Ecoambiguity

Karen Thornber

Published by University of Michigan Press

Thornber, Karen.
Ecoambiguity: Environmental Crises and East Asian Literatures.
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012.
Project MUSE., https://muse.jhu.edu/.

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Ecoambiguity
DMZ Ecotopia  /  Ecoambiguity at the Demilitarized Zone, the world’s
most fortified border and an accidental, eccentric ecological preserve.
Ersatz deer watching over shrapnel on a concrete dais against a
backdrop of rusting metal bamboo and healthy vegetation.
Photo by David Damrosch.
Ecoambiguity
Environmental Crises and East Asian Literatures

Karen Laura Thornber

The University of Michigan Press

Ann Arbor
Copyright © by the University of Michigan 2012
All rights reserved

This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part,

including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying
permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law
and except by reviewers for the public press), without written
permission from the publisher.

Published in the United States of America by

The University of Michigan Press
Manufactured in the United States of America
c Printed on acid-free paper

2015 2014 2013 2012  4 3 2 1

A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Thornber, Karen Laura.

  Ecoambiguity : environmental crises and East Asian literatures /
Karen Laura Thornber.
  p. cm.
  Includes bibliographical references and index.
  ISBN 978-0-472-11806-9 (cloth : acid-free paper) — ISBN 978-0-472-
02814-6 (e-book)
  1. East Asian literature—History and criticism.
2. Environmentalism in literature.  3. Ecology in literature.  I. Title.
PL493.T48  2012
895—dc23 2011043750
Für Adam, Jacob, Matthew, Emily, Nathaniel,
Juliette, und Katherine,
  alles Liebe
Acknowledgments

Every year anticipation built as spring gradually turned to summer, until

finally we headed off to points north and west—exchanging the heat and
humidity of the New York suburbs for the cool crispness of the Adirondacks,
the White Mountains, Maine, the Pacific Northwest, or Canada. Weeks of
hiking and climbing followed, my parents instilling in my sister and me deep
appreciation for the outdoors. These magical childhood trips remained with
me throughout the year—the feel of the soil, the sound of the wind and water,
and the scent of the trees lingered in memory long after arriving home.
At some point the paradox hit. My family’s love of nature meant that we
spent gallons of fuel driving or flying to get to nature, and considerable time
disrupting it. No matter how careful we were, didn’t our mere presence harm
the landscapes to which we became so attached? But had we stayed home,
would we not simply have disturbed other ecosystems? These and similar ques-
tions would fade as I yielded to the pull of cross-country running; it was impos-
sible to resist the allure of spending autumn afternoons training and competing
in the woods, the steeper and more “untouched” the terrain the better. But
doubts would resurge as I spent more time in Asia and on other continents and
developed greater appreciation of the finiteness of space and resources.
This book finds its origins in these early vexations, which have only in-
tensified over the years. Most striking to me now is just how easy it is to
forget about environmental degradation, even when spending so much of my
time contemplating and writing about it. Sometimes I catch myself thinking,
despite everything I have seen and read, despite everything I know, that all
is actually well. This is because when at home I am still able to spend days
and nights in a treetop study in a leafy, quiet town—with a front row seat
to the rising and setting sun, the changing seasons, and the antics of well-fed
wildlife. And I can still work out on miles of overgrown hills and conserva-
tion trails. Harmony between people and environments seems in tune when
one can live in an environment like this yet still commute to the city on foot,
not dodging traffic but instead on a bikeway that gives the illusion, especially
during the summer months, of being quite bucolic.
viii  acknowledgments

Is it possible to appreciate fully what we are doing to the planet only

when we are immersed in the mushrooming miasmas of environmental cri-
ses, when we are standing on Louisiana’s oil-soaked shores in the wake of
the British Petroleum disaster, or living in a city with severely polluted air,
or forced to abandon homes flooded by caustic industrial sludge and towns
poisoned by nuclear radiation? Perhaps. But it is also true that literature
addressing environmental degradation helps us better understand and care
more deeply about damage of all scales. Sometimes creative works can even
transform our values and behaviors vis-à-vis the environment. Literature
frequently does so by grappling with the complexities of human relation-
ships with the natural world. Ecoambiguity takes up several hundred cre-
ative works from China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, engaging with many
different types of writing on damaged ecosystems and disabusing us of the
common perception that East Asian literatures have been little concerned
with environmental degradation. The introduction develops the concept of
ecoambiguity, the contradictory interactions between people and the natural
world. Chapter 1 provides an overview of East Asia’s environmental prob-
lems and the literary works that have wrestled with them, while chapters
2–7 offer more detailed textual analyses of select East Asian novels, poetry,
and short stories that engage with the ambiguities of ecological problems.
Throughout I offer brief comparisons with literary texts from a number of
other cultures. The creative works that I include are only a fraction of those
that could be discussed, and they can be talked about in many more ways
than they are here; I focus mainly on themes and concepts, since these negoti-
ate environmental ambiguities especially rigorously, but I examine stylistics
wherever relevant to my arguments. I hope this book deepens understandings
of literatures and environmental crises in East Asia and beyond and inspires
explorations of other forms of environmental ambiguity. I also hope that the
extensive supplementary analyses I provide prove helpful to future research-
ers interested in the many facets of creative negotiation with environments
that have not yet been pursued. I am under no illusion that reading and dis-
cussing literary depictions of ecological harm will free us from lifestyles that
depend on radically transforming ecosystems. But engaging with literature
allows us to think more deeply about why we make the choices that we do,
and about many of the consequences of these choices, necessary first steps in
remediating current damage and preventing it in the future.

Timely completion of a project of this scope would have been impossible

without support from numerous individuals and institutions, for which I am
most grateful. Grants from the Academy of Korean Studies (AKS-2011-R20),
 Acknowledgments  ix

Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, Japan Foundation, and Northeast Asia

Council of the Association for Asian Studies helped fund extensive research
and travel in China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan as well as research and writ-
ing in Cambridge and Lexington. At Harvard, the Achilles Fang Prize, Asia
Center (Mark O’Friel Japan Initiatives Fund, Asia Center Provost Fund for
Inter-Faculty Initiatives), Center for the Environment (Faculty Seed Grant),
Korea Institute, and Reischauer Institute for Japanese Studies provided wel-
come financial support. Generous subsidies from the Harvard FAS Tenure-
Track Faculty Publication Fund and the Harvard Korea Institute helped off-
set publication costs.
Colleagues and friends in the United States and around the world have
been generous with their time and wisdom, and I have benefited greatly from
their advice. I am thankful to Ursula K. Heise, Victor Mair, Scott Slovic,
Simon C. Estok, Christine Marran, Fang Hong, Juan Long, Shiuh-huah Ser-
ena Chou, Yūki Masami Raker, Kim Won-Chung, and Alireza Anushiravani
for their wonderful feedback, and to Bruce Fulton for carefully reading the
sections on Korea and Korean literature. Brett Walker, Julia Thomas, and
Ian Miller invited me to speak at the Japan Natural Legacies Conference in
Big Sky, Montana, just as my ideas on this project were taking shape. Re-
marks from colleagues attending this workshop and my other invited talks
and conference presentations on literature and the environment helped refine
my arguments.
Closer to home, deep thanks go to all my colleagues in Comparative Lit-
erature, Asian studies, and environmental studies at Harvard for providing
such an intellectually rigorous yet warm collegial setting. I am particularly
indebted to Verena Conley for the earliest encouragement of the project; to
Jim Engell and Steve Owen for perceptive comments on the book and valu-
able conversations on literature and the environment; and to Larry Buell and
David Damrosch for insightfully reading an earlier version of the manuscript,
guiding me around many snares, and offering sage advice throughout the
writing and publication process. John Kim tirelessly tracked down moun-
tains of library books and deftly helped me untangle several Korean poems,
while Rita Banerjee skillfully assisted with Bengali and Hindi, and Tran Phu-
ong Hoa with Vietnamese sources. Satoru Hashimoto meticulously proof-
read two versions of the manuscript, offering excellent suggestions for my
Chinese, Japanese, and Korean translations/romanizations. The dedicated
students in my Literature and Environment seminar reinforced the need to
write a book such as this. I was fortunate as well to have Deb Cohan to put
everything into perspective.
I am very grateful to the two outside referees for their stimulating
x  acknowledgments

comments and to my editor Tom Dwyer, copyediting coordinator Marcia

LaBrenz, and the Board and staff of the University of Michigan Press for their
expert editorial and production care.
My familial debts go back many years. Thank you to my parents, Karvel
and Nora Thornber, for emphasizing the importance of independent thinking
in scholarship and in life, and for giving me the privilege of growing up in a
home spilling over with both math and science, and music and song, one that
taught me respect for the many paths to knowledge. To my grandparents,
Lois and Chalmers Thornber, for opening to us your home in the Cascades,
with its miles of enticing trails just outside the front door, and for teaching
me about the rich human and natural history of the Pacific Northwest. To my
father and sister Carol Thornber, for sharing inspiring tales of your climbs on
five continents. And to my spouse Tom Havens, for more than a decade of
memorable journeys together in Asia.
While researching and writing this book I benefited greatly from the en-
thusiasm, questions, and perspectives of my sister-in-law Anne Havens Fuller
and my three stepchildren and their families, world travelers and adventur-
ers all: Bill Havens and Julie Hunt; Carolyn Havens Niemann and Michael,
Adam, Jacob, and Matthew; and Kathy Havens Whitten and Emily and Na-
thaniel. My grandmother, parents, sister, brother-in-law Evan Preisser, and
nieces Juliette and Katherine Thornber were wonderfully supportive and full
of bons mots throughout. As always, my greatest debts are to Tom, whose
eager reading of chapters hot off the printer and zeal for discussing cepts
large and small regardless of the hour or time difference made working on
the book even more of a pleasure, and whose wit and boundless love bring
ever more joy to my life.
This book honors the past, especially my grandfather, whose career engi-
neering and managing dams in Oregon and Washington embodied the environ-
mental ambiguities I examine, and the generations of biologists and botanists
in our family who preceded him, who worked both to improve human lives
and to protect environments in the American and Canadian West, but who
likely never imagined ecological devastation that is now all too common.
Even as Ecoambiguity honors the past, it looks to the future. I have dedi-
cated this book to Adam, Jacob, Matthew, Emily, Nathaniel, Juliette, and
Katherine—the next generation of our family, now enjoying the pleasures
and facing the pressures of college, daycare, and everything in-between—in
the hopes that in the years ahead you will come to treasure all the planet has
to offer, and that no matter the paths you choose your lives will continue to
overflow with learning, laughter, and love.
Contents

Conventions xiii
introduction: Environments,
Environmental Ambiguities, and Literatures 1
Changing Environments  7
Environmental Ambiguity  9
Environments of Literature  13
Changing Environments of Literature  16
Ecoambiguity 26
one  /  Environmental Degradation and Literature in East Asia 32
Environmental Degradation in China  35
Chinese Literature and Environmental Degradation  41
Environmental Degradation in Preindustrial Korea and Japan  54
Environmental Degradation in Modern Japan  55
Japanese Literature and Environmental Degradation  61
Environmental Degradation in Modern Korea  74
Korean Literature and Environmental Degradation  77
Environmental Degradation in Taiwan  84
Taiwanese Literature and Environmental Degradation  88

Part i
two / Accentuating Ambivalence 99
Ambivalence 102
Reconceptualizing Use  107
Suffering Worlds 108
Threatened Worlds 119
Disappearing Worlds 125
Protesting Protection  132
Navigating Disparate Attitudes  146
three / Underlining Uncertainty 156
Informational Ambiguity  160
The Unknown and Unknowable  164
xii  contents

Making Sense of Symptoms  169

Assessing Damage  175
Assessing Collateral Nonhuman Damage  184
Questioning Nonhuman Resilience  191
Ambiguous Futures  204
four  /  Capitalizing on Contradiction 214
Determining Cause, Assessing Accountability  216
Among People 216
Necessity and Accountability  225
Human, Nonhuman, or Both  231
Contradictions: Trading Off  237
Decreasing Human Numbers, Helping Environments  238
Increasing Human Numbers, Harming People
  and Environments  240
Helping Environments, Harming Environments  245
Assessing Assessments of Behaviors  258
Standards 259
Physical Standards 261
Social and Temporal Standards  274

Part ii
five / Acquiescing 281
Myopia and Myopic Hyperopia  282
Accepting Environmental Degradation  291
Necessity, Compulsion, and Actively Damaging Environments  310
Denying Disavowals  318
Arresting Behaviors  323
six  /  Illusions and Delusions 328
Physically and Conceptually Manipulating Environments  335
Gaping Chasms  341
Signifying Indifference  347
Culture, Civilization, and Damaged Environments  357
seven / Green Paradoxes 380
Injurious Fascination  389
Admiring Ecosystems, Longing for Control  404
Green Hypocrisy  417

Notes  437
Works Cited  569
Index  645
Conventions

Chinese words are transcribed in pinyin, Japanese words in the modified

Hepburn system used by Kenkyusha’s New Japanese-English Dictionary,
and Korean words in a modified McCune-Reischauer system. Transcriptions
of Korean at times are based on how syllables are written, not on how they
are pronounced.

In cases where persons with East Asian names writing in East Asian lan-
guages list alternative transcriptions of their names, I give both the standard
and the alternative transcriptions. In cases where titles of East Asian lan-
guage sources incorporate words from other East Asian languages, I give
these words as they are pronounced in the other East Asian language, fol-
lowed by their standard transcription in brackets.

East Asian names are given in the customary East Asian order, with family
name preceding personal name, except for cases of Western-language pub-
lications in which the name order is usually reversed. Macrons are omitted
over long vowels in the most familiar Japanese place-names; breves are omit-
ted over vowels in the most familiar Korean place-names.

Dates for writers and other key figures, many of which are not readily avail-
able in English-language scholarship, can be found in the notes and index. I
refer to writers by pen name if that name is used more commonly than the
birth name.

Unless otherwise indicated, translations from French, German, Italian, and

Spanish, as well as from modern and classical Chinese, Japanese, and Korean
are my own.
Introduction: Environments, Environmental
Ambiguities, and Literatures

“We’d like to cut down the trees with nature in mind.” So declared Suzuki
Takehiko, director of the Shōsenkyō Kankō Kyōkai (Shōsen Gorge Tourism
Association), in August 2008. Part of Japan’s Chichibu-Tama-Kai National
Park, Shōsen Gorge has for decades been labeled the country’s “most beau-
tiful valley.” Years of deforesting meant that when the park was founded
in 1950, little stood between tourists and the majestic rock formations for
which the gorge is most famous. But by the turn of the twenty-first century
visitors were frustrated that trees were now blocking much of the view. The
park’s laissez-faire approach to the valley’s vegetation did not threaten its
ecosystems—trees are hardly invasive species there. But this economically
disadvantaged part of Japan depended on a steady stream of tourists who
wanted to see cliffs, not trees; some even claimed that the trees were depriv-
ing the valley of its beauty. So Suzuki argued that “trees” (part of nature)
should be felled so that people could have a better view of “nature” (the
gorge). Despite Suzuki’s appeal, most of the trees still stand and in fact are
highlighted in the park’s promotional materials. The Shōsen Gorge Tourism
Association’s website features images of colorful trees growing beside, and
out of, majestic crags; in some pictures trees effectively obscure the cliffs.
A banner running near the top of the website declares Shōsen Gorge the
most beautiful in Japan, full of the [many] wonders of nature (日本一の渓
谷美を誇る『昇仙峡』は自然の素晴らしさがいっぱいです; Nihon ichi no
keikokubi o hokoru “Shōsenkyō” wa shizen no subarashisa ga ippai desu).1
This episode encapsulates what I call ecoambiguity, the complex, con-
tradictory interactions between people and environments with a significant
nonhuman presence.2 Many parks, although established at least in part to
protect ecosystems from human abuse, ultimately depend on the human foot-
print for their existence; areas that do not attract visitors risk being devel-
oped.3 Likewise, calls to destroy one part of an ecosystem frequently stem
from the desire to protect another; deer populations, for instance, regularly
are culled so that vegetation can be restored.4 But the ambiguity of people’s
relationships with Shōsen Gorge is particularly pronounced. The original re-
2  ecoambiguity

quests for deforestation stemmed from the desire not to save but instead to
see another segment of the landscape; tourists wanted the trees removed not
so the cliffs could be protected but so they could be photographed. Their calls
have gone relatively unheeded; trees remain part of the appeal, their foliage,
particularly in autumn, a highlight of visits to Shōsen Gorge.
Many parts of Japan have not been so fortunate. While some of East
Asia’s environmental problems have clearly been ameliorated as a result of
increased ecological consciousness in the region, others have grown more
menacing. In this sense East Asia is no different from most other parts of the
world. Few places celebrate ecological destruction, instead giving lip service
to “greening” environments, but many promote lifestyles that virtually en-
sure devastation. Today, the separation between practice and environmen-
tal protection rhetoric exists practically everywhere; the divergence is so in-
grained it can be taken for granted.
Most experts agree that ongoing changes to the world’s ecosystems, trig-
gered largely by nebulous combinations of human behaviors and nonhuman
processes, are not sustainable and that unless these vectors are redirected,
global environmental crises are inevitable.5 At best, our relationships with
the natural world are instrumental, regardless of whether we advocate pure
preservation or profligate plunder of ecosystems. As Julia Ireland has argued:

Such instrumentality is evident not only in the worst forms of envi-

ronmental degradation such as strip mining, but also in the language
behind even progressive efforts at sustainable development. The very
way nature comes to appear is already made subordinate to the activ-
ity of human beings, who either destroy it outright or feel compelled
to manage it. Thus, while sustainable harvesting practices can keep
a forest alive, they can never change the deep structures of a style of
thinking through which a tree already first comes into appearance as a
resource rather than as Dillard’s “tree with the lights in it.”6

But instrumentality in many ways is simply a euphemism for an unstable

environmental Ponzi scheme or inverted pyramid of epic proportions, one
that human history suggests would be nearly impossible to dismantle even if
we really were committed to doing so. As many have argued, we believe, or
act as though we believe, that we can demand ever more of the planet, that
its resources are so abundant and its biosphere so elastic that it will absorb
our increasing effluent with scarcely a trace and provide endless resources
with which to create additional waste.7 This thinking and behavior are nearly
ubiquitous, but much else remains uncertain, including—most paradoxi-
 Introduction  3

cally—how “greening” or attempting to “green” environments can readily

harm them.8
Creative writing on distressed ecosystems does not shy away from this
and other uncertainties. Initially I had planned to organize Ecoambiguity
around creative treatments of major environmental problems. I had thought
of comparing, for instance, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese, and other
literary engagements with deforesting, damming, pollution, overpopulation,
species eradication, climate change, and (nuclear) apocalypse. After all, we
expect area specialists and especially comparatists to highlight cultural and
regional differences, differences both among individual (non)-Western societ-
ies and between non-Western and Western societies. Separateness often is as-
sumed to be more prevalent, and important, than similarity, not to mention
commonality.
But the more I read, the more it became apparent that something quite
different was at stake. Throughout history people have routinely damaged
both proximate and distant landscapes, despite vast differences in cultures,
attitudes toward nature, and the resilience of the ecosystems they inhabit.
Environmental damage has varied greatly, yet there are few if any places that
have not been harmed by the human footprint, literal or metaphorical. I soon
realized that it was important, indeed imperative, to analyze how literature
as a form of discourse deals with the causes and consequences of ecodeg-
radation writ large. Once I no longer looked at texts primarily through the
lenses of individual societies or environmental problems, but instead exam-
ined how creative works from disparate places negotiated more generally
with ecological quandaries, their shared environmental ambiguity became
unambiguously clear. The authorial, readerly, cultural, and environmental
circumstances/identities behind the production of a particular text certainly
mattered—including assumptions about target audience, as well as institu-
tional control of literary production such as censorship practices—but not
as much as I had presumed. Environmental ambiguity is a hallmark of ev-
erything from brief poems to multivolume novels; from the work of writers
known globally to those scarcely recognized within their own societies; from
texts discussing relatively isolated ecological damage to those concerned with
ruin on a global scale; from those focusing on environmental distress, in-
cluding ecological life narratives, to those mentioning it only briefly; from
works that celebrate ecodegradation to those that decry it; in texts published
everywhere from the Americas to Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia.9 To be
sure, ecoambiguity appears more prevalent in literature from East Asia than
in other textual corpuses. And its irony is certainly deeper, considering the re-
gion’s long cultural history celebrating the intimate ties between humans and
4  ecoambiguity

nature even as its peoples severely damaged environments. But with several
notable exceptions, and especially within East Asia, these disjunctions and
their many permutations do not depend as much on specific literary culture
or environmental problem as one might anticipate. And so I moved the focus
to the concept of environmental ambiguity itself. Languages, genres, styles,
and tropes differ within and across cultures, but the concerns raised have
much in common.
In addition, although I had first thought of focusing on a few key writ-
ers and texts, the more I read and was exposed to the incredible variety and
richness of East Asian creative negotiations with environmental problems,
the more it became vital to counter the common perception that, with several
prominent exceptions, East Asian literatures typically describe only harmo-
nious human-nonhuman relationships. Examining a wide range of Chinese,
Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese texts that address ecodegradation makes
us more aware of the many ways different societies have grappled with phe-
nomena that are grounded in their specific cultures and histories but that
also resonate with those of other places and peoples and have widespread
regional if not global implications.
Readers are invited to consider the particular ways that ecological prob-
lems are negotiated in the national literatures that form the focus of this
book, while recognizing the many commonalities of human relationships
with the nonhuman across time and space. Ecoambiguity hopes to work to-
ward breaking down barriers of isolation, insularity, and exceptionalism,
reminding us that although human societies, the environments in which they
live, and the dilemmas facing different peoples and ecosystems are distinctive,
they are not unique.
For most communities, limiting further ecological degradation and re-
mediating damaged ecosystems of all sizes will require significant cultural
change, including “new learning, a changed ethos, and vigorous action.”10
Societies need to reconceptualize the actual and the ideal places of people
in ecosystems. Perceptions need to be aligned with actualities, and ideals
need to be implemented. Essential to these endeavors is developing deeper,
more nuanced understandings of the fluid relationships both among peoples
and between peoples and environments in specific places and moments, as
well as over time and across spaces. Writing, reading, and analyzing litera-
ture—openly imaginative texts with clear aesthetic ambitions—can perform
important roles in this undertaking. Literature has the power to move us
profoundly as it exposes how people dominate, damage, and destroy one
another and the natural world. It also allows us to imagine alternative sce-
 Introduction  5

narios. As Lawrence Buell has argued, “For technological breakthroughs,

legislative reforms, and paper covenants about environmental welfare to take
effect, or even to be generated in the first place, requires a climate of trans-
formed environmental values, perception, and will. To that end, the power of
story, image, and artistic performance and the resources of aesthetics, ethics,
and cultural theory are crucial.”11
The power of story is particularly significant. Our sense of reality, our un-
derstandings of who we are and of our relationships with our surroundings,
generally are constructed around stories, not around quantitative data.12 The
South African writer Njabulo S. Ndebele’s comments on writing hold true
for story: “[Writing] has the powerful capability to invade in a very intimate
manner the personal world of the reader. Whenever you read, you risk be-
ing affected in a manner that can change the course of your life.”13 Stories,
whether of the dangers or benefits of certain behaviors (e.g., consuming a
particular product, from Vicodin and Percocet to red wine and dark choco-
late), often surpass data in their power to change people’s behavior. In fact, to
become comprehensible, let alone to effect change, data themselves must be
translated into narrative, and ultimately stories. Stories have the capacity to
awaken, reinforce, and redirect environmental concern and creative thinking
about environmental futures. Taking Buell’s argument one step further, sto-
ries not only help shape legislation that requires changes in behaviors; stories
also can cause sweeping changes in behaviors on a large scale in the absence
of public policy.14 Yet the stories we tell ourselves to construct our sense
of reality often differ from the stories narrated in creative texts and other
art forms: the former tend to impose more logic and unity, or at least what
appear to be logic and unity. There are of course numerous exceptions, as
depicted in the American writer Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise (1984) and
the German writer Günter Grass’s novel Die Rätten (The Rat, 1986).15 But
as George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller have observed, “The human mind
is built to think in terms of narratives, of sequences of events with an internal
logic and dynamic that appear as a unified whole.”16 Likewise, documentary
nonfiction, which frequently translates data into narrative, is committed to
precision, or at least to the pretense of precision.17
Literature’s regular and often blatant defiance of logic, precision, and
unity, by contrast, enables it to grapple more insistently and penetratingly
than many other discourses with ambiguities in general and with those aris-
ing from interactions among people and ecosystems in particular.18 More
specifically, literature’s intrinsic multivalence allows it to highlight and nego-
tiate—reveal, (re)interpret, and shape—the ambiguity that has long suffused
6  ecoambiguity

interactions between people and environments, including those interactions

that involve human damage to ecosystems. Ambiguity here emerges not pri-
marily as an ethical or aesthetic value but as a symptom of epistemological
uncertainty that is parsed both sympathetically and exactingly as a deficit
of consciousness and/or implicit confession of the impotence of writers and
literary characters.
Environmental ambiguity manifests itself in multiple, intertwined ways,
including ambivalent attitudes toward nature; confusion about the actual
condition of the nonhuman, often a consequence of ambiguous informa-
tion; contradictory human behaviors toward ecosystems; and discrepancies
among attitudes, conditions, and behaviors that lead to actively downplay-
ing and acquiescing to nonhuman degradation, as well as to inadvertently
harming the very environments one is attempting to protect.19 My readings
of hundreds of creative works from diverse cultures reveal these imbricated
forms of ecoambiguity as fundamental attributes of literary works that dis-
cuss relationships between people and the nonhuman world. Most interest-
ing is how creative texts articulate the permutations and implications of these
discrepancies vertically in time and horizontally in physical and social space.
I focus this study at a middle range between the global and the local, look-
ing regionally at the interrelated literatures and cultures of East Asia, a prime
arena of ecological concern and debate today. Analyzing Chinese, Japanese,
Korean, and Taiwanese fiction and poetry of the past hundred years reveals
these literatures as replete with discourse on ecodegradation and ecoambigu-
ity to a degree that might surprise readers accustomed to conventional im-
ages of Asian ecological harmony.20 East Asian artists and philosophers have
long idealized people’s interactions with their nonhuman surroundings. Their
representations have given the impression that East Asians, unlike Americans
and Europeans, are inherently sensitive to the environment, that they love na-
ture and intermingle peacefully with it. Yet romanticizing close relationships
between people and their environments has more often defied than reflected
empirical reality. Like most peoples, East Asians have for millennia reshaped,
even exploited their surroundings. Moreover, much modern and even some
premodern East Asian fiction and poetry depict people damaging everything
from small spaces to entire continents.
As the first book in any language on Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and
Taiwanese literary depictions of damaged environments, Ecoambiguity is
grounded in original Chinese-, Japanese-, and Korean-language sources held
in major archival collections throughout the region. I hope that the follow-
ing chapters will open new portals of inquiry in both East Asian studies and
ecocriticism, and also in comparative and world literatures.
 Introduction  7

Changing Environments

Constantly shifting relationships within and among biotic, abiotic, and

cultural entities ensure that ecosystems undergo relentless transformation.
People are incessantly changing and being changed by one another, their (in)
tangible artifacts, and the natural world. But anthropogenic alterations of
ecosystems are especially striking. In their relationships with environments,
two factors set people apart from the nonhuman. First, humans are the only
species that has changed terrestrial and marine ecosystems in every corner
of the planet. Second, people have an exceptional ability to destroy the very
ecosystems on which they depend for existence.21 As Jared Diamond has ar-
gued, “Managing environmental resources sustainably has always been dif-
ficult, ever since Homo sapiens developed modern inventiveness, efficiency,
and hunting skills by around 50,000 years ago . . . Every human colonization
of a land mass formerly lacking humans . . . has been followed by a wave of
extinction of large animals . . . Any people can fall into the trap of overex-
ploiting environmental resources.”22 People have long altered the places they
live and work, as well as more distant sites through fires, mining, damming,
and more recently large-scale industrialization, carbon dioxide emissions,
and nuclear weapons.23 And scientists increasingly are unearthing the impor-
tance of human factors in changes once believed to be “natural,” including
damage from storms, floods, and exploding animal populations.24
From earliest times, communities of gatherers cleared forests via felling,
ring barking, and fire to make room for desired plants. Hunting changed
ecosystems more dramatically: within several hundred years of human
settlement on Madagascar (first century C.E.), most of the island’s larger
animals were extinct; early aboriginals killed off 80 percent of Australia’s
large animals; primitive hunters in South America likewise cost the conti-
nent approximately 80 percent of its large animals.25 But the changes to
environments brought about by gathering and hunting pale next to those
instigated by agricultural communities, which first developed about ten
millennia ago.26 Agriculture (including animal husbandry), accompanied by
deforestation, soil erosion, and rising populations, not only concentrated
the environmental consequences of human activities. Farming also made
it more difficult for human societies to escape the ecological consequences
of their actions. The decline and even collapse of a number of the world’s
great early civilizations—those in Sumer and elsewhere in Mesopotamia,
the Indus valley, China, the Mediterranean (including Greece and Rome),
Egypt, the Americas (such as the Maya), Nordic countries (particularly Ice-
land and Greenland), and Easter Island—have been attributed at least in
8  ecoambiguity

part to massive human-induced changes to ecosystems, including unsus-

tainable agricultural practices.27
Transformations of environments gradually accelerated and intensified
across time, as populations increased and technology became more sophis-
ticated in sites around the world. European expansion into the Americas,
Africa, and Australia beginning in the sixteenth century launched new eras
of environmental transformation. But the industrial revolution starting in
the late eighteenth century, the development of nuclear weapons in the mid-
twentieth century, and the human population explosion of the last fifty years
have resulted in massive changes to environments.28 The implications of the
late twentieth-century information revolution for environmental change are
unclear. Greater access to data and ideas has enhanced environmental con-
sciousness, but it also has triggered an environmental backlash; accessibility
has prevented some changes while accelerating others.29 Greenness is often a
mirage. As Daniel Goleman argues, “Today’s standards for greenness will be
seen tomorrow as eco-myopia . . . Greenwashing pollutes the data available
to consumers, gumming up marketplace efficiency by pawning off misleading
information to get us to buy things that do not deliver on their promise.”30
Gustave Speth summarizes conditions as of the first decade of the twenty-first
century:

Half the world’s tropical and temperate forests are now gone. The
rate of deforestation in the tropics continues at about an acre a sec-
ond. About half the wetlands and a third of the mangroves are gone.
An estimated 90 percent of the large predator fish are gone, and 75
percent of marine fisheries are now overfished or fished to capacity.
Twenty percent of the corals are gone, and another 20 percent severely
threatened. Species are disappearing at rates about a thousand times
faster than normal. The planet has not seen such a spasm of extinction
in sixty-five million years . . . Persistent toxic chemicals can now be
found by the dozens in essentially each and every one of us . . . Human
activities have pushed atmospheric carbon dioxide up by more than
a third and have started in earnest the dangerous process of warming
the planet and disrupting climate.31

Speth, like Mark Dowie, Michael Shellenberger, Ted Nordhaus, and other
intellectuals, blames not only governments, corporations, the media, and pri-
vate citizens but also environmental activists themselves for choosing “to
work within the system,” for dealing with effects, not causes, and for not
 Introduction  9

investing in “deeper approaches to change.”32 Clearly, ambiguity undergirds

the attitudes, as well as the behaviors, of even those most committed to re-
pairing current ecodegradation and preventing future damage.

Environmental Ambiguity

Every human action changes environments. Some changes are readily vis-
ible and accounted for, some are readily visible yet ignored or denied, some
become apparent only after archaeological excavation or scientific exami-
nation, others are merely hypothesized, while countless remain unknown.
Describing change to environments has long been a challenge: often new con-
cepts must be developed and terms coined. Pinpointing agents of change has
been no easier. Even the most obvious perpetrators can be wrapped in webs
of disclaimers. Likewise, accurately predicting change has nearly always
proved difficult. This is often because the nonhuman appears or is imagined
to be inexhaustible, and signs of imminent depletion are easily ignored or are
not readily apparent.33 Even more problematic has been evaluating change,
whether past, present, or anticipated: what change can be understood as dam-
age, what damage can be condoned, even encouraged? Simon C. Estok has
characterized anthropogenic transformations of environments as stemming
largely from ecophobia, understood as “an irrational and groundless fear or
hatred of the natural world, as present and subtle in our daily lives and lit-
erature as homophobia and racism and sexism.”34 Ecophobia, Estok writes,
regularly “wins out” over its alleged opposites: biophilia, understood as “the
innately emotional affiliation of human beings to other living organisms,”
and, more generally, ecophilia, or love of nature.35 To be sure, ecophobia
can explain much of people’s desire throughout history to control (parts of)
the natural environment and engage in such massive destruction of nature as
large-scale deforestation and species eradication. Likewise, ecophilia seems
to propel people’s embrace of nature, as well as promote environmental re-
mediation and conservation, and, in fact, inspire the field of ecocriticism it-
self. But as the cliché “love nature to death” suggests, environmental changes
need not be symptoms of absolute ecophobia or ecophilia. A bias against the
nonhuman that keeps someone inside a city apartment relatively cut off from
nature surely alters the nonhuman less directly and potentially less substan-
tially than a love of the natural world that leads someone to drive for hours
to go hiking or canoeing.36 And even when changes are motivated largely by
ecophobia or ecophilia, the changes themselves often are less easily evalu-
10  ecoambiguity

ated. The uncertainties suffusing relationships and interpretations of rela-

tionships between people and their environments suggest that ecoambiguity
is often more prominent than ecophobia or ecophilia alone.37
Attitudes and behaviors toward natural phenomena, as well as infor-
mation on environmental conditions, arise based on social standards and
the institutions that enforce these standards—among them economic, edu-
cational, familial, journalistic, legal, medical, military, penal, political, and
religious. The variability of a society’s norms for perceived, actual, and ideal
relationships between people and the nonhuman contributes significantly to
the ecoambiguity underlying changes to environments.
Human attitudes toward the nonhuman are often marked by ambiva-
lence. An individual or group can simultaneously feel positively (e.g., rever-
ent), negatively (e.g., antagonistic), uncertain, and apathetic toward different
species; an individual or group can also have mixed emotions toward a single
species, or about the nonhuman more generally.38 Just as frequently, a single
plant, animal, or ecosystem will evoke positive sentiments in some people,
negative sentiments in some people, uncertainty in others, and no discern-
able emotions in still others.39 Likewise, perceptions of (in)appropriate life-
styles and of what constitutes (ir)responsible behavior vis-à-vis environments
change regularly and often are contradictory. Beliefs also are inconsistent on
what makes changes to ecosystems necessary or at least acceptable. Percep-
tions vary on which changes should be prevented, encouraged, and over-
looked; which are mitigated by other changes; and which should be altered,
and how and by whom.40
Informed in part by ambivalent attitudes arising from social standards
and institutions that are themselves contested, human behaviors toward the
nonhuman tend to be contradictory. Behaviors fluctuate and cancel out one
another.41 They also often are at odds with attitudes and at times correspond
surprisingly little with environmental conditions.42 In her pathbreaking Silent
Spring (1962) the American marine biologist and environmentalist Rachel
Carson declared: “We are reminded that in nature nothing exists alone . . .
The earth’s vegetation is part of a web of life in which there are intimate and
essential relations between plants and the earth, between plants and other
plants, between plants and animals. Sometimes we have no choice but to dis-
turb these relationships, but we should do so thoughtfully, with full aware-
ness that what we do may have consequences remote in time and place.”43
Carson’s words are well intended. If consequences are pondered, presumably
behaviors will be modified. Presumably, but not necessarily: “thought” and
“full awareness” run the risk of excusing, even facilitating ecodegradation.
 Introduction  11

Ambiguity attends the impacts of behaviors: even those that seem to be

easily categorized as “helping” (e.g., recycling) or “hurting” (e.g., deforest-
ing) ecosystems can have indefinite or incongruous outcomes and uncertain
implications. Alan Macfarlane summarizes some of the paradoxes of change:
“Almost every change has negative as well as positive effects . . . The contra-
dictory consequences are numerous and remind us that for almost every two
steps forward on one front, there is a step back on another.”44 For instance,
the same technology that improves the lives of some creatures harms the lives
of others, whether of the same or different species. Likewise the same nonhu-
man being can both help and harm a single ecosystem.45
Macfarlane’s comment assumes that the contradictory consequences of
change can be neatly classified as “positive” or “negative,” as moving con-
ditions “forward” or “backward.” But “positive” or “negative” to what/
whom? Moving “forward” or “backward” from what/whose perspective?
To give one example, at the same time that dams generate power for down-
stream communities and prevent flooding, they block fish from migrating
and create lakes that bury upstream communities. They thus have been
widely condemned, particularly in recent decades. On the other hand, just
as generating power can lead to further environmental destruction and pre-
venting flooding can harm flora and fauna that depend on it, new lakes can
foster new ecosystems and homes for diverse species, while the absence of
fish can allow other species to flourish. For its part, dismantling dams—a
growing trend from rural Maine to urban Japan—allows the populations
of many species to resurge, but this in turn can encourage increased aquatic
recreation, which pollutes environments in other ways. Potentially dan-
gerous as well to downstream communities is the release of contaminated
sediment when dams are dismantled.46 Strengthening one group, whether
people, trees, fish, or parasites, often weakens another group; the more
complex the landscape and the more nebulous its borders, the more dif-
ficult it is to evaluate changes taking place within it. Ambiguity spares not
even the hybrid vehicle. The Toyota Prius, marketed under the seductive
albeit gendered slogan “Harmony between Man, Nature, and Machine”
and since July 2009 the top selling vehicle in Japan, not only is the most
fuel efficient car on the market, it also is nearly quiet when running on
battery power.47 Silence might seem an entirely “positive” feature: spaces
free from the sounds of people and their technologies are something of an
endangered species, especially in industrialized nations.48 But in fact, quiet
cars themselves endanger the vision-impaired and others who rely on sound
to navigate urban space. And so Toyota developed an optional speaker
12  ecoambiguity

system for its third-generation Prius; with the flick of a switch drivers can
make their vehicle sound like a regular car.49
Even if silent cars continue to propagate, the damage they cause likely
will not be severe, since people will become more accustomed to them. The
same cannot be said of larger scale ostensibly eco-friendly actions, particu-
larly those that would radically transform already transformed environ-
ments. David Harvey has argued:

There are very few if any ecosystems in the world today that do not
bear the marks of continuous human actions, and the continuity of
that action is essential to their maintenance. If global capitalism col-
lapsed tomorrow, there would be a dramatically stressful period of
ecological adaptation as dams and irrigation ditches deteriorated, as
fertilizer inputs diminished, as urban and agrarian systems collapsed.
It is, then, flows of money that make the contemporary environment
what it is, and any interruption in those money and commodity flows
will potentially have ecological consequences just as catastrophic as
the history of the development of these flows has had since World War
II . . . The right to be free of ecological destruction is posed so strongly
as a negative right that it appears to preclude the positive right to
transform the Earth in ways conducive to the well-being of the poor,
the marginalized, and the oppressed.50

The ever more sophisticated findings of scientists, social scientists, human-

ists, activists, and other concerned citizens have helped resolve numerous
ambiguities about the condition of ecosystems. But acting productively on
this knowledge has proved difficult. Much information is suppressed, and
the information that is released tends to be interpreted in conflicting ways; it
is often distorted, politicized, and overshadowed by other rhetoric.51 In ad-
dition, new information often brings with it new questions, in turn further
destabilizing knowledge about environmental conditions. Feeling ambivalent
about such ambiguities is not uncommon: people frequently are aware but
not sure what to make of all the contradictions. In short, interactions among
people and environments—particularly interactions involving significant
changes to ecosystems—are nothing if not ambiguous. Consciousness of am-
biguity does not necessarily hamper efforts to repair environments; in fact,
it can foster broader cooperation.52 It also encourages a surprising flexibility
in attitudes and behaviors that can help relieve many of the problems facing
human and nonhuman communities.53
 Introduction  13

Environments of Literature

Since prehistoric times, cultural products, themselves part of the ecologies

of local and global spaces, have negotiated changes within and among eco-
systems. Paleolithic cave paintings dating to well before 30,000 B.C.E. give
diverse perspectives on human practices that alter environments.54 Language
has likewise played an important role in transforming ecosystems. It has been
used to command, describe, justify, celebrate, condemn, encourage amelio-
ration of, or divert attention from human treatment of environments. For
thousands of years creative texts around the world have probed not only
how people are affected by their surroundings but also how and why they al-
ter environments near and far; most literary works that feature people show
them changing ecosystems. References in literature to constructing, inhabit-
ing, and dismantling built environments as well as to hunting, agriculture,
and eating all point to changed landscapes. Even creative texts without hu-
man characters (e.g., animal stories) often at least mention human-induced
transformations of environments. For its part, world literature—understood
broadly as creative texts that have circulated beyond their culture of origin—
has since The Epic of Gilgamesh (second millennium B.C.E.) depicted people
as radically altering their surroundings.55
Classifying change as actual damage is not necessarily straightforward;
injury to one component of an ecosystem is often precisely what enables an-
other to flourish. For the most part I consider damage to be human-induced
change that significantly harms the health of an ecosystem, often by compro-
mising its biodiversity or its capacity for self-renewal.56 These changes can
involve the injury or death of a single creature or plant, members of a single
species, or more often members of multiple species, if not entire species them-
selves. Degrading an environment can include harming or uprooting plants
by weeding, deforesting, or spraying, or it can involve widespread displacing,
injuring, or killing via fishing, hunting, and polluting. Damaging an envi-
ronment also frequently involves radically changing its abiotic components,
including its air, water, and soil.57
Creative discourse on human transformations of environments regularly
spotlights the ambiguities of these changes. Literature is not the only art
form that foregrounds ecoambiguity, but it is certainly one of the most com-
pelling. Even within a single text, characters can disagree considerably on
whether changes might be celebrated, condoned, or condemned, on whether
changes should be continued, impeded, modified, or reversed, and on the
effect of these uncertainties on people and the nonhuman. Creative works ad-
14  ecoambiguity

ditionally discuss ecological damage of differing spatial and temporal scopes,

including situated damage—short-term injury to relatively small, isolated
ecosystems; spatially pervasive damage—harm of relatively limited temporal
scope that affects larger or multiple ecosystems; temporally pervasive dam-
age—environmental degradation whose duration is greater than its spatial
scope; and encompassing damage—environmental degradation that is both
enduring and widespread. Also varying considerably are causes and types of
degradation; the range of species affected (including the presence or absence
of notable human suffering); and the proportion of the text devoted to ex-
plicit discussion of environmental distress.
Ecoambiguity shows that much East Asian literature addressing harm
to ecosystems is environmentally cosmopolitan (ecocosmopolitan), either
explicitly or implicitly taking up ecodegradation beyond a single time or
place.58 The most obviously ecocosmopolitan texts are those that speak gen-
erally about degradation on a potentially global scale. These are frequently
poems or other short texts that talk broadly of “human beings” destroying
the planet. More complex expressions of environmental cosmopolitanism are
found in creative work that explicitly depicts particular types and instances
of ecodegradation, regardless of scale, as encompassed in larger environ-
mental problems or encompassing smaller ones. For instance, even a short
poem that focuses on a single ailing animal might also speak explicitly of
this animal’s suffering as resulting from large-scale deforestation. Similarly, a
lengthy novel on climate change or the eradication of multiple species world-
wide is likely also to speak in detail on conditions in specific places. Other
ecocosmopolitan texts depict problems in one space as analogous to those
in other spaces: a literary work focusing on a polluted field might speak of
the resemblance between damage done to this tract of land and similar harm
done to another at some distance. Many texts that concentrate on incidents
that occur in a specific place and time both draw parallels with conditions in
other places and times and speak of these instances as part of larger patterns
of environmental distress or as encompassing smaller problems. Although
literary treatments of human relationships with damaged environments often
exhibit strong local ties, on the whole they tend to be somewhat less cultur-
ally, nationally, or even regionally specific than discourse on other subjects,
including celebrations of nature.59 This is not surprising considering that en-
vironmental globalization is the oldest form of globalization, predating its
economic, political, social, and cultural counterparts.60 In addition, many
writers who take up environmental damage, including those whose work
is examined in this book, have spent substantial time abroad and witnessed
ecodegradation in multiple locales. Ecological globalization has arguably fa-
 Introduction  15

cilitated its literary counterpart, and literary globalization has brought in-
creased attention to its ecological counterpart.
Much ecocosmopolitanism is implicit and raises questions of environ-
mental actuality and possibility. Environmental actuality refers to the ecolog-
ical degradation that a text explicitly addresses or to which it clearly alludes.
Environmental possibility indicates the human-induced environmental harm
that a text more abstractly implicates. This can be damage a writer might
mean to signify, but does so in a less than obvious manner.61 More gener-
ally, environmental possibility refers to what can be deduced or extrapolated
from a creative work, regardless of authorial intent and the specific social
and environmental circumstances surrounding textual production. Numer-
ous creative works focus on situated damage that could be read as a micro-
cosm of spatially pervasive damage, temporally pervasive damage, or even
encompassing damage. Thus in some cases a brief poem on a single ailing
creature that contains no references to other animals can be read as address-
ing the plight of that species or of multiple species in multiple spaces. So too
in some cases can a short story on animals suffering from pesticides used in a
single field, with mere changes to place, personal, and species names (if these
are given), increase understanding of the plight of animals in other spaces. In
short, texts can be environmentally cosmopolitan without speaking explicitly
of ecological degradation beyond a single time and place.
It is often difficult to determine whether a text’s environmental possibilities
can or should take precedence over its environmental actualities, especially
when—as nearly always is the case—these possibilities are ambiguous.62 But
the extent of environmental degradation currently facing the planet requires
that we look closely at these possibilities. This is not to deny the particu-
larities of ecological distress in individual sites or the need to understand
the specific circumstances of cultural production. The latter are especially
important in cases where the writer is active in environmental or other politi-
cal movements, or where the text focuses on ecological concerns apparently
distinctive to a single place. Moreover, the reader’s own background and
circumstances affect how a text’s possibilities are grasped. Still, the analyst of
literary works on environmental degradation must take seriously actualities,
possibilities, and the myriad positions in between. Creative texts, as tangible
cultural products, stand within, not outside, ecosystems from the local to the
global, something that allows them to comment instructively on a variety of
environments.
Literature rarely offers comprehensive remedies, much less proposes of-
ficial policies to prevent future or remediate current damage to landscapes;
in some cases creative writing itself might even abet the ecodegradation it
16  ecoambiguity

deplores. But drafting policies, not to mention implementing them, requires

changes in consciousness—perceptions, understandings, and expectations—
something literature is well placed to enhance. To be sure, celebrations of
the wonders of nature, even those that make no mention of compromised
environments, have moved readers greatly and done much to foster environ-
mental consciousness.63 Yet more explicit creative discourse on degraded en-
vironments—whether it describes actual conditions or imagines (im)possible
scenarios, whether it is embedded in overt celebrations of nature or forms
the center of a text—highlights especially clearly the immediate challenges
confronting ecosystems of all kinds.64 Creative works that directly address
environmental damage also indicate the difficulties in pinpointing precise
causes and providing surefire solutions. And to varying degrees they address
one of the greatest ambiguities of human changes to landscapes: to what
extent these changes matter, morally and ecologically. Literature that probes
degraded ecosystems thus underlines the urgency of better understanding the
ambiguity that pervades relationships among people and their environments,
including human efforts to protect or repair the nonhuman.65 This literature
points directly to the consequences of failing to do so. At stake is less the loss
of glorious, often imagined wilderness than the loss of actual lives, both hu-
man and nonhuman.

