Walker

Japan’s Kamioka Mine: Engineering Human Pain in the Hybrid Environments of the Jinzū River Basin
Brett L. Walker Department of History Montana State University

Tuesday, Sept 18, 2007 at 4:00 pm in Shiffman 216, Brandeis University

With the beginning of the Meiji wars, miners started extracting silver and lead from the Kamioka shafts of the mountainous regions of Toyama Prefecture. This technological complex, and the engineered environments it birthed, seamlessly connected to the Jinzū River Basin, which also fed downstream paddies that, in their own way, were engineered environments as well. Smelting and ore flotation devices that allowed miners and processors to extract ever higher percentages of their desired metals caused pollution problems in nearby agricultural lands. But these pollution problems, particularly their consequences for human health, represented the product of hybrid causation. Naturally occurring oxidization processes in riparian ecosystems created the toxins that caused human pain; but “it hurts, it hurts” disease, or cadmium poisoning, was also the product of the physiological consequences of Meiji state pronouncements regarding being a “good wife and wise mother.” Women who were both productive and reproductive tended to suffer disproportionately from cadmium poisoning: obeying meant sacrifice for the state. Similarly, women who sheltered themselves from the sun, in a culturally ingrained habit to preserve their white complexion, deprived themselves of nutrients that could have protected them from industrial disease. Mining technologies, engineered environments, natural alchemy, state pronouncements, and cultural habits enmeshed and intertwined to create disease and pain downstream from this important wartime mine.

Dr. Walker, chair of the Department of History at Montana State University, is the author of "The Lost Wolves of Japan" (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005) and "The Conquest of Ainu Lands: Ecology and Culture in Japanese Expansion, 1590-1800" (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001)

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The Japan Studies Colloquium Series is made possible by the Office of the Dean of Arts and Sciences. Dr. Walker's lecture is co-sponsored by the Department of History and the International Center for Ethics, Justice and Public Life.