Japan and the Environment 2017 – Page 11

Dreaming of seafood on United Airlines flight 881

A 12-hour flight is certainly a unique space. To my left are young school children flopped over and deep in sleep. All around me, in darkness, passengers sleep or absorb themselves in a movie appearing on a tiny screen on the back of the seat in front of them. Pan to me, reading an anthropological piece about the interconnectedness of physical market processes and national culinary trends. Okay, I’m not just reading it for fun. This chapter, “Wholesale Sushi: Culture and Commodity in Tokyo’s Tsukiji Market” by Theodore C. Bestor, was our designated reading to do during the flight. But it was a fun read.

Returning to the anthropological and sociological sides of historical and contemporary events is always enjoyable as I think it is a useful way for me to collect broad, sometimes abstract thoughts about history and bring them to a human scale. By that, I don’t mean that ideas and concepts in history can’t exist on a human scale, just that viewing events and processes through anthropological eyes shows how these things impact people individually, and people as groups.

I’ll get into some specifics now. Bestor’s main ideas depend on analyzing Japanese culinary concepts on two levels: one at the Tsukiji fish market, where wholesalers flock to bid for the best fish they can get, brought in from around the globe; and one in which people’s ideas of what seafood is – where it comes from, how it looks, how it’s produced, etc. – drive market patterns. I particularly liked one example, perhaps because it hits close to home. He mentions sea urchin roe, an important part of Japanese seafood cuisine. Hokkaido and Maine fisheries supply Tsukiji with sea urchin roe, although one can’t always be sure of a particular batch of roe’s origin. This is because sea urchin roe that arrives from Maine in Hokkaido is repackaged, labeled as though it originated from Hokkaido, then sent down to Tokyo for market sale. Bestor attributes this activity to the larger trend that recognizes domestic seafood as having higher quality and thus higher value.

I don’t know if there is an actual difference in the quality between Hokkaido and Maine sea urchin roe, but there is a cultural standard that puts more stock in domestic seafood, thus the incentive to alter the point of origin on the packaging. Seafood acts as a medium of communication and connection between Japan and the rest of the world, but it also serves as a defining (or defined) factor of cultural production. Tomorrow, I will venture to Tsukiji with the rest of the cohort to observe the fish market and hopefully we will put together some concrete impressions to ground the more conceptual ideas from the reading.

Thoughts of a Passerby Overhead

I guess, again, I’ll be doing a two-part post. Mostly, I just wanted to document some thoughts I had on the flight from Portland to Chicago, and then later I’ll write about our first day in Japan. I think I tend to get oddly reflective whenever I’m on a long flight. I wrote these down, mid-flight, honestly just shortly after taking off from Portland, so tense might be a bit strange to read after the fact. ごめん！Gomen! Sorry!

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I think, you never really realize how fragmented and patchy our landscapes are, even in a place like Maine, until you’ve been flying over it in a small, short-distance, domestic airplane. Patches of cleared forest, square and rectangular in shape; highways and winding, crisscrossing roads; towns and cities sprawled out as grey and black tiles against the contrasting hues of green, human settlements arranged in grids or perhaps more haphazardly–that’s the landscape I see below me now. As we depart from major urban and rural hubs of everyday human life, between the sea if slowly-drifting, low-flying clouds I see rolling hills and small mountains interspersed with vales. All are crowned with the dark green of trees and yet, still occasionally I’ll see a break, a line, and though I cannot see below the canopy, from way up high, I know that there’s an asphalt serpent winding its way through those trees, with cars and trucks riding its black scales.

We’re so conditioned, I think, to see the world in contrasts and boundaries. Even within this small airplane, traveling some many thousand feet in the air, we compose a patchwork symphony of different backgrounds, different identities, different personalities. I think it’s a wonderful thing, such diversity, but at the same time our very sensory systems are designed to highlight edges through lateral inhibition, though perhaps those are more graded to an extent. What if our landscapes were not so patchy, but gradually faded and blended with those of our surrounding environments, of nature? What if, for instance, Central Park in New York City or Meiji Shrine in Tokyo were not islands of green, biodiversity in an ocean of metal and concrete, but rather blurred into those urban surroundings? And what if, in turn, those cityscapes melded into their surrounding countrysides? What ecological consequences would arise? What about social or cultural implications? Would this, too, be a gradual change, or would we suddenly be cast into a world where this was so?

