Conspiracies and Coalitions in Japanese Environmental Humanities (AAS 2022 Panel)

Originally presented at the 2022 Association for Asian Studies Annual Conference in Honolulu, Hawaii.
This Japan Foundation-sponsored interdisciplinary panel is inspired by environmental-anthropologists Timothy K. Choy and Natasha Myers, and in particular their discussion of “conspiracies” as endeavors to “breathe together” to create livable worlds. Featuring scholars of Japanese anthropology, history, film, and literature, we discuss three case studies from Japan, and one from Japan and the Philippines, of conspiracies to heal bodies both human and non-human, no matter how cognitively or geographically distant.
We begin with Professor Wakana Suzuki’s “Listening to the Voices of Microbes,” on a Japanese entrepreneur who developed a “decomposing economy” in a small Japanese village by culturing microbes which enable his community to grow self-sustainable worlds with minimal waste. The panel continues with Professor Jon Pitt’s “Sharing the Air to Spare the Air,” on the paradoxical efforts of a Japanese conservationist to maintain the livable worlds of the Ogasawara archipelago (the Galapagos of East Asia). The panel then moves to Dr. Alyssa Paredes’ “There Is No Circle of Poison,” on transnational environmental activism in the context of aerial spraying of fields in the Philippines that provide bananas for distant Japanese consumers. Wrapping up the panel is Professor Daichi Sugai’s “Emotions Floating in the Air,” which focuses on artistic responses to the Wind Phone, a booth in Iwate Prefecture where individuals can share their personal grief, destabilizing the conventional and collective recovery narratives surrounding natural and unnatural disasters.
Together, these papers challenge conventional understandings of Japanese environmental activism and integrate more deeply Japan Studies and the environmental humanities.
Participants:
Karen Thornber, Harvard University
Jon Pitt, University of California, Irvine
Alyssa Paredes, University of Michigan
Wakana Suzuki, Osaka University
Daichi Sugai, Aichi Gakuin University
Sakura Christmas, Bowdoin College
Satsuki Takahashi, Hosei University