Transnational Japan in the Global Environmental Movement

Front matter

TRANSNATIONAL JAPAN IN THE GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT

TRANSNATIONAL JAPAN IN THE GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT

TRANSNATIONAL JAPAN IN THE GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT

Introduction

Japan and the Global Environmental Movement

I've often said that the problems of pollution in Japan, though regarded as a trifling matter by some, portend the destiny of the whole world.

In a document prepared for the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment (UNCHE) in 1972, the activist-engineer Ui Jun declared that Japan probably had “the worst environmental pollution problems of any country in the world."? Rejecting triumphalist rhetoric about Japan's economic “miracle,” Ui described instead an archipelago disfigured by “pollution department stores" with all measure of ground, water, and atmospheric contaminants.’ Richard Curtis and Dave Fisher of the New York Times could only agree. In a 1971 article for the newspaper, the journalists included smog-choked Tokyo in their list of the “seven pollution wonders of the world,” and they irreverently advised travelers to pack a “gasmask.”* Echoing this sentiment, at the first Earth Day in the United States in 1970 and at UNCHE in 1972 environmental activists marched with placards demanding *No More Tokyos!” and “No More Minamatas.” For the influential biologist and environmental advocate Paul Ehrlich, Japan was akin to the coal miner's canary of old: just as the tiny bird had alerted miners to potentially fatal gases, the situation in Japan presaged for humanity an impending global crisis born of industrial pollution and overpopulation? Even William D. Ruckelshaus, head of the newly established Environmental Protection Agency in the United States, found the Japanese case expedient. In arguing for the merits of the Clean Air Act of 1970, Ruckelshaus invoked frightening images of Tokyo, with its ^world-class smog" and traffic policemen shielded by pollution-filtering facemasks. Meanwhile, on the other side of the globe, engineers designing a state-of-the-art petrochemical facility in Finland carefully scrutinized Japan's infamous Yokkaichi petrochemical complex, site of asphyxiating air pollution that had caused nearby residents to literally cough themselves to death."

Indeed, Japan's ascent as a polluters’ paradise and the struggles of its pollution victims propelled the country to the very forefront of a historic global environmental awakening in the 1960s. Japanese industrial pollution, its victims, and the country's environmental activists became influential components of what Ursula Heise has called the environmental imagination of the global: a moment when the entire planet arguably became "graspable as one's own backyard"? Metaphors such as “Spaceship Earth" and the hauntingly beautiful images of Earth from the Lunar Orbiter satellites and the Apollo missions of the 1960s and 1970s encapsulated this sense of a solitary planet with a finite stock of resources and a fragile biosphere. The famous Apollo 8 “Earthrise” image, of the planet appearing from behind the moon, and the later “Blue Marble” photograph taken from Apollo 17 helped shape a growing sentiment that the environmental issues of one region could no longer be ignored as the problems of those “over there.”

One only need consider the simultaneity of environmental events worldwide to appreciate how Japan became part of a genuinely global-historical moment. In the United States in 1962, marine biologist Rachel Carson shocked the nation with her best seller Silent Spring on pesticides and environmental poisons (translated into Japanese in 1964). Only two years later, in 1964, economist Miyamoto Ken'ichi and engineer Shoji Hikaru provoked similar outrage in Japan with their book Osorubeki Kégai (Fearsome pollution), which documented chronic industrial contamination throughout the archipelago. Antipollution and environmental conservation movements proliferated worldwide at this time, not only in the rich “North” but also in developing nations of the global South, as in India where the Chipko or “tree-hugging” movement began in the early 1970s and in Kenya where Wangari Maathai established her famous Green Belt Movement in 1977. Influential international environmental nongovernmental organizations (ENGOs) such as Friends of the Earth (FoE) (1969) and Greenpeace (1971) also formed during this period, and mass media reportage increased dramatically, fueled by numerous high-profile pollution disasters such as Minamata disease in Japan in the late 1950s; the Torrey Canyon oil tanker spill off the coast of Cornwall, England, in 1967; and the Union Oil Company platform explosion off the Santa Barbara coast in 1969. Governments were also drawn into the environmental maelstrom as they groped to address mounting public concern about pollution. In 1970 the British government established the world’s first cabinet-level Environment Department, followed shortly thereafter by establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency in the United States in 1970, the Environment Agency of Japan (EAJ), and Ministére de l'Environnement in France in 1971 And, at the international level, the convening of UNCHE (the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment) in 1972 broke ground not only as the first UN conference dedicated to a single issue—namely, the environment—but also as a formative networking opportunity for NGOs, including Japanese victims’ groups, which traveled to Sweden to participate.

