Pre-industrial Korea and Japan in Environmental Perspective (review)

Conrad Totman's recent book, Pre-industrial Korea and Japan in Environmental Perspective, examines Korean and Japanese history leading up to 1800 in the context of the countries' similar natural surroundings. Building on his demonstrated interest in the relationship between Japanese social development and its ecological environs (Green Archipelago [1989] and Early Modern Japan [1993]), Totman breaks new ground here by considering Korean and Japanese experiences on a shared plane.

In many respects, it is a wonderful book. Totman tells the familiar, long chronological durée from preagricultural society to the verge of industrialization with numerous fascinating twists and unfamiliar and suggestive insights. He focuses particularly on the interplay between the region's natural world—atmospheric, geologic, biologic—and the human quest to control its forces for survival and political and economic gain. At the same time, Totman is also concerned with placing Korean and Japanese history in the larger, global developmental context, which is particularly useful given the lack of attention these countries receive in most so-called world or "big" histories.

The first chart in the book, "Demographic Trends" (p. 4), illustratively sets the tone for the text. Totman shows the historical populations of Korea and Japan to the present plotted against the longstanding historical world population chart of Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones, revealing among other things that Japan's population today is almost equal to the world population of 2,000 years ago. In explaining the graph, however, Totman alerts his reader right away that the sharp disjunctures of our industrialized world embodied in the skyrocketing post-1800 line will not preoccupy him. Instead, the temporally longer and flatter lines will be his focus—what many would consider the less sexy part of the chart—because of his determination to present the richly similar histories that gave, as he convincingly argues, more commonality than difference to Korea and Japan's history for so long.

The book is divided straightforwardly along large blocks of time: the paleo ages to roughly 1000 B.C.E., the advent of metal tools leading up to early agricultural societies in Korea and Japan, the gradual stratification within these societies, and the exponential development of those societies until their ultimate stasis roughly 300 years ago. In closing, there are some particularly lucid concluding remarks concerning the stagnation of these societies as they sat unknowingly on the verge of the industrial revolution.

In the first and second chapters, Totman revisits themes he has touched on in previous books such as Green Archipelago. Yet here he casts a wider net in his explanation of the geoatmospheric conditions necessary to sustain rice agriculture, for example, weaving Korea and Japan's experience together, which, as he demonstrates, makes more than enough sense because these political entities were long from being imagined separately at the time. Although some readers' eyes may widen with Totman's explanations here because of the number of dates in the "million years before present" range, I found fascinating his discussion of the breakup of the Pangaea supercontinent in the Mesozoic era (45 million years before present) causing, for example, the random series of events that led to the creation of the Himalayas, that, in turn, channel eastward the winds necessary to foster rice cultivation as unbelievably far north as Akita or Hamhung. Without these winds bringing along the required rains, of course, there never would have been the growing conditions in the rice-cultivating civilizations that became known as Korea and Japan in the first place. Thus, as is true throughout the book, a little willingness on the reader's part to venture into unfamiliar vocabulary offers plenty of reward.

Also in the geological context, Totman emphasizes possibly the most significant difference in the environmental history of Japan and Korea, and it merits quoting at length:

The similarities of Korea and Japan notwithstanding—their shared temperate-zone location, similar biota, modest amounts of flat land, ample coast lines, and rich fisheries—the geographical differences...