Speaker: JOANNA LINZER, Harvard Center for the Environment Postdoctoral Fellow (PhD History, Yale University 2021)

Moderator: IAN J. MILLER, Professor of History, Harvard University

Summary:

During the early modern period, miners deep in the mountains of Japan's Chūgoku region innovated new ways to use water to extract grains of iron from granite slopes. In this way, they supplied more and more iron needed across the archipelago for everything from new-and-improved farming tools to samurai swords. Yet the new mining technologies also involved washing tons upon tons of mine tailings into the river basins that drained from Chūgoku's mountains, wreaking havoc far downstream. This talk explores mountain mining villages, the rich agricultural communities in the plains below, and the politics that emerged between them as they clashed, negotiated, and compromised. How did these communities adapt to a changing environment? Who got the upper hand in tension between the production of an essential commodity and its environmental costs? And what can all of this tell us about the place of Japan in world environmental history? In this talk, I will delve into the politics of iron mining in early modern Japan to examine these questions.

Reischauer Institute Japan Forum co-sponsored by the Harvard University Center for the Environment and Weatherhead Center Program on US-Japan Relations