Troubled Natures: Waste, Environment, Japan by Peter Wynn Kirby (review)

Peter Kirby warns us that this book will go “in unexpected directions and into controversial territory” (p. 2). The most controversial territory explored is that fuzzy conceptual zone that lies between physical contamination and stigma, or between environmental pollution and conceptual pollution. For me, this is the main theme emerging from the two intriguing ethnographic studies at the heart of Troubled Natures. The theme has acquired an ominous new significance since the Fukushima nuclear disaster of March 2011, which occurred shortly after this book was published. Kirby’s two field studies are full of striking parallels and contrasts with my own Fukushima fieldwork,¹ and anyone interested in the Fukushima situation should read Kirby’s book carefully.

The first field study, presented in chapter 2, looks at Igusa, a district of Tokyo’s Suginami ward. The name of the ward and district within it have been changed to “Azuma ward” and “Izawa” out of sensitivity to informants’ privacy; in ecological debates, however, Suginami disease is now sufficiently well known as to make anonymity unnecessary. An underground compacting facility for plastic waste was built at Igusa in 1996, and the chapter describes some very serious health problems—disfiguring skin conditions, acute breathing difficulties, visual impairment, and so on—experienced by several hundred people, or about 10 percent of the community living within five hundred meters of the facility. Because only a small minority of residents were affected, many of the others treated their complaints with skepticism, as did the local authorities. Today there is no question that Suginami disease is real—local authorities were forced to admit as much in 2000, and to pay compensation to some of the victims. Controversy has, however, continued concerning the precise cause, with the authorities blaming leaks of hydrogen sulfide and refusing to make further compensation payments after the leaks were rectified, while a citizens’ group blamed toxic fumes from semivolatile plastics and insisted there was no change in symptoms even after those repairs were made. The facility was finally closed in 2009 amid further ambiguity: ward authorities denied their decision had anything to do with Suginami disease and instead attributed it to a shift in policy toward burning “unburnable” plastics in high-tech furnaces at temperatures high enough not to generate dioxins.

Kirby’s nuanced account of encounters between the victims and the authorities, and sometimes between women and their own skeptical menfolk, includes the observation that being prone to Suginami disease—or “feeling” it—confers a certain status, as it demonstrates “sensitivity”; victims are “imbued by their comrades with a kind of mystical power, hypersensitive and therefore special” (p. 131). But at the same time, opponents blamed the Suginami victims for their own condition—a phenomenon also observable in the case of Fukushima victims and indeed of disaster victims generally.

Kirby’s account of discrimination against Suginami disease sufferers shows two distinct strands: first, a culturally ingrained dislike of people who make a fuss about nothing—and especially of “hysterical” women—and, second, disgust toward people who are ill or disabled, disgust only weakly linked to fears of contagion. Clearly these two grounds for distaste are mutually contradictory: the first assumes that the victims are not ill, the second that they are ill. But discrimination is rarely logical, and when there is an underlying concern about the collapse of housing values and rental income from having one’s district associated with a health scare, those who might tend to discriminate even under the best of circumstances are likely to care even less about their reasons for doing so.

Kirby describes how the victims, very far from hysterical, mustered scientific evidence, enlisting an academic environmentalist with the necessary equipment to measure airborne toxicity. He also comes across cases of data having been manipulated, deliberately misinterpreted, or ignored by the authorities when it did not suit their interests. As one informant put it: “They take lots of measurements everywhere but only use the ones that are...