Over fifteen years ago in late 2000, I completed an introduction and annotated bibliography focused on environmental history for Henry Smith's “Japanese History Bibliography” graduate colloquium at Columbia University. It can still be found on Smith's Columbia website. I entitled it “A Basic Guide to Resources on Environmental History.” The title is no exaggeration. In retrospect, I recognize that my knowledge of the field was indeed basic, though over the years a few colleagues have perhaps humored me by mentioning that it served as a useful introduction. More importantly, it is striking how limited the scholarship on Japanese environmental history was at the time. In the last decade and a half, the field has flourished, as exemplified by the trio of books—a monograph, an edited volume, and a survey history—that are the focus of this short review essay. That new interest is a reflection of humankind becoming much more cognizant of environmental challenges, from climate change to the 3/11 triple disaster. These developments have changed the questions many historians, including historians of Japan, are asking.

Though a late developer in environmental history, research in Japanese history adheres to the same broader trends as the field at large. J. R. McNeill has divided the field into “three main varieties, one that is material in focus, one that is cultural/intellectual, and one that is political.”Footnote ¹ Such a taxonomy makes sense for the Japan field too. These three books, and other recent and emerging works, can be understood in this way.

As noted by co-editors Bruce Batten and Philip Brown in their introduction to Environment and Society in the Japanese Islands, Japanese environmental history began to emerge in the 1980s and 1990s. Both in the English-speaking world and remarkably in Japan as well, it was largely the realm of a single historian, Conrad Totman, whom Batten and Brown accurately call the “father of Japanese environmental history” (pp. 10–11). Totman's studies had a material and political focus. He wrote specialized accounts on the history of forestry and authored survey histories with an explicitly environmental bent. He also influenced others, most importantly Brett Walker. Beginning in 2001, Walker became the most prolific figure in the field, publishing three monographs—The Conquest of Ainu Lands, The Lost Wolves of Japan, and Toxic Archipelago—in less than a decade.Footnote ² Walker's influence on the field though, has gone well beyond those monographs. He teamed with Gregory Pflugfelder to introduce animals into Japanese history with the edited volume, JAPANimals.Footnote ³ He then collaborated with Ian Jared Miller and Julia Adeney Thomas as they sought “to expand the focus” of historical scholarship to “explore Japan's role of global environment” in Japan at Nature's Edge.Footnote ⁴ In this way and others, Walker has inspired and mentored many students beyond Montana State University, where he has long taught. On an individual level, the influence of environmental history is perhaps most obvious in the work of Miller, whose project on the Ueno Zoological Gardens firmly fit within cultural history when it first appeared as a chapter in JAPANimals, but became framed as environmental history by the time it appeared in book form as The Nature of the Beasts.Footnote ⁵ Walker now has plenty of company in this vibrant subfield.

In A Concise History of Japan, Walker reaps what he and increasingly others have sown over the last decade and a half, and the harvest is bountiful. While Walker states that his survey is not “an environmental history per se,” it is clearly informed by the questions he and others have been asking and the scholarship they have produced (p. xvii). A Concise History draws heavily from his monographs on ecological imperialism in early-modern Hokkaido (Ezo), the extermination of the archipelago's wolves, and industrial pollution in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In this more specialized research, Walker favors the material approach, but in those monographs and this survey he is adept at bringing in the cultural, intellectual, and political varieties of environmental history as identified by McNeill. As a textbook, A Concise History achieves Walker's goal of “blend[ing] many different approaches to history—social, gender, cultural, environmental, and biographical” to create a well-rounded, readable historical overview of the archipelago from the beginning of time to the present (p. xvii). Last fall, before I knew I was going to be reviewing it, I assigned it in my early Japanese history course. The students found it engaging. A number of them even gave it the ultimate compliment, noting that they were not going to sell it back to the bookstore and were planning to finish reading the second half covering the modern period that I had not assigned.

