![]() ![]() When we talk about Japanese environmental problems we tend to focus on the big modern cases like Minamata disease or itai itai byou, but what I liked about this story is that it shows that even earlier there were signs that proto-industrial, protocapitalistic growth of the Japanese economy was having an effect on the natural world. Any time civilizations develop the land for one reason or another you’re going to see environmental change. The agricultural transition happened around 10,000 bce (before common era) with a massive restructuring of the way that we interact with the land. This tale offers us a cautionary note that we have long been impacting the environment in a variety of ways. The first thing that’s important about it is that when we think of commercialization, development, and environmental change, we oftentimes assume-wrongly-that those are products of modern life and industrialism. What made you want to look further into that story?īrett Walker: Well, I liked the story for a handful of reasons. That inadvertently expanded wild boar habitat and led to a boar population explosion, which in turn led to competition for food and eventually a famine where 3,000 people died. Winifred Bird: Your article about the Hachinohe Wild Boar Famine describes an episode in far-northern Honshu in the mid-1700s, where farmers started growing soybeans as a cash crop to send to Edo (now Tokyo), and to do that they used slash and burn agriculture. Winifred Bird spoke with him by telephone at his office in Bozeman. Walker is Regents’ Professor and department chair of history and philosophy at Montanta State University, Bozeman. Often, he traces the roots of environmental destruction much further into the past than we commonly assume they reach. Always, the stories he tells are unflinching, impressively researched, and eloquently written. Since then he has documented how trade and conquest transformed Hokkaido’s landscape (The Conquest of Ainu Lands: Ecology and Culture in Japanese Expansion, 1590-1800, 2001) how modernization drove wolves to extinction (The Lost Wolves of Japan, 2005) and how workers, farmers, mothers, and babies have paid in pain for the industrial development of Japan (Toxic Archipelago, 2010). While there he befriended some scholars who encouraged him to study its history more seriously he did so, gaining his Ph.D from the University of Oregon in Japanese history in 1997. After graduating he traveled to Hokkaido, teaching at a juku and falling in love with the country. Walker says he “stumbled on Japan” as an undergraduate history student in Idaho. Yet it is industrial civilization as a whole, rather than a uniquely Japanese interpretation of it, that his books condemn. ![]() As he acknowledges-without apology-in the prologue to his most recent book, Toxic Archipelago: A History of Industrial Disease in Japan, the patterns he finds are often dark ones: “I am a historian and I am calling it as I see it, and I see environmental decline and deterioration everywhere,” he writes. He treats economics, folklore, ecology, family history, and politics not as independent disciplines but as threads that wrap together into episodes, which in turn accumulate into the patterns that give history meaning. ![]() History as Walker writes it is as seamlessly complex as life outside of books. Any student of Japan who is tempted to idealize, or simplify, the way people in this country have historically interacted with nature would do well to search out the writing of environmental historian Brett Walker. ![]()
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