Author: Masafumi Yokemoto
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 9819932394
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 148
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Book Description
This book describes how modern industry affected people in Japan and their communities by polluting their living environment with toxic emissions. It also shows how the populace endeavored not only to restore their once-clean environment but also to rebuild communities that had been damaged by pollution and its accompanying effects. Environmental pollution is usually referred to in Japan as kogai, public damage, meaning that such pollution not only harms the physical environment—air, water, soil, and the human body—but also destroys the social and personal relationships in the polluted area. Those people who took action recognized that industrial and economic development had been given the highest national priority even at the cost of their health and welfare. In this sense, anti-kogai movements led them to alternative community development and to rethinking what kind of environment and community they wanted. This book also explores the efforts driven by residents in several parts of Japan after the middle of the twentieth century and the endeavors of museums and archives as a memorial to those who suffered from the pollution and for the prospect of a better society with a good environment.
Author: Tamie Nakajima
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 9811662495
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 174
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Book Description
This thought-provoking book examines how the accumulated knowledge on past and present environmental issues and risks within Japan can be applied in order to help deliver the transformation to a sustainable and well-being society. The book opens with a series of case analyses on environmental pollution events and pollution-related diseases within the country over the past half century or more. Lessons learned regarding the harm to society are highlighted. Diverse current environmental issues are then explored in detail, ranging from the management of hazardous chemical and asbestos exposure to marine plastic pollution and nuclear disasters. This discussion forms the basis for the final part of the book, which focuses on how progress can be made towards the Sustainable Development Goals set out in the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Important insights are also provided into future directions in human ecology and ecotoxicology. The book will be a valuable resource for both new and established researchers as well as for those seeking comprehensive information on environmental/occupational health and health promotion.
Author: Simon Avenell
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824874382
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 333
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Book Description
What motivates people to become involved in issues and struggles beyond their own borders? How are activists changed and movements transformed when they reach out to others a world away? This adept study addresses these questions by tying together local, national, regional, and global historical narratives surrounding the contemporary Japanese environmental movement. Spanning the era of Japanese industrial pollution in the 1960s and the more recent rise of movements addressing global environmental problems, it shows how Japanese activists influenced approaches to environmentalism and industrial pollution in the Asia-Pacific region, North America, and Europe, as well as landmark United Nations conferences in 1972 and 1992. Japan’s experiences with diseases caused by industrial pollution produced a potent “environmental injustice paradigm” that fueled domestic protest and became the motivation for Japanese groups’ activism abroad. From the late 1960s onward Japanese activists organized transnational movements addressing mercury contamination in Europe and North America, industrial pollution throughout East Asia, radioactive waste disposal in the Pacific, and global climate change. In all cases, they advocated strongly for the rights of pollution victims and people living in marginalized communities and nations—a position that often put them at odds with those advocating for the global environment over local or national rights. Transnational involvement profoundly challenged Japanese groups’ understanding of and approach to activism. Numerous case studies demonstrate how border-crossing efforts undermined deeply engrained notions of victimhood in the domestic movement and nurtured a more self-reflexive and multidimensional approach to environmental problems and social activism. Transnational Japan in the Global Environmental Movement will appeal to scholars and students interested in the development of civil society, social movements, and environmentalism in contemporary Japan; grassroots inter-Asian connections in the postwar period; and the ways Asian countries and their citizens have shaped and been influenced by global issues like environmentalism. An electronic version of this book is freely available thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched, a collaborative initiative designed to make high-quality books open access for the public good. The open-access version of this book is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which means that the work may be freely downloaded and shared for non-commercial purposes, provided credit is given to the author. Derivative works and commercial uses require permission from the publisher.
