Bad water : nature, pollution, and politics in Japan, 1870-1950 / Robert Stolz.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Stolz, Robert, 1970- author.

Series:

Asia-Pacific

Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University

Asia-pacific: culture, politics, and society

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Pollution--Political aspects--Japan.

Pollution.

Environmental protection--Political aspects--Japan.

Environmental protection.

Water--Pollution--Political aspects--Japan.

Water.

Environmental conditions.

Water--Pollution.

Environmental protection--Political aspects.

Pollution--Political aspects.

Japan--Environmental conditions--Political aspects--19th century.

Japan.

Japan--Environmental conditions--Political aspects--20th century.

Physical Description:

xi, 269 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm.

Place of Publication:

Durham ; London : Duke University Press, 2014.

Summary:

Bad Water is a sophisticated theoretical analysis of Japanese thinkers' and activists' efforts to reintegrate the natural environment into Japan's social and political thought in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth. The need to incorporate nature into politics was revealed by a series of large-scale industrial disasters in the 1890s. The Ashio Copper Mine unleashed massive amounts of copper, arsenic, mercury, and other pollutants into surrounding watersheds. Robert Stolz argues that by forcefully demonstrating the mutual penetration of humans and nature, industrial pollution biologically and politically compromised the autonomous liberal subject underlying the political philosophy of the modernizing Meiji state. In the following decades, socialism, anarchism, fascism, and Confucian benevolence and moral economy were marshaled in the search for new theories of a modern political subject and a social organization adequate to the environmental crisis. With detailed considerations of several key environmental activists, including Tanaka Shozo, Bad Water is a nuanced account of Japan's environmental turn, a historical moment when, for the first time, Japanese thinkers and activists experienced nature as alienated from themselves and were forced to rebuild the connections. "Bad Water is a vitally important study of the growing incidence of recognizable pollution of the environment in Japan's late Meiji period (1890s-1900s). It is both a Prescient and penetrating critique of the costs of the country's modernizing transformation and a withering assault on the political paradigm that informed it. Above all else, Robert Stolz has constructed a brilliant critique of the price extracted by the country's liberal endowment and, by extension, by liberalism everywhere." "In Bad Water, Robert Stolz has created a fascinating, complex synthesis of intellectual history, environmental studies, and critical theory. The book will speak to readers interested in capitalist modernity, the dialogue between the cosmopolitan and the local production of knowledge, and social movements and the possibilities of criticism. Thoughtful and provocative, it is a superb book and one that I expect will be widely read." Book jacket.

Contents:

A decade of leaks

Pollution and peasants at the limits of liberalism

Nature over nation : Tanaka Shōzō's environmental turn

Natural democracy

The original green company : Snow Brand Dairy

Conclusion : Bad water, a theoretical consideration

Appendix. Tanaka and Kōtoku's Appeal to the Meiji Emperor.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 211-257) and index.

ISBN:

9780822356905

0822356902

9780822356998

0822356996

OCLC:

860755383