The Japanese Relationship to Nature: Notes from a Visitor
In an era of global climate change where human impact on biogeochemical systems is evident, it is important to consider how the human relationship with nature may be culturally expressed through material culture and the management of nature. As a three-month visitor from California to the Research Institute for Humanity and Nature (RHIN) in Kyoto in Fall 2017, I explored the Japanese relationship to nature. This is, of course, ambitious for such a short visit, but the following are a set of impressions and experiences, enhanced by Conrad Totman’s masterful Japan, An Environmental History (2014), writings by the eminent Japanese economic historian Kaoru Sugihara, and conversations with colleagues at RHIN. In the following I first provide an impressionistic perspective of the Japanese Relationship to Nature from observations and conversations, then move to examining an historical perspective based on limited reading, against my background in studies of land use and the environment in California.
The Contrast
What is striking overall is, from a Californian’s perspective, how uninterruptedly the Japanese have lived in and shaped their archipelago. California’s environmental history, in contrast, had a traumatic disruption when colonialists subjugated the indigenous populations and settled the land only recently. This has meant the new inhabitants treated the land as without history; it was a place where the landscapes, patterns and rhythms were unknown and unfamiliar to the new residents, settlers who came with preconceptions about how to engage with a foreign nature (Pincetl 1999). This entrained dramatic and quite destructive changes in the environment.
Fierce Intimacy
Superficially, in the first part of the 21st century, what can be observed in Japan is a fiercely intimate treatment and deep appreciation of nature as one explores the streets and parks of Kyoto and beyond, from the breathtaking Fall Chrysanthemum displays in the city’s botanical garden, to the carefully tended thousand-year-old temple gardens. Chrysanthemum growth patterns and varieties are exhaustively and specifically known. The varieties are chosen for the effect desired, trimmed, trained and pruned, some over several years. The bonsai tree-like forms, painstakingly and devotedly tended to grow on volcanic rock, roots trailing downward, anchoring the small yellow flowered plant, or the cascading Chrysanthemum variety trained to flow like rivers of color over horizontal trellises, show this remarkable relationship of the human to the plant, the way in which they respond to one another to create a specific beauty. In the temple gardens, or in parks of all the cities I visited this Fall, humans have created canopies of the different maples varieties to carefully overlap one another, creating a kaleidoscope of color from deep green to brilliant burnt oranges, each branch tended to create the proper effect. They sit against the dark green of pine or fir, spruce or cedar, nested, arranged and displayed to their best quality, with bright yellow Ginkos offering yet another shade of color and shape of tree. Growth habits of these trees are known from centuries of engagement, experimentation, replacing, cutting, encouraging and nurturing. And the crowds of Japanese who turn out to view the Fall displays are impressive, cameras pointed, zoom lenses trained; people are entranced by the spectacle of nature – a curated, manipulated, framed nature, fiercely trained for effect.
Another example of this forceful relationship includes, as RHIN scholar Daniel Niles so eloquently describes, includes the ancient charcoal making tradition (2017 in process). He writes about the techniques of forest and kiln management that come from intense physical labor, ecological knowledge, dexterity derived from a lifetimes’ worth of working the forest and the resource, and mindfulness about long-term sustainability of the resource. Steep mountain slopes, thick vegetation and just the right tree species all combine to yield, under strict management, the renowned and prized timber for the kishu binshotan charcoal used in the finest restaurants in the land. The techniques are labor intensive and involve a judicious above ground clear cutting, retaining enough of the sawtooth oak to ensure the roots are healthy and extensive, anchoring the mountainside, and for regeneration over a period of 15 years. This, of course, requires a fine understanding of the resource, a balance between the charcoal maker’s needs and the need of the resource and ecosystem to maintain themselves in collaboration over the long term (Niles op cit). The process of making the charcoal in kilns precariously placed on the hillside with bamboo chimneys and a specifically configured oven that can be fired and controlled to perfection is another aspect of this deep relationship to nature, to place, to its potentiality and commitment to its reproduction over time. The kilns are simple in their materials, but constructed with precision. The final product that takes about a week to make, is the result of careful, nearly hourly attention over the last 24-hour cycle, controlling the intensity of burning, the quality of the burn and so much more.
