Landscapes in the Dark Valley: Toward an Environmental History of Wartime Japan

William M. Tsutsui

JAPAN'S "HOME FRONT" during the Second World War has received surprisingly little academic attention over the past half century. Japanese observers have long seen the war years as a "dark valley" (kurai tanima), a time of extreme deprivation and suffering, a memory "too bitter to recall with detachment."1 Western scholars, with a few notable exceptions, also have tended to slight Japan's domestic experience of war in favor of military history and grander political and diplomatic narratives.2 Only in recent years have analysts on both sides of the Pacific shown increasing interest in wartime life in Japan, recognizing that mass mobilization had significant long-term consequences for Japanese society. But while studies have suddenly proliferated on topics like wartime industrial and labor policy, the mobilization of Japanese women, and the legacy of statist economic and political structures, some important aspects of Japan's home front have continued to be overlooked.3	1
A striking omission from the scholarly literature is a systematic study of Japan's natural environment during World War II. Wartime mobilization, dislocation, and combat clearly left their marks on the Japanese landscape and on the Japanese people's relationships with the natural world. Structures for managing, utilizing, and perceiving the environment—both formal and informal, economic, political, and cultural—were recast under the pressures of "total war." Many wartime developments—from deforestation to changing patterns of rural land-use to the radioactive aftermath at Hiroshima and Nagasaki—would have sweeping implications, even long after the end of the conflict. Gaining a fuller understanding of Japan's complex and compelling wartime experience demands that closer attention be paid to the environmental policies, costs, and consequences of the Second World War.4	2
This essay represents a preliminary step toward such a reappraisal of wartime Japan from the perspective of environmental history. The central concern here will be a fundamental—and deceptively modest—question: What impact did World War II have on Japan's environment? Few historians have directly addressed this issue. The implicit assumption of most observers has been that war—especially "total war" in the twentieth century—has been recklessly and unambiguously destructive of the natural environment. The atomic bombings in Japan, the use of chemicals like Agent Orange in Indochina, and the burning oil wells of the Persian Gulf usually are taken as evidence aplenty for the notion that modern warfare is inevitably ruinous for the environment.5	3
Nevertheless, as this essay argues, the environmental effects of war are much less neat (and often much less obvious) than might at first be assumed. Specifically, while the Second World War clearly had a deleterious impact on many aspects of Japan's natural environment, there were also significant ways in which the war brought unexpectedly beneficial environmental consequences. War, in other words, need not necessarily be all bad for the environment. At the same time, the case of Japan also suggests that the effects of warfare on the environment (be they favorable or detrimental) are often less lasting and less significant than we might imagine. Nature, happily, has extraordinary powers of regeneration, and humankind, regrettably, has an uncanny ability to shatter delicate ecological systems even in times of peace. In short, the environmental legacies of war are complex, contingent, and often surprisingly transitory.	. . .