Changing Environments of Literature

Because damaged environments are a global phenomenon, literary treat-

ments of ecodegradation regularly transcend their particular cultures of pro-
duction and together form intercultural thematic and conceptual networks.
Intercultural thematic networks are webs of creative texts from multiple cul-
tures that focus on similar topics, whether or not the writers of these texts
actively reconfigure one another’s work.66 Ecoambiguity demonstrates the
development of thematic webs concerned with degraded environments dia-
chronically through time as well as their synchronic presence across space.
As Werner Sollors has argued:

By making [a particular theme the constant], the persistence and

scope of the literature can begin to be sketched; at the same time,
many other variables are left open, inviting comparisons across liter-
ary genres and periods . . . What may seem intriguing or cryptic in
an individual work may be clarified by considering other literary and
nonliterary texts; what may appear radically innovative in one text
 Introduction  17

may actually be widely shared by many earlier literary texts and other
documents; what is praised as the accomplishment (or what the New
Critics might call the “thematic unity”) of a single text may be more
fairly viewed as the nuanced refiguring of themes that are familiar
from many other texts; what is regarded as the defining motif of a
certain ethnic group may really be a shared feature of many other
ethnic and national literatures; what is looked at as a startling and
noteworthy “subversion” of a traditional element may actually be in
itself a traditional commonplace.67

Likewise, Rob Nixon has rightly proposed that instead of automatically plac-
ing into national ecocanons creative texts on specific environmental issues
such as land rights, nuclear testing, pollution, and oil, we instead reposition
these works in international context and examine them comparatively. Do-
ing so will allow us not only to diversify environmental literary canons but
also to reconceptualize the prevailing paradigms of these canons.68 I speak of
such intercultural thematic networks where appropriate. But this book goes
one step further in reconfiguring paradigms by focusing not on national net-
works or even on networks formed around a specific environmental problem
(thematic networks) but instead on those formed around concepts (concep-
tual networks)—in this case ecoambiguity, which undergirds and accompa-
nies environmental degradation of most kinds, places, and times. The focus
is primarily on environmental ambiguity in twentieth- and early twenty-first-
century Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese literary works that ad-
dress ecodegradation. Yet by also touching on dozens of other creative texts
from diverse eras and locations—including Africa, the Americas, Australia
and New Zealand, Europe, the Middle East, and South and Southeast Asia—
the book emphasizes the global reach of this phenomenon. Engaging with
literature in this way repositions the markers of East Asian studies, ecocriti-
cism, and comparative and world literatures. It also increases the planetary
consciousness of literature studies.
Researchers in the social and natural sciences both within and outside
East Asia have written extensively on environmental problems in modern
and premodern China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, on the many movements
and organizations that have fought against ecodegradation, and on official
responses on local, subnational, national, and regional levels. In contrast,
most humanistic research on East Asian literary works that discuss interac-
tions between people and nature has looked at creative manipulations of the
latter: literary celebrations of nature; depictions of nature as a refuge, often
imagined, from human society; portraits of relatively harmonious integration
18  ecoambiguity

of people with nature; or, less frequently, episodes of people overpowered

by calamities such as avalanches, earthquakes, and floods. Much less has
been published on East Asian creative negotiations with environmental dam-
age, despite its presence in thousands of years of Chinese-, Japanese-, and
Korean-language literatures, and particularly in the region’s twentieth- and
early twenty-first-century creative corpuses. Ecoambiguity thus contributes
to an emerging subfield within East Asian studies.
This book also is intended to widen the geographic and linguistic scope
of ecocriticism (environmentally oriented literature studies, literature-and-
environment studies).69 In the United States and Europe most ecocritical
scholarship draws from American and European literatures, and even in Asia
discussions of the relationship between literature and damaged environments
has focused disproportionately on Western examples.70 Scholarship on en-
vironmentalism and postcolonialism has surged in recent years, analyzing
the ecological implications of texts from Africa, Latin America, and South
Asia.71 But most of this research has concentrated on the Western-language
literatures of these regions. In the coming years, ecocritics will need to ad-
dress a broader range of literatures, including those from East Asia, a region
home to three of the world’s largest economies and nearly one-fourth of its
people.72 East Asia is heir to thousands of years of writings on human in-
teractions with environments. It is also heir to thousands of years of intense
environmental degradation. Moreover, ecoambiguity has been particularly
pronounced in the region. East Asia has long been associated with belief
systems advocating reverence for nature, especially Buddhism, Confucian-
ism, Daoism, and Shinto as well as numerous indigenous philosophies and
religions.73 These modes of thought have inspired the environmentality, or
concern for environmental health, of numerous Asian as well as American,
European, and to a lesser extent Middle Eastern and African intellectuals.74
Popular perceptions both within and outside East Asia often hold that en-
vironmental degradation in the region began in the late nineteenth century,
when East Asian peoples, pressured by Western nations, assimilated the lat-
ter’s technologies and industries. But actually, East Asian societies have long
histories of transforming environments. Rhoades Murphey has gone so far
as to argue:

All Asian cultures in the areas east of Afghanistan and south of the
former Soviet Union have long been noted for their admiring attitudes
toward nature . . . All of this is contrasted with the Western view . . .
The Asian record, however, makes it clear that, despite the professed
values of the literate elite, people have altered or destroyed the Asian
 Introduction  19

environment for longer and on a greater scale than anywhere else in

the world, even in the twentieth-century West.75

Murphey perhaps overstates the case, since the changes early East Asian
peoples made to environments did not have the reach of those instigated by
societies in the twentieth-century West.
Nevertheless, the disjuncture between beliefs and behaviors is significant.
As the historian Mark Elvin has observed concerning China:

Through more than three thousand years, the Chinese refashioned

China. They cleared the forests and the original vegetation cover, ter-
raced its hill-slopes, and partitioned its valley floors into fields. They
diked, dammed, and diverted its rivers and lakes. They hunted or do-
mesticated its animals and birds; or else destroyed their habitats as a
by-product of the pursuit of economic improvements. By late-imperial
times there was little that could be called “natural” left untouched by
this process of exploitation and adaptation . . . A paradox thus lay at
the heart of Chinese attitudes to the landscape. On the one hand it was
seen . . . as a part of the supreme numinous power itself. Wisdom re-
quired that one put oneself into its rhythms and be conscious of one’s
inability to reshape it. On the other hand the landscape was in fact
tamed, transformed, and exploited to a degree that had few parallels
in the premodern world.76

Heiner Roetz expands on this line of reasoning, boldly claiming that in

early China, “a sympathetic feeling for nature, like that [expressed in] the
Zhuangzi, was a simple reaction against [what was actually happening].”77
Roetz stretches the point. Not all expressions of sympathy, much less cel-
ebrations of nature, even celebrations emanating from societies that are sig-
nificantly transforming their environments, can be read as reactions against
actual conditions. But most can be discussed as providing alternatives.
East Asian peoples long have had a heightened consciousness of human-
induced damage to environments, but despite the commitment of individuals,
organizations, and governments to repairing extant damage and limiting fur-
ther harm, overall environmental degradation in the region shows every sign
of persisting.78 To be sure, many of East Asia’s most obvious environmental
problems have been ameliorated in the past few decades, including urban air
and water pollution in Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and to a lesser extent China.
Faced with the combined challenges of high population density, accelerated
consumption, and decreasing tolerance for damaged surroundings, East
20  ecoambiguity

Asian societies have devised ingenious solutions to environmental problems.

The Japanese, for instance, developed scrubber technology to filter emissions,
as well as low-emission garbage incinerators to power local facilities.79 They
also have profited from selling pollution-control technology to China. The
Chinese, for their part, currently are constructing six mammoth wind farms,
each of which “dwarfs anything else, anywhere in the world.”80 In Dezhou
(Shandong Province), the Chinese are constructing the world’s largest solar
energy production base.81 And engineers at the Hanguk Kwahak Kisulwŏn
(Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology) in Taejŏn are mak-
ing progress on an electric vehicle system that provides power via induction
strips embedded in roads; this system eventually will allow Seoul to replace
its 9,000 gasoline-fueled buses with electric models that would reduce Ko-
rea’s dependence on foreign oil.82
But in many cases pollution is simply being exported, not eradicated, cre-
ating multiple shadow ecologies.83 Sulfur dioxide emissions from coal burn-
ing in China have caused serious acid rain problems outside China’s borders.
The rapid expansion of China’s Gobi Desert, brought about by deforestation
and overgrazing, has intensified the region’s sand and dust storms, primary
carriers of China’s industrial pollutants to neighboring countries.84 Japan has
a long history of preserving its own forests while relying on timber from
Southeast Asia, while in the 1970s, largely in response to environmental
regulations at home, Japan began outsourcing its heavy-pollution industries
to China and other parts of Asia. And so for more than thirty years there
has been a “lively debate over the relationship between Asia’s environmental
crisis and the Japanese political economy,” with Japan alternating between
“environmental superpower” (kankyō taikoku) and “pollution superpower”
(kōgai taikoku).85 At the same time, claims of remediation have been exag-
gerated. Recent research indicates that improvements in Beijing’s air quality
during the 2008 Olympics had more to do with fortunate weather patterns
than with source control measures.86 As chapter 1 discusses in detail, envi-
ronmental conditions and responses to these conditions differ greatly within
the region and among different areas of China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan.
East Asian literary mediations of relationships among people and environ-
ments, particularly relationships that involve changes to the nonhuman, have
also varied considerably across time and space. This region’s diverse litera-
tures thus are fertile soil for twenty-first-century ecocritical research.
In teasing out the contradictions inherent in literary discourse on environ-
mental degradation I also attempt to bring new perspectives to ecocriticism.
The “first-wave” ecocritical scholarship of the 1990s often adopted a bio-
centric or preservationist approach, focusing largely on nature writing and
 Introduction  21

on the capacity of literature to model ecocentric values, as well as on literary

depictions of the biological, psychological, and spiritual bonds joining hu-
mans and the natural world.87 Ecocriticism’s “second wave,” which gained
momentum around the turn of the twenty-first century, has taken a more
anthropocentric or sociocentric standpoint; this scholarship highlights litera-
ture of the city and industrialization, as well as environmental (in)justice and
related social issues, particularly in the context of ethnic and minority con-
cerns, indigeneity, postcolonialism, diaspora, and cosmopolitanism. It like-
wise moves place-attachment from the local to the transnational or global.88
To date, both waves of ecocriticism have made significant breakthroughs,
including foregrounding relatively neglected literary genres and subgenres
such as nature writing, toxification narrative, ecopoetry, and ecodrama that
are concerned with relationships among people and their environments; re-
interpreting thematic configurations related to the environment such as the
pastoral, environmental racism, and eco-apocalypticism; and uncovering en-
vironmental subtexts from a range of creative works. Most recently, the field
has looked to diverse genres and media beyond the written text, including
graphic novels, animated film, bioart and green architecture, and innovative
digital data sources, transforming how scholars think about the ecocritical
agenda.89 What has not yet been widely seen in these modes of ecocriticism is
sustained attention to the complex ambiguities we face in responding to the
vexed issues raised by rapid ecological change and degradation. The future
of ecocriticism has been said to lie in demonstrating the place of environ-
mentality in literature, especially literature’s posing environmentality as a
“thought experiment . . . complicated by multiple agendas and refusal to take
fixed positions.”90 There is no question that engaging with environments,
inevitably fraught with ambiguity, has long been a vital part of global textual
production. Yet it also is important to examine the dynamics of ecoambigu-
ity itself, that is, the complexities of shaping, implementing, and interpret-
ing environmental-ethical concerns, as well as their conceptual and physical
implications.
Adopting neither a primarily biocentric/preservationist nor a primarily
anthropocentric/sociocentric position, Ecoambiguity instead analyzes the
intricacies of environmental ambiguity in a wide range of works—from cre-
ative texts concentrating nearly exclusively on ecodegradation to those that
refer only briefly to it, from texts on the devastation of wilderness to those
treating the polluted slums of dense megacities, from texts that celebrate eco-
degradation to those that decry it. It explores the multiple ways fiction and
poetry highlight the absence of simple answers and the paucity of facile solu-
tions to environmental problems.
22  ecoambiguity

In addition to expanding the fields of East Asian studies and ecocriticism,

I hope to strengthen the presence of comparative modern East Asian litera-
tures in the field of comparative literature. In Europe the field has focused
largely on European literatures, and in the United States on European and
to a lesser extent American literatures; in both the United States and Europe
considerable work also has been done on literary relations between the West
and non-West, broadly defined. In East Asia, scholars of comparative litera-
ture have addressed these same concerns. They also have written extensively
on relationships among early Chinese literature and the early literatures of
Japan or Korea. Increasing numbers of East Asian scholars are now examin-
ing interactions between any two of the four modern East Asian literatures.
But scholarship on relationships among the modern Chinese-, Japanese-, and
Korean-language literatures of the region is still in its infancy. As with my
Empire of Texts in Motion: Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese Transcultura-
tions of Japanese Literature, the first book in any language to analyze inter-
actions among modern Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese literary
worlds and literatures, Ecoambiguity examines in comparative perspective
the literatures of twentieth- and twenty-first-century China, Japan, Korea,
and Taiwan.
I place my individual textual analyses in environmental and historical
context, even while calling attention both to the internal diversity of literary
works and to the amorphous boundaries that nominally separate them.91 I
also identify patterns of transculturation within East Asia, where transcul-
turation is understood as the “many different processes of assimilation, ad-
aptation, rejection, parody, resistance, loss, and ultimately transformation”
of cultures and cultural products.92 My discussions of intraregional flows are
incorporated into those of interregional vectors and global cultural currents.
East Asia and its literary products have a long history as contact spaces of
global discourse on relationships between people and nature, where contact
spaces are understood broadly as physical and creative sites of transcultura-
tion.93 Notwithstanding the region’s extensive record of environmental deg-
radation, the environmentality of its philosophies and religions as well as of
individual artists and intellectuals has for centuries inspired people the world
over. Likewise, East Asians have actively transculturated the environmen-
tality of counterparts from outside the region. Global networks of peoples,
ideas, and texts concerned with the degradation of environments have be-
come particularly complex since the mid-twentieth century, as the severity
and scope of this degradation have become more apparent.
These networks form an important component of world literature, which
has been identified by David Damrosch as
 Introduction  23

all literary works that circulate beyond their culture of origin either in
translation or in their original language . . . a work only has an effec-
tive life as world literature whenever, and wherever, it is actively pres-
ent in a literary system beyond that of its original culture . . . World
literature is an elliptical refraction of national literatures . . . [It] is not
a set canon of texts but a mode of reading: a form of detached engage-
ment with worlds beyond our own place and time . . . [that helps us]
appreciate the ways in which a literary work reaches out and away
from its point of origin.94

The study of world literature has burgeoned in recent years, but little has
been written on the relationship between world literature and ecodegrada-
tion, even though countless works of world literature take up the human
destruction of environments. To help galvanize the study of world literature
and globalized environment, Ecoambiguity includes discussion of works of
world literature that originated in East Asia and others that have found a
second home there, generally in translation.95
Most of the creative works analyzed in Ecoambiguity have been translated
into at least one language, but few have had a truly active presence in literary
systems beyond their original culture. They thus are not generally interpreted as
works of world literature. On the other hand, almost all of these texts address
concerns that transcend those of their source cultures and are environmentally
cosmopolitan, either explicitly or implicitly. Much can be gained by reading
them as world literature, that is to say examining how they reach beyond their
points of origin. Ideally, I argue, literary systems should be studied not only
along cultural/national lines, but also in terms of intercultural thematic and
conceptual networks. The most significant networks address urgent matters of
global significance, including poverty, disease, slavery, warfare, and environ-
mental destruction. Spotlighting these networks reveals how readily literature
traverses boundaries of all kinds: environmental, political and administrative,
economic, demographic, and cultural and social.96 One of the most effective
means of increasing the planetary consciousness of literary studies is reading as
world literature even those texts that might not be works of world literature in
the conventional sense but that engage with important issues extending beyond
single cultures.97 The worlds these texts discuss often are physically beyond
our own place and time, but the concerns they address strike close to home.
Concepts of “planetary consciousness” have long been linked with impe-
rialism. Discussing natural history in eighteenth-century Europe, Mary Louise
Pratt aligns that era’s “planetary consciousness” with disruption, (re)ordering,
imperialism, and Eurocentrism:
24  ecoambiguity

The eighteenth-century systematizing of nature as a European knowl-

edge-building project . . . created a new kind of Eurocentered plan-
etary consciousness. Blanketing the surface of the globe, it specified
plants and animals in visual terms as discrete entities, subsuming and
reassembling them in a finite, totalizing order of European making.98

Racism, culturalism, and speciesism, which assume the superiority of people

or particular groups of people, underlie quests for this form of planetary
consciousness. Other intellectuals have argued that people are themselves
the “planet’s consciousness.” For instance, despite their philosophical differ-
ences, the prominent Soviet geochemist and mineralogist Vladimir Vernad­
sky and the French theologian, biologist, and philosopher Pierre Teilhard
de Chardin both believed “that human beings are the planet’s conscious-
ness with the right, responsibility and now ability . . . [to] direct evolution-
ary forces.”99 Teilhard de Chardin embraced and expanded on Vernadsky’s
argument that the planet, already having evolved from a geosphere into a
biosphere, ultimately was being transformed into a noosphere, a sphere of
human thought, a sphere that “human beings [had] a duty to modify . . .
through science and technology.”100
But just as emphasizing “planetary consciousness” can strengthen local-,
ethno-, anthro-, or other centrisms, it also can be used to counter prejudices.
Referring to the work of the Latin American philosopher Enrique Dussel,
particularly The Invention of the Americas (1995), Nelson Maldonado Tor-
res observes: “Against the (imperial) ‘planetary’ perspective of European
imperial eyes that became instrumental for bourgeois colonial adventures,
Dussel deploys another ‘planetary’ perspective . . . Instead of serving imperi-
alism, this ‘planetary’ perspective aims to overcome Eurocentrism.”101 This is
precisely the objective of a number of contemporary imaginings of planetary
consciousness.
In the past decade, critics such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Wai
Chee Dimock have urged scholars of both comparative literature and na-
tional literatures to take a more planetary approach. By this they mean, in
simplest terms, increasing both the scope and the cultural grounding of lit-
erature studies. Dimock proposes reading American literature as a subset,
by no means the most encompassing one, of “an infinite number of larger
aggregates that take their measure from the durations and extensions of the
human species itself, folding in American literature as one fold among oth-
ers.”102 The perspective she advocates could easily be applied with modifica-
tion to any number of other literatures, national or otherwise. Spivak argues
 Introduction  25

somewhat controversially that “as presumed collectivities cross borders un-

der the auspices of a comparative literature supplemented by Area Studies,
they might attempt to figure themselves—imagine themselves—as planetary
rather than continental, global, or worldly . . . It is as an alternative . . . to the
arrogance of the cartographic reading of world lit. in translation as the task
of Comparative Literature, that I propose the planet.”103
Evocations of the planet enrich literature studies as they enrich human un-
derstanding more generally. Recent visions of planetary humanism and plan-
etary consciousness stress the need to analyze creative and other discourse on
urgent issues of actual or potential interregional and often planetary import.
Paul Gilroy speaks of the importance of developing “a planetary humanism
capable of comprehending the universality of our elemental vulnerability to
the wrongs we visit upon each other,” as well as “a planetary consciousness
of the tragedy, fragility, and brevity of indivisible human existence.”104 Like-
wise, in her discussion of the value of adopting a more planetary research
program, Dimock gives the example of slavery, which although “so often
studied only within the geography and chronology of the United States, be-
comes a virtually unrecognizable phenomenon when it is taken outside these
space and time coordinates.” She rightly highlights the “conceptual broad-
ening that comes with [the] broadening of the evidentiary ground.”105 Al-
though Dimock here speaks of broadening the evidentiary ground of histori-
cal research, literary criticism might follow a similar trajectory, examining
more fully, for instance, intercultural networks on slavery and other human
rights abuses. Such criticism would analyze creative works as products both
of specific times and places and of shared human experience.
But arguably even more vital to increasing the planetary consciousness
of literature studies is identifying and analyzing intercultural networks that
negotiate relationships between people and environments, particularly rela-
tionships involving ecological degradation.106 This approach is imperative
for several reasons. First, such an orientation more accurately reflects its ep-
onym: “planet,” more than “globe” or “world,” points at once to the planet
Earth and to the diverse and interacting bodies—tangible and intangible, hu-
man and nonhuman, biotic and abiotic, massive and microscopic in size and
impact—that form, inhabit, and move across this sphere.107 Second, as recent
environmental justice and ecofeminist scholarship suggests, examining how
creative works articulate interactions between humans and environments in
fact deepens appreciations not only of these relationships but also of those
among people.108 Third, and most important, scholarship on literature can
help us develop deeper, more nuanced understandings of human/nonhu-
26  ecoambiguity

man contacts; these understandings have the potential to speed the cultural
changes necessary for remediating damaged ecosystems, limiting further eco-
logical degradation, and preserving human health.
Ultimately, however, enhancing the planetary consciousness of literature
goes beyond increasing the geographical breadth of scholarly research, and
beyond moving the object of study from interactions among people to both
these interactions and those between people and environments (i.e., inter-
cultural networks of discourse on relationships between and among people
and the nonhuman). It also involves assessing the environmental cosmopoli-
tanism of these interactions: examining how individual literary works, even
those that seem focused exclusively on very local environmental concerns,
might increase consciousness of transnational and transcultural phenomena.
Equally, it requires us to evaluate how literary treatments of widespread phe-
nomena might increase awareness of concerns of smaller scope.109 I hope to
contribute to increasing the planetary consciousness of literary studies by
showing how creative works demonstrating the ambiguity of damaged envi-
ronments, often in specific sites, position themselves and can be positioned
as part of larger discourses.110 I also explore how creative texts featuring the
ambiguous relationships among people and their surroundings on a global
scale (e.g., eco-apocalyptic texts) might transform understandings of more
situated phenomena.

Ecoambiguity

In the following chapters I take up several hundred writers and texts from six
continents—from Nobel Prize winners and others translated and celebrated
around the world to individuals and creative products little known even in
their own communities. This is only a fraction of the number that could have
been discussed. Naturally, the texts I include can be analyzed in a variety of
ways. Because I am writing from an ecological perspective and am focusing
on networks of environmental ambiguity, my readings are often unconven-
tional.
Chapter 1 provides the historical and literary background for the analyses
of creative works found in chapters 2–7. In the first chapter I discuss ecologi-
cal transformations, crises, movements, and legislation in China, Japan, Ko-
rea, and Taiwan from earliest times to the present. I also introduce some of
the region’s most noteworthy literary treatments of environmental degrada-
tion, identifying trajectories of creative negotiations with ecological distress
in these four East Asian lands from antiquity to the twenty-first century. I
 Introduction  27

debunk stereotypes of East Asians as environmental stewards and of East

Asian literatures as depicting only close relationships between people and
the natural world. Readers interested in context will find chapter 1 especially
helpful for that purpose, whereas those eager to dive into analyses and close
readings of individual texts should begin with chapter 2 and turn to the first
chapter as desired.
Chapters 2–7 discuss specific literary texts within the analytical frame-
work developed in the introduction and the historical and literary context
found in chapter 1. The second through seventh chapters examine how lit-
eratures addressing environmental degradation—particularly those in East
Asia—regularly grapple with ecological ambiguities. These chapters each
begin with discussion of environmental concepts and close reading of a se-
lected text, with special attention to matters of language and stylistics, be-
fore turning to broader literary analyses of a variety of other novels, short
stories, poems, and essays. I group creative works not by nation, language,
genre, style, date of publication, or environmental problems discussed, but
instead according to the types of ecoambiguity displayed most prominently,
acknowledging that these taxonomic categories frequently blur and dissolve
into one another and thus often remain rather loose and slushy buckets.
Consideration is paid throughout to the spatial and temporal implications of
the phenomena addressed.
The three chapters of Part I examine how literature negotiates disjunctions
in attitudes, in information, and in behaviors. Chapter 2, “Accentuating Am-
bivalence,” takes up the relationship between devastated ecosystems and am-
bivalent human emotions, perceptions, and beliefs regarding animals, plants,
and other parts of the natural world. It analyzes creative texts that depict peo-
ple who at once proclaim they love nature and believe that it exists primarily
for human benefit, who celebrate both the grandeur and the destruction of
the same nonhuman entity, or who simultaneously call for and denounce en-
vironmental regulations. This chapter begins with a brief look at the Japanese
writer Sakaki Nanao’s poem “Hoshi o tabeyō yo” (Let’s Eat Stars, 1988) and
a close reading of the Japanese writer Ishimure Michiko’s novel Kugai jōdo:
Waga Minamatabyō (Sea of Suffering and the Pure Land: Our Minamata Dis-
ease, 1969). It also includes analyses of the Taiwanese aboriginal writer Topas
Tamapima’s short story “Zuihou de lieren” (The Last Hunter, 1987) and nativ-
ist writer Huang Chunming’s “Fangsheng” (Set Free, 1987), as well as the Chi-
nese writer A Cheng’s novella Shu wang (King of Trees, 1985).111 I show how
these and other works address the complex and often conflicting psychologies
that accompany much environmental degradation.
Even when ecosystems are severely damaged, data on them often are am-
28  ecoambiguity

biguous. Interpretations of these data can be even more convoluted since

so much is at stake, and so much remains unknown. Because the nonhu-
man regularly ebbs and regenerates regardless of human behaviors, environ-
mental health frequently is difficult to determine. Chapter 3, “Underlining
Uncertainty,” examines how ambiguous information about damage to the
nonhuman is incorporated into a range of works, everything from texts that
focus almost entirely on ecological devastation to those with only brief refer-
ences to environmental change. This chapter analyzes creative discourse on
the complexities of assessing the causes, extent, and significance of damage
to environments, including collateral damage caused by human-on-human
violence. It also probes literature that raises questions about environmental
resilience and futures. Following a close reading of a poem by the Korean
writer Kim Kwanggyu, I discuss poetry by Sakaki Nanao, the Korean writers
Chŏng Hyŏnjong and Ko Ŭn, and the Taiwanese writers Rongzi and Xin Yu,
as well as prose by the Chinese writer Wang Ping.112 This chapter shows how
literature portrays preconceptions and prejudices as shaping understand-
ings of information on environments in complicated and often contradictory
ways. With their reduced claims to accuracy, creative texts often expose and
even exploit inconsistencies of information about changes to ecosystems.
Although people have become more environmentally conscious over the
last half century, we know surprisingly little about the etiologies, the patterns
of progression and regression, and the consequences of damaged environ-
ments. Chapter 4, “Capitalizing on Contradiction,” discusses how creative
works depict particular human behaviors as having inadvertent, unexpected,
multiple, and contradictory results. This chapter also examines how litera-
ture portrays an individual’s or a community’s conflicting behaviors vis-à-vis
environments and the frequently contradictory consequences of these behav-
iors. It likewise underlines how literature questions moral accountability for
ecodegradation and emphasizes the difficulties of assessing behaviors as well
as assessments of behaviors. After briefly examining a poem by the Korean
writer Ch’oe Sŭngho, I give a close reading of the Chinese-language writer
Gao Xingjian’s acclaimed novel Lingshan (Soul Mountain, 1989). Other
texts explored include poetry by the Taiwanese writer Liu Kexiang; short
stories by the Korean writer Hwang Sunwŏn and the Japanese writers Ma-
suda Mizuko and Miyazawa Kenji; and essays by the Taiwanese writer and
biologist Jia Fuxiang.113
Part II, similarly divided into three chapters, examines how literature
grapples with acquiescence to environmental degradation (chapter 5), illu-
sions and delusions concerning ecological conditions (chapter 6), and the
limitations and dangers of green rhetoric (chapter 7).
 Introduction  29

Literature often features people who acquiesce to environmental devasta-

tion: their behaviors clash with empirical conditions in the sense that they do
nothing to alleviate human and nonhuman suffering and sometimes increase
both. Many creative texts include characters who simply look the other way
when confronted with damaged ecosystems. These individuals often do so
because they hunger for immediate profit and desire instant gratification.
Other literary works portray people who are disturbed by what is happening
to the environment but do nothing to repair existing damage or prevent fur-
ther injury. They frequently react like this because they believe that damage
is too extreme and social systems are too inflexible to permit change. Still
other creative texts show how acquiescing to environmental devastation can
be taken to its logical extreme. These works feature damage not only as going
unchallenged but also as being accelerated, despite predictable consequences.
Chapter 5, “Acquiescing,” opens with a brief look at Masuda Mizuko’s short
story “Kagami” (Mirror, 1996), then gives close readings of the Japanese
writer Tanikawa Shuntarō’s poem “Sora ni kotori ga inakunatta hi” (The
Day Small Birds Disappeared from the Skies, 1977) and Ch’oe Sŭngho’s
poem “Mul wi e mul arae” (Below the Water That’s above the Water, 1983).
It also discusses dynamics of acquiescing to ecodegradation in poetry by the
Korean writer Yi Hyŏnggi and the Chinese writer Chen Jingrong; short sto-
ries by the Chinese writer Han Shaogong, the Japanese writer Tsutsui Yas-
utaka, and the Korean writer Cho Sehŭi; and the Chinese writer Jiang Rong’s
best-selling novel Lang tuteng (Wolf Totem, 2004).114
Chapter 5 focuses on how creative texts highlight discrepancies between
human behaviors and environmental conditions, depicting behaviors that at
best maintain the status quo and at worst increase damage to environments.
Slightly shifting the focus, chapter 6—“Illusions and Delusions”—looks
closely at writing that draws attention to one of the greatest discrepancies
between attitudes and conditions: our tendency to believe that our interac-
tions with environments are as they should be, despite considerable evidence
to the contrary. Many literary works mock the human proclivity to insist that
everything is “all right” even when confronted with nearly apocalyptic con-
ditions. Other texts show how readily perceptions of environmental health
can be manipulated; they feature characters who are easily convinced that
ecosystems which appear damaged are in fact still healthy. Still others reveal
the firmness and the fallacy of the belief that environments can sustain even
the most extreme human behaviors. Chapter 6 begins with a close reading of
the Taiwanese writer Bai Xianyong’s “Anlexiang de yi ri” (A Day in Pleas-
antville, 1964), then discusses poetry by the Japanese writer Isakawa Mas-
aomi and the Korean writer Ch’oe Sŭngja; short-short fiction by the Japanese
30  ecoambiguity

writer Hoshi Shin’ichi; and the Chinese writer Wang Lixiong’s massive novel
Huang huo (Yellow Peril, 1991).115 These and other literary works on (un)
conscious disavowals of the severity of ecodegradation show how literature
exposes the human tendency to minimize our shaping of environments.
Creative texts that depict people damaging ecosystems regularly tackle one
of the most sobering realities and greatest paradoxes of this degradation: re-
spectful attitudes toward nonhuman species can lead to behaviors that injure
and even destroy them. Popular environmental discourse often underscores the
need to value the nonhuman, even learn to “love nature,” on the assumption
that so doing will facilitate environmental health. Such attitudes frequently
prompt actions that benefit ecosystems. Yet many literary works propose that
even people who harbor benign attitudes can readily harm the natural world.
The texts examined in chapter 7, “Green Paradoxes,” identify the limits and
dangers of environmental rhetoric, particularly its unexpected role in facilitat-
ing destruction of ecosystems. I begin with a close reading of Jiang Rong’s Wolf
Totem, then discuss poetry by the Japanese writer Oguma Hideo and the Ko-
rean writers Ko Ŭn and Kim Kwanggyu; short stories by the Taiwanese writer
Huang Chunming and the Japanese writers Dazai Osamu and Murakami Ha-
ruki; and two novels: the Japanese writer Abé Kōbō’s Suna no onna (Woman
in the Dunes, 1962) and Wang Lixiong’s Yellow Peril.116
The chapter concludes with brief words on the future of literary criti-
cism—East Asian, environmental, comparative, and world—as well as the
humanities more generally, on a planet that faces unprecedented environ-
mental peril. I argue for a deeper planetary consciousness enhanced by com-
parative ecocritical scholarship. The ubiquity of environmental problems and
the interdependence of all life make it especially vital that creative articula-
tions of environmental degradation be read not only as part of national lit-
eratures but also in terms of intercultural thematic and conceptual networks.
Ecodegradation occurs everywhere on the planet, with a temporal and geo-
graphic scope unsurpassed by any other pressing global concern. Environ-
mental crises more than any other phenomena impel us to consider our lives
and responsibilities in planetary terms.117 This book takes up a particularly
thorny component of texts that feature damaged ecosystems—their ambigu-
ity. Two of the most difficult yet potentially rewarding tasks facing scholars
of literature and environment in the early twenty-first century are unpacking
the complex ambiguities of these writings and analyzing their diverse cosmo-
politan implications.

Since its beginnings, literature has mediated ambiguous relationships be-

tween people and environments. Creative works can give us insight into some
 Introduction  31

of our greatest challenges as we seek to understand the interactions of the

local, the global, and everything in-between. Persistent environmental dam-
age shows how extreme deference to local social norms has the potential to
harm the entire planet, including the very people whose customs are allegedly
being respected. Such damage also demonstrates how excessive concern with
planetary health risks compromising the local buy-in essential to balanced
relationships among people and environments the world over. The creative
texts examined in this book underline the ecoambiguity central to negotiat-
ing these and similar concerns.
Most creative texts featuring human-induced harm to ecosystems do more
than simply describe changes to environments. Not confining themselves to
the “what” of ecological degradation, they also link these changes to chang-
ing social standards and institutions, as well as to ambiguous attitudes, be-
haviors, and conditions. They bring to light the contradictory implications
and broader effects of change, as well as efforts to alter change. But by de-
picting environmental degradation as so deeply infused with ecoambiguity,
what room do creative texts leave for improving the condition of people and
the other forms of life with which we share the planet? In many ways, this
question returns us full circle, underlining the inescapability of ambiguity in
relationships among people and their environments. In literature as in the
experienced world, no matter how much respect individuals and societies
profess for landscapes, no matter how devoted they claim to be to secur-
ing the well-being of plants and animals, no matter how much they know
about the damage particular behaviors cause to ecosystems, very few people
have been willing to alter radically their own lifestyles. Perhaps, as many
environmentalists have argued, ecological implosion is inescapable. But most
creative texts, even eco-apocalyptic narratives, leave some uncertainty. And
with this uncertainty come flexibility and possibility.
one  / Environmental Degradation and
Literature in East Asia

人之壞元氣陰陽也亦滋甚 . . .悴然使天地萬物不得
其情 . . . 吾意有能殘斯人使日薄歲削禍元氣陰陽
者滋少是則有功於天地者也.

People’s destruction of the Primal Forces of Yin and Yang

[by plowing, felling, drilling, digging, and building] is even
greater [than that of vermin] . . . People make it impossible
for Heaven and Earth and the myriad things to attain their
true state . . . In my opinion, if there were someone/something
who could damage humanity and make them daily fewer
and diminish by the year, and make the damage to the Primal
Forces of Yin and Yang steadily decrease, then such an entity
would be someone/something who had achieved merit for
Heaven and Earth.
—Liu Zongyuan, Tian shuo (Theory of Heaven, 814)1

More so than their counterparts in other areas of the world, premodern

East Asian literatures, fine arts, religions, and philosophies frequently ideal-
ized abstract visions of the natural world and of human interactions with
it.2 But as Theory of Heaven, one of East Asia’s first radically environmental
texts suggests, these representations more often defied than reflected empiri-
cal reality. This chapter highlights trajectories of environmental problems
and literary engagements with them in China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan
from premodern times to the present, providing the ecological and creative
contexts for the texts given closer readings in chapters 2–7. East Asian envi-
ronmental histories are not well known outside the region, and East Asian
literary negotiations with environmental problems even less so. Here I show
Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese writers as far more attuned to
environmental issues than has been previously understood in East Asia, not
to mention elsewhere.3 The present chapter discusses the development of en-
vironmental consciousness in East Asian literatures, examining how these
creative corpuses have addressed particular environmental problems (e.g.,

32
 Environmental Degradation and Literature in East Asia  33

deforestation, pollution, and animal abuse). Chapters 2–7 look at a subset of

these texts: those that highlight the conceptual phenomenon of ecoambigu-
ity. While chapter 1 focuses primarily on identifying key environmental texts,
subsequent chapters analyze individual works in greater detail with a focus
on their paradoxical treatments of damaged ecosystems.
Unlike the remainder of Ecoambiguity, this chapter divides environmen-
tal concerns and their literary treatments along national and then thematic
lines. To be sure, many of Asia’s environmental issues transcend national
and often regional borders, whether literally (e.g., China’s pollution blowing
into Korea and flowing into Vietnam) or through parallel behaviors (e.g., the
same agrochemicals used in Japan and Taiwan affecting the environments of
these two lands in similar ways).4 It also goes without saying that East Asian
countries face common global environmental problems, including species ex-
tinction, ozone depletion, and climate change. Likewise, many East Asian
writers are familiar with the oeuvres of their counterparts from elsewhere in
the region; despite diplomatic tensions and official conflicts, intra–East Asian
literary consumption and transculturation, although uneven, have blossomed
since the mid-twentieth century.5 Where relevant, these artistic connections
are acknowledged, often in the notes. More important, as developed in Chap-
ters 2–7, much of the region’s creative writing on ecodegradation belongs to
intercultural conceptual networks of environmental ambiguity. On the other
hand, ecodegradation and responses to it, including in literature, have fol-
lowed different trajectories in China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. In addition,
except for writers in Taiwan with strong familial ties to China, most East
Asian creative artists have a clear sense of belonging to a single East Asian
nation.6 Thus it is crucial to understand the local and national contexts in
which both ecodegradation and literature have arisen before looking closely
at the intercultural conceptual resonances of creative writing on ecological
devastation in East Asia and beyond.
Like most societies, East Asian peoples have an extensive history of using
landscapes to their own benefit by reshaping, even exploiting them to meet
(perceived) needs and satisfy desires. At the same time, in order to avoid
depleting resources, East Asian individuals and communities have long ac-
cepted restrictions on helping themselves to nature’s abundance. Nascent
environmental consciousness in the region dates to well before the ancient
Chinese philosopher Mencius, who famously declared: “If nets of fine mesh
do not enter pools and ponds, there will be more fish and turtles than we can
consume. If axes enter the hills and forests only at the proper times, there
will be more wood than we can use” (數罟不如污池，魚鱉不可勝食也。斧
斤以時入山林，材木不可勝用也; Cugu buru wuchi, yubie buke shengshi ye.
34  ecoambiguity

Fujin yishi ru shanlin, caimu buke shengyong ye).7 And radically environ-
mental texts date at least to Liu Zongyuan’s Theory of Heaven, which cites
Liu’s contemporary and fellow writer Han Yu as decrying human destruction
of the Primal Forces of Yin and Yang by plowing plains, felling forests, and
opening rivers and reservoirs. As cited at the beginning of this chapter, Han
Yu argues provocatively that reducing the human population would benefit
both heaven and earth. Not surprisingly, Liu Zongyuan is at a loss to re-
spond to such a hypothesis.
Han Yu’s position is extreme, but his frustration is to a certain degree un-
derstandable. To be sure, human activity in East Asia often has been guided
by what today is considered sustainable use—use that meets the requirements
of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet
their own needs.8 Yet understandings of needs and the capacity of ecosystems
to meet them vary widely and often do not comport with practical realities.
Always in flux, relationships between people and environments became par-
ticularly lopsided during the twentieth century, when human populations
burgeoned and people developed technologies to transform landscapes more
rapidly, more radically, and on a larger scale than ever before.
Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century industrialization was gener-
ally celebrated in East Asia. With few exceptions, the relatively unfettered use
of natural resources was central to the narrative of China’s, Korea’s, and Tai-
wan’s modern economic development, as well as Japan’s prosperous growth
and overseas empire (1895–1945).9 Similar discourse surrounded postwar
industrialization in the 1950s and early 1960s in Japan, in the 1960s–1970s
in South Korea and Taiwan, and in China in the 1980s. During these de-
cades people generally did not see themselves as significantly damaging en-
vironments. Ecosystems were believed so resilient, and their self-restorative
powers so great in relation to human demands, that even such activities as
disgorging toxic waste were not thought to matter much if at all. As environ-
mental damage became more severe and widespread, this relative noncha-
lance receded, only to be replaced by a conviction that blighted environments
were a necessary cost of rapid, sustained growth. Some triumphalists even
argued that belching smokestacks signaled national prosperity. It was not
until the late 1960s in Japan, the 1980s in South Korea and Taiwan, and the
1990s in China that a widely shared sense of ecological crisis emerged. This
sentiment propelled citizens to organize and demand change, ultimately lead-
ing governments and enterprises to adopt policies intended to remediate pres-
ent environmental damage and curb it in the future. Corporations generally
supported such measures as good investments since they helped retain con-
sumer confidence. Subsequent decades witnessed uneven improvements in
 Environmental Degradation and Literature in East Asia  35

environmental health and less tolerance for behaviors that blatantly damage
ecosystems. Building on this momentum, a green fervor has permeated East
Asia, with Taiwan’s Green Party (Taiwan Lü Dang, Taioan Lek Tong, 臺灣
綠黨; est. 1996), China’s “Green Olympics” (Lüse aoyun; 綠色奧運, 2008),
South Korea’s “Green New Deal” (Noksaek nyudil; 녹색 뉴딜2009), Japan’s
“Green New Deal” (Gurīn nyūdīru; グリーンニューディール, 2009), and
countless other “green” endeavors. But despite these steps and a widespread
consciousness that current lifestyles are unsustainable, local, national, and
regional environmental problems and crises continue.
For their part, East Asian literatures are famous for celebrating the beau-
ties of nature and for depicting people as intimately connected with the non-
human world. But in fact, as this chapter reveals, much modern and even
some premodern East Asian fiction and poetry portray people damaging if
not destroying everything from small ponds to the entire planet; references
to ecodegradation have appeared regularly in East Asian literatures since the
late 1960s (in Japan and Korea) and 1980s (in China and Taiwan).　Some
creative works that discuss damage to ecosystems conform to conventional
understandings of “nature writing” or “environmental/ecological writing,”
at least in their place of origin, but many others do not. The tremendous vari-
ety of literature in twentieth- and twenty-first-century East Asia and through-
out the world that addresses ecodegradation—incorporating references that
occasionally celebrate, sometimes simply describe, and often condemn harm-
ful changes to environments—testifies to the persistence of damaged environ-
ments and to the ecological consciousness, however diaphanous, of literary
artists.

