- Convenors:
-
Paulina Kolata
(Harvard University)
Aike Rots (University of Oslo)
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- Discussant:
-
Saskia Abrahms-Kavunenko
(Kyoto University)
- Format:
- Panel
- Section:
- Interdisciplinary Section: Environmental Humanities
Short Abstract
The panel examines how pollution takes shape and endures at ritual, domestic, and post-industrial sites in Japan and how it affects human and nonhuman lifeworlds, ecologies, and care practices over longer periods of time.
Long Abstract
This panel explores how pollution shapes environmental pasts, presents, and futures in Japan. Examining sites of ritual practice, domestic life, and post-industrial landscapes, the papers trace how waste and toxicity endure within infrastructures, ecologies, and bodies, where they continue to shape human and nonhuman life over time. Combining insights from anthropology, history, and the environmental humanities, the panel highlights how people navigate daily encounters with pollution in contemporary Japan. It approaches pollution not as a temporary event but as an ongoing condition that demands constant negotiation through practices of habitation, ritual care, and environmental governance. In the process, new practices of containment and care emerge that reflect contested notions of responsibility, value, and harm.
The three papers reveal how Japan’s environmental present is experienced as both constrained by the stubborn accumulations of the past and oriented toward uncertain ecological futures. Presenter 1 examines the afterlives of industrial pollution in Minamata, tracing how histories of corporate violence and environmental toxicity are alternately concealed, curated, and confronted. Contrasting the state-sponsored eco-park and the citizen-led Minamata Disease Museum, the paper shows how museum exhibits, physical nature-making, and ritual innovations produce competing accounts of past responsibility and present-day recovery. Presenter 2 turns to domestic interiors to explore how pollution unfolds as a slow, lived condition in hoarding cases shaped by mould, vermin, and chemical agents. The paper examines how accumulated objects reshape indoor ecologies through the interaction of architectural forms, seasonal rhythms, and human routines, producing toxic domestic environments that render pollution difficult to perceive and contain. Presenter 3 examines how concerns over anticipatory pollution and contamination reshape ritual ecologies in temple-run ossuaries where food offerings for the dead persist beyond ritual moments. The paper shows how decay, pollution risk, and waste regulation reorganize ritual care, reconfiguring how relations with the dead are materially enacted and managed amid tensions between ritual cycles and material temporalities. The panel’s discussant, whose work on plastics foregrounds durability, toxicity, and the relationality of petrochemical matter, will situate these cases within broader academic debates and offer some transnational perspectives.
| Abstract in Japanese (if needed) |
Accepted papers
Paper short abstract
This paper discusses the town of Minamata, known for its history of industrial pollution, as it appears in 2025. It examines the narratives and practices of the "eco park" and its state-sanctioned educational facilities, juxtaposing them with the Minamata Disease Museum run by a citizens' movement.
Paper long abstract
The seaside town of Minamata in Kumamoto Prefecture is world-famous. It was here that, for several decades in the mid-twentieth century, the chemical company Chisso (now renamed JNC) released large quantities of toxic methylmercury into the sea, leading to the death or permanent disability of thousands of human and nonhuman residents. Minamata disease still exists, but the town has been rebranded by local authorities and corporate sponsors as an “environmental model city” that takes the lead in recycling technology and is home to a 41-hectare-large "eco park." This park literally conceals the polluted "sea of sorrow" (Ishimure 1969) from sight: the authorities created it by reclaiming land from the sea, turning it into "nature" by adding a bamboo landscape park and native seedling forest alongside sports fields, playground, and a roadside station selling local agricultural products. The park is also home to three educational facilities that tell the official story of Minamata disease and teach school children about environmental sustainability.
But there are other stories that can be told about Minamata. Stories of corporate violence, community conflict, and lingering pollution, for instance. And stories of citizens’ activism, artistic engagement, and more-than-human care. Such stories are told in a different museum, located far from the eco park, with a much lower operating budget: the Minamata Disease Museum managed by the NGO Sōshisha. This museum, which builds upon the work of writer Ishimure Michiko, functions as an archive and a meeting place. It is also a ritual site, as people here make offerings to the spirits of humans and cats who died as a result of Chisso’s corporate violence.
