A moving account of Minamata disease victims' struggle for recognition and support in the years after mercury pollution was discovered in a group of fishing villages

First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This collection of ecocritical essays is focused on the work of Japan’s foremost writer on environment and culture, Ishimure Michiko. Ishimure is known for her pioneering trilogy that exposed the Minamata Disease incident and the nature of modern industrial pollution. She is also regarded by many critics as Japan’s most original and important literary writer. Ishimure has written over 50 volumes in a wide range of genres, including novels, Noh drama, poetry, children’s stories, essays, and mixed-genre writing. This collection brings together the work of scholars from Japan, the U.S., and Canada who are authorities on Ishimure’s writing. Contributors discuss Ishimure’s writing in the context of the latest issues in ecocritical theory, arguing for an expanded, more-than-Western understanding of literature, theory, and environmental responsibility. It will help to relate various environmental, cultural, and ecocritical issues, ranging from the events at Minamata to those at Fukushima, and consider how they point to future developments.

Nearly forty years after the outbreak of the “Minamata Disease,” it remains one of the most horrific examples of environmental poisoning. Based on primary documents and interviews, this book describes three rounds of responses to this incidence of mercury poisoning, focusing on the efforts of its victims and their supporters, particularly the activities of grassroots movements and popular campaigns, to secure redress. Timothy S. George argues that Japan’s postwar democracy is ad hoc, fragile, and dependent on definition through citizen action and that the redress effort is exemplary of the great changes in the second and third postwar decades that redefined democracy in Japan.

"Lake of Heaven is the story of a traditional mountain village in Japan that is destroyed in the process of constructing a dam. It tells of the lives of the displaced villagers as they struggle to retain their traditional culture - including their stories, dances, music, mythology, and dreams - in the face of displacement, environmental destruction, and rapid modernization. Although fictional, the work is rooted in the events of actual villages in the mountains of Kyushu and Ishimure's imaginative reconstructions of their people's tales. Lake of Heaven considerably stretches the familiar Western conceptions of the novel form. Its interweaving of local stories, dreams, and myths lends it a deep sense of the Noh Drama."--BOOK JACKET.

What can ecocriticism do when engaging with Japanese literature and culture? This edited volume Ecocriticism in Japan attempts to answer this question. The contributors place themselves inside the domestic fields of production of works of art and express their concerns and ideas for the English-speaking spheres of the world. Taking up subjects ranging from the eleventh-century novel The Tale of Genji, an early twentieth-century writer Taoka Reiun, the post-WWII atomic bombing literature by women, the internationally-renowned Abe Kōbō, the Nobel laureate Ōe Kenzaburō, the world-widely popular writer Murakami Haruki, the Minamata writer Ishimure Michiko, and the anime artist Miyazaki Hayao to the recent TV anime Coppelion, a production that foresaw a devastating nuclear disaster after the Great East Japan Earthquake, this volume extricates and discusses innate, complex values of Japanese people and culture in terms of nature and environment.

Translated from Japanese, this study exposes English-language scholars to the complexities of the relationship between food, culture, the environment, and literature in Japan. Yuki explores the systems of value surrounding food as expressed in four popular Japanese female writers: Ishimure Michiko, Taguchi Randy, Morisaki Kazue, and Nashiki Kaho.

This book takes the unique approach of combining cognitive approaches with more established close-reading methods in analysing a selection of Japanese novels and a film. They are by four well-known male authors and a director (Natsume Sôseki, Shiga Naoya, Ôe Kenzaburô, Ibuse Masuji and Imamura Shôhei) and five female authors (Kirino Natsuo, Kawakami Mieko, Murata Sayaka, Tsushima Yûko, and Ishimure Michiko) from the early twentieth century up to the early millennium. It approaches the different artistic strategies that oscillate between emotional immersion and critical reflection. Inspired by new developments in cognitive theory and neuroscience, the book seeks to put a spotlight on the aspects of modern Japanese novels that were not fully appreciated earlier; the eclectic and fluid nature of the novel as a form, and the vital roles played by affects and emotions often complicated under the impact of trauma. Rejuvenating previously established cultural theories through a cognitive and emotional lens (narratology, genre theory, historicism, cultural study, gender theory, and ecocriticism), this book will appeal to students and scholars of modern literature and Japanese literature.

A snapshot of ecocriticism in action, Coming into Contact collects sixteen previously unpublished essays that explore some of the most promising new directions in the study of literature and the environment. They look to previously unexamined or underexamined aspects of literature's relationship to the environment, including swamps, internment camps, Asian American environments, the urbanized Northeast, and lynching sites. The authors relate environmental discourse to practice, including the teaching of green design in composition classes, the restoration of damaged landscapes, the persuasive strategies of environmental activists, the practice of urban architecture, and the impact of human technologies on nature. The essays also put ecocriticism into greater contact with the natural sciences, including elements of evolutionary biology, biological taxonomy, and geology. Engaging both ecocritical theory and practice, these authors more closely align ecocriticism with the physical environment, with the wide range of texts and cultural practices that concern it, and with the growing scholarly conversation that surrounds this concern.