Robert Stolz. Bad Water: Nature, Pollution, and Politics in Japan, 1870–1950.

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Like Caesar's Gaul, Robert Stolz's Bad Water: Nature, Pollution, and Politics in Japan, 1870–1950 is divided into three parts: intellectual history, environmental studies, and critical thought from Karl Marx to Harry D. Harootunian. The author aims to explore “Japan's environmental turn, a broad historical moment [at the end of the nineteenth century] when Japanese thinkers and activists experienced nature as alienated from themselves and were forced to rebuild the connections” (p. 6). He then asks, “What sort of conceptions of nature can be the basis of a new politics adequate to the environmental crisis?” (p. 10). The most sustained and original parts of this deeply researched, relentlessly argued volume address the environmental ideas of the reformer and ecologist Tanaka Shōzō (1841–1913), the journalist and anarchist Ishikawa Sanshirō (1876–1956), and Kurosawa Torizō (1885–1982), founder of Snow Brand Dairy, for many years Japan's largest. Starting in 1877 the Ashio Copper Mine north of Tokyo contaminated the Watarase and Tone Rivers with copper waste and, during repeated floods in the 1890s, polluted nearby lands worked by hundreds of thousands of farmers. The earliest of modern Japan's environmental disasters, Ashio prompted Tanaka to make “a key breakthrough in environmental thought when he argued that humans could neither transcend nature nor completely control it” (p. 15). Until the early 1890s Tanaka was a loyal member of the Constitutional Reform Party “committed to Japan's modernization,” but once he confronted the Ashio crisis, his career thereafter showed “the limits of liberalism and its autonomous, private individual to deal with the unprecedented horrors of industrial pollution” (p. 66). In speeches to the national parliament (Diet) Tanaka argued that “the government has been completely overrun by the private power of the Furukawa zaibatsu,” owners of the Ashio mine (p. 71), leading to Tanaka's theory of “national death” (bōkokuron) in which a public Japan no longer existed; instead corruption, bribery, and private gain now ruled. In 1901 Tanaka and the socialist Kōtoku Shūsui (1871–1911) made a quixotic appeal (jikiso) to the Meiji emperor to remove the poisoned earth and make the Watarase River pure again. When this petition failed, Stolz notes, Tanaka abandoned “Meiji liberalism to develop a radical environmental politics” (p. 79).