romances such tragic beauties as Yûgao (Evening Face), croons with acquaintances about singing warblers and chirping insects, and moves through the social intricacies of the Heian court with dexterous grace. His mood is perennially sensitive and melancholic, always touched by the sadness of this fleeting world: a Buddhist aesthetic inspired by the transience of things. Importantly, the natural aesthetic of the Heian period, particularly as preserved in poetry, shaped enduring Japanese attitudes towards the natural world.

The development of Japan’s courtly age began with the Nara court’s conquest of the Emishi, a tribe of hunter-gatherers in the northeastern section of the archipelago, people largely removed from the Chinese-inspired changes that had swept Japan since the fourth century. They are best described as Jômon remnants: people who stood outside the ritsuryô (penal and administrative) codes that incrementally defined life in Japan’s core provinces by the seventh century. The Nara court constructed an elaborate Buddhist theocracy and Chinese-style administrative bureaucracy, which it relied upon for managing the affairs of state. The Heavenly Sovereigns, following their earlier Yamato trajectory, developed into chief priests and imperial ‘living gods’, who shared, at least in the pages of the Kojiki (Record of ancient matters, 712), divine ancestors with the Sun Goddess. The Kojiki brushes over genealogical discontinuities among Japan’s emperors, which was its principal purpose in narrating the land’s creation myth. Other eighth-century sources, such as the Nihon shoki (Chronicles of Japan, 720), resemble Chinese dynastic histories, drafting a record of events from the advent of the Yamato emperors forward. Dynastic genealogies proved important because they, along with the ritsuryô codes, cemented and legitimized political power. By the end of the eighth century, Heian culture had become an amalgam of elements from Buddhist theocracy and ritsuryô governance.

In the late fifteenth century, a handful of small European states began to refashion the world. Prior to that time, most of the world’s wealth had been located in Asia, the Middle East, and the Indian subcontinent, where traditional trade networks in luxury items, from spices to slaves, enriched the sultans and emperors of the grand Asiatic empires. With two striking maritime voyages, however, Europe entered the age of discovery and, eventually, the age of colonialism. These voyages explain how Europeans ascended to a position of global domination through command of resources such as silver and sugar, and exchange of such micro-organisms as the smallpox virus. Between the fifteenth and the nineteenth centuries, once-great empires and civilizations crumbled under the pressure of Eurasian microbes, military technologies, colonial rule, and economic rapaciousness. The early modern age witnessed the dispersal of European culture and institutions globally, including to the shores of Japan. Japan survived Europe’s age of discovery, however, and did so completely intact, at least compared to the New World, India, and China, for reasons that will be described in this chapter. Importantly, Japan’s initial encounter with Europe in the sixteenth century contributed to its relative successes against later Western imperialism in the nineteenth.

Early modern Japan, or the period between 1600 and 1868, witnessed the birth of many of Japan’s most enduring cultural and political attributes, as well as the expansion of its basic geographic boundaries. For our purposes, the characterization of this period as ‘early modern’ is important because it bridges the historical chasm that usually separates the ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ realms of Japan’s historical development. Once the three unifiers had completed the military and political labours of uniting the realm, Japan developed in a manner that propelled it into the modern age.

Japan’s mid-nineteenth-century entry into the modern period was not exclusively the result of its adoption of Western civilization after the Meiji Restoration of 1868, but also the result of forces pushing from within. These forces caused indigenous changes, such as early forms of capitalism, increasing political centralization, development of science and technology, and the gradual emergence of early nationalism. These developments conspired with the importation of Western institutions and cultures to make Japan a rising Asian power in the late nineteenth century. The implications of identifying an early modern period in Japan are profound. They suggest commonalities in human histories, ones that transcend striking cultural variations. That is, as different from Europeans as Japanese had become over the centuries, with their blackened teeth and chonmage (shaven pate) hairstyles, they also developed in a manner that paralleled societies around the globe.

Japan emerged from the Pacific War in tatters, but the small island country, showing Meiji-era resolve and with US support, quickly began rebuilding. By the 1950s, Japan had entered the era of ‘high speed growth’ and washing machines, refrigerators, and televisions, the ‘three sacred jewels’ of post-war consumerism, started to inhabit most Japanese homes, or at least most consumer imaginations, brightening once-glum lives. Government agencies, working in tandem with corporations and labour, and sheltered by the US security umbrella, orchestrated the economic recovery that birthed such global powerhouses as Toyota Motor Corporation and Sony. Politically, the conservative Liberal Democratic Party dominated the Diet for decades. It revised US occupation reforms and later pushed for constitutional changes, as well as further privatization of the economy. But as Japan entered the 1970s, environmental pollution tainted its celebrated economic success. Although the ‘big four’ pollution cases of Niigata and Minamata methyl-mercury poisoning, Yokkaichi asthma, and cadmium poisoning in Toyama stole most national and international headlines, smaller, equally devastating pollution problems occurred wherever industrial development went unchecked. In the name of the post-war economic recovery, which preoccupied Japanese politics for decades, the nation appeared willing to poison its most vulnerable people and environments.

