The emergence of a modern Japan in the late 1800s involved struggles to define what it meant to “be modern” and what it meant to “be Japanese.” Vivian Blaxell's essay explores this issue of identity formation through a focus on the transformation of the island that we now know as Hokkaidō. The term “Hokkaidō” dates to 1869 when it was so named by the Meiji government. These northern reaches used to be known as Ezochi and were inhabited by the Ainu, indigenous people who considered themselves distinct from “the Japanese” (wajin) who populated the lands to their south. Blaxell examines the incorporation of Ezo-turned-Hokkaidō into modern Japan, a process that she frames as Japan's first colonial acquisition, with particular attention to the built and natural environments. While considering Blaxell's argument about how ideas of modernity and national identity were revealed and extended by the manipulation of space, note the various kinds of space discussed in the essay and how Blaxell approaches and views what “being Japanese” meant for Hokkaidō.

Not unlike the ways in which early Meiji-era Japanese extended their gaze northward to Hokkaidō in the interest of modernization, in the early decades of the twentieth century, various people became interested in Hokkaidō's alpine landscape informed by a belief in science and technology as the embodiments of modernity and progress. Be it government officials who wanted to develop the land or elite mountaineers who thought that science could help them overcome the challenges of nature, the story of alpinism told by David A. Fedman is one of Hokkaidō's scientific and cultural incorporation into Japan and the conquest of the natural world by modern science. Reading Blaxell's and Fedman's essays together, the authors share a concern with how modernity shaped the relationship between people and the natural world and how this was manifested in the dynamics between Hokkaidō and the rest of Japan. Because they deal with slightly different time periods, the two pieces also raise questions about the extent to which attempts by the state and those outside of Hokkaidō to tame the environment of this northernmost main island was characterized by continuity in concerns, approaches, and aims.

Blaxell and Fedman make reference to the displacement and deculturation of Ainu in the process of Hokkaidō's incorporation into modern Japan. Indeed, the assimilation of Ainu resulted in what some have characterized as near “cultural extinction” and provoked enduring worries about the loss of Ainu identity as mixed marriages between Ainu and Japanese increased; practices in clothing, housing, and food became more Japanese; and the Ainu language fell out of daily use. In response, there have been attempts, especially since the 1970s to protect, revive, and promote Ainu culture. Kayano Shigeru (1926-2006) was a prominent conservationist of Ainu culture who, in 1999, offered in a children's book an adaptation of an Ainu kamuy yakur, a song of gods and demigods. Or more precisely, a yakur is an epic poem that draws on Ainu oral traditions, and kamuy are spirit forces that are believed to control the visible universe. This particular kamuy yakur, translated into English by Kyoko Selden, is about an encounter between Pikatakamuy, the goddess of the wind, and Okikurmi, the guardian god of the Ainu. Consider this song as a primary source that speaks to Ainu views of gods, nature, and the relationship between humans and nature. And compare this to the understandings of the natural environment that were discussed in the Blaxell and Fedman essays, with sensitivity to both resonances and tensions. Kayano Shigeru wore many hats as a promoter of Ainu culture. In one significant legal case he became an environmental activist against the construction of the Nibutani Dam on the Saru River in Hokkaidō during the 1990s. Like many environmental activists in Japan over the last century, one inspiration was Tanaka Shōzō, profiled in the next essay.

In this essay, Robert Stolz takes us back to the Meiji period to examine the ideas of an early environmental activist, Tanaka Shōzō. Stolz describes Tanaka as a “modern environmental thinker” whose theory of the relationship between “poison” and “flow” informed his Meiji-era activism against both the Ashio Cooper Mine's pollution of rivers and the Meiji state's designs for flood control on the Kantō plain. Tanaka's concern with humanity's relationship to nature should be read alongside the attitudes of his contemporaries discussed in the Blaxell and Fedman essays. In addition, Stolz's discussion of how Tanaka's ideas might be relevant to present-day controversies over dams enables a consideration of how state efforts to control nature have, and have not, changed over the course of the modern period.