One could also point to the example of Senko Hanabi, an ancient form of Japanese firework from the Edo period (1603-1868) that is made of a long-twisted strand of paper with some pyrotechnic composition intertwined at one end. It is a sparkler that relies on a very limited set of constituents. However the source and quality of those materials must be just right, like the resin sourced from a specific pine, or the lampblack similarly sourced; these will produce the most appealing sparks. Many say that outside of Japan, the right resin/lampblack cannot be found as the pine’s growing conditions in Japan make for its perfect product. Further, Kozo (mulberry) or Gampi (Japanese Wickstroemia bush, obtained in the wild) paper, or long-fibre tissue papers are the best. Senko Hanabi has been described as a microcosm of life: the violence of birth, the growth of childhood, exuberance of youth, the productivity of middle age, the slow decline of old age, the fade away (or sudden disaster) of death (http://www.vk2zay.net/article/226, accessed 11.15.17). The refined beauty when it burns is considered one of the high arts of fireworks. One can see in Ukiyo-e woodblocks (16th – 19th century predominantly) Senko Hanabi being burned by women, for example, assembled around a table in semi-obscurity, admiring the display. Here too, the specific use and understanding of raw materials is vibrant and alive, a historic relationship to nature.
One final set of examples (of many that could be chosen) of the exceptional relationship to nature exhibited in Japan, can be seen in relatively recently built museums. The Sagawa museum (1998), known as the floating museum, is on Lake Biwa, the largest lake in Japan that supplies water to Kyoto and Osaka. It is a spectacular concrete building whose roof reminds one of a traditional thatched roof, floating in a moat of shallow water, reflecting the museum, trees and sky adjacent to the lake. The way it is situated shows that the light and shadow of the site were captured to beautiful effect. The I.M. Pei Miho (1996) museum is situated in the hilled forested countryside in Shiga Prefecture, not far from Kyoto. Much of the museum is nested in a carved out rocky mountain top, but lodged with respect and care to ensure that both nature and the building are enhanced by the interplay between the two, like the suspended bridge over a deep wooded gorge that one has to cross to accede to the entrance of the museum itself. Its location and perfection inspires awe. Finally, the museums (early 1990s) on Naoshima Island in the Inland Sea are also built to valorize the beauty of the location, but provide perplexing sets of juxtapositions that reveal the complexity of this nation’s relationship to nature and its economic vitality. The museums were developed by the heir of the Benesse Corporation as a desire to, in part, revitalize the economy on Naoshima, including the agricultural community by subsidizing traditional paddy rice agriculture, and by investing in 3 important museums designed by Tadao Ando. The museums are built on reclaimed contaminated land. The island is dominated by the giant Mitsubishi coal-fired smelter plant dedicated to recycling circuit board rare minerals and precious metals. Since the Chinese are backing out of recycling imported waste, the Japanese are moving to claim the market. Previously the plant was a premier metal smelting plant of long-standing. Traveling over on the ferry one sees a giant mountain of coal that serves to power the smelter nested in an excavated hill by the shore. Yet the museums themselves are also inserted into the landscape to the best effect of both, offering views out to the Inland Sea, plowed by the many container ships and fishing boats, an industrial, commercial Sea, including fish farming. Another intense, fierce and intimate set of relationships to nature. The Inland Sea still also carries a mythic and deep meaning for its beauty and mystery for the archipelago.