Environmental Degradation in China

China’s civilization is the oldest in East Asia and has the longest history of
environmental damage. Belief in the continuity of being, that all forms of ex-
istence are organically connected, as well as emphases on holism and cosmic
harmony, characterize how early Chinese understood relationships between
people and nature.10 On the other hand, even though their attitudes toward
the nonhuman have changed significantly over time, Chinese for millennia
have engaged in ecologically unsustainable practices.11 As Vaclav Smil has ar-
gued, “we cannot find any better example of human impacts on the environ-
ment than those provided by China’s long quest to accommodate its growing
population.”12 These changes include everything from massive deforestation
to sizable hydroengineering projects such as canals, irrigation systems, and
36  ecoambiguity

dams; from terracing of ever steeper slopes to technological developments

that increasingly allowed Chinese to shape their environments.13 Elizabeth
C. Economy has likewise observed:

Confucianism, Taoism, Legalism, and Buddhism [the leading schools

of early Chinese thought] share a healthy respect for the importance
and power of nature to shape [people’s] conditions and prospects for
a fruitful and prosperous life. Yet it is the Confucian belief in [peo-
ple’s] ability to shape nature to fulfill [their] needs that is most evi-
dent throughout Chinese history. The efforts of early environmental
thinkers and officials were overwhelmed by the imperatives of war,
economic development, and population growth. Thus, the continual
cycles of social transformations, including war, population growth,
economic development, and eco-environmental change resulted in
astonishing levels of deforestation, desertification, soil erosion, and
flooding.14

Economy’s comments indicate that disjunctions between environmental at-

titudes and behaviors have long been prominent in China.15
Deforestation was one of China’s earliest and most serious environmental
problems. Settled agriculture there dates to approximately 5000 B.C.E., and
perhaps as early as 8000 B.C.E.16 The eventual deforestation, at least by
1000 B.C.E., of China’s uplands to support agriculture instigated centuries
of silting and flooding and ranks among history’s largest ecological blun-
ders.17 Concerns about deforestation plagued Chinese officials well before
the Common Era. According to “Rite of Zhou: Regional Officer” (dating to
the Western Zhou), local governors were responsible for protecting forests,
mountains, rivers, and animals from unnecessary abuse.18 Duke Mu of Shan,
a court minister, commented in 524 B.C.E. that if forests are exhausted,
people will be weakened and their farmland uncultivated. He thus urged
that “the superior man should be concerned about this problem in a spirit
of altruistic urgency, and without relaxation.”19 Particularly noteworthy is
the duke’s assertion that if not done judiciously, felling forests to make room
for agriculture ultimately hinders crop production since agriculture depends
on healthy woodlands. Deforestation proliferated despite such warnings. As
Rhoads Murphey has observed, in China “shortages of timber, erosion of
land, siltation of irrigation works and streambeds, and increased flooding
were all apparent and commented on by the eighth century and multiplied
during [the Song, 960–1279], when in addition to new capital cities and
palaces made of wood, there was now a large navy and merchant fleet.”20
 Environmental Degradation and Literature in East Asia  37

Maize production under the Song helped sustain the increasing popula-
tion, but its spread accelerated soil erosion.21 China’s economy continued to
grow during the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1911) dynasties, lead-
ing to ever more deforestation, flooding, soil erosion, and desertification.22
At various junctures, especially in the Ming and Qing dynasties, Chinese
leaders attempted to restrict new construction as well as access to forests,
and to replant woodlands that had been felled.23 But market pressures and
the needs of a growing population resulted in increased deforestation, in-
cluding in Manchuria, despite initial Qing efforts to safeguard the region.24
Nineteenth-century Western travelers noted that most of China, including
Hong Kong, had already been cleared.25 Although Han Chinese were re-
sponsible for most of the mainland’s deforestation, creation myths of other
ethnic groups also reveal intense transformation of environments. Ancient
epic songs from the Miao (Guizhou Province, southwest China), for instance,
speak of hillsides being burned to crack rocks and allow desired metals to
“fall out.”26
Management of waterways also played a significant role in transforming
Chinese landscapes. Throughout China’s dynastic history, reining in the Yel-
low River was an important part of maintaining imperial legitimacy, since
flooding or any disorder in the natural world was believed to signal the moral
shortcomings of those in power.27 The main section of the Grand Canal was
completed by the Sui (589–618), linking the Yellow and Yangzi rivers by
utilizing shorter waterways dating to the Eastern Zhou (771–221 B.C.E.).
Subsequent dynasties extended the Grand Canal northeast to Beijing and
south to Hangzhou. Vast webs of canals, dikes, levees, and irrigation ditches
supported crop production throughout the imperial period, but they also
disrupted animal and insect habitats.
Expelling “wild animals” was likewise a central feature of early imperial
culture. Helping King Wu of the Zhou dynasty displace the last sovereign
of the Shang dynasty (1523–1045 B.C.E.), the Duke of Zhou is said to have
driven out tigers, leopards, rhinoceroses, and elephants. As a result, “the
world was greatly delighted.”28 Over the centuries such behaviors resulted
in the decimation and extinction of numerous species. People warned of the
dangers of these practices. But population pressures and the desire for essen-
tially unsustainable lifestyles meant that admonitions were seldom heeded in
practice; instead the Chinese landscape was regularly marred and the earth
habitually exhausted.29
The introduction of Western ideas about scientific forestry in the early
twentieth century changed perceptions and aspirations. Chinese leaders be-
gan to promote conservation and afforestation, believing that protecting
38  ecoambiguity

woodlands signaled development of a strong, modern state. But as before,

policies were almost impossible to translate into practice. During the Re-
publican period (1912–49), domestic conflicts and all-out war with Japan
inflicted further damage to environments. Conditions only worsened under
Mao Zedong, leader of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) from its found-
ing in 1949 until his death in 1976.30 At first PRC officials tried to promote
afforestation and restrict water usage, but with developing agriculture and
industry the top priorities, and Mao’s claim that people must “conquer na-
ture” (ren ding sheng tian), conservation was quickly undermined. The Chi-
nese Communist Party launched a literal “war on nature” to “defeat nature”
(zhansheng ziran), declaring that “shock troops” were to reclaim grasslands
and that wilderness was to be opened to plant grains (kaihuang zhong liang-
shi). The battles against the natural environment that followed became some
of the most extreme of their kind.
China adopted Soviet-style plans for rapid development in the early 1950s,
accelerating environmental degradation. For its part, the Great Leap For-
ward (1958–61) initiated tremendous land reclamation projects that ended
up starving many millions of people and devastating forests, wetlands, riv-
ers, and lakes. Chinese were ordered to fell trees everywhere from the spaces
around their homes to distant, already nearly barren hillsides. Campaigns to
produce iron and steel in backyard furnaces hastened deforestation. People
were exhorted to eliminate the “four pests” (chu si hai)—flies, mosquitoes,
rats, and sparrows—and to use harmful fertilizers and farm equipment.31
Reservoirs, dams, and irrigation projects ruined marine and often terrestrial
ecosystems. Factories and power plants were built along rivers, which in the
absence of treatment facilities were used for drainage. Not surprisingly, air,
water, and soil pollution increased dramatically.
Mao’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966–76) pursued its
ideals via coercion, resulting in even greater damage to China’s terrain. With
few environmental regulations guiding agriculture and with industry now
tarred as bourgeois and revisionist, ecological devastation increased dramati-
cally. Those who cautioned restraint were exiled or killed. The emphasis
on “opening wasteland” (kai huang) at the expense of millions of acres of
forests and biodiversity led to severe land erosion, which resulted in a vi-
cious cycle of increased deforestation just to maintain output.32 Judith Sha­
piro notes the similarities between Mao’s project and those of earlier Chinese
leaders—waterworks, land reclamation and conversion, deforestation—but
then explains the vast differences: “[Mao’s] effort to conquer nature was
highly concentrated and oppositional, motivated by utopianism to transform
the face of the earth and build a socialist paradise . . . The articulation of
 Environmental Degradation and Literature in East Asia  39

Mao’s war against nature is striking for its overtly adversarial expression
. . . it undermined aspects of traditional practice that fostered sustainable
relationships with nature.”33
The death of Mao in 1976 ushered in a new era of Chinese interactions
with both other societies and landscapes closer to home. Under the initial
guidance of Deng Xiaoping, China transformed itself in a quarter century
from one of the most impoverished countries in the world to an increasingly
prosperous nation deeply integrated with the global economy.34 Living stan-
dards for millions have improved significantly, but the environmental cost
has been high. Chinese leaders in the 1980s no longer spoke so explicitly
of a war on nature and in fact issued propaganda posters urging people to
“green the motherland” (lühua zuguo), “plant trees and make green” (zhi-
shu lühua), and “cherish greening and treasure old and famous trees” (aihu
lühua zhenxi gushu mingmu).35 But believing ecological protection incom-
patible with economic growth, Chinese ultimately launched what amounted
to significant attacks on their environments. To be sure, China’s controversial
one-child policy, instigated in the late 1970s, likely has slowed degradation
of ecosystems.36 Also contributing to remediating environments are such
groups as Ziran zhi You (Friends of Nature), China’s first environmental
nongovernmental organization. Founded in 1994 by Liang Congjie, who
had been inspired by television reports of Greenpeace, Friends of Nature has
worked with the Chinese government to encourage ecological responsibility,
established China’s first bird-watching group, and promoted environmental
education in Chinese schools; in 1999 its undercover video of officials pro-
posing to log illegally led Chinese Prime Minister Zhu Rongji to order a ban
on such activities.37 Yet the nation’s unchecked industrialization under Deng
Xiaoping and subsequent leaders has resulted in some of the world’s most
polluted air and water. As of the first decade of the twenty-first century ap-
proximately one-third of China was affected by acid rain, groundwater was
tainted in more than 90 percent of the nation’s cities, more than 70 percent
of its rivers and lakes were polluted, fully half of the water in its largest rivers
was unusable, and 25 percent of Chinese lacked clean drinking water. With-
out question, urbanization and economic growth are sending the nation on
a collision course with a water crisis.38 Moreover, China’s continued reliance
on coal and charcoal stoves, as well as rapidly increasing car ownership, has
resulted in ever more severe air pollution.39
The hydroelectric capacity of the Three Gorges Dam—a structure first
proposed by Sun Yat-sen in 1919, discussed by Chinese leaders throughout
the twentieth century, and mainly constructed between 1993 and 2006—is
expected to improve China’s air quality by reducing sulfur dioxide and coal
40  ecoambiguity

dioxide emissions, as well as by curbing the nation’s coal consumption.40

The dam also will help control flooding along the Yangzi. But the environ-
mental costs are substantial. Construction of the world’s “biggest dam, big-
gest power plant, and biggest consumer of dirt, stone, concrete and steel”
has forced approximately 1.2 million people from their homes, increased the
likelihood of earthquakes and landslides in the region, exacerbated the effects
of recent droughts, further jeopardized already endangered species includ-
ing the Chinese alligator, Chinese sturgeon, Chinese tiger, giant panda, and
Siberian crane, and led to the near extinction of the Yangzi river dolphin.41
Mountains of trash swept in during the floods of 2010 threatened one of the
dam’s key floodgates.42 China sees the Three Gorges Dam as an anchor in
a group of hydropower “mega-bases” it has planned for the Yangzi, further
cementing its status as the most dammed country on earth.43
To make matters worse, approximately 80 percent of household and in-
dustrial trash in China goes untreated and is not processed sustainably.44
More than one-fourth of the nation’s land is now desert; desertification rates
have doubled since the 1970s, and threats to biodiversity continue to grow.45
The Chinese government has announced numerous environmental laws, reg-
ulations, and policies that when implemented have enjoyed at least limited
success.46 But efforts to curb environmental degradation are often ignored in
favor of economic growth or in some cases simple survival.47 On the other
hand, Chinese citizens are becoming less tolerant of living under such condi-
tions and are growing increasingly demonstrative over the industrial poison-
ing of both themselves and their ecosystems.48 Peter C. Perdue has argued
that, with their country facing real environmental crises, Chinese in coming
decades might well mobilize to protest ecological damage, just as in the past
they have openly expressed frustration with their leaders for not protecting
citizens against internal upheaval, foreign invasion, and natural disasters.49
Chinese now publish numerous periodicals on environmental protection.50
As in other parts of East Asia, universities in China are increasingly offering
courses in environmental studies, and even elementary schools are incorpo-
rating environmental education into their curricula.51 Twenty-first-century
communications technology is also playing an important role: blogs and es-
pecially text messages are more and more used to spotlight the dangers of
proposed projects and ultimately to organize demonstrations.52
These environmentalist efforts have also addressed China’s contributions
to a number of regional and global ecological problems. The rapid expansion
of China’s Gobi Desert has led to ever more severe sand and dust storms,
principal carriers of China’s industrial pollution to Korea and Japan. As a re-
sult, the environmental ministers of China, South Korea, and Japan formed a
 Environmental Degradation and Literature in East Asia  41

yellow-dust monitoring network in 2002, and in May 2006 they established

the Northeast Asia Anti-Sandstorm Alliance, two months after Seoul was
covered in a blanket of yellow dust blown in from China.53 Dams in China
have wreaked destruction not only in the nation itself but also in Southeast
Asia, most notably along the Mekong River,54 while Central Asian nations,
particularly Kazakhstan, have felt threatened by Chinese requests to till their
soil.55 From Afghanistan to Africa and South America Chinese are tearing
down mountains and relocating entire towns to mine copper and other min-
erals.56 Chinese have been farming in Africa for years, and in the mid-2000s
the Chinese government began prioritizing large-scale agricultural invest-
ment in the continent, with hopes of expanding China’s food supply and
thus augmenting food security, as well as alleviating population pressures.57
Even more significant is China’s expansive investment in African oil extrac-
tion to accommodate the nation’s ever-increasing energy needs.58 Chinese
are involved in dam projects, often controversial, in nearly fifty countries,
from Myanmar (Burma) to Turkey, the Sudan, Gabon, and Ecuador; Chi-
nese companies are currently building nineteen of the world’s twenty-four
largest hydropower stations.59 China is the world’s greatest contributor of
ozone-depleting substances and one of its major emitters of carbon dioxide
into the atmosphere; it also is one of the leading importers of timber from
tropical rain forests.60 Compounding its ecological morass, China imports
mountains of untreated garbage from the United States and elsewhere and is
home to industries employing technologies illegal in their country of origin.61
Clearly financial profits come first in this stage of development, a pattern
seen in most industrializing economies, whether capitalist, socialist, or as in
China mixed ownership. But Chinese landscapes also are being devastated
by global warming caused by many of the world’s industrialized nations. In
the spring of 2010 the nation’s southwest suffered its worst drought since the
Ming dynasty; conditions were so extreme that Guizhou Province’s Huang-
guoshu waterfall, Asia’s largest and a popular tourist destination, was turned
off every night to conserve water. Scientists suspect that climate change has
radically changed patterns of precipitation here and elsewhere in China.62

Chinese Literature and Environmental Degradation

References to the natural world abound in early Chinese literature. They ap-
pear prominently in the Shijing (Classic of Poetry, 600 B.C.E.), China’s first
poetry anthology, whether as straightforward presentations, metaphorical
images, or evocative descriptions.63 Han (206 B.C.E.–220 C.E.) yuefu (Mu-
42  ecoambiguity

sic Bureau poetry) on capital cities and royal palaces and parks extensively
enumerate flora and fauna. Part of imperial ideological construction, these
texts “[presented] the royal dwelling place as a microcosm for the whole
universe.”64 The Six Dynasties (222–589) yielded the first distinct genres of
Chinese landscape poetry. During this period flora and fauna were socially,
religiously, and philosophically idealized in poetry of seclusion, including in
the work of Zuo Si; farmstead poetry (tianyuan shi; lit. poetry of fields and
gardens), particularly in the oeuvre of Tao Yuanming; and landscape poetry
(shanshui shi; lit. poetry of mountains and waters), most notably in the writ-
ings of Xie Lingyun.65 Fostering the development of these genres were the
loss of northern China to “barbarians,” who drove China’s artist-intellec-
tuals from office and forced them to the mountainous southeast; renewed
attention to Daoist thought, which encouraged withdrawal and tranquility;
and the embrace of elements of Indian Buddhism.66 Much Six Dynasties verse
was also inspired by frustration with existing social conditions, with spaces
distant from concentrated human habitation exerting special appeal.67 Dif-
ferent forms of farmstead, landscape, and recluse poetry remained part of the
Chinese literary canon until the twentieth century; China’s landscape poetry
is arguably the world’s earliest extensive creative engagement with the non-
human.68
Nature takes many different guises and serves many different functions in
early Chinese literature: as mood setter, as microcosm of the universe, as an-
tagonist or refuge, as foil, as metaphor, as allegory, and as object of celebra-
tion, comparison, and contemplation.69 Scholarship on depictions of nonhu-
man phenomena in early Chinese literature stresses their aestheticism, even
artificiality; many texts are described as more visionary than visual in their
portrayal of environments. At the same time, a preoccupation with linguistic
construction and stylistics often obscures early Chinese literature’s attention
to human injury to physical landscapes. Although greatly outnumbered by
representations of ecological abundance, portraits of anthropogenically dam-
aged or destroyed landscapes occupy an important position in the premodern
Chinese literary corpus, especially poetry. On the other hand, unlike much
late twentieth-century creative work on the topic, early Chinese literature is
more likely to celebrate than to bemoan, much less condemn, human changes
to environments. Even texts that express delight, reverence, and sensitivity
vis-à-vis landscapes sometimes also rejoice in their (partial) capitulation.
References to deforestation are sprinkled throughout premodern Chinese
literature. This is evident from the Classic of Poetry, which was compiled
during the Zhou (1045–221 B.C.E.), a dynasty founded on the clearing of
landscapes.70 “Zaishan” (Mowing Grasses), one of the two agrarian hymns
 Environmental Degradation and Literature in East Asia  43

in the Classic of Poetry celebrating the agrarian cycle, stresses that the first
step of this cycle is clearing away grasses and trees; the poem applauds people
for replacing less desirable flora with grains.71 Even more enthusiastic about
this form of human manipulation of environments are selections in the Clas-
sic of Poetry such as the following:

Hating the excesses of the Xia and Yin

Heaven looked around and turned its sights to the west,
and there it gave an abode to the Zhou.
We cleared them and got rid of them,
the dead trees that still stood and those that had fallen.
We pruned and flattened
bushes and trees that grew closely together.
We opened and cleared them
the tamarisks and the cane trees.
We cleared away and cut
wild mulberry trees.

Heaven transferred the bright virtue from Yin to Zhou,

their customs and virtue became grand.
Heaven established a counterpart on earth,
the given appointment became solid.

Heaven examined the mountains,

the various oaks were uprooted,
the pines and cypresses were cleared,
here Heaven made a state.72

Far from censuring the Zhou as excessive like the Xia and Yin in their own
reshaping of landscapes, Heaven instead rejoices at these changes, recogniz-
ing them as having legitimized the new dynasty. The poem enumerates the
many types of trees that have been cut and cleared, highlighting biodiversity
loss: dead and fallen trees, those growing thickly together, tamarisks and
canes, wild mulberries, various types of oaks, and pines and cypresses. Inter-
estingly, the more sunlight that reaches the soil, as opposed to the treetops,
the brighter the virtue; the fewer the trees and the less dense the vegetation,
the more solid the appointment. Clearing land became an important marker
of becoming civilized; peoples the Chinese perceived as barbarians called at-
tention to their deforesting prowess as proof of their own progress.
Other early Chinese poetry, such as the exiled Xie Lingyun’s famed
44  ecoambiguity

“Shanju fu” (Exposition on Dwelling in the Mountains) which celebrates

the wonders of lush nature and harmonious interactions between people and
the landscape, simply mentions felling trees. But when deforestation notably
changes environments and threatens human well-being, creative texts not
surprisingly explicitly lament it. A poem by the late-Ming writer Jiang Tingyi
comments:

In the courtyard are many grasses and weeds,

beneath the stairs are many pines and bamboos.
In the morning we gather the fuel to cook our breakfast,
and in the evening we take more to cook our dinner gruel.

It’s easy to exhaust the pines and bamboos,

and the grasses and weeds don’t grow enough . . .

When we traveled through the mountains last month,

the trees on the mountains appeared to pile up together,
but now that we’ve come down from the mountains,
we see afar they’re sharp and bare.

The farmers have nothing to use as fuel,

so they set on fire the axles of their water carts.73

This text is based on a landscape (the lower Yangzi region) that had been
subjected to millennia of human transformations and that during the seven-
teenth century was chronically incapable of meeting human demands. The
poem suggests that people have razed surrounding landscapes neither out of
hubris nor over time, but that they have done so quickly with no objective
other than stoking their cookfires. Most interesting are the opening six lines
translated above and given here in the Chinese: 庭中多草莢 (tingzhong duo
caolai) / 階下多松竹 (jiexia duo songzhu) / 朝取炊晨餐 (chao qu chui chen-
can) / 夜拾煮夕粥 (ye shi zhu xizhou) / 松竹易以盡 (songzhu yi yi jin) / 草莢
生不足 (caolai sheng bu zu).
The first two characters of the first two lines identify location (in the
courtyard, tingzhong; beneath the stairs, jiexia), the third character indicates
quantity (many, duo), and the fourth and fifth characters specify what is
plentiful (grasses and weeds, caolai; pines and bamboo, songzhu). The fol-
lowing two lines, not surprisingly, reveal that people have no difficulty ob-
taining fuel for their morning and evening cookfires. But then conditions
suddenly change. The fifth and sixth lines claim that these grasses and weeds,
 Environmental Degradation and Literature in East Asia  45

pines and bamboo, in fact are easily depleted (yi yi jin) and do not grow suffi-
ciently (sheng bu zu). What seemed so plentiful actually is far from adequate.
Depicting the inability of environments to meet human needs, Jiang Tin-
gyi’s poem underlines people’s complete dependence on fragile ecosystems
that appear to give little warning of their imminent collapse. Other premod-
ern Chinese literature suggests that the only thing preventing animals and
plants from being destroyed by humans is their perceived uselessness. The
Tang poet Du Fu’s “Gu bo xing” (Ballad of the Ancient Cypress), for in-
stance, features massive ancient trees, at which people and their oxen gaze
but which they nevertheless do not fell when wood is needed to rebuild their
great halls: “[The tree] would not object to being cut / but who would be able
to send it? . . . / It has always been true that the greatest timber is hardest to
put to use.”74 “Ballad of the Ancient Cypress” is the most famous poetic ar-
ticulation of the metaphor of timber as talent. But the relationship that texts
deploying this metaphor identify between people and trees also can be read
more literally. This is particularly true of Tang poet Liu Zongyuan’s “Xing
lu nan” (Troubles on the Road), which describes profligate squandering of
natural resources and points to similar wasting of human talent:

The axes of officials charged with managing the forests have spread
through a thousand hills,
At the orders of the Work Department they’re lumbering and
hacking posts and beams
For every ten trunks chopped in the depths of the forests, only one
gets taken away . . .
Trees of tremendous height and girth block the path
Wood all over tumbling, flames on the hillsides burning,
The remaining shrubs are completely unprotected,
Trampled over, how could ravines and valleys exist?
A group of unused wood dies young,
Thrusting mountains and deep gorges now empty cliffs and ranges.75

Although highlighting the poet’s own position as an exiled government of-

ficial, the line “For every ten trunks chopped in the depths of the forests,
only one gets taken away” also points to needless destruction of timber. In
contrast with Jiang Tingyi’s poem, where people search desperately for wood
to take home, “Troubles on the Road” states explicitly that only a small frac-
tion of chopped trees are actually hauled away. Liu Zongyuan’s poem then
makes clear the long-term consequences of such activities.76
Imperial Chinese writers also expressed concern for the welfare of ani-
46  ecoambiguity

mals. The speaker of Xie Lingyun’s “Dwelling in the Mountains” is proud

that he has never hunted or fished and instead finds pleasure in caring for
animals.77 Poems and jottings by the Tang literatus Bai Juyi and the Song
literatus Su Shi suggest that scholarly elite of the middle imperial period oc-
casionally freed animals from captivity, sparing their lives.78 But from the
1580s the custom of saving animals became more entrenched among the
literati. As Joanna F. Handlin Smith has argued:

More than ever before, members of the scholarly elite recorded how
they, upon spotting a pig in the hands of a butcher or a chicken up for
sale, hastily bought the hapless creatures and set them free. They also
wrote much about their concern for animals—not just for the oxen
whose labors were so valued in tilling the fields, but for birds and fish,
tortoises and tiny insects; not just for plump animals destined for the
cooking pots, but for irksome flies and poisonous scorpions.79

Handlin Smith sees this new sensibility as arising not simply from increas-
ing social instability, a growing economy, and a deepening spiritual quest
but also from “literati attempts to maneuver and redefine themselves in an
increasingly complicated society.”80 The theme of “liberating lives” became
an important element of didactic tales and other writings in the late Ming
and early Qing.
Qing authors also devoted increased attention to other forms of ecodeg-
radation, demonstrating strengthened environmental consciousness. Poems
included in Zhang Yingchang’s edited volume Qing shi duo (Qing Bell of Po-
esy, 1869) are particularly noteworthy. For instance, Wang Taiyue’s “Tong-
shan yin” (Laments of the Copper Hills) describes the difficulties of miners
confronted by deforestation and increasingly scarce mineral reserves:

The mining paths go deeper and deeper with every day . . .

What once was just a morning’s work,
now takes at least ten days.

The lumber too has grown increasingly scarce,

the woodlands resemble clean-shaven heads.
For the first time they regret that all this logging, day after day
has left them without the firewood they need . . .

So fertile are the hills and seas

that it seems ridiculous to ask whether they flourish only when
protected by disaster . . .
 Environmental Degradation and Literature in East Asia  47

But if people take everything, if they have no restraint,

then they will exhaust heaven and earth.81

Read literally, the poem’s concern extends beyond the mines and nearby
woodlands to the biosphere more generally. Unlike much early East Asian
literature, “Laments of the Copper Hills” depicts not a flourishing environ-
ment, nor even one whose damaged areas are relatively contained, but in-
stead a world threatened by an increasingly robust and ravenous human pop-
ulation. The poem acknowledges that calls for caution might appear absurd,
but it stresses that people in fact have the capacity to wreak irreparable harm.
Wang Taiyue’s poem and similar texts laid the foundation for twentieth-
century Chinese creative negotiations with local, national, and eventually
regional and global environmental degradation. Literature of the Republican
period is sprinkled with references to human abuse of the natural world.
For instance, the narrator of Lu Xun’s prose poem “Qiuye” (Autumn Night,
1924), the opening selection of his Yecao (Wild Grass, 1927), speaks of a date
tree with branches that “are still hanging low, nursing the injuries to their
bark made by sticks used to beat down the dates.”82 Lu Xun’s narrator is not
as upset by these injuries as writers such as Thoreau, who chastises himself
for throwing rocks at a chestnut tree to make the nuts fall: “It is worse than
boorish, it is criminal, to inflict an unnecessary injury on the tree that feeds
or shadows us.”83 Although some branches must tend to their wounds, “Au-
tumn Night” makes it clear that the trees can easily withstand what people
inflict on them: freed of leaves and fruit, most of the branches “yawn and
stretch comfortably” (qianshen de hen shufu), while some even pierce the
sky and moon, so forcefully that the latter is said to go into hiding. At the
same time, the narrator reveals sensitivity toward more fragile species. In the
tender concluding lines of the poem he watches the insects that have come to
rest on a nearby paper shade: “Like sunflower seeds with their large heads
and small tails, they’re only half the size of a grain of wheat, the dark green
of their whole body adorable, pitiable. I yawn, light a cigarette, puff out the
smoke, and facing a lamp pay silent respect to these verdant exquisite he-
roes.”84 The text suggests that the most delicate parts of the landscape—hu-
man and nonhuman—perhaps are its greatest hope. Early twentieth-century
China’s most prominent creative figure, Lu Xun abandoned his medical stud-
ies in Japan to become a full-time writer; he believed that changing people’s
spirits (gaibian tamen de jingshen) was more important than healing their
physical bodies and that literature was the most effective means of doing so.85
Lu Xun was far more concerned with human than nonhuman suffering. His
texts, including the selections in Wild Grass, highlight the many absurdities
of human existence, with nature frequently functioning as background or
48  ecoambiguity

metaphor. But sensitivity to his people’s plight occasionally intermingled with

sympathy for, and admiration of, the natural world.
More noteworthy from an environmental perspective is Shen Congwen’s
“Wuge jun’guan yu yige meikuang gongren” (Five Army Officers and a Coal
Miner, 1934). Set among the coal mines of western Hunan, this essay features
a rogue miner who murders a sentinel and then leads a group of desperate
individuals who take over a mountain town. The narrator focuses primarily
on the deleterious effects of mines on people: blackened miners daily risk
their lives in unstable shafts. He gives no indication that a nearby river has
been polluted by the mines. On the other hand, he portrays the rogue miner
as dropping the murdered sentinel into a pit “half filled with black water.”86
Human activities darken the landscape, but only on the smallest of scales. A
key figure of native soil literature (xiangtu wenxue), Shen Congwen is known
primarily for his writings on imagined native communities. He reconfigures
China as a country based not on nation, race, or unified strength but instead
on the comforts of native spaces and local diversity.87 Native soil literature
stems from the deep concern of writers with their home regions, concern they
often feel acutely only after being uprooted and no longer able to experience
“home” directly. As David Der-wei Wang has noted, this is “literally and
rhetorically a rootless literature . . . whose meaning hinges on the simultane-
ous (re)discovery and erasure of the treasured image of the homeland.”88
Creative discussions of the homeland rarely centered on environmental woes,
but they did touch on many of them.
Broader damage to environments is suggested in such texts as Mu Shiy-
ing’s “Shanghai de hubuwu” (Shanghai Foxtrot, 1932). This fragmented
short story, offering slivers of Shanghai street and dance hall life circa 1930,
incorporates many of the experiments with language, space, and time that
characterize Chinese, Japanese, and European modernist writings. “Shang-
hai Foxtrot” most obviously points to the great human sacrifices made to
construct a technologically advanced city: “The corpse is removed. In the
empty lot: ditches horizontal and vertical, steel bones, debris, still a pile of his
blood. On the blood, spread cement, build up steel bones, a new restaurant
rises up! A new dance hall rises up! A new hotel rises up! Take his strength,
take his blood, take his life crushed beneath.”89 But the story also speaks
briefly of the damage this built environment inflicts on its natural counter-
part. In the early lines the narrator describes the moon as illuminating a large
“ashen plain.”90 Near the end he comments: “The Eastern sky, sunlight, like
a golden eyeball opening its eyes in crow-black clouds.”91 The former refer-
ence suggests soil pollution and the latter could indicate air pollution. At the
same time, the moon is said to shine brightly despite both air pollution and
 Environmental Degradation and Literature in East Asia  49

Shanghai’s powerful strobes, which pulsate throughout the story; “Shanghai

Foxtrot” depicts moonlight and sunlight as still fully able to withstand mod-
ern technology. Like most other early and mid-twentieth-century Chinese
writers, Lu Xun, Shen Congwen, and Mu Shiying feature environments that
are not grievously harmed by human behaviors.92 This trend continued into
the postwar period, although there are numerous exceptions, including Chen
Jingrong’s poem “Dushi huanghun jijing” (City Scene at Dusk, 1946), which
begins: “The noises of the city have drowned dusk.” Urban clamor is strong
enough to drown an entire segment of the day. Subsequent lines reveal that it
also has torn apart the city’s “nerves.”93
Chinese literary production after the founding of the PRC (1949) gener-
ally followed Mao Zedong’s Yan’an Talks (1942), which aimed to establish
political and ideological uniformity within the party and rein in dissenting
artists: writers were to fuse their thoughts and feelings with those of the
masses, make their language and style accessible to them, and help them
“propel history forward”; literature was subordinated to the party’s revolu-
tionary tasks, but it also was “an indispensable part of the entire revolution-
ary cause.”94 Thus between the 1950s and the 1970s Chinese wrote a good
deal on the destruction of their environments.95 Among the best-known texts
in this vein and echoing Mao’s exhortation to eliminate the “four pests” is
Guo Moruo’s “Zhou maque” (Cursing the Sparrow, 1958). The first two-
thirds of this poem enumerate the bird’s many faults, while the final third de-
clares, “You’ve been evil for several thousand years / Today it’s time to settle
it all. / We’ll shoo you out, hit you, poison you, attack / and in the end throw
you in the flames / and put you in ashes with your five bad traits [wuqi].”96
When it accuses birds of being plagues on society the poem is speaking as
much about wayward officials as it is about animals. But at this time attacks
on birds were not simply rhetorical.
Other references to damaged environments are more subtle. The socialist-
realist fiction that came to dominate cultural production between 1949 and
1966 often celebrates the beauties of the Chinese landscape, but it also al-
ludes to damaged environments.97 For instance, Yang Mo’s lengthy novel
Qingchun zhi ge (The Song of Youth, 1958), the archetype of revolution-
ary realist and romanticist fiction, opens with a young girl aboard the Bei-
jing-Shenyang train marveling at the thriving landscapes through which she
passes; the fields are jade green, the skies are blue, the seas sparkle. Yet when
she exclaims to a porter that he is fortunate to live so close to such a beautiful
body of water, he responds, “What’s so great about it? If we don’t catch any
fish we won’t have anything to eat, and we won’t notice whether it’s beautiful
or not.”98 It is possible that the porter is referring to the perennial chanciness
50  ecoambiguity

of fishing, but his rapid dismissal of the girl’s exuberance suggests that there
might be something more at stake. It is possible that this landscape’s radiant
surfaces conceal empty insides.99
The Cultural Revolution (1966–76) was marked by a relative dearth of
literary production, but the liberalization of cultural policy following Mao’s
death in 1976 resulted in an outpouring of Chinese creative expression.100
Largely freed from the ideological assumptions of Maoist discourse, in the
late 1970s and 1980s writers experimented with critical realism, modern-
ist literary styles, romantic self-expression, and the avant-garde; they pub-
lished in a number of intertwining literary genres, including Misty Poetry
(menglong shi; obscure poetry, highly personal modernist-style poetry), scar
literature (shanghen wenxue; fiction on the psychological traumas of the Cul-
tural Revolution), roots-seeking literature (xungen wenxue; fiction seeking
return to China’s indigenous cultures), and the avant-garde (postmodern fic-
tion challenging modernity’s narrative of self, progress, and enlightenment).
In contrast, the decade following the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989
first witnessed “soft” cultural suppression and then culture’s commoditiza-
tion and commercialization, as well as a return to realist, particularly urban,
fiction.101
References to ecological degradation appear in most of the above types
of post-Mao Chinese literature, including the roots-seeking literature of Jia
Pingwa and Han Shaogong.102 Also noteworthy in the last three decades has
been the growth of explicitly environmental literature, which first was termed
huanjing wenxue (lit. environmental literature) or lüse wenxue (lit. green lit-
erature), and then shengtai wenxue (lit. ecological literature). In the 1980s,
Chinese writers distinguished their “environmental literature” from Japan’s
and other nations’ “pollution literature,” arguing that the Chinese strove not
only to expose individuals and behaviors that damaged environments but
also to extol environmental protection efforts.103 Chinese “environmental lit-
erature” has been defined as literature that “arouses people’s love of nature
and anxiety toward the deterioration of the environment.”104 For its part,
Chinese “ecological literature” has been defined as literature that “reflects
the relationship between the ecological environment and the development
of human society” and literature that “takes as its subject environmental
protection.”105 Regardless of terminology, late twentieth-century Chinese lit-
erary interest in environmentalism can be traced to the Shen Congwen boom
of the 1980s; Chinese were moved by Shen’s impressionistic documentations
of local places and cultures as well as his depictions of beautiful Chinese
landscapes. Shen Congwen’s early twentieth-century output was especially
 Environmental Degradation and Literature in East Asia  51

popular with writers of roots-seeking literature, who sought inspiration in

regional customs, ethnic minorities, and other marginal groups, and in the
countryside and nature more generally. To be sure, in roots-seeking literature
the natural world generally is discussed as determining ethnic and personal
identities, not in terms of landscapes harmed by human behaviors.106 And ex-
citement with Shen Congwen’s literature resulted from fatigue with politics,
not with technology; Chinese generally were delighted with the industrializa-
tion and economic growth of their nation in the 1980s.107 But prosperity
was accompanied by further damage, prompting some writers to look more
deeply at human interactions with the nonhuman. At this time Chinese also
began translating such American environmental classics as Rachel Carson’s
Silent Spring and Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, both of which
found a wide audience.108
The degree to which a Chinese text needs to engage with environmental
matters for a Chinese critic to consider it “environmental literature,” “green
literature,” or “ecological literature” varies. More significant is the diversity
of Chinese texts that talk about damaged ecosystems, addressing such prob-
lems as soil and air pollution, deforestation, desertification, water shortages,
flooding, pollution, species extinction, and global warming.109 A key exam-
ple of 1980s Chinese environmental fiction is A Cheng’s novella Shu wang
(King of Trees, 1985), which discusses devastation to China’s ecosystems
during the Cultural Revolution.110 Shen Rong’s Sihe (A Dying River, 1985),
focuses more on environmental protection, celebrating efforts to control the
pollution of Mata Lake in Shandong Province.111 Also noteworthy from the
1980s are writings such as Gao Xingjian’s drama Yeren (Wild Man, 1985)
and novel Soul Mountain (1989), Han Shaogong’s short story “Nü nü nü”
(Woman, Woman, Woman, 1986), and Su Tong’s short story “Shu nong”
(The Brothers Shu, 1988). Su Tong’s text focuses on Shu family relationships,
but it also draws attention to the pollution plaguing their southern Chinese
town. Early in the story the narrator alerts readers that the river crossing the
legendary Fragrant Cedar Street will appear several times in his narrative,
“probably without meaning, since as I said, I’m only relaying impressions
[yinxiang].”112 The impressions the narrator gives of the tributary running
through their neighborhoods are of a body damaged beyond repair; the river
in fact is far from meaningless. Remarking that circumstances here are typi-
cal of this part of China, the narrator notes:

Even after a century had passed, the people still cherished the memory
of the river that cuts through our southern city . . . I remember that
52  ecoambiguity

once the water became polluted, it never again turned clear. It was
black and smelled terrible. The river seemed to be the city’s natural
drain—floating on its surface were rotten leaves, dead cats and dead
rats, greasy industrial dirt, and a steady stream of condoms.
This is the scenery of the south. Why were there people singing on
the riverbanks? . . . Fragrant Cedar Street didn’t know. Fragrant Cedar
Street, which ran along the banks of the river, didn’t know at all.113

People are deeply attached to the river, but it appears as though they do noth-
ing to attempt to restore it to its former state; once polluted it never again
becomes clear (houlai de heshui bu fu qingcheng). Later the narrator reveals
that conditions are continuing to deteriorate: the river drowns people, but
there is no way to “penalize” it for so doing, since pollution has already
“punished” it severely.
Nonhuman revenge plays a larger role in such creative texts as Zheng Yi’s
novel Shenshu (Wondrous Tree, 1996), which features a protagonist who
gives his life for an ancient, magnificent tree. Not long after both he and
the tree are slaughtered, a landslide engulfs his village. A harsh critic of the
Communist Party and a leader of the Tiananmen Square protests, Zheng Yi
left China in 1992 and now resides in the United States; because his work
is banned on the mainland, he publishes in Taiwan. Many of his texts have
been translated into Japanese, including Wondrous Tree (trans. 1999), and
they have received rave reviews from Japanese writers such as the Nobel
Prize–winning author Ōe Kenzaburō, who met with Zheng Yi during his year
at Princeton University (1996–97).114 In a conversation with Ōe shortly after
the publication of Wondrous Tree, Zehng Yi commented that the tree in this
novel represents the “agony of the people” and claimed that Ōe employs the
same technique in his trilogy Moeagaru midori no ki (Flaming Green Tree,
1993–94).115 There is no question that in Wondrous Tree, as in Ōe’s trilogy,
nonhuman suffering stands in for its human counterpart, but both texts ex-
pose how ruthlessly people treat the natural world.
Chinese nonfiction writing on environmental crises similarly blossomed
in the 1980s and 1990s, branching off from the broader genre of reportage
literature.116 One of the most cited writings from this period is Xu Gang’s
narrative “Famuzhe, xing lai!” (Loggers, Wake Up!, 1987), which describes
the destruction of woodlands and other ecosystems across China and the far-
reaching, lethal consequences of current forestry practices the world over.117
Also significant are the writings of Dai Qing, a Tiananmen Square protester
and one of China’s most vocal and prolific opponents of the Three Gorges
Dam. Dai Qing, trained as an engineer in China and Japan, wrote some
 Environmental Degradation and Literature in East Asia  53

fiction but made larger marks in journalism and reportage. While in Hong
Kong in 1987 she learned about the potential social and environmental con-
sequences of the planned Three Gorges Dam. Horrified, she published re-
ports that exposed its likely local, national, and global reach. These include
the essay collections Changjiang! Changjiang! (Yangzi! Yangzi!, 1989) and
Shuilong lai le! (The River Dragon Has Come!, 1997). Dai Qing also brought
public attention to the role human behaviors played in the great China fire of
1987. This conflagration, which has been called one of the largest in world
history, burned millions of acres of conifer forest (10 percent of the world’s
reserves) in Heilongjiang Province along the Sino-Soviet border.118
Concerned with ecological degradation and hoping to develop the genre
of environmental literature in China, in January 1991 Chinese writers
founded the Huanjing Wenxue Yanjiuhui (Society of Environmental Litera-
ture); this group was established nearly two years before The Association
for the Study of Literature & Environment (ASLE), the United States’ pre-
mier organization for the study of literature and environment that now has
branches worldwide.119 The following year Chinese established Lüye (Green
Leaves), China’s first journal devoted to environmental literature, which in
five years published more than a thousand environmental texts and contin-
ues to flourish to this day.120 In their opening issue, the organizers of Green
Leaves speak of their admiration for Rachel Carson and the impact of her Si-
lent Spring; they stress the need to increase global dialogue on environmental
degradation.121 Not surprisingly, it was also at this time that Chinese began
publishing anthologies of “green” literature, making more accessible writing
deemed to be of urgent national and planetary significance.122
The twenty-first century has so far proven fertile for Chinese literature
on human damage to ecosystems. One of the new millennium’s first such
novels was Jia Pingwa’s Huainianlang (Remembering Wolves, 2000). This
text features Gao Ziming, a journalist and environmentalist who returns to
Shangzhou in central China and together with two hunters sets out to docu-
ment the region’s fifteen remaining wolves. Instead, the group ends up killing
these animals. Most notable is the blurring of boundaries between people
and wolves, even the metamorphosis of one into the other.123 Also writing on
relationships between wolves and people is Jiang Rong, whose Wolf Totem
won numerous literary prizes and has sold in the millions in China alone; this
novel has been translated into more than fifteen languages, including both
Korean (2006) and Japanese (2007). In China, Wolf Totem inspired a “wolf
boom” as well as Internet debates on Chinese nationalism and treatment of
minorities. It likewise has prompted people to think more closely about the
relationships between Chinese and the natural world more generally.124 Part
54  ecoambiguity

of the novel’s great appeal especially abroad are its exposés of environmental
damage. In the editor’s note to the Japanese translation of Wolf Totem An
Boshun calls attention to the ecological significance of Jiang Rong’s novel,
commenting that “at a time when nature is being destroyed, the number of
species is decreasing, and the human spirit and character are day by day get-
ting weaker and becoming ever more corrupt, modern readers are truly lucky
to be able to read a long, epic novel like this that describes wolves.”125 We are
fortunate that novels such as Wolf Totem have been received so enthusiasti-
cally, and it will be interesting to watch how Chinese literature continues to
grapple with environmental crises present, past, and future.126
In sum, in the past quarter-century writing on environmental problems
has become an important part of Chinese literary production. And not sur-
prisingly, both the increased concern of Chinese writers with environmental
degradation and the burgeoning of ecocriticism in American academic dis-
course have led to an upswing in Chinese ecocritical scholarship, first on An-
glophone and now increasingly on Sinophone literature.127 Trends in creative
writing have been accompanied by similar phenomena in film and the visual
arts.128 Chinese authors and other artists have not been deceived by official
rhetoric on “greening” environments. Nor have they been duped by popular
discourse on Chinese “love” of nature. Instead, they have called attention
to the many challenges facing China’s environments and the fundamental
ambiguities underlying much ecodegradation. Some of the works mentioned
above and many other modern Chinese writings are examined in more detail
in subsequent chapters below.