It was against this backdrop of worldwide environmental awakening that Ui Jun could speak of the global-historical significance of his country's pollution situation. As he argued in the 1970s, people elsewhere cared about Japan's polluted archipelago because they could see in it the fate of their own countries. Moreover, they were genuinely interested in the movements of ordinary Japanese citizens, which were battling environmental contamination and human poisoning of a form, scale, and intensity never before experienced by humanity. For Ui's colleague Miyamoto Kenichi, Japan had become a "laboratory for pollution" without precedent in world history, with its toxic mixture of “new pollution" born of recent breakneck economic development and “old pollution" carried over from the first phases of heavy industrialization in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.? As the historian Julia Adeney Thomas has more recently observed, Japan has been

1 *Demoless a “peculiarity” than “a participant in the global problematic." graphically and in other ways,” Thomas suggests, Japan “provides a laboratory for thinking about the global future in relation to the national past." ? The disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant after an earthquake and tsunami in 2011 and the resultant worldwide debate about the safety of nuclear power attests to the ongoing relevance of particular national experiences like those in Japan for debates concerning our global future.

Japan's Environmental Injustice Paradigm and

the Role of Rooted Cosmopolitans

In this book I use the national history—or, more correctly, the many local histories—of pollution and protest in postwar Japan as a springboard to investigate an untold transnational history of Japanese environmental activism. I argue that the seminal encounter with industrial pollution— encapsulated in what I call Japan's “environmental injustice paradigm"— has been a critical and ongoing source of motivation for Japanese environmental activism not only within but also, importantly, beyond the archipelago. The agonizing experience of industrial pollution victims in local communities throughout the archipelago inspired some Japanese activists to look abroad, and it profoundly shaped the messages they sent to the world— even when interest shifted from localized pollution to the global environment in the late 1980s. For many Japanese activists who became involved transnationally, industrial pollution victims represented living proof of an unbreakable chain linking political and economic power, environmental degradation, and the violation of basic human rights. On a personal level, the encounter with shocking environmental injustices served as a powerful motivation to act. As scientists, activists, and victims from the world's most polluted nation, individuals such as Ui Jun felt an intense responsibility to ensure that such human injury and injustice did not occur elsewhere. Although this environmental injustice paradigm underwent important modifications in the process of transnational involvement, throughout the book I show how it provided a coherent vocabulary and concrete vision for groups engaged in a diversity of transnational initiatives over many decades.

In essence it was a decidedly anthropocentric and localistic vision of environmentalism that focused attention on the grassroots victims of environmental contamination and degradation, such as industrial pollution disease sufferers and, later, the marginalized people of developing nations. The paradigm pointed to the responsibility of conscientious and knowledgeable individuals to offer support for these local victims and to resist the forces of industrial modernity and capitalist expansion that wreaked havoc on marginalized communities. Although this vision was sensitive to the class implications of environmental injustice, it recognized that class alone was insufficient to explain such injustice or to fashion an effective grassroots response. As the Japanese experience revealed, the victims of pollution did not always fit easily into orthodox class categories, nor did the allies and enemies of protest movements. Moreover, born as it was in the context of local suffering in the face of all-encompassing ideologies of economic growth and the national interest in postwar Japan, the paradigm incorporated a degree of skepticism toward collectivist global discourses like "Spaceship Earth" or “our common future" because experience in Japan taught that such ideas tended to obscure instances of local injustice, marginalization, and discrimination as much as they expressed any sense of comradery or common predicament. Coming as it did at a moment of heightened attention to both the environment and human rights worldwide in the 1970s, this focus on the local and injustice propelled Japanese environmental advocates and victims to the very center of debates about the environment and development, the “limits to growth,” and the objectives of environmentalism in a world of extreme inequity.!°

