Nature over nation

Tanaka Shōzō's fundamental river law

Bibliographic Data

ID7837555
AuthorsRobert Stolz (University of Tennessee at Knoxville, corresponding author)
Year2006
Volume18
Issue3
Pages417-437
Publication date2006-11-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJapan Forum (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0955-5803 • E-ISSN: 1469-932X
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/09555800600951712
OpenAlexW2087841036
LanguageEN
References cited17

This article examines Tanaka Shōzō's fundamental river law (konponteki kasenhō) and the environmental philosophies of doku (poison) and nagare (flow), which Tanaka developed after his famous appeal to the emperor in 1901 and in polemic with the Meiji state's re-engineering of the Watarase and Tone watersheds. Although articulated in a Neo-Confucian vocabulary of principles (ri) and essences (sei) reminiscent of eighteenth-century agronomy and political economy, Tanaka's thought breaks from that tradition in identifying doku as both a conceptual and a historical intervention into the discourse on nature and as the key to understanding Japanese modernity. The result is a discovery of a natural freedom located in the environment and centered on the concept of nagare. Keywords: Tanaka ShōzōAshio copper minepollutionenvironmentalism-JapanPopular Rights Movementflood controlYanaka Acknowledgements I would like to thank Julia Adeney-Thomas, Brett Walker and Gregory Golley as well as the two anonymous reviewers at Japan Forum for their helpful suggestions and guidance. Notes 1. In this respect it is unfortunate that Conrad Totman's groundbreaking study on the Tokugawa forestry, The Green Archipelago, did not continue to examine changes brought on by Japan's great transformation. See CitationTotman (1989). 2. Also, in 1898, party politicians entered the cabinet for the first time, further reducing the efficacy of public-private/selfish distinctions. 3. On the Sakura legend as an example of peasant protest, see Walthall (1986, 1991). For Meiji Liberals' use of Sakura imagery, see CitationArai (2000), Kanai (Citation1998, Citation2003) and CitationFukuzawa (2002). 4. Friend and later biographer Kinoshita Naoe criticized Tanaka for encouraging the emperor to use extra-constitutional power. See CitationKinoshita (1902). 5. It is interesting to note that the Home Ministry ran not only the river projects, but also the better studied shrine mergers and local improvement movements, both of which also gave rise to variations of environmental protests. These relied strongly on the concept of Japanese nature and a national culture. 6. One notable exception was damage to forests due to toxic emissions from the refinery's smokestacks. It was determined that no technology existed which could remove all the sulphur dioxide from the smoke. When it found that the 1897 measures removed only 26 percent, the committee suggested building smokestacks that would reach above the mountaintops and the matter was dropped. Today citizens groups like the Ashio ni midori o tsukurukai are still experimenting with various plant varieties to try to find something that will grow in the sulphurous soils. 7. The decision to prepare for war with Russia was made in early 1903 just as the committee was coming to its conclusions (CitationMiura 2000). 8. Intended to make the Watarase and Tone rivers immune to flooding and therefore totally predictable and infinitely manageable, the proposals would sever the rivers from their watersheds, changing the water systems in a way riparian engineer CitationJeremy Purseglove (1988) calls the difference between a river and a drain. 9. In 1908, the area within the remaining levees, the village itself, was declared subject to the River Law as a way to evict the residents from their shacks. 10. Of those who did sell, many would ultimately end up, together with other Tochigi flood victims, in Saroma on the sea of Okhotsk in northern Hokkaido as part of a settlement initiative from 1907 to 1912, which sought to colonize the previously disputed northern frontier with Russia. The relocation to Hokkaido of the Watarase valley inhabitants was discussed during the twelfth meeting of the committee, in December 1902, which also suggested using compulsory purchase. Encouraging the Hokkaido relocation was invariably tied to years of severe Kanto flooding. See CitationMiura (2000). 11. In contrast to romantic notions of a retreat to nature, both nagare and doku exist as processes within history and not as an escape from history. This is different from cultural histories of Japanese views of nature, especially like those of the 1930–40s, most recently analyzed by CitationJulia Adeney-Thomas (2001). 12. According to Tanaka and Shimada, the 1907 rains were 5 shaku lower than in 1906 yet the Watarase was 1.5 shaku higher above Ashikaga and the Tone 2-3 shaku higher above Sekiyado (CitationTanaka 1989, 5: 237). (1 shaku = 30.3 cm.) 13. This critique also questions the separation of pollutants into soluble and insoluble forms adopted by the committee. Determining the level of pollution by abstracting to a yearly average regardless of season and timing in relation to agricultural production, rejected here by Tanaka, would continue to be a source of contention in the postwar period. See CitationSugai (1983). 14. Prior to this, the Tone became the Sumida River and the Omoi and Watarase flowed into the Edo River. Tanaka was not mistaken in seeing this link to military precaution, as Kumazawa Banzan's discussion of river management in his most famous work, Daigaku wakumon (Questions on The Great Learning [1687]) occurs in the context of his fear of a Manchu invasion for which he felt Japan was not prepared (CitationMcMullen 1979: 338). Kumazawa and Edo-era river managers are credited with diligent dredging and maintaining the width of the sluice at Sekiyado at forty ken. Meiji dredging policies, in Tanaka's estimation, were no more 40 to 50 per cent of Edo-era levels and Sekiyado had been narrowed to a mere nine ken. (1 ken = 1.82 meters.) 15. In other ways national death was part of Tanaka's vision from its emergence in his ‘national death speeches’ of 1900. These speeches deal with the loss of a public Japan that has been superseded by bribery and personal gain (kairakushugi). After the appeal to the emperor, when Tanaka begins his investigation of nature and the development of his thoughts on doku, national death becomes material as well as spiritual. 16. Though there is no room to explore them here, aspects of Christianity were also prominent in this new protest. During this period Tanaka attended a discussion group headed by Arai Ōsui (1836–1922) who had returned from the United States in 1900 after spending nearly thirty years at the Swedenborgian commune headed by Thomas Lake Harris (1823–1906) in up-state New York and later in Santa Rosa, California. Arai was introduced to the Harris commune when he traveled there together with Mori Arinori (1847–89) in 1873. A fascinating aspect of Tanaka's Yanakagaku is the fluidity of the concepts of water, Yanaka and Jesus Christ

Ancient history · Appeal · Appropriation · Economic history · Emperor · Heresy · Modernity · Peasant · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Chinese history and philosophy · History · Japanese History and Culture · Law · Philosophy

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