Environmental Degradation in Preindustrial

Korea and Japan

People have lived on the Korean peninsula for 30,000 years and the islands of
Japan for at least 20,000 years, but early forager populations had little effect
on the region’s ecosystems. Cropping entered the Korean peninsula and the
Japanese archipelago in approximately 2,000 B.C.E. and 500 B.C.E., respec-
tively; in both spaces metallurgy followed some centuries later.129 Scholars
date the first “dramatic and permanent modification of Japanese woodland”
to 300 B.C.E.130 But it was not until around 700 C.E., when agricultural
practices had developed sufficiently to support consolidated ruling elites in
new political centers with dense populations and high timber consumption,
that the first obvious strains on ecosystems emerged in each country. Most
noteworthy were the deterioration of hillsides, soil erosion, and downstream
 Environmental Degradation and Literature in East Asia  55

flooding, consequences of excessive land clearance, deforestation, and min-

ing.131 Capital cities placed new demands on ecosystems, not only for their
initial construction but also for maintenance, repair, and replacement of
structures, often after fires.132 Flora and fauna changed in Japan’s and Ko-
rea’s lowlying areas as the human-centered biological community (people,
domestic animals, and parasites) thrived at the expense of other species. But
these alterations ultimately increased biological diversity. From all accounts,
damage to environments at this time was sufficiently modest that it inspired
little meliorative response.133
By 1350 aristocratic bureaucracy had flourished and faded in Korea and
Japan. The next five centuries saw continued land reclamation and deforesta-
tion in both countries as well as agronomic intensification including increased
use of fertilizers.134 In Japan, urbanization and famines, particularly during
the Tokugawa period (1600–1868), made it increasingly apparent that con-
temporary treatment of environments could not be sustained; although many
continued to blame fate, the gods, and the weather for the near ecological
collapse, intellectuals such as the physician Andō Shōeki censured govern-
ment policies and human behaviors.135 Tokugawa officials took some steps to
increase sustainability, constructing waterworks and reforesting hillsides.136
The presence of large mountain regions meant that much of Korea and Japan
remained relatively unaffected by human behaviors, but areas most accessible
to people were plagued by overcutting as hillside after hillside was stripped
bare.137 Human incursions into increasingly higher elevations led to severe
collisions between people and animal species unable to adapt readily to the
human presence, including tigers in Korea and wolves, deer, and boars in
Japan.138 The use of coal in Japan beginning in the 1700s led to damage of
downstream rice paddies and communities by mine effluent. Yet the absence
of sheep and goats (animals known for desiccating hillsides), and of environ-
mental pollution beyond relatively confined areas, meant that on the whole
preindustrial Korea and Japan were spared the severe environmental traumas
they experienced during subsequent centuries.

Environmental Degradation in Modern Japan

Japan’s intense industrializing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth cen-
turies, part of the Meiji (1868–1912) government’s project to “enrich the
country, strengthen the military” (fukoku kyōhei), resulted in vast degrada-
tion of its terrain.139 The first major modern Japanese environmental crisis
occurred in the 1880s at the Ashio copper mine on the Watarase River (Toch-
56  ecoambiguity

igi Prefecture, north of Tokyo). Mining operations and pollution there date
to the seventeenth century; during the Tokugawa period Ashio copper was
a favored export. The mine adopted new technology and rapidly increased
operations after the Meiji Restoration (1868), more than doubling produc-
tion between 1887 and 1891. As a result, water pollution grew increasingly
severe, and by the late 1880s nearly all marine life in the Watarase and Tone
rivers had died. Massive deforestation to support the mine’s expansion led to
flooding of the Watarase valley and fields in Gunma, Tochigi, Saitama, and
Ibaraki prefectures with poisoned water that devastated crops and harmed
people who worked the fields. By 1893 tens of thousands of acres had been
deforested by the sulfurous acid gas from the refineries.140 Insects and birds
disappeared from the area and infant mortality rose. Floods in 1896 poi-
soned more than 100,000 acres.141
This destruction was not met silently. The Ashio disaster produced one of
Japan’s first environmentalists, Tanaka Shōzō, who fought for years on be-
half of those affected by the polluted water and soil.142 It also spurred one of
Japan’s first modern citizens’ movements. Farmers from affected areas staged
mass demonstrations in their own prefectures and in Tokyo; a remarkable
array of citizens’ groups supported their efforts, as did academics and the
media. After pollution-control measures failed, a large reservoir was built in
1907 to trap fouled floodwaters; the reservoir submerged the heavily polluted
village of Yanaka and quickly became a toxic swamp.143 But the Ashio mine
was not closed until 1973; cadmium in the soil continued to cause health
problems into the 1990s.144 Today, hundreds of volunteers from the Ashio
Green Growing Association (Ashio ni Midori o Sodateru Kai), founded by
the Japanese novelist Tatematsu Wahei in 1995, meet annually to attempt to
replant (regreen) the mountainsides near Ashio, but the soil remains polluted,
and it is uncertain whether this effort will be successful.145
The Ashio mine was one of several responsible for Meiji environmental
distress. The Besshi mine (Niihama, Ehime Prefecture, Shikoku) also was
the site of large-scale pollution, leading to the Niihama refinery pollution
incident (1893) and the Shisaka Island refinery pollution incident (1905).146
Pollution from the Kosaka copper mine in Akita Prefecture and the Hitachi
mine in Ibaraki Prefecture also noticeably injured surrounding ecosystems.
In the 1910s mines in Toyama Prefecture (on the Japan Sea) began signifi-
cantly polluting both water and land, killing fish and rice and debilitating
people with what was called Itai Itai disease (lit. Ouch Ouch disease).147
Nonetheless, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries such oc-
currences were seen as aberrations. And they hardly restrained individuals
 Environmental Degradation and Literature in East Asia  57

such as Shiga Shigetaka, a journalist, geographer, and proponent of asserting

Japan’s cultural distinctiveness in face of pressure from the West. In Nihon
fūkeiron (Japanese Landscape, 1894), a “rational geographic treatise and a
travelogue in the Western style,” Shiga defied conventional means of viewing
the Japanese landscape. He was above all taken with Japan’s geology and
geophysical attributes; he celebrated the wonders of this terrain, hoping to
increase national awareness and pride, as well as to demonstrate to Japanese
their important position in the new world order.148 Even when pollution in-
cidents became a pattern—after industry replaced agriculture as the most
productive sector of the Japanese economy (1905)—the dominant attitude in
Japan remained that these incidents simply did not matter, that the natural
world was powerful, its ability to rejuvenate was indisputable, and industrial
pollution was of little significance.149
This mentalité persisted beyond the deforesting of Japan to meet war-
time needs and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August
1945, events that demonstrated just how radically and in the latter case how
quickly people could transform environments.150 A decade after the war,
confronted with pollution and other damage caused by postwar economic
growth, Japanese became more aware of the environmental consequences
of their behaviors, but most believed the benefits of industrialization still
outweighed the costs. Japanese citizens and their government demonstrated
considerable apathy toward environmental health until the mid-1960s, when
air, water, and soil pollution grew so severe and so deadly to both people and
the ecosystems on which they depended that it could no longer be dismissed
or justified.151 The 1960s witnessed three major pollution diseases in Japan:
Minamata disease, Niigata Minamata disease, and Yokkaichi asthma, as well
as further instances of Itai Itai disease.152
The symptoms of Minamata disease, which affected well over 3,000 peo-
ple in and around Minamata (a village on the Shiranui Sea in western Ky-
ushu), are well known even outside Japan, thanks in part to W. Eugene Smith
and Aileen M. Smith’s powerful photographic volume Minamata: severe
brain damage, neurological degeneration, physical deformities, numbness,
slurred and spontaneous speech, involuntary movements, unconsciousness,
and death.153 The key dates in the Minamata story also are clear: in 1908
Nihon Carbide built a factory in Minamata; later that year Nihon Carbide
merged with Sōgi Electric to create Nitchitsu (Nihon Chisso Hiryō Kabushiki
Kaisha, Japan Nitrogenous Fertilizers, Inc.); in 1932 Chisso began using mer-
cury catalyst in the production of acetaldehyde; in the mid-1950s people
in Minamata and surrounding areas began exhibiting symptoms similar to
58  ecoambiguity

those of acute anterior poliomyelitis; in 1959 a Kumamoto University re-

search group determined mercury to be the probable source of their distress;
in 1968 the Japanese government declared Chisso’s organic mercury the cause
of Minamata disease.154 Minamata patients, their families, and activists con-
tinue to struggle for recognition and compensation.155 So too do those suf-
fering from Niigata Minamata disease; confirmed in 1965, this affliction was
caused by methyl mercury released into the Agano River (western Japan) by
the Shōwa Electric Company.156 When Meiji University opened an exhibition
on Minamata disease in October 2010, university president Naya Hiromi
stated, “Our memory of even a sorrowful incident tends to fade away in
time, but we should keep it so we will not repeat such a tragedy. I expect this
exhibition to enable us to reflect on past mistakes.”157 Visitors are compelled
to think deeply, but how much difference this will make in shaping future
conditions remains to be seen.
Yokkaichi asthma, the third of Japan’s major pollution diseases, was caused
by sulfur oxide released by petrochemical processing facilities and refineries in
Yokkaichi, Mie Prefecture (near Nagoya). Large cotton mills moved into Yok-
kaichi during the Meiji period, and in the mid-twentieth century the town’s
lowlands were filled to attract modern industry, including petrochemicals, oil
and gasoline refining, and steel production. Residents welcomed these develop-
ments, after being promised that Yokkaichi would become a “city of sunlight
and greenery,” an urban model for postwar Japan. They were delighted when
in 1959 Yokkaichi’s complex began twenty-four-hour operation, people ex-
claiming over their “million dollar night view.” But this proximity was costly.
Noise and fumes quickly became unbearable, and residents began contracting
a severe form of asthma that failed to respond to conventional treatment. Fish
caught in nearby waters became inedible. Even so, additional industrial com-
plexes were built in the area in 1963 and again in 1973.
Minamata disease, Niigata Minamata disease, Yokkaichi asthma, and
polluted air, water, and soil throughout Japan resulted in a looming sense of
environmental crisis. In the late 1960s the Japanese government responded to
protests and litigation by Minamata and Yokkaichi victims, nascent environ-
mental groups, and other concerned parties by enacting a series of antipollu-
tion measures; in 1970 the Diet passed so many such laws that it was dubbed
the “Environmental Pollution Diet.” The next year Japan established an En-
vironment Agency (Kankyōchō, Kankyōshō [2001–]) and in 1972 the Diet
passed the Nature Conservation Law (Shizen Kankyō Hozenhō). Corpora-
tions generally supported such measures as good investments in consumer
confidence. Environmental movements flourished through the early 1970s
 Environmental Degradation and Literature in East Asia  59

by calling increased attention to ecodegradation.158 But damage continued:

in 1975, rice in various parts of Japan was found to have high concentra-
tions of cadmium; in that same year, tests revealed that a startling number of
breastfeeding mothers were nourishing their infants with milk contaminated
by PCB, DDT, and BHC.159
As long-standing environmental problems eventually abated, new con-
cerns developed: acid rain (brought about in part by pollution in China and
both Koreas), poisonous effluents from high-tech semiconductor factories,
extensive land reclamation, continued concretizing of waterways, habitat
and biodiversity loss, increasing quantities of toxic (including nuclear) waste
and the proliferation of waste sites, and persistent water pollution from agri-
cultural chemicals applied to maintain golf courses.160 Some of this damage
is caused by U.S. military bases located in Japan. In fact, before the March
2011 magnitude 9.0 Tōhoku earthquake (Higashi Nihon Daishinsai; Eastern
Japan Great Earthquake Disaster)–which resulted in tsunamis well over 100
feet high and meltdowns in three reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear
power plant complex–reinforced Japanese responsibility for many of the na-
tion’s environmental woes, some argued that the U.S. military was “Japan’s
largest polluter.”161 At the same time, Americans living on the Atsugi base in
the 1980s and 1990s suffered numerous health problems and contracted fatal
diseases from carcinogenic emissions from a nearby Japanese incinerator.162
Facilitating ecodegradation were relaxed environmental controls during the
1980s, especially under Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro.163 During the con-
struction booms of the 1990s and early 2000s hundreds of rural roads were
paved and waterways dammed. Japanese environmental groups continued to
focus on local issues, forming around a specific problem and disbanding with
its resolution, making it difficult to promote a sustained nationwide agenda.164
Yet a renewed rhetoric seeking to mitigate and prevent environmental
problems has emerged since the 1990s. The green bandwagon has enthralled
citizens, corporations, and government alike.165 Everyone, it seems, “loves
nature.” Recycling is taken very seriously; semitransparent garbage bags al-
low neighbors to keep watch over one another’s trash to make certain that
regulations are obeyed. Ecopropaganda abounds, and there is no question
that green sells.166 Emperor Akihito himself has decried environmental pol-
lution and advocated going green.167 But in a powerful display of ecoambi-
guity, green discourse often is used in conjunction with behaviors that have
questionable impacts on environmental health.168 This discourse also coex-
ists with behaviors that undeniably devastate environments. At the same time
that it advocates biodiversity on the international stage, Japan has been criti-
60  ecoambiguity

cized repeatedly for blocking attempts to cut greenhouse gas emissions.169

It additionally is one of the world’s worst producers of dioxin contamina-
tion.170 Other points of contention have been Japan’s reliance on imports to
meet its timber needs, particularly its impact on the forests of Southeast Asia,
as well as Japanese fishing and whaling practices and the country’s seem-
ing apathy toward preserving biodiversity more generally.171 Nevertheless,
Japan’s low birthrate, decreasing population, and resistance to becoming an
immigrant culture (thus virtually guaranteeing a continued decline in popula-
tion), not to mention its various policies to minimize scarring of landscapes,
make it possible that pressures on the archipelago’s physical environments
will diminish in coming decades.172
Indeed, belief in the need to conserve resources has become particu-
larly acute since the March 2011 triple disaster of the Tōhoku earth-
quake, tsunami, and Fukushima nuclear meltdowns. In the months that
followed this crisis signs announcing setsuden (saving electricity) policies
were posted in government buildings, private businesses, and transporta-
tion hubs around Japan. These measures were taken seriously, despite
the physical discomfort to workers, consumers, and commuters during
blistering heatwaves in the summer of 2011. Restrictions on power use
were lifted in early September 2011, although many customers plan to
continue cutting back on electricity use. More significant have been re-
newed calls to transform Japan’s energy policies by reducing dependence
on nuclear power without returning to fossil fuels. Even conservative
pundits have joined the antinuclear campaign, which is growing stron-
ger (the day he took office in September 2011, Noda Yoshihiko, Japan’s
new prime minister, promised to continue Japan’s nuclear phase-out) and
has changed energy policies across the globe. Many in Japan also have
demanded that the nation hold its energy providers, particularly TEPCO
(Tokyo Electric Power Company) more accountable. As Ōe Kenzaburō
urged in “History Repeats,” published in The New Yorker two weeks af-
ter the earthquake and likely expressing the sentiments of many Japanese:
“The dead, watching over us, oblige us to respect [the] ideals [of postwar
humanity], and their memory prevents us from minimizing the pernicious
nature of nuclear weaponry in the name of political realism. We are op-
posed. Therein lies the ambiguity of contemporary Japan: it is a pacifist
nation sheltering under the American nuclear umbrella. One hopes that
the accident at the Fukushima facility will allow the Japanese to reconnect
with the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to recognize the danger of
nuclear power, and to put an end to the illusion of the efficacy of deter-
rence that is advocated by nuclear powers.”
 Environmental Degradation and Literature in East Asia  61

Japanese Literature and Environmental Degradation

The attention Japanese literature has devoted to nature since the Kojiki (Re-
cord of Ancient Matters, 712), Japan’s oldest extant text, and the Man’yōshū
(Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves, eighth c.), the earliest surviving col-
lection of Japanese poetry, is often cited as confirmation of Japanese “love
of nature.” So consistently have Japanese literature and other art forms dis-
cussed, celebrated, and demonstrated sensitivity toward the nonhuman that
this “love of nature” is said to have “uniquely distinguished Japan since
before the advent of agriculture.”173 It is easy to understand why such be-
liefs have persisted, how attention to and appreciation of the natural world
have been so readily conflated with love, and love with stewardship, despite
ample empirical evidence to the contrary. Unlike its European counterparts,
most classical Japanese literature that features the nonhuman depicts inti-
mate and harmonious interconnections between people and artistically re-
configured, relatively benign, and thriving environments.174 Classical Japa-
nese literature tends to focus on the mild, kind, and aesthetic aspects of the
nonhuman world, rather than striving to give objective, scientific, or “cor-
rect” impressions.175 The same is true of premodern Japanese translations
of foreign literatures. For instance, while the ant in Aesop’s “The Ant and
the Grasshopper” shows little mercy on an indolent grasshopper, the ant in
the early seventeenth-century Japanese translation of this fable is somewhat
charitable.176 The very structure of Japanese poetic language, together with
classical literary techniques such as engo (associative language) and kakeko-
toba (pivot words), accentuates a deep sense of connection between people
and nature.177 Landscapes depicted in much classical Japanese literature are
more “literary” than “actual”; writers are often inspired less by the physical
world than by textual predecessors, which themselves tend to depict a do-
mesticated and restrained natural world.178
To be sure, classical Japanese literature highlights the impermanence of
flora and fauna. Yet theirs is a predictable, “natural,” and celebrated imper-
manence; blossoms flourish and fade, but they do so in time with the seasons
(or at least the seasons as constructed in literature), and there is no fear that
they will not be replaced.179 Human transformations of landscapes gener-
ally occur on the smallest of scales. Premodern Japanese literature mainly
depicts people as seeking refuge in and drawing inspiration from nature, not
as radically altering their surroundings; changes to environments, including
the felling of groves to construct homes and temples, tend to be minimized.
It is environments that shape people, at times harming them physically or
62  ecoambiguity

economically but most often benefiting them artistically and fulfilling them
emotionally and spiritually.180
Most scholarship on depictions of nature in classical Japanese litera-
ture focuses on these representations.181 Yet an important subset of pre-Meiji
Japanese literature—beginning with several poems in the Collection of Ten
Thousand Leaves—alludes to or even speaks explicitly of significant human-
induced changes to environments. To be sure, as Edwin Cranston has as-
serted, “the feeling for the divinity and beauty of the land is one of the most
attractive aspects of Man’yō [Ten Thousand Leaves] poetry.”182 But some
verses in the Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves that praise Japan’s won-
drous terrain also appear to be celebrating people’s notable reshaping of it.
These include the anthology’s second poem: “There are crowds of mountains
in Yamato, and among these is Heavenly Mount Kagu. When I [Emperor
Jomei, 593–641] climb Mount Kagu and look out over the land [kunimi; lit.
survey the realm], above the plains the smoke rises and rises; above the seas,
the gulls rise and rise. A beautiful land, Dragonfly Island, the land of Yam-
ato.”183 The Japanese text reads: 大和には(Yamato ni wa) 群山あれど(mu-
rayama aredo) とりよろふ(toriyorou) 天の香具山 (ama no Kaguyama) 登り
立ち(noboritachi) 国見をすれば (kunimi o sureba) 国原は(kunihara wa) 煙
立ち立つ(keburi tachitatsu) 海原は(unahara wa) 鷗立ち立つ(kamame tachi-
tatsu)うまし国そ(umashi kuni so) 蜻蛉島 (akizushima) 大和の国は (Yamato
no kuni wa).
This poem describes a “land looking” (kunimi) ritual, whereby a ruler
would climb a mountain and look out over the land to affirm his power and
the prosperity of his terrain.184 Here the realm includes both land (kunihara;
lit. land plain) and seas (unahara; lit. sea plain); the emperor claims that
smoke occupies the airspace above the plains, and that gulls—whose verti-
cal ascent parallels that of the smoke, the verb tachitatsu (to rise) used to
describe both—occupy the airspace above the sea. The smoke often is inter-
preted as manifesting the spirit of the land and the gulls as manifesting the
spirit of the sea. This poem celebrates Jomei’s authority over both parts of his
realm; his power is such that he can see water not actually visible from the
diminutive Mount Kagu.185 But what are the implications of smoke, presum-
ably from human activity, rather than an animal or other nonhuman body,
embodying the spirit of the land? Emperor Jomei’s reign (629–41) coincided
with the early decades of Japan’s “ancient predation” (600–850), an era of
construction and logging on a scale never before seen on the archipelago as
its rulers, inspired by the introduction of large-scale architecture from the
Asian continent, “dotted the Kinai basin with a plethora of great monaster-
ies, shrines, palaces, and mansions” and eventually felled all the old-growth
 Environmental Degradation and Literature in East Asia  63

stands in the region.186 Read ecocritically and taking into consideration his-
torical circumstances, the poem suggests that although gulls and presumably
other animals continue to flourish at sea, people have commandeered the
land. Moreover, the emperor seems not the least disturbed by these changes;
in fact, he celebrates them. This smoky land not only is declared “beautiful”
but also is referred to as “Dragonfly Island,” a common appellation for Ja-
pan. Flying animals give the land its name, but the fact that they no longer fly
above the land is taken as a sign of progress.187
Prominent in premodern Japanese literature are creative works that con-
trast the ephemerality of human love/life with the endurance of the non-
human—in the form of seeming permanence (e.g., that of a mountain) or
reliable impermanence (e.g., the successful reproduction and predictable life-
cycles of animals and plants). A number of Tokugawa-era kanshi (Chinese-
language poems by Japanese) echo such sentiments, including works by Hara
Sōkei, Oka Kunshō, and Toriyama Shiken that comment on “autumn grass
[that] has buried all footprints [by a grave mound],”188 depict ancient battle-
fields that now are places “where birds grieve . . . the setting sun illuminates
green moss . . . [and] the only thing left to see is the moon moving back and
forth in cold trees,”189 and assert that although “flowers and spring are never
exhausted, / human and worldly affairs are completely different.”190 Some
texts are more ambiguous, suggesting that it is precisely such beliefs that
facilitate human shaping of environments. The celebrated Japanese writer
Matsuo Bashō points to this phenomenon in Oku no hosomichi (Narrow
Road to the Deep North, 1694) when he intertextualizes the Chinese Tang
poet Du Fu’s famed “Chun wang” (Spring View). Du Fu’s poem, primarily
a lament on the sorrows of war, was written on the occasion of An Lushan’s
755 rebellion and occupation of the Tang capital Chang’an. It begins: “The
kingdom is destroyed, hills and rivers remain; in the city in spring, grasses
and trees grow deep.”191 These lines most obviously contrast fragile human
life and easily crumbled human constructions with more enduring geological
bodies (hills and rivers) and more quickly reproducing bodies of flora (plants
and trees). But they also point to human displacement and destruction of
vegetation: the mention of plants and trees growing deep in the toppled city is
a reminder that before kingdoms can exist to be toppled, vegetation must be
felled; the grasses and trees that now grow deep are the descendants of those
cleared to build and trimmed to maintain the once magnificent capital.192
Some passages in Narrow Road to the Deep North challenge the para-
digm of resilient nonhuman and ephemeral human. Confronted with the ru-
ins of Lord Yasuhira’s house at Hiraizumi, Bashō cites Du Fu’s poem and one
by his own companion Sora: “The words ‘The kingdom is destroyed, hills
64  ecoambiguity

and rivers remain / In the city in spring, grasses grow green’ came to mind
. . . [Sora wrote] ‘Summer grasses are all that remain of the dreams of ancient
warriors.’”193 But then, admiring the two adjacent temple halls, Bashō is
relieved that former generations thought to protect their buildings; so do-
ing, he writes, has prevented cultural products from disintegrating and being
replaced by grass. The latter sentiment exchanges respect with apprehension:
the grass no longer simply endures longer than people; when left to its own
devices, it threatens to disassemble human creations. Yet by speaking of ear-
lier people’s preemptive thwarting of this vegetation, the poem also suggests
that people can successfully manipulate environments.
Other reconfigurations of Du Fu’s verse in Narrow Road to the Deep
North are even more suggestive. Admiring an enduring eighth-century monu-
ment in Ishikawa, Bashō notes: “Many places of yore have come down to us
in poetry, but mountains crumble, rivers carve out new paths, covering roads
and rocks with earth. Trees get old and are replaced.”194 In contrast with Du
Fu’s lines, Bashō’s emphasize the instability of nonhuman bodies (mountains,
rivers, rocks, trees) as compared with human creations such as poems and
monuments. Changes to the environment can occur independent of human
behavior, but they also can be anthropogenic: mining and forestry, both well
established in Bashō’s time, can destroy mountains; dams, also prevalent in
his age, can force rivers to carve out new paths; and afforestation, which he
likely also witnessed, replaces trees. Nature endures, but Bashō’s ambiguous
discourse suggests that its shape might be more determined by human behav-
iors than his literary predecessors acknowledged.195
More deliberately contradictory are texts such as Yoshida Kenkō’s Tsur-
ezuregusa (Essays in Idleness, 1332), which decries the abuse of most animals
but condones that of horses and oxen:

Domestic animals include the horse and the ox. It’s a shame that we
have to bind and hurt them, but there’s nothing else we can do, since
they’re invaluable to us . . . When animals that run are confined to
pens or fastened with chains, when birds that fly have their wings
clipped or are caged, their longing for the clouds and their sadness at
being away from the hills and fields knows no end. How can those
capable of imagining how terrible they would feel under these condi-
tions enjoy keeping such animals as pets? A person who enjoys hurt-
ing living beings is just like Emperor Jie [of Xia] and Emperor Zhou
[of Shang].196

Kenkō strongly advocates the humane treatment, indeed freedom of nearly

all animals. Yet instead of suggesting how people might improve their inter-
 Environmental Degradation and Literature in East Asia  65

actions with horses and oxen, he declares that mistreating these species is
unavoidable.
Over the centuries premodern Japanese literature articulated a broad
range of human interactions with environments. Although never entirely ab-
sent from the corpus, explicit references to human-induced ecological degra-
dation began to appear more frequently in early twentieth-century creative
works and then regularly beginning in the 1970s. To be sure, the Meiji “dis-
covery of landscape” (fūkei no hakken) manifested in late nineteenth- and
early twentieth-century Japanese realism and conceptualized by the Japanese
literary critic Karatani Kōjin was little concerned with unearthing damage
to environments; realism “[brought] into existence landscapes which, al-
though they had always been there, had never been seen,” but these gener-
ally were not the landscapes of pollution or other environmental distress.197
Although Meiji (1868–1912), Taishō (1912–26), and early Shōwa (1926–89)
literatures often celebrated nature, depicted it as the means to salvation, ex-
pounded on its curiosities, and featured characters deeply integrated within
it, some early twentieth-century creative works depict a more intimidating
landscape. Both Nagatsuka Takashi’s novel Tsuchi (The Earth, 1910) and
Arishima Takeo’s novella Kain no matsuei (Descendants of Cain, 1917) dra-
matize the struggles of those working the land.198 In Arishima’s text nature
is as much the tenant farmer’s adversary as are his neighbors and landlord.
As the narrator declares in the opening pages: “The relentless wind raged
across mountains and fields. The night flowed eastward like a great river of
lacquer . . . The only thing revived there was wild, fierce, and overpower-
ing nature [arakureta ooki na shizen dake ga soko ni yomigaetta].”199 Here
winter is bitter cold, spring rains drown crops, summer brings with it a blitz
of insects, and autumn rains rot the harvest. Other creative works, including
Satō Haruo’s novella Den’en no yūutsu (Rural Melancholy, 1917), depict an
oppressive nonhuman, one where plants defy the attempts of gardeners to
control their growth, battle one another for resources, and suffocate people
and their constructions:

The untended garden grew thick in midsummer. All the trees

stretched their roots into the ground as deeply as they could to draw
power from the soil. The trees wore leaves on every side to soak
up their fill of sunlight . . . To bathe in as much sunlight as pos-
sible, to grow larger, every tree thrust out its branches . . . The lush
branches and leaves of the many different types of vegetation, the
entire garden, were just like the melancholy of wild hair hanging
down from a madman’s leaden forehead. The invisible weight of
66  ecoambiguity

the vegetation pushed on the narrow garden from above and made
one feel as though the building in the middle were surrounded and
squashed by its perimeter.200

Rural Melancholy, like many of its contemporaries, depicts environments as

shaping, not as shaped by, people.
On the other hand, the widespread, serious, and rapid damage Meiji Ja-
pan’s industrialization inflicted on the nation’s landscapes was not completely
overlooked by Japanese literary artists. Among the most famous examples of
early twentieth-century environmentally conscious writings are Miyazawa
Kenji’s well-informed portraits of diverse ecologies. His poetry, short sto-
ries, and children’s literature celebrate flora, fauna, and intimate relation-
ships between people and nature, but they also evoke nostalgia for a more
innocent past that suggests these relationships are now threatened if not in
some cases already destroyed.201 Stories such as “Chūmon no ōi ryōriten”
(The Restaurant of Many Orders, 1924) disparage particular human atti-
tudes and behaviors vis-à-vis environments, including arrogance and sport
hunting. This text features two hunters who enjoy shooting animals just to
watch them suffer. Wandering deep into a forest, they become disoriented,
and their dogs suddenly perish. They then have a horrifying hallucination:
they enter a restaurant of “many orders” believing they will have their choice
of dishes to select but instead discover that they are the ones being ordered
and will soon be served to wild animals for dinner. Awakening from their il-
lusion just as they are about to be eaten, the men return safely home but with
faces damaged beyond repair. Likewise criticizing Japanese hunting practices
are texts such as Oguma Hideo’s “Tobu Sori” (Flying Sled, 1935), which
paradoxically depict the reverent Ainu as taking more nonhuman lives than
disrespectful urban Japanese.
Speaking of specific ecological tragedies were such texts as Shiga Naoya’s
Aru otoko sono ane no shi (The Death of a Certain Man’s Sister, 1920),
which mentions the Ashio copper mine incident. Shiga’s novella centers on
the contentious relationship between a boy and his father; near the conclu-
sion the narrator notes that the most serious argument between the two arose
when the boy (then a middle-school student) attended a rally protesting the
damage to people and the environment caused by effluent from the Ashio
copper mine and announced he was going to tour the affected sites. He was
forbidden to do so by his father because his grandfather once had been titular
owner of the mine; the grandfather overhears the argument between father
and son but remains silent, the narrator speculating that he greatly regrets
having instigated such suffering. The Death of a Certain Man’s Sister does
 Environmental Degradation and Literature in East Asia  67

not speak at length about the poisoning of the Watarase River, but it does
give a glimpse into the psychologies of those involved in its aftermath: youth-
ful protestors, elderly accomplices, and a middle generation fearful of at-
tempting to reconcile the two.202
Visiting (semi)colonial East Asians also commented on the toxicity of some
of Japan’s cityscapes. For instance, in his posthumous essay “Tonggyŏng”
(Tokyo, 1939) the colonial Korean writer Yi Sang remarked, “My first im-
pression of Tokyo was, ‘This city reeks of gasoline!’ . . . The citizens of Tokyo
smell like cars.”203 Somewhat tongue-in-cheek, he blames his inability to ap-
preciate Tokyo’s sights and smells on his own weak lungs and morality, the
latter of which he claims “exudes a sour nineteenth-century odor.” Depicting
much about Tokyo as an illusion, Yi Sang shreds the facades of Japanese
modernity: “These days, the seven-story Mitsukoshi, Matsuzakaya, Itōya,
Shirokiya, and Matsuya [all major department stores] don’t sleep at night.
However, we can’t go inside. Why? The interiors are one story, not [as their
facades suggest] seven stories.”204 The pollution outside, on the other hand,
is all too real.
The 1940s yielded somewhat increased literary attention to ecological
degradation.205 In Tsugaru (1944) the literary leader Dazai Osamu addressed
environmental problems including deforestation. Although it focuses primar-
ily on human suffering, literature of the atomic bomb from its inception in
1945 has decried destruction of the nonhuman and called attention to many
of nature’s ambiguities, particularly how quickly it recovers from injury.206
Other creative work such as Hayashi Fumiko’s Ukigumo (Floating Clouds,
1951) exposes rampant and needless Japanese wartime deforestation in
Southeast Asia. This text depictsTomioka, an employee of the Japanese Min-
istry of Agriculture and Forestry stationed in French Indochina, writing in his
memoirs that he and his men “were forced by the army to fell trees recklessly
and violently [kanari ranbō na ranbatsu mo yatta].” Many of the trees they
chop remain close to where they fall, the narrator noting: “The kacha pines
must be fifty or sixty years old, but the Japanese were chopping them down
randomly, without hesitation, reporting only numbers to the army. The num-
bers were laughing . . . [The slain trees remained on the riverbanks.] Only the
numbers moved, from desk to desk.”207 Hayashi’s novel does not condemn
this sportlike destruction, but it does question its appropriateness. On the
other hand, the chief of the Forestry Bureau tells Tomioka that the slash-
and-burn agriculture of the local indigenous peoples has radically changed
conditions in the primeval forest, suggesting that the Japanese are not the
only ones to have altered this region’s ecosystems.208 Human manipulation
of forests, and of the planet more generally, is also addressed in Kawabata
68  ecoambiguity

Yasunari’s novel Koto (Ancient Capital, 1962) where Naeko alerts her long-
lost sister Chieko that the trees Chieko has been admiring in fact are “cryp-
tomeria made by people.” She continues:

These are about forty years old. They’ll be cut and made into pillars
and similar things. If left to themselves, they would likely grow for
a thousand years, becoming thick and tall . . . I like primeval forests
best. In this village it’s like we’re making cut flowers . . . Were there
no people in the world, there would be nothing like Kyoto either. It
would be natural forests and weeds. The land would belong to the
deer and wild boar, would it not? Why are people in this world? It’s
frightening, people.209

The dangers of postwar urbanization and industrialization to ecosystems of

all kinds were readily apparent to people across Japan.
Atomic bomb literature, Floating Clouds, Ancient Capital, and similar
creative texts from the 1940s to early 1960s, and even more significantly
the 1964 Japanese-language translation of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and
Japanese society’s growing environmental consciousness, cleared the track
for the late-1960s and 1970s boom in literary texts portraying devastated en-
vironments.210 Pollution was the principal concern, writers such as Mishima
Yukio in Tennin gosui (Decay of the Angel, 1970), for instance, depicting
characters traveling to sites celebrated in classical literature for their natural
beauty only to find them littered with the debris of contemporary life, includ-
ing Coke bottles, food cans, and plastic bags. Writers and activists, focusing
on past and present crises alike, drew inspiration from early twentieth-cen-
tury predecessors such as Arahata Kanson’s Yanakamura metsubōshi (His-
tory of the Collapse of Yanaka Village, 1902) on the Ashio mine, reprinted
in 1970; in 1973 Ishimure Michiko revealed that Minamata residents had
eagerly read Arahata’s book in the early stages of their struggle against the
Chisso Corporation.211 Texts such as Nitta Jirō’s Aru machi no takai entotsu
(The Tall Smokestack of a Certain Town, 1968), which takes place between
1903 and 1915 and concerns the Hitachi mine pollution case, and Kimoto
Shōji’s novel Shisakajima (Shisaka Island, 1972), which deals with the hard-
ships encountered by farmers on Shisaka Island when Besshi mine began
smelting operations there at the turn of the twentieth century, reminded read-
ers of the deep historical roots of Japan’s environmental problems.212
The best-known and most encompassing environmentally oriented cre-
ative works from the late 1960s and 1970s address contemporary events—
Ishimure’s Sea of Suffering and the Pure Land (1969) and Ariyoshi Sawako’s
 Environmental Degradation and Literature in East Asia  69

Fukugō osen (Compound Pollution, 1975). A creative writer, activist, and

native of Minamata, Ishimure has worked for decades to educate people
the world over about Minamata disease and to compel Japanese authorities
to compensate more adequately Minamata disease patients and their fami-
lies.213 Sea of Suffering, her most famous literary work, is the first part of her
trilogy on Minamata and one of her many writings on this tragedy.214 The
narrator of this novel includes accounts on her own interactions with Mina-
mata patients and experiences fighting corporate and government bureaucra-
cies that refuse to acknowledge their suffering. She also incorporates moving
stories of Minamata patients in their own voices and those of their families
and friends. In addition, she contextualizes the experiences of the Minamata
villagers, discussing pollution incidents elsewhere in Japan and the world.
Whereas Sea of Suffering focuses largely on the etiologies and realities of
Minamata disease, Compound Pollution addresses more generally pollution
brought about by drastic increases in Japanese consumerism. This novel was
serialized in the Asahi shinbun from October 1974 to June 1975. A collection
of newspaper columns divided into fifteen sections, it interweaves fact and
fiction in a variety of genres to highlight the dangers of air and water pollu-
tion, as well as food contaminated with additives and agricultural chemicals.
The book emphasizes that although pollution often is perceived as occurring
in isolated bursts and affecting only small groups of people, it in fact threat-
ens everyone; contaminated air, water, and soil jeopardize the health of rich
and poor, urban and rural, young and old. Presuming its audience, especially
female consumers, knows little about pollutants, the text introduces a variety
of chemical substances, explaining the politics behind their use, how they are
employed in Japan and around the world, and the threats each poses to people
and environments. By revealing the connections between agriculture and pol-
lution, as well as war and pollution, the narrator stresses the responsibilities
of the consumer; she refuses to allow her readers to perceive themselves solely
as victims and encourages them to make ethical choices. She likens herself
to Rachel Carson, insisting that she is not promoting a ban on all chemicals
but instead recommending more careful vetting before use. Not surprisingly,
both Sea of Suffering and Compound Pollution attracted considerable atten-
tion and were catalysts for Japanese environmental movements and reforms.
The endurance of Ishimure’s work is particularly noteworthy: Sea of Suffering
and the final two parts of her Minamata trilogy are the only Japanese novels
included in the Japanese publisher Kawade Shobō Shinsha’s current Sekai
bungaku zenshū (Complete Collection of World Literature, 2007–); the tril-
ogy is advertised as “a masterpiece representing postwar Japanese literature”
that “deeply questions what it means to be human.”215
70  ecoambiguity

Most of Japan’s early environmentally conscious literature concerns pol-

lution, but in the 1970s Japanese published several significant creative texts
focusing on conservation. In addition to Tanikawa Shuntarō’s poem “Sora ni
kotori ga inakunatta hi” (The Day Small Birds Disappeared from the Skies,
1977), these include Nitta Jirō’s Kiri no shisontachi (Descendants of the
Mist, 1970) and Watanabe Jun’ichi’s Mine no kioku (Memories of Moun-
tain Peaks, 1976).216 Nitta’s novel, set in the 1960s, concerns the potential
ecological and cultural consequences of extending the Venus Line toll road
through the Kirigamine mountains (Nagano Prefecture). Written to assist the
local opposition movement, Descendants of the Mist describes the ecosys-
tems of the region, exposes the aims of the developers, and urges people
to work together to forestall this and similar projects.217 Watanabe’s novel
Memories of Mountain Peaks concerns the planned construction of a road
through Hokkaido’s Daisetsuzan National Park. The novel’s protagonist is
a civil engineer who must determine the route for the highway with the least
potential effect on the park’s ecosystems. His hopes to preserve a primeval
forest are thwarted when an overloaded helicopter carrying supplies crashes
and catches fire, charring the woodland. Unlike many of its contemporaries,
Memories of Mountain Peaks describes a potential rather than an actual inci-
dent.218 The novel warns its readers about the uncertain future of landscapes
they take for granted.
Similarly focusing on imagined scenarios is Japan’s environmental sci-
ence fiction. Abé Kōbō’s Daiyon kanpyōki (Inter Ice Age 4, 1959), declared
by some to be Japan’s first science fiction novel, depicts a world in which
climate change and genetic engineering have radically transformed human
society; rising sea levels have buried continents and people have been re-
placed by a new species created from aborted human fetuses.219 Also note-
worthy are texts such as “Tatazumu hito” (Standing Person, 1974) by Tsu-
tsui Yasutaka, one of Japan’s most prominent science fiction writers. Hoshi
Shin’ichi, midcentury Japan’s short-short story writer par excellence, made
even larger contributions to environmental science fiction, as did Komatsu
Sakyō, who was haunted by the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Komatsu’s Nippon chinbotsu (Japan Sinks, 1973), which features the physi-
cal collapse of Japan, was a best-seller; the novel and its manga adaptation
were published simultaneously, and a film version was released the following
year.220 Even more significant from an environmental perspective are two
stories from Komatsu’s 1973 collection Adamu no sue (The Descendants of
Adam): “Aozora” (Blue Sky) and “Seijaku no tsūro” (Silent Corridor). “Blue
Sky” features a couple who reject a pristine mountain environment in favor
of a city so polluted that people must wear filters in their throats to prevent
 Environmental Degradation and Literature in East Asia  71

their bodies from being overwhelmed with sand and soot. In contrast, “Si-
lent Corridor”—which takes place in 1990s Tokyo—depicts a couple having
difficulty conceiving; the text discusses a range of environmental problems
likely responsible for their infertility. “Silent Corridor” is advertised as a
“fictionalization” of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring; the story is prefaced by a
quotation from the Japanese translation of Carson, and several episodes echo
passages in Carson’s book.221
Literary attention to environmental problems continued during the 1980s
and 1990s. While writers such as Masuda Mizuko and Murakami Haruki
for the most part addressed human abuse of environments relatively tangen-
tially, creative works from this era such as Kayano Shigeru’s Kamuiyukara
to mukashibanashi (Yukar, The Ainu Epic and Folktales, 1988) depict Ainu
life in Hokkaido and stress the importance of preserving that island’s eco-
systems; Kayano, one of the last native speakers of the Ainu language, pro-
tested the damming of rivers in northern Hokkaido.222 Published two years
later, Amano Reiko’s Mansa to Nagaragawa: “Saigo no kawa” ni ikita otoko
(Mansa and the Nagara River: A Man Who Lived on the “Last River,” 1990)
deplores dam construction on the Nagara River, highlighting the significance
of protecting local landscapes and the lifestyles of the region’s fishers; Amano
has published extensively on dams and rivers and is a leading opponent of
dam construction on the Nagara River.223 Many novels by the environmental
activist Tatematsu Wahei from these decades likewise address ecodegrada-
tion in Japan and beyond, including Enrai (Distant Thunder, 1980), Net-
tai urin (Tropical Rain Forest, 1983), and Umi no kanata no eien (Eternity
across the Sea, 1989).224 And the horrors of Minamata disease continued
to be revealed not only in new editions of Ishimure’s work but also in such
contemporary texts as Ogata Masato and Ōiwa Keibō’s Tokoyo no fune
o kogite: Minamatabyō shishi (Rowing the Boat of the Eternal World: An
Unauthorized History of Minamata Disease, 1996) and its English-language
adaptation Rowing the Eternal Sea (2001). Twenty-first-century best-selling
Japanese writers regularly express environmental concerns in their work, in-
cluding the celebrated feminist poet Itō Hiromi in Kawara arekusa (Wild
Grass on the Riverbank, 2005) and popular novelist Taguchi Randy in Kon-
sento (Outlet, 2000), Hikari no ame furu shima Yakushima (Island Where
Shining Rain Falls: Yakushima, 2001), Tensei (Transmigration, 2001), Ko-
dama (Echo, 2003), and Fujisan (Mount Fuji, 2004).225 While Outlet ref-
erences global warming, Mount Fuji the garbage scarring this mountain,
and Echo the deforestation of ancient groves, Yakushima addresses how
or whether to write about breathtaking landscapes; so doing likely will in-
crease both demands to preserve them and pressures for tourist travel. In-
72  ecoambiguity

deed, the Japanese Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport, and Tourism

runs ecotours to Yakushima which ultimately harm local ecosystems.226 Also
noteworthy is the Okinawan writer Ikegami Eiichi’s science fiction novel
Shanguri-ra (Shangri-La, 2005) and its recent manga and television adapta-
tions, which feature a tropical twenty-first-century Tokyo, transformed by
global warming.227 The March 2011 Tōhoku catastrophe is likely to have a
sustained impact on Japanese literary production. Japan’s best-known au-
thors–Ōe Kenzaburō and Murakami Haruki–have already published on the
quake and its aftermath, and numerous figures, from popular writers such
as Yoshimoto Banana to authors unknown outside of Japan, have written
poems and short stories grappling with the triple tragedy of the earthquake,
tsunami, and nuclear meltdowns.
As the interest in Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and references to environ-
mental problems outside Japan in Japanese creative work suggest, postwar
Japanese writers have avidly read environmentally oriented literature from
around the world, the United States in particular.228 Japanese and Western
writers and artists have long looked to one another’s work for inspiration,
particularly for understandings and depictions of nonhuman phenomena.229
Their interpersonal connections are also notable. Strongest have been the
ties between the poets and environmental activists Sakaki Nanao and Gary
Snyder. Sakaki and Snyder spent significant time living, hiking, and moun-
tain climbing in each other’s countries, as well as in many other sites around
the world.230 Sakaki included Snyder and other foreigners in Buzoku (The
Tribe), a countercultural group that he and the environmental writer Yamao
Sansei led in Japan in the 1960s and 1970s.231 He also translated Snyder’s
verse, including the collection Turtle Island (1984), into Japanese. Snyder’s
foreword to a volume of Sakaki’s work in English translation reveals his
enormous admiration for his Japanese counterpart. Hagiographically de-
scribing Sakaki’s ethos, Snyder exclaims:

Nanao Sakaki’s poems and presence are known from Tokyo to Am-
sterdam, New York to London, Maine to San Francisco. He also lives
and works—completely at home—in the mountains back of Taos, in
the deserts of the lower Rio Grande, in pine forests of the Sierra Ne-
vada, the subtropical islands of the Ryukyu archipelago, the chilly
spruce woods of Hokkaido, the narrow valleys of Kyoto, and the
ten thousand bars maze of Shinjuku, Tokyo. He is one of the first
truly cosmopolitan poets to emerge from Japan, but the sources of his
thought and inspiration are older than east and west. And newer.232
 Environmental Degradation and Literature in East Asia  73

For decades the two poets regularly wrote about each other and intertextu-
alized each other’s literary output in their own creative work.233 Dialogues
among Japanese writers and scholars and their counterparts elsewhere in
East Asia have likewise taken a more environmental turn, although, with
several notable exceptions, as of the first decade of the twenty-first century
interactions among East Asian ecocritical scholars of different nationalities
are more common than those among ecologically oriented creative writers.234
Also showing no sign of diminishing are the contributions of Japanese
popular culture to discourse on the environment in Japan and around the
world. Japanese film has played a vital role, from documentaries such as
director Satō Makoto’s Agano ni ikiru (Living on the Agano, 1992) and its
sequel Agano no kioku (Memories of Agano, 2004), both of which drama-
tize the impact of Minamata disease on a mountain community in Niigata,
to the Oscar-winning twelve-minute “Tsumiki no ie” (The House of Small
Cubes, 2008), which was directed by Katō Kunio and depicts an old man
attempting to prevent rising water caused by global warming from flooding
his house.235 Environmental degradation occupies an even larger position in
Japanese manga and anime. One example is the anime metaseries Gandamu
(Gundam, 1979–), which features overpopulation and destruction of ecosys-
tems as causing massive armed conflict and migration to outer space; Gun-
dam began as a television series and now includes a plethora of films, manga,
novels, and video games. Just as noteworthy is celebrated director Miyazaki
Hayao’s postapocalyptic Kaze no tani no Naushika (Nausicaä of the Windy
Valley, 1982–94). This anime depicts human societies as declining sharply af-
ter a millennium of plundering the earth’s riches, polluting its air, and chang-
ing its life-forms; during the Seven Days of Fire they destroyed their cities and
lost their advanced technology. Nausicaä is set a millennium after the Seven
Days of Fire, but the world remains covered by the “Sea of Corruption”; in
this environment people are capable of eking out only the most meager of
existences.236 Even more popular has been Miyazaki’s Mononokehime (Prin-
cess Mononoke, 1997), Japan’s highest-grossing film of all time, animated
or otherwise. Set in the fourteenth century, Princess Mononoke opens with
a wild boar felling a primeval forest; the boar has been maddened by an iron
ball lodged in its body. The remainder of the film features struggles between
people and the beasts and spirits of a magical forest. Decapitating the leader
of the forest, people set off a chain of events that results in its destruction, but
in the end harmony between humans and environments is restored. Miyaza-
ki’s supernaturalization of the “natural” reconfigures conventional Japanese
views of the nonhuman, depicting landscapes such as the forest as abjected
74  ecoambiguity

spaces that ultimately enact revenge.237 This animated film, in the words of
Susan Napier, is “a wake-up call to human beings in a time of environmental
and spiritual crisis that attempts to provoke its audience into realizing how
much they have already lost and how much more they stand to lose.”238 With
several notable exceptions, Japanese films have sounded more strident wake-
up calls than Japanese literary works, but for decades the latter have been
actively negotiating the ambiguities surrounding environmental degradation.

