Overview

Bad Water is a sophisticated theoretical analysis of Japanese thinkers and activists' efforts to reintegrate the natural environment into Japan's social and political thought in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth. The need to incorporate nature into politics was revealed by a series of large-scale industrial disasters in the 1890s. The Ashio Copper Mine unleashed massive amounts of copper, arsenic, mercury, and other pollutants into surrounding watersheds. Robert Stolz argues that by forcefully demonstrating the mutual penetration of humans and nature, industrial pollution biologically and politically compromised the autonomous liberal subject underlying the political philosophy of the modernizing Meiji state. In the following decades, socialism, anarchism, fascism, and Confucian benevolence and moral economy were marshaled in the search for new theories of a modern political subject and a social organization adequate to the environmental crisis. With detailed considerations of several key environmental activists, including Tanaka Shozo, Bad Water is a nuanced account of Japan's environmental turn, a historical moment when, for the first time, Japanese thinkers and activists experienced nature as alienated from themselves and were forced to rebuild the connections.

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9780822356998

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The author presents important material that is new to environmental history, to intellectual history as well as to studies of Japan. He shows that Japan has a long history of environmental disasters and gives some sense of why this has been so. His individual case studies (Tanaka, Ishikawa and Kurosawa) are well selected. And his conclusions about the limitations of liberal democracy and of liberalism in any form are illuminating, thoughtful accurate and sobering. Nature does not care whether politicians or a majority of the population they lead recognize the greater frequency of extreme weather-including global warming-or not. These things are happening and surely require a far stronger response than any counter-measures that have been proffered up to now. - -- James Bartholomew Times Literary Supplement A sound achievement in an area of modern Japanese thought too lightly regarded before now. -- Tom Havens American Historical Review Bad Water is a vitally important study of the growing incidence of recognizable pollution of the environment in Japan's late Meiji period (1890s-1900s). It is both a prescient and penetrating critique of the costs of the country's modernizing transformation and a withering assault on the political paradigm that informed it. Above all else, Robert Stolz has constructed a brilliant critique of the price extracted of the country's liberal endowment and, by extension, of liberalism everywhere. -- Harry Harootunian, author of History's Disquiet: Modernity, Cultural Practice, and the Question of Everyday Life Stolz's book gains its special strength from its close intertwining of Marxist theory with the lives of the central protagonists... As this statement suggests, Bad Water successfully stitches together environmental history, a social ecology that predates that of Bookchin, and Marxist theory. -- Paul Waley Journal of Interdisciplinary History In Bad Water, Robert Stolz has created a fascinating, complex synthesis of intellectual history, environmental studies, and critical theory. The book will speak to readers interested in capitalist modernity, the dialogue between the cosmopolitan and the local production of knowledge, and social movements and the possibilities of criticism. Thoughtful and provocative, it is a superb book and one that I expect will be widely read. -- Christopher Nelson, author of Dancing with the Dead: Memory, Performance, and Everyday Life in Postwar Okinawa

"""Bad Water is a vitally important study of the growing incidence of recognizable pollution of the environment in Japan's late Meiji period (1890s-1900s). It is both a prescient and penetrating critique of the costs of the country's modernizing transformation and a withering assault on the political paradigm that informed it. Above all else, Robert Stolz has constructed a brilliant critique of the price extracted of the country's liberal endowment and, by extension, of liberalism everywhere."" - Harry Harootunian, author of History's Disquiet: Modernity, Cultural Practice, and the Question of Everyday Life ""In Bad Water, Robert Stolz has created a fascinating, complex synthesis of intellectual history, environmental studies, and critical theory. The book will speak to readers interested in capitalist modernity, the dialogue between the cosmopolitan and the local production of knowledge, and social movements and the possibilities of criticism. Thoughtful and provocative, it is a superb book and one that I expect will be widely read."" - Christopher Nelson, author of Dancing with the Dead: Memory, Performance, and Everyday Life in Postwar Okinawa"

Bad Water is a vitally important study of the growing incidence of recognizable pollution of the environment in Japan's late Meiji period (1890s-1900s). It is both a prescient and penetrating critique of the costs of the country's modernizing transformation and a withering assault on the political paradigm that informed it. Above all else, Robert Stolz has constructed a brilliant critique of the price extracted of the country's liberal endowment and, by extension, of liberalism everywhere. - Harry Harootunian, author of History's Disquiet: Modernity, Cultural Practice, and the Question of Everyday Life In Bad Water, Robert Stolz has created a fascinating, complex synthesis of intellectual history, environmental studies, and critical theory. The book will speak to readers interested in capitalist modernity, the dialogue between the cosmopolitan and the local production of knowledge, and social movements and the possibilities of criticism. Thoughtful and provocative, it is a superb book and one that I expect will be widely read. - Christopher Nelson, author of Dancing with the Dead: Memory, Performance, and Everyday Life in Postwar Okinawa

Author Information

Robert Stolz is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Virginia.

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