Upstream, Downstream: Iron Mining in Early Modern Japan and the Uneven Spread of Environmental Protection (2023)
This article examines disputes over iron mining in early modern Japan (1600–1868), focusing on how and why some communities had greater say in stopping or permitting environmental harm. Well before Japan became the first non-Western society to industrialize, mountain miners in the southwestern region of Chūgoku developed increasingly effective technologies for extracting Japan’s most abundant source of iron—iron sand found in granite rock. But their hydraulic methods involved sending more than a billion cubic meters of tailings into the region’s rivers, wreaking downstream havoc, from ruined crops to tainted drinking water. When downstream people pushed to curtail mining, two important social factors came into play. First, across ironmaking river basins, and in contrast to better-known modern cases, more affluent downstream plains communities bore the brunt of the damage that poorer mountain miners caused. Indeed, miners used their villages’ relative poverty to galvanize official support to continue mining. At the same time, in negotiating compromises, upstream and downstream inhabitants of different river basins also arrived at sharply different standards of what constituted an acceptable level of mining. These differences depended on the complex political geography of early modern Japan, in which some jurisdictions had much greater authority than others. All told, these disputes both reaffirm and cut against more familiar patterns found in modern cases, foreshadowing the uneven spread of industry’s harms across the social landscape, while also reflecting the distinctive mining technology, political culture, and geography of this early modern society.
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