Environmental Degradation in Modern Korea

Korea at the turn of the twentieth century experienced industrialization, rapid

population growth, and steady urbanization as well as new agronomic and
fishery technologies and intense forest harvesting. Although these changes
improved the lives of many, they led also to substantial environmental prob-
lems, particularly pollution and biohabitat loss. Practices harmful to envi-
ronments were instigated or intensified by the Japanese colonial government
from 1910 to 1945. Japanese leaders, frequently relying on local collabora-
tors, subjected Korea to numerous policies that exploited both its people and
its ecosystems. The colonizers increased agricultural production and rapidly
became dependent on Korean crops to feed people in the metropole. In the
1930s Japan began building heavy industries in Korea to advance its military
agenda. The Japanese, who depended on Korean labor, also constructed an
extensive network of roads and railways; mined the colony’s gold, silver,
iron, and coal; depleted its fisheries; dammed its rivers; and felled its forests
so extensively that by the 1940s only the remotest regions still enjoyed tree
cover.239
The Korean War (1950–53), which took the lives of nearly three million
Koreans, devastated the peninsula’s population and flattened its industries
and cities.240 Park Chung Hee’s coup d’état in 1961 ushered in decades of un-
precedented industrial and urban growth in South Korea.241 The ecological
impact on the Korean peninsula initially was not as substantial as might have
been expected, since Koreans relied increasingly on imported metals, fossil
fuels, wood products, and foodstuffs.242 But by the 1970s ecodegradation
at home became impossible to ignore, and South Koreans organized several
small groups to heighten environmental consciousness.243 Even so, pollution
generally was believed to be an inevitable price of economic growth, Park
Chung Hee adamantly declaring in 1962, “Dark smoke rising from factories
is symbolic of our nation’s growth and prosperity.”244 The powerful desire
for development, combined with the authoritarianism of Korea’s military re-
 Environmental Degradation and Literature in East Asia  75

gime, meant that few dared protest the nation’s environmental policies and
practices. It was only in the 1980s, under Chun Doo Hwan, that South Korea
developed its first comprehensive environmental program.245 Citizens also
formed a number of green organizations during the 1980s that called at-
tention to the high human and nonhuman costs of pollution, particularly
Onsan disease, an illness similar to Japan’s Itai Itai disease that is caused by
heavy-metal contamination.246 During the 1980s South Korea’s dependence
on nuclear power also came under heightened scrutiny, and the nation’s first
antinuclear movement was founded in 1987. Surveys from this period in-
dicate that a large majority of South Koreans believed the environmental
quality of their nation a serious problem, suggesting strong public support
for efforts to curb ecodegradation.247 Yet despite some improvements, most
notably for the 1988 Olympic Games in Seoul, overall conditions continued
to decline.248
The early 1990s brought a number of significant environmental crises and
protests: plans to build a nuclear waste storage facility on Anmyŏn Island
(western Korea) met with considerable resistance, and a chemical spill in
the Naktong River near Taegu (southeast Korea) endangered the lives of 1.5
million South Koreans and captured nationwide attention. Although in both
cases the physical scope of the (anticipated) damage was relatively small, the
incidents terrified the Korean population. Many residents feared that they
might be the next to be directly affected by nuclear and other forms of pol-
lution. On the other hand, although both environmental movements and the
government’s alleged commitment to solving ecological problems boomed
in the 1990s, there was little improvement in the environment itself. As Su-
Hoon Lee notes, “In 1996 alone, major incidents related to pollution or
environmental deterioration included the illegal release of water from the
contaminated Siwha Lake, incidents of pollution illness reported in the Yeo-
cheon petrochemical industrial complex, dead fish in major rivers, and sum-
mertime ozone-related smog in Seoul.”249 These trends continued into the
twenty-first century: pollution, destruction of habitat, and decreasing biodi-
versity remain significant problems.250 As mayor of Seoul between 2002 and
2006, Lee Myung Bak instigated a number of projects to green the city.251
Such initiatives beautified sections of its surface, but the air remained pol-
luted. Between September 2008 and December 2009, Lee Myung Bak (then
South Korea’s president) allocated 80 percent of Korea’s total fiscal stimulus
spending to green stimulus spending, the highest percentage in the world.252
In 2009 he announced a Green New Deal for the country, promising to im-
prove energy conservation, carbon reduction, recycling, and flood preven-
tion, as well as create new jobs. The backbone of this ecoambiguous policy is
76  ecoambiguity

the Four Rivers Restoration Project (4RRP), which aims to control flooding
and provide South Koreans with more and better water, but this program
has been criticized by hundreds of environmental and civic groups as likely
to harm water quality, endanger species, and reduce biodiversity.253 Even so,
the extent to which environmental groups can truly mitigate the degradation
threatened by the 4RRP remains to be seen. Despite high awareness and
vigorous environmental activism since the 1980s, South Koreans, like many
peoples around the world, seem to care more about “private space” than
“shared space” (i.e., environments) and thus are not willing to modify their
behaviors in ways that might preserve the latter.254 Exacerbating conditions
are yellow dust and industrial pollution blown in from China, which not
only contaminate South Korea’s air but also increase acid rain.
North Korea is even more at the mercy of Chinese pollution, but many
of its environmental problems—severe industrial pollution; deforestation,
flooding, and soil erosion; water pollution, including from nitrates in the
very high concentrations of fertilizers and pesticides such as DDT used in the
country; and disposal of nuclear and other toxic waste—have sources closer
to home.255 Frustrating remediation efforts are the nation’s geography, lega-
cies of colonialism and war, heavy industrialization, technological gaps in
environment management and pollution control, and an institutional frame-
work that militates against two necessary factors for environmental man-
agement: decentralized responsibility and lateral coordination. North Korea
passed its basic Environmental Protection Law in 1986; this law stipulates
that all industries are to adhere to environmental standards, claims all citi-
zens have environmental rights, and places the burden of liability on pollut-
ers. And at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 North Korea signed major interna-
tional agreements on biodiversity, climate change, and forestry. But changing
actual interactions with the natural world has been a tremendous challenge.
Not surprisingly, in the last two decades most of the nation’s environmental
problems, deforestation in particular, have only become more severe.
The Korean peninsula’s most ecoambiguous phenomenon is its demilita-
rized zone (DMZ), a space four kilometers wide and nearly 250 kilometers
long near the 38th parallel, at once the world’s most heavily militarized bor-
der and an accidental, eccentric wildlife preserve.256 Human settlements and
farmlands in the region date back an estimated five millennia, but having
been almost entirely free from human habitation since 1953, the zone now is
home to more than one thousand plant species and hundreds of animal spe-
cies, many of which are elsewhere endangered. The DMZ has been heralded
as a “global treasure house of ecosystems.”257 And experts have claimed that
collaborative efforts to transform the DMZ into a UNESCO World Heritage
 Environmental Degradation and Literature in East Asia  77

Site are likely to improve relationships among the two Koreas and the other
Six-Party states.258 At the same time, not only is the DMZ full of deserted
villages and tens of thousands of unburied human corpses, it also remains a
site of continued army operations.259 In addition to defoliants and forest fires
set for site clearing, land mines are a significant problem. As the celebrated
Korean fiction writer Kim Yŏngha once noted, “I remember waking at night
hearing deer exploding [because of the land mines] . . . I would hear the
sound of the explosion and would think of the deer lying there dying.”260
Much of the recent idealization of the DMZ as ecological paradise is illusory.

Korean Literature and Environmental Degradation

Engaging with interactions between people and nature has always been an
important part of Korean literary production; since its outset, Korean litera-
ture has incorporated numerous references to the nonhuman and often has
made it the focus.261 Analogies between people and trees date from ancient
Korea, with the pine, cypress, and several other species often standing in for
the ruling dynasty. As Peter Lee has noted, trees also serve as a “symbol of
life for individual, generation, and race . . . Later the symbolism of the tree
was tinged by certain Confucian and Daoist virtues such as endurance, fidel-
ity, integrity, order, continuity, freedom, fulfillment, and destiny.”262 Like-
wise, much early Korean literature compares individuals’ circumstances with
those of the natural world or otherwise relates human and nonhuman emo-
tion and experience. For instance, “Hwangjo ka” (Song of the Yellow Birds),
attributed by some to Koguryŏ’s (37 B.C.E.–668 C.E.) Emperor Yuri, written
in literary Chinese, and alleged to be Korea’s earliest literary composition,
reads: “Fluttering yellow birds, / Males and females having fun together, /
Think of me all alone! / With whom will I return?”263 Recently abandoned by
one of his lovers, the poem’s speaker envies the birds their seemingly effort-
less companionship. He also looks to the animals for sympathy. Other early
Korean literature describes landscapes, usually luscious, that are seemingly
devoid of people; or it speaks of people, often recluses or others eager to
escape society, immersing themselves in such landscapes.264 Still more writ-
ings highlight the relative permanence of nonhuman phenomena. The famed
cartographer and poet Kwŏn Kŭn writes in “Sangdae pyŏlgok” (Song of
the Censor, 1419) that “south of Mount Hwa, north of the Han River, for
a thousand years a famous scenic spot /. . . clear winds have blown here for
tens of thousands of years.”265
In contrast, a small but important part of early Korean literature ad-
78  ecoambiguity

dresses harm to environments. Some works criticize human abuse of the nat-
ural world, while others such as the prolific scholar-official Yi Kyubo’s poem
“Tongmyŏng Wang p’yŏn” (Book of Emperor Tongmyŏng [r. 37–19 B.C.E.],
1193) glorify it. “Book of Emperor Tongmyŏng” is based on the foundation
myth of the Koguryŏ kingdom. Elaborating on Chinese and Korean histories,
it interweaves depictions of nonhuman fecundity with those of human abuse
of environments. At times, the poem simply alludes to the latter. It claims that
Emperor Tongmyŏng chose as the site of his capital a space “surrounded by
rivers and thickly wooded hills”266 and that when it came time for the capital
to be constructed:

The crests of the ridges were concealed,

and thousands of people
could be heard breaking trees.
The king said, “Heaven is building me
a fortress over there.”
Suddenly the mist scattered
and a towering royal palace stood there.267

The poem does not speak explicitly of ravished hillsides, but with enough
wood felled to satisfy thousands of carpenters, the landscape has been sig-
nificantly altered.
At times Yi Kyubo’s poem addresses human abuse of animals more di-
rectly. Before he became emperor, Tongmyŏng, then known as Chumong,
went looking for a trusty stallion. Identifying the strongest horse in the king’s
herd, he and his mother “stuck a needle in its tongue / that pained it so it
couldn’t eat; / [and] in a day or so it wasted away [ssŭrigo ap’a mŏkji mothae,
/ myŏch’il man e yawiŏsŏ].”268 Believing the horse on the verge of death, the
king gives it to Chumong, who feeds it and restores its strength. Later in the
poem, after anointing himself Emperor Tongmyŏng and hoping to vanquish
his rival Songyang, Chumong/Tongmyŏng “caught a tall snow-white deer /
and strung it up by its hind feet / . . . [the deer] was in such distress / its moans
were heard in heaven.”269 These cries bring about Tongmyŏng’s victory: the
rains fall, Songyang submits, and Tongmyŏng’s new fortress is built. Flora
and fauna are depicted as expendable and their suffering and deaths even
celebrated in the name of human glory.270
References to environmental harm appear more regularly in Korean liter-
ature written after the nineteenth century. Scholarship on twentieth-century
Korean literature has called attention to how it articulates the suffering of the
Korean people: despair, poverty, illness, forced labor/conscription, imprison-
 Environmental Degradation and Literature in East Asia  79

ment, rape, torture, and death as a result of Japanese colonization (1910–

45); the division of the peninsula into North and South Korea in 1945 and
the 1953 armistice that permanently separated families and resulted in a sig-
nificant American military presence in the South to this day; the Korean War;
and South Korea’s postwar military dictatorships and corrupt administra-
tions. Without question, human suffering resulting from human behavior—
whether Japanese, American, or Korean—is a central part of twentieth- and
early twenty-first-century Korean literature.
But violence by people against people is not the only trauma exposed
by these writings. A number of creative works also reveal anthropogenic
damage of the nonhuman. Injuries take many forms, including polluted and
at times irradiated air, water, and soil, deforestation, and depopulation or
even species extinction. Some creative texts—including Yi T’aejun’s “T’okki
iyagi” (Rabbit Story, 1941)—point to the moral dilemmas of killing animals
for income. “Rabbit Story” depicts an impoverished writer whose wife, hop-
ing to ease their financial woes, raises rabbits for their meat.271 Although
the protagonist believes that he as a man is duty-bound to kill the animals,
he finds it impossible to do so; the story concludes with his desperate wife
appearing before him with shaking, bloody hands. Colonial-period Korean
writers including Yi Sang speak of landscapes damaged on a broader scale
in such texts as “Ach’im” (Morning, 1936), a prose poem that describes the
injurious effects of air pollution. Early twentieth-century Japanese writers
with experience in Korea also wrote of damage to Korea’s environments.
Yuasa Katsue’s novella Kan’nani (1934) depicts storms, not human behav-
iors, as uprooting nature and features a Japanese character who declares the
Korean skies more beautiful and the rainbows more intense than anything
back home. On the other hand, this novella describes rivers after the storms
as littered with personal belongings, furniture, domesticated animals, and
even toppled houses, because people have not firmly secured their built en-
vironment.272
To be sure, many postwar South Korean writers published creative work
celebrating Korea’s landscapes or depicting other relatively conventional in-
teractions between people and environments. These include Hwang Tong-
gyu, whose poetry often idealizes human/nonhuman relationships; Pak Tujin,
whose texts speak extensively of the power of nature as a place of transcen-
dence and salvation of humanity; and Sin Sŏkchŏng, who wrote such pae-
ans to the landscape as “San san san” (Mountains, Mountains, Mountains,
1953), which reads simply: “Shot up / on the earth / the mountains are beau-
tiful // Mountains are beautiful / because they stay so high // Mountains are
more beautiful because innocent animals and flowers prettier than Helen /
80  ecoambiguity

live there together // All the time / I too, trying to become a mountain / stretch
my neck like a giraffe / and gaze into the distance / mountains / mountains
/ mountains.273 Yet only a month after writing “Mountains,” Sin Sŏkchŏng
composed “Chayŏn kwa Rousseau” (Nature and Rousseau, 1953). Begin-
ning with “Would you say ‘Return to nature’? / Where is beautiful nature
that makes you say so?” (Chayŏn ŭro toragaraguyo? / arŭmdaun chayŏn
i ŏdi ittki e / malssŭm imnikka?) this poem claims there is no “nature” to
which to return, because all the trees have been cut from the hillsides and all
the birds have vanished.274
The number of creative texts published in South Korea mentioning if not
decrying human abuse of environments sharply increased in the late 1960s
and early 1970s, when Korean literature turned more generally to expos-
ing the consequences of rapid industrialization. One of the most celebrated
works of this type is Kim Kwangsŏp’s “Sŏngbuk-dong pidulgi” (The Pigeons
of Sŏngbuk-dong, 1968). The poem features a pigeon that once enjoyed
friendly relationships with its human neighbors but now has been driven
from its home by new construction. It has no place to perch and its body is
constantly being shaken by explosions from a nearby quarry. As a result, it
has lost its ties to both people and the land; its heart, once flooded with love
and peace, now is literally cracked (kasŭm e kŭm i katta).275 The poem ini-
tially depicts the bird as attempting to comfort the people of Sŏngbuk-dong,
despite the fact that it has been dislocated. But the explosions prove too
much even for short visits, and it eventually must abandon this space. Many
texts on urbanization highlight the absence of animals in cityscapes, even
creatures such as pigeons that can flourish on human scraps. As the Persian
poet Sohrab Sepehri notes in “The Water’s Footfall” (1964): “The town was
visible: / The growing geometry of cement, iron and stone / The pigeon-free
rooftops of hundreds of buses.”276
While Kim Kwangsŏp’s poems are among the first in Korea to speak ex-
plicitly of damage caused by postwar urbanization and industrialization,
creative work by writers such as Yu Hyŏnjong and Mun Sunt’ae paved the
way for discourse on transformations of rural areas. Yu Hyŏnjong discusses
the ecology of the DMZ in “Pimujang chidae” (Demilitarized Zone, 1964),
while in the short story “Kohyang ŭro kanŭn param” (Wind Going to the
Hometown, 1977) Mun Sunt’ae exposes the plight of farmers whose lives
are radically altered when a new dam submerges their village.277 Kim Wŏnil’s
novella Toyosae e kwanhan myŏngsang (Meditation on a Snipe, 1979) picks
up where “The Pigeons of Sŏngbuk-dong” and “Wind Going to the Home-
town” leave off, featuring a protagonist who actively protests the disruption
to bird populations caused by the polluted Tongjin River. This text, regarded
 Environmental Degradation and Literature in East Asia  81

as one of the pioneering works of Korean environmental literature, highlights

the mistreatment of both people and the natural world under South Korean
military dictatorship. The factory cluster in the novel resembles the Onsan
Industrial Complex, which was constructed in the early 1970s and became
the source of Onsan disease. Meditation on a Snipe references and echoes the
style of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring.278 Even more important is the text’s
environmental cosmopolitanism: it argues that unless Koreans change their
interactions with environments, Japan’s Minamata and Itai Itai diseases soon
will plague Koreans as well.
For its part, creative work such as Kim Kwanggyu’s poem “Kohyang”
(Hometown, 1979) examines how such conditions change conceptions of
home:

Fish with crooked backs

live in the Han River.
Bearing baby fish with crooked backs,
even though they gasp, choking
they cannot leave the sewers of Seoul.
They don’t go to the sea.
A place which cannot be departed,
and now a place to which there can be no return,
is the hometown a place like that?279

The original Korean reads: 등이 굽은 물고기들 (tŭng i kubŭn mulgogi tŭl)/ 한

강에 산다 (Hangang e sanda)/ 등이 굽은 새끼들 낳고 (tŭng i kubŭn mulgogi
tŭl nak’o)/ 숨막혀 헐떡이며 그래도 (summakhyŏ hŏlttŏkimyŏ kŭraedo)/ 서
울의 시궁창 떠나지 못한다 (Seoul ŭi sigungch’ang ttŏnaji mot handa)/ 바
다로 가지 않는다 (pada ro kaji annŭnda)/ 떠나갈 수 없는 곳 (ttŏnagal su
ŏmnŭn kot)/ 그리고 이젠 돌아갈 수 없는 곳 (kŭrigo ijen toragal su ŏmnŭn
kot)/ 고향은 그런 곳인가 (kohyang ŭn kŭrŏn kosinga).
To most readers, “Hometown” is first and foremost a poem on the plight
of those living in a divided Korea: the border between North and South
has broken apart countless families and isolated people from their ancestral
homes; individuals living in the South whose hometowns are in the North,
and those living in the North whose hometowns are in the South, are for-
ever trapped on the “wrong” side of the border, at least geographically. The
poem’s setting on the Han River intensifies the sense of both prohibited de-
parture and forbidden homecoming. Because the Han River flows into the
Yellow Sea at the DMZ, navigating downstream is not an option. Moreover,
although the Han River’s primary source is the Namhan (South Han) River
82  ecoambiguity

in South Korea, its secondary source is the Pukhan (North Han) River in
North Korea, which originates in the Kŭmgangsan (Diamond Mountains),
one of North Korea’s most celebrated sites. South Koreans have been al-
lowed to visit the Diamond Mountains only since the late 1990s, and only
in a separately administered tourist region. The Han River is a literal conflu-
ence of North and South, but there is no physical return for those from the
North. Published less than a week before the assassination of Park Chung
Hee, “Hometown” also points to the traumas of being trapped within a toxic
social and political climate.280
Just as significant, the poem clearly addresses the ecological devastation
that characterized parts of Korea in the late 1970s. The first six lines (two-
thirds) describe the plight of diseased fish (tŭng i kubŭn mulgogi tŭl) and
their similarly diseased offspring (tŭng i kubŭn saekki tŭl); the former live
in the Han River, which runs through Seoul, and the latter gasp for breath
in Seoul’s sewers (sigungch’ang), one of which—at least in the 1970s—was
the Han River itself. Conditions decline rapidly: while the parents live, their
trapped children struggle for breath. The shift from “[they] don’t go to the
sea” (pada ro kaji annŭnda) to “a place that cannot be departed” (ttŏnagal
su ŏmnŭn kot) suggests that circumstances continue to deteriorate.281 It is
not simply that the fish do not leave the city’s polluted waters; likely incapaci-
tated by their deformed backs, and, in the case of the fry, unable to breathe,
they are not strong enough to do so. And so they remain trapped in Seoul’s
sewers. The following two lines speak more generally of place—of a place
which cannot be departed (ttŏnagal su ŏmnŭn kot), the polluted waterways
of Seoul, and of a place to which there now can be no return (kŭrigo ijen
toragal su ŏmnŭn kot), the pristine waterways of Korea—while the final line
asks whether the hometown (kohyang) is just such a site. In so doing, the
poem for the first time since the title points to the human condition; the word
kohyang appears only twice in “Hometown,” as the first word (the title)
and as the subject of the final line. The human plight can be said to frame
“Hometown,” and certainly people’s circumstances can often resemble those
of trapped and diseased fish. But like many postwar Korean creative works,
Kim Kwanggyu’s poem is best understood as grappling with both human and
nonhuman suffering.
South Korean creative attention to environmental degradation increased
in the 1980s and 1990s, as damage to ecosystems grew more severe. Un-
like elsewhere in East Asia, poetry rapidly became the favored medium for
addressing ecological degradation and has remained so into the twenty-
first century thanks to such figures as Ch’oe Sŭngho, Ch’oe Sŭngja, Chŏng
Hyŏnjong, Kim Ch’unsu, Kim Hyesun, Kim Kwanggyu, Ko Ŭn, Mun Tŏksu,
 Environmental Degradation and Literature in East Asia  83

Song Sugwŏn, and Yi Hyŏnggi, whose texts are discussed in the following
chapters.282 South Korean writers including Cho Sehŭi also have published
a number of novels and short stories that address harm inflicted on every-
thing from individual animals to entire ecosystems.283 As is true of other
literatures, some South Korean creative texts focus on human abuse of envi-
ronments, while others make only passing reference to it. But more so than
most creative corpuses, South Korean literature that addresses ecodegra-
dation depicts it as closely related to human-on-human abuse; as in Kim
Kwanggyu’s “Hometown,” literary texts frequently integrate discussions of
the former—particularly degradation resulting from war and industrializa-
tion—into those of the latter. This dynamic occurs in everything from Cho
Sehŭi’s Nanjangi ka ssoaollin chagŭn kong (Little Ball Launched by a Dwarf,
1978), one of Korea’s first novels to speak extensively of industrial pollution,
and Yi Namhŭi’s novel Pada ro put’ŏ ŭi kin ibyŏl (Long Parting from the
Sea, 1991), an account of Onsan disease, to the internationally celebrated
dissident writer Kim Chiha’s “Minjung ŭi sori” (Cry of the People, 1974),
a lengthy poem decrying myriad types of injustice, including environmental
degradation.284 While the narrator of Long Parting from the Sea accentu-
ates the bodily damage caused by heavy-metal poisoning and the narrator
of Little Ball Launched by a Dwarf plays up the high human cost of indus-
trialization, the speaker of “Cry of the People”—writing not long after the
1973 Yom Kippur War—gives more space to the economic consequences of
policies that increased the country’s reliance on imported oil.285 But these
three texts leave no question as to the deadly effects of pollution on people
and the nonhuman alike.
Other contemporary South Korean creative writing addresses changes
close to home that have worldwide resonance, including global warming.286
The second part of Hwang Tonggyu’s poem “SOS” (S.O.S., 1993), for in-
stance, features a speaker lamenting that the Han River no longer freezes in
winter, speculating that “winter must have disappeared for good,” and remi-
niscing about the days “when ice lived.” To be sure, his principal focus is his
own yearning to hear the sounds of cracking ice. He concludes “S.O.S.”: “I
want to go inside the sound of cracking ice. / Please send me inside the sound
of cracking ice. / Please send me to that dawn / when ice lived inside time. /
Ah, once again, / the sound of cracking ice!”287 But the speaker also points to
the dangers of a land without winter; houses in the village now remain damp
year-round, a situation that if not resolved likely will result in their disinte-
gration and the eventual crumbling of society itself.
In its early years Korean-language scholarship on literature and the en-
vironment focused largely on the output of Western figures such as Rachel
84  ecoambiguity

Carson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Gary Snyder, and Henry David Thoreau, all
of whom have been popular with South Korean environmentalists, writers,
and academics since the 1970s.288 Gary Snyder’s deep involvement with East
Asian societies, philosophies, and religions made his oeuvre particularly at-
tractive to South Koreans. But today scholars are increasingly reconceptual-
izing late twentieth-century Korean literature as deeply concerned with both
human and nonhuman suffering.289 So too are South Korean environmental
groups and the public. Since 2002 the South Korean Citizens’ Movement for
Environmental Justice has held an annual Environmental Book Festival to
encourage reading on the environment; titles for recommended reading are
drawn primarily from Korean and Western literatures but also include texts
from elsewhere in Asia. Like most literatures, that from South Korea gener-
ally does not propose explicit solutions to environmental problems. But it
does address many of the peninsula’s ecological dilemmas and engage with
the complexities of their origins, proliferation, and mitigation.

Environmental Degradation in Taiwan

People have lived on Taiwan and nearby islands for at least eight millen-
nia, but before the seventeenth century their numbers remained relatively
small, and there is little indication that their behaviors affected ecosystems
significantly. So it is not surprising that when Portuguese sailors landed on
Taiwan in 1544 they were so captivated by the island that they named it
Ilha Formosa (beautiful island) in honor of its verdant cover and abundant
natural resources. The first noteworthy human changes to Taiwan date to
early seventeenth-century migrations by mainland Han Chinese, who opened
spaces to agriculture.290 In the mid-1620s the Dutch East India Company
encouraged Chinese to move to the island and cultivate its land. When they
were forced from Taiwan in 1661 by the Ming loyalist Koxinga, the Dutch
left behind a population of 120,000 recently settled Chinese, as well as a
legacy of “crops, domestic animals, irrigation, and a land system for Tai-
wan’s agriculture.”291 Except for the deer population, which plummeted in
the 1600s despite Dutch prohibitions against hunting the animal, the island’s
species and most of its terrain remained intact. Koxinga used the island as
a base for potentially retaking the mainland, expanding farmlands and the
sugar industry.292 Migration, land acquisition, sugar production, and re-
source utilization increased under the Qing, who incorporated Taiwan into
China in 1683 and ruled the island loosely until 1894.293 Qing authorities
adopted policies aimed at minimizing disturbances to aboriginal populations
 Environmental Degradation and Literature in East Asia  85

and ecosystems, but these ultimately did little to prevent rapid agricultural
expansion throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By the time
the island was colonized by Japan (1895), the western and northeast plains,
uplands, and hillsides had been almost entirely deforested for cultivation,
and some portions of the eastern valleys had also been opened up.294 The
island’s population topped 2.5 million, most of whom were Han Chinese.295
Taiwan’s colonization brought with it sizable changes to human inter-
actions with ecosystems. The Japanese government almost immediately na-
tionalized all land not privately owned. This meant that most of Taiwan’s
woodlands came under colonial control. Japanese land surveys led quickly
to developing, with the help of Taiwanese, a modern lumber industry that
harvested Taiwan’s lower-altitude forests, especially camphor trees. Although
substantial, deforestation did not cause major problems during the colonial
period.296 In contrast, from the very beginning the sugar industry played a
central role in Japan’s expansion of Taiwan’s economic output, opening new
lands for farming and dozens of new factories for sugar refining.297 Likewise,
building Taiwan’s first hydroelectric reservoir in 1934 greatly disturbed lo-
cal ecosystems as it trebled the island’s electric capacity, marking the be-
ginning of its industrialization and significant transformations of its varied
landscapes.298
The retreat of the Chinese Nationalists (Guomindang, KMT) from the
mainland to Taiwan in 1949, four years after decolonization, increased the
island’s population by several million. This growth, combined with rapid in-
dustrialization and economic development under a military dictatorship that
smothered opposition and harshly punished dissenters, led to unchecked ex-
ploitation of the island’s ecosystems and unprecedented pollution of its land,
water, and skies. Demand for wood and foreign exchange increased sharply,
as did the quality of tools, machines, and transportation methods, resulting
in several decades of hyperdeforestation. With numerous nonhuman spe-
cies unable to survive such timberland fragmentation, changes to Taiwan’s
biodiversity were substantial. The human cost was also considerable, as the
number of people affected by pollution diseases and other ailments rapidly
multiplied.
Deforestation slowed in the early 1970s, when Taiwan’s industries be-
came self-financing and no longer required income from wood exports.299 In
contrast, tempering other forms of degradation awaited sustained environ-
mental campaigns. Taiwan’s antipollution protests and nature conservation
movement date to the early 1980s; surveys revealed that by the mid-1980s
nearly 90 percent of Taiwanese believed their island’s environmental prob-
lems serious or very serious, leading increasing numbers to demand curbs
86  ecoambiguity

on ecodegradation.300 But damage to Taiwan’s landscapes was addressed in

earnest only after martial law ended in July 1987. The gradual democrati-
zation of the country strengthened existing environmental movements and
stimulated new ones, most notably the antinuclear effort, which delayed
nuclear power plant construction.301 Taiwan’s indigenous tribes also played
important roles in efforts to improve conditions by protesting deforestation,
disposal of nuclear waste on aboriginal lands, and other behaviors harmful
to the island’s human and nonhuman populations.302 One of the most note-
worthy and prolonged cases involved the Taiwanese government’s decision in
1974 to build a temporary nuclear waste-disposal facility on Orchid Island,
off the southeastern coast of Taiwan and home to the Tao aboriginal tribe.
The government deceived the Tao, claiming it was building a fish cannery,
and admitted the truth only belatedly. Authorities have promised to remove
some of the waste from the island, but negotiations continue.
Late twentieth-century Taiwanese environmentalists were inspired by their
counterparts in other nations who had been successfully protesting environ-
mental degradation since the postwar period. They translated key Western
texts on damage to ecosystems, the first of which was Rachel Carson’s Silent
Spring (trans. 1969). This work’s relatively rapid translation belies the diffi-
culties plaguing Taiwanese eager to ameliorate and prevent damage to their
own landscapes.303 Taiwanese writers have participated actively in the island’s
environmental movements since their start, joining campaigns to rescue en-
dangered species and spaces, modify industrial development projects, and
limit human behaviors harmful to ecosystems.304 In addition, since the 1980s
they have published an impressive array of environmental nonfiction, much of
which has scientific roots: travel and historical reports that emphasize Taiwan’s
diverse ecologies, ecological essays, compositions that objectively address envi-
ronmental problems, and what commonly is referred to in Taiwan as “nature
writing” (ziran shuxie, ziran xiezuo). Definitions of the latter vary. The scholar,
translator, and ecopoet Yang Mingtu believes “nature writing” to be “pieces of
writing that record the phenomena of nature and the activities of birds, insects,
plants, and other living organisms in the wilderness . . . [and that] inspire peo-
ple’s love [and respect] of nature.”305 Liu Kexiang, Taiwan’s preeminent nature
writer, is careful to distinguish between this genre and conventional landscape
literature, emphasizing the former’s foundation in scientific observation and
engagement with scientific terminology:

The language employed in nature writings abounds with elements of

natural science and informative descriptions. Often there is a long pe-
riod of survey work from a fixed location in the field, with a special
 Environmental Degradation and Literature in East Asia  87

emphasis on the experience and time-space qualities of the actual set-

ting on the ground. The authors . . . are fully cognizant of the omni-
presence of metropolitan civilization, that there is no escaping it in
this world.306

The concern of Liu Kexiang and other Taiwanese writers of nonhuman-cen-

tered nonfiction with defining the parameters of this genre suggests a certain
amount of anxiety about its form, at the same time that it signals a key mo-
ment in Taiwanese writing about environments.
Many of these narratives celebrate Taiwan’s natural beauty and biodiver-
sity, emphasizing all that the island has to lose if current behaviors continue
unabated. In the 1980s nature writers often turned to their classical coun-
terparts, seeking inspiration from depictions of beautiful landscapes in texts
by Zhuangzi, Wang Wei, Tao Yuanming, and others.307 During the following
decade they frequently condemned exploitation of nature, exposing the dis-
turbing realities of environmental degradation. As the Taiwanese writer Lin
Wenyi’s essay “Zai huchenghe youan” (On the Right Bank of the City Moat,
1993) declares:

Cars roar by without a moment’s rest, their exhaust pipes disgorg-

ing carbon monoxide as they cross Zhongxing Bridge, from Taipei to
Erchongpu and Xinzhuang, from Erchongpu to Taipei . . . For many
many years the waters of the Danshui were as they were a century
ago, clear and sweet enough to drink, abundant with fish and shrimp.
But today there isn’t a bit of oxygen in the utterly dead Danshui River.
What kind of nourishment can travelers from the north [wild geese]
get from this river?308

Much nonfiction nature writing encourages various forms of resistance and

changes in environmental policy.309 In the last few decades this genre has
notably increased Taiwanese consciousness of the need to repair the island’s
ecosystems.310
Thanks largely to the efforts of committed environmentalists, writers, and
other concerned citizens, and despite increased economic growth, industrial-
ization, and consumerism, Taiwan’s ecohealth has improved markedly since
the late 1990s. Even so, many problems remain unresolved. These include
persistent pollution of air, water, and soil in certain areas, as well as threat-
ened biodiversity, largely because of unregulated industrial development,
high energy demands, and improper disposal of nuclear and other waste.311
Particularly worrisome is the development of Taiwan’s mountainous regions;
88  ecoambiguity

“garbage waterfalls” as long as 400 meters are not uncommon in the moun-
tains of central Taiwan, some of which have been dynamited to facilitate
transport of lumber. Taiwan is only one-tenth the size of Japan but annually
expropriates ten times more land for industrial use.312
Helping improve Taiwan’s ecosystems has been the export of nuclear and
other waste to China, North Korea, Russia, and the Solomon Islands.313 Tai-
wan also has relocated to other parts of the world corporations with sub-
stantial environmental violations. Most egregious among these is Formosa
Plastics, the world’s largest producer of polyvinyl chloride (PVC), whose
practices in Taiwan were so destructive and safety violations so appalling
that in the late 1970s and early 1980s large public protests over the compa-
ny’s proposed expansion led it to move some of its operations to the United
States. Its plants have caused untold damage to people and environments in
Delaware, Louisiana, Texas, and several other states. The American writer
and activist Diane Wilson’s novel An Unreasonable Woman (2005)—a pow-
erful account of the struggle against Formosa Plastics and its many American
facilitators—captures the irony:

Our great state of Texas handed an outlaw polluter over two hundred
fifty million dollars in incentives just to come here . . . We pay it. And
that money is going to a polluter that would have come here any-
way, because it isn’t the incentives or the tax packages that draw these
companies. What draws them is our cheap oil and our plentiful land
and our fresh water and the bays to dump their waste and carry their
plastic products hither and yon . . . Little rural community. Fishermen.
Not much education.314

That Formosa Plastics did not pay but instead was paid by Texans and other
Americans to relocate augments the paradoxes of environmental degrada-
tion. An Unreasonable Woman is a reminder not only of the multidirec-
tionality of ecological currents, both literal and figurative, but also of the
complex economic and ecological factors underlying people’s interactions
vis-à-vis both one another and their environments.