There is a vigorous debate among theorists in globalization studies over the positioning and significance of the local in a global age. Some, such as the eco-critic Ursula Heise, subscribe to a resolutely cosmopolitan and globalist agenda that privileges an enlightened “sense of planet” over a blinkered “sense of place.” Heise is skeptical about the value of local knowledge in the environmental movement, arguing that while a “sense of place” might be useful “for environmentally oriented arguments,” it “becomes a visionary dead end if it is understood as a founding ideological principle or a principal didactic means of guiding individuals and communities back to nature.” Heise points to the “ambivalent ethical and political consequences that might follow from encouraging attachments to place,” and she criticizes proponents of the local, such as deep ecology founder Arne Naess, who assume the spontaneity and naturalness of “sociocultural, ethical, and affective allegiances” at the local level while disregarding the possibility of meaningful attachments at larger scales.’ Instead of “focusing on the recuperation of a sense of place,” argues Heise, “environmentalism needs to foster an understanding of how a wide variety of both natural and cultural places and processes are connected and shape each other around the world, and how human impact affects and changes this connectedness."!ó

At the other end of the spectrum are thinkers like Arif Dirlik, who see the local as a necessary counterweight to the hegemony of globalism. Dirlik argues that, precisely because of the entanglement of “contemporary place consciousness" within globalization, "places offer a counter-paradigm for grasping contemporary realities," and “an alternative vision that focuses not on the off-ground operations of global capital . . . but on the concrete conditions of everyday life." From a slightly different perspective, Sheila Jasanoff and Marybeth Long Martello have questioned the “wholesale adoption of shared environmental ontologies among the nations of the earth.”'® They point to the centrality of the local in environmental activism, which has derived “emotional force” from attachments to “particular places, landscapes, livelihoods, and to an ethic of communal living that can sustain

B Introduction stable, long-term regimes for the protection of shared resources.” They criticize social science for not adequately incorporating "the resurgence of local epistemologies and their associated politics in the context of globalization," and they call for a conceptualization of the local beyond the epitome of everything "prescientific, traditional, doomed to erasure, and hence not requiring rigorous analysis." Jasanoff and Martello note how the local has been reconstituted and made "richer" through policymaking for the environment and development. No longer is the local constrained to "spatial or cultural particularity,” but it becomes also a signifier for "particular communities, histories, institutions, and even expert bodies." The “modern local,” Jasanoff and Martello argue, is distinguished not by parochialism but by the way it produces “situated knowledge" that creates “communal affiliations" built on “knowing the world in particular ways."?? Here they borrow from the globalization scholar Roland Robertson, who famously proposed the notion of “glocalization” in an attempt to highlight the entanglement of the local in translocal, supra-local, and global processes.”! The local is certainly being reconstituted through globalization, but it retains import as a situated perspective. As the feminist scholar Donna Haraway has astutely put it, "Ihe only way to find a larger vision is to be somewhere in particular"?

The local is at the center of the transnational history I recount in this book. For the Japanese activists and groups I explore herein, the local— whether understood as national or subnational space(s) —was a key source of inspiration and by no means a visionary dead end when it came to engaging with global environmental problems. In the 1960s and 1970s, for instance, pioneering advocates for local pollution victims such as Ui Jun and the physician Harada Masazumi undertook overseas investigative tours, which offered the domestic movement an invaluable comparative perspective on the dynamics of Japanese pollution—how it differed from and how it resembled pollution elsewhere. These early transnational environmental advocates used such opportunities to communicate the tragic story of Japanese industrial pollution and injustice to the world. In turn, their knowledge informed and invigorated environmental struggles worldwide, as in Canada where indigenous communities battled mercury contamination in the 1970s, and at UNCHE in 1972 where the Japanese experience became a leitmotif for environmental decay under advanced capitalism. In the 1970s and 1980s Japanese environmental activists extended their reach throughout Asia and the Pacific, protesting the relocation of polluting industries to other East Asian nations and governmental plans to dump radioactive waste in the Pacific Ocean. Articulating their critigue, activists pointed to the Japanese pollution experience, arguing that corporations and the government had a moral obligation to not replicate these injustices elsewhere. With the emergence of global-scale environmental issues such as climate change in the late 1980s, Japanese activists modified their message of environmental injustice again: rich countries that were primarily responsible for global-scale environmental problems had no right to demand environmental compliance from developing nations without guarantees of substantive material compensation for centuries of imperialism and exploitation.

What this history reveals, then, is a Japanese environmental movement deeply enmeshed in the contemporary global movement yet driven by a profound sense of responsibility born of very local experiences with environmental injustice. In other words, this is not a history in which “parochial” or “narrow” local sentiments and perspectives finally matured into a “superior” cosmopolitan mentality. On the contrary, it is a history in which transnational involvement became a conduit through which the local could be relativized, understood, and repositioned within regional and global imaginaries without losing its centrality as a site of struggle and identity.

