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Paper short abstract:

This paper situates Tanaka Shōzō – the leader of Japan’s first modern environmental movement – in a forgotten intellectual network in the early twentieth century. It showcases a competing vision of civilisation that was locally circulated in juxtaposition to Meiji’s modernisation discourses.

Paper long abstract:

With the rise of environmental concerns and doubts cast on the existent linear mode of progression in human history, recent scholarship has turned to the ideas of Tanaka Shōzō (1841–1913), known as the leader of Japan’s first modern environmental movement. Tanaka famously criticised the Establishment’s pursuit of industrialisation and human-ecological exploitation. Therefore, existing literature often depicts Tanaka as a heroic political-environmental activist – almost like a martyr. In doing so, it tends to somewhat isolate him from the rest of the sociocultural and intellectual currents of his time. This paper situates Tanaka and his critique of the culture-nature hierarchy in a much larger intellectual context of early twentieth-century Japan. It does so through a new, extensive intellectual network that I am uncovering, namely a web of the grassroots thinker Arai Ōsui (1846–1922) and his comrades. In stark contrast to renowned Tanaka, Ōsui’s resonating critique of civilisation has been almost completely forgotten in historiography. And yet, it was this Ōsui whom Tanaka intellectually and spiritually relied on and revered as his master, even though Ōsui was younger than him. Through the scope of the Ōsui network, this paper argues that Tanaka’s environmental activism well manifested the wider concerns of hierarchy, morality, and civilisational advancement, which were locally circulated outside of the state and academic institutions in early twentieth-century Japan. The examination of this cultural-intellectual web will interconnect previously disconnected historical actors, and showcase an anti-imperial vision of civilisation and progress that was variously supported in juxtaposition to the established narrative of Meiji’s imperial modernisation.