Taiwanese Literature and

Environmental Degradation

Taiwanese fiction and poetry have attempted to negotiate many of the same
issues as their nonfiction counterparts. Whether penned by residents of Tai-
 Environmental Degradation and Literature in East Asia  89

wan or by visiting Chinese, Japanese, or Europeans, most creative discourse

on Taiwan’s environments published before the 1950s comments on, even
celebrates the island’s ecosystems or applauds, rather than criticizes, their
shaping by humans; significant “damage” to environments is depicted as re-
sulting largely from floods and other seemingly “natural” disasters, not from
human behaviors. For instance, the eighteenth-century Chinese official Lan
Dingyuan, responsible for many early transformations of the island’s land-
scapes, believed his projects increased the island’s beauty: “Little by little,
malaria stricken lands / Were fashioned, and then refined, until they were re-
splendent. / The finer qualities of streams and plains showed forth in all their
magic, / Nor could the thickset growth stay undeveloped.”315 Two centuries
later, Nishikawa Mitsuru, one of the most active colonial Japanese artists
based in Taiwan, wrote Sairyū ki (Sulfur Expedition, 1942), a novella about
the seventeenth-century Chinese explorer Yu Yonghe’s journey to Jilong and
Danshui in search of much-needed sulfur.316 Yu Yonghe is portrayed as men-
aced by insects, birds, wind, floods, and hollows boiling over with sulfur,
but nevertheless he marvels at Taiwan’s landscapes. The text claims that this
expedition, always in need of firewood for its cauldrons and desiring a di-
rect trail to the sulfur hollow, works on cutting a path through “a prime-
val forest that for hundreds of years had escaped felling.”317 Nishikawa’s
story contrasts aboriginal with Chinese treatment of the environment. On
the other hand, later references to this forest in Sulfur Expedition reveal that
Yu Yonghe’s expedition inflicted only minimal damage. As the Japanese art-
ist Fujishima Takeji enthused in 1934, “[Taiwan is] a virgin place preserved
for us painters.”318 And most early twentieth-century Japanese writing about
Taiwan and other southern islands deploys the standard tropical images of
flourishing ecosystems replete with exotic birds, palm and banana trees,
flowers, coconuts, and moonlight.319
Colonial-period Taiwanese writers were somewhat more ambiguous
about ecological conditions and human interactions with environments, at-
titudes that were not surprising considering how the Japanese reshaped the
island’s landscapes. Returning home from Japan, the narrator of Yang Kui’s
Japanese-language short story “Shinbun haitatsufu” (Paperboy, 1934) notes:
“I gazed at springtime Taiwan from the deck of the grand Hōrai Maru. On
the surface it was beautiful and fleshy, but one prick would reveal a spray
of stinking, putrid, bloody pus [omote koso bibishiku himan shite iru ga,
hitohari atareba, akushū punpuntaru chiumi no tobashiri o mirude arau Tai-
wan no haru o mitsumeta].”320 The Chinese translation of this short story
accentuates both the island’s surface beauty and its damaged interior. It also
emphasizes that Japanese imperialism is responsible for its unstable position:
90  ecoambiguity

“This Jewel Island, under imperialist Japanese colonialism, had a sumptuous,

fleshy surface, but inserting a single needle would reveal a spurting of threat-
eningly putrid, bloody pus [Zhei baodao, zai Riben diguozhuyi de tongzhi
zhi xia, biaomian suiran zhuang de fuli feiman, dan zhi yao chajin yi zhen,
jiu hui kandao echou biren de xuenong de bengliu!].”321 In these lines, which
conclude the story, the narrator is most clearly alluding to his own hopes of
reforming economic and social conditions in colonial Taiwan and seeking
vengeance for the abuse of his family. But his comments also reveal the some-
times precarious position to which Japanese colonialism consigned Taiwan’s
ecosystems.322 In Ajia no koji (Orphan of Asia, 1945), a novel focusing on
cultural conflicts in the colonial period as well as the difficulties faced by for-
eign-educated Taiwanese intellectuals, the Taiwanese writer Wu Zhuoliu also
reveals the complex negotiations of colonial Taiwanese with both Japanese
policy and the island’s biophysical environments: “Taiming wasn’t the only
one who had changed. When he at long last returned home on vacation, his
family’s carefully conserved pine forest had been completely felled, adopting
a cruel appearance. Having heard the rumor that all forests were to be taken
over by the Japanese, his family had hastily cut down their trees. They then
learned that the Japanese wanted simply to monitor woodlands, not seize
them.”323 Here it is Taiwanese who destroy flora, believing that if the annihi-
lation of their forest is inevitable they at least should be the ones to deal the
final blows. But when the Japanese are revealed as having no designs on these
woods, or at least far less destructive plans than the Taiwanese had imagined,
what first appeared to be a defensive strategy takes on aggressive overtones.
Environmental concerns played only a small part in Taiwanese creative
work published in the first few decades of the postwar period; in those
years Taiwanese literature was characterized by anticommunist propaganda
(1950s), a largely Western- but also Japanese-influenced modernist move-
ment (1960s), and a populist, nativist movement (1970s).324 Since the 1980s,
Taiwanese literary production has been more diversified and often market
driven. Writing centered on the natural world has flourished in this envi-
ronment. Nature writers and other Taiwanese in the 1980s and subsequent
decades who speak of the nonhuman in their creative work draw at least in
part from the insights and achievements of the nativists, who vocally con-
demned key aspects of the country’s economic and social policies and focused
on lives and landscapes outside Taiwan’s metropolitan centers. Nativist lit-
erature generally is concerned with the plight of rural individuals, victims of
Taiwan’s increasingly capitalist, urban, and materialist culture. However, this
genre does not neglect damage to nature.
 Environmental Degradation and Literature in East Asia  91

Much late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Taiwanese literature

comments on or even celebrates the island’s natural beauties and nonhuman
vigor by glossing over ecological degradation (e.g., featuring a site known to
have been environmentally compromised yet remaining silent about its con-
dition or even depicting it as flourishing), or confining itself to evocations of
spaces that have not been notably damaged by human behaviors. These texts
include what commonly is regarded as creative “nature writing,” imaginative
writing that focuses on the natural world and often is penned by individuals
who also have published nonfiction nature writing such as ecological essays
and travel and historical records with an ecological focus.325 Also included
are writings in which relationships among human beings are the focus but
that interweave at least minimal discussion of the nonhuman.
In the last few decades many different types of Taiwanese creative works
also have decried or otherwise addressed environmental degradation. Tai-
wan’s literary artists, including those from the island’s indigenous tribes, of-
ten speak of the beauty of Taiwan’s landscapes, but they depict this beauty as
something that is on the verge of disappearing, if not something that already
has vanished or even vanished long ago. For instance, in the Taiwanese writer
Zheng Qingwen’s short story “Bian” (Braids, 1989) the first-person narrator
interrupts his description of the fishing habits of a man from his hometown
to comment on how much the landscape has changed in the last forty years:

Back then, if I ran into him on the street, he was always carrying a
creel. If he wasn’t going out fishing, he was returning from fishing, or
he was taking fish to the market. At that time the rivers weren’t yet
polluted, so there were still many fish in the lakes and rivers. If Jinchi
was returning from fishing or headed to the market, his creel was
always full of large eel and catfish weighing more than two pounds
and carp that were even bigger. These days you don’t see eel or catfish
that big.326

Likewise, the narrator of Zhu Tianxin’s novella Gudu (Ancient Capital,

1996), set in 1990s Taiwan and an intriguing exploration of the construc-
tion and deconstruction of multiple cultural identities, as well as a striking
example of intertextual literary negotiation, opens with:

Is it possible that none of your memories count? The sky back then
was much bluer, so blue it made you feel as though the ocean weren’t
that far away, pulling you toward it . . . the sun penetrated intensely
92  ecoambiguity

through clean air that had never been blocked . . . The trees back then
. . . could grow exceptionally tall and big, exceptionally green, re-
sembling those in countries in tropical rain forests . . . Summer nights
back then displayed the Milky Way and shooting stars.327

Ancient Capital is not “about” compromised physical environments, but

these early references to deleterious ecological changes—echoed throughout
the text—instantly alert the reader that more than individual memories have
been lost.
In fact, as the Taiwanese writer Yang Mu’s three-stanza prose poem
“Gao­xiong, 1973” (1973) suggests, a creative work need not speak at length
about ecodegradation to have it serve as a conceptual focus; at times, a brief
mention in a single strategic location is all that is required for ecological dev-
astation to pervade the creative work conceptually.328 Yang Mu wrote “Ga-
oxiong” three years after receiving his Ph.D. in comparative literature from
the University of California, Berkeley; he had decided to remain in the United
States after graduation to protest the totalitarianism of Chiang Kai-shek’s
regime. As Michelle Yeh has noted, he was particularly opposed to how this
regime repressed free speech, discriminated against native Taiwanese, and
compromised Taiwanese autonomy by making concessions to the United
States, Japan, and other foreign investors.329 The latter concern is prominent
in “Gaoxiong,” which features an individual visiting the free-trade zone by
Gaoxiong Harbor (southwest Taiwan) who comments sarcastically on the
disparity between the pride of a senior harbor official in Gaoxiong having
become China’s largest harbor and his own shame at seeing tens of thousands
of impoverished female workers whose undercompensated labor symbolizes
Taiwan’s economic exploitation. This text was so offensive to Taiwanese offi-
cials that within days of its publication it was torn out of the volume in which
it first appeared.330 On the other hand, it is not just people who are being
abused. “Gaoxiong” makes two pithy but important references to environ-
mental harm at Gaoxiong: in the second section it cites the senior harbor
staff member’s comment that when he first arrived in the area “the harbor’s
color was determined by war [zhei gang de yanse ruhe wei zhanzheng suo
jueding]” and in the third section it indicates that “waste oils are floating on
the water [feiyou piao zai shuimian shang].” The second stanza also remarks
on the decline of both Shanghai’s harbor and Taiwan’s Deer Harbor because
of excessive sedimentation. These lines cast an ecodegratory shadow over
the poem’s other more ambiguous utterances; the speaker suggests that the
unease permeating his being has at least something to do with Gaoxiong’s
growth and ecological decline. Written the same year as the oil crisis trig-
 Environmental Degradation and Literature in East Asia  93

gered by the Yom Kippur War, a time when Taiwanese planners were press-
ing industries to develop more efficient modes of production, “Gaoxiong”
addresses the nation’s overconsumption of foreign fuel even as it focuses pri-
marily on human abuse.331
Most scholarship on writing and environment in Taiwan focuses on na-
ture writing, both fiction and nonfiction.332 Yet when probing Taiwanese lit-
erature’s multiple relationships with environments it is crucial to consider
not only “nature drama,” “nature fiction,” and “nature poetry” but instead
the full range of creative texts that address environmental degradation, even
those that speak of it only in passing. Like its nonfiction counterpart, nature-
centered creative production tends more readily to increase awareness of the
nonhuman. Whether or not it speaks of ecodegradation explicitly, it often
augments appreciation of the significance of human relationships with envi-
ronments more than does literature with briefer references to flora and fauna.
As Nick Kaldis has noted, Liu Kexiang and many other nature writers believe
human experience of nature is

fraught with irreversible choice, permanent loss, and a knowledge

of the burden of being responsible for one’s own fate, as enacted in
one’s representations of attitudes and actions toward the environmen-
tal other. This awareness is the origin of an anxiety one finds at the
heart of much Taiwan nature writing . . . It is an anxiety that, directly
expressed or left implicit, runs like a shudder just beneath the surface
. . . Nature writing, at its best, creates and sustains unresolved states
of anxiety.333

At the same time, nature writing is not the only Taiwanese discourse to sus-
tain unresolved states of anxiety concerning the environment. As this book
demonstrates, creative works on ecodegradation that engage with ecoambi-
guity but are usually not considered nature writing—including texts by Bai
Qiu, Bai Xianyong, Chen Huang, Huang Chunming, Rongzi, Shang Qin,
Topas Tamapima, Xin Yu, and Yu Guangzhong from Taiwan—likewise fre-
quently exhibit apprehension.334 Taiwan’s dramatists, poets, and fictional
prose writers have published an impressive corpus that gives complex and of-
ten conflicting impressions of interactions between people and the nonhuman
in their own society, East Asia, and the world. Analyzing creative discussions
of those relationships that involve ecological degradation, regardless of the
genre in which they appear, gives us not only a more comprehensive picture
of Taiwanese literature but also a heightened consciousness of relationships
between literature and the environment more generally.
94  ecoambiguity

Without question, East Asia is experiencing considerable ecological unrest.

As In-Taek Hyun and Sung-Han Kim have argued:

High rates of economic growth, large populations, and growing en-

ergy demands are turning [East Asia] into an environmental “hot
spot.” How the region responds to its increasingly serious pollution
problems and increasing constraints on natural resources can have
major implications for quality of life, long-term sustainability, and
interstate relations within the region and beyond.335

In China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, as in most of the world, intentional

and immanent environmental problems are difficult enough to address;
slow-moving and unplanned events including gradual poisoning of air, wa-
ter, and soil, and especially such phenomena as global warming and species
extinction have yet to galvanize a reaction powerful enough to translate into
significant behavioral changes.336 Inspired by the Mesoamerican Biological
Corridor and talk of establishing nature reserves in the DMZ, experts have
proposed creating a Northeast Asian Biodiversity Corridor that would con-
nect critical habitat in Russia, China, and the Korean Peninsula and ideally
bring some relief to the region.337
Where then does this leave literature? And the study of literature? East
Asian creative writing has been addressing ecodegradation for millennia and
with particular urgency since the 1960s. Although intra–East Asian transcul-
turation of creative texts on human damage to environments has not been
as frequent as might be expected considering the many other postwar liter-
ary contact nebulae in the region, intercultural thematic and conceptual net-
works that address ecological problems are thriving as never before.338 Par-
ticularly intriguing are the many different forms of ecoambiguity that are the
focus of the following chapters. But in addition to analyzing and closely read-
ing literary mediations of the complicated and often conflicting relationships
between people and environments, the next chapters also argue for increased
attention not primarily to the cultures of any single nation or region, but
rather to the global cultures of environmental degradation, and to those of
their frequent subsets and facilitators: cultures of environmental ambiguity.
In the preface to his recent Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima,
9/11, Iraq, the Japanese historian John W. Dower reveals that while research-
ing this book, he found himself returning to “all the clichés about the unique-
ness of Japanese culture . . . and asking new questions not merely about Ja-
pan and the United States and other Allied powers all those decades ago, but
also about war as a culture in and of itself, and why it is always with us.”339
 Environmental Degradation and Literature in East Asia  95

Dower acknowledges that “culture,” in the conventional sense of “distinctive

societies bound together by shared beliefs, values, attitudes, and practices,”
is obviously important and that cultural differences matter.340 But as Dower,
and before him Peter Dale, Kosaku Yoshino, Yoshio Sugimoto, Harumi Befu,
and others have stressed, emphasis on cultural uniqueness tends to minimize
important variations within individual societies.341 Just as significant, focus
on cultural specificity, much less cultural essentialism, also can obscure the
even more important resemblances among disparate societies, resemblances
that allow us to understand more deeply our common humanity, and in par-
ticular the fundamental similarities of contacts between people and environ-
ments, throughout time and space, in life as well as in literature. Ecoam-
biguity regularly transcends cultural, national, and other divides, and it is
to literary analyses and close readings of the multiple expressions of this
phenomenon that I now turn.
two / Accentuating Ambivalence

Environmental ambivalence is a hallmark of the Japanese writer and activist

Sakaki Nanao’s poem “Let’s Eat Stars” (1988):1

Kids it’s true.

God
Made the sky for airplanes
Made coral reefs for tourists
Made cultivated fields for agrochemicals
Made rivers for dams
Made woods for golf courses
Made mountains for ski resorts
Made animals for zoos
Made cars for traffic accidents

Made nuclear power plants so ghosts dance

Made people so robots dance.

Kids it’s okay.

Wells don’t run dry.

Look, the sunset.

In the cultivated fields sunflowers,
In the sky red dragonflies.

Someone breaks out in song,

Let’s eat stars.

September 1988
Chūbetsu River, Hokkaido2

99
100  ecoambiguity

At once amusingly flippant and disturbingly serious, “Let’s Eat Stars” parodies
religious and other forms of anthropocentrism; it mocks the belief—articulated
in Genesis 1:1 and elsewhere—that a heavenly being created earth’s ecosystems
entirely for human use and that this deity expects people to conquer (i.e., ex-
ploit) them.3 Even more important from an ecological standpoint is the text’s
striking portrayal of environmental ambivalence: anxiety over human behav-
iors virtually certain to degrade the earth’s landscapes is accompanied by a call
to destroy ecosystems outside the planet’s biosphere. The poem suggests that
one of the very people uneasy with human reshaping of earthly environments
sees nothing wrong with literally consuming other celestial bodies.
As in many of Sakaki’s poems, the final lines of “Let’s Eat Stars” posi-
tion the poem in a specific time and place: “September 1988 / Chūbetsu
River, Hokkaido.” The text evokes the controversial dam constructed on the
Chūbetsu River (in the central part of the island) between 1977 and 2007
and the many arguments used to justify building dams more generally. The
reference to sunflowers in cultivated fields also points to human shaping of
environments prevalent in Hokkaido; the prefecture’s sunflower farms and
festivals are legendary.4 But the poem itself reaches far beyond Japan’s north-
ernmost island. Speaking generally of how humans both abuse ecosystems
and justify this abuse, and not specifying time and place until the very end,
Sakaki’s text addresses patterns repeated globally.
In the first two stanzas of “Let’s Eat Stars” the poem’s speaker attempts
to convince skeptical children, if not himself, that God created the natural
world precisely for people to visit and reconfigure, in part for sustenance
but largely for amusement. The second stanza’s second through seventh lines
move from the sky down to coral reefs and then inland to cultivated fields,
the rivers that feed into and sustain them, the woods that stretch beyond
them, and the mountains that reach back up to the skies, thereby bringing
the verse full circle. The eighth line speaks of animals, which inhabit all the
sites listed in the previous six lines and thus to a certain extent pull together
these disparate yet ecologically connected spaces. Referring in the fourth line
to “cultivated fields” (hatake) rather than simply “fields” (nohara) or “prai-
ries” (daisōgen; purērī), the speaker gives his first indication that he believes
God created not only nonhuman entities but also human reconfigurations of
them, a belief on which he elaborates in the final line of the second stanza and
into the third stanza. But the four lines following “cultivated fields”—speak-
ing of rivers, woods, mountains, and animals—return the focus to seemingly
less constructed nonhuman bodies. “Let’s Eat Stars” declares that these seven
things were made purposely for humans to use (and abuse) with their air-
planes, tourism, agrochemicals, dams, golf courses, ski resorts, and zoos.
 Accentuating Ambivalence  101

Significant here is that the poem does not implicate urbanization or industry,
the most obvious culprits of environmental degradation. Instead, Sakaki’s
text focuses on things that can give the illusion of harmonious interactions
between people and nature; agrochemicals, zoos, and even dams can benefit
the nonhuman, agrochemicals by stimulating plant growth, zoos by rescuing
endangered species, and, albeit more controversially, dams by creating new
ecosystems. Repeating the phrases “for” (no tame ni) and “make” (tsukuru),
the second stanza’s second through eighth lines insist on the validity of two
assertions: nature is not so much natural as it is constructed (made), albeit
by a heavenly being, and, even more important, it is constructed with the
express purpose of pleasing people. Where the Bible speaks in general terms
of occupying and conquering the earth and mastering the animals, “Let’s Eat
Stars” indicates how these directives might be fulfilled.
The second stanza’s ninth and final line adds an intriguing twist: “[God]
Made cars for traffic accidents” (kōtsū jiko no tame ni jidōsha tsukuri). In
the wake of seven lines on God’s handiwork, the poem’s speaker—following
up on the reference to “cultivated fields” in the fourth line—here suggests
that cars are as much God’s creation as are animals and their diverse habitats.
In so doing, blurring the boundaries between human and heavenly creations,
the text at once deprives people of agency and liberates them from responsi-
bility. The implications of this move become more pronounced in the third
stanza, where cars are replaced first by nuclear power plants and then by peo-
ple, while traffic accidents give way to dancing ghosts (presumably including
but not limited to the ghosts of the people killed in these accidents) and then
to dancing robots (likely replacements for these people and those harmed by
nuclear power plants). “Let’s Eat Stars” not only depicts the natural world
as created for human amusement but also blames some of the most deadly
“human” creations (i.e., nuclear power) on a higher power.
Most interesting, however, is the children’s response to this rhetoric. In
the fourth stanza the speaker switches tactics, suggesting that his audience
has not been seduced, despite the poem’s near numbing repetition. So rather
than continuing to justify what has been done to the planet by speaking of
the “truth” (as he claimed to be doing in the second and third stanzas), he
instead strives to prove simply that everything is truly “okay” (daijōbu). He
declares that wells continue to produce water, sunflowers bloom in culti-
vated fields, and red dragonflies take wing in the sunset. Hearing this, yet
still unconvinced, someone suggests that they should set their sights beyond
the planet earth: “Someone breaks out in song, / Let’s eat stars.” This un-
identified individual—perhaps one of the children, or an adult who has been
listening in—seems unconvinced that the earth can withstand current human
102  ecoambiguity

behaviors, however seemingly sustainable. But rather than urge that these
be curbed, this person instead suggests that people literally devour (tabeyō)
other celestial bodies.
“Let’s Eat Stars” follows technology’s evolution from the agricultural revo-
lution through the automotive revolution and the nuclear age to a time of
human and mechanical robots dreaming of colonizing the universe. The sen-
tence “[God] made people so robots dance” (robotto ga odoruyō ningen o
tsukutta) proved prescient in the final decade of Sakaki’s life: the dawn of the
twenty-first century saw the development of several types of sunflower robots
that danced and even followed human movements.5 Taking the reader from
cultivated fields to cars to nuclear power plants, the poem points to the increas-
ing ability of people to manipulate environments. But then, replacing cultural
artifacts with human beings in the final line of the third stanza—“Made people
so robots dance”—the poem highlights human impotence: people allegedly are
made by God for the benefit of robots, the very cultural artifacts they create.
It is unclear what if any control people have over their behaviors, not to men-
tion the impacts of these behaviors on themselves and the nonhuman. Taken
literally, the poem suggests that humans have very little agency, that they are as
malleable as the terrain they reconfigure. The people who earlier in the poem
appeared to be following a divine plan in creating airplanes, golf courses, and
ski resorts now are described as either dead or irrelevant.
Not surprisingly, these sentiments frighten the children, and they must be
convinced that they have nothing to fear, that familiar markers remain intact
despite relative lack of agency: the sky is made for airplanes, but it continues
to feature sunsets and dragonflies; the fields are made for agrochemicals, but
this allows even greater numbers of sunflowers to grow. These examples do
little to quell anxieties, leading to the exhortation “Let’s eat stars!” The poem
points to the paradoxical dynamics underlying calls for ecological imperialism,
including the colonization of space: believing local resources insufficient or
their use at best impractical and at worst threatening too much of the familiar,
societies set their sights on larger, distant spaces. Anxiety over changes to some
environments is precisely what justifies obliterating others. Sakaki’s poem sug-
gests that it is none other than individuals uncomfortable with how people are
manipulating the earth who urge the destruction of other celestial bodies.

Ambivalence

To be sure, the clearest ambiguities in human attitudes toward the natural

world, especially attitudes about the ideal relationships of people with en-
 Accentuating Ambivalence  103

vironments, occur not within individuals, as in Sakaki’s poem, but instead

between seemingly cohesive groups with opposing ideologies. Logging lobby-
ists usually have very different beliefs about woodlands from forest preserva-
tionists; industrial fishers often have very different perceptions of marine life
from indigenous fishers. Less noticeable are attitudinal ambivalences within
groups: some forest preservationists believe that wide swaths of forest should
be completely off limits to people while others think that people should spend
more time in wooded areas; some industrial fishers urge voluntary conser-
vation while others promote trawling even in prime breeding waters. Most
concealed but arguably most significant are the internal conflicts in attitude
that any one individual might hold, consciously or unconsciously, toward
the nonhuman. Sakaki’s poem suggests an extreme example: an individual
concerned about manipulating the surface of the earth who nevertheless sees
nothing wrong with literally consuming other planets. More common is the
indigenous fisher who proclaims love of nature yet who might or might not
recognize the conflict between this fondness and his belief that nature exists
for his benefit, even to the point of depleting stock. And the logging lobbyist
who thinks that people have the right to fell trees at will might or might not
recognize the disjuncture between this attitude and her deep affection for the
flowering dogwoods that line her property. Even when acknowledged, this
ambivalence often is simply taken for granted.
Individuals and groups can have at once positive, negative, uncertain, or
apathetic emotions about different species; individuals and groups also can
have multiple views about a single species, or about the natural world writ
large. Just as frequently, a single species will induce positive outlooks in some
people, negative views in some people, uncertainty in others, and no dis-
cernable attitudes in still others. Some emotions change regularly, others less
so, but few are unvarying across time and space. Adding further ambiguity,
understandings of what constitutes “positive,” “negative,” “uncertain,” and
“apathetic” can be very flexible. Also diverging significantly are beliefs and
perceptions about people’s interactions with surroundings. With social stan-
dards forever in flux, perceptions of (in)appropriate lifestyles and of what
defines (ir)responsible behavior vis-à-vis environments alter regularly and
often are contradictory. Viewpoints vary on what constitutes consequential
change to environments and which changes degrade, maintain, or enhance
ecosystems. Perceptions also differ on whether changes should be prevented,
encouraged, condemned, overlooked, or celebrated; whether changes are
mitigated by other changes; and whether changes should be changed, and
how and by whom.
Creative works addressing human damage to environments highlight
104  ecoambiguity

many of these expressions of ambivalence, often exploring their etiologies

and their connections with empirical conditions and human behaviors.6
These literary texts reveal attitudes toward the nonhuman as inconsistent
both within and among individuals and groups. In so doing they point to the
complex and often conflicting psychologies underlying much human-induced
ecodegradation. Yet complicating matters is the fact that literature frequently
does not speak explicitly of internal ambivalences: narrators are often as
complicit as their characters in focusing instead on intergroup difference. By
teasing out disparities within groups and individuals, this chapter offers nu-
anced understandings of texts, writers, and their environmental and literary
milieus, and it provides new ways of analyzing creative discourse on ecodeg-
radation, and ultimately of comprehending ecodegradation itself.
Especially intriguing is how literary works concerned with environmental
damage demonstrate the ease with which an individual or group can simul-
taneously admire a species or a landscape yet accept or even in extreme cases
celebrate its destruction. Such internal ambivalence often is overshadowed
by the more obvious discrepancies between the attitudes of those who are
responsible for major damage to environments and the outlooks of those
who directly suffer from and protest this destruction.7 The former—whether
governments, corporations, colonizers, or wealthy tourists—frequently are
outsiders, relative strangers to the spaces they injure. They are often depicted
as technologically sophisticated, seeking profit and pleasure, and harboring
antagonistic attitudes toward nature, heedless of the damage they inflict. In
contrast, the people who suffer from the ecodegradation triggered by outsid-
ers are frequently portrayed as impoverished, undereducated, and less tech-
nically adept, but with deep ties to these spaces, many of which are imbued
with spiritual significance. Often such people are described as living in rela-
tive harmony with the surrounding nonhuman, a concord shattered with the
arrival of logging companies, agribusiness, commercial fisheries, factories,
and other large-scale polluters.
But living in harmony does not preclude inflicting harm. More reveal-
ing even than the disparities between the typical polluters and their victims
are the internal conflicts of attitude within groups and particularly within
individuals. Groups most affected by environmental damage nearly always
include persons who are complicit in it: ecodegradation, like colonialism and
other forms of oppression, in many ways relies on local collaborators. In fact,
as Japan’s Taiji dolphin slaughter and Yanba Dam controversies both demon-
strate, local peoples can be among the most vocal enthusiasts for projects in-
volving significant environmental harm, often because of cherished traditions
or the promise of economic benefit. The latter explains the concern of some
 Accentuating Ambivalence  105

rural Japanese in the wake of the March 2011 Fukushima catastrophe, not
that the nuclear plants slated for their towns will be built as planned, but in-
stead that these facilities will not be constructed.8 Likewise, groups that spoil
landscapes usually include members who urge restraint on activities most
detrimental to ecosystems. Also important are the conflicting beliefs, percep-
tions, and emotions toward environments that individuals exhibit, whether
they revile anthropogenic damage, deny it, or justify it. Most notable is how
often denunciations of ecodegradation can be laced with anthropocentrism,
showing that people tend to regard the planet largely in terms of human
experiences and values.
Such subtleties of environmental ambivalence radically complicate the
schisms, indeed chasms conventionally mapped out by narrators, charac-
ters, critics, and activists between “lovers” and “haters” of nature, between
“green” and “antienvironmental” consciousness. These subtleties reveal the
snares of starkly opposed analytical categories and bring to light underex-
plored possibilities for more refined understandings of how people relate to
their surroundings. If translated into changed behaviors, some of these un-
derstandings could potentially slow human transformations of environments.
No ecosystem consists entirely of healthy, flourishing components. Vi-
sions of environments with or without people as stable, whole, or integrated
are misguided; landscapes are always changing, certain parts thriving at oth-
ers’ expense or disintegrating to their benefit.9 The human population and
per capita impact on surroundings have grown greatly since the early twen-
tieth century. These increases, often seen as inevitable and difficult if not
impossible to control, pose problems for remediating damage and preventing
further degradation of environments. Marilyn M. Cooper argues that “In the
broadest sense, the question that drives the environmental movement is how
to resolve the contradiction between the lifestyle of modern industrial society
and the continued existence of [diverse] life on earth.”10 This concept needs
to be broadened further: all people and societies, no matter how seemingly
“ecofriendly,” affect one another and the nonhuman. One objective of envi-
ronmental discourse is to conceptualize ecosystems where the imputed needs
of the nonhuman are better integrated with real human needs and desires.11
Literary works invoking damaged ecosystems frequently negotiate the
conflicts that arise between people’s (supposed) needs and those of the non-
human; these creative texts often also mediate conflicts among the (supposed)
needs of different individuals and groups. Narrators and characters often
bluntly contrast the attitudes of environmentally oriented individuals with
those who blatantly exploit the nonhuman: one common paradigm is cele-
brating the beliefs, emotions, and perceptions of local farmers and fishers, in-
106  ecoambiguity

cluding indigenous peoples, while condemning those of government and cor-

porate officials. In such an approach, the inner environmental ambivalence
of both parties goes unnoticed. But conflicting attitudes, particularly within
people with deeper emotional and physical ties to damaged landscapes, are
a key part of discourse on human transformations of environments. Argu-
ments against outsiders’ abuse of animals, plants, and other parts of the natu-
ral world—whether articulated by a text’s narrator or characters—often are
accompanied by arguments advocating use of the nonhuman for personal or
local benefit. This discourse seldom explicitly justifies the widespread abuse
of ecosystems or censures as hypocrites those who condemn destruction of
ecosystems. Instead it highlights the ambiguities of conceptualizing mutually
beneficial relationships with the nonhuman, let alone instigating productive
change.
The pages that follow analyze how creative works concerned with dam-
aged environments navigate an individual’s or a group’s simultaneous admi-
ration of, even attachment to the natural world on the one hand, and on the
other, acceptance of or even enthusiasm over the devastation of at least some
of its inhabitants. In this context, destruction of the nonhuman, whether
individual bodies or entire bodyscapes, usually involves putting nature to hu-
man use. This can entail everything from felling a “useful” tree for firewood
to removing a “useless” tree to make room for something deemed more “use-
ful.” Most of the creative texts examined in this chapter contrast the ideolo-
gies of two distinct groups: those with and those without long-standing ties
to a space subjected to environmental injury. Within these parameters I look
primarily at the attitudinal ambivalence demonstrated by people with deep
connections to the afflicted region. Without critiquing the outlooks or life-
styles of local farmers, fishers, and indigenous peoples whose ecosystems are
damaged by outsiders, the aim is to develop more sophisticated understand-
ings of how creative texts grapple with the attitudinal conflicts of the people
most affected by devastated environments.
Like humans everywhere, none of the people depicted in the creative
works examined here—whether wealthy or impoverished, whether relative
newcomers or individuals harboring long-standing emotional and physical
attachments to an ecosystem—could survive, much less enjoy a level of com-
fort, without making a mark on their environments. For this reason, it is
unclear whether any human community or individual can truly value the
nonhuman for its own sake; E. O. Wilson’s character Raff Cody is perhaps
the exception that proves the rule.12 At the same time, contradictions arise in
the discourse of those who regard ecosystems as wholly for human exploita-
tion, just as in the discourse of those, like many deep ecologists, who claim
 Accentuating Ambivalence  107

to value nature entirely for its own sake.13 Labeling groups and individuals
as “lovers” or “haters,” as “respectful” or “disrespectful” of nature obscures
the very real ambiguities that pervade human attitudes. Focusing on am-
bivalence—contradictions in emotions, perceptions, and beliefs—grants new
perspectives on how people conceptually shape the shaping of environments.

Reconceptualizing Use

Striking environmental ambivalence appears in creative works that address

the conflicting attitudes toward nature held by people with enduring ties to
ecosystems mutilated by outsiders. Deep emotional and physical attachments
to their surroundings lead the local fishers, whalers, and hunters in the Japa-
nese writers Ishimure Michiko’s Sea of Suffering (1969), Ogata Masato and
Ōiwa Keibō’s Rowing the Boat of the Eternal World (1996) and Rowing the
Eternal Sea (2001), and Nitta Jirō’s Tale of Alaska (1974) to believe these
spaces are their own, to use for their benefit, regardless of the potential con-
sequences for both themselves and the natural world.14 The most readily ap-
parent contradiction addressed by Ishimure’s, Ogata and Ōiwa’s, and Nitta’s
texts arises between the attitudes of corporate polluters, illegal whalers, and
apathetic government officials on the one hand and the outlooks of the people
whose environments they severely compromise on the other: the former are
relatively indifferent to and the latter deeply concerned with the well-being
of environments. More specifically, the former perceive nonhuman bodies
primarily as financial enablers, whether as sources of profitable marine life
(Tale of Alaska) or as sites to deposit industrial waste free of charge (Sea of
Suffering, Rowing the Boat of the Eternal World, Rowing the Eternal Sea).
In contrast, local farmers, fishers, whalers, and hunters believe flourishing
ecosystems are the source of their own health. But more intriguing even than
the attitudinal conflicts between these two groups is the often unconscious
ambivalence of local denizens: deep concern for the well-being of environ-
ments combined with the belief that they are entitled to take whatever they
wish from these spaces, no matter how imperiled ecosystems already are or
might become. Remarkably, all four texts posit disturbing congruencies be-
tween the attitudes toward the environment upheld by the outsiders most
obviously responsible for its degradation and those of local people who suffer
most from its destruction. Although the damage they inflict differs greatly in
intensity, both groups assume ecosystems are at their disposal.
This dynamic is unique neither to the narratives examined in this sec-
tion nor to twentieth-century Japanese or East Asian literatures in general.
108  ecoambiguity

It occurs in a wide variety of creative texts on environmental degradation

that pit groups who dramatically compromise ecosystems with which they
have limited ties against groups with deeper connections to these landscapes.
Analyzing the internal conflicts of these groups and individuals, conflicts of
which they generally are unaware and to which narrators rarely refer explic-
itly, offers fresh vision into ecological damage from all sources.

Suffering Worlds

As noted in chapter 1, Ishimure Michiko’s novel Sea of Suffering—Japan’s

most prominent narrative on Minamata disease and a widely known work
of environmental literature—is a moving exposé of human suffering in 1950s
and 1960s rural Japan.15 The narrator of Sea of Suffering interweaves tales
on her own experiences interacting with Minamata patients and their loved
ones with accounts of confronting politicians, corporate officials, and even
local residents in order to bring justice to individuals poisoned, disabled,
and killed by effluent from the Chisso factory in Minamata. She also in-
cludes narratives of Minamata sufferers told in their own voices and those of
their families and friends. By incorporating poetry, fictional and nonfictional
prose, medical, scientific, and journalistic reports, accounts of the rich cul-
tural history of the towns on Minamata Bay and the Shiranui Sea, and lyrical
depictions of the region’s landscapes, Sea of Suffering openly defies narrow
definitions of genre and, more important, underlines the interdependence of
scientific, social scientific, and humanistic interpretations of the experienced
world. Including local dialect whenever possible, the narrator accentuates the
distance of Minamata from Tokyo power centers.
Ishimure’s novel loops back and forth in time, denying human suffer-
ing a beginning and an end. Demonstrating an explicitly ecocosmopolitan
consciousness, it also denies suffering any clear spatial borders. The narrator
speaks repeatedly of the Ashio copper mine incident and Niigata Minamata
disease, the latter of which creates in her mind the vision of a “deep, fissure-
like pathway [fukai, kiretsu no yō na tsūro] that with a cracking sound ran
the length of the Japanese archipelago.”16 With Minamata located on the
western coast of Kyushu, well north of the Japanese archipelago’s southern
tip, and Niigata on the western coast of Honshu, far south of Japan’s north-
ernmost point, the narrator indicates that the tragedies shared by these two
cities have reverberated well beyond their axis; not only does the path (tsūro)
of suffering join Minamata and Niigata, it also extends hundreds of miles
farther, to Okinotorishima and Bentenjima, Japan’s southernmost and north-
ernmost points. The word tsūro is significant: it implies a well-established
 Accentuating Ambivalence  109

passageway, but one that separates even as it connects. Not only does it
call attention to the fragility of the Japanese islands themselves, fragility ac-
centuated by audible cracking, it also points to the country’s many chasms,
particularly between polluters and fishers/farmers, the wealthy and the im-
poverished, and the healthy and the infirm, gaps that threaten the stability
of Japanese society. Sea of Suffering also moves outside Japan, exposing the
Chisso Corporation’s controversial history in colonial Korea, including its
factories in Hŭngnam and damming of the Yalu River between China and
Korea.17 The narrator discusses the plight of Koreans under Japanese con-
trol more generally, referencing Korean deaths in the atomic bombings of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In her afterword, Ishimure also condemns Chisso’s
clandestine attempt in the late 1960s to export to Korea containers of poi-
sonous mercury effluent.18 Here and elsewhere the novel explicitly describes
Minamata disease as having regional if not global implications.
Like A Cheng’s King of Trees, introduced in chapter 1 and discussed at
the conclusion of this chapter, Sea of Suffering depicts government-sanc-
tioned environmental exploitation for economic development. But whereas
King of Trees takes place in a socialist command economy where govern-
ments directly order resource use, Sea of Suffering takes place in a develop-
mental state; Chisso’s close ties with the government are part of an industrial
policy organized by private businesses and the national bureaucracy.19 So,
not surprisingly, the narrator of Sea of Suffering explicitly condemns state-
sanctioned capitalism for encouraging the sacrifice of human life for finan-
cial gain. She repeatedly censures the unchecked desire for profits that led
Chisso first to dispose of its untreated waste in the waters surrounding Mina-
mata without ascertaining that this would not harm local residents, then to
continue doing so—as I discuss in more depth in chapter 5—even after the
toxicity of its emissions became indisputable; she denounces the analogous
greed that for decades enabled the Japanese government to condone Chisso’s
actions, in practice if not always in legislation. The narrator also frequently
reproaches Chisso and the Japanese government for failing to admit respon-
sibility, much less compensate or provide medical care for people suffering
from Minamata disease. And she asserts that not only the government and
Chisso are to blame; many living in the long-impoverished Minamata region
were so grateful to the company for improving their standard of living that
they turned against neighbors who had contracted Minamata disease and
refused to acknowledge their plight. As the narrator observes: “Minamata
disease is becoming more and more of a taboo topic among the people of
Minamata. They think that if they speak of the disease, then the factory
will collapse, and if the factory collapses, the town of Minamata will disap-
110  ecoambiguity

pear.”20 On the other hand, the novel does not depict this fear as entirely
unfounded. The narrator indicates that some residents of Minamata and its
environs were so impoverished before the arrival of Chisso that they fled
Japan for China and Southeast Asia, where they toiled as laborers and prosti-
tutes. Nonetheless, highlighting both the physical suffering and the emotional
isolation of Minamata patients, the narrator and many of the characters in
Sea of Suffering condemn economic, political, and social systems that make
it relatively easy to damage human lives.
The narrator’s and many Minamata residents’ deep concerns with hu-
man anguish and human-on-human cruelty contrast sharply with their at-
titudes toward the natural world. On the one hand, the narrator and most
Minamata patients idealize symbiotic, mutually beneficial contacts between
people and environments, contacts that in light of Chisso’s widespread pollu-
tion now exist mainly as memories or aspirations. On the other hand, these
same individuals show concerns about the health of the nonhuman primarily
because of its direct impact on human health. Moreover, some Minamata pa-
tients explicitly state their belief that the natural world exists for their benefit,
to do with as they please and to pass down to their progeny. To be sure, as
will be stressed below, neither the narrator of Sea of Suffering nor her char-
acters seem aware of their contradictory attitudes toward their surroundings,
unlike Ogata and Ōiwa in Rowing the Boat of the Eternal World and Row-
ing the Eternal Sea, analyzed in the following section. In addition, Sea of
Suffering does not explicitly discuss actual or potential effects of this type of
anthropocentrism (local people believing nature exists primarily for human
consumption) on environments. When Sea of Suffering was published, the
actual consequences of these conflicting outlooks appeared minuscule in the
areas around Minamata; they still do today, more than four decades later.
But factories, power plants, and commercial farming, fishing, and whaling
are not the only elements capable of damaging ecosystems; people with far
less sophisticated technology also can radically shape their surroundings.
The narrator of Sea of Suffering celebrates the harmonious interactions
Minamata residents once enjoyed with their surroundings; the novel’s open-
ing passage depicts the town’s ecosystems before Chisso’s arrival as healthy,
well-integrated places where people, their cultural artifacts, and the non-
human all flourished. The narrator accentuates the synchronization of hu-
man and nonhuman life by portraying them as undulating together peace-
fully: boats and baskets float on gently rippling water, while voices meander
through foliage. People disrupt the sea, but only superficially; their splashes
in open water are insignificant, while gushing springs enclosed in wells are
 Accentuating Ambivalence  111

safe havens for animals. In fact, as the narrator stresses in the novel’s opening
line, nature, in the form of typhoons, is more disruptive than people:

The village of Yudō surrounds a small bay where the waves billow
only with the typhoons that come once or twice a year.
In Yudō Bay, small boats, sardine baskets, and the like floated atop
gentle ripples that were akin to tickling eyelids. Naked children played
there, jumping from boat to boat and splashing in the water.
In the summer, the voices of those children rose through tangerine
groves, oleanders, tall sumacs with coiled bumps, and stone walls and
could be heard in the houses.
At the lowest part of the village, at the base of the terrace right by
the boats, there was a large old well—the communal washing place.
Small minnows and cute red crabs played in the shadows of the moss
on the stone walls of the large four-sided well. This kind of well where
crabs lived was without a doubt fed by a pure gushing rock spring of
soft-tasting water.
Around here springs gushed even at the bottom of the sea.21

Speaking first of a human settlement (the town of Yudō) as surrounding a

small, peaceful nonhuman body (a bay of the same name), then homing in on
human cultural artifacts (boats, sardine baskets), followed by people (chil-
dren) interacting with the larger nonhuman space (Yudō Bay), Sea of Suffer-
ing points immediately to the water as a peaceful site of human/nonhuman
intermingling.22 Although they take life from the waters, small boats and sar-
dine baskets seem almost to have become part of them. The second sentence
indicates that waters gently rise and fall, but not because of human intrusion;
boats float on rather than cause ripples. In fact, by following the references
to fishing vessels and equipment with mention of children jumping among
boats and splashing in the water, the narrator emphasizes how little impact
trawling has on the waters of Yudō Bay. Interestingly, even as boats take life
from water, they also to a certain degree protect the water from people; some
children jump from boat to boat rather than into the water.
Fishing boats and baskets are left behind in the third paragraph, as the
narrative moves slightly inland. Here children’s voices rise through various
nonhuman bodies (plants) and human cultural artifacts (stone walls) and
infiltrate other human cultural artifacts (houses) some distance away—water,
air, land, people, human creations, and flora all are tied together by voices at
play. Even more significant is the scene at the well. The nonhuman home (the
112  ecoambiguity

bay of the first two paragraphs) and the human home (the house of the third
paragraph) here blend into a home integrated in both composition and oc-
cupancy. Also noteworthy is how the stone wall and the house merge into the
stone well. A small body of water, the well is surrounded by rocks arranged
by people and fed by a rock spring; the gathering place of moss, marine life,
and people, this structure built and used by humans is also a comfortable
home for the nonhuman. In the fifth paragraph, which shares with the fourth
a reference to gushing springs, the spotlight shifts back to the sea. The narra-
tor’s careful choice and placement of images in these opening lines reinforce
impressions of human/nonhuman symbioses.
Taking the reader back to the well and then out again into open waters,
the next several paragraphs continue in a similar vein. The narrative lens
pans out: to Yudō, both town and bay, are added the names of adjacent bod-
ies of water, pieces of land, and human settlements. Then suddenly, in the
final paragraph of the novel’s first section, the narrator indicates that this re-
gion also is home to the greatest number of Minamata cases. After listing the
towns and villages most affected by the disease, she concludes: “The Chisso
Corporation’s Minamata factory had its drain in Hyakken Harbor.”23 This
abrupt turn is one of many in Sea of Suffering; the narrative constructs a scene
of enduring, near perfect harmony only to undermine it almost completely by
displacing fresh, gushing springs that nourish everything from small wells to
the sea with factory effluent that poisons ecosystems of all kinds.
Besieged in turn by devastated environments, people are both the pollut-
ers and the polluted. The narrator later explains, “Organic mercury never
appeared directly in front of people. It lurked densely where people went
through the routines of daily life—where they fished the mullets, caught the
octopuses under the clear sky, and angled in the night, surrounded by the
nocticulae. It infiltrated deep into the human body together with people’s
food, their sacred fish.”24 This passage reveals how the very animals on
which the fishers depended for livelihood and life, for physical and spiritual
fulfillment, now hasten their deaths, economic and corporeal. The narrator
emphasizes that mercury is not an obvious opponent; it does not simply ap-
pear in front of people for them to dodge at will: hitobito no shōmen kara
arawareta no de wa nakatta. Instead, it first “lurks densely” (びっしり潜ん
でいて; bisshiri hisonde ite) in the nonhuman and then, having been con-
sumed, “infiltrates deep into people’s bodies” (人びとの体内深く潜り入って
しまったのだった; hitobito no tainai fukaku moguri-itte shimatta no datta).
Repeating the character 潜 (hiso(mu); mogu(ru)), the narrator stresses not
only mercury’s stealthy invasion but also its deep penetration of both hu-
mans and animals. Yet this reality, even when recognized, does not dampen
 Accentuating Ambivalence  113

local people’s deep emotional attachments to poisoned waters and animals.

