（青いベンチとネコさんたち）
和辻哲郎の『風土』を取り上げた学生ですが、この論稿を十分把握するのは難しかったと見えます。反動的（復古調）の生態学の概念に驚きました。
Ecology and Japanese History: Reactionary Environmentalism’s Troubled Relationship with the Past |
February 1, 2017
Volume 15 | Issue 3 | Number 2
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Abstract
Much ecological thought today turns to Japan’s past for inspiration. The reason, according to conservative Japanese ecologists, deep ecologists, and environmental philosophers, is that Japan’s history of aesthetic “oneness” with nature provides a model for the world to emulate as it addresses the global environmental crisis. I critique this view by showing that conservative, or more accurately, reactionary ecology in Japan is closely intertwined with ethnic communitarianism, Japan’s wartime ideology of the 1930s, and deep ecology. I suggest that these forms of reactionary ecology reflect a fascist desire to create or rely upon a nationalistic narrative of Japanese cultural uniqueness that conceals the excesses of capitalism and operates to sustain the socio-economic order that is today generating ecological catastrophe. Keywords: Reactionary Ecology, Environmental Ethics, Deep Ecology, “Japanese View” of Nature, Pollution, Fascism 復古調（反動的生態学)、環境倫理、ディープエコロジー（Deep ecology）は、1973年にノルウェーの哲学者アルネ・ネスが提唱したエコロジーの概念である。 ネスはそれまでに存在した環境保護の活動を「シャローエコロジー」（Shallow ecology）とし、欠けている分野を深めたものを「ディープエコロジー」と名づけた。 Japan’s past has become an important resource for much contemporary ecological thinking both within and outside Japan. Conservative cultural critics and scholars within Japan, for example, speak of an enduring “Japanese view of nature” rooted in pre-modern Japanese animism and Buddhism. They locate the root of ongoing environmental destruction in the West’s scientific, technological civilization, its view of nature as an object detached from humanity, and its will to dominate the natural environment. The “traditional Japanese view,” they suggest, provides a very different perspective, one in which the subject of the person and the object of nature are unified, a relationship characterized by reverence and harmony. Proponents of this kind of reactionary ecology in Japan uphold the “Japanese perspective” as a possible solution to the world’s ecological problems. Meanwhile, scholars and activists in the fields of deep ecology and environmental ethics seek to overcome anthropocentric views of the person that sanction the exploitation of the environment for human benefit. They call instead for eco-centrism and the cultivation of a unity of individual self and all organic life. They too, in many cases, turn to Japan’s past, drawing on Buddhism and Shinto in their efforts to articulate their ideal of the non-anthropocentric “Self”.1 Why have Japan’s historical religious and philosophical traditions become increasingly central to current ecological discourse? Ostensibly, the historical record confirms Japan’s unique relation to nature and establishes a model for the world to emulate. Given the alarming series of environmental crises now confronting the world—greenhouse gas emissions and global climate change, the acidification of the world’s oceans, biodiversity loss, industrial pollution, the ecological damage brought by an inadequately regulated nuclear power industry—these views should be taken seriously. Yet, I adopt a different approach to the above question by examining the conjuncture of the ecological views I address in this essay with an ongoing discourse on ethnic communitarianism, the deep ecology movement, and Japan’s wartime ideology. This has important implications for how we might assess these ecological views. First, reactionary ecology in Japan reflects a desire for ethnic community. This is manifested through fears of cultural loss and through essentializing and largely invented assertions about the aesthetic character and culture of the Japanese people. Thus, though reactionary ecology in Japan today warns of global environmental catastrophe, this is not really its primary concern. Instead, by shifting focus from the global environment to the particular landscape of Japan, then to the “unique” cultural values of the Japanese “folk” that were ostensibly shaped by this landscape, reactionary ecology in Japan hopes to reinforce a narrative of homogeneous cultural community and peoplehood. The purity of Japanese culture, in this narrative, is tied to the uncontaminated cultural and natural landscape, giving rise to discrimination targeting ethnic others and to an ahistorical and selective appropriation of the past whereby the concrete ecological disasters of Japan’s past and present are downplayed or concealed rather than placed front and center for analysis. Second, Japan’s reactionary ecology has much in common with so-called “radical” theories of deep ecology and environmental philosophy that take “the Japanese view of nature” as its starting point. Just as the former seeks community on the national level, the latter calls for a global organic community by way of an intuitive process of self-realization. The case of deep ecology, moreover, is important as it suggests that the problematic claims and dangers examined in this essay are not confined to Japan but are global and informed by global