A DECADE OF LEAKS

Thought lags behind nature.

—GILLES DELEUZE AND FÉLIX GUATTARI, A Thousand Plateaus

The third decade of Meiji, the 1890s, is supposed to have been a time of consolidation and control. It was the decade of the constitution and the Diet, the end of the violence of the popular rights and liberty movement (jiyuminken undo, 1874–84). It was the departure from Asia, military victory over Qing China, the replacement of foreign experts with highly trained Japanese, the extension of sovereignty over Okinawa and Hokkaido, and the beginning of the end of the unequal treaties. At worst, the 1890s are seen as having been a transitional period, the last gasp of the Tokugawa Era before the "traditional" finally gave way to the "modern." In short, the 1890s are supposed to have been the end of the irrationality of feudalism and the beginning of the enlightened institutions of modern life. In the first decades of Meiji, nearly every aspect of life was judged against modern, rational, scientific standards and, when necessary, reformed. Central to this project was the production of a new Japanese subject unbound by the "backward, feudal" practices of the past, an idealized, autonomous individual who identified with the new nation. Doubly liberated from the feudal past by national revolution and from enslavement to nature by capitalist industrialization, the new Japanese subjects joined together and worked to build a nation of "civilization and enlightenment," a "rich nation [with a] strong army." By 1895, the new nation had defeated the long-venerated Chinese, established a colonial presence in Korea and Taiwan, obliterated distance with the beginnings of a national rail and telegraph network, and banished night with the new gas lamps of Tokyo. To all the world, Japan and the Japanese seemed on the cusp of the long-promised rational modernity. Things seemed so secure that even a previously terrifying nature was readmitted into modern life, this time as (national) landscape, to be gazed upon and internalized as Japaneseness itself. But with the emergence of industrial-scale pollution at the Ashio copper mine northwest of Tokyo, the material nature and material bodies that Meiji ideology had worked so hard to transcend returned and started causing new problems. It soon became clear that nature had been transcended only in thought.

If we consider what was happening in material nature, in the environment, in the 1890s, the entire narrative of stability and control breaks down. There nothing was certain. Nothing could be taken for granted. If we include the environment in our narratives of modern Japan, the dislocations and instability of the third decade of Meiji put the struggles of the 1880s and even the chaos of the bakumatsu-ishin period to shame. Despite the way Obata Tokujiro and his colleagues struggled to rationalize every aspect of life, and despite most Meiji historiography, the 1890s stood witness to a return of the strange. It is surely no coincidence, then, that in the 1890s historians have found few political appeals to a normative nature, though such appeals had been common during both the recent periods of natural rights theory and the social Darwinism of the 1880s. How could there have been many appeals to a normative nature, when nature was behaving in ways never seen before?

After the fifty-year, toxic floods of August 1890, and again after even larger flooding in 1896, antipollution activists got back to basics to try and find out what was going on. Across the Watarase and Tone watersheds they set up investigative committees, volunteer associations, new journals, and fact-finding groups. Their dogged pursuit of the Ashio pollutants eventually took them into nearly every corner of Meiji society, finding industrial effluent and its effects everywhere: from fish, to levee failures, to soil chemistry, to breast milk, to disease and poverty, and even to representative politics. In contrast to the attempted separation of humans and nature begun by Obata and friends in the 1870s and 1880s, the 1890s was a decade of leaks. The decade of leaks culminated in the muckraking journalist Matsumoto Eiko's ethnographic Sufferings of a Mine-Poisoned Land (Kodokuchi no sanjo, 1901–2), in which she documented the total breakdown of the legal, conceptual, and even physical walls built to separate the Meiji subject from a now-toxic environment. In Matsumoto's text the leaks became a flood and then an undifferentiated sea of toxins and misery. We shall see in the next two chapters that as the countless mutual penetrations of humans and nature grew harder to ignore, the autonomous subject in de pen dent of the environment of Meiji liberalism became harder to maintain. By 1900, the stage was set for a move away from the autonomous individual as the cellular form of society toward new forms of social organization that began with the environment. The growing doubts on—and later rejection of—the separation of humans and nature during the decade was at once a social, scientific, conceptual, and political move that signaled Japan's environmental turn, and the beginning of an environmental politics.