For instance, as Yuki, one of the patients, exclaims: “Is there anything more
beautiful than fish? . . . I believe the Palace of the Dragon King [ryūgū] really
does exist on the bottom of the sea. I’m sure it’s as beautiful as a dream. I just
can’t get enough of the sea . . . I long to go out to sea again, just one more
time.”25 By evoking the Palace of the Dragon King (i.e., the palace of the sea
god), a frequent presence in myths and legends including that of the fisher
Urashima Tarō, whose reward for rescuing a turtle is a visit to this magical
place, the narrator points to a more innocent time, however constructed.
Also noteworthy is her conviction that despite what has happened to Mina-
mata’s ecosystems, not everything has been destroyed; if one travels far away
from the Chisso factory, great splendor can still be found. Asking rhetorically
if there is anything more beautiful than fish, Yuki underscores her wonder
for the natural world; she implies that even the magnificent, imagined Palace
of the Dragon King is not as glorious as these aquatic animals. The sea that
houses fish (in actuality) and palaces (at least in the imagination) pulls at her
ever more insistently.
The nonhuman continues to entrance the residents of Minamata, but for
the most part Sea of Suffering portrays it as discussed—by government and
corporate officials, scientists, journalists, teachers, activists, fishers, Mina-
mata patients, and the narrator alike—primarily in terms of its service to
people, whether as a vital source of human physical and spiritual nurture or
as a convenient space for dumping waste. Clearly, concern for human suf-
fering trumps concern for nonhuman suffering. People are alarmed by the
mercury levels in fish primarily because they depend on fish for nourishment.
Likewise, people grow worried when confronted by cats with visible symp-
toms of Minamata disease mainly because they fear the fate of the cats might
soon be their own; for their part, scientists study cats precisely because they
believe that understanding the suffering of these animals will provide insight
into human distress. Few passages in Sea of Suffering decry or even mention
animal suffering without immediately linking it to human trauma.26
These priorities are to be expected considering the severe human anguish
caused directly by fish and prefigured by cats; human and nonhuman suffer-
ing are connected much more intimately here than in texts such as A Cheng’s
King of Trees, where people might feel as though they too have been felled,
or incinerated, but it is the natural world that has experienced this torture
directly. Likewise, violence by people against people is a central part of the
Minamata story, one that, as the hybrid and whirling narrative structure
of Ishimure’s novel suggests, needs to be continuously repeated in words,
lest it be repeated in behaviors even more frequently than it already is. But
114  ecoambiguity

those characters in Sea of Suffering who believe nonhuman suffering worth

considering regularly suggest that this is because of its direct connection with
human distress.
Such privileging of human suffering raises several important questions.
How severely must animals, plants, and other elements of the nonhuman
damaged by people in turn harm people before people are moved to reme-
diate and prevent further devastation of environments? To what extent are
ameliorating and foiling destruction of environments deemed important only
when human health is clearly at stake? Ishimure’s novel emphasizes that, in
the case of Minamata disease, the people who become concerned about or
even protest ecodegradation nearly always have little to lose. This includes
those who have already become ill (Minamata patients) or even more deeply
impoverished (fishers with nothing to catch) as well as concerned outsiders
(journalists, intellectuals, artists) who champion causes without making sig-
nificant personal sacrifices. Sea of Suffering contrasts these two groups with
those threatened by economic catastrophe: Chisso, the Japanese government,
and the many local residents not afflicted with Minamata disease who are
terrified that Chisso will be forced to close its doors.
What these groups often fail to realize is that although they in some
ways have much to lose economically, they are not as far removed as they
might imagine from the experiences of those whose suffering is already vis-
ible. Most obviously, the residents of the Minamata area who oppose the
anti-Chisso protests are themselves at some risk of contracting Minamata
disease. Also important is the narrator’s suggestion that Tokyo—home to the
Diet officials who eventually are persuaded to travel to Minamata—might in
fact be just as polluted as the environs of the Shiranui Sea. Suffering as well
from overpopulation and overconsumption, especially of automobiles, the
Japanese capital hardly provides a benchmark of ecological health. As the
elderly fisher Ezuno notes partway through his rhapsody on the beauties of
the sea, discussed later in this section: “I heard that in Tokyo cars line up on
the roads, outnumbering people, who can’t walk on the roads. Houses and
people both are rapidly multiplying, and even sunlight doesn’t filter down to
them . . . They say the people in Tokyo live pitiful lives. From what I’ve heard
the fish paste they eat is made of rotten fish . . . People who live in Tokyo
never get to know the taste of fresh fish. They live their entire feeble lives
without seeing the sun.”27 Ezuno first claims that cars outnumber people and
then that people and their homes multiply rapidly, effectively filling up hori-
zontal and vertical space. City dwellers live under extreme conditions: their
homes and automobiles thrive, but they lack space, light, and fresh food, and
even their fish paste comes from putrid animals. Ezuno suggests, however un-
 Accentuating Ambivalence  115

wittingly, that Tokyo officials, already inured to environmental degradation,

simply take for granted, however unconsciously, much of what has happened
in the Minamata region. In fact, the area’s bright sunshine and relatively clear
skies can make it appear more ecologically robust than the Japanese capital.
On the other hand, if Minamata disease had affected only cats (i.e., if
people, unlike cats or fish, could tolerate mercury), would the fishers have
had sufficient resources to investigate why these animals were sick? More
important, are people who suffer or watch a loved one suffer from an illness
as debilitating and horrific as Minamata disease capable of reflecting on non-
human suffering? Should they be expected to do so? Sea of Suffering implies
that these three questions merit a negative answer and that this is part of
what makes preventing and repairing ecodegradation so difficult. The best
hope may be concerned outsiders, including the journalists, intellectuals, and
artists to whom Ishimure refers, who seemingly have less at stake. But the
narrator exposes these persons as fickle: their interest in human and nonhu-
man suffering lacks the deep roots required for finding solutions.
A concern for nonhuman health because of its link to human health
closely relates to the view that the nonhuman is in the service of humans,
a perception shared even by those with deep emotional connections to na-
ture. In fact, in highlighting such environmental ambivalence (respecting the
nonhuman and believing it to be at their service), Sea of Suffering unwit-
tingly posits certain congruencies between local people’s attitudes toward
the nonhuman and the outlooks of the Japanese government and the Chisso
Corporation.28 Japanese authorities and Chisso officials, like high-ranking
employees of most governments and corporations, believe ecosystems at their
disposal, to be used as they see fit. And in certain ways, paradoxically, so too
do the people of Minamata, largely because of their profound attachments
to these bodies of water.
Sea of Suffering cites Minamata residents as claiming that the sea “re-
sembles” or is “like” both their own garden, and, even more strikingly, their
own sea. The people of Minamata generally stop short of declaring the sea to
be “theirs,” preferring to focus on its similarities with rather than identifica-
tion as personal property, but their repeated assertions of near ownership put
them in some awkward positions. At times such attitudes stem at least in part
from desperation. As one of the local residents asserts, “I’ve neither rice pad-
dies nor fields to leave my family. Just the sea, which I think of like my own
sea [umi dake ga, waga umi to onaji yō na mon de gozasuga; lit. Only the sea,
which I think of as something that is the same thing as my own sea].”29 The
language could not be clearer. At the same time that this individual laments
his destitution, he reveals that it accentuates his perceptions of ownership;
116  ecoambiguity

lacking rice paddies and fields, he claims the much greater area of the sea.
Here poverty, not wealth, enables exaggerated declarations of ownership.
Other characters in Sea of Suffering liken the sea to personal gardens that
are in no danger of disappointing their owners. Yuki, for instance, reassures
her husband Mohei that they will have little difficulty finding fish. She re-
minds him, “I’ll take you to a place teeming with fish. I’ve been at sea since I
was three; I grew up on a boat. The area around here is like my own garden
[kokora wa waga niwa no gotaru to bai]. And anyway, they say Ebisu [the
Japanese god of fishers; one of the Seven Gods of Good Fortune] has deep
compassion for boats with women.”30 Not only is the sea nearly one’s own, it
is treated as a garden; harvesting the sea as one would a garden is not simply
sanctioned, but encouraged. Belief that Ebisu regulates the sea, or at least
that he helps ensure a steady catch, appeases concerns that the couple will go
hungry. But in so doing it also liberates Yuki and Mohei from responsibility
for this space. The area around her home is “like” her garden, but it is not
actually hers, so she is not responsible for maintaining its fecundity.
For Ezuno, the sea not only is the natural extension of people and their
property, from which they can harvest food at will, it also makes them be-
lieve the entire planet is at their disposal: “There was the sea, like a field
or garden stretching from our houses, and whenever we went, there were
fish [waga uchi ni tsuitoru hatake ka, niwa no gotaru umi no soko ni atte,
sakanadomo ga itsu itatemo, soko ni otto de gozasuken] . . . Out on the sea,
it’s as though the whole world is yours [umi no ue ni oreba waga hitori no
tenka ja mo ne].”31 Ezuno does not pronounce that people own the sea, and
he stops just short of claiming that the sea resembles their private gardens,
declaring instead that the waters stretch out from their houses like fields or
gardens of undetermined provenance (hatake ka, niwa no gotaru umi vs.
Ezuno’s waga niwa no gotaru [umi] and the waga umi of the Minamata
resident cited above). But these more ambiguous conditions stimulate more
grandiose understandings of possession: it is the world, not the sea, that they
believe their own.
Perceptions like Yuki’s and Ezuno’s leave little allowance for endangered
stock. To be sure, some fishers advocate gluttony, if only in jest, the narrator
noting that the favorite saying of the fisher Masuto was “A fisher who can’t
eat a bucket of sashimi in one sitting is no fisher.”32 But most who believe
fish a gift pride themselves on taking from the sea only what has been sanc-
tioned from above. Ezuno stresses that “Fish are a gift from heaven. We take
as much as we need . . . All our lives we have eaten what heaven has given
us.”33 And the narrator remarks that for Yuki and Mohei “the catch was not
terribly large; they spent their days fishing in moderation.”34 Together, these
 Accentuating Ambivalence  117

and many similar statements underscore the ready fusing of feelings of con-
nection with those of usership rights, a combination that is not inevitable—as
texts such as the Iranian writer Simin Daneshvar’s short story “Sutra” point
out—but one that is strikingly prevalent and can have potentially grave con-
sequences for environments.35
Indeed it is significant that Yuki and Mohei believe there is nothing wrong
with continuing to fish even when the supply of marine life has notably de-
creased; they are proud that they do not take more than they need, but they
do not stop to consider what will happen when what they need is more than
the waters can provide, a possibility that is not purely hypothetical. Imme-
diately before remarking that the sea is like her own garden and that Ebisu
is looking out for her, Yuki notes, “I remember that at that time [when Yuki
and Mohei were looking for fish] fish had already disappeared from the sea
around Hyakken. But I knew better than the Minamata fishers where there
were fish.”36 Not surprisingly, fish populations in Hyakken harbor, where
Chisso discharges its wastewater, have plummeted. Pockets of fish remain in
other locations, and people believe that knowledge of the waters, and guid-
ance from the gods, will help sustain Minamata fishers. But Yuki is seemingly
undisturbed about these losses and by the fact that she and her husband need
to travel farther to find food. Yuki appears unconcerned about both piscine
and human futures; the sea is so abundant and the gods so generous that
even if one space is depleted there are infinite substitutes just a short boat
ride away.
And it is not just Yuki; the narrator indicates that over the years many
local fishers have exhibited similar tendencies.37 Earlier in Sea of Suffering
she describes the time-honored custom of gray mullet fishing in Minamata.
She notes that fishers long had “competed with one another for the season’s
largest gray mullet catch.”38 Beginning in the early 1950s neither they nor
their counterparts in nearby Tsunagi could get a single gray mullet to bite,
no matter how carefully they tweaked conventional fishing techniques; the
populations of other animals also decreased dramatically. The fishers talked
with one another about these strange conditions, but their discussions appear
to have become snagged in a debate about whether the depletion of marine
life in Tsunagi had anything to do with similar events in Minamata. The fish-
ers appear to be uninterested in investigating the reasons behind the sudden
disappearance of the mullet, shrimp, gizzard shad, sea bream, lobsters, and
other creatures on which they have long depended. Instead, they are said to
have sold their fishing supplies and invested in flashier nets, which were not
only ineffective but also quickly consumed by a rat population that exploded
because of a dearth of cats. Not long thereafter, the narrator reveals, the
118  ecoambiguity

newly bankrupt fishers began poaching to survive. Lacking the perspective to

seek more sustainable alternatives, they believed this was their only choice.
Without question, industrial pollution usually involves more rapid and
severe damage to the biotic and abiotic nonhuman than do conventional fish-
ing, hunting, and farming by local peoples. But corporate and local attitudes
vis-à-vis environments, particularly perceptions of appropriate relationships
between people and other species, are not as dissimilar as might first be as-
sumed. Sea of Suffering implicitly raises an extremely important question in
this regard. How different is it for a corporation to think it appropriate to
use the sea as a dumping ground from a town to assume it can use the sea
as its source of nourishment, even if so doing involves hunting down its last
remaining fish? Although these two outlooks seem to diverge greatly, when
translated into behaviors, as they often are, distinctions can become more
ambiguous. As Jared Diamond’s Collapse and many other works show, there
is little to prevent what seems to be sustainable use from eventually triggering
catastrophe.
The narrator of Sea of Suffering distinguishes clearly between the villag-
ers’ directly killing animals for survival (killing based on need) and Chisso’s
indirectly killing animals for profit (killing based on desire for revenue); the
former is portrayed as sustaining people, the latter as destroying both peo-
ple and environments. But a persistent question remains: what will happen
when nonhuman reproduction no longer keeps pace with human demand?
As Gregory M. Pflugfelder notes, paraphrasing Conrad Totman:

When we try to understand the dynamics of human-biosystem rela-

tions, it is well to bear in mind that how we humans think about
other animals (or about plants) carries little weight when compared to
the level of our capacity to manipulate or otherwise affect the world
around us. If we need or want something badly enough, and have
the capability to obtain it, it seems, we will soon devise a rationale to
justify doing so. Sadly, the record of human history suggests that it
is a matter of little consequence [as people see it] whether any other
members of the biosystem—including weaker humans—are inconve-
nienced by the enterprise.39

Sea of Suffering is foremost a stirring portrait of the physical and psycho-

logical anguish of the human victims of Minamata disease, one that includes
many painful passages on the suffering of Minamata patients and their fami-
lies. Employing local discourse, the narrator never allows the reader to for-
get that despite the environmentally cosmopolitan implications of Minamata
 Accentuating Ambivalence  119

disease, this illness was for many a deeply personal ordeal. Yet Ishimure’s
novel also sheds important light on conflicting attitudes toward ecosystems,
not only between but also within groups and individuals. Most frighten-
ing, perhaps, is how regularly these ambiguities go undetected. The novel
does not directly address the potential impacts of local people’s attitudes,
when translated into behaviors, on the long-term health of ecosystems. But
it does reveal attitudes toward the nonhuman as complex, and often contra-
dictory, particularly in cases of significant human suffering brought about
by a degraded environment. Manifesting ecocosmopolitanism most directly
are the narrator’s references to cases of Minamata disease in places far from
Minamata and her mention of other instances of human-induced suffering in
Japan and elsewhere. Likewise, the narrator acknowledges Minamata disease
as but one manifestation of the problematic relationships among people and
between people and the nonhuman, relationships frequently independent of
culture and nationality. Just as significant, but not addressed explicitly, is the
prevalence in many societies of ecoambivalence such as that found in Sea of
Suffering. Although often unrecognized, the attitudinal clashes exhibited by
Minamata fishers differ little from those of fishers and rural peoples in other
parts of Japan, East Asia, and elsewhere in the world.

Threatened Worlds

Conflicting views about the nonhuman, especially about relationships be-

tween people and environments in the Minamata region, are addressed more
explicitly in Ogata Masato and Ōiwa Keibō’s Rowing the Boat of the Eternal
World (1996) and its English adaptation Rowing the Eternal Sea (2001) than
in Sea of Suffering. Writing three decades after Ishimure, Ogata and Ōiwa
had more time to reflect on what Ogata, a fisher and activist from Kuma-
moto (Kyushu), has condemned as the “Chissoization [Chissoka] of human
society.”40
Both Rowing the Boat of the Eternal World and Rowing the Eternal Sea
accentuate many of the complexities of human/nonhuman interactions artic-
ulated in Ishimure’s Sea of Suffering, particularly attitudes of fishers toward
the nonhuman. Like Ishimure’s narrator, Ogata and Ōiwa depict the Chisso
Corporation and twentieth-century technology in general as damaging eco-
systems on a vast scale, shattering the seemingly harmonious relationships
people in the Minamata area once enjoyed with their surroundings. In fact,
the narrators explain, in the past there was no need for the word shizen
(nature), so intertwined did people believe themselves to be with nature. The
narrators’ subsequent anachronistic use of shizen suggests that dynamics
120  ecoambiguity

now are so different that even those closest to the land have no other way
of referring to the nonhuman: “We, as living things, live facing the seas,
mountains, trees, and plants. In the old days we didn’t use the word ‘nature’
[shizen]. It’s only in the last twenty years that it’s been used. There was no
need for it, simply because our lives were so immersed in nature [shizen]. We
thought of the seas and mountains as living things.”41 This comment also
indicates the gulf between the relationships of Minamata residents and those
of most Japanese with their environments: the term shizen became common
in Japanese discourse in the 1890s, eighty years before it supposedly entered
the vocabulary of the Minamata area.42 On the other hand, perceiving the
seas and mountains to be living things does not preclude harming or at least
taking life from them.
Many passages in both the Japanese text and its English adaptation high-
light discordant attitudes toward environments between government and in-
dustry on the one hand and local fishers and farmers on the other—predict-
able ambivalence for a narrative on industrial pollution. More significant,
Rowing the Boat of the Eternal World and Rowing the Eternal Sea also
reveal attitudinal conflicts within groups and individuals, fishers in particu-
lar. These conflicts, of which the narrators only sometimes seem aware, show
how difficult it is to understand the many nuances of human relationships
with other species.
Ogata and Ōiwa explain that Ogata’s father, a fisher,

often referred to fishing as a “duel between souls” [tamashii kurabe].

For instance, he would say, “Today the gray mullet were jumping.
But we couldn’t catch them all. Today we lost to the souls of the fish”
. . . He often would speak of a duel between the souls [tamashii
kurabe] . . . Fishing at night, we would be stabbed by stonefish and
bitten by crabs. When this happened we would scold them, saying,
“You old stonefish” or “Damn you, crab!” In this way, both fish and
crabs became partners in conversation. That is to say, we were all con-
nected, one with another. Fish, cats, and dogs—they are not the same
as human beings, but we talk to them.43

Most obvious here is the conflict between attitudes and actualities. Ogata’s
father speaks of fish as near equals, in some sense demonstrating respect for
nonhuman species, but his comments obscure what he and other fishers are
actually doing to these animals; fish and crabs are less conversation partners
than prey. While stonefish might stab and crabs might bite people, people kill
these and other sea creatures, and not always swiftly; in fact, conventional
 Accentuating Ambivalence  121

methods easily can lead to protracted deaths for wildlife. Ogata and Ōiwa
suggest that fishers using motorboats are inferior to those in rowboats, since
the former know little about tides and are “not on the same wavelength as
the world of fish.”44 Yet even though motorboats pollute the waters, the
fishers in these boats potentially reduce the suffering of individual fish via
modern harvesting techniques.
Just as noteworthy as the discrepancies between attitudes and actuali-
ties are the contradictions among attitudes. Minamata fishers believe them-
selves at once in conversation and in a nearly spiritual duel with sea life;
they believe themselves truly integrated with surrounding ecosystems at the
same time that they perceive their hunt to be both an intra- and an interspe-
cies competition.45 In Rowing the Eternal Sea and Rowing the Boat of the
Eternal World Ogata and Ōiwa contrast conventional rural and contempo-
rary urban attitudes toward the natural world. Yet in so doing they also
reveal these attitudes, especially conventional rural outlooks, as themselves
inherently contradictory: the people of Minamata, as depicted by Ogata and
Ōiwa, pride themselves on their respect for and their deep connections with
environments. But they also believe and act as though animals are theirs to
own, utilize, and ultimately kill, attitudes shared by fishers in many parts of
the world.
The fishers’ anxiety over their lifestyles suggests that they are aware of
these contradictions; unlike most industrial polluters and their collaborators,
fishers recognize a hazy distinction between a large catch and one that is too
large. Ogata admits: “When I catch a lot of fish [iwoba (イヲば) takusan totta
toki], I think the sea is just fantastic. But if I catch too many, I get scared [an-
mari toreru to kaette osoroshiku naru]. Taking fish is taking lives. So when
too many are trapped in my nets [anmari takusan ami ni kakaruto] I feel as
though my life will also be taken. It’s not just me. Other fishers say the same
things . . . Once every several years there is a boat with a large catch [takusan
iwoba totta fune] that doesn’t return to port. Our fears are well grounded.”46
Noteworthy here is Ogata’s choice of words, at least as transcribed by Ōiwa.
He first distinguishes between catching “a lot” of fish (takusan totta) and
catching or trapping “too many” fish (anmari kakaru). Fishers are said to
believe the former ideal, in contrast with the latter, which can cost them their
lives. Ogata then undermines distinctions between “large” and “too large,”
speaking of boats with a “large catch” (takusan iwoba totta fune)—not boats
with “too large a catch”—as regularly failing to return to port. Distinctions
between “large” (takusan) and “too large” (anmari takusan) are subjective,
but this is precisely the point. Behind all the claims and perceptions of trans-
species harmony and healthy symbioses lie fears that these are an illusion, if
122  ecoambiguity

not impossibility. Ogata suggests as much when he continues, “This sense

[fear that taking too much from the sea puts our own lives in jeopardy] is
surely the natural world’s way of stopping us from taking more than we need
[hitsuyō], and of warning us.”47 He implies that were the “natural world”
not to implant such fears in people, greed might lead them to take more than
they actually need to survive.
Yet in truth people already take more than they need to survive, embold-
ened by beliefs that fish are gifts from the gods, in this case Ebisu, and that
it would be bordering on dishonorable for them to reduce their catch, even
under extreme conditions. Contradictions between attitudes—fishers’ belief
that they are stewards of the sea as contrasted with their pride in not reduc-
ing their consumption of seafood—only magnify with the onset of Minamata
disease and the long struggle both to repair the damage inflicted by Chisso
and to prevent further human degradation of local environments. In a pas-
sage found in Rowing the Eternal Sea but not in the earlier Rowing the Boat
of the Eternal World, Ogata remarks that although he is loath to moralize
or give a précis of Minamata disease, the syndrome had three characteristics:
villagers continued eating fish long after everyone else had determined sea-
food too dangerous to consume; they continued having children even after
bearing sons and daughters with Minamata disease (a pregnant Minamata
patient can pass the disease to her fetus just as mercury in a mother’s body
can pass to her fetus); and they never killed anyone (they did not physically
attack Chisso officials and their collaborators) even though so many in the
community were poisoned. Ogata is proud of the villagers for restraining
themselves, wrapping up his comments on their behaviors as well as his own,
“We continued to eat fish, we continued to have children, and we did not kill
anyone [at Chisso]. This philosophy of ‘life-ism’ is all we need to stand up
against the destructive aspects of modern civilization. There was no need to
win a court battle. We had won before we began the proceedings.”48
There is no contradiction between the attitude of “life-ism” and celebrat-
ing restraint in dealings with company officials.49 Nor is there necessarily a
contradiction between a belief in “life-ism” and continuing to have children,
although many might argue that people should not be proud of knowingly
bringing into the world individuals likely to be condemned to a lifetime of
suffering, no matter how much they are loved.50 But there is a notable dis-
juncture between the attitude of “life-ism” and the belief that there is no need
to win court battles. In a display of empathy for nonhuman suffering rare in
texts focusing so heavily on human distress, Ogata comments that it would
be impossible to compensate animals for all the anguish they have endured.51
On the other hand, villagers, particularly those afflicted with Minamata dis-
 Accentuating Ambivalence  123

ease, have every need to win court battles, one of few effective means of
obtaining the compensation funds needed for a comfortable life. Even more
significant, particularly in light of Ogata’s remarks on nonhuman suffering,
is the contradiction between his attitude of “life-ism” and his pride in con-
tinuing to eat, and perhaps even sell, poisoned fish. As Ogata himself admits,
eating poisoned fish—whether done by cats, birds, or people—results not in
sustaining life but instead in serious illness and often death.
Deepening the ambiguity is that these fish first must themselves be killed;
when people are the ones doing the killing, the sea is transformed into a
battleground.52 In their titles Ogata and Ōiwa claim the world and sea “eter-
nal,” but the animals in these ecosystems are at the mercy of the fishers who
profess to idealize them. Ogata carefully notes that his family could have
survived quite well without catching fish; unlike the individuals featured in
Ishimure’s Sea of Suffering they own rice paddies, fields, and woodlots that
generate both food and income. Instead, he explains, “We placed complete
faith in [animal] life and received it with reverence and gratitude. We felt that
Ebisu, the god of the sea, was sharing his bounty with us.”53 Even more im-
portant, he says, is his love of fish: “Eating fish is part of my identity; I eat it
with great happiness . . . I even love the smell of fish; it is the smell of life.”54
A more cynical view might be that the smell Ogata enjoys is not the smell of
life but that of life taken, and that selling diseased fish makes one complicit
in the taking of human life. Several pages later Ogata admits that he “feels
apologetic” toward the fish he kills. But such sentiments do not lessen his
pride in his or his neighbors’ continuing to trawl for marine life.55 These
attitudes are particularly noteworthy in a man so in tune with nonhuman
rhythms, one who, going to the hills, claims that he “spoke to the trees and
plants” and that “They would answer from afar. Of course they wouldn’t
do so with voices. It was more like their swaying in the wind, for example,
teaching me what life is all about. Feelings mix. It’s that sort of sensation.”56
Ogata is hardly alone. Throughout history the hunter has been “a liminal
and ambiguous figure, who can be seen either as a fighter against wilderness
or as a half-animal participant in it.”57 Hunters, as well as fishers, are often
both.
In “Shinwa no umi e” (To the Sea of Myth), her prologue to Rowing the
Boat of the Eternal World, Ishimure Michiko reminisces: “I think of that day
[when Ogata launched his wooden boat Tokoyo (Eternal World)] even now.
Having harbored unprecedented suffering, and taking on the physiognomy
of myth, the Shiranui Sea is beginning to revive.”58 Without question, the
region has rebounded from its days as one of Japan’s most polluted sites;
Minamata has reinvented itself as an environmental model city, complete
124  ecoambiguity

with Eco Town (an industrial park with a focus on recycling) and Eco Park
(on reclaimed land in Minamata Bay). But as Ogata and Ōiwa emphasize in
Rowing the Boat of the Eternal World, Rowing the Eternal Sea, and other
writings, many problems remain. The conflicts, as they have articulated
them, are multiple. They exist between powerful outsiders intent on making
a profit and impoverished local peoples who are easily manipulated. They
exist between individuals afflicted by pollution diseases and people, both
outsiders and locals, who do not see themselves as affected by the presence
of these diseases, not to mention those benefiting financially from industries
whose emissions cause these disorders.59 They also exist between individuals
suffering from pollution maladies: different people with different hopes for
themselves, their towns, and their ecosystems.60
Most important, these conflicts exist—albeit often surreptitiously—within
individuals. In his epilogue to Rowing the Eternal Sea, Ōiwa notes that for
Ogata the “solution” is “a return to a spiritual world on Earth, in which
everyone and everything has a place. It is a world in which life is respected,
worshipped, and celebrated.”61 Yet despite Ogata’s and his colleagues’ deep
attachments to the nonhuman, despite Ogata’s claim at the conclusion of
Rowing the Eternal Sea that “Embraced by the mountains and sea / Ego dis-
solves; self and landscape are one,” addictions to killing and eating, at the
expense of human health, lives, and the stability of marine ecosystems, do
not conflict as drastically as might be supposed with the behaviors of out-
siders that Ogata and Ōiwa criticize so harshly.62 To be sure, the actions of
local fishers rarely have as concentrated an impact on human and nonhuman
health as those of large polluters; the fishers do not exhibit anywhere near the
same desire for wealth, technology, prestige, or power as do the Chisso Cor-
poration, the Japanese government, and many of their neighbors (individuals
particularly concerned with their financial futures). But even though they
pride themselves on their humility, the fishers too are not without culpability.
In both Rowing the Boat of the Eternal World and Rowing the Eternal
Sea Ogata comments, “For me, [the reclaimed land in Minamata Bay] is in
a word a place to apologize [sore wa wabi o ireru basho]. It is a place to
apologize not for others but for myself [mizukara susunde wabi o ireyō to
omou]. It is a time to think of my own crimes.”63 Rowing the Eternal Sea
elaborates on questions of individual and collective guilt. Ogata asserts that
even though he completely opposes Chisso and its practices, he bears some
responsibility for what happened in Minamata:

Before talking about the responsibility that should be borne by Chisso

or the state for Minamata disease, I had taken it upon myself to con-
 Accentuating Ambivalence  125

sider my own sins, my own responsibility for this incident . . . I am

forced to conclude that people bear the sin for Minamata disease and
that the fundamental responsibility for this incident lies in the nature
of our collective existence . . . From the perspective of the movement,
Chisso is the Other, the enemy, the assailant. For me, this viewpoint
evolved until I could recognize “the Chisso within.”64

Ogata also comments that he is uncertain what he would have done had he
worked for Chisso: it is easy to censure the corporation, but had he been its
employee he might well have participated in destroying Minamata’s ecosys-
tems. He calls attention to the ambivalence that pervades human understand-
ings of actual and ideal relationships with both people and environments,
ambivalence that in many cases accompanies the massive harm to both.
Even more significant, Ogata likens his own (potential) culpability to
those of Japanese who supported the emperor system and Germans who sup-
ported the Nazis during World War Two: “We can degenerate before we
know it. Human beings are weak. It was, after all, the average person who
embraced Nazi ideology and worshipped Hitler. Can any of us say with cer-
tainty that this would never happen to us? It was the average person who
betrayed family members and turned in friends.”65 Moved by his visit to
concentration camps in Europe in the mid-1990s, he contrasts Germany’s de-
termination to expose its war crimes with Japan’s struggle to repress discus-
sion of them, just as the Japanese government has attempted to whitewash
the Minamata disaster. Rowing the Eternal Sea here situates in global context
even more than does Ishimure’s Sea of Suffering the attitudes and behaviors
that led to catastrophic and continued damage to Minamata.

Disappearing Worlds

Worlding local environmental destruction is likewise a hallmark of the Japa-

nese writer Nitta Jirō’s Tale of Alaska (1974). This gripping novel, published
during Japan’s boom years of literature on environmental degradation and
drawing on considerable research conducted in both Japan and Alaska, is
based loosely on the experiences of Frank Yasuda, a Japanese man who dedi-
cated his career to improving the lives of indigenous Alaskans.66 But even
as it reveals great chasms between indigenous attitudes toward nature and
those of Russian and European-American governments and whalers, Tale of
Alaska—more so than Rowing the Boat of the Eternal World and Rowing
the Eternal Sea, not to mention Sea of Suffering—deeply complicates indig-
enous perceptions of ideal relationships with environments, particularly with
126  ecoambiguity

whales. Although some indigenous peoples, including Australian Aborigines,

deem whales too sacred to hunt, indigenous Alaskans have a long history
both of deep concern for the well-being of these animals and of believing
them at their disposal.67
A meteorologist by training, Nitta was at the time of his death one of
Japan’s most popular writers, known in part for his documentary novels on
Japan’s natural environments, some of which discuss damage to landscapes
while others underline the power of nonhuman phenomena.68 In Tale of
Alaska Nitta shifts the focus to the United States and its long and disturb-
ing history of mistreating Asian immigrants, Native Americans, and animals.
The novel depicts Frank Yasuda as moving to the United States in his early
twenties. After a difficult year in California, first as a farmhand and then as a
low-ranking employee in a cosmetics factory, he joins the crew of the Bear, a
vessel that patrols Arctic waters attempting to curtail illegal whaling. When
in early December 1893 the Bear becomes stranded on an ice field without
sufficient supplies to endure the winter, the ship’s captain sends Frank on
foot to Point Barrow, approximately 120 miles to the southeast.69 Rescued
by two “Eskimo” (esukimō) several hours from Barrow by dog sled, Frank
develops great respect for the region’s indigenous communities; having been
subjected to discrimination by white Americans since his arrival in the United
States, he decides to stay on in Barrow.70 Unlike many other outsiders who
have passed through the area, Frank adapts to local customs, learns the local
language, and quickly becomes an important part of the community, even
marrying an indigenous woman; the ease with which he learns their ways,
including harpooning, combined with his appearance, lead many to believe
him an Eskimo from a tribe called “Japan.”71 Frank devotes the next half
century to fighting for the survival of indigenous Arctic peoples whose lives
have been severely compromised by illegal whaling. First helping them regu-
late consumption of the chronically insufficient emergency provisions sent by
the U.S. government, he then teaches them how to hunt a variety of animals
and ultimately establishes a new home for them, the town of Beaver, Alaska,
south of the Brooks Range and about 100 miles north of Fairbanks.72 Frank
lived in Beaver the rest of his life, with the exception of four years during
World War Two, when like many people of Japanese descent in the western
United States he was forced to relocate to an internment camp.
Along with introducing the customs of indigenous Arctic peoples and ex-
posing the prejudice of Americans of European descent toward both the Jap-
anese and their continent’s primordial inhabitants, Tale of Alaska reveals the
great environmental crises facing Alaska and the Arctic in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries. The indigenous peoples depend on a steady
 Accentuating Ambivalence  127

diet of whales and, particularly after they move inland, other large mammals.
But the damage illegal whalers and nonindigenous hunters have inflicted on
local ecosystems makes it almost impossible for indigenous peoples to obtain
enough food to survive.
Nitta’s novel most obviously contrasts the attitudes of Frank and indig-
enous Alaskans toward animals with the attitudes of (other) outsiders: com-
mercial whalers (when Alaska belonged to Russia) and their illegal counter-
parts (after Alaska became part of the United States) off the state’s northern
coast and hunters of European descent in the state’s interior. Yet as is true
of Sea of Suffering, Rowing the Boat of the Eternal World, and Rowing the
Eternal Sea, just as significant in Tale of Alaska is the ambivalence of local
peoples themselves toward animals: they are deeply concerned about their
well-being but believe they are entitled to take from already imperiled eco-
systems what they think they deserve. On the other hand, unlike Minamata
residents, the indigenous peoples of Tale of Alaska are depicted not as deeply
attached to nature but rather as united in an eternal struggle against it. As
the narrator comments: “For these people living under severe nature [kakoku
na shizen], their opponent in battle was nature [tatakai no aite wa shizen de
atta]. Struggles among people were not unknown. But the indigenous peo-
ple knew from experience that good relations with one another were more
advantageous than fights when confronting magnificent nature [daishizen
ni tachimukau].”73 Absent are the peacefully lapping waters with which
Ishimure begins Sea of Suffering and even the close relationships between
people and whales seen in such novels as the New Zealand Māori writer Witi
Ihimaera’s The Whale Rider (1987) and the Native American writer Linda
Hogan’s People of the Whale (2008).74
Indeed, the ambiguities described in Nitta’s novel are more dramatic than
those in these other texts, largely because circumstances are more extreme.
Although many of the fishers and animals (particularly fish and cats) in Sea
of Suffering, Rowing the Boat of the Eternal World, and Rowing the Eter-
nal Sea suffer from a debilitating and frequently fatal illness, the indigenous
peoples and animals (particularly whales and caribou) featured in Tale of
Alaska both face eradication. The indigenes relocate not long before they
would have starved to death, while the animals are nearly killed off, by both
outside and local hunters. As is true of hunter/fisher communities almost
everywhere, peoples indigenous to the Arctic are angered at the decimation
of the whale population in waters they once had to themselves and in many
cases believe are theirs; they decry outsiders’ disrespect of local ecosystems.
But the indigenous Alaskans in Tale of Alaska also insist on their own right
to hunt whales; they do not think about how they too might be contributing
128  ecoambiguity

to the devastation of the region’s marine mammals. To be sure, as the nar-

rator highlights, the impact of indigenous peoples on animal populations is
much slighter than that of illegal whalers, since the poachers’ steam-powered
vessels, with their broader range and more advanced technology, allow them
to kill whales more efficiently. Yet it is noteworthy just how intent indig-
enous peoples are on capturing whales despite the latter’s rapidly decreasing
numbers; they care about the health of local ecosystems only insofar as these
ecosystems continue to provide them with the meat their communities have
been eating for centuries.
This is almost entirely because, short of uprooting their villages, they
appear to have no other choice. Their terrain is the converse of that of Mina-
mata and its environs, where the land is so plentiful and fertile that fishers
fortunate enough to own a parcel could abandon fishing in favor of farm-
ing. Instead, the indigenous peoples of Tale of Alaska inhabit a forbidding
environment of bitter cold and harsh storms, as well as long periods of dark-
ness. They are so well adapted to this environment that acclimatizing to life
in what many outsiders would consider the more hospitable interior of the
state—where the indigenous community, on the verge of starvation, eventu-
ally relocates—is a considerable challenge and results in significant human
distress. The interior also is a site of substantial nonhuman suffering. Thanks
to the sudden influx of “white people” (hakujin) into Alaska with the gold
rush, the caribou stock has been nearly depleted. Surviving caribou have
migrated to locales with fewer people, but they continue to be pursued by
newcomers of European descent and by indigenous tribes who long have
depended on them for survival.
Nitta’s novel thereby reveals an important paradox surrounding ecodeg-
radation, and more specifically eradication of species. The motivations of
newcomers and peoples who have long inhabited a space often differ signifi-
cantly. In fact, the shared plight of indigenous peoples and the nonhuman
is a common theme in indigenous literatures, many of which highlight envi-
ronmental-justice concerns and even genocide.75 But Tale of Alaska reveals
obsession with killing endangered animals as characteristic not only of inter-
lopers seeking quick profits but also of the people who rely on these animals
for survival. When and to what extent, if at all, can those most dependent on
a species change their own ways of life to forestall its eradication?
Tale of Alaska integrates remarks on the damage outsiders have inflicted
on Arctic animal populations with discussion of how indigenous peoples de-
pend on these animals for cultural and physical survival. The novel begins
with Frank on a 150-mile walk to Point Barrow from the Bear, a police vessel
dispatched to catch illegal whalers that has become stranded in an ice field.
 Accentuating Ambivalence  129

The narrator comments:

The Arctic Ocean once had been a treasure house of whales, a hunt-
ing preserve of marine animals. But when Russia controlled Alaska
[1733–1867], these animals had been overhunted, almost without re-
striction, and so their numbers decreased rapidly . . . [After it bought
Alaska] the first thing the United States did was to protect the Arctic’s
animal resources. Hunting sea animals was prohibited for all but in-
digenous peoples. In acknowledging the traditional right of the Eski-
mos, the United States made it possible for them to live.76

Yet despite several decades of American ownership and the creation of pro-
tected areas for sea animals, nonhuman populations have not recovered. The
narrator continues, “The whales were nearly extinct, a fate they shared with
other sea animals,” largely a result of illegal hunting by outsiders whom
law enforcement is seemingly powerless to disarm.77 Later in the novel the
narrator reveals that the U.S. government did not enact policies to preserve
whale populations as rapidly as his earlier comment had suggested. And once
these policies were in place, authorities did not devote sufficient resources to
enforcing them. The narrator remarks:

The fact that whales suddenly had become unattainable, even though
the American conscience had led to a sudden switch from an era of
overhunting to a policy of protecting whales, was proof that the re-
vival of a whale population that had showed signs of decline could not
be stimulated. It was proof that the whale population was decreasing
as before. That poachers had fueled this tendency could not be ig-
nored . . . [As the only patrol boat] the Bear was powerless.78

All hope seems lost.

This is not the first time that indigenous whale hunts have failed; seasons
when whales were impossible to find and when many local people starved
to death were not unknown to the ancestors of the people Frank befriends.
On the other hand, earlier hunts were unsuccessful not because whale pop-
ulations were devastated but instead because the whales had altered their
migration path. Changing weather conditions—including water temperature
and ice melting patterns—reconfigured the whales’ route; diverted from the
waters near Point Barrow, they temporarily swam beyond the reach of local
whaling vessels. Yet the whales always returned to waters accessible to indig-
enous communities. Circumstances now are very different. Both the narrator
130  ecoambiguity

and the indigenous peoples themselves speak not of a temporary displace-

ment of whales but instead of their near extinction. Witnessing an interlop-
er’s rapid slaughter of several pods of these animals, the Eskimos say one to
another, “What terrible things white people are doing! If they go on like this,
whales soon will be completely annihilated.”79 The most obvious struggles
here are between white hunters and both indigenous peoples and whales.
Less apparent but just as significant is the complicated and often contra-
dictory relationship between indigenous peoples and whales, brought into
relief by the circumstances surrounding the discourse just cited. The indige-
nous peoples are horrified at the “white man’s” slaughter of whales. But they
witness this slaughter not via binoculars from the shore nor from espionage
vessels trailing the illegal whalers. Instead, they are themselves out on the
sea hunting whales. And, even more ironically, they are precisely the ones
who—albeit unintentionally—in this instance make the whales easy targets
for poachers: they no sooner round up and encircle the animals than the Sea
Wolf appears and poaches them with harpoon guns, slaughtering them all.80
Although unlike in Diane Wilson’s An Unreasonable Woman local peoples
are not explicitly charged with reducing animal populations, they are in part
responsible.81 It is easy to understand the indigenous peoples’ conflicting at-
titudes toward whales. A decimated whale population threatens existence as
they have known it; the narrator goes so far as to bluntly declare: “If they
couldn’t catch any whales, they would starve.”82
Yet would they, do they really? Tale of Alaska highlights the dire situation
facing animal populations in the Arctic and calls attention to the importance
of whaling to tribal identity and survival. But while condemning the behav-
iors of illegal whalers, and actually that of most hunters without deep ties to
the places where they hunt, the novel also raises questions about the ability
or more accurately willingness of human societies to adapt their lifestyles to
changes in nonhuman populations. Nitta’s novel portrays indigenous peoples
who replace hunting whales with hunting other animals as improving their
lives, at times even thriving. The fur trade is lucrative, even though those
participating in it must contend with thieves who steal from indigenous com-
munities. More important, although the indigenous people who move from
Barrow to Beaver at first have trouble adapting to their new surroundings,
they eventually create such comfortable lives for themselves that even when
whales return to Barrow, not a single person heads back north; they have
come to enjoy the longer days and more moderate weather. Significant as well
is that many of the inland indigenous Arctic peoples who came to Beaver to
survive also choose to stay there even when the caribou reappear on their
 Accentuating Ambivalence  131

ancestral lands. Nonhuman life appears plentiful in Beaver. To be sure, so

many beaver pelts are sold here that Frank worries this animal will meet the
same fate as animals in Barrow did years before. To take the burden off of the
beaver he tries raising mink, but this project fails when hundreds of mink die
from an unknown disease. And so he returns to hunting beaver, which seem
more than capable of meeting outside and local demands.
Tale of Alaska does not explicitly critique the attitudes of indigenous
Alaskans toward their environments. Instead, it goes out of its way to con-
demn the attitudes of “white people” (outsiders) toward these spaces. But
Nitta’s narrative does reveal important aspects of attitudes toward animals,
particularly the outlooks of those most worried about their destruction and
most dependent on them for survival. The novel indicates that deploring
eradication does not necessarily deter people from believing themselves en-
titled to act in ways that hasten it; just as important, the novel suggests that
sometimes it is compassionate outsiders such as Frank who alone are capable
of preventing the obliteration of resident people and their nonhuman prey.
Outsiders do so by demonstrating that ties to a specific site are not unbreak-
able, that however disruptive to human communities, sometimes the most
effective means of dealing with ecologically compromised landscapes is to
abandon them, at least until they have time to recover.
Tale of Alaska is one of an important subset of Japanese-language creative
works that highlight the lives of Japanese residing in the United States. Nitta’s
novel reveals Frank as discriminated against because of his Japanese heritage,
but the narrator focuses more intently on Frank’s important contributions to
American environments. Ultimately, Tale of Alaska is less concerned with
Japanese experiences, even triumphs in the United States, than with environ-
mental crises—the devastation of both people and ecosystems—beyond Ja-
pan’s shores. The novel alerts Japanese readers to the encompassing damage
of landscapes at some spatial and temporal remove from their archipelago.
It suggests that the fate of whale populations in the Arctic easily could be
duplicated in Japan, where whale futures have long been contentious. Even
more significant, the novel’s exposés of the environmental ambivalence of
peoples indigenous to Alaska warn readers of all nationalities that ensur-
ing the survival of endangered nonhuman species—whether in the United
States, Japan, or elsewhere—is more complex than they might imagine. In
many cases peoples closest to and most immediately dependent on particular
nonhuman entities share with outsiders the perception that environments ex-
ist largely for human consumption. Unless countered, this pervasive attitude
can lead to destruction of nonhuman populations, even extinction of species.
132  ecoambiguity

Ishimure’s Sea of Suffering, Ogata and Ōiwa’s Rowing the Boat of the Eter-
nal World and Rowing the Eternal Sea, and Nitta’s Tale of Alaska eloquently
express the anguish of people witnessing rapid and profound changes to their
ecosystems, changes that have been enacted or condoned by more powerful
groups—governments, corporations, and more financially solvent and tech-
nologically sophisticated societies. These narratives most obviously contrast
outsiders’ attitudes toward environments with the attitudes of communities
who have deep ties to particular spaces. But these narratives also reveal con-
tradictions within the attitudes of both groups, particularly within the atti-
tudes of the latter: concern with, even deep attachment to a landscape often
goes hand in hand with the assumption that one has special claims to it—the
belief that one is justified in using it for one’s own benefit. Such contradic-
tions paradoxically undermine distinctions between the attitudes of outsiders
and those of local farmers, fishers, whalers, and hunters, even when these
two groups have very different immediate effects on environments. This envi-
ronmental ambivalence reveals some beliefs, emotions, and perceptions con-
cerning the natural world as readily shared, for the most part unconsciously,
by otherwise seemingly very different groups. The implications, albeit often
unstated, are profound: the task of discerning human attitudes toward the
nonhuman is in some ways simplified at the same time that recognizing al-
ternatives to such attitudes—or even the possibility of alternatives—is made
infinitely more difficult.