forces. And third, the ideological landscape of wartime Japan, and the works of philosopher Watsuji Tetsurō, in particular, serve as a rich though problematic resource informing the views of both reactionary ecology in Japan and deep ecology. This conjuncture taken as a whole may be called reactionary modernism, a term Peter Osborne and Mark Neocleous use to describe fascism in Germany under National Socialism.2 While I do not define the current Japanese government as fascist, I do suggest that the conjuncture sketched out above and explored in more detail below reflects a fascist desire. This points to something more than a fixation on an invented cultural identity. The danger here is a desire, reminiscent of wartime Japanese ideology, to cultivate a hegemonic and patriotic nationalism, to conceal and contain the excesses of capitalism, and thus to sustain the very socio-economic order that generates the ecological crises we now face.←戦前の日本の覇権的で愛郷的ナショナリズムが現況肯定につながる危険性ということでしょうか。 The Narrative of Reactionary Ecology in Japan
Reactionary ecology traces the world’s environmental problems to a “Western conception of nature”. In the West, according to this view, nature is seen as an object detached and separate from humanity and this conception of nature contributes to the tendency to dominate and exploit the environment. Philosopher Umehara Takeshi is representative of this perspective. From 1987 to 1995, Umehara headed the conservative Nichibunken, the International Research Center for Japanese Studies established by former Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone. For Umehara, “the direct cause of present-day environmental destruction is modern scientific-technological civilization” informed by “dualistic thought separating humanity from nature” and organized around the belief that “the progress of civilization requires the subjugation of nature by man.” This belief, he says, is anthropocentric, egocentric, and no longer viable.3 Thus, he identifies the problem primarily in idealist rather than materialist terms, as a problem of ideas and beliefs rather than material conditions. This is a widely shared assessment among reactionary ecologists in Japan and deep ecologists.4 In contrast to this “Western view of nature” characterized by a subject-object (humanity-nature) dualism, reactionary ecology in Japan upholds a “Japanese view” in which humanity and nature are identified. As Economist Murota Yasuhiro explains, “the Japanese view of nature is quite different from that of Westerners...the Japanese people considered themselves to be so intimately integrated with nature that they could not identify it objectively as a separate entity...”5 This humanity-nature unity, according to this view’s proponents, is reflected in the Japanese people’s reverence for and harmony with nature. Umehara, for example, states that in “East Asian religion, the concept of man subduing nature hardly exists.”6 Such claims concerning the “Japanese view of nature” are basic to reactionary ecological discourse in Japan. Deep ecology’s efforts—drawing upon Eastern religious traditions to overcome western dualism in the realization of organic wholeness—appear strikingly similar.7 Contributors to this discourse on nature turn to a range of religious and philosophical traditions from Japan’s past—Buddhism, Shinto, Shugen-dō, Confucianism—to substantiate their claims and to suggest that located within the history of this nature aesthetic is perhaps a solution to the world’s ecological problems.8 In each case, Japan’s pre- and early-modern past is drawn upon to assert the Japanese people’s aesthetic relationship to nature as a unique and timeless cultural feature. Moreover, there is a clear binary opposition at work here. These ecological thinkers derive a “Japanese conception of nature” by way of an opposition to an ostensibly transparent and coherent “Western view”. Implicit in such assertions is the conclusion that the latter must be overcome and the former cultivated if the world is to have any hope of addressing its current ecological troubles. But the ahistorical claims associated with reactionary ecology and its focus on aesthetic values rather than material conditions undermine its authority as the solution to today’s global environmental crises.9 Omissions and Distortions: Concealing Environmental Disaster A major problem with the narrative outlined above is not merely its essentialized representation of Japan and the West, but the ahistorical perspective underlying its presuppositions and claims. The view of the Japanese people as inherently and harmoniously at one with nature relies not only on the regulative idea of a nature-dominating West, but also on a serious and persistent misreading and distortion of the past. Left out of reactionary ecology’s narrative of Japanese history are a wide range of ecological problems including polluted air, soil, and water associated with iron manufacturing and mining operations from the end of the 16th century;10 the Ashio Copper Mine disaster; Japanese industry’s role in deforestation, particularly in Southeast Asia;11 Japan’s well-documented “Big Four” industrial diseases of the 1950s and 1960s;12 and Japan’s ongoing struggles with water pollution (including the synthetic chemical perflourooctanite or PFOA that recently contaminated the Yodo and Ai Rivers near Osaka) and pesticide pollution.13