Walker's textbook works for a number of reasons. First, its emphasis on the environment, made explicit from the opening lines of the preface, is effectively folded into the other approaches. Unlike Totman's A History of Japan, Footnote ⁶ a pioneering endeavor that foregrounds the environment in its periodization and content, Walker's survey, other than in the last chapter that exclusively focuses on climate change and natural disasters, weaves the insights of environmental history into the other strands to create a more complete narrative. Its periodization adheres to political developments, and there are some chapters where the environment gets little attention. In A Concise History, environmental history is one perspective among many, though its role is certainly prominent compared to previous survey histories. Second, reflecting recent historiographical trends, Walker places the history of Japan in the context of the wider history of the world and frequently pauses to contemplate comparative examples. While avoiding telling the country's history as a peculiarly Japanese story, Walker asserts that national identity is built materially, through a people's physical (as well as metaphorical) interactions with their natural environment that make communities and traditions something that are not entirely imagined and invented. Third, A Concise History is particularly skilled at giving voice to individuals, both prominent and less familiar, and both men and women, from Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835–1901) to Kusunose Kita (1833–1920), to show how they and many others, as Walker puts it, “in their own ways, were architects of [their] world” (p. 5). Fourth, Walker connects the past to the present throughout the text, from the final chapters to his treatment of the early periods, where those connections are not as obvious. Finally, to my surprise, Walker's analysis led me to reconceive my notions of Japanese history several times, not something I was expecting from a survey history.

The book is not flawless. Perhaps most notably, its coverage of Okinawa is lacking, from the islands’ absence from the all the book's maps to not even a mention of the massive US military bases there. But in general the book works, and it works so well it will become an assigned text in both my (and perhaps many others’) undergraduate early and modern Japanese history courses.

The influence of Walker and the rise of environmental history is evident in Robert Stolz's monograph Bad Water: Nature, Pollution, and Politics in Japan, 1870–1950, a synthesis of intellectual and environmental history with ample critical theory thrown into the mix. Stolz clearly favors the cultural and intellectual variety of environmental history, but, perhaps reflecting the influence of new materialism, he does not neglect the influence of the physical world, particularly in his discussion of the permeability of the human body. Here and elsewhere, Stolz builds on the work of Walker in Toxic Archipelago. His principle intellectual inspiration, though, is much older—Karl Marx—and the book is more about capitalism, or perhaps more accurately, capitalism's influence on nature, pollution, and politics.

More precisely, Stolz is interested in the subordination of nature by industrial capitalist production and how “an increasingly polluted environment undermined the self-contained, autonomous, individual subject of Meiji liberalism” (p. 7). Three of the five chapters focus on the Ashio copper mine producing the “bad water” that devastated those downstream and especially on the evolving thought of Tanaka Shozō (1841–1913), a politician turned anti-pollution activist. Approaching Tanaka from the lens of intellectual history, environmental studies, and critical theory, as well as drawing from Japanese scholarship, Stolz provides a new perspective on a figure who has received insufficient attention since Kenneth Strong's biography, Ox Against the Storm.Footnote ⁷ Stolz argues that Tanaka's critique of the Ashio problem from 1902 illustrated the limits of liberalism and represented “an environmental turn [away from liberal political protest] in which a nature existed as the ultimate guarantor of human freedom, above the nation and beyond industrial capitalism” (p. 83). In the conclusion, Stolz observes that the long postwar history of industrial poisoning—from the Minamata mercury poisoning of the 1950s to 3/11—makes it clear that because liberal democracy created these problems through its support of industrial capitalism, it cannot solve the problem. Even nature cannot save us, he bleakly concludes, because it is (still) subsumed by capital.

By introducing two other figures personally associated with Tanaka—the anarchist Ishikawa Sanshirō (1876–1956) and Kurosawa Torizō (1885–1982)—Stolz fills a half-century gap in the evolution of environmental thinking from Tanaka to the Minamata anti-pollution activists who claimed Tanaka as an inspiration. Ishikawa and Kurosawa, Stolz writes in chapters 4 and 5, built on their participation in the Ashio anti-pollution struggle and continued to grapple with the questions of the proper relationship of nature, individuals, and society, though in different ways. During the 1920s, Ishikawa developed a “theory of industrial society as a historically specific rift in human-nature relations” (p. 140) and advocated for industrial activity grounded in “natural democracy,” by which the “cultivation of the earth” restored personal autonomy (p. 128). Stolz writes that Ishikawa successfully avoided supporting fascist agrarian nationalism during the wartime years, despite its analogous rhetoric of returning “back to the land,” by adhering to “a dispersed and diffused social ecology of overlapping, temporary alliances between all living things that rose up and dissolved again before they could harden into hierarchies of domination and control” (pp. 119–20).

