Bad Water: Nature, Pollution, and Politics in Japan, 1870–1950 by Robert Stolz (review)

Robert Stolz's Bad Water: Nature, Pollution, and Politics in Japan, 1870–1950 is an impressive analysis of the history of the interaction between political and ecological thought in modern Japan. The Japanese experience of the Ashio Copper Mine pollution incident during the late Meiji period created a great many thinkers and activists, such as the politician and ecologist Tanaka Shozo (1841–1913). This book is valuable to the study not only of Tanaka and of Japanese environmental problems but also of the history of ideas on the relationships among politics, society, the human body, and nature in a global context.

The term bad water (akusui 悪水) originated from farmers' opposition to damage caused to their crop fields by leeching from mines that had been opened before the Meiji era. Stolz argues that people's environmental awareness changed, as evidenced by the switch from the term bad water during the Edo era (1603–1867) to pollution (osen 汚染) during the Meiji (1868–1912). It was during this shift that Tanaka formed his philosophy of "poison" (doku 毒) and "flow" (nagare 流れ). Tanaka considered that if humans ignored nature's laws and instead tried to control it, it would respond with the harmful, poisonous flows he called doku and that such practices would finally threaten to erode the civil rights of Japanese citizens.

In his introduction, Stolz points out that there was a close relationship between the scientific thought imported from Western Europe at the end of the Edo era and industrial pollution such as that which caused the Ashio Copper Mine incident. Generally speaking, it is difficult to specify the exact start of the pollution from the Ashio mine, but we can identify Furukawa Ichibei's discovery of a rich vein of copper in 1884 as the trigger that ultimately caused terrible damage to the land in the Watarase River Valley. During the 1890s and 1900s, the Ashio incident gave rise to a peasants' movement against mine pollution. Questions were asked in the National Diet, and there was a direct appeal to the Meiji emperor by Tanaka. Nevertheless, Stolz argues, the Ashio incident had its roots in the 1870s, before the damage became intense, since the underlying cause of the incident lay within Meiji rationalism and liberalism.

The introduction starts with such works of Obata Tokujiro as Tenpen chii (天変地 異 The Extraordinary Workings of Heaven and Earth). According to Stolz, the Meiji Restoration had more impact on the Japanese perception of nature than did the start of capitalism. At the end of the Edo era, many thinkers and philosophers made enormous efforts to break down superstition about nature. The Japanese people were civilized and educated, and they started to recognize how natural phenomena such as thunder and lightning could be explained by scientific thinking. People were encouraged to trust that human beings could control nature; nature was separated from politics and became an operational object.

At the same time, the concept of the autonomous individual subject was established in the 1870s through the popular rights and liberty movement. According to Stolz, the establishment of the autonomous individual subject is indispensable to capitalism, but the operations of the mining industry by autonomous individuals brought a pollution crisis to modern Japanese society. Stolz points out that victims from Ashio to Minamata have asked, "How much freedom can one enjoy in a toxic environment?" The Ashio incident meant not only the failure of the attempt to separate nature from politics but also the defeat of the image of the individual subject that was looked for in the popular rights and liberty movement. Burgeoning capitalism, based on the concept of civil rights, gradually attacked human health and freedom that is rooted in the natural world.

Chapter 1 documents the historical background and structure of the Ashio incident. Stoltz argues that the air and water pollution from the Ashio mine were caused by the emergence of the concept of autonomous individual subjects. In...