Author: Hidefumi Imura
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN: 9781781008249
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 432
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Book Description
This book is a must; it is best reading for all interested in or working on environmental policy formulation and implementation, be it in a polluted industrial country or in a polluting developing country. Environmentalist . . . a well-conceptualized analysis of the evolution of Japan s environmental policies and programmes. . . The quality of integration from chapter to chapter is much superior to that of most multiple-author texts. International Sociology Review of Books The eleven contributors to this book provide profound retrospective view son the fearsome damage inflicted on the environment of Japan and on its people during the rapid economic growth period from late 1950s to the early 1970s. The book also presents a clear vision of how developing countries might draw lessons from Japan s experiences in overcoming some of its pollution problems. Hiroshi Ohta, Pacific Affairs This is, I m sure, the most comprehensive and the best book ever on Japan s environmental policy. This book is a must; it is best reading for all interested in or working on environmental policy formulation and implementation, be it in a polluted industrial country or in a polluting developing country. Udo E. Simonis, Internationales Asienforum The volume is a great source to explain what factors have made Japanese pollution control policy so successful. . . Imura and Schreurs have unveiled the intricacies of Japanese pollution control policy in this volume. The book can be used at the undergraduate and graduate level, particularly as a stepping stone in projects focused on minimization of contaminant emissions and on Japanese environmental policy and politics. Raul Pacheco-Vega, Global Environmental Politics A gold mine of information, this book gives a balanced, comprehensive, and authoritative analysis of Japan s environmental policy and candidly covers both its considerable achievements and persistent limitations. Although this volume focuses on issues of policy implementation, it impressively addresses most aspects of environmental issues in Japan. . . This is indeed a superb book that provides encyclopedia-like information about environmental issues in Japan and is unmatched, especially in its emphasis on policy implementation. Lam Peng Er, Journal of Japanese Studies Japanese environmental management style is in many ways distinct from that found in Europe or the USA. There is less emphasis on litigation, more emphasis on administrative guidance and considerable use of voluntary mechanisms for policy implementation. This volume considers what factors may have contributed to Japan s relatively successful efforts at dealing with severe industrial pollution and problems associated with rapid urbanization. The book introduces Japan s environmental history, its key environmental regulations and the forces that have driven Japan to introduce these environmental regulations and programs. It also examines the various formal and informal institutional mechanisms and policy instruments that have been introduced over the past several decades to implement pollution control and energy conservation. The authors conclude by putting Japan s environmental policy experiences in comparative perspective and considering what useful lessons can be drawn from the Japanese experience for developing nations. Providing a detailed analysis of environmental policies and policy instruments in Japan by leading experts in the field, this book will be of great interest to students of environmental policy and politics and policymakers concerned with environmental protection in Asia.
Author: Ian Jared Miller
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824838777
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 338
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Book Description
Japan at Nature’s Edge is a timely collection of essays that explores the relationship between Japan’s history, culture, and physical environment. It greatly expands the focus of previous work on Japanese modernization by examining Japan’s role in global environmental transformation and how Japanese ideas have shaped bodies and landscapes over the centuries. The immediacy of Earth’s environmental crisis, a predicament highlighted by Japan’s March 2011 disaster, brings a sense of urgency to the study of Japan and its global connections. The work is an environmental history in the broadest sense of the term because it contains writing by environmental anthropologists, a legendary Japanese economist, and scholars of Japanese literature and culture. The editors have brought together an unparalleled assemblage of some of the finest scholars in the field who, rather than treat it in isolation or as a unique cultural community, seek to connect Japan to global environmental currents such as whaling, world fisheries, mountaineering and science, mining and industrial pollution, and relations with nonhuman animals. The contributors assert the importance of the environment in understanding Japan’s history and propose a new balance between nature and culture, one weighted much more heavily on the side of natural legacies. This approach does not discount culture. Instead, it suggests that the Japanese experience of nature, like that of all human beings, is a complex and intimate negotiation between the physical and cultural worlds. Contributors: Daniel P. Aldrich, Jakobina Arch, Andrew Bernstein, Philip C. Brown, Timothy S. George, Jeffrey E. Hanes, David L. Howell, Federico Marcon, Christine L. Marran, Ian Jared Miller, Micah Muscolino, Ken’ichi Miyamoto, Sara B. Pritchard, Julia Adeney Thomas, Karen Thornber, William M. Tsutsui, Brett L. Walker, Takehiro Watanabe.
