Session Abstract

As the Japanese archipelago reached its maximum sustainable population by the mid-Tokugawa period (1600-1868), disputes over land usage increasingly brought interest groups head-to-head.  The consolidation of a centralized state structure following the Meiji Restoration (1868), the rapid industrialization and urbanization, and the demographic jump all fueled this competition for access to limited resources.  The contentions unfolded over numerous issues, including the economic value, religious significance, “scientific” import, and political power related to the riches in question; and the tensions took place at both local and national levels. 

The panel focuses on the environment in early modern and modern Japan as a crossroads of religious, social, cultural, and intellectual history.  A look at the village-temple contest over the use of woodlands surrounding Yakuō-in on Mt. Takao sheds new light on the lay-religious relationship during the time, more complex than previously imagined.  A study of the Meiji governmental reform of the nation’s shrines brings to fore the environmental and cultural consequences of the attempted state centralization of Shinto.  The aftermath led to Shinto’s emphasis on nature guardianship as one of the religion’s core identity, which continues to this day.  The perceived crisis of environmental destruction by the Taisho period (1912-1926) led to the movement to establish a nation-wide law protecting the natural surroundings.  Examination of the crusade for this law reveals the participants defining the environment as remains of the nation’s human and natural history, and thus important academic evidence as well as sources for national moral education.  The law became and still remains the Japanese state’s important ideological tool for national formation.  Through stories of how the contested places held multiple meanings to multiples people’s lives, the panel established how environmental factors became central to the human experiences in Japan between the seventeenth and the twenty-first centuries.