[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Back to the Future

[Bill Totten]

The Edo Biosphere

by Thomas Daniell

www.archis.org (December 19 2008)


1. Postwar Japan

Japan's phoenix-like emergence out of the urban firestorms triggered by
incendiary bombing campaigns during the final months of the Second World
War is a story that has been told often enough. The incredible
collective willpower that rebuilt - or better, reconceived - the nation
during the postwar period (albeit under the benevolent guidance of the
American Occupation for the first seven years) enabled decades of
unprecedented industrialization, urbanization, modernization,
democratization and a welcome reentry into the global community of
nations symbolized by the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and the 1970 Osaka Expo.

It was a long haul from the brutal, favela-like conditions of Japan's
cities at the end of the war, confronted as they were with overwhelming
homelessness, unemployment, inflation and material scarcities. The
turning point was 1960, the year Hayato Ikeda (a career bureaucrat in
the Finance Ministry) became Prime Minister and announced his 'income
doubling plan' and 'politics of patience and reconciliation': slogans
that equated to massive industrialization and a concomitant suppression
of societal disagreement. Ikeda built on his own late-1950s policies of
preferential financing for heavy industry, advocating huge government
investment in transportation infrastructure and an uncompromising
commitment to economic progress. The environmental and social
consequences were immaterial. Ikeda's personal ruthlessness was no
secret: he had been appointed head of MITI (the Ministry of
International Trade and Industry) in 1952, but was forced to resign
within a month as a result of his infamous statement that in the pursuit
of national industrialization, 'it makes no difference to me if five or
ten small businessmen are forced to commit suicide' {1}. Heartless as
this may sound, Ikeda's crime was merely an overly blunt expression of a
generally accepted Japanese principle: individual suffering is
irrelevant in the pursuit of collective wellbeing.

Boosted by US investment and the Korean War, the Japanese economy
succeeded far beyond expectations. Within a few years, Japan had a Gross
National Product second only to the US, an affluent citizenry with a
remarkably flat distribution of wealth, a superb educational system, the
highest literacy rates in the world and local industries producing an
array of consumer goods that had turned the label 'Made in Japan' from a
contemptuous warning into an assurance of quality. The 1960s also
nurtured the Metabolists, a group of young visionaries who attempted to
give architectural form to the utopian promises of technological
progress, infinite growth and development without consequences {2}. The
spirit of the times is encapsulated by Kenzo Tange's 1960 Tokyo Bay
Plan, an enormous, potentially infinite, extension of the city out
across the water, with housing and other facilities sprouting from a
central infrastructural spine.

The parallel story is one of appalling and tragic environmental damage
that gave Japan the sadly deserved reputation of having the worst
pollution problems of any developed country. Since the late nineteenth
century, incipient industrialization had been causing serious damage to
local ecosystems and their human inhabitants, but the problems
exponentially increased after the Second World War. A series of
notorious ecological disasters during the 1950s and 60s resulted in
outbreaks of incurable illnesses, birth defects and deaths, as the
natural environment became poisoned by industrial waste: arsenic
(Morinaga Milk Powder poisoning), sulfur dioxide (Yokkaichi Asthma),
mercury (Minamata Disease), cadmium (Itai-itai Disease) {3}. Such
incidents were initially confined to rural areas, a result of provincial
governments trying to stimulate their local economies by attracting
industrial investment - mining, chemical production, wood pulp treatment
- that directly and indirectly destroyed the health of their farming and
fishing communities. Protests were initially suppressed or ignored, with
the wider population all too content in their new prosperity. Media
coverage of the problems and successful compensation claims eventually
led to the enactment of strict new environmental legislation in 1970 and
the establishment of the Environmental Agency in 1971.

