Details

ISBN-10: 0822356996
ISBN-13: 9780822356998
Publisher: Duke University Press
Publish Date: 04/04/2014
Dimensions: 8.90" L, 6.00" W, 0.60" H

Bad Water: Nature, Pollution, and Politics in Japan, 1870-1950

Paperback

Price: $26.95

Overview

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 Shōzō, 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.

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Reviews
"The author presents important material that is new to environmental history, to intellectual history as well as to studies of Japan. He shows that Japan has a long history of environmental disasters and gives some sense of why this has been so. His individual case studies (Tanaka, Ishikawa and Kurosawa) are well selected. And his conclusions about the limitations of liberal democracy and of liberalism in any form are illuminating, thoughtful accurate and sobering. Nature does not care whether politicians or a majority of the population they lead recognize the greater frequency of extreme weather–including global warming–or not. These things are happening and surely require a far stronger response than any counter-measures that have been proffered up to now."­–James Bartholomew "TLS"
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Details

ISBN-10: 0822356996
ISBN-13: 9780822356998
Publisher: Duke University Press
Publish Date: 04/04/2014
Dimensions: 8.90" L, 6.00" W, 0.60" H
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