Seeds of Precarity: Environmental Transformation, Rural Poverty, and the Problem of Japanese Development

Though much has been written about Japan’s modernization, the tendency of historians to try to fit Japan into an idealized Western developmental path has ultimately led to a stilted rendering that too often obscures the sustained hardships that underpinned Japan’s economic reproduction. To remedy this problem, I argue for engaging with more recent approaches in Political Ecology and Environmental History, particularly those works dealing with development in the Global South. Doing so not only reveals the co-constitutive process of economic and ecological change, but also enables a shift in perspective from Japan’s more economically advanced regions commonly featured in the literature to its “backwards” peripheral regions that acted as sacrificial extractive zones that bore the brunt of Japan’s industrialization.

To illustrate this, this paper focuses on the recurring issue of crop failures and deepening immiseration in the three northern prefectures of Aomori, Iwate, and Akita between 1868 and 1935. Far from reflecting the region’s natural limits as some scholars argue, I contend that this issue was a historical product of a restructuring of the relations between human and non-human nature in which lifeforms and practices not amenable to capital valorization were eradicated and replaced with those which served capital accumulation.

By tracing these material transformations in conjunction with sources such as welfare surveys, policy papers, land use records and oral testimony, this paper hopes to answer a series of questions: What kind of material legacies—whether deemed useful or obstructive—were available to the Meiji State at the time of industrialization? What impact did this restructuring have on the short-term and long-term well-being of farmers in the prefectures I examine? How might these results force us to rethink Japan as an ideal model for development?