This was another turning point, coinciding with the World Expo in Osaka
- a paean to progress and technology, dominated by the Metabolist
architects. Again Kenzo Tange made the definitive contribution, a vast
spaceframe roof covering the Expo grounds. For the general public the
utopian idealism of it all was no longer inspiring, but rather a callous
display of the gap between these fantastic visions and the degraded
reality of their living environment. It fueled a burgeoning backlash to
modern affluence and progress - the dawning feeling that something was
deeply amiss, that a historical wrong turn had been taken. This was the
genesis of the 'Edo Boom' (or more accurately, series of booms): a
flourishing popular interest in the premodern Edo period (1603-1867).
Once regarded as laughably backward, an embarrassing episode best
forgotten in the forward thrust of Japan's manifest destiny, during the
1970s a stream of books, lectures, exhibitions and television shows
began to valorize Edo as an innocent, Edenic period of social and
ecological sustainability. This reached a crescendo during the second
half of the 1980s, precisely coinciding with the most shamelessly
unsustainable period of Japan's postwar economic growth, the so-called
'bubble'. Since the burst of the bubble at the beginning of the 1990s,
the fascination with Edo culture has only deepened. An Edo-Tokyo Museum
opened in 1993 and new publications on the subject continue to appear,
ranging from serious, substantial historiography to the most
superficial, self-congratulatory 'nipponology'.

2. Edo Japan

The Edo Period began in the wake of a century of devastating civil wars,
with a military regime (the Tokugawa Shogunate) taking control of the
nation and imposing a somewhat Taliban-like peace, stability and unity.
Japan was run for the following two-and-a-half centuries by a series of
warlords - de facto rulers based in the de facto capital, Edo, while the
nominal ruler, the Emperor, lived in secluded irrelevance in the
official capital, Kyoto. The new rulers invented a strict social
hierarchy (a five-tier caste system), regulated architectural form and
aesthetics (preventing wealthier commoners from building houses that
might compete with the aristocracy), banned and confiscated all firearms
(ensuring the dominance of the samurai sword) and most importantly
closed the country to the outside world. Foreign trade and communication
were almost entirely prohibited. The Edo Period ended with the
restoration of the Emperor to power in 1868, together with the official
relocation of the nation's capital from Kyoto to Edo (the latter city
was then renamed Tokyo). Japan was reopened to the world, and like a
child starved of novelty began to enthusiastically and uncritically
import Western ideas while dismissing the older ways as primitive and
worthless.

Yet during those centuries of self-imposed isolation, Japan was a closed
system, a laboratory for an extended experiment in sustainability.
Without significant fossil fuel reserves, unable to import energy or
manufactured goods, Japan effectively became a solar-powered nation.
Recycling was not a choice or an ideology, but a life-or-death
necessity, so pervasive that the word itself did not exist. The
exquisite minimalism of the arts and crafts was not a rejection of
luxury and decoration, but the only available option. Edo society teemed
with itinerant artisans specialized in repairing various materials:
welding metal cooking pots, gluing broken ceramics, repapering lanterns
and umbrellas, refurbishing footwear, replenishing ink pads. If an
object was beyond repair, it was repurposed: kimonos became diapers
became cleaning rags. Finally, the component materials were collected
and reused: scrap metal was melted down, coagulated wax from old candles
was made into new ones, used paper was pulped and turned into clean
sheets. {4}

A balanced integration with the wider ecosystem was crucial for
long-term survival. Centuries of small-scale farming and forestry around
Japanese villages resulted in a kind of hybrid natural-artificial
landscape known as satoyama {5}. A word that today evokes an idyllic,
rural lifestyle, satoyama are usually defined as coppice woodlands
maintained in a sustainable equilibrium with adjacent paddy fields and
human communities. Forests were regularly, judiciously thinned and the
wood used for charcoal and construction. The inedible straw left over
from the rice harvest was turned into coats, hats, footwear, bags,
embedded into clay walls as reinforcement, woven into tatami mats for
floors and used as fuel for fires. Ultimately, everything was returned
to the earth, whether directly or as ash after being burned. The main
source of fertilizer was 'night soil' (human excrement), often collected
directly from residences by farmers who paid for it in cash or crops. It
was valuable stuff: dealers set up warehouses, landlords argued with
their tenants over ownership and farmers became connoisseurs - different
neighborhoods commanded different prices and the best shit was used for
cultivating the highest grades of green tea. One side effect was cities
that were extraordinarily clean by medieval standards (no one would pour
potential wealth out the window, European-style). Equally important was
the daily reminder that humanity was intimately, necessarily connected
with the cycles of nature.

