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i
Japanese Environmental
Philosophy
1
iv
1
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v
CONTENTS
Introduction 1
Index 303
viii | Contents
ix
T he great culture gaps between Japan or China and America today are
not so much differences between Tokyo or Shanghai and New York,
as internal differences between the rich and poor, urban and rural, young
and old. In each of these countries, centuries-old lifestyles and death rituals
are rapidly giving place to lives devoid of ritual meaning and styled only
after media images—simulacra, in a word. Years ago, American media had
taught me to believe subconsciously that typing rapidly was superior to
handwriting slowly, that a “Big Gulp” (liter of liquid) was more satisfying
than a sip of tea, and that half-naked teenage Miss Universes strolling the
beach were more beautiful than octogenarians.
My first few weeks living in a temple in Japan transformed that world-
view. I witnessed an eighty-eight-year-old calligrapher brush a scroll that
combined art and wisdom in a way no typing could. I sat on my heels for
hours in a tearoom to receive a sip of tea more deeply memorable and sat-
isfying than any liter of cola. I watched the slender hands and ageless face
of an octogenarian classical dancer perform with more grace and beauty
than any Miss Universe.
As the media’s blinders fell from my eyes, I gained hope for humanity.
If speed, size, and youth were all that mattered, then all adult humanity
would have to forever remain wretchedly longing to be swifter or bigger
or younger than it could ever be—and people who are slower or smaller or
older would be forever doomed to inferiority. But it is precisely these ani-
malistic values that Japan had transcended in the classical arts and lifestyle
that it had cultivated.
x
With locally made paper and brush or kimono, the Japanese calligra-
pher and dancer achieved self-cultivation and communicated elegance
that all could admire and seek to cultivate in themselves. As long as our
basic needs for hydration (and food and shelter) are achieved, it is more
sustainable—indeed more human—to appreciate the tea-making of a sin-
gle cup, than to consume far more calories than our bodies need. To be
sure, the late-teen age is the most biologically desirable time for human
bodies to reproduce, but this is no reason for our entire value system to be
debased to biological reproduction. Rather, for a species that lives more
years after than before reproduction, to cultivate grace and elegance in
movement can remain a more fulfilling goal for the remainder of our days.
Rapid modernization of any society intensifies the cultural gaps between
traditional and modern worldviews and lifestyles. When I moved to Japan
in the early 1970s, most homes were inhabited by five to ten family mem-
bers belonging to several generations. Japan retained many of its classical
values and attitudes toward life, death, and aging. Although urban-rural,
younger- elder, and north- south variations could be found, they were
largely outweighed by the common worldview and value systems shared
by the majority of Japanese. Japan prided itself on the fact that most of its
citizens were “middle class,” that farmers, laborers, and housewives were
respected for their roles, that the gap in salary between a production-line
worker and a CEO was among the world’s lowest, and that its crime rate
was the lowest in the developed world.
Living in three-generational families, honoring their ancestors at family
altars, Japanese ostensibly epitomized a culture conscious of its continu-
ity with the past and its indebtedness to its forefathers. Ceremonies of
tea, flowers, meditation, calligraphy, aikido, and many similar arts were
precisely the kind of “paths” (michi 道) in which the cultured sensibilities
of maturity could find expression; people became potentially more, rather
than less, valuable through age. Moreover, ideas of reciprocal obligation
and interdependence dictated that elders be cared for, not because they
might again contribute to society, but because they had already contributed
to those now in a position to repay that obligation.
After leaving the temple complex for university, I lived with an edu-
cated family in a typical country home built in earlier centuries. We shared
rooms of traditional tatami grass matting, on which we unfolded low
tables for eating and working that we exchanged at night for the futons on
which we slept. Local vendors peddled fresh tofu and vegetables to our
doorsteps daily. Homes had neither ovens nor freezers, air conditioners,
x | Foreword
xi
dishwashers, nor clothes dryers; our well had recently been fitted with a
motorized pump. We washed ourselves at public bathhouses, and many
toilets were little more than outhouses. Bare fluorescent lamps provided
light, while hibachi charcoal braziers provided minimal heat through the
cold winters. Adults commuted by bicycles and trains, while children
played with insects and bamboo in the backyard.
This lack of modern Western amenities was somewhat offset by a strong
sense of family cooperation. We huddled together around the hibachi in
the winter to keep warm, and washed each other’s backs in the public
bath. The entire family pitched in to replaster walls or repair the paper
shoji screens and scrub the floors. Doors were not locked, and neighbors
regularly exchanged gifts from their gardens; any neighbor could tell our
parents where the younger children were playing.