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“Riffle through my Mind” (a poem, as we passed over the Great Lakes)

Will you ripple across the surface of a glassy lake,
or will you lose yourself in a swirling riffle?
You might call the forest floor your home,
clinging to soil or burrowing down with the earthworms, the beetles.
Or perhaps you might reside on the waxy green of a leaf,
a traveler ready to depart
and soar amidst the clouds.
At times invisible,
at times clearly seen.
Gentle in the first light of dawn,
sheathing the most peaceful blades you may ever witness.
Or, barreling through channeled walls,
scratching and clawing at the rock like a torrent of rabid mice.
Of many forms and dispositions, this ocean’s daughter,
but all one and the same, this precious water.

~~~

Someone, entirely unknown to us, just came over and asked us if we knew if the people next to us (also total strangers to both parties), sleeping, were supposed to get on the presently boarding flight. Out of total, random concern for people he didn’t know, that they’d miss their flight. It takes guts and an eye open to your surroundings to reach out to two independent groups of strangers like that.

Not-So-Natural Disasters

And I’m back at Bowdoin! Unfortunately it was the last day of preparation, but that means in about two days we will be on route to 日本！

There was no group reading for today, but I did get to present on my favorite reading so far! It is called Fukushima in Light of Minamata by Timothy S. George.

The consequences of disasters may be the start of something new. This article compared two seemingly different disasters in Japan: Fukushima Daiichi and Minamata. One can label the former as a “natural” disaster and the latter a “manmade” disaster, though if you agree with this author the distinctions between these two labels are not drastic as you may think. First, we look at Minamata and then see what this infers about Fukushima. For background, the Minamata disaster began in 1932, when the chemical company Chisso started dumping methylmercury–

Chemistry is one of my passions, so I have to add this tidbit in: the most dangerous form of mercury is methylmercury, or MeHg, because it is easily taken into the body. This is because it mimics an essential amino acid, so basically your body thinks it needs it when in fact it is a poison. In both Inorganic Chemistry and in chemistry lab TA training, you learn about this story of a Dartmouth professor who worked with MeHg. She spilled a couple drops of it on her gloves, and because they were the improper gloves and she did not remove the gloves immediately, the MeHg absorbed into her body. A few months later, she started experiencing symptoms of mercury poisoning. She later died in the hospital, not even a full year after her accident. (From hair testing they found that her mercury levels started increasing at 17 days and did not stop increasing until nearly 40 days after.)

–into Minamata Bay. After all the cases of mercury poisoning, there were four “solutions” afterward:

Minamata disease was officially recognized in 1956
Settlement in Japanese court 1973
One-time payments in 1995/6
Supreme Court decision in 2004

Long story short, these actions did not seem to resolve much (hence the quotations on “solutions”). And what does this infer about Fukushima? Well, a few things, like: officials are untrustworthy, a company matters more over people, effects will be downplayed, and that the disaster response may last a long time. We actually see this general response happen in Fukushima, so Minamata and Fukushima may not be as different as we thought. At the end of the article, George suggests that natural disasters are only disasters because of humans (will edit to explain). And that perhaps we should not be paying attention to when the disaster will “end” but rather what it starts. In the case of Minamata, it was the creation of groups like Environmental Protection, etc.

It appears as though Japanese people have an extreme resistance to protest, so they have to work harder or more creatively to impact the government. Michael presented on Mobilizing Mothers by Nicole Freiner, an article that focuses on environmental activism and how women help facilitate social movements. Although the Japanese government has a low repression, there is a societal pressure to conform, which makes social movements harder to engage with. Citizen activism can get creative, like making a documentary, which was the case for Oguma Eiji (mentioned in a previous post). Because this article focuses on mothers, we wonder: How do identities operate with these social movements?

After these discussions, we watched some videos on post-war Tokyo. In particular, we saw a part of Harajuku’s history. How interesting that it used to be an American military base! What had to be erased/remade for Harajuku to be made how it looks like today?