If Japan’s manufactured exports, ranging from the Toyota Corona to the Sony Walkman, characterized the decades after the Pacific War, pop culture exports have characterized recent decades. Whether in the urban exploits of Godzilla or the animated films of Miyazaki Hayao (b. 1941), Japan’s cultural production reflects many Japanese anxieties about nuclear warfare and industrial pollution. But Japan has emerged as a major exporter of culture. Today, the island nation is as much celebrated for its graphic novels as it is for the ‘sacred war’ it fought against the US and its staggeringly successful post-war economy.

In the nineteenth century, when Meiji reformers set in motion Japan’s rapid industrialization, they recognized only its obvious economic and military benefits, ones ruthlessly demonstrated by Western imperialism. Since then, Japan has become part of a community of wealthy nations who have, through the burning of fossil fuels, slowly undermined the relatively stable climate that has insulated human civilizations. Since the Meiji transition to non-renewable energy, Japan has become a major global contributor to climate change, with carbon dioxide equivalents, or greenhouse gases, at 1,390 megatons in 2005, more than Germany or the UK. One consequence of Earth’s changing climate is sea level rise, which poses serious challenges to many island nations in the Pacific, including Japan. The link between Japan’s nineteenth-century industrialization and the reality of rising oceans is unequivocal and has placed Japan on a precarious historical precipice. For all the benefits of nineteenth-century ‘civilization and enlightenment’, and the economic growth they offered, within a handful of generations it has come to threaten Japan at a fundamental level. Japan’s climate, topography, and biodiversity are in the thrall of dramatic changes, and therefore so is the nation that this physical environment supports. As one historian has observed, the ‘discipline of history exists on the assumption that our past, present, and future are connected by a certain continuity of human experience’, but climate change threatens those continuities. In the case of Japan, climate change has underwritten a tumultuous half-century, in which natural forces, from seismic events to Pacific super storms, interface with unnatural ones, such as coastal settlement patterns and land reclamation, to set the tone for Japan’s twenty-first century prospects.

By the early twentieth century, Meiji reforms had refashioned the island country. Japan’s early modern experience, combined with the global trends of the nineteenth century, proved powerful enough to remake Japan into a burgeoning modern nation, transforming politics, society, and culture, along with the environment and many of the non-human organisms that lived on the archipelago. Both people and the natural world became artefacts of modern and industrial life. With bobbed-hair ‘modern girls’ and urban dandies sporting the newest Western attire, Japan came to share more in common with the modern industrial nations of Europe than it did with its former pre-Meiji self or its immediate neighbours. In this respect, Meiji reforms had reconfigured and rescripted virtually every aspect of the Japanese landscape and life, but often at great social and environmental cost. The Meiji period had a dark underbelly, one characterized by human hardship and early signs of the environmental problems invited by unbridled industrialization and the reliance on fossil fuels.

Changes in the Countryside

Meiji reforms weighed heavily on Japan’s new commoners, particularly those living in the countryside. By the mid-Meiji period, farmers in Japan cultivated about 11 per cent of the total land available in Japan, or approximately 4 million hectares (nearly 10 million acres), and that later rose to nearly 16 per cent, or close to 6 million hectares (nearly 15 million acres) in 1919. This contrasts with more contemporary practices: in the post-Pacific War years, Japan witnessed a precipitous decline in the number of farmers and farmer households. In 1965, the number of ‘core agricultural workers’ stood at 8.94 million people, but that number had declined to 2.24 million by 2005. In terms of hectares of land under cultivation, Japan declined from 6 million hectares in 1965 to 4.69 million in 2005, stabilizing around the mid-Meiji numbers. This is despite the fact that Japan’s population increased from just under 40 million in 1890 to nearly 128 million in 2005. These numbers suggest that, with Japanese paving over much of their farmland and rural populations declining rapidly, the island nation is on the cusp of not being able to feed itself. As we shall see, much of Japan’s rural turmoil can be traced to the Meiji Restoration and taxation policies.