One could enumerate a number of examples of still active traditions. Silk thread making, dying and weaving, ceramics, knife making, and many more that rely on engaged and interactive working with regionally sourced primary materials. Japan’s remarkable 17th and 18th century reforestation, described in Totman’s Green Archipelago (1989), as well as the continuing tradition of intensive vegetable gardening and rice farming are all aspects of the Japanese relationship with nature. The forests, even around Kyoto, support bears, boars, deer and monkeys. Their historic biodiversity is returning, and people hike the woods, go to view the changing colors, harvest mushrooms. Yet, at the same time, the pace of land transformation from agriculture to urban is unrelenting and taking place on the scarce acreages that are suitable for agriculture in this steep land. The now thick and increasingly diverse forest resource is by and large uncultivated and neglected as the country imports timber from Indonesia where labor is cheaper, contributing to deforestation there. Whole regions of the country are becoming depopulated in favor of the Japan’s vast megacities, most especially Tokyo, the original global megacity. The contradictions and complexities are many, yet from the outside, the rich legacy and remaining knowledge is tangible and expressed through the concentrated and specific expressions, appreciations and co-production of Japan’s natural beauty. These activities demonstrate knowledge of place and result from traditional knowledge passed on generation-to-generation. And the primacy of form endures. In Japan function follows form, as RHIN colleague Hein Mallee points out. That means that symbolic expressions of the relationship to nature endure as in flower arranging that reflects the passing seasons. But these are precise connections and interactions, one could say they are specific, almost microscopic (Saito 1985), dwarfed in the larger impact and extent of industrialization on the country’s landscapes. One can imagine a future of preserved remote spots where vestigial practices of harvesting, cultivating, artisanal production remain, smothered by the larger infrastructures that support processes of urbanization, current economic structures and Japan’s global footprint.
Historical and Geographical Context
But, it is clear for this Westerner, that the processes in Japan’s development are significantly different due to a set of nested and interacting specificities that may also underlie an exceptional relationship to nature and the appreciation of the exquisite qualities of nature. Japan’s culture is shaped by the uniquely situated geographical location of the country: an archipelago that encompasses sub-Arctic to sub-Tropical climate zones and an extremely steep mountainous, erodible and forested land surface with constrained arable and buildable areas. An early history of hunters and gatherers that practiced some dry grain growing made way to rice and wet paddy agriculture, introduced by China. Setting aside an exhaustive recounting of Japanese environmental history so well elaborated by Totman (2014), several salient issues emerge, importantly highlighted and elucidated by Sugihara’s extensive writing about national and East Asian regional economic history. Sugihara highlights the importance of the region’s monsoonal climate enabling rice farming and the feeding of increasingly large populations (2017). He points out, that different from Europe, Japanese economic development and growth relied on a more thorough utilization of human resources through labor intensive technology and labor absorbing institutions (2003) and the increase of household ability to develop a collaborative mutuality with nature (Totman 2014). Utilizing women’s time more effectively by raising silk on the farm, fed by field cropped mulberry trees, and the spinning of silk in households, home workshop weaving, increased farm outputs and prosperity. Such activities and higher yields from rice, enabled population growth. Sugihara describes a distinctive East Asian path of growth through labor intensification, discipline and skill raising, without additional inputs of land and energy. This model involved better mobilization of human labor, rather than non-human resources, as occurred in the West with animal and then fossil energy inputs. Rural industries, facilitated by rural merchants who engaged in regional commerce, were critical to this evolution. There was little geographical specialization and coupled rural agricultural and industrial activity kept production distributed, and perhaps, more linked to the local resources rather than dependent on imported ones, or fossil energy. There was a high degree of technical and institutional sophistication.
Over time, as Totman (op.cit.) explains, purposeful resource sharing and management emerged, as well as reforestation to create a more sustainable forest resource base. Fisheries too became more regulated and freshwater fisherman began to raise carp in ponds, along with catfish, freshwater shrimp and other edible creatures (op cit p. 182). But by 1734 population growth was outstripping the scarce land resource. Infanticide and abortion were instituted to slow birth rates, and population remained stable between 1721 and 1846 (Sugihara 2003). Awareness of the need for population regulation as well as investment in reforestation in this period are additional examples of Japanese awareness of nature and its limits for human needs and sustainability. In contrast, Britain for example, deforested in the early-to-middle ages like Japan, but did not reforest. And instead of auto-regulating population, the English produced Thomas Hobbes who saw nature as ‘red in tooth and claw’, man [sic] as having insatiable desires and the state of nature being a war of all against all. English approaches to the ‘limits of nature’ were to immigrate to far-flung parts of the world and to colonize them to supplement local resources (a caricature, to be sure, but nonetheless there was no effort to control population growth in Britain or to intensify production through knowledge of local conditions).
