'Yanakagaku': Pollution and environmental protest in modern Japan

The main body of the dissertation explores of a range of new political, social, epistemological and material issues that emerged with Japan's first industrial-scale pollution incident in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Centering on the thought of Tanaka Shozo (1841-1913) it explores his discovery of a finite nature vulnerable to human practice. Central to this is his environmental philosophy of doku (poison) and nagare (flow) developed, after his famous appeal to the emperor in 1901, and in polemic with the Meiji state's reengineering 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 the tradition of an infinite and optimistic concept of nature by identifying doku as both a conceptual and historical intervention into the Japanese discourse on nature and as the key for understanding Japanese modernity. The result is a discovery of a finite nature that may go into decline and an attempt to formulate an ecologically informed system of a continuously managed concept of freedom located in a finite nature-as-environment and centered on the concept of healthful flows (nagare) and harmful metabolisms ( doku). The dissertation concludes with a look at Tanaka's influence on the anarchist Ishikawa Sanshiro and the founder of Snow Brand Dairy, Kurosawa Torizo.