The Pure Bodies of Meiji Rationalism

In order to appreciate the urgency and importance of the environmental crisis of 1890s Japan, we must understand the extent to which the modern, liberal subject depended not only on the stability of Heaven in Fukuzawa's Gakumon no susume, but also on the stability of Earth in Obata's Tenpen chii. The environmental crisis of the 1890s was able to politically contaminate the Meiji subject precisely because that subject was an idealized and reified individual, imagined as an autonomous actor divorced from outside corruption, whether from the state, other actors, or the natural world. In most historiography, from Fukuzawa's "trends of the times" (jisei) to Kato Hiroyuki's evolutionary schema, the dominant view of the first two decades of Meiji has privileged time: linear development and modernization. In this rush to escape the Tokugawa dark ages and join the Western powers in modernity, Meiji thinkers sought a temporal rupture with the traditions of the past. But they sought a spatial rupture as well. Recent work on the ideologies of time and space in the Meiji period have explored the abandonment of the ethico-epistemological status of nature in the Tokugawa period in favor of "the acculturation of nature" in social Darwinism and the "emptying" of the "spaces of experience" that characterized the rise of the scientific approach to space in Meiji Japan. Further, recent Japanese environmental historiography by Julia Thomas and Brett Walker has shown that the age-old question of overcoming nature—from the Frankfurt School to Maruyama Masao to the Lecture School (Koza-ha) of Japanese Marxism—is the wrong question. Thomas's work on the multiple ideologies of nature in Japanese political philosophy, and Walker's examination of the inversion of attitudes toward the Japanese wolf in the Meiji period, show that nature is never transcended, merely reconceptualized.

If we adopt Henri Lefebvre's claim that each form of society constructs its own kind of space, we need to find out what the space of Meiji rationalism was and what sort of subject inhabited it. In the 1870s and 1880s, across the Meiji intellectual and ideological spectrum—including positivism, neo-Kantianism, social Darwinism, the abolition of usufruct (iriaiken) and the alienation of land, and the ambitious anticholera campaigns in the new discipline of public health—we can clearly see how in "health, wealth, and thought" Meiji rationalism constructed an idealized Japanese subject alongside an alienated nature. In exploring the role of the environment in Meiji rationalism, I want to supplement the period's numerous appeals to a normative (metaphysical) nature (social Darwinism, natural rights theory, natural law) with what historian of medicine Warwick Anderson has called "the transcendence of the natural body." By transcending the natural body, liberal political philosophy sought to create an ideal body with no (or only voluntary) relations with the outside world. This transcendence was accomplished through the epistemological, discursive, and (as much as possible) physical separation of the new political subject from the material environment. The reduction of an active nature to inert space cleared the ground, in some cases literally, for the production of the abstract, sterilized space of modern Japan that would serve as mere resources for accumulation, the raw materials for the production of a "rich nation [with a] strong army."

Though it is tempting to see Meiji Japan as some radical ecology does, as a tragic break from a premodern organic community to an anthropocentric and inherently destructive Western modernity, this view is very difficult to maintain. Further, as we shall see in later chapters, adopting this view sets up a politically dangerous dichotomy that sets a "naturalized" Japan against a "mechanistic" West. Although much good work has been done on the emergence of modern medicine in Japan and Asia, I will not focus on the history of medicine and the major breaks between the Tokugawa, miasma, and germ theories of disease. Although these clearly are important disciplinary ruptures within medicine, focusing on the differences veils a much longer, deeper process of alienation and reification of nature and humans that begins well before the Meiji Era. Despite their differences, both miasma and germ theories of disease represented a break from medicine as a neo-Confucian ethical practice in the Tokugawa period. Rather than studying this rupture as only a change in medical paradigms, I will look at the politics and the implications for political subjectivity that came of this rupture. The result, I argue, is that just as capitalist private property is the apotheosis of earlier partial alienation from the land, Meiji rationalism should be seen as the industrial capitalist apotheosis of a long trend that had been secularizing and reifying the natural world for over a century. Conrad Totman has shown the fundamental break with the metaphysical Tokugawa discourse on nature as infinite (shizenron) in his study of Tokugawa forestry. In Totman's work the infinite nature of shizenron is replaced with a finite nature of forestry management, making the Tokugawa discourse on the economics of forests a function of their scarcity. Federico Marcon's excellent recent study has further shown the clear reification of the natural world in the field of honzogaku (materia medica), beginning with the national surveys done under Yoshimune from 1735 to 1736. Already here we can see the process of commodifying individual species as they are ripped from their network of social and ecological relations to be idealized as discrete "species" existing in glorious isolation on the pages of lavishly illustrated natural history encyclopedias, ready for buying and selling. Some of this tradition came to influence Meiji policy directly from the Satsuma agronomist and theorist of national economic power, Sato Nobuhiro.