In the early 1970s, Japan’s steps to address these serious pollution problems brought positive results.14 But because the socio-economic order that generated these environmental problems was essentially unchanged, environmental degradation, together with reactionary ecology’s efforts to ignore or downplay it, continued.15 Thus, Japan’s greatest ecological catastrophe in recent years, the disaster at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant of 2011, also receives little attention among reactionary ecologists. If Japan’s past is to suggest a solution to the world’s environmental problems, then it must be the past without a cleansing away of Ashio, industrial diseases, PFOAs, and Fukushima. Yet, in Japan’s reactionary ecological discourse where the argument is made that Japan and its environmental history holds the solution to today’s ecological crises, Japan’s disastrous environmental record receives little if any scrutiny.16 We find much the same situation in works of the deep ecology movement: a great deal of attention to ideologies of Japan’s “oneness with nature,” often drawn from wartime Japan, but little attention to the ecological tragedies of Japan’s past and present.17 Clearly, reactionary ecology’s “Japanese view of nature” has little to do with historical reality. How, then, do we account for its authority? Alienation and the Desire for Community “Oneness with nature” is put forward as a timeless feature of the Japanese character but this assertion’s emergence is in fact quite recent.18 Of course, assertions of this kind were common in early twentieth century Japan, as noted above, yet a similar discourse emerged decades later at least in part as a response to the excesses of capitalism in Japan’s postwar period. The industrial diseases of the 1950s and 1960s in particular, but also socio-economic unevenness, consumerism, and tensions of class, gender, and ethnicity, gave rise to a growing sense of dislocation and alienation and, in turn, a desire for community.19 Indeed, many of the contributors to this discourse in the 1960s and 1970s, and today as well, speak of a sense of alienation (sogai kan). Murota Yasuhiro, for example, speaks of the “serious problem” of “the feeling of homelessness that the Japanese people experienced” with changes of industrialization.20 Sonoda Minoru, an anthropologist and Shinto priest, expresses a similar view, lamenting the loss of community associated with “kakyō,” meaning “one’s old home” or “one’s homeland”21 And Kitamura Masami, a scholar of agriculture, observes that while the introduction of the natural sciences to Japan spurred scientific thought among Japanese, “it also brought a detachment from nature. Probably the greatest loss from this was the feeling of unity with nature.” For Kitamura, this meant a cultural loss as well, because, he explains, “Japan’s traditional culture emerged out of this sense of unity... from the flower arrangement and Japanese gardens to the tea ceremony, tanka and haiku poetry, and Noh and Kabuki, not one is produced detached from nature.”22自然との一体化が崩れた現況ー日本文化のあらゆるところに見られる文化のコアは自然との一体化の神話？ Thus, for some, alienation is experienced or understood as a loss of cultural tradition, as a detachment from nature to which the Japanese were once connected by “spiritual ties,” and as a longing for a “return” to traditional “homeland” or community.23 This desire for a “return” contributes to a discourse on the overcoming of alienation in an imaginary community of Japanese people at one with nature and with each other. But this is a mis-diagnosis of the problem, building on a very narrow view of alienation. By focusing on alienation as estrangement from culture and tradition, reactionary ecology loses sight of a more concrete form of alienation. For example, Hiroko Tabuchi has shown the plight of Japan’s nuclear power labor force, part of a broader “two-tiered workforce, with an elite class of highly paid employees at top companies and a subclass of laborers who work for less pay, have less job security and receive fewer benefits.” These contract workers, who made up 89% of the more than 10,000 workers at the Fukushima nuclear power plant in 2010, are routinely exposed to dangerously high levels of radiation.24 It is this material form of alienation—in which workers, like those in the nuclear power industry, have little control over the labor process and their working conditions—rather than the ideal and imaginary loss of homeland, that must be the starting point for any assessment of Japan’s environmental problems.25 Yet, many within and outside Japan accept the idea that Japan’s past illustrates a unique nature aesthetic. In an effort to provide an underlying basis for this claim, they turn to older theories linking climate and culture. This has taken the form of a new discourse on “climate”.福島原発の労働者の置かれた現況の矛盾。 A New Discourse on Climate
以下、省略。なぜ和辻などの思考がファシズムに導くのかが後半に書かれていますね！３万語制約があり、以下紹介できません。直接このオリジナルサイトへどうぞ！自然と一体化する思考が全体主義へと導かれる論は論として理解できますね。個、個人の概念も人間中心主義でしょうが、人新世のビジョンはどうでしょう？Anthropoceneとは？
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