Reviewed by: Becoming One: Religion, Development, and Environmentalism in a Japanese NGO in Myanmar by Chika Watanabe David Fedman (bio) Becoming One: Religion, Development, and Environmentalism in a Japanese NGO in Myanmar. By Chika Watanabe. University of Hawai'i Press, Honolulu, 2019. xiv, 238 pages. $68.00, cloth; $28.00, paper. To travel across Southeast Asia today is to encounter Japanese developmental assistance in its many guises. Behind major programs of reforestation and land reclamation lie Japanese experts, many of them dispatched by the Japanese government as standard bearers of "green development." Where there are dams, bridges, and other monumental feats of engineering, there have often been Japanese technical advisors. This is to say nothing of the dense network of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and humanitarian aid groups, which stand on the front lines of sweeping programs of agricultural improvement. And yet, despite the robust presence of Japanese organizations across Southeast Asia, we still know precious little about their activities on the ground. To date, Japan's postwar role in the region has been assessed primarily in round sums of foreign aid. It is no secret that the Japanese government has poured considerable amounts of official development assistance into the region as part of an ongoing effort to promote its own economic and geopolitical interests. We know further, thanks to a growing body of work by political ecologists, that these links have had, for both good and ill, profound environmental consequences. What remains to be asked is how aid organizations have promoted Japan's own traditions of environmental stewardship and to what effect on local communities and the landscapes that surround them. It is precisely for this reason that Chika Watanabe's new book is such a fresh and welcome contribution. Becoming One is, at its core, a case study of Japan's oldest and largest NGO: the Organization for Industrial, Spiritual, [End Page 506] and Cultural Advancement (OISCA). Blending ethnographic methods and historical research, Watanabe charts the rise of OISCA from a littleknown religious sect in the 1960s to a sprawling international aid organization today, with field sites scattered across Asia, Africa, and South America. The anchor point of her analysis, however, is Myanmar, specifically, the agricultural training center in Yesagyo Township. More than simply profile the operations of this single facility, Watanabe uses this site as a lens into the wider world of OISCA, situating its staff and operations within a tangled web of institutions and ideologies. As its subtitle suggests, Becoming One casts a wide net of inquiry. Moving between discussions of religious doctrine, agronomic policy, and institutional politics, the book operates on multiple registers. Binding these issues together, however, is what Watanabe calls the "moral imagination of aid work," the spiritual convictions, political persuasions, and environmental discourses mobilized by OISCA in its quest to create a better world (p. 12). This moral imagination was at once intimately local and broadly universal. It called for, at the local level, social cohesion, resource conservation, and the reverence of nature. Yet it also rested on assumptions about the global ecological community, ideas that bound the work of OISCA to universalist discourses about sustainability and eco-friendly development. These two notions of "becoming one"—the harmonious hamlet and the verdant planet—are the ideological axes around which the work of OISCA revolves. The book is comprised of six core chapters, each tackling a different dimension of OISCA's moral imagination. Watanabe begins in chapter 1 with an overview of the origins of OISCA and the worldview of its founder, Nakano Yonosuke. This is not simply an institutional history. In narrating the emergence of OISCA, Watanabe elucidates a subtle but pervasive tension in its organizational culture—the fact that many members speak of its religious roots in whispers. Why is it, she asks, that members of this group are so committed to a nonreligious public face? This was not always the case. Early on, OISCA operated as an expressly religious organization, one inseparable from the eclectic spiritual project of its creator—Ananaikyō, a new sect Shintō organization. Shifts in public perceptions of these religious groups spelled trouble for OISCA, however. Especially in the wake of the Aum Shinrikyō sarin gas attack in...
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Jun 25, 2024
Debasish Nandy 
Open Access