In religion numerous environmental ethics celebrate the Shinto—and therefore indigenous Japanese—intimacy with nature. But in fact, more often than not, Shinto conceived of nature as a horrifying realm of rot, decay, and disease—kegare and yomi—a place to be avoided at all costs. Indeed, if not ritually constrained, kegare can consume a kingdom, and great care was taken to protect the court and the capital from contamination. Well before the Meiji period, Shinto and folk medicine understood epidemic disease as the intrusion of "that world" (ano yo) into "this world" (kono yo). Contemporary rituals aimed at controlling and preventing epidemic disease (ekibyo matsuri) do not enact a philosophy of balance or harmony between worlds. Ekibyo matsuri were organized to prevent the forces of "that world" from entering the body and home. This included placing charms or shimenawa at the boundaries between inner and outer, especially doors and gates, to prevent infiltration across the thresholds. In short, far from an intimate connection to nature, ekibyo matsuri show clearly that "that world" and "this world" were two realms meant to be separated. Priests, geomancers, and people themselves made huge efforts to police these frontiers. Further weakening the hard break between a premodern Japanese nature and a modern Western one, ekibyo matsuri and kegare have much more in common with the similarly reductive miasma and germ theories of disease than with modern environmental thought or ethics. The "inescapable ecology" of the body-in-environment examined in later chapters was simply not part of this pre-Meiji discourse.

Nor should the long tradition of discourses on health, the countless Yojokun, be considered an early version of environmental politics. Contrary to an Orientalist environmental ethics that assumes an Asian intimacy with nature, the overwhelming majority of the Yojokun do not show a simple Taoist trust in nature's healing capabilities. Like the policing of boundaries by the shimenawa charms, most of these texts preach strengthening the individual body against external harm. Hashimoto Hakuju's Dandokuron (1810) explicitly called the body a battleground where health and disease fight, and if the body has been made strong through proper habits, the external, invading disease will be defeated. Another text warned that sickness-causing demons entered the body through the gap between finger and fingernail; it advised constant care of this area. The most famous Yojokun, too—Kaibara Ekiken's—was a guide to strengthening the individual body against the various poisons, dangers, and ill winds that lurked outside. Tellingly, in texts that focused on the relation between the body and nature, as in the neo-Confucian shizenron tradition, nature was an imagined and idealized realm, an infinitely fecund source of nourishing life, never the source of pollution and harm. Of course the nature of these shizenron texts was not the material environment of the Yojokun and kegare, but the wholly abstract, immaterial nature of metaphysics. As we have seen, it was this metaphysical nature that was adopted by Meiji natural rights theorists.

To sum up, Meiji "civilization and enlightenment" was less a clean break with an imagined premodern harmony between Japanese society and nature than the apotheosis of all these previous, partial reifications of humans and nature. In Henri Lefebvre's terms, we could say Meiji rationalism was the moment of inflection when the production of things in space gave way to the production of space itself—both internal and external. This means, of course, that the separation of the body from the environment in the creation of the modern subject was by no means limited to medicine or ritual practice. In fact, the separation of the human from the natural is the condition of possibility of the liberal subject, essential for it to carve out an autonomous, individual conscience protected from outside interference, first from nature and then from the state. This atomistic individual is what others have called the "bourgeois body," an enclosure that polices itself, maintaining a constant internal purity. Just as in the West, in Meiji Japan this separation was expressed as a new regime of knowledge centered on the individual psychological subject. Like the Tokugawa medical texts, the Meiji liberal metaphors are spatial and militarized. Indeed, defending the fortress of the individual conscience from state incursion is the explicit goal of Uemura Masahisa's General Psychology (Shinri ippan, 1884). Nishi Amane's even more ambitious Encyclopedia (Hyakugaku renkan, 1870) systematized all disciplines centered on the psychological subject. Though heavily influenced by Auguste Comte's Cours de philosophie positive (1830–42), Nishi broke with Comte's privileging of biology and the body as the basis of all science, replacing them with Mill's Logic and psychology (Nishi had discovered both Comte and Locke as a student in Leiden from 1862 to 1865). As a result of this substitution of psychology for biology, the natural sciences take up a very small and relatively unimportant part of the Encyclopedia, in which the natural world and the material body as the starting point of a system of knowledge is replaced with a mind-centered system. Nishi repeated Obata's Kantian separation of nature and politics by severing the material (butsuri) from the mental (shinri), preserving the latter for the realm of politics and values. He illustrated this separation by insisting on the qualitatively different and unrelated principles (ri) behind (subjective) good government and (objective) falling rain. Likewise, Meiji ethicists and moral philosophers Nishimura Shigeki, Nakashima Rikizo, and Inoue Tetsujiro followed a similar division of (natural) fact from (human) value in the construction of a national ethics. This Kantian divide was popularized in texts such as Nakamura Keiu's translation of Samuel Smiles's Self-Help (Saikoku risshi hen, 1870), a runaway Meiji best seller that had a deep impact on Tanaka Shozo. Self-Help was a series of biographies describing such self-made men as George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, the Duke of Wellington, and other individuals who were not only politically free subjects but also, through constant frugality, not beholden to anyone else through debt. Nakamura's introduction preached that it was one's attitude or spirit alone that defined one's relationship to the world and determined one's success or failure.