Scholarship to date has masterfully recounted this tortuous, oftentragic, and occasionally redemptive local experience in Japan.” It began around the mid-1950s, when numerous cases of toxic industrial contamination and urban pollution emerged. In regional communities methyl mercury, cadmium, and other chemical pollutants contaminated local ecosystems and poisoned human bodies, while in cities like Tokyo children collapsed in school playgrounds from photochemical smog pollution. In response, people in isolated villages, regional cities, and crowded metropolises mobilized in protracted struggles against the corporations that poisoned their bodies and the government officials who obstructed protest and accused victims of local egoism. Their wave of protest and struggle for justice was, to a great extent, a response to the idiosyncrasies of the country's modern political and economic institutions, which endorsed essentially unrestrained industrial—and, for a time, military—expansion from the mid-nineteenth century onward. This postwar history of industrial pollution is also a story of how legislative and institutional changes ensued, how local governments flexed their progressive muscles, and, ultimately, how by the early 1970s a national pollution disaster was, if not eradicated, significantly ameliorated. To be sure, there were very important instances of industrial pollution in

Japan before this period, for instance at the Ashio and Besshi copper mines and at the Northern Kyushu Yahata Steelworks. But the postwar encounter with and reaction to industrial pollution was of a scale, intensity, and impact unique in modern Japanese and, perhaps, global history. For certain activists such as Ui Jun, it even portended the “destiny” of the whole world.

As Brett Walker, Timothy George, Ui Jun, Iijima Nobuko, Ishimure Michiko, and others have masterfully and sensitively shown, industrial pollution victims occupy a central place in this history.” According to Walker, the core of the national pollution experience in Japan was pain, especially pain inflicted on the weak, the old, the young, the unborn, the marginalized, and the politically disenfranchised. In order to legitimize its claims upon citizens to endure pain and even death for the nation, the Japanese state (but, of course, not only the Japanese state) has devoted a great deal of energy to what Walker characterizes as a process of "interpreting and contextualizing such pain as dignified national sacrifice." Yet, as Walker points out, not all forms of pain have been so easily absorbed into national narratives and mythologies of selfless sacrifice. In particular, “pain caused by industrial pollution is less easily interpreted and contextualized as dignified and so can prove... dangerously subversive to the nation and those who tell its stories."?? Indeed, so subversive was the experience of pain and discrimination from industrial pollution in Japan, I argue, that it formed the foundations of a powerful environmental injustice paradigm that inspired some Japanese to take action even beyond the archipelago—to communicate the national experience of environmental injustice to the world. The groups I explore in this study took great care to conscientiously knit this local experience of pain and injustice into the very fabric of their movements to address environmental problems threatening other countries and the globe. They were convinced that local experience, sentiment, and suffering such as that at Minamata Bay or along the Jinzü River could be—in fact, had to be—translated across geographical, political, and cultural space to become the raw material for struggles elsewhere.

In this book I first want to show how Japanese transnational activists have practiced agency beyond, yet always in connection to, the national and the local. The Ghanaian philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah has articulated this sentiment most eloquently in his musings on the plausibility of a "rooted cosmopolitanism." For Appiah, the rooted cosmopolitan experience is made possible not because of some “common capacity for reason” but via "a different human capacity that grounds our sharing: namely the grasp of a narrative logic that allows us to construct the world to which our imaginations respond.”?” For Japanese transnational activists this meant understanding narratives of pollution and resistance from abroad through the familiar lens of local experience, as if observing a different yet recognizable reflection in a mirror. As Appiah puts it, "Cosmopolitanism can work because there can be common conversations about these shared ideas and objects.””” He prefers a "form of universalism that is sensitive to the ways in which historical context may shape the significance of a practice."?? This is, admittedly, an elusive sentiment to pin down, hovering, as it does, between the particular and the universal. But it seems to me to best encapsulate the standpoint of most transnational environmental activists in Japan throughout the period under study.