Like Ishikawa, Kurosawa was mentored by Tanaka in the struggle against Ashio and “believed that [it] had exposed the extensive but fragile connections between the environment and the social” (p. 160). Unlike Ishikawa, Kurosawa tried to put the ideas of creating a “self-sufficient, self-sustaining socio-ecological model” into practice in Japan. In the 1920s, he founded what Stolz calls “the original green company,” a cooperative of dairy producers in Hokkaido that became so large it was targeted by SCAP under the conglomerate-busting directives after the war (p. 16). Kurosawa's model sought to create a new relationship with nature that shielded it from the state and outside capital. That model created autonomy through a “reciprocal method” of household production whereby the cows’ manure fertilized the fields that in turn fed them and allowed them to produce milk. Stolz calls Kurosawa's vision an “ecology of autonomy,” the practical application of Ishikawa's “cultivation of the earth” that could replace industrial capitalism (p. 160). Over time, this was easier said than done. The cooperatives, which came to be referred to as Rakuren, produced a commodity that relied on the market and thus made it vulnerable to cooptation by the state during the national mobilization of the wartime years. In the postwar years, Rakuren became Snow Brand at SCAP's command, and continued to pursue a “new cooperative national capitalism” that further betrayed its founding principles and reveals what Stolz, then and now, calls “our true enemy …: the real subsumption of nature under capital, … the active manipulation of nature by humans to produce a nature most conducive to capital accumulation” (p. 189).

Unlike Walker's survey, Bad Water aims for a narrower audience, as one might expect from a monograph. Still, I regret that Stolz likely will not reach readers beyond those in a few graduate seminars. The book is undermined by tendencies that have often weakened intellectual history, critical theory, and at times environmental history. The writing is frequently, though not always, nearly impenetrable. I also periodically wondered if a general lack of context might make it inaccessible to non-Japan specialists. Finally, other than Tanaka, Ishikawa, and Kurosawa, there is little concern for individuals. For example, Stolz introduces the little-known writer Matsumoto Eiko (1866–1928), whom he credits with producing “a monument of ‘muckraking’” journalism about Ashio, but we learn next to nothing about her as an individual (p. 46). Fortunately, like Walker and unlike some other experts in intellectual history and critical theory, Stolz explores actual practice and lived experience and not just ideas.

Like Stolz, Environment and Society in the Japanese Islands co-editors Batten and Brown recognize Walker's influence in their preface and introduction. The idea for their edited volume was conceived during their participation in the conference convened by Miller, Thomas, and Walker that led to the publication of Japan at Nature's Edge. Because that conference had a focus on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and took more of a cultural and intellectual approach to environmental history, Batten and Brown, both premodern historians, created a separate project considering environmental developments over a much longer (earlier) period and, as they memorably put it, “calling on the skills and perspectives of technically disposed disciplinary specialists” (p. xi). As a result, this edited volume takes a decidedly material approach, though with some exceptions. As mentioned, Batten and Brown provide an overview of Japanese environmental history, the best historiographical introduction of the field to date, and acknowledge the contributions of Totman and Walker. Like Japan at Nature's Edge, this volume highlights how environmental history can shed new light on the relationship between human society and the natural environment, which are thoroughly interconnected.

In organizing their own project, Batten and Brown followed two principles: diversity and coherence. They aimed to introduce a variety of approaches to environmental history, though the material sort dominates the volume. In part, this may have been because as they invited contributors, who ranged from emeritus professors to graduate students, they sought to include a number of Japanese scholars, and such researchers often come from disciplines other than history—archeology, geography, and climatology in this case—and even if historians, those who take a more material approach. The inclusion of these scholars is a particularly welcome contribution because not nearly enough Japanese scholarship appears in English. For coherence, the editors challenged their authors to pay heed to the ecological concept of “‘resilience’—the ability of natural, or by extension social or socionatural systems to continue functioning when disturbed” (p. xii).

The volume exhibits organizational integrity as well. The editors group the volume's twelve essays into four categories: Japan's geology and physical landscape; its hydrosphere; its biosphere of plants, animals, and organic material; and its atmosphere of weather and climate. These parts as a whole nicely proceed chronologically through time from the ancient past to the present, for example, from the topography of the ancient capital city of Heijō to the climate and built environment of Tokyo today.

