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Remake Politics, Not Nature: Tanaka Shōzō'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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In this essay, Robert Stolz takes us back to the Meiji period to examine the ideas of an early environmental activist, Tanaka Shōzō. Stolz describes Tanaka as a “modern environmental thinker” whose theory of the relationship between “poison” and “flow” informed his Meiji-era activism against both the Ashio Cooper Mine's pollution of rivers and the Meiji state's designs for flood control on the Kantō plain. Tanaka's concern with humanity's relationship to nature should be read alongside the attitudes of his contemporaries discussed in the Blaxell and Fedman essays. In addition, Stolz's discussion of how Tanaka's ideas might be relevant to present-day controversies over dams enables a consideration of how state efforts to control nature have, and have not, changed over the course of the modern period.

Type
Part I - Conceptions of Nature and Space
Information
Asia-Pacific Journal , Volume 10 , Special Issue S2: Course Reader No. 2. Environmental History , January 2012 , pp. 56 - 68
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 2012

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.