Julia Adeney Thomas takes us beyond Japan to the nearby Korean peninsula to consider the broadly significant issue of the relationship between human beings and nature through the particular and unusual case of a space with minimal human intervention: the Korean Demilitarized Zone, or DMZ. Thomas focuses on this strip of land—over 2 miles wide and about 160 miles long—that runs roughly along the 38th parallel that separates North and South Korea. Heavily militarized along each border, this buffer zone of 64 million square feet is hostile to and barren of much human life. This has made it a space unique in its relative absence of human intervention that has become, quite by accident, a refuge for wildlife. In contrast to the other essays discussed in this volume, Thomas explores a lack of human intention and action vis-à-vis the environment, and asks how deliberate human action might now preserve an ecosystem that was created without design. Also, in a more methodological vein, she poses questions about how the complexities and contingencies of environmental history challenge the foundations of the discipline of history.

Owing to its diverse geology, geography and climate, Japan is a country rich in biodiversity. However, as a result of accelerated development over the last century, and particularly the post-war decades, Japan's natural environments and the wildlife which inhabit them have come under increased pressure. Now, much of Japan's natural forest, wetlands, rivers, lakes and coastal environments have been destroyed or seriously degraded as a consequence of development and pollution. Despite increasing awareness of the importance of preserving Japan's remaining natural environments and wildlife, habitat destruction (both direct and indirect), inadequately controlled hunting, and introduced species pose a threat to these. This paper explores these factors, and the underlying forces—political, legislative and economic—which have undermined efforts to preserve Japan's natural heritage during the post-war decades.

In the 1950s, residents of the small fishing village of Minamata on the southern island of Kyūshū began to fall ill with a disease (later named Minamata disease) that caused damage to the central nervous system, physical disfiguration, abnormal pregnancies, and death. Investigations revealed what is now one of the most well-known cases of environmental pollution in Japan's, and indeed the world's, modern history—from 1932 to 1968, the Chisso Corporation manufactured the chemical acetaldehyde, used to make plastics, with a mercury catalyst that it had been dumping as industrial waste into Minamata Bay. The chemical company's poisoning of the marine ecosystem of the Shiranui Sea and the residents of its fishing communities is a story not just of industrial pollution, but also of civic activism. The physically damaged victims and their supporters, angered by ongoing evasion of responsibility by both Chisso and the government, pressed for redress and humane treatment in a legal battle that has continued in some form until the present day. In his essay, Eric Johnston outlines the history of this effort and offers thoughts about the legacies and ongoing struggles of Minamata 50 years after the first case of Minamata disease was officially reported in 1956. He also suggests how the unfolding story of Minamata was shaped by the interests and power of various constituencies such as activist citizens, the Ministry of the Environment, and the Chisso Corporation, and how this past has influenced memories of the environmental and humanitarian disaster.

The mercury discharged into the sea by the Chisso factory in Minamata, and the radiation released by the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, are not entirely different “accidents,” although one was the result of a “natural disaster” and one not. Minamata offers hints of future developments as Japan attempts to respond to and recover from Fukushima.

UI Jun (1932-2006) was well known as an environmental activist and scholar. He was working at the University of Tokyo when Minamata came to light and was frustrated by his colleagues’ disregard for his findings that methyl mercury caused the disease. He went on to research other forms of water pollution, and in 1986 moved to Okinawa where he became a vocal critic of the environmental degradation caused by the U.S. military bases there. This essay, which was published in Japanese in 2003, should be read as a primary source authored by a citizen activist. Note how Ui not only describes some of the environmental issues relevant to the U.S. military presence, but also criticizes how the Japanese government has handled them.

Like Ui Jun, Miyume TANJI examines the environmental and economic effects of the disproportionately large U.S. military presence on Okinawa from the bottom up—in this case, through the lens of one village on the west coast of Okinawa. Tanji too is concerned with the various influences of the U.S. military on local communities in Okinawa, but subtly pushes back against a narrative of victimization and is ultimately a bit more hopeful in tone than Ui. This is because she focuses on the village of Yomitan, unique among Okinawan villages in its success at not becoming a base-dependent service economy. Tanji offers Yomitan as a model, because it has attempted since the 1970s to resist both the environmental and economic challenges presented by local dependence on U.S. military bases through sustainable and endogenous community development.

