WFHB Bloomington Community Radio
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 59:00 — 81.0MB)
Our topic today is a modernizing, industrializing, Japan, and the life and thought of Tanaka Shozo, the the late 19th and early 20th century Japanese peasant, politician, land speculator, liberal parliamentarian, transgressor against the Emperor, and environmental rights activist. But, we are, in the end, talking about liberal modernity and industrial capitalism across the globe. From labor coercion, and industrial accidents, to widespread pollution and so-called engineering fixes that frequently only compound disasters, this is not a story unique to Japan. We are all Japanese, and no one is Japanese. You’ll have to listen to the show for that to be explained.
In Bad Water, published by Duke University Press, Robert Stolz demonstrates how a series of large-scale industrial disasters in the 1890s revealed the need to incorporate nature into politics.
The Ashio Copper Mine unleashed massive amounts of copper, arsenic, mercury, and other pollutants into surrounding watersheds and in the process exposed the myth of the autonomous liberal subject.
When the air, water and land are contaminated by private corporations in support of an adventurous modernizing state, how can one be responsible for one’s own health and well-being. How can one pursue liberty and happiness in this corrupted environment? And if the new system of government fails to protect you on every level, who, or what can you appeal to?
Finally, Stolz discusses Tanaka’s concept of Nagare (or positive flow) and Doku (literally, poison), and his warning that creating too much “poison” can overwhelm Nagare so that no equilibrium can be found. There will be only Poison. This is clearly a message that “enlightened” and modern humanity has failed to learn.
GUEST
Robert Stolz is associate professor in the department of history at the University of Virginia, and author of Bad Water: Nature, Pollution, and Politics in Japan, 1870–1950.
RELATED
Remake Politics, Not Nature: Tanaka Shozo’s Philosophies of ‘Poison’ and ‘Flow’ and Japan’s Environment by Robert Stolz
On Being Domesticated By the State: A Conversation With James Scott
Revolutionary Parallels: Zhang Taiyan and Anti-Imperialism (Interchange with Viren Murthy)
Spreading Global Freedom, or the Divine Right to Traffic Drugs, Guns, and People (Interchange with Mark Driscoll)
MUSIC
“Turn You Inside-Out,” Green
“Cuyahoga,” Life’s Rich Pageant
“These Days,” Life’s Rich Pageant
“Undertow,” New Adventures in Hi-Fi
“I Remember California,” Green
ID inserts
“Endgame” (Out of Time) and “Underneath the Bunker” (Life’s Rich Pageant)
CREDITS
Producer & Host: Doug Storm
Executive Producer: Kade Young