Another way to divide the essays is by the environmental history approach each takes. As noted, the material approach is most widely represented. It is most evident in many of the contributions of the Japanese scholars. A geographer and two climatologists—Takehiro Mikami, Masumi Zaiki, and Junpei Hirano—team up to present a history of climate change–based meteorological evidence found in documentary evidence—such as lake-freezing records and weather diaries—for the fifteenth to the early nineteenth centuries. Archaeologist Gina Barnes provides readers with a “tectonic setting of life in the archipelago,” introducing the foundational and ongoing role of volcanoes and earthquakes. Like Barnes's essay, geographer Tatsunori Kawasumi's essay on settlement patterns in Heijō uses geological and archeological data to explore the past, in this case “how eighth-century Japanese chose the locations and layout of imperial capitals, and how people and institutions were ordered over urban space” (p. 43). In his chapter, Brown asserts that a collapse in governance in the Warring States decades of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries led to severe disruptions in agricultural activity that took the form of devastating floods because of a lack of maintenance. But local practices, undertaken by “villagers, townsmen, and even their military baron (daimyo) overlords plan[ning] and execut[ing] sophisticated civil engineering projects” enabled recovery and resilience (p. 98). In a fascinating essay, historian Shizuyo Sano examines the use of resources on the shoreline of Lake Biwa, and concludes that traditional intensive human activities, such as harvesting of aquatic plants and sediment, in littoral environments were vital in maintaining the lake's water quality and high biodiversity until the 1940s. Sano's essay connects nicely to Toshihiro Higuchi's. He argues that Japan's dependence on extracting nitrogen from animals and plants—as in the use of Biwa's aquatic plants and in this case specifically fish meal from Hokkaido and soybean cake from Manchuria—made Imperial Japan an “organic empire,” much more reliant on plant- and animal-based products than other colonial powers of the day. This reminded me of the Japanese army's reliance on horses to move men and equipment during World War II, including, for example, its use of 100,000 horses compared to just 15,000 vehicles during Operation Ichigo in China in 1944.Footnote ⁸ In the volume's final two essays, the historical demographer Osamu Saito explores the relationship between climate and famine based on data from the tenth to the mid-seventeenth centuries and Scott O'Bryan examines the contemporary history of Tokyo as one of the “world's premier examples of the urban heat island effect” and discovers that “our built environments reveal the very ‘built’ nature of the climate itself” (p. 230). In the end, Saito and O'Bryan each conclude that politics and policy are crucial. Saito finds that, despite unfavorable climatic periods, “politics and institutions mattered” as leaders implemented reforms that led to decreases in famine rather than expected increases (p. 226). And in Tokyo, O'Bryan concludes that a lack of policies, because urban planners and policy makers have yet to catch up the knowledge generated by urban climate studies, are key to understanding the climatic dilemmas of built environments.

Several of the volume's chapters take a more political approach. Such an approach is more likely for topics in more recent history, when states and societal interest began to take more of a systematic approach to environmental questions. In his examination of massive Sakuma hydroelectric dam in central Japan, Eric Dinmore finds that “[a] key, if not the key, to early postwar comprehensive development schemes was the promotion of large, phenomenally expensive multipurpose dams” (p. 114). Colin Tyner too identifies the state as a principle player in his analysis of the Ogasawara Islands, located over 600 miles south of Tokyo. Interestingly, he argues that human and nonhuman partners, such as invasive plants and animals, joined the state in transforming the islands and did so in ways that were difficult for the government to control. Similarly, Kuang-chi Hung focuses on a variety of colonizing actors, who “‘conquered’ Taiwan's forests and established so-called scientific forestry in the 1930s” (p. 174).

The lone cultural approach among the volume's essays is perhaps that of Gregory Smits, who uses an examination of several works of early modern earthquake literature to support the volume's overall theme of resiliency. Smits argues that the stories, dramatic as they often were, served to promote “social resilience by normalizing earthquakes, … to entertain and to reassure” (p. 58).

This separation of these essays into the categories of material, intellectual/cultural, and political may be somewhat forced because many of them do not fit so cleanly into a particular variety. Their approaches blur boundaries and are not easily categorized. This, I think, is a strength rather than a weakness of this volume and other new and emerging work. The increasing amount of work on Japanese environmental history of various and assorted stripes highlights vibrancy and insights I could not have imagined a decade and a half ago.