Synopses & Reviews
New in Paperback
This fascinating environmental history of Japan examines how traditions and practices in several industries -- from raising silkworms to mining lead and coal to refining petroleum -- have affected the health of workers and those who have lived in these toxic landscapes.
"Historian Walker effectively links, perhaps for the first time anywhere, the historical processes of the economic, social, and land-use policies involved in modernizing and globalizing Japan with the pain and suffering of its environment and people. Never has a book so clearly illustrated the aphorisms 'all politics are local,' 'the personal is the political,' and 'we are what we eat.' This discussion of the evolution of environmentalism in Japan will reflect new light on the understanding of environmental history. Essential." -Choice
Brett Walker is Regents' Professor and department chairperson of history and philosophy at the University of Montana, Bozeman. He is the author of The Lost Wolves of Japan.
Winner of the George Perkins Marsh Prize for Best Book in Environmental History
Review
"Walker's carefully researched, thoughtfully rendered accounts of industrial disease in Japan make clear that, far from liberating us from nature, modern technology has instead tightened the binds between us and the world we inhabit." --D. Magee, Journal of Environmental Studies, June 2011
Review
"Walker's is an unorthodox approach to academic scholarship. It mixes academic rigor with personal anecdotes and experiences. It is historically grounded, soundly documented scholarship. It is fascinating, but at times sickly so." -Miranda A. Schreurs, Journal of Japanese Studies, 38:1, 2012
Review
"Toxic Archipelago would make an excellent addition to any course on environmental issues in Asia. . . . carefully researched, thoughtfully rendered accounts of industrial disease in Japan make clear that . . . modern technology has . . . tightened the binds between us and the world we inhabit." -Darrin Magee, Journal of Environmental Studies and Science, Vol. 1 (2011)
Synopsis
Every person on the planet is entangled in a web of ecological relationships that link farms and factories with human consumers. Our lives depend on these relationships -- and are imperiled by them as well. Nowhere is this truer than on the Japanese archipelago.
During the nineteenth century, Japan saw the rise of Homo sapiens industrialis, a new breed of human transformed by an engineered, industrialized, and poisonous environment. Toxins moved freely from mines, factory sites, and rice paddies into human bodies.
Toxic Archipelago explores how toxic pollution works its way into porous human bodies and brings unimaginable pain to some of them. Brett Walker examines startling case studies of industrial toxins that know no boundaries: deaths from insecticide contaminations; poisonings from copper, zinc, and lead mining; congenital deformities from methylmercury factory effluents; and lung diseases from sulfur dioxide and asbestos.
This powerful, probing book demonstrates how the Japanese archipelago has become industrialized over the last two hundred years -- and how people and the environment have suffered as a consequence.