In the aftermath of the nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant precipitated by the earthquake and tsunami in March of 2011, the environmental risks of atomic power might seem obvious. Nuclear disasters have caused radiation sicknesses and death, poisoned the natural environment and its inhabitants, and jeopardized food safety. The construction of nuclear power plants has involved forest clearing, sea refilling, and other human alterations of the environment. Nuclear power plants themselves require monitoring of gaseous and liquid radioactive effluents and the contamination of nuclear waste. The assumption that Japan, having experienced first-hand the devastating capabilities of atomic power, should have understood these potential dangers has prompted questions about how the country came to allow the construction of nuclear reactors on its soil. How did the atom come to be viewed as safe and productive, rather than dangerous and destructive?

Yuki Tanaka and Peter J. Kuznick address these questions by focusing on the pivotal decade of the 1950s, when President Eisenhower's “Atoms for Peace” campaign sought to convince skeptics about the potential of peaceful atomic power. Considered together, these two articles also speak to contradictions and resistance in Japanese attitudes toward nuclear power, ironies in the role of the U.S. in influencing such views, and the dynamics of the U.S.-Japan relationship during this immediate postwar decade. Note the absence of discussions about the environmental impact of nuclear power at a time before the expansion of the industry in the 1970s and the Chernobyl disaster of 1986.

In the aftermath of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a majority of Japanese people came to see nuclear power as safe and productive even as there were misgivings about nuclear weapons. President Eisenhower's attempts in the 1950s to convince people about the potential of peaceful nuclear power were quite successful and, especially compared to carbon fuels, nuclear energy was considered a relatively inexpensive and environmentally friendly way for Japan to achieve energy self-sufficiency. Robert Jacobs’ essay reminds us of the important distinction between responses to nuclear energy, and to nuclear weapons, in the wake of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The atomic bombings left room for optimism about the future of nuclear energy, but they also reinforced pessimism about the future of nuclear weapons. Jacobs examines how Western editorial cartoons from the 1940s and 1950s that responded to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki gave birth to the visual icon of the whole earth. Well before photographs of the whole earth became a part of the cultural lexicon in the late 1960s, these cartoon renderings shaped how the earth came to be viewed and understood as a target and victim of nuclear weapons and war. Jacobs stresses the importance of the visual in environmental history, and underscores themes interwoven through many of these essays including the interconnectedness between present debates and battles over the past, and the multi-national or transnational nature of many environmental issues.

One might expect that the nuclear disasters at Chernobyl in 1986 and Fukushima in 2011 would have fundamentally shifted conversations about the environmental safety and desirability of nuclear power; claims made in the immediate aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki about the harmless and peaceful atom would have had to evolve to account for the environmental and human devastation caused by these two events. Yet there has been a striking degree of consistency in the scientific arguments made by proponents of nuclear power, as Gayle Greene reveals in this essay. Greene takes aim at the science marshaled by advocates of nuclear power and at media coverage that she suggests has allowed misunderstandings about the safety of nuclear power to endure. Reading this essay alongside the newspaper articles it discusses will illuminate the contours of the scientific debate about the health effects of both nuclear disasters and the kind of low-dose, radiation exposure over time that comes from working in the industry, living close to a reactor, or coming into contact with winds, groundwater, or food contaminated by nuclear waste. Greene reminds us about the historical and contemporary disagreements about the dangers to the environment and people posed by nuclear power, and takes a side in this debate with her plea to appreciate fully the human costs at stake.

As discussed in Greene's essay, the belief in the safety of nuclear power has historically been quite strong. Jeff Kingston picks up this idea in his piece, characterizing the faith in absolute safety a “myth” that blinded the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) and the Japanese government to the potential dangers of nuclear power. The story that Kingston tells is about how environmental events in the form of an earthquake and tsunami together with human error caused a disaster with grave environmental and human consequences. He argues that the power of an idea, the inadequate knowledge of politicians, and the vested interests of bureaucrats and businessmen resulted in a lack of attention to environmental risks and shortcomings in emergency procedures. Or to put it more pointedly, TEPCO and government regulators failed for a variety of reasons to take seriously the risks of a tsunami or earthquake and to respond adequately to the dangers of radiation. Kingston's essay also prompts us to remember the privileged position from which historians think and write about the past, with the benefit of hindsight, when convincing ideas have been revealed as myth and human failings have been exposed by catastrophe.