Sugihara (2016) explains that the peasant household in Japan was the basic economic unit. Through a set of cultural and village institutions the household producers drove the rise of land productivity and strategies for labor absorption, including decisions on consumption, savings and reproduction. With a focus on raising levels of education, hygiene and cleanliness, the late Tokugawa period set the conditions for modern Japan (pg. 320) in the Meiji period. This is certainly a different trajectory than what occurred in Europe and in England in particular, with the enclosure movement and displacement of rural populations into cities, the development of large scale industries in the 18th century and the rise of the idea of poverty (Himmelfarb 1984). In Japan labor intensive agriculture and industry was supported by skilled labor, well trained labor and a very high work ethic. People stayed on the land and intensified the relationship with nature to extract place-based sustenance. This was not a country that imported much raw material for manufacturing like England did with cotton, silk and sugar, as well as luxury items.
As scholars have noted, after 1890 Japan entered into a new era: high population growth, greater mobility and rise of urban centers, high growth in technological innovation and a shift from intensive agriculture to an industrial society (Totman 2014:235). It became fossil fuel and global resource dependent. Urban populations grew. Tokyo surpassed 2 million in 1905 and by 1935 had 6.7 million inhabitants. Population numbers reflected much better public health. Hokkaido’s transformation from a wooded Northern enclave to an agricultural product exporting region including pelagic fish and fishmeal fertilizer dramatically transformed the island’s landscapes and seas. In fact, herring were fished to near extinction for their value as fertilizer for the rest of Japan. As the nation industrialized and urbanized, competition for its already scarce low land resource increased. Land suited for agricultural production was also best for urban and industrial expansion. Coastal areas were especially impacted with industry polluting bays depleting fisheries, pushing fishing out to the ocean. Coal resources of the nation were largely depleted by the 1930s – leading to oil imports -- but at the same time the country was one of the most electrified in the world.
Industrial growth in the country like everywhere else it was occurring, led to land and water pollution, increased throughput of materials like timber, the dramatic decline of coastal fisheries, the rise of environmental health problems and disease. Mining disrupted and polluted streams and exacted heavy tolls on worker health and safety, industry polluted agricultural lands and urban air and water. Fisheries pressure on pelagic resources increased due to coastal overfishing and pollution. Paper mills were having increasing impacts on water quality. Population, industrial and urban growth were dramatically changing the environment and the start of a rural to urban migration, leaving many country sides today, to management by the elderly (Totman 2014).
Japan’s early Twentieth century was, of course, also characterized by imperial campaigns in Asia to secure resources and political prominence. Post 1945 however, Japan’s industrial production and innovation was like none other the world had previously experienced. Drawing from the country’s strong skilled labor inheritance, a pattern of household labor as the basic economic unit, highly efficient management institutions and public-private enterprises, the country entered into a period of globally unprecedented economic growth. The American occupation’s imposition of a new constitution and reforms, and the highly educated workforce, created a relatively egalitarian relationship between management and labor and instigated an industrial revolution that was based on dramatically changed organizational dynamics (Totman 2014).
Modernity, Economic Growth and the Environment
The Japanese pioneered the use of the deep ship harbor for containerships, dramatically altering their shorelines, and developed the mechanization of docks for the loading and unloading of containerships with associated rail transport for distribution. The shift to oil for heavy industry, coupled with energy and time saving technologies put Japan at a global competitive advantage – just in time production -- for example, was a Japanese innovation. Ship-building, consumer electronics, passenger cars and high-technology industries such as computer, telecommunications and medical equipment industries all grew (Sugihara 2016: 322). State involvement in planning and financing of infrastructure, extensive use of sea transport and more, led Japan to global prominence. At the same time, this involved a dramatic shift to a regime that was more urban than ever before, capital and fossil fuel intensive. Japan became a leading exporter of pollution as this industrial model diffused throughout Asia. After a period of serious environmental degradation and public health scandals like the Minimata mine disaster of methylmercury and cadmium poisoning, health and environment impacts of toxic oil spills, Japan gradually developed environmental protection legislation over the course of the 1970s. Yet, as Totman soberly notes, many of Japan’s fisheries had already been destroyed and abandoned, and poisoned agricultural land was sold and converted to urban uses (2014: 265). Cultured seafood production has grown as a result but has not compensated for the loss of the resource to pollution, and both the number of farms and farming has dramatically declined with a growth in food imports which now constitute up to 60-70 percent of the supply.
