The World Whole: an Environmental History of Japanese Space Power
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Conley 1 The World Whole: An Environmental History of Japanese Space Power The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. - Archilochus1 Introduction: Grand Narratives, Modernity, and Environmental Change The past is made of stories, or at least history is. Walter Benjamin once wrote that "where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he [The Angel of History] sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet. He would like to pause for a moment so fair, to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed.”2 Those who write that past under the Angel’s gaze organize this chaotic, formless mass of occurrences, peoples, and interactions into broad narrative strokes made up of discreet causative events, heroes and villains, and conflicts.3 These stories help historians and readers to give meaning to the chronicles, but they also inevitably distort the past, twisting it to fit into more definite narrative patterns. My purpose throughout writing this thesis has been to deconstruct particular stories, but hopefully to do so in a provocative and useful, rather than destructive, way. In dissolving the boundaries, categories, and relationships that certain narratives rely on, I want to offer a richer collection of stories about the past than these constrains allow. That being said, the narrative form is not altogether escapable for reasons of clarity, cohesion, and necessity as much as evocation and readability. I do not want to eschew it 1 Isaiah Berlin. The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History. 2nd Edition. Ed. Henry Hardy (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2013). 1. 2 Walter Benjamin. “On the Concept of History.” Trans. Dennis Redmond. Transcribed by Andy Blunden. Marxists.org. 2005. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/benjamin/1940/history.htm. 3 The standard work on narrative construction in history is Hayden White’s. See Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. 40th Edition. First published in 1973 (Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 2014). Conley 2 altogether, but to critically engage it, to place these stories in the context of Japan’s modern engagement with outer space, and read between their lines and pull on the various frayed threads to work towards a more robust, but pluralistic, picture of the evolving relationship(s) between humans, technology, and nature. William Cronon’s famous 1992 essay “A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative” helped push environmental historians toward a “cultural turn” by acknowledging the important subjectivities that define the perimeters and nodes within and around which they tell their stories.4 Distinguishing two broad narrative patterns in the historiography of the Dust Bowl, Cronon typifies these histories as “progressive” or “declensionist.” Progressive narratives emphasize human ingenuity and achievement, spinning triumphalist tales of human overcoming of a harsh and antagonistic natural landscape, ultimately leaving behind a happier and healthier human population undergirded by a tamed environment. Declensionist narratives, on the other hand, slope downwards towards tragedy, emphasizing humans’ failure to accommodate themselves to a balanced and fragile ecosystem, irreparably damaging it and causing all too social “natural disasters.”5 In this latter type, it is important to recognize the theme of destruction; “nature” is defined as balanced, stable, and cyclical, while human intervention is the motor of linear change. In the process of dominating the landscape, subduing it and reorganizing its components “productively” according to human needs, “nature” is destroyed and strikingly “unnatural” disasters are made possible.6 4 William Cronon. “A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative.” Journal of American History. Vol. 78 Issue 4 (1992). 1347-1376. For an insightful historiography that pays close attention to these debates in the 1990s, see Andrew C. Isenberg. “Introduction: A New Environmental History.” The Oxford Handbook of Environmental History. Ed. Andrew C. Isenberg (New York: Oxford UP, 2014). 1-20. 5 Cronon. “A Place for Stories,” 1352. 6 Cronon. “A Place for Stories,” 1357-1364. Conley 3 These narratives are also essentially stories about modernity. Pre-modern peoples, it is often imagined, lived in more harmony with nature and were less disruptive. This story is the classic Edenic narrative; modernity, broadly writ as science, capitalism, and industrialism, has alienated people from nature. Although the two narratives can be contrasted in terms of their values, their underlying descriptive assumptions form a much larger grand narrative. Modernity, they have it, can be understood as the linear process through which humans have used technology to increasingly control nature. In progressive narratives, this control is colored positively, as an achievement, while in declensionist ones, control is as vilified as nature is victimized through humans conquest, “rape,” and destruction. These narratives share a common ontology, a set of discreet, bounded entities: humans, technology, and nature; they ascribe distinct roles to each: agent, instrument, and object; and they organize the history by a single, broad, parameter: control over time. Cronon rightfully sees the dichotomous values both narratives attach to their histories, but an overriding focus on moral value overshadows the underlying structures that make either narrative make sense in the first place. Cronon’s emphasis on value in general allows one not only to overlook the existence of that common ground, but also to overlook substantial questions regarding their problematic nature. Narratives may change their moral characteristics over time, but often over a descriptive substructure internalized as common sense. Japan, Environmental History, and Outer Space Emerging in the 1970s, environmental history came into its own by the early 1990s. In that year, the Journal of American History held a field-defining roundtable that introduced the nascent subject to the mainstream historical community. In this roundtable, particularly circling Conley 4 around the essays by William Cronon and Donald Worster, a debate emerged regarding the promise and future of environmental history. For Worster and likeminded colleagues, it was important that environmental historians not sell themselves short and “nostalgically” revert to the constructivist approaches of the social historians. Nature, he had it, was a real and powerful force independent of culture and the human mind. Historians must not, against Cronon, “place nature within history,” but must rather “see beyond culture” and contextualize human activity within nature and the material world. Cronon, wishing to put environmental history in closer dialogue with other historians’ work, wished, alongside Carolyn Merchant, that the new field adopt the analytic categories of gender, race, and class to ground human engagement with the natural world.7 Over time, the debate has become seen as one between materialist and social constructivist approaches. Ever since, environmental historians have arguably worked to give both sides their equal weight, adopting “hybridity” as a keystone concept to explain the “long and tangled history” between social and natural forces.8 Nature mattered in history, perhaps even had agency, but no social or natural development worked independently, and both were needed to understand each other. As Paul Sutter’s recent review put it, the second generation of environmental historians saw “the world with us.”9 Most recently, two themes especially have been pushing the field forward into new, exciting territory. First, as exemplified by Timothy LeCain’s recent tour-de- force The Matter of History, neo-materialist approaches that emphasize the hard physical basis of 7 See Donald Worster “Transformations of the Earth: Toward an Agroecological Perspective in History.” 1087-1106; “Seeing Beyond Culture.” 1142-1147; William Cronon. “Modes of Prophecy and Production: Placing Nature in History.” 1122-1131; Carolyn Merchant. “Gender and Environmental History.” 1117-1121. Journal of American History, Vol. 76, No. 4 (1990). 8 See Richard White. “From Wilderness to Hybrid Landscapes: The Cultural Turn in Environmental History.” A Companion to American Environmental History. Ed. Douglas Cazaux Sackman (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). 187. 9 Paul Sutter “The World with Us: The State of American Environmental History.” Journal of American History, Vol. 100, No. 1 (2013). 94-120. Conley 5 all history has decentered the human mind as the force of change in history. Rather, the material world has been reconfigured as an active force, one that is in constant and unstable flux. For LeCain, environmental historians have to forget about “nature,” as such, and focus on the material environment we find ourselves in, and it is this environment and our engagement with it that ought to be at the forefront of environmental historians’ work.10 Relatedly, the notions of embodiment or embeddedness are beginning to find a central place in environmental historians’ basic concepts. In a short but surprisingly influential 2005 essay (only three pages in length), Linda Nash argues that we must not obsess over the “agency of nature,” but instead focus instead on “putting the human mind back in the world.” If we understand agency as something “dispersed among humans and nonhumans,” the individual human mind, the source of intentionality, is grounded in