This paper introduces Minamata as it appears to a visitor in 2025. It discusses the eco park, the educational facilities, and the attempts at nature-making. It also analyses the history and present-day activities of Sōshisha, with particular focus on the role of ritual objects and practices. What do Minamata’s multiple stories tell us today, in this new age of widespread industrial pollution, anthropogenic disasters, and incessant extractivism? And what is the possible significance of ritual action in the face of such environmental precarity?
Paper short abstract
Based on ethnography in regional temple communities, I examine temple-run ossuaries as sites where ritual care for the dead generates pollution. Focusing on food offerings, I show how decay, risk, and regulation emerge from care itself, revealing the politics of food waste and governance.
Paper long abstract
What happens when practices of caring for the dead generate materials that linger, decay, and become sources of contamination? Across many Buddhist temples in rural Japan, food offerings such as bowls of rice, fruit, sweets, canned drinks, and their packaging remain on altars in temple-run ossuaries (nōkotsudō), domestic altars (butsudan), and graveyards as nourishment for the dead. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research with Buddhist temple communities in Miyazaki, Shimane, Hiroshima, Nara, and Kyoto, and centring on a detailed case from rural Miyazaki, this paper examines food waste as a form of stubborn material excess produced through ritual care. It approaches ossuaries as sites where acts of ritual care generate unintended forms of pollution, examining pollution not as external to ritual practice but as emerging from within care itself.
At Shōnenji, a local Buddhist temple in Miyazaki, food offerings placed before individual ossuary altars frequently persist beyond ritual moments. Accumulating within enclosed halls, they require continuous curatorial labour to manage rot, smell, pests, and material degradation. As they endure, these offerings reshape ritual ecologies and extend into local waste systems and more-than-human relations involving the dead, microbes, insects, and other material actors. Attending to the layered temporalities through which this excess unfolds, the paper traces how cyclical ritual time oriented towards sustaining relations with the dead collides with material temporalities of perishability, expiration dates, food safety regimes, and longer horizons of environmental governance shaped by waste regulation, sustainability discourse, and disaster preparedness. In response to anticipated decay, contamination, and regulatory scrutiny, temples and families increasingly substitute perishable offerings with long-life emergency foods, wax or plastic replicas, crocheted fruit, and heavily packaged alternatives. While these substitutions stabilise ritual spaces and mitigate organic decay, they introduce durable materials that persist across longer temporal scales, shifting the form rather than the presence of excess. By tracing how concerns over pollution and risk reorganise practices of ritual care, this paper argues that temple-run ossuaries offer a critical lens for understanding the politics of food waste in contemporary Japan, revealing how environmental governance reshapes moral relations with the dead.
Paper short abstract
What makes domestic environments in Japan toxic or inhabitable and for whom? Rather than treating hoarding primarily as a psychological pathology, the paper approaches it as a material and environmental condition that unfolds within particular architectural, climatic, and temporal contexts.
Paper long abstract
This paper takes the notion of the environment indoors and asks: What makes domestic environments in Japan toxic or inhabitable and for whom? Drawing on a decade of research on hoarding in Japan and recent work on mould in anthropology, human geography and environmental humanities, it examines the specific configurations through which hoarding becomes entangled with indoor ecologies. Rather than treating hoarding primarily as a psychological pathology, the paper approaches it as a material and environmental condition that unfolds within particular architectural, climatic, and temporal contexts.
Japanese dwellings, characterised by wood-based construction, and the widespread use of electric heating in winter and air-conditioning during the humid summers, provide especially favourable conditions for the growth of mould and the proliferation of vermin. In hoarding cases, accumulated objects do not merely crowd living space but actively reshape domestic environments. Clutter creates sheltered niches for rats and cockroaches and obscures the gradual spread of mould along walls, floors, and structural elements, often rendering environmental deterioration difficult to detect until it becomes advanced.
Seasonal rhythms, patterns of heating and ventilation, and the slow accretion of objects produce environments in which biological processes and human routines become tightly interwoven. How do inhabitants contain, fight, or resign themselves to their more-than-human cohabitants? In some cases, residents actively attempt to share space with more-than-human cohabitants, while in others they seek to manage infestations through chemical agents. How, then, are the chemical agents used to control mould infestations experienced as creating other forms of toxicities? I argue that domestic environments offer a critical lens through which to understand how environmental harm is lived, managed, and endured, revealing the ethical and political challenges of inhabiting environmental futures that are already saturated by the residues of the past.