The social movement scholar Sidney Tarrow offers an excellent characterization of this locally informed yet globally sensitive “rooted cosmopolitan” mindset that I see emerging and developing within Japanese activists and groups involved transnationally from the late 1960s onward. Tarrow defines transnational activists as “people and groups who are rooted in specific national contexts, but who engage in contentious political activities that involve them in transnational networks of contacts and conflicts.””? Rootedness for Tarrow stems from the fact that, even as activists “move physically and cognitively outside their origins, they continue to be linked to place, to the social networks that inhabit that space, and to the resources, experiences, and opportunities that place provides them with."?? It is not a process of activists "migrating" from the domestic to the international but, rather, activists deploying local "resources and opportunities to move in and out of international institutions, processes, and alliances"?! In this way, transnational activists become the "connective tissue of the global and the local, working as activators, brokers, and advocates for claims both domestic and international.”** This aspiration among some Japanese environmental activists to act as the connective tissue between geographically separated struggles and to project their worldview of environmental injustice onto movements in other countries and global initiatives is at the heart of the concept of agency I will illustrate throughout this book: specific local experiences of environmental injustice provided them with the raw material for a larger vision and mission. The activities of these rooted cosmopolitans provide a marvelous methodological tool for tracking the ways notions of environmental injustice were first absorbed within the activist community in Japan and then transmitted by some across borders.

Transnational Activism and the Historical Development of Japanese Civic Activism

The second and related argument of this book is that a transnational historical perspective can tell us important new things about the trajectory of Japanese environmental activism—and, perhaps, Japanese civic activism more generally—after the country's massive wave of domestic environmental protest in the 1960s and early 1970s. Most obviously, this transnational history complicates notions of a social movement "ice age" in Japan from around the mid-1970s onward. Throughout the book I show the palpable influence of Japanese activism on environmental developments in countries as far afield as Finland and in international organizations such as the United Nations. Japanese activists injected their struggle against environmental injustice into a range of movements addressing issues such as chemical contamination in Canada, Italy, and Thailand; air pollution in the Philippines; radioactive waste dumping in Micronesia; deforestation in Malaysia; and global climate change. Moreover, a transnational perspective reveals how exogenous forces (i.e., extranational forces) may have shaped civic activism in the country in a kind of boomerang effect.” A key objective of this work is to show how transnational involvement stimulated ideational transformations within some leading civic activists and groups in Japan, especially with respect to notions of victimhood prevalent in many Japanese movements of the early postwar period.

Leading civic activists and scholars alike have spoken of an “ice age" for contentious activism in Japan after the high point of antipollution protests in the early 19705.?* Herein Japanese environmental activism—actually, contentious, advocacy-focused activism more generally—arguably entered a period of prolonged stagnation, only to reignite again in the 1990s fueled by the new political opportunities of a recessionary Japan and the influence of new norms supportive of civil society.” The ice age thesis is highly persuasive to the extent that it explains the mechanisms behind the waning of overt, widespread protest in the early 1970s. Robert Pekkanen, for instance, explains the mid-1970s transition from contentious activism to an "ice age" of "inward-looking consumer identity-focused groups" in terms of the *regulatory framework,” which made it extremely difficult for most civic movements to grow and institutionalize.*° In his classic study on the law and social change in Japan, Frank Upham pointed to the role of officials in formulating countermeasures to preempt and manage open conflicts like the one they faced at Minamata Bay.” From a different perspective, I have also identified the role of leading civic activists in endorsing noncontentious forms of associational activity after the turbulence of the late 1960s and early 1970s— in effect facilitating the “deep freeze."??

But, as Pekkanen, I, and many other scholars recognize and have shown, an ice age should not be interpreted as an extinction.?? Just as some life survives—indeed thrives—in climatic ice ages, so too in social movement ice ages. After the cycle of protest receded (as all protest cycles do), contentious environmental activism continued in myriad ways both domestically and transnationally, albeit in a different and far less visible or widespread manner than the 1970s high point.” As I show in subsequent chapters, one of these historical trajectories played out transnationally in manifold movements that crossed the borders of the archipelago relatively unnoticed, only to become visible periodically when they confronted national and international political institutions and multinational corporations. In fact, the notion of a movement ice age is, no doubt, partially a by-product of our choosing a particular scale of analysis. Focusing on the national level and below has made the transnational movements I explore in this book virtually invisible to date and has arguably contributed to both activist and scholarly notions of an ice age for contentious civic activism from the mid-1970s onward. There was undoubtedly a waning of high-profile and widespread environmental protest in the early 1970s in Japan, but shifting the spotlight to transnational activism complicates the sense of complete rupture or disjuncture implicit in the idea of a movement ice age followed by a thawing in the 1990s. Indeed, the following chapters point to fascinating continuities in contentious environmental activism linking the era of pollution protest to the 1990s resurgence of civil society and the rise of movements advocating for the global environment in Japan.

