That Brett Walker's study of industrial disease and the environmental impact of Homo sapiens industrialis on the Japanese archipelago was released as the Deep Water Horizon exploded and spewed millions of barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico could neither have been more appropriate nor ominous. Tragically, the present Fukushima nuclear power disaster makes the book even more relevant and its thesis even more disturbing. Deep Water Horizon is now a seemingly distant memory to most Americans, but environmental pollution and industrial accidents, Walker reminds us, are produced through a confluence of events and their impact is never far below the surface.
Walker argues that industrial pollution, its immediate and future impact, is the result of hybrid contexts and causations, which are both natural and artificial. Pollution's manifestation and the “physical pain caused by industrial pollution is the product of toxins that navigate naturally occurring ecosystems and technological systems that are seamlessly intertwined and indicative of highly engineered environments” (p. 16). Lax enforcement or the absence of regulations for disposing hazardous waste, cultural beliefs and practices, government policy, and ecosystems all worked together to magnify the affect of pollutants on Japan's under-represented populations, primarily women and the rural poor.
In six chapters, Walker takes his readers through a veritable cornucopia of pollutants that go well beyond, but include, the well-known Japanese cases of Minamata disease and the Ashio Copper Mine. The first two chapters introduce the reader to a fascinating history of insect related problems and insecticides in Japan that reaches from the Tokugawa era to the present. Walker's examination moves in multiple directions, showing how human populations’ insect problem creates problems for insects, and insecticides problems for both insects and man. Adding cultural, economic, and environmental components to these stories illustrates how a confluence of factors changed Japan's toxic landscape. Stagnant water in Buddhist cemeteries, for example, increased the mosquito population which, when combined with large numbers of pigs kept close to urban centers, promoted the spread of the deadly Japanese B encephalitis virus, which killed thousands in Tokyo and other major cities.
Turning to mines and mining-related incidents, Chapters 3 and 4 focus on the Ashio and Kamioka mines. Walker again combines the long history of these industrial sites with cultural, political, and economic factors to illustrate the intricate web of environmental degradation. On the one hand there was the direct damage to agricultural communities downstream from the mines caused by heavy metals entering irrigation channels. This was compounded, however, by Meiji government policies that promoted mining. Improved technologies for reclaiming greater amounts of copper, lead, and zinc from the ore made it easier for heavy metal mine waste such as cadmium to enter the riparian environment where the pollutants were more easily absorbed into crops and in turn by human bodies. One result was itai itai byô (“it hurts, it hurts disease”) which was more prevalent in women who shielded themselves from the sun in order to retain their “whiteness.” This gendered cultural behavior decreased levels of vitamin D that would have metabolized the cadmium, lessening or eliminating the effects of the toxin.
Technological improvements at the mines also wreaked havoc on the Shimotsuke Plain silkworm population (and thus the economies of agricultural communities and beyond). Copper smelters spewed sulphur-laden smoke into the atmosphere, which returned to earth as acid rain. As farmers tended to their silkworm nurseries, entire crops of these fragile insects began to die because they were poisoned by sulfuric acid (rain) deposits on the mulberry leaves that had been so carefully harvested and chopped for the tender young worms.
Japan's most notorious environmental accident, which was no accident at all, is the topic of the fifth chapter. Minamata disease or methylmercury poisoning was the result of the Chisso chemical plant dumping toxic waste into Minamata Bay. Mercury entered the food chain “where it biomagnified…and poisoned…the pinnacle of the global food chain: the human fetus” (p. 137). Walker's contribution to the history of this well-known incident is to expand the story to include the tales of Minamata disease patients, and the history of the fishing community, discussed through the filters of bioaccumulation and Minamata's canary-in-a-coal mine, cats.
This book's final industrial disease is not a disease at all but an industrial accident, the Hôjô coal mine explosion of 1914. Japan's worst mining disaster to date, the Hôjô mine explosion was caused by a confluence of factors. Unusual for environmental history, Walker shows how natural and human induced events and activities created the perfect mix of ingredients which, when combined with a defective mining light, brought down the mine. Like the other chapters in this book, Chapter 6 describes the intersection of technological and environmental complexity combined with human pain and suffering.
Early on and at key junctures throughout the text, Walker begs his readers’ indulgence as he “takes a page out of the Hmong storyteller's repertoire” (p. 20), venturing on tangents seemingly far at hand but promising to tie these disparate elements together by the end of the story. If there are any shortcomings to this book, this would be it. The Hmong storytelling-style renders a certain degree of redundancy to the writing. Walker continually brings in bits from preceding or future chapters and reminds his readers of the intricate web which is the human eco-existence. That said, this detracts little from the overall work.
Nicely punctuated with historic illustrations and Walker's own photographs of the industrial sites visited during the course of researching this book, Toxic Archipelago is an outstanding history of industrial disease and environmental degradation in Japan. It is a welcome addition to the small but growing field of Japanese environmental history by one of its leading scholars. In many ways, it nicely complements Walker's dissertation advisor's well-known study of forestry in early modern Japan and one cannot help but notice the parallel titles (Conrad Totman, The Green Archipelago: Forestry in Preindustrial Japan, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). Although I would hesitate to recommend this book to an undergraduate audience, graduate students and scholars interested in the linkage between Japan's environmental and industrial history could benefit from this book. Walker weaves a complex fabric of causation and aftermath that supports not only his methods and theories, but leaves the reader both fascinated and angered that Homo sapiens industrialis has not taken better care of this once Green Archipelago.