Unsurprisingly, a society of reuse and recycling is not good for
business. Without constant disposal and demand for new products, the
economy stagnates. Historical analyses show that the Japanese economy
grew insignificantly during the Edo period, averaging 0.3% per year {6}.
The picture painted by the Edo Boom is undoubtedly a simplistic
idealization of what must have been a grueling existence for much of the
population. Admittedly, not even the most extreme of the contemporary
Edo-philes are proposing a return to that lifestyle. More than an
unwillingness to abandon modern conveniences, this is the acknowledgment
of an insurmountable problem: the sustainability of Edo Japan was
predicated on a far lower population (throughout the Edo Period, the
nation held a stable thirty million people) and a correspondingly higher
proportion of arable land and natural forest.

Interlude: Biosphere 2

Though national in scale and multigenerational in duration, the isolated
ecology of Edo Japan might be seen as a precursor to Biosphere 2, the
largest artificial closed ecological system ever constructed. Intended
as a microcosm of the earth itself (that is, Biosphere 1), Biosphere 2
comprises an array of enormous greenhouses in the Arizona desert. From
September 1991 to September 1993, eight humans were sealed inside
together with 3800 other living species spread across seven biomes
(rainforest, desert, ocean, savannah, marshland, agriculture and a
'cultural' habitat for humans). There was to be no material input, with
the entire system powered primarily by sunlight, and rigorous crop
rotation, animal farming and waste recycling providing all necessities
for the duration. Given the complexity and originality of the
experiment, calculation errors and unforeseeable events inevitably
intervened. Insects destroyed much of the crops. Oxygen and food ran
low. The team was forced to slaughter all the pigs and chickens,
eliminating the absurd inefficiency of raising vegetables only to be
used as animal feed - one outcome was evidence that a vegetarian diet
and abnormally low body weight will significantly increase human health
and longevity (as had already been proven with laboratory animals). Yet,
inadvertently perhaps, Biosphere 2 was a social experiment as much as a
scientific one. Destabilized by the shortage of food, the participants
soon divided into two factions with a relationship that was, at best,
icy {7}. Violence was only averted through a determined commitment to
civility and the creation of ad hoc food-related festivals - not unlike
some primitive agrarian society - intended to inspire a sense of
community. The widespread media criticism of Biosphere 2
notwithstanding, it was a compelling confirmation of the experience of
Edo Japan: the creation of a closed system exponentially increases the
importance of efficient recycling, of maintaining a high ratio of
cultivated land to human population, and of ensuring a strict social order.

3. Japan now

With a population of close to 130 million overwhelmingly middle-class
consumers, contemporary Japan simply cannot sustain itself without a
constant influx of new resources. Indeed, the nation is now one of the
world's main importers of raw materials and energy (oil, natural gas,
uranium). Yet grassroots activism on issues of energy, recycling and
pollution has spread into national awareness, exemplified by the 1997
Kyoto Protocol, the nature-themed Aichi Expo 2005 and the bid for a
carbon-neutral Tokyo Olympics in 2016. Japan is now a world leader in
solar power research and usage. Maverick architect Tadao Ando, after
four decades of creating sublime yet uninsulated raw concrete dwellings,
is focusing his energy and fame on planting trees. In a droll echo of
Tange's 1960 proposal for extending human habitation out into Tokyo Bay,
Ando has been promoting a 480,000-tree 'Sea Forest' on a garbage
landfill island in the bay. As in many First World countries, Japan now
has an increasingly popular back-to-the-land movement {8}. Following
decades of rural depopulation due to youth invariably moving to the
cities, idealistic new communities are resettling abandoned villages and
publicly funded volunteer groups are rejuvenating the satoyama landscapes.