Author: Akira Furukawa
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 328
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Book Description
"From an environmentalist perspective, the book examines the life world of villagers in modern Japan and their wisdom in daily life, with the focus on their religious life, preparation for natural disasters, irrigation systems, maintenance methods of forests and changing village structures. With ample ethnographic illustrations, the author explores the potential of indigenous philosophy rooted in rural life and a fresh form of communalism in Japan." -- Publisher.
Author: Robert Stolz
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822376504
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 284
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Book Description
Bad Water is a sophisticated theoretical analysis of Japanese thinkers and activists' efforts to reintegrate the natural environment into Japan's social and political thought in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth. The need to incorporate nature into politics was revealed by a series of large-scale industrial disasters in the 1890s. The Ashio Copper Mine unleashed massive amounts of copper, arsenic, mercury, and other pollutants into surrounding watersheds. Robert Stolz argues that by forcefully demonstrating the mutual penetration of humans and nature, industrial pollution biologically and politically compromised the autonomous liberal subject underlying the political philosophy of the modernizing Meiji state. In the following decades, socialism, anarchism, fascism, and Confucian benevolence and moral economy were marshaled in the search for new theories of a modern political subject and a social organization adequate to the environmental crisis. With detailed considerations of several key environmental activists, including Tanaka Shōzō, Bad Water is a nuanced account of Japan's environmental turn, a historical moment when, for the first time, Japanese thinkers and activists experienced nature as alienated from themselves and were forced to rebuild the connections.
Author: Brendan F. D. Barrett
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429581467
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 314
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Book Description
First published in 1991. Japanese attitudes to pollution and environmental protection were distinctly equivocal. The Japanese are a nature-loving people, yet they are responsible for widespread environmental destruction; Japan has some of the world’s strictest environmental quality standards, but the country also has some of the world’s most environmentally damaged areas. In this book the authors present a broad and detailed analysis of policy and process in Japan in the late twentieth century. Brendan Barrett and Riki Therivel, who both have extensive research experience in Japan, describe interest group participation in Japan’s environmental policy-making and give an historical review of the relationship between economic growth and environmental problems. They look at the framework for environmental policy-making and outline the system for environmental management. This is complemented by a discussion of Environmental Impact Assessment, and by live case studies of the practical realities of EIA in Japan. With environmental problems reaching global proportions, countries all over the world have much to learn from the experience of Japan, and the book will be extremely useful to national government officials, to local planning officers responsible for EIA, and to environmental consultants working for commercial and industrial companies. It will also be essential reading for students of geography, environmental studies, Japanese studies and planning economics.
Author: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
Publisher: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development ; [Washington, D.C. : sold by OECD Publications Center]
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 106
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Book Description
Author: Midori Kagawa-Fox
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136481729
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 334
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Book Description
This book examines the Japanese government policies that impact on the environment in order to determine whether they incorporate a sufficient ethical substance. Through the three case studies on whaling, nuclear energy, and forestry, the author explores how Western philosophers combined their theories to develop a ‘Western environmental ethics code’ and reveals the existence of a unique ‘Japanese environmental ethics code’ built on Japan’s cultural traditions, religious practices, and empirical experiences. Kagawa-Fox’s discussions show that in spite of the positive contributions that Japan has made towards the global environment, the government has failed to show a corresponding moral obligation to the world ecology in its environmental policy. The book argues that this is a result of the integrity of the policies having been compromised by vested interests and that Japanese business and politics ensure that the policies are primarily focused on maintaining sustainable economic growth. Whilst Japan's global environmental initiatives are the key to its economic survival in the 21st century, and these initiatives may achieve their aims, they do however fail the Japanese code of environmental ethics. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in Environmental Studies, Environmental Policy and Ethics, Japanese Politics and Japanese Culture and Society.
