Transnational Japan in the Global Environmental Movement by Simon Avenell (review)

In his second monograph, historian Simon Avenell goes beyond the nation-level analysis of his earlier work, Making Japanese Citizens.¹ Tracing Japanese environmentalists’ global engagement from the 1960s to the beginning of the twenty-first century, he argues that their “transnational” activism was both informed by the local experiences of victims of environmental tragedies in Japan and transformed by the reflexivity brought on by the global impact of the country’s policies, which complicated the victimization narrative of Japanese pollution activists.

Chapter 1 begins by briefly tracing major cases of industrial pollution in Japan, including not only the well-known “Big Four”—the outbreak of mercury poisoning in the city of Minamata, Kumamoto Prefecture, that became known generally as “Minamata disease”; the same illness in Niigata Prefecture; itai-itai disease (from the Japanese for “it hurts, it hurts”), mass cadmium poisoning that occurred in Toyama Prefecture; and “Yokkaichi asthma” in Mie Prefecture, caused by air pollution—but also the tainting of Morinaga Milk products with arsenic in 1955 and of Kanemi rice-bran oil with PCBs in 1968. Several works in English describe these incidents and the responses by patients and their supporters, journalists, companies, local and national governments, and the legal system.² While this existing literature has already made it clear that these experiences gave Japan’s environmentalism what Avenell calls an “anthropocentric perspective,” what he adds here is the significance of how this perspective “deeply informed later transnational involvement” (p. 36).

The rest of the first chapter, together with the second and third chapters, constitutes one of Avenell’s most important contributions: a focus on key members of the Research Committee on Pollution (RCP), founded in 1963 by economist Tsuru Shigeto (1912–2006) and seven other progressive academics. Avenell traces the research, activism, and thinking of Miyamoto Ken’ichi (1930–), Ui Jun (1932–2006), Harada Masazumi (1934–2012), and Tsuru up to and beyond the landmark 1972 United Nations Conference on Human Environment (UNCHE) in Stockholm. Their stories have long deserved to be told at this length in English.

Economist Miyamoto Ken’ichi published Osorubeku kōgai (Fearsome Pollution) with fellow RCP member Shōji Hikaru in 1964. The book is often compared to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which was published two years earlier, but as Avenell rightly notes, this combination of scientific discussion by Shōji and analysis of the political economy of pollution by Miyamoto served as more than a wake-up call, providing not only motivation but also a vocabulary and even guidelines for antipollution movements. Miyamoto started from a Marxist standpoint before realizing that pollution existed in socialist countries as well. He eventually came to share “an affinity with later global discourses on human rights . . . , in which groups subject to injustices because of race, gender, sexuality, or even the environment would become part of” what Ernesto LaClau and Chantal Mouffe called a “chain of equivalence,”³ but need not “surrender their unique identities for a shared subjectivity of class” (p. 45). Through Miyamoto, Avenell shows us two of the major characteristics of antipollution movements in Japan: a focus on injustice and on links with victims of other injustices and a hesitant and incomplete affiliation with the established radical left, including the Communist and Socialist parties.

Ui Jun was a chemical engineer whose concern with the mercury pollution in Minamata in the late 1950s led him to become Japan’s best-known activist environmental scientist. Avenell rightly calls him “arguably the most important figure in transnational environmental activism in postwar Japan” for the way in which his work to understand and combat the poisoning and discriminatory treatment of victims in Minamata and Niigata impelled him to global research and activism (p. 46). Ui spent a good deal of time in Europe in the 1960s investigating pollution there as well as spreading awareness of Japan’s pollution problems as warnings to other industrialized countries. Beginning in 1970 he organized the Independent Lectures on Pollution...