Modern Japan relies on a global resource base, like most modern industrialized nations in the world. As Totman remarks (2014: 290) measures to reduce the rate of environmental pollution by the country’s industrial society may have local benefits, but the global benefits may be more than offset by increased pollution from other places resulting from dependence on imports from those places. Finally, no discussion of Japanese relations with nature would be complete without mentioning the major quake and tsunami of 2011 that ravaged the East coast of Tôhuku, devastating a large area of Fukushima prefecture and demolishing the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant contaminating land and water. The terrible Faustian bargain that energy production requires today – fossil fuels, the rare-Earth minerals and other materials required by solar and wind-power equipment, or nuclear power plants that pollute the planet and destroy Earth systems – underlies current prosperity and underpins any scenarios for economic growth for developing regions, still.
Enduring Values
How is one to understand the enduring Japanese relationship to nature that is manifest in many aspects of daily aesthetic life, including continued artisanal production, relative to more recent industrial and economic successes predicated on harvesting global resources as well as the abandonment of rural regions? Can artisanal production endure given how physically hard and isolated charcoal making is, for example? While one still sees highly productive urban and peri-urban agriculture that depends on a highly-experienced farming/gardening tradition, with the transformation of agricultural land to suburbs, can this knowledge of soil, plants and cropping continue? Forest management is in decline as well. Is there a younger generation of bonsai Chrysanthemum growers? Ultimately these questions revolve around the future direction of the metabolic rift that occurs as populations become urban and detached from place, soil and resources. One of the sources of the Japanese exquisite and fierce engagement with nature is place-based knowledge coupled with the physicality of artisanship. This means getting dirty, using one’s body, acquiring manual dexterity and feel of a material, from spinning silk from a worm’s cocoon to chopping the oak just right so it regenerates. The Japanese perform these activities with a formality and form that seem to prioritize beauty and process, combine grace with a manipulative intimacy with nature that is special and ancient. How these traditions endure and perhaps even offer windows and insights for a possible different future, or inspiration for a new path, it seems to me is an important question, not just for Japan, but for how humans inhabit the planet going forward. These productive activities are, I would argue, both pre-and post carbon – they emerge in a time when fossil fuel energy was not available, but offer techniques that can be built-upon to invent new hybrid forms for more sustainable practices in the Anthropocene, fusing old knowledges and ways of doing with new techniques. The old ways involve concrete society-nature material relationships that also carry cultural symbolic dimensions. They emerge from an understanding of nature in its potentiality and how it can be socially configured – including the consequences such as erosion – to yield products for human use. This approach to making carries an insistence on perfection, on quality and on form.
The Future – Japanese Knowledge for Resilience in the Anthropocene
Until about the mid twentieth century, Japan was mostly food self-reliant while supporting a large population. Food self-reliance was a national goal and policy, but today with suburbanization and apparent growth in size of residences while population numbers continue to decline in the countryside, raising sufficient food for the nation may be a losing proposition. At this point there is much competition for scarce peri-urban land resources and farther flung regions seem inadequate (or unattractive) for current needs – whether they be land for food sufficiency or cultural life-style preferences and jobs. At the same time, there are signs of interest, like in other developed nations in organic agriculture, and sustainable food systems. Rice growing is still subsidized, but free trade pressures may threaten those subsidies which will mean that this tradition could disappear entirely. Rice cultivation is an art and a skill, as well as a science. Many varieties of rice are grown throughout the country, including sake rice varieties. If these vanish as a consequence of import substitution and the demise of older farmers, there will be multiple consequences. Firstly the knowledge, the “how-to,” of how to grow is lost, making it difficult to reestablish the practice. Secondly heritage varieties, as has been discovered elsewhere, that may offer buffers for resilience with climate change, agricultural pests and other secondary effects on agro-ecological systems, vanish. Once such varieties have been superseded, food systems become more brittle. This has been evident in places like Mexico where cheap hydro-carbon mono-crop, mono-species imported corn has undermined local subsistence and traditional varieties of corn have nearly disappeared. Such changes are choices and must be entered into carefully, with consideration of the long-term future. Japan has a valuable heritage that can provide it with buffers from climate change, as well as offer other countries an example of how to preserve their own traditions for resilience.
