Bad Water: Nature, Pollution, and Politics in Japan, 1870-1950.
Brown, Philip C.
Bad Water: Nature, Pollution, and Politics in Japan, 1870-1950, by
Robert Stolz. Asia-Pacific: Culture, Politics, and Society. Durham, Duke
University Press, 2014. xi, 288 pp. $24.95 US (paper).
Robert Stolz argues that a sense of environmental crisis overturned
an existing paradigm of scientific mastery of nature, beginning with the
poisoning of Kanto waterways by industrial waste from the Ashio copper
mine. He further contends that efforts to confront this sense of crisis
began within Meiji liberalism as manifested in the career of politician
cum environmental protester Tanaka Shozo (1841-1913), a
"liberal" politician who, ultimately disillusioned with
political action, turned to developing a new understanding of nature
itself as powerful. Stolz argues that while Tanaka is often treated as
an idealized, isolated figure, his awareness of environmental issues
continued in the careers of anarchist Ishikawa Sanshiro (1876-1956) and
Kurosawa Torizo (1885-1982), the founder of the early "green"
corporation Snow Brand Dairy. Throughout, the author seeks to
"combine environmental history with political philosophies of the
subject to explore the extremely rich and still urgent search for a form
of political subjectivity and social organization adequate to the
environmental crisis of capitalist modernity" (p. 10). Drawing in
part on perspectives of Actor-Network Theory (ant) and Science,
Technology and Society (STS) studies, Stolz seeks to explore
interactions among objects and the "agency of the non-human"
(p. 11) but explicitly adopts a Marxist framework to add an historical
dimension to these approaches.
Stolz effectively strips away the idealized images of Tanaka that
permeate many contemporary assessments of him as part of an effort to
take early environmentalism beyond discussion of its role in Meiji
liberalism. His analysis is well documented and convincing. An emphasis
on "participatory democracy" (p. 36) in local elections
conveys an impression of broad participation, yet suffrage in these
realms, like later national parliamentary elections, had property
qualifications that restricted suffrage in local governments
(institutions that had limited financial resources other than those from
the central government)--all of which suggests that Tanaka was even less
representative of broad popular sentiment than Stolz indicates. All that
said, the degree to which this perspective changes our broader
understanding of modem Japanese history is not clear, for all the key
people Stolz analyzes were clearly exceptional individuals, especially
anarchist Ishikawa.
Underlying Bad Water's historical trajectory is a clear
demarcation between modem economic activities and those of pre-modern
eras, which oversimplifies the divide. The sharp focus on industrial
pollution facilitates this bifurcation, and leads Stolz to be rather
dismissive of flood control issues as less critical than pollution (p.
88), even though a greater proportion of Japan was subject to the former
risk than industrial pollution. This focus also means that the
environmental impacts of other forms of natural resource exploitation,
most linked to profit-maximization, are downplayed. Further, this
approach leads to creation of a sharp break in the shift to a
"scientific mastery" perspective when older perspectives
continued to exert influence and carry legitimacy in intellectual and
policy debates.
Bad Water's agenda is both broad and diverse, raising
significant challenges of translation across the frameworks addressed.
Marxism, Japanese history, ANT, and STS all involve specialized
vocabularies, and readers familiar with one or two of them will not
necessarily be familiar with all. To introduce specialists to the other
fields requires clear explication of key concepts. Stolz does this
inconsistently and even when he does define key terms, the explanation
frequently comes well after the first use of the term. A particularly
frustrating example is the use of Marx's concept of
"subsumption," a key concept in the author's analysis and
effort to link sources of nineteenth-century environmental awareness to
later, present-day concerns. The concept is first introduced on page
eleven, almost as an aside and buried in the middle of a paragraph with
no definition provided--despite the fact that as indexed, this is the
first page of several that supposedly treat Marx's use of the term
(p. 267, "subsumption" sub-entry). Glimpses of Marx's
"subsumption" and its meaning appear over the next two pages,
but are again buried in the midst of paragraphs that highlight other
scholarly works. In the end, readers are left with little idea of how
the concept functioned for Marx or its suitability for the purpose that
Stolz employs the term. This kind of issue is compounded by numerous
apostrophes, and laconic references to Western thinkers who are
unfamiliar to Japan specialists or those not already steeped in
histories of environmental thought.
The end result is a work that encourages scholars to avoid
anachronistic evaluations of Meiji era Japanese liberalism but is often
frustrated in its larger ambitions by inadequate translation across
intellectual realms.
DOI: 10.3138/CJH.ACH.50.3.007
Philip C. Brown, The Ohio State University