We also watched a bit of the NHK documentary on the biodiversity in the forrest surrounding Meiji Shrine. This was a time that I was really かなしい that my Japanese language skills are still at the very amateur-level (i.e. there were no English subtitles). But thank you to Selinger-sensei for major translations (and Valeria for whispering meanings of certain words to me)! How fascinating that Meiji was built 100 years ago, with careful planning, on a wasteland. The whole point of it was for humans to start the forrest but then for it to be untouched by humans afterward. The documentary really emphasized how the species observed in the forrest have never been described in Tokyo before. This tied in with the concept of purity we talked on about the first prep day, so we have reached a full circle!

Reimagining Activism

Today marks the last day of prep work! We have certainly come a long way since Monday the 22nd at 9am. To commemorate the last day of the controlled setting, I want to focus on some broader ideas instead of the detailed retelling of the day (which you can read on my wonderful peers’ posts!).

Through today’s discussion of disaster, activism, and rebuilding, I am really curious about the common people’s responses to events that may seem distant temporally and geographically. Obviously, we research and engage with others who care about these issues and want to pursue the topics in more details, but what about the majority of the population? Do people think about the corporate lack of responsibility and persistent denial/cover-up or is Minamata disease merely marked off as a tragedy? How is/who hardship appropriated to indicate moral capacity? How do existing societal values and “rules” affect the willingness of people to respond? The recent social activism stems from very “average” citizens who aren’t used to being vocal and expressive. I am very inclined to want to compare social activists (for different topics) across cultures. Especially reflecting on my class the past semester about popular culture and mass politics in North/West India, the protests in Japan could not be any more different. What do people want from the authority? Are the expectations of the values different and why do they differ?

I also recently wrote an essay about An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro. The temptation to use memory as a device to reconstruct history and nonlinearity was crucial to the unreliable narrator’s retelling of his past. Memory can be easily manipulated to incite forlorn nostalgia or redeemable mistakes. The constant suppression of painful memories eventually encouraged the readers to pity the unreconcilable world the narrator now exists in. Many of the events we look at, including American occupation, are not ancient history. How much do we remember and what do we choose to remember? Most importantly, who/what gets erased and why? I think to be able to go to Tokyo with some Japanese history background will allow us to better compare and track continuity and changes.

Minamata and Fukushima

Karen started today’s discussion with her presentation of “In light of Minamata” in which it was a sort of compare and contrasts between the “nature” of the two disasters and reactions from the government. While Minamata was clearly labeled a man-made disaster and Fukushima a “natural”-disaster: there was a rather similar response from the government and the companies associated (Chisso and TEPCO respectively)- a denial of responsibility. Furthermore, the question of the disaster being “over” was introduced. Can it really be over, if the mercury in the water as well as the radiation in the soil can only be diluted and not eradicated? It changes our perspective from thinking of a disaster being over to moving forward and learning how to live with them…

“what would it mean for the environment to be healed?

Due to the political structure of Japan and the societal pressure to conform, protest and social activism are seen as unpopular to engage with. Michael talked about the power role of women, especially mothers in activism in Japan. Women and children are seen as the most vulnerable of the population-when they suffer it becomes more tragic, and therefore social protests turn from factual and violent riots to emphatic movements. Through the feminization of memory, the social movements appeal to societal values-which provokes the masses to voice their concerns and cause a change.

We briefly reviewed the history of some the places we will be visiting in Japan, such as Harajuku, where america transitioned from violence to desire and Meiji Shrine, the “Man-Planned” eternal forest. Throughout the viewing the Meiji Shrine Video, there were audible gasps and comments of awe due to the diversity found in the the “eternal forest.” The forest in the heart of Tokyo that surrounds Meiji Shrine is an interesting political as well as environmental experiment. After carefully planning the forest onto a wasteland, the forest has been left alone to take its own course…

明後日は日本に行きますね！　私はこの旅行に興奮しています。楽しみにしています。興奮みましょう、みんなさん！\(^o^)/