No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 May 2025
“We'd like to cut down the trees with nature in mind.” So declared Suzuki Takehiko, director of the Shōsenkyō Kankō Kyōkai (Shōsen Gorge Tourism Association), in August 2008. Part of Japan's Chichibu-Tama-Kai National Park, Shōsen Gorge has for decades been labeled the country's “most beautiful valley.” Years of deforesting meant that when the park was founded in 1950, little stood between tourists and the majestic rock formations for which the gorge is most famous. But by the turn of the twenty-first century visitors were frustrated that trees were now blocking much of the view. The park's laissez-faire approach to the valley's vegetation did not threaten its ecosystems—trees are hardly invasive species there. But this economically disadvantaged part of Japan depended on a steady stream of tourists who wanted to see cliffs, not trees; some even claimed that the trees were depriving the valley of its beauty. So Suzuki argued that “trees” (part of nature) should be felled so that people could have a better view of “nature” (the gorge). Despite Suzuki's appeal, most of the trees still stand and in fact are highlighted in the park's promotional materials. The Shōsen Gorge Tourism Association's website features images of colorful trees growing beside, and out of, majestic crags; in some pictures trees effectively obscure the cliffs. A banner running near the top of the website declares Shōsen Gorge the most beautiful in Japan, full of the [many] wonders of nature (Nihon ichi no keikokubi o hokoru “Shōsenkyō” wa shizen no subarashisa ga ippai desu).
1 <link>. Chichibu-Tama-Kai National Park is mainly in Yamanashi prefecture, approximately two hours west of Tokyo.
2 Ishimure has worked for decades to educate people the world over about Minamata disease and to compel Japanese authorities to compensate more adequately Minamata disease patients and their families. Sea of Suffering, her most famous literary work, is the first part of her trilogy on Minamata and one of her many writings on this tragedy.
3 Lawrence Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and the Literary Imagination (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), vi.
4 Although the two frequently overlap, attitudes are best understood as mental states and behaviors as actions we carry out toward other entities, including the nonhuman. Barbara Almond, The Monster Within: The Hidden Side of Motherhood (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 8.
5 Translations are my own, based on Ishimure Michiko, Kugai jodō: Waga Minamatabyō, in Ishimure Michiko zenshū 2. (Tokyo: Fujiwara Shoten, 2004), 7-254.
6 During the colonial period Chisso built a network of factories in Korea, China, and Taiwan.
7 In a developmental state, business leaders and national economic bureaucrats together plan an industrial economy, but the means of production are in private hands.
8 The principal exception is an article from a supplement to the January 1957 issue of the Kumamoto Igakkai zasshi (Journal of the Kumamoto Medical Society), included in the novel's third chapter, that discusses the symptoms of a cat afflicted by Minamata disease (118-20). The narrator also includes several graphic descriptions of poisoned fish.
9 Sea of Suffering likewise reveals contradictions between local people's attitudes and actual behaviors toward animals, most significantly between the fishers’ deep affection for and killing of fish.
10 Gregory M. Pflugfelder, “Preface, Confessions of a Flesh Eater,” in Gregory M. Pflugfelder and Brett L. Walker, eds., JAPANimals: History and Culture in Japan's Animal Life (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2005), xv.
11 The narrator of Sea of Suffering frequently alternates references to Chisso's heartlessness with those to the dedication of medical researchers.
You have
Access
Open access