William M. Tsutsui

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.	4
I am, of course, not alone in being a defector. A quick check of the CVs of some of the most prominent scholars publishing on Japanese environmental history—Conrad Totman, Gavan McCormack, Tessa Morris-Suzuki—will reveal first (and sometimes second, third, and fourth) books written on topics far distant from the environment. This is hardly surprising, since even when I went through graduate school in the late 1980s, finding advanced training in East Asian environmental history was well-nigh impossible (and still remains far from easy today). Happily, the pattern of scholars coming to environmental history somewhat belatedly in their careers has, I believe, been beneficial to the development of the field. Converts like myself have helped infuse environmental history with what I consider the best kind of interdisciplinarity—an organic integration of approaches and perspectives from one established subfield, be it economic, political, or military history, with the evolving frameworks and emerging theories of environmental historians. My training in business history has served me well in the transition to working on the Japanese environment: The professional discourses of efficiency engineers, it turns out, resonate strongly with those of hydrologists, fisheries bureaucrats, and even birdwatchers; the managerial theories applied to industrial labor have their echoes, or perhaps their origins, in strategies for administering natural resources.	5
The future will bring more scholarly migrants into environmental history, as long as the field retains its intellectual spark and its practitioners retain their passion, both for the environment itself and the history that they write. Environmental history has certainly gone beyond being a historiographical flash in the pan, just another of the discipline wannabes—"disability studies," "entrepreneurship"—that have proliferated in recent years. Yet in its very success lie hazards. As the field becomes more established, it may well grow more narrow and, eventually, ossified; like so many other topical slivers of the historical profession, environmental history runs the risk of becoming fixated on a limited range of time-honored debates and obsessed by precisely delineating (rather than constantly expanding) the intellectual boundaries of the field. As more young scholars are trained specifically as environmental historians, some of the field's interdisciplinary nature and its pioneering—dare one say crusading?—edge may be lost. Business history is an object lesson, having traced such a trajectory from the brave new world of Alfred Chandler's Visible Hand (1977) to the doldrums of today. The perceived relevance of a field, the excitement and creativity of its practitioners, and its honeymoon on the cutting edge of scholarship can all evaporate in a terrifyingly short time. That being said, I strongly suspect that the pervasive interdisciplinary connections between environmental history and the "hard" sciences, the sensitivity of so many environmental historians to the policy implications of their work, and their intense, infectious personal commitment to the enterprise of environmental history will give it a long scholarly shelf life as a vibrant (or what some might call a "paradigm generating") field.	6
The future also should bring more frequent and intensive engagement between environmental historians in North America and scholars abroad, especially, I believe, in Asia. Japanese historians have long worked on environmental topics—notably forestry, fisheries, and agriculture, especially in the early modern period—but few Japanese researchers have yet framed their work within the Western discourse of environmental history. In the coming years and decades, we can look forward to our study of the environment being enriched by new perspectives from overseas historians, and to our approaches and frameworks being extended to their investigations as well. Such global cross-pollination is not necessarily inevitable, but will require initiative and resources from environmental historians and interested organizations both in North America and abroad. We can rest assured that the individual and intellectual returns of international bridge-building will make the investments of time, energy, and (scarce) funding well worthwhile.	7
William M. Tsutsui is associate professor of history at the University of Kansas and the author of Godzilla on My Mind: Fifty Years of the King of Monsters (2004). He currently is conducting research on the environmental impact of World War II and the American occupation on Japan.

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