William M. Tsutsui

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William M. Tsutsui | Where the Grass is Always Greener | Environmental History, 10.1 | The History Cooperative

Anniversary Forum

Where the Grass is Always Greener

I AM A LATECOMER to environmental history, and my mid-career conversion experience has shaped my sense of the field's future.	1
For the better part of twenty years—through multiple theses, a dissertation, two monographs, an anthology, and countless seminars, symposia, and topics courses—I toiled in the foursquare confines of business and economic history.	2
For most of that time, it was a good and stimulating life intellectually: Banking and management seemed promising angles for understanding modern Japan, the field of business history seemed energetic and reasonably creative, economic statistics seemed so reassuringly concrete and conclusive.	3
But in the late 1990s, my research interests began to stray. The hallway whispering at national conferences increasingly bemoaned business history as a "dead field," the literature seemed to grow less rich and more derivative, and, as Japan's "Great Recession" stretched on for over a decade, the allure of economic analysis as the key to Japanese history started to fade. In a serendipitous lull between major projects, I decided to make the leap to environmental history and retool myself mid-career (an intellectual exercise I would, incidentally, recommend to anyone). I was drawn to environmental history not just by the insistent proselytizing of colleagues in the field, but by the thrill of applying a sophisticated and (to me, at least) new historical literature to times and places that had never been examined through an environmental lens. Moreover, environmental history seemed (and seems) relevant to concerns beyond the ivory tower in a way that the more esoteric and ingrown concerns of business and economic history regrettably now do not.	. . .

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