In contrast for example, California has been experimenting (once again) with urban gardens to respond to “food deserts.” The knowledge of gardening has largely had to be generated anew as the tradition of small intensive growing is virtually non-existent. Ironically, before World War II, there was small scale intensive peri-urban farming by Japanese immigrants in California. With Japanese internment and expropriation, increase in land prices and urbanization, that knowledge and tradition has largely been lost. There is little tradition to draw on that is based on the understanding of place and how to best engage with local conditions. Urban agriculture is often practiced on vacant land, waiting to be developed, meaning that soil fertility cannot built-up or experimentation about best suited crops to grow can’t occur as land values drive its development. Remaining indigenous Californians who carry such knowledge, struggle against the overwhelming powers of over two centuries of marginalization and near extermination. Urban expansion onto prime agricultural land continues and large scale industrial agriculture is dominant. California has vast land resources that are not being nurtured. There is little attention to place, to specific qualities inherent in the state’s geographies. This is an industrial and modernist model that prioritizes function and efficiency over investing in resource productivity and ensuring the resources of the state endure over the long term. California practices an extractive agricultural model (Pincetl 1999).
Another aspect of the Japanese relationship to nature, which does not exist in California except among the California indigenous communities, is the ritual honor of order and perfection of beauty nature’s beauty through Ritual. There are examples of this everywhere, the thousands of Shinto shrines that are scattered throughout the urban fabric and adorned with a cup of water and flowers, to Ikebana (flower arranging). These traditions do endure, and thus ritual, in this sense, is a commitment to continuity. So perhaps what will ensure the Japanese historic relationship to nature will continue to be alive and reproduced through time is ritual and tradition. But this will require an active commitment to maintain, through practice, the understandings of natural systems that are quite ancient. How to sustain people ecologically, to valorize that lifestyle, will have to be figured out in an era of status through consumption taste making and global resource extraction that relies on cheap labor, cheap nature and cheap food in other places.
Yet, as the impacts of biogeochemical and climate change lead to a rethinking of a world system based on oil and the aspiration of economic growth, Japan may have a depth of knowledge and remaining continuity with nature through tradition, that can provide a different path forward. There remains across the globe, similar understandings and activities in indigenous communities and some developed countries. They are perhaps a lifeline for human thriving in a changing globe, a post-carbon future where time and space are no longer compressed for the sake of efficiency and growth. Given Japan’s position as a developed nation, the impact of maintaining the continuity of traditional knowledge and having it remain a viable aspect of the national economy and life, is especially crucial as an example for other countries.
Such a relationship with nature and resources involves both the dedication to make things of beauty and an interaction with the environment that ensures it will be sustained. This means dedication to a way of being that is based on human nurturing, working in and with, natural processes. It does not mean that nature is a pristine object to be observed and conserved. Rather, it starts with an understanding that nature is an essential partner for humans on the planet. Tradition, as the eminent Buddhist teacher Stephen Batchelor puts it, is a dialogue between the past and the present, and it can evolve. Tradition is not static, it provides a framework of processes and procedures for building knowledge. This is what the Japanese relationship to nature offers California and beyond.
References
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Niles D. 2017. The charcoal forest: ecology, aesthetics, and the Anthropocene. In Review.
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Saito, Y. 1985. The Japanese appreciation of nature. British Journal of Aesthetics. 25: 239-251.
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