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Remake Politics, Not Nature: Tanaka Shozo's Philosophies of ‘Poison’ and ‘Flow’ and Japan's Environment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 May 2025

Robert Stolz
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Tanaka Shozo (1841–1913) is widely acknowledged as Japan's “first conservationist.” A former village headman, in the 1890s he led the fight against the Ashio Copper Mine's pollution of the Watarase and Tone rivers northwest of Tokyo. Tanaka's endeavors are frequently cast as a peasant warning to an industrializing Japan, but they can more accurately be seen as the work of a modern environmental thinker who developed a sophisticated ecological theory of society based on the twin processes of nature: “poison” (doku) and “flow” (nagare). From this position he went on to combat the Meiji state's flood control plans for the Kanto plain: a massive reengineering of the entire watershed and the beginning of the Japanese state's systematic intervention in nature. In response to the state's flood control plan, Tanaka's Fundamental River Law (konponteki kasenho) and philosophies of “poison” and “flow” describe the harm that comes from ignoring the dictates of an active nature in the name of absolute human agency. His law revered flow, “not as a made thing” but as fundamental to nature, indeed, to all life.

Type
Research Article
Information
Asia-Pacific Journal , Volume 5 , Issue 1 , January 2007 , e18
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2007

References

Notes

[1] F. G. Notehelfer, “Between Tradition and Modernity. Labor and the Ashio Copper Mine” Monumenta Nipponica, Vol. 39, No. 1. (Spring, 1984), pp. 11–24.

[2] “Kodoku chosa iinkai chosahokokusho” in Tochigi kenshi shiryohen genkindai 9 (Tokyo: Gyosei, 1980). 635–6.

[3] Kasenho 1896, Horei zensho, Okurasho insatsukyoku.

[4] Kodoku chosa, 992.

[5] Tanaka Shozo, Tanaka Shozo senshu 7 vol., ed. Anzai Kunio, Kano Masanao, Komatsu Hiroshi, Sakaya Junji and Yui Masaomi (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1989). 4: 159.

[6] Tanaka (1989), 5: 333.

[7] Tanaka (1989), 4: 149–50.

[8] Tanaka (1989), 4: 137–8.

[9] Tanaka (1989), 4: 228.

[10] Tanaka Shozo, preface to Arahata Kanson, Yanakamura metsuboshi (Tokyo: Iwanami bunko, 1999). 8.

[11] Tanaka (1989), 7: 247.

[12] Arundhati Roy, The Cost of Living (New York: Modern Library Paperbacks, 1999).

[13] Patrick McCully, Silenced Rivers: The Ecology and Politics of Large Dams (New York: Zed Books, 2001) and Michael Goldman, Imperial Nature: The World Bank and Struggles for Social Justice in the Age of Globalization (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005).

[14] Gavan McCormack, “Minamata: The Irresponsibility of the Japanese State”

[15] David a. Fahrenthold, “Wildlife Waste is Major Water Polluter, Studies Say,” The Washington Post, 29 September 2006.