2 - Japan’s Colonial Environments

Summary

This chapter presents Japanese colonialism as an environmental process, one fueled by resource extraction yet also committed to “greening” the territories it occupied. Planting cherry trees in places such as Korea symbolized Japanese rule. At the same time, Japanese agricultural and botanical ideals had to adapt to meet the conditions of diverse ecologies. Even when attempts to remake landscapes fell short, they established legacies that persist across East Asian landscapes through to the present day.

Introduction

By the time the Japanese empire reached its greatest extent during the throes of the Second World War, it occupied territory ranging from Alaska's foggy Aleutian islands and the Mongolian steppe to Burmese mangroves and the phosphate island of Nauru. This diversity of ecologies was no accident. It reflected not only the empire's vast geographic reach but also the fact that Japan's Asia-Pacific War was a resource war. Coal, oil and rubber are seldom found in a single location, and as they fueled Japan's engines of war they also pushed the empire into new environments. While the spatial scale of this process may have been unprecedented, Japan and its empire had been expanding in ecologically transformative ways for a long time.

This chapter addresses what I call Japan's colonial environments. Taking a cue from the field of environmental history, “environment” here connotes neither a passive background for human events nor a universalized and singular entity (“the environment”). Instead, I take “environment” to reside first in the mass of non-human materials, minerals, rivers, seas, marshes, mountains, trees, grasses, shrubs, crops and animals that constituted the physical reality of the Japanese empire and also in the relationships these various objects, organisms and landscapes had with each other and with humans. The colonial or quasi-colonial spaces within the modern Japanese empire on which this chapter focuses are, by year of acquisition or incorporation, Taiwan (1895), South Sakhalin/Karafuto (1905), Korea (1910), the South Seas Mandate (1919) and Manchukuo (1932).

Before addressing any of the above cases, I examine the early modern incorporation of Ezo/Hokkaido, where the stage was set for the drama of Japanese imperialism to play out across continental Northeast Asia and islands to the south and north of the Japanese archipelago.