Chapter 5 - Standing on the Earth

Summary

Tanaka Shōzo, the “martyr of domin seikatsu”, spent the last years of his life in the company of a few inhabitants of Yanaka who defied the government's expropriation order by remaining on the site of the village. Together, they were attempting to “stand on the earth”. But already by 1907, with Yanaka virtually eradicated and most of its population displaced, there was little chance that such tactics of resistance would ever be successful. People who knew of his obstinacy saw Tanaka as an eccentric old man, a foolish dreamer overcome by the forces of modernity.

Yet, two things have to be said about his actions during the decade or so that preceded his death in 1913. First, one may think of Tanaka's stance during those years as the last breath of his utopian vision, one that would have allowed peasants to stand on the earth in equality and freedom, while being mindful of nature's lessons. As such, Tanaka's efforts to restore dignity to the people of Yanaka belong to a long list of idealistic endeavours designed to improve the human condition that ultimately failed. Second, despite the perception of unreasonableness these actions conveyed, their legacy is shaping present day discourse relating to environmental politics. Yanaka disappeared from the map, but not so the significance it has held ever since as a symbol of the tensions inherent in the man-nature interaction.

When Ishikawa Sanshirō contributed in 1925 to the establishment of the Nōmin Jichikai, a network of farmers’ self-governing councils, he participated in a similar project of standing on the Earth. And, similarly, he formulated a vision that would prove utopian in conception and implementation. In late 1920s Japan, it was a highly ambitious, indeed far-fetched project to facilitate the replacement of tenant farmers with a population of small-scale independent cultivators, all connected to each other through unions and cooperatives, and engaged in artistic activities as both consumers and producers.

Not surprisingly, the Nōmin Jichikai disbanded in 1928 following irreconcilable differences amongst its founding members. And, unlike Yanaka, its brief existence is barely remembered today, not least because historians have tended to conflate it with other expressions of popular agrarianism of the 1920s and early 30