By examining involvement beyond the archipelago, we discover how Japanese activists and groups contributed to a nascent environmental "transnationality" worldwide based on "the rise of new communities and formation of new social identities and relations" not definable "through the traditional reference point of nation-states." * As these activists searched globally for answers to Japanese pollution, they became part of the global environmental awakening of the 1960s and 1970s. They were drawn into what Sheila Jasanoff and Peter Haas have called "epistemic" networks and communities, and they became part of emergent environmental "transnational advocacy networks." Some of these spaces Japanese activists helped to construct were actual physical places such as the parallel NGO forums at UN environmental conferences, while others were more like shared experiential spaces such as the meetings between Japanese Minamata disease sufferers and Canadian Indians poisoned by mercury in the 1970s. As Mathias Albert and others contend, such “transnational political spaces” become "crucial locations for the production of cultures and cultural spaces,” and, even more significantly, they can also become "new political spaces above and beyond the nation-state framework." ? At NGO conferences held parallel to UNCHE (1972) and the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED, 1992), for example, Japanese activists played a role in the construction of an emergent transnational, even global, civil society in which participants were beginning to experiment with new forms of citizenship “beyond the state." ^^ As I discuss further in the conclusion, the transnational engagement of the Japanese environmental groups analyzed in subsequent chapters was, in fact, part of a wider spectrum of Japanese transnational activism that began to expand and diversify from the 1970s. Along with environmental groups, activists involved in peace and antiwar issues, women's liberationism, Asian developmental assistance, and Japan-South Korean grassroots relations all became active from around the early 1970s. This study hopes to contribute to this largely unresearched history through its focus on transnational Japanese environmental activism.

Significantly, participation in these spaces emboldened and empowered Japanese groups to exert pressure back on to Japanese political and economic institutions and, in some cases, to force substantive modifications in behaviors, policies, and practices. Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink's groundbreaking research on transnational advocacy networks is particularly important in this context. As Keck and Sikkink explain, such networks are “bound together by shared values, a common discourse, and dense exchanges of information and services.” They are influential on multiple levels—locally, nationally, regionally, internationally, and transnationally. They build “links among actors in civil societies, states and international organizations,” thereby multiplying “the opportunities for dialogue and exchange.” Importantly, through their engagement in advocacy networks, activists “bring new ideas, norms and discourses into policy debates, and serve as sources of information and testimony.” By making “international resources” such as ideas about the environment available in domestic struggles, they blur “the boundaries between a state's relations with its own nationals" and, in the process, challenge the previously impermeable barrier of national sovereignty.

Keck and Sikkink also describe a *boomerang pattern of influence" of transnational networks, in which “international contacts can ‘amplify’ the demands of domestic groups, pry open space for new issues, and then echo these demands back into the domestic arena.”“° Faced with new pressures from without, unresponsive states are often left with no choice but to act. The Japanese government's abandonment of plans to dump radioactive waste in the Pacific Ocean in the early 1980s, which I explore in chapter 5, is a good example of Japanese activists shrewdly using transnational alliances to influence domestic policymaking.

But this boomerang pattern of influence operated not only at the level of political and economic institutions: activists often found themselves, their messages, and their movements transformed in the process of engaging abroad. Thus, another central objective of this study is to examine the ways Japanese environmental activists and their environmental injustice paradigm changed in response to transnational involvement and, moreover, the consequences of this for the development of civic activism in Japan more generally. In the following chapters I endeavor to show how transnationalism— "the ongoing interconnection or flow of people, ideas, objects, and capital across the borders of nation-states" —had a lasting effect on the way the Japanese activists involved contextualized and positioned local and national phenomena, most notably the trauma of industrial pollution in Japan." Interactions abroad forced them to think very carefully about the possible limitations of understanding environmental injustice through the lens of Japanese victimhood alone. As they engaged with activists throughout East Asia and the Pacific in the 1970s and 1980s, for example, Japanese activists learned that the success of their local struggles might even, and ironically, be contributing to the suffering of people elsewhere as Japanese companies relocated polluting industries offshore. I believe activists’ reflexive awakening to their complicit “aggression” in this system marks an important ideational development in the mentality of postwar civic groups in Japan.