In the past thirty-odd years, radical economic and demographic changes
have disturbed those traditional lifestyles. The 1980s witnessed an unprec-
edented boom in the Japanese economy, leading to a spate of debates about
its sustainability, and followed by similar booms in Taiwan and Hong
Kong, Southeast Asia, and China. The boom led to an economic bubble, in
which such two-, three-, and four-generation families built separate resi-
dences and moved from their traditional country estates into anonymous
suburban apartment complexes. Today, most Japanese live with only three
people to a domicile. They eat hamburgers while sitting on Western-style
chairs, sleep on beds, and drive cars. Now city people have their own bed-
rooms, enjoying heating and air conditioning, electrically heated baths
and toilet seats, high-definition widescreen digital televisions, and air-as
well as water-filtering systems—no more communal cleaning, huddling,
or bathing. Many parents insist that their children carry cell phones as the
only way to keep track of them.
Superficially obvious changes hide greater changes in the ways people
think and relate to each other. The Japanese language contains dozens
of terms of respect for seniors, and dozens of terms for deprecating one-
self out of politeness. These are no longer used by the younger genera-
tion; teenagers and octogenarians speak completely different dialects of
the same Japanese language. When Japanese gymnasts swept the Tokyo
Olympics in 1964, they publicly attributed their glory to their coaches and
seniors, or apologized for bringing their coaches only silver medals instead
of gold. When Japanese athletes win at sports meets today, they personally
gloat over their successes but no longer apologize to their seniors for their
failures.
Foreword | xi
xi
xii | Foreword
xi
with the remnants of abandoned farms and terraces. In fact, the hills
directly behind our own were once totally covered with tiny terraces on
which rice was hand grown, before tractors reformed farming and made
plots that are too small for tractors uneconomical. In a mere generation or
two since their abandonment, the terraces have crumbled, allowing good
soil slowly to wash away, and the remaining soil has become overgrown
with thickets of bamboo, with a root system too shallow to preserve the
hillside from landslides, but too toughly intertwined to allow newcomers
to readily farm again.
Today, as TPP1 threatens national governments with lawsuits from
corporations whose profits are in jeopardy, it also threatens the topsoil
of Japan’s mountainous islands. The case of India is tragically illustra-
tive. Every year during its monsoon season, Asia—from India to Japan—
receives meters of rainfall within just a few weeks. Our terraced paddies
serve as miniature dams, trapping the rainwater that falls during this short
period, allowing it to slowly seep into the soil and water table over the
following months, while nourishing the wet-paddy rice and discouraging
weeds and pests that cannot survive in the water. Before the British Raj
dominated India, much of India’s land was devoted to terraced rice farm-
ing. Backed by a new market economy, British entrepreneurs urged India
to farm cotton, indigo, tea, and spices in large fields rather than water-
gathering terraces. Indian farmers abandoned their terraces for broad-field
agriculture suited to countries where rain is far less plentiful and more
evenly timed. In the absence of terracing, the monsoon torrents gradually
washed the best topsoil down to the rivers and downstream to the sea.
Within a century, the soil had lost much of its lighter and richer organic
matter, retaining only heavier silt and clay resistant to the monsoon floods,
facing much of India with desertification despite its concentrated rainfall.
Japan has argued against TPP demands on the grounds that rice is a
sacred part of its history and culture. It might be more persuasive to point
out that, if TPP forces Japan to buy foreign rice, much of Japan’s terraced
paddy land will be abandoned to the incursions of bamboo, while its best
topsoil washes away to the sea every year. This is not a reversible process.
Foreign foods will become increasingly expensive as the cost of fossil
fuel transportation rises. In the future, when the costs of long-distance
transportation, food-mileage taxes, or carbon taxes make local Japanese
rice once again economically competitive with foreign rice, Japan’s good
topsoil will already have washed to the sea, and its paddies overgrown
with bamboo. Not only Japan, but the entire world, needs the wisdom of
Foreword | xiii
vxi
my neighbor, who values maintaining the arability of his land even over
personal convenience or expense.
Such insights are not unique to Japanese farmers, but can be found in
traditional agriculture around the world. The problem is how modern agri-
culturists can vocalize these insights against the onslaughts of transna-
tional corporations that value the world only in terms of short-term profits,
regardless of the long-term disasters they create in loss of topsoil or eradi-
cation of pollinating insects.
At the same time, traditions of respect for elders and elder care, of home
doctors and community cooperation have declined. While the yen replaces
more traditional values as a common denominator of self-worth, retirees
face psychological crises of self- worth, housewives prefer remunera-
tive part-time jobs to caring for their elders, and economically motivated
crimes have soared. Growing gaps between rich and poor parallel growing
diversity in values, especially between urban and rural, young and old,
north and south. While it used to be somewhat possible to speak of Japan
in one breath, it is increasingly difficult to make generalizations about
Japan as a single entity. If America’s diversity can be called a melting pot
or salad bowl, Japan’s diversity may be analogized to the fragmentation of
a melting polar ice floe, or the cracking of a clear glass marble thrown into
ice water. And it may be argued that from its beginnings, Japan had a less
unified or articulated worldview than America, which self-consciously
grounded itself on biblical and philosophical texts.
