Turbulent Streams: An Environmental History of Japan's Rivers, 1600–1930 by Roderick I. Wilson

Abstract

Reviewed by: Turbulent Streams: An Environmental History of Japan's Rivers, 1600–1930 by Roderick I. Wilson Mark Metzler (bio) Turbulent Streams: An Environmental History of Japan's Rivers, 1600–1930. By Roderick I. Wilson. Brill, 2021. xiv, 294 pages. €94.00, cloth; €94.00, E-book. Roderick Wilson's Turbulent Streams is the first major study in English of the history of Japan's rivers. It focuses primarily on riparian works and the complex state-society-environment interactions they involve. Secondary focuses include river transport, river communities, fishing, and irrigation, and for the modern period, the social dynamics of engineering and policy. Geographically, it centers on the radical transformations of the Tone River system on the north side of Edo/Tokyo but also has much to say about the Yodo River system in the Kansai region, about other Japanese rivers, and about river engineering internationally. The book introduces multiple bodies of relevant scholarly literature on subjects ranging from the nature of the [End Page 162] Tokugawa state to the development of modern hydrology and civil engineering. Wilson's careful attention to the literature in Japanese and English and to questions of method and approach are present throughout. Altogether this is an important new contribution to the fast-developing field of Japanese environmental history and has major implications for the urban history of Edo/Tokyo especially. Wilson's approach to environmental history focuses on webs of environmental relations and describes human environments as places that are always in the making. To illustrate this approach, the book opens with a brief history of the former Ogura Lake, which was a wide, shallow lotus-filled lake south of Kyoto. Well represented in literature and art, Ogura Lake was a place of dense and diverse human activity, a kind of marshy "satoyama" landscape whose usage resembled that of Lake Biwa's former lagoons as described in the path-breaking analysis by Shizuya Sano. 1 Villagers dredged lake-bottom muck and used it as fertilizer, and the lake was a rich resource for fishing and for harvesting reeds and water chestnuts. As a result of the great Yodo River re-engineering project of the 1890s–1910s, it became stagnant and malarial. Ultimately it was decided to entirely fill the lake and its surrounding marshes. This was completed by 1941, creating 2,300 hectares of rice fields. Here as later, however, Wilson does not tell a simple story of decline and loss, explaining that Ogura Lake itself had long since been reshaped and recreated by human action, most notably after 1594 when Hideyoshi ordered the Uji River to be rerouted in order to construct the castle town and river port of Fushimi. The regimes the lake operated under for 250 years were varied in their goals and in their environmental and social effects. Close historical analysis of these changes will help us understand what questions to ask when it comes to planning and managing large-scale coupled human-natural systems and will widen our imagination concerning their multiple possibilities. The book is divided into two major sections, the first on the period of Tokugawa rule from 1600 to 1868 and the second on the first part of the modern period, from 1868 into the 1930s. It concludes with some discussion of the years since then. By taking in such a wide span of time, Wilson's work provides rich material for macrohistorical analysis, and in the spirit of offering a review that furthers the discussion Wilson has opened, I'll focus here on some points concerning long-run regimes in river governance and the limits they encounter. One could describe this history as a long Tokugawaera river-control cycle followed by the first phase of a long modern cycle. [End Page 163] Wilson's detailed analysis of Tokugawa-era river works is essential to his larger argument. How was it possible, in terms of supply and logistics, for the shogunal capital of Edo to grow from a fishing village into what was probably the world's largest city in 1700? This book offers some answers by elucidating the development of the Kanto region as a supply zone, with riverboat transportation being a basic part of...