Environment and Society in the Japanese Islands: From Prehistory to the Present ed. by Bruce L. Batten and Philip C. Brown (review)

It might be helpful to think about this book in the context of the two conferences that produced it. The editors of Environment and Society in the Japanese Islands trace its origins to the conference on “Japan’s Natural Legacies: Bodies and Landscapes Realized, Idealized, and Poisoned,” convened in 2008 near Big Sky, Montana. Both editors participated in that conference—Brown was among the contributors to the volume that it produced, Japan at Nature’s Edge—but were talking even then about how to make some of the ways of doing Japanese environmental history that were not well represented during discussions in Montana, or elsewhere in the field, visible to a wide audience.¹ For Batten and Brown, that meant a book that included work on early Japan and studies exploring changes unfolding over the long span of Japan’s history. They were interested too in bringing together the work of “more traditional historians” with “the skills and perspectives of technically disposed disciplinary specialists” (p. xi). Toward that end, this new volume includes chapters by archeologists, climatologists, and geographers, in addition to contributions by historians.

If the 2008 conference provides one framework for contextualizing the book, the late March 2011 gathering in Hawai’i of almost all of its contributors suggests another. The devastating earthquake and tsunami earlier that same month inevitably shifted expectations about the nature of the work that environmental history about Japan might be asked to perform and about the potential interventions of a book like this. In a concluding chapter appropriately titled “In the Shadow of 3.11,” Batten and Brown acknowledge as much and touch on the perspectives that the chapters in this volume bring to the study of the disaster’s causes and effects. “Resilience” is one of the concepts the book uses as a foil for exploring “the processes of historical, socionatural change,” including those associated with the sudden, catastrophic kind (p. 13).

Developed by ecologists to explain how some ecosystems are able “to remain more or less stable in the face of drastic external perturbations” while others undergo dramatic and permanent change when subject to comparatively minor disruptions, resilience refers to “the capacity of a system to withstand or adapt to shocks without experiencing a fundamental regime shift” (p. 13). The editors are not arguing that resilience or the concept of adaptive cycles, another analytical framework developed by ecologists and also referenced here, map completely onto questions that interest environmental historians the most. What they do suggest is that some of these ideas might be helpful for understanding the interactions and feedback cycles operating within socionatural systems, in a range of spatial arrangements, and over time scales short and long. Most chapters make use of one or more of these frameworks, some more uncritically than others.

Gina Barnes’s observation in “Vulnerable Japan,” the first of three chapters on geology and topography, that “[e]nvironmentally, the Japanese Islands are a dangerous place to live” reflects both the country’s recent history and what we understand from the evidence emerging out of archaeoseismology and volcanic ash archaeology (kazanbai kōkogaku) (p. 22). The work that scholars in this latter, relatively new field have been doing has not been all that visible to nonspecialists, and one of Barnes’s contributions here is to help draw our attention to it. What these recent studies tell us is in some ways familiar, in that uncovering artifacts and other markers of human habitation from under tephra falls is not so different from other forms of archaeological practice. The cumulative effect of Barnes’s description of multiple excavation sites and of the region-wide impact of events such as the calamitous Kikai eruption of ca. 5300 BCE, which deposited up to 20 centimeters of ash over much of Kyushu, Shikoku, and parts of Honshu, however, is...