The Critical Heritage of Japanese Geography: Its Tortured Trajectory for Eight Decades

Abstract

In Japan, critical geography has been practised for eight decades: since the 1920s when poverty and the miserable condition of labour and peasants instigated Japanese social scientists to adopt Marxism. The critical heritage began with importing works by German Marxist and soviet scholars, followed by criticism of the geopolitical ideologies that supported the militarist regime and the war of aggression. Besides them, the general orientation of critical geography before World War 2 remained mainly exceptionalist. Critical geographers gained momentum in the course of the democratisation process after World War 2, and they consolidated themselves by forming one of the earliest alternative organisations of geography, the Japan Association of Economic Geographers. Although the trend of exceptionalism persisted, some attempts to theorise critical geography emerged in the late 1960s to early 1970s. Noboru Ueno's work Chishigaku no Genten (The ultimate origin of chorography) (1972, Taimeido, Tokyo), for example, integrated the tenets of Marxism and phenomenology into a theoretical body of Marxist chorography that dealt with alienation of the indigenous fishers from the neighbouring sea, which was polluted with mercury from industrial waste. Yet, the advent of Toshifumi Yada's chiiki kozo ron (theory of regional structure) in 1973 (see Yada, 1990 Chiiki Kozo no Riron [The theory of regional structure] Mineruba Shobo, Kyoto) and its subsequent domination in the circle of once-critical geographers of a younger generation shattered further development of the critical heritage. The general orientation of geographers in Japan has become much more conservative and lost the intellectual power to come to terms with the growing critical trend among international geographers. At the same time, Japanese social scientists outside geography started to adopt the conceptions of critical geography developed abroad, bypassing the Japanese geographers' circle. It was not until the early 1990s that a group of critically minded geographers set out their endeavour to revitalise the critical heritage of geography afresh, to create their own conceptions of critical geography in close association with an international group of critical geographers.