So there are great lessons to be learned from Japan, both about tradi-
tional and sustainable values, and about their rapid erosion in the face
of media imagery and so-called globalization. Some of these may be
gleaned from the writings of Japanese thinkers like ISHIDA Baigan2 and
NINOMIYA Sontoku; others may better be deduced from lifestyles and
practices like those alluded to above. I hope that this book will prove not
only a provocative introduction to historical thought but also a challenge
to all readers to discover and adopt more sustainable values and lifestyles
for a world that increasingly needs them.
Notes
xiv | Foreword
xv
corporations to sue governments for billions of dollars if they were “harmed” by laws or
policies designed to protect public health or the environment.
2. Most of the time, Japanese names are presented in this volume in traditional
order: the surname comes first with all letters capitalized, followed by the given name
(e.g., WATSUJI Tetsurō or NISHIDA Kitarō). Whenever an author is referred to by sur-
name only, the name is capitalized in the usual way (e.g., Watsuji or Nishida). Japanese
scholars who regularly publish in English typically have their names presented in Western
order, with only the first letter of the surname capitalized (e.g., D. T. Suzuki or Yuriko
Saitō).
Foreword | xv
xvi
xvi
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
wife’s parents, John and Catherine Thornton, for their love and support.
Many thanks to my research assistants, Katie McMurtrey, Tyler Haulotte,
Yuzhou Wang, and Shrijan Amatya, for their hard work on this project.
I give genuine thanks to Ron and Dianne Winney and Travis Traylor for
their generous support of my research. Finally, I offer my gratitude to the
staff at Oxford University Press, with whom it has been a great pleasure to
work. Dōmo arigatō!
xviii | Acknowledgments
xi
CONTRIBUTORS
xx | Contributors
xxi
Contributors | xxi
xxi
xxii | Contributors
xxii
number of journals and book chapters, some of which have been translated
into Finnish, French, Polish, and Portuguese. Her Everyday Aesthetics was
published by Oxford University Press in 2008. She is Associate Editor
of Contemporary Aesthetics, an online, free-access, and peer-reviewed
journal.
TAKAHASHI Takao graduated from the University of Tokyo and
holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from Kyushu University. He is now Emeritus
Professor and Visiting Professor at Kumamoto University, Japan. His publi-
cations include Logic of “Co-existence with Disasters” (Fukuoka: Kyushu
University Press, 2013) and Life, Environment, and Care (Fukuoka: Kyushu
University Press, 2008), and he is the editor of Taking Life and Death
Seriously: Bioethics from Japan (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2005).
TOYODA Mitsuyo is Associate Professor at Niigata University’s Center
for Toki and Ecological Restoration. She holds master’s degrees from both
the University of North Texas and University of Hawai‘i, and Ph.D. from
Tokyo Institute of Technology. Her primary research interest is to com-
bine environmental ethics, which she studied with Baird Callicott at the
University of North Texas, with the dialogue-based educational method
“philosophy for children” that she learned at the University of Hawai‘i.
She examines philosophical issues that arise through collaboration with
the public and governmental sectors for sustainable development, and
attempts to construct democratic processes of environmental conservation.
Her article “Revitalizing Local Commons,” appeared in Environmental
Ethics 35, no. 3 (2013): 279–293.
YAMAUCHI Tomosaburō is an emeritus professor at Osaka University
of Education and has served as a visiting scholar at many academic
institutions, including Kyoto University, Kobe University, and Monash
University. His numerous publications on the subject of ethics include
A History of Western Ethics (Tsukuba: Gakujutsu Tosho, 1983), Putting
Oneself in Another’s Shoes: The Moral Philosophy of R.M. Hare (Bunkyō-
Ku: Keiso-Shobo, 1991), and Reading Singer (Tokyo: Showado, 2008).
He has translated a number of books into Japanese, including J. Baird
Callicott’s Earth’s Insights under the Japanese title Chikyū no Dōsatsu
地球の洞察 (Tokyo: Misuzu-Shobo, 2009).
Contributors | xxiii
vxi
xv
Introduction
2 | Introduction
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2.
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3.
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fantastisen rouvan luona kaikin puolin kunnioittavilla
tervehdyskäynneillä ymmärtämättä oikein itsekään, miksi niin teki, ja
tämä otti hänet aina ystävällisesti vastaan ja tunsi jostakin syystä
mielenkiintoa häntä kohtaan aivan viime aikoihin asti.
Tutkintatuomariin hän ei vielä ollut ennättänyt tutustua, mutta oli
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puhellutkin hänen kanssaan, kummallakin kertaa naisista.
— Riita rahasta?
— Mitenkä toisin?