Yet however admirable, without broader action these trends are deeply
quixotic. Their success is predicated on a far smaller population
willing (or forced) to make do with far less and an understanding of the
human world as being integral to the natural world. Premodern Japan
lacked a sharp distinction between nature and culture, conceiving each
as inextricably embedded in the other. Time was seen as circular: any
one life follows a linear trajectory from birth to death, but the
collective rides cycles of eternal recurrence and renewal. Balance must
be maintained and the individual must stay strictly subservient to the
group. The mentality of modern Japan has arguably undergone a shift
toward a Western, linear conception of time. At worst, this manifests in
lunatic fantasies of infinite growth or even more insidiously the End of
Days: if our present moment is located somewhere between a creation and
an apocalypse, the 'moral' thing to do is use up our divinely bequeathed
resources before time runs out.

While Japan may have belatedly recognized the urgent need to shift
course nationally, globally the situation is only being maintained
through massive imbalances in regional wealth. The idealized
self-sufficiency of Edo Japan is no longer tenable. For true
sustainability, everything removed must be replenished. The flows of
material into Japan and the rest of the First World are themselves
unsustainable. As formerly Third World populations increase in affluence
- cars for the Chinese, refrigerators for the Indians - there will not
be enough to go around. Priority must go to tackling new frontiers in
intensive agriculture and technologies for resource recycling and
procurement (seaweed farms? alchemical transformation of plastic waste?
towing mineral-rich asteroids into earth orbit?). Failing that, the
problem becomes disturbingly simple: without realistic recourse to
global vegetarianism or global war, the closed system of our planetary
biosphere now holds more human beings than it can sustain.

Notes:

1. Chalmers Johnson, MITI and the Japanese Miracle: The Growth of
Industrial Policy, 1925-1975 (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press,
1982), page 202.

2. Their manifesto was presented at the World Design Conference held in
Tokyo in 1960 as Metabolism 1960: The Proposals for New Urbanism (Tokyo:
Bijutsu Shuppansha, 1960).

3. Jun Ui (editor), Industrial Pollution in Japan (Tokyo: United Nations
University Press, 1991).

4. The information given here about recycling in the Edo Period is
primarily drawn from Eisuke Ishikawa, Oo-edo Risaikuru Jijou [The
Recycling Situation in the Edo Period] (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1997) and
Atsushi Tsuchida, Ekorojii Shinwa no Kouzai [The Value of Ecology Myths]
(Tokyo: Hotaru Shuppan, 1998).

5. A comprehensive survey of historical and contemporary satoyama is
contained in Kazuhiko Takeuchi, R D Brown, I Washitani, M Yokohari
(editors), Satoyama: The Traditional Rural Landscape of Japan (Berlin:
Springer, 2003).

6. Eisuke Ishikawa, Oo-edo Risaikuru Jijou [The Recycling Situation in
the Edo Period] (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1997).

7. The two sides of the story are recounted in Abigail Alling, Mark
Nelson, and Sally Silverstone, Life under Glass: The Inside Story of
Biosphere 2 (Tuscon: Biosphere Press, 1993) and Jane Poynter, The Human
Experiment: Two Years and Twenty Minutes inside Biosphere 2 (New York:
Basic Books, 2006).

8. See, for example, John Knight, 'The Soil as Teacher: Natural Farming
in a Mountain Village', in Pamela J Asquith and Arne Kalland (editors),
Japanese Images of Nature (Richmond: Curzon, 1997), pages 236-256.

http://www.archis.org/volume/2008/12/19/volume-18/


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