Protesting Protection

Ishimure’s Sea of Suffering, Nitta’s The Tale of Alaska, and Ogata and Ōiwa’s
Rowing the Boat of the Eternal World and especially Rowing the Eternal
Sea are concerned with events of substantial spatial and temporal reach.
The scopes of the Taiwanese aboriginal writer Topas Tamapima’s “The Last
Hunter” (1987) and the Taiwanese nativist writer Huang Chunming’s “Fang-
sheng” (Set Free, 1987) are more implicit; these texts focus on the plights of
particular landscapes, but the incidents they describe are not unique to these
spaces, nor is the environmental ambivalence they reveal. Like the narratives
examined above, “The Last Hunter” and “Set Free,” published the year Tai-
wan lifted martial law and just as Taiwanese environmental consciousness
was beginning to burgeon, both depict indigenous/local farmers, fishers, and
hunters fighting for their livelihoods amid government-enabled ecological
degradation. Yet different in both cases is the recent, official transformation
of devastated lands into conservation areas with strict limits on use. Char-
 Accentuating Ambivalence  133

acters in “The Last Hunter” and “Set Free” are for the most part spared
listening to denials that ecosystems have been damaged and official decrees
that merely delay environmental injury. Significantly, however, they are far
from relieved that the government is trying to remediate the ecodegrada-
tion for which it is at least partly responsible. Instead, they protest the new
conservation laws and actively defy them. As was true in the United States
in the wake of the 2010 British Petroleum disaster, when Louisiana residents
were outraged at the Obama administration’s temporary ban on deepwater
oil and gas drilling, in these Taiwanese stories the same individuals condemn
both the degradation and the conservation of a single space.83 Environmental
ambivalence is magnified, both between and within groups and individuals.
Much of the opposition to government conservation policies in “The Last
Hunter,” “Set Free,” and similar narratives stems from an inversion of the
NIMBY (Not in My Backyard) phenomenon: people decry lifestyle changes
mandated in the name of ecological recovery. These texts depict those who
long for healthy environments as loath to alter their own lives in ways that
will facilitate the project and in fact as advocating behaviors that almost
certainly will further harm ecosystems. Topas Tamapima’s and Huang Chun-
ming’s protagonists express deep attachment to particular landscapes, but
they also believe it their prerogative to use these spaces for their own benefit,
regardless of the ecological consequences. The Taiwanese stories focus on
damage to local landscapes, but their environmental possibility is vast; the
devastation they describe and people’s responses to this devastation are du-
plicated in sites the world over.
A member of the Bunun, based in central Taiwan and one of the island’s
largest aboriginal tribes, Topas Tamapima is both a celebrated writer and a
physician. Although outsiders (Japanese, Han Chinese, nonindigenous Tai-
wanese) have been writing extensively about indigenous Taiwanese since the
Japanese occupation, Topas Tamapima is part of the first group of indig-
enous Taiwanese writers who write in Chinese. Many of his essays and short
stories, including “The Last Hunter” and “Xiyang chan” (Sunset Cicadas,
1987), describe the challenges faced by Taiwan’s aboriginal peoples.84 “The
Last Hunter”—published in the early days of the indigenous rights move-
ment and part of the first blossoming of Taiwanese indigenous literature—
narrates the experiences of Biyari (Chn. Quan Guosheng), a Bunun hunter
from the Renlun settlement. Feeling confined at home, his relationship with
his wife Pasula tense because of her recent miscarriage and their continu-
ing infertility, he takes off one morning for several days of sport hunting in
the mountains. Target animals are difficult to find in the depleted highland
forests, circumstances Biyari attributes to the insensitivity of Taiwan’s gov-
134  ecoambiguity

ernment employees toward the marvels of the wilderness: a decade earlier,

when it sold farm and forest land to lumber companies, Taiwan’s Forestry
Bureau had cleared all the valuable timber and then set fire to a tremendous
expanse of forest; what remains likely will be transformed into a park for
wealthy urbanites. Biyari eventually bags an already deceased trapped fox as
well as a muntjac (a type of deer), which he shoots and then retrieves with
the help of his loyal dog Yifan. While exiting the forest he is stopped by a
policeman who chastises him and his fellow tribespeople for breaking long-
standing laws banning guns and hunting. The officer confiscates the freshly
killed muntjac and sends Biyari on his way, encouraging him to abandon
hunting and find a new career. The chances of Biyari heeding this advice are
slim, so reluctant is he to change his lifestyle despite the numerous physical
and economic hardships it entails, not to mention its potential effects on
already compromised surroundings. Unlike many members of his tribe he
refuses to work in the flatlands, even though so doing would allow him a
more comfortable existence.85
The narrator of “The Last Hunter” leaves little question as to the per-
sonal slights and linguistic indignities foisted on Taiwan’s tribal peoples by
bureaucratic officials, a result of the Nationalist government’s assimilation
policy, launched in the early 1950s, that eroded indigenous languages and
cultures and effectively designated indigenous peoples second-class citizens.86
The policeman who stops Biyari immediately assumes he is up to no good,
shouting out to him: “Hey, savage [fanzi], what are you looking at? What
are you doing? Are you a hunter or an arsonist?” The officer is of course
correct in assuming that Biyari is not in the forest simply to pick flowers and
relax, as Biyari claims is the case. On the other hand, there is little about
him to suggest he is an arsonist, much less a savage. When Biyari fearfully
responds, the seemingly uncomprehending officer, rather than asking him to
speak more clearly, takes this opportunity to criticize his Chinese language
skills: “What did you say? Your Chinese is terrible [Ni de guoyu taicha le].”
Likewise, when asked for his name, Biyari responds “Biyari,” to which the
officer counters, “I’m warning you, don’t play games with me. Give me your
Chinese name [guoyu mingzi].”87 Here “The Last Hunter” draws attention
to the linguistic displacement of indigenous Taiwanese, who have had little
choice but to become proficient in guoyu (lit. language of the country) and
even adopt guoyu mingzi (lit. names in the language of the country). Sig-
nificant as well in this regard is not only that “The Last Hunter”—unlike
some texts by Taiwanese aboriginal writers—is written in relatively graceful
Mandarin but also that nearly all of Biyari’s utterances are as well, except for
a curse he hurls at the policeman at the end of the story, which a footnote
 Accentuating Ambivalence  135

explains is from the Bunun language.88 Replicating the perceptions of many

indigenous writers, the narrative underlines how thoroughly aboriginal peo-
ples have been deprived of both physical and cultural spaces.89
Reinforcing the impression of people mercilessly displaced and stereo-
typed, the officer later asserts: “You mountain people are inherently ruthless
and difficult to change. The government has arranged it so that you don’t
have cares or concerns and can escape outside aggression. But you’re glut-
tonous and lazy.”90 Not surprisingly, the indigenous Taiwanese also harbor
prejudices against outsiders, including tribespeople who have left the moun-
tains to work for the government. At one point Biyari thinks to himself that
it would be pleasant to split a bottle of wine with his friend Luka, “sing
tales about the forest, and talk about the repugnant people living at the foot
of the mountain, curse those brown-skinned government employees, their
spines so changeable.”91 He does not state explicitly that these employees are
indigenous collaborators. But referring to them as easily manipulated and as
“brown-skinned,” when taken in the context of his later comment that the
lightness of the skin of the policeman at the checkpoint precludes his being
(indigenous) Taiwanese, suggests that they are from tribal communities. In
the end, however, the narrator of “The Last Hunter” does not devote as
much space to these prejudices as to those against tribal peoples.
“The Last Hunter” exposes the disrespect employees of Taiwan’s gov-
ernment show toward indigenous Taiwanese and, to a lesser extent, the re-
verse. The attitudes of both groups toward Taiwan’s ecosystems are not as
clear. Indigenous peoples and government employees, criticizing each other’s
behaviors and particularly attitudes vis-à-vis the nonhuman, both believe
themselves better stewards of the island’s environmental health. Yet calling
attention to inconsistencies between attitudes and behaviors, inconsistencies
among behaviors, and, most significant, inconsistencies among attitudes both
between and within these two groups and their individual members, Topas
Tamapima’s story reveals the fallacies of such self-flattering assertions. “The
Last Hunter” depicts tribespeople, especially Biyari, as experiencing deeper
emotional and physical connections with environments than do employees
of Taiwan’s government. But these connections do not result in significantly
different perceptions of ideal relationships with the nonhuman, much less in
heightened perceptions of the (potential) changes these behaviors inflict on
these environments; Biyari believes he should be allowed to use landscapes
to fulfill his personal desires, even when this means hunting the forest’s most
endangered animals.92
In fact, early in “The Last Hunter” the narrator describes perceptions
about environmental degradation as easily distorted, rendering the gap be-
136  ecoambiguity

tween attitudes and actualities at times quite substantial. Verbalizing the

sounds and sights of Biyari’s village shortly before sunrise, the narrator
contrasts the behaviors of animals with those of people: roosters crow and
dogs bark, while men chop wood and houses belch gas: “A small number of
households had already ignited their firewood, and their chimneys disgorged
black smoke. In this place there had never been anyone who thought that the
black smoke would create air pollution. This was because the tribal people
believed that the black smoke would rise to the heavens with the clouds.”93
The villagers have no idea that something so ingrained in their daily lives as
their heating and cooking fires could be poisoning the air. Topas Tamapima’s
narrator does not divulge his own perception of the smoke, but by inserting
the term “air pollution” (kongqi wuran) he suggests that he, or at least out-
side observers, might categorize the smoke in this way. This ambiguity opens
the possibility that villagers’ other perceptions of their relationships with en-
vironments are also somewhat misguided. “The Last Hunter” confirms that
some of the deepest conflicts in attitudes concerning the nonhuman exist not
between Taiwanese tribespeople and the island’s government employees, as
Biyari believes, but rather within the tribespeople themselves.
Biyari thinks of the forest as his refuge, as a place to be comforted and
consoled: “It would be fantastic if women were like the forest—secluded
and gorgeous. From inside the forest, from outside the forest, and especially
looking down from high places, the beauty of the forest is a harmonious
green unity [lüse hexie de zuhe], like the world of the Garden of Eden.”94
Biyari believes himself part of this heavenly, ultimately imagined space and
concludes that such feelings are foreign to government employees. Frustrated
that after a morning in the mountains the only animal he has encountered
is a dead fox caught in a trap, he worries about the future of the forest. He
fears that within several years this treescape will be filled with “the sounds
of people and the sounds of vehicles,” that because of the wounds sure to be
inflicted on the land by developers, “all traces of its animals will be destroyed
and hunters will disappear from tribes.” To forestall this seeming inevitabil-
ity, Biyari believes that wealthy government employees should be “brought
to the mountain to probe the forest’s secrets.” He argues that they should be
induced to

Listen by themselves to the sounds of birds, wind, wild animals, and

falling leaves in the woods; then walk into the valleys and look at the
magnificent cliffs; take off their shoes and wet their feet in the pure
spring water; admire fish that are gracefully swimming, not yet “en-
joying” human waste and simply having no fear of people. The gov-
 Accentuating Ambivalence  137

ernment employees would be awakened to the enigmatic forest, and

just like criminals in jail about to be sentenced they would regret their
initial lack of insight . . . Biyari tried hard to open his eyes, but the
tranquility of the forest, the warm sunshine, and the soporific shade
joined together and steadily engulfed him. In the end he was hypno-
tized by the magic of the forest.95

First these outsiders are simply to listen, to absorb the (ordinary) sounds of
plants, animals, and wind. Then, slowly succumbing to the forest’s allure like
Masahiko in Ishimure Michiko’s Tenko (Lake of Heaven, 1997), examined in
chapter 3, they are to look at the “magnificent” (xiongwei) cliffs and “grace-
ful” (youmei) fish and feel the “pure” (chunjing) spring water. Modifiers,
absent in the first part of the passage cited above, gradually become stronger.
Having experienced the wonders of the landscape, government employees
will awaken to the “enigmatic” (miban) forest and recognize the errors of
their ways. But what rouses outsiders hypnotizes Biyari; what impresses them
engulfs him; what is enigmatic to them is magic (mofa) to him. Here and
elsewhere “The Last Hunter” portrays Biyari and other tribespeople as ca-
pable of having deeper emotional and physical connections with the nonhu-
man world than government officials. In fact, the older tribal hunters believe
the Forestry Bureau responsible for setting the fire that a decade before had
devastated one of the region’s forests; the younger hunters cannot believe the
bureau could have acted so foolishly, but they are certain their parents and
grandparents are without blame; tribal peoples, unlike bureau employees,
“knew that life in the forest accounted for half of life on earth, most of which
was closely bound up with the hunters.”96
These intimate interactions are multifaceted: the landscape can hypnotize,
but it also can prove a difficult companion; interspersed with references to
the beauties of the natural world are those to the difficulties of living within
it. “The Last Hunter” begins with Biyari struggling to chop enough wood
to allow his wife Pasula to keep the fire burning in their stove. Frustrated at
his slow progress, and growing steadily colder, she remonstrates with him
for refusing to work as a temporary packer in the flatlands; she reminds him
that had he taken this job the family would have had enough money to buy
warm clothing, and they would have been able to stave off the chill that now
penetrates their home. Storms brew outside, where the clouds are “growing
thicker and rolling savagely down the mountain, just like an avalanche.”
Fearful of falling into a ditch, Biyari follows closely behind his dog. And after
returning home later that evening, thoughts of “avalanches and icy air” keep
him awake.97 But Biyari soon realizes that it is in precisely this weather that
138  ecoambiguity

animals come down from the mountain, their movement following that of
the clouds. And so, feeling suffocated at home, he decides that the next day
he will go hunting. The surrounding forest remains a refuge, from domestic
life if nothing else; as Biyari remarks soon after arriving in the woods, echo-
ing the sentiments of Minamata residents deprived of virtually everything
they have held dear, “If one day I get disgusted with that woman, well, I still
have the forest.”98 Of course, this space is not without its perils. The narrator
notes that had a bear stumbled across Biyari while the latter was hypnotized
by the magic of the woods he would have awakened inside the animal.
Yet with people actively hunting wildlife, this treescape also becomes a
potential site of nonhuman slaughter. In the minds of Biyari and the few
remaining tribal hunters, appropriate interactions with environments in-
volve not just soaking up their splendor, as Biyari wishes government offi-
cials would take the time to do, and enduring their unpredictability, as most
people living in the tribal village must do as a matter of course. Sanctioned
interactions also include killing animals for reasons other than survival. To
be sure, after some delay Biyari successfully bags a muntjac. But “The Last
Hunter” focuses less on the contradictions between his attitudes and his be-
haviors (believing himself close to animals yet taking their lives) than on
his ambivalent attitudes. Biyari wishes that government officials would open
themselves to the sights and sounds of the forests, that they would think
about more than the “thickness of timber.” Ironically, however, these same
officials are the ones enforcing gun control laws and hunting bans in areas
of diminished animal populations, demonstrating at least superficial concern
for the forest’s future. Biyari’s own attitudes differ greatly from those of the
officials, but not solely in the ways the reader might expect. Believing it his
right to hunt even in areas that have explicitly been decreed off limits, and
more important, in areas where some fauna clearly have been thinned, Biyari
flouts restrictions. He doggedly pursues an animal to bring home to his wife
to help him reestablish his honor.99
In fact, the passages surrounding Biyari’s paean to the forest reveal a man
intent on finding great joy in displacing some of its last living animals, not
to sustain tribal ways of life but instead to repair his relationship with his
spouse.100 The narrator indicates that Biyari enters “primeval forest” that he
uses as his personal hunting ground “determined to capture a wild boar or
muntjac to make [Pasula] happy.”101 Likewise, not long after waking from
the slumber induced by the forest’s warmth, shade, and tranquility, he spots
a large goat that darts away almost immediately. He sends his dog Yifan after
it, and when the dog fails to deliver, Biyari becomes even more determined to
capture an animal, any animal: “What a shame. Pasula enjoys eating goats’
 Accentuating Ambivalence  139

small intestines. I really have to bag something before dusk, otherwise when I
return home Pasula won’t give me her love, and Luka [another tribal hunter]
might be waiting for me on the road, wanting to make fun of me.”102 After
successfully capturing a muntjac, Biyari indicates that its meat will help his
wife regain some of the strength she lost after her recent miscarriage. But his
thrill at the kill results less from nourishing than from impressing his spouse:
“He was very pleased with having captured something so large. He stuffed
the animal into his knapsack and then sang a song celebrating the muntjac
hunt as he hopped and skipped to the cave . . . [After cleaning up] he set out
for home, relaxed and happy.”103 The policeman who detains Biyari asks
why he came to the mountains to hunt, since meat is readily available at
lower elevations. Biyari does not pretend to be unaware of this, nor does he
plead physical desperation. Instead, he responds directly: “I’m not a glutton.
My wife and I had a fight. She looks down on me and laughs because I can’t
find work. So I suddenly hankered after the forest.”104
That Biyari is proud of killing one of the few larger remaining animals in
the devastated forest, when surrounding spaces are experiencing no appar-
ent shortage, highlights his anthropocentrism, indeed selfishness. Biyari is
genuinely concerned that the “sounds of people” and “sounds of cars” will
fill the forests, displacing hunters and animals. His anxieties in some ways
echo those of early national parks planners in the United States and around
the world: protected lands need continued public support, something difficult
to sustain if the public is denied access, but increased public access, and the
greater automobile traffic that makes it possible, also threaten nonhuman life
in these spaces.105 Yet in certain respects Biyari misses the point. Despite the
relative absence of cars and people, hunters and animals already have been
displaced. To be sure, the narrator of “The Last Hunter” does not assign
explicit responsibility for the meager animal population in the forest where
Biyari hunts. Although tribe members blame the state for having destroyed
landscapes, the story portrays Taiwan’s government officials as having be-
come watchful guardians of the forests, protecting them not from outsiders
and their cars but instead from tribal hunters. The story concludes with the
policeman encouraging Biyari to “Turn over a new leaf. Don’t call yourself a
hunter anymore,” but Biyari silently vows to return, even without a rifle.106
So Biyari himself risks becoming, or at least more closely resembling, one
of the people he fears. He attempts to separate himself from the clamorous
nonindigenous Taiwanese and their automobiles. In many ways he is justified
in doing so. But the real difference between these visitors and hunters, at least
as depicted in “The Last Hunter,” lies not in fundamental attitudes toward
the landscape. Biyari’s overwhelming concern, despite his clear affection for
140  ecoambiguity

his hunting dog, is not protecting the forest’s animals; he worries about the
future of the forest only insofar as it is a space of personal rejuvenation and
empowerment, both of which for him involve taking nonhuman life.
“The Last Hunter” addresses some common ambiguities of relationships
among people and environments. Most important, it explores the ecoam-
bivalence, often unconscious, of those who seem to have the strongest affec-
tive ties with nature. Much writing on indigenous populations, both creative
and critical, highlights their deep reverence for nature and contrasts these
attitudes with those of the populations that have commandeered indigenous
territory.107 “The Last Hunter” problematizes such assumptions, proposing
that to indigenous peoples being part of a landscape means killing animals
that live in that space, even when they are scarce and their meat is not needed
for survival. Genuine appreciation for environments is not an impediment
but an enabler to believing oneself justified in taking life from already seri-
ously destabilized ecosystems. Without question, Topas Tamapima’s story
signals the many difficulties facing indigenous communities in Taiwan, whose
lives have themselves been altered significantly by government officials intent
on weakening tribal identities. But the narrative also reveals that interactions
on the island among people and environments are far more complex than
the intergroup dichotomies through which tribal peoples and government
officials attempt to make sense of each other’s motives.108

As with “The Last Hunter,” the contemporary Taiwanese writer Huang

Chunming’s short story “Set Free” includes characters who simultaneously
long for diverse, prosperous, and aesthetically pleasing environments; ad-
vocate behaviors that directly harm landscapes; and denounce policies that
would ameliorate existing damage to ecosystems and prevent further occur-
rences. The protagonists of both texts, although great advocates for the natu-
ral world, are angry at government regulations prohibiting the taking of non-
human life. But “Set Free” intensifies the environmental ambivalence of “The
Last Hunter.” Huang Chunming’s story features a couple who have a strong
affinity for the natural world and have spent years fighting against industrial
pollution, yet are deeply disturbed by new government rules guaranteed to
enable birds to flourish in their backyard. Topas Tamapima’s character Biyari
kills one of the forest’s few remaining desired animals, but he never speaks
explicitly of doing so (he talks only of hunting, not of hunting endangered
animals). Biyari makes it clear that he would have been delighted had there
been more prey. In contrast, Granny Jinzu and her husband Zhuang Awei,
the protagonists of “Set Free,” speak directly of their fear that birds will de-
stroy their fields now that the government has designated their coastal area a
 Accentuating Ambivalence  141

bird sanctuary; they believe that the combination of an increased bird popu-
lation and prohibitions against catching the animals will bankrupt the fam-
ily. Further intensifying the environmental ambivalence of “Set Free” is the
greater severity and visibility of the ecodegradation: while Biyari and his fel-
low villagers are not even aware that the smoke emanating from their homes
pollutes the air, there is no escaping the encompassing pollution described in
“Set Free.” In addition, the Zhuang family spent many years publicly protest-
ing the pollution emitted by neighboring factories, pollution that virtually
eliminated area bird populations; Jinzu and Awei’s son also participated in
these protests and was jailed for his activism.
Widely recognized as Taiwan’s representative nativist writer, even nativist
“cultural hero,” Huang Chunming set his story in the small town of Dak-
enggu, located at the mouth of the Wulaokeng River in northeast Taiwan.109
The terrestrial, aquatic, and atmospheric environs of Dakenggu have been
damaged by the increasing emissions, both wastewater and airborne contam-
inants, of nearby chemical plants and cement factories. The town’s human
residents also suffer economically and physically; pollution prevents them
from growing crops and catching fish, many persons have become ill, and
some have died. Having been partly responsible for bringing chemical plants
and cement factories to town and then having fought unsuccessfully to have
the polluters removed, the human residents of Dakenggu, especially Jinzu
and Awei, are resigned to a degraded environment. But to the couple’s sur-
prise, after years of showing little concern for anything but corporate profits,
the authorities announce plans to transform the coastal area, including Jinzu
and Awei’s fields, into a bird refuge; to entice and protect different species
of birds, factories soon will be prohibited from dumping their toxic waste in
the water, and people will not be allowed to catch birds, even crop predators
that are certain to revive in the absence of pollution. Although their friend
Tianying repeatedly calls this development “good news” (hao xiaoxi), Jinzu
and Awei do not share his enthusiasm. A flourishing and untouchable bird
population will almost certainly inhibit agricultural output, resulting in a
harvest that is no less meager than when the area was plagued by pollution.
The couple resent having their own fields, their own backyard, transformed
into a space that ironically represents everything for which they fought.
From the opening pages, the narrator of “Set Free” spotlights the severe
pollution plaguing Dakenggu and the harm it inflicts on plants, animals, and
people. The story begins on laundry day. Jinzu hurries to bring in her wash
before it is drenched by a rapidly approaching thunderstorm and finds it cov-
ered with soot emitted from local factories. The narrator reveals that this pol-
lution, severe enough to have disfigured a statue at the local temple, has been
142  ecoambiguity

a menace for more than a decade. He claims: “It was something the people of
Dakenggu couldn’t do anything about. But over time, the women had already
figured out how to rid their laundry drying outside of the smoky dust.”110
They beat it out of their bedding and clothing, letting the soot fall to the
ground. Of course, where no clothing or other objects break its fall, the dirt
tumbles directly from the sky to the earth. As the narrator observes several
pages later, “For years the people of Dakenggu had cursed the chimneys [of
the chemical plants and cement factories], but [those were nothing more than
helpless responses] . . . Bamboo, magnolia, daylilies, and knotgrass—there
wasn’t a single upward-facing flower petal or leaf that wasn’t covered with
a layer of soot.”111 While soot enshrouds plants, pollution leaches life out of
water. When Jinzu’s husband returns from the river not with the brimming
pail of loaches he had hoped to find but instead with a “load of shit,” she
exclaims: “I’ve been thinking that since the factories opened, there haven’t
been any loaches, snails, spotted groupers, turtles, or clams at Dakenggu. All
the life in the water has disappeared.”112 Ironically, the only water capable
of sustaining life is the water that local people control; individuals who sell
loaches, like those who sell eels and shrimp, now must raise these animals
themselves in protected spaces.
Huang Chunming’s story also highlights the politics of environmental
degradation: although “Set Free” takes place during the days leading up to
the release of Jinzu and Awei’s son Zhuang Wentong from prison for pro-
testing the increasingly severe pollution of his town, the narrator’s reminis-
cences together with conversations between Jinzu and her husband reveal
that twenty years before, in elections for township head, the Nationalist
Party (Guomindang, KMT) had backed a candidate who assured voters that
if he were selected he would bring factories to the impoverished area. People
believed this would improve their economic prospects, so they elected him.
But the new industries not only failed to provide employment and economic
security for very many villagers, they also polluted the region. People, plants,
and animals all died:

Yang was elected township head. With Nationalist support and great
speed, he handed the land—publicly prepared by the township gov-
ernment—over to businessmen at a deeply discounted price. Factories
were built. And their chimneys, which at first made the villagers feel as
though they had entered the modern world, day and night belched out
thick black smoke that spread for five or six kilometers. Several years
later the farmers finally discovered the undeniable relationship be-
tween the soot and the stunted, withered shoots and seedlings in their
 Accentuating Ambivalence  143

fields. At the same time, they discovered an unpleasant odor permeat-

ing the water in their streams and wells. They weren’t as concerned
with the failure of local youths to find employment in the factories as
with the increasing severity of pollution-related problems.113

Back then, people were more concerned with the environment than with em-
ployment, the former having an even greater impact on their lives than the
latter. Some protested, but their voices were quickly quelled. Eight years later
a candidate promising to remove the factories ran for office; not surpris-
ingly, he won in a landslide. But unlike his predecessor, he did not keep his
promises: not only were the existing factories not removed, but additional
ones were built, destroying farmland and polluting the sky and waters even
more severely:

The more than 200 families in Dakenggu had always made their liv-
ing by catching fry in the port [and doing a bit of farming] . . . But
after the factories upstream began dumping wastewater in the river,
the fry died of the poison . . . And if the disappearance of fry weren’t
enough, the putrid black water sporadically released by the factories
every fourth or fifth day did terrible things to anyone with an open
wound who came into contact with it.114

People continued to protest, some arguing that water samples were tam-
pered with to conceal the extent of the pollution. But dissenters were quickly
silenced, and some, like Wentong, were jailed. And additional factories
sprouted up: “After Wentong was imprisoned . . . several more factories
were built around there, polluting the sky with thick smoke and fouling the
waters.”115
Huang Chunming’s story describes one couple’s struggle against unrelent-
ing assaults on their village and their way of life, which is tied directly to the
health of the surrounding water, soil, and air. To be sure, “Set Free” posits
the villagers as immediately responsible for this state of affairs; the KMT can-
didate’s rhetoric on profits via industrializing was more appealing even than
the independent candidate’s talk of “‘democracy’ [minzhu], ‘freedom’ [ziyou],
‘equality’ [pingdeng], [and] ‘human rights’ [renquan].”116 But Huang Chun-
ming’s text also highlights their concerted albeit long and unsuccessful attempts
to restore their surroundings. For the most part, families like the Zhuangs, not
to mention local ecosystems, are portrayed as at the mercy of seemingly in-
domitable, unstoppable, and destructive government and industry.
Yet the human/nonhuman contacts cited in “Set Free” in fact are more
144  ecoambiguity

complex. Several phenomena make it impossible to establish clean divisions

between heartless and destructive polluters on the one hand and ecologically
minded townspeople on the other. One is Awei’s long-standing obsession
with catching an egret, the text’s principal subplot and a concern from be-
ginning to end; an excellent example of disjunctures between beliefs and be-
haviors, Awei’s fascination with this animal is discussed in chapter 7. Just as
illuminating, but more textually concentrated, are Jinzu and Awei’s responses
to Tianying’s report on the government’s agenda for the region. Tianying
first announces that the authorities are planning to turn the coastal area,
including their fields, into a “protected area for birds” (quanbu guiru niaolei
baohuqu). When Awei asks what this means, Tianying clarifies that people
will not be permitted to catch the teals, goldfinches, and swans that migrate
to the coast in winter. Awei seems relieved that his life will not be disrupted.
Reminding Tianying that ever since polluters came to town, there have been
few birds to catch, he apparently is not troubled by the idea of a bird sanctu-
ary without birds. But Tianying quickly disabuses him of this scenario, telling
him, “After the bird sanctuary is established, the factories will be prohibited
from discharging toxic water.” Tianying does not need to state the obvious
corollary: paradoxically, an absence of poison, something for which Awei
and his neighbors fought for years, will result in an influx of birds, which to
Awei is intolerable. He and Jinzu are troubled by the news that they will not
be allowed to snare even the birds eating their crops. Tianying and Awei both
believe that in their town “a bird [now] is more valuable than a person.”
Tianying is not particularly disturbed by this recent development, declar-
ing, “Who cares if we can’t catch sparrows? The factories no longer will be
discharging toxic water. Isn’t this a good thing?” Awei and his wife disagree,
the narrator noting, “This comment not only did not console them. It instead
brought to mind the fact that Wentong had been jailed for several years pre-
cisely because the factories had been discharging toxic waste.”117 Industrial
emissions and the government’s resistance to tempering them have brought
undue suffering to the Zhuangs and their town. Yet the news that these emis-
sions will be cut brings not joy but fear. “Set Free” suggests that Awei and
Jinzu believe the government has done nothing more than swing from one
extreme to another: where corporations once could disturb and even destroy
environments without repercussion, now farmers cannot touch individual
animals. Since they soon will not be allowed to do anything about the birds
consuming their crops, their livelihoods appear threatened.
This storyline is dropped as quickly as it is introduced. Recognizing that
he has overstayed his welcome, Tianying wanders off, and the spotlight re-
turns to Awei and Jinzu’s concerns about when their son will be freed. “Set
 Accentuating Ambivalence  145

Free” concludes not long thereafter, with Awei liberating his egret and Wen-
tong, newly released from prison, at last returning home. But the couple’s
immediate reaction to news of the impending conversion of their environs
from lifeless cesspool to bird sanctuary highlights their environmental am-
bivalence. On the one hand, the Zhuangs desire an ecosystem amenable to
birds—not only will catching birds increase the family’s monthly income,
but also the soil of an ecosystem hospitable to birds will almost surely be
amenable to crops, the sale of which sustains the family. But if the family is
prohibited from removing birds from their fields, their crops most likely will
be destroyed, and they will go bankrupt. In short, what they desire is not so
much freedom from pollution as one of the freedoms that pollution curtails,
that is to say, freedom to use the nonhuman world to their personal advan-
tage. “Set Free” makes clear the environmental ambivalence preservation can
provoke.118
Topas Tamapima’s “The Last Hunter” and Huang Chunming’s “Set
Free” expose conservation as potentially just as controversial as degrada-
tion: anger at the destruction of ecosystems is accompanied by anger at sub-
sequent restrictions on using them. Such conflicts in attitudes reveal con-
cern for nonhuman health as tied almost inextricably to concern for human
well-being; they show rejuvenating ecosystems as being welcomed only when
so doing contributes to or at least does not obstruct the physical, financial,
or emotional rejuvenation of human life. Whether exhibited by people and
communities with close ties to these ecosystems or by groups responsible for
significantly changing (degrading or restoring) them, these attitudinal con-
flicts often are readily understandable. But they are seldom acknowledged
or analyzed—characters, narrators, and critics reveal their own ambivalence
about ecoambivalence.
Narratives concerned with ecodegradation as well as discourse on these
narratives frequently villainize industry and governments for damaging and
condoning damage to environments, pitting corporate and national inter-
ests against the well-being of relatively defenseless people and ecosystems.
Likewise, such texts and discourse on them frequently draw attention to the
deep respect of local peoples for the nonhuman entities populating their com-
promised landscapes. These narratives and their interpretive reconfigurations
highlight local people’s emotional attachment to the nonhuman. But so doing
frequently obscures people’s assumptions of entitlement to the natural world.
Such beliefs need not entail conscious intent or readiness to inflict harm, but
they are not necessarily divorced from the willingness or ability to do so. At
times arguments for taking the lives of endangered animals are based on the
actuality or at least the perception that people need to do so to survive. Yet
146  ecoambiguity

the creative works examined in this chapter suggest that even those condi-
tions that seem the most uncompromising—such as the plight of indigenous
Alaskans described in Nitta’s Tale of Alaska—often are not without alter-
natives. Most situations include some measure of maneuverability. On the
other hand, the absolute dependence of people on the nonhuman for survival
makes virtually inevitable their belief that they are entitled to manipulate
ecosystems, wherever they might be.

Navigating Disparate Attitudes

Many texts on environmental degradation highlight how easily people de-

stroy environments with which they do not have long-standing ties; ecosys-
tems often are depicted as at the mercy of relative outsiders. But some cre-
ative works accentuate the ambivalent attitudes toward the nonhuman not
of indigenous or local peoples—as do Ishimure’s Sea of Suffering, Ogata and
Ōiwa’s Rowing the Boat of the Eternal World and Rowing the Eternal Sea,
Nitta’s Tale of Alaska, Topas Tamapima’s “The Last Hunter,” and Huang
Chunming’s “Set Free”—but instead of newcomers to a region. Such works
include the Chinese writer A Cheng’s novella King of Trees (1985), which
takes place during China’s Cultural Revolution (1966–76) and reveals the
conflicting attitudes toward trees and landscapes more generally of young
men under orders to mutilate unfamiliar yet awe-inspiring ecosystems that
authorities have condemned as “old” and “useless.” This novella demon-
strates how readily, and without explanation, awe can become indifference,
only to be transformed into terror at what has been done in the name of
indifference.
Narrated by a young man who does not recognize this contradiction
within either himself or others, King of Trees underscores the difficulties of
acknowledging, much less addressing, what enables large-scale environmen-
tal destruction. The novella is based on A Cheng’s own experiences during
the Cultural Revolution in the Xishuangbanna, a Daizu Autonomous Region
bordering Laos and Burma and one of China’s most diverse biological sanc-
tuaries. Son of the film critic Zhong Dianfei, A Cheng was born and raised
in Beijing, where he attended one of the city’s most prestigious secondary
schools; he returned to Beijing after the Cultural Revolution, gained promi-
nence in the 1980s as a writer of roots-seeking literature (xungen wenxue),
and emigrated to the United States in 1986. Most notable about his work is
how it eschews both the self-pity of scar literature and the idealistic images of
 Accentuating Ambivalence  147

pastoral writers. Instead, many of his texts use traditional storytelling tech-
niques to depict rural China.119
King of Trees is one of many Chinese writings on being sent down to the
countryside (xiaxiang) during the Cultural Revolution. Campaigns to dis-
patch China’s youths to rural areas occurred well before the mid-1960s.120
But what had been relatively voluntary became mandatory, and eventually
20 million urbanites were torn away from their families. Some were sent
to rural villages to join production teams and establish residence (chadui
luohu). These individuals did not significantly change environments. Oth-
ers were sent to the frontier regions of China, everywhere from the tropical
forests of Hainan Island and Yunnan to the deserts and forests of Xinjiang
and the steppes of Inner Mongolia and Gansu, where they “opened waste-
land,” ultimately claiming more than three million acres for agriculture. Not
surprisingly, their impact on ecosystems was tremendous; some reclamation
did create arable land, but in many cases it destroyed terrain. Wetlands were
obliterated and hillsides deforested, while animal populations plummeted.
A Cheng was one of approximately 200,000 educated youth sent to the Xi-
shuangbanna, whose rain forests contained species thought to date back mil-
lions of years. There, educated youths felled more than 600,000 acres, chang-
ing even the region’s climate.121
A harsh critique of the Cultural Revolution, A Cheng’s King of Trees gives
insight into the struggles of those sent to transform landscapes far from home
and explores their complicated relationships with their new surroundings. As
several critics have noted, this novella uses the environment neither as setting
for the cultural imaginary nor as “metaphorical vehicle for a meditation on
human culture and history.”122 Instead, one of the principal priorities of the
text is highlighting the rampant mutilation of ecosystems that occurred dur-
ing the Cultural Revolution. In so doing, the novella touches on numerous
attitudinal conflicts vis-à-vis the nonhuman. The clearest contradictions are
those between Li Li and Xiao Geda (Knotty Xiao). Li Li is an educated youth
and enthusiastic revolutionary who has been dispatched to the mountains,
while Xiao Geda is part of a production team that has been working for
nearly a decade in the area where Li Li is sent. The principal task of the newly
arrived workers is to help replace trees condemned as useless with “useful
trees” (youyong de shu). King of Trees here inverts Zhuangzi’s parable of
the tree, where “useless” trees are spared precisely because of their useless-
ness.123 Li Li believes that existing vegetation, as an “old thing,” like the
actual four olds (sijiu; old customs, old habits, old culture, and old thinking,
the destruction of which was one of the stated goals of the Cultural Revolu-
148  ecoambiguity

tion), must be removed at all costs. His behaviors match his attitudes, and he
quickly proves himself the group’s most dedicated logger. In contrast, Knotty
Xiao, already uncomfortable with the continuing destruction of trees and
undergrowth on the mountains, is deeply disturbed by Li Li’s determination
to cut down even Shu Wang (King of Trees). The King of Trees is the region’s
largest and most impressive, one that Knotty Xiao and many locals believe
sacred; the death of this tree at the hands of Li Li and his friends is followed
quickly by Knotty Xiao’s own, so pained is he by its demise.124 The attitudes
of the first-person narrator fall between those of Li Li and those of Knotty
Xiao. Like Li Li, the narrator is an educated urban youth. But unlike Li Li he
appreciates, indeed stands in awe of the rural landscape. On the other hand,
he delights in participating in its destruction. Despite his initial fascination
with this mountainous region, it takes felling the King of Trees and spatially
pervasive damage—transforming mountains into raging infernos—for the
narrator to become uncomfortable with human alteration of ecosystems.
More subtle yet more significant than the differences between Li Li’s and
Knotty Xiao’s attitudes toward the landscape is the narrator’s own environ-
mental ambiguity: he is awestruck by his surroundings but nonchalant about
the annihilation of some of its largest flora. In addition, he helps destroy
some of the very bodies that captivate him. The narrator’s environmental
conflict is shared by most of the other young men. His frequent use of the
terms “educated youth” and “everyone” (dajia) when describing the stu-
dents’ perceptions of the mountains and forests indicates that many of them,
perhaps everyone except Li Li and his innermost circle, are moved deeply by
the natural world. This they share with their counterparts in other fiction on
the experiences of young people sent to China’s rural areas during the Cul-
tural Revolution, including the young men in Ma Bo’s novel Xuese huang­
hun (Blood Red Sunset, 1988). Yet the youths all participate in destroying
the forests, some even joyfully. Only when the King of Trees is felled and the
mountains are burned do they have second thoughts.
One of the great paradoxes of this novella lies in the students’ and par-
ticularly the narrator’s attitudinal conflicts; these are less easily explained
than the contradictions between their attitudes and their actions, which
result directly from the perils facing educated Chinese during the Cultural
Revolution, including the fact that they will be severely punished if they do
not clear the land as ordered. In contrast, nothing prevents the narrator from
being troubled by deforestation and voicing internal outrage about the loss of
so much vegetation. The narrator does not address the contradictions in his
or the other young men’s attitudes, nor does he even appear to be aware of
 Accentuating Ambivalence  149

them. King of Trees demonstrates how easily appreciation and reverence of

ecosystems can be accompanied by indifference to them or even satisfaction
at their destruction. The immediacy of wonder when encountering a space
is contrasted with rampant eagerness to trash it; second thoughts about this
destruction arrive only belatedly.
The young men are instantly captivated by the mountain landscape that is
their new home. King of Trees opens: “The tractor transporting the educated
youth entered the valley and finally stopped on a small piece of level ground.
Already gasping in admiration of the wild landscape along the way, when
the educated youth learned that this was their destination, they all became
extremely excited and jumped to the ground one after the other.”125 The nar-
rator’s language and images stress both the ruggedness of the land and the
joy of the young men’s encounter with it: they have been traveling through
“wild landscape” (yejing) and now are in a valley, but level terrain remains
scarce. The young men could not help but gasp in admiration (zantan) when
traveling through the wilds, and their excitement only grows when they learn
they can have direct contact with it.
That evening, the narrator excuses himself from the group and wanders
off to take a closer look at the area; curious about its various features, he
converses with Knotty Xiao. The following day, the educated youth climb
one of the mountains with their new team leader. Reaching the top, they
look out at the scenery and are rendered speechless: “All that remained of
the distant mountains was their color, undulating blue spreading out, grow-
ing paler with each tier. We all gasped dumbly, opening our mouths one
after another to speak but at a loss for words. I suddenly felt as though these
mountains were like the ripples of the human brain. I just didn’t know what
they were thinking.”126 The final three sentences of this quotation powerfully
juxtapose rows of actively thinking mountains on the one hand with those
of young men who are “gasping dumbly” (daidai de chuanqi) and “cannot
speak” (shuo bu chu hua) despite their mouths having opened one by one to
do so (fenfen zhangzhe zui). Just as in the opening paragraph they jumped off
the tractor one by one (fenfen tiao xia che lai), now they open their mouths
in succession. Yet having become even more mesmerized by the mountains,
the youths are rendered speechless, writing capturing what verbal discourse
cannot. Even more important, the mountains are presumed to be actively
thinking while the young men’s brains appear frozen.
Fascination with their surroundings, even curiosity about the conscious-
ness of their surroundings, does not stop the young men from being swept
along by rhetoric clamoring to reshape it. As everyone is “gasping dumbly”
150  ecoambiguity

and the narrator ponders what the anthropomorphized mountains might be

thinking, the team leader announces that they have been tasked with help-
ing clear more than 1,600 acres of mountain land and replanting this space
with “useful trees.” Li Li asks whether all the mountains within view will be
planted with “useful trees,” and when told that this is correct, he responds,
“Magnificent. Transforming China is magnificent” (Weida. Gaizao Zhong-
guo, weida). The other young men all concur. To be sure, the educated youth
agree with Li Li’s comment on the importance of transforming China without
explicitly stating that deforesting is itself a “magnificent” project. But they do
not seem concerned that the very land that left them speechless just moments
ago is to be cleared of vegetation. Moreover, they do not appear at all trou-
bled when soon thereafter the team leader provides additional details: “We’ll
do the following to the mountain where we’re currently standing: topple its
trees, burn its timber, terrace it, dig more holes, and plant useful trees.”127
In fact, rather than questioning whether such extensive manipulation of the
mountain’s ecosystems is really necessary, the young men immediately ask
why the large tree dominating a nearly replanted neighboring mountain has
not been felled.128 When the team leader responds that it has “become a
spirit” and that real trouble awaits whoever cuts it down, the young men
laugh and ask how this is possible. Their skepticism is understandable; as Li
Li explains, the team leader’s viewpoint represents the long-standing super-
stition that if a plant survives beyond its expected lifespan it has defied a law
of nature and thus is assumed to be a spirit. Noteworthy from an ecological
perspective are both the young men’s attention to the one tree that has not
been taken down and their apparent conviction that, spirit or not, it should
meet the same fate as those around it, despite the young men’s attraction to
the landscape just moments before.
Similar dynamics are repeated and intensified throughout King of Trees.
With the notable exception of Li Li and a few of his close friends, the young
men remain in awe of their surroundings. Just hours after agreeing that de-
stroying mountain ecosystems, including large trees, is a magnificent task,
their curiosity gets the better of them, and they decide to climb another
mountain to take a look at a tree they had seen from a distance earlier that
morning. Discovering that this is the King of Trees, the young men again find
themselves rendered speechless, their minds empty. The narrator comments,
“For a short while my mind went blank. I gradually felt ashamed that I had
this useless mouth. I couldn’t speak and couldn’t sing. If I’d made a sound,
it would have been just like that of a wild animal. After a long time, we
looked at each other strangely and everyone just swallowed hard and gradu-
ally backed up.”129 Although the narrator’s mind is blank for only a short
 Accentuating Ambivalence  151

while, it is a long time before the young men are able to release themselves
from the spell of the tree, their shame being replaced by gradual retreat. The
tree, on the other hand, retains its voice; the narrator describes its leaves as
“gurgling, as though the tree were talking to itself, or as though it were play-
ing with hundreds of children.”130 As before, the nonhuman takes on human
voice while people stand speechless.
Interestingly, however, when the time comes to begin felling trees—just a
day after the incident described above—the landscape appears to have lost its
magic. The space that fewer than twenty-four hours before had presumably
left him at a loss for words now is described relatively objectively:

Our job was naturally [ziran] cutting trees. For hundreds of thousands
of years, no one had touched this primeval forest, so the entire forest
had grown into a single mass. Dodging one another, vying against one
another, the trees left no room, from top to bottom. Vines crept from
this tree to that tree . . . The grass was having a heyday. As it withered,
each year’s crop would add to the thickening crust, which the new
blades had to break through.131

Naturally (ziran), the young men’s task is to obliterate nature (ziran), a single
yet dynamic mass, its trees having colonized vertical space, its vines horizon-
tal space, and its undergrowth piling up everywhere, new shoots struggling
to penetrate crusty old plants just to stay alive. To be sure, in the pages that
follow the narrator does not record or even allude to conversations with/
among the other young men on the mountain, but neither does he describe
himself or his companions as speechless. Instead, he calmly outlines the dif-
ficulties of felling trees. He claims that the forest has never been touched by
human hands, but he does so not to incite anger at the loss of primeval spe-
cies but instead to impress on the reader the physical labor required to eradi-
cate them. His failure to note negative reactions to felling trees is particularly
noteworthy in a section that does not record conversations, which perhaps
were banned, but instead highlights thoughts and experiences.
Notably, the only thing that seems to bother the young men about de-
stroying the forest is the tedium and the arduousness of the task. They ea-
gerly join Li Li in his efforts to cut down a colossal tree not unlike the King
of Trees even while knowing that previous loggers have avoided this plant
because the time required to cut it down would not justify the credit they
would receive.132 The educated youths, on the other hand, voluntarily decide
to join forces in this endeavor, “regardless of the man-hours.”133 To be sure,
by concentrating their efforts on this one tree they are sparing a consider-
152  ecoambiguity

able number of smaller ones. But more significant is the satisfaction, indeed
pleasure the young men derive from felling something so massive. The mo-
ments following the tree’s fall find them somewhat shaken, but these feelings
quickly dissipate, and the young men walk jovially down the mountain. The
narrator contrasts the demeanor of the young men with that of Knotty Xiao,
who having offered them eleventh-hour assistance now is visibly distressed.
Emotions change with the felling of the King of Trees. Although he had
been very eager to participate in destroying the region’s other massive tree,
the narrator opposes this project from the start. When Li Li declares the
King of Trees his next target the narrator protests that they have other more
pressing tasks, and besides, he asks, “wouldn’t it be wasteful [to chop down]
a very good tree [like the King of Trees]?”134 Li Li reminds the group of
the symbolism and superstition with which many have imbued the tree and
declares that felling it will teach the peasants a lesson: “What’s really impor-
tant is to educate the peasants. Old things [jiu de dongxi] must be destroyed
. . . Once the King of Trees falls, a concept [guannian] will be gotten rid
of . . . [What matters] is that people’s ideology be completely renewed and
cleansed.”135 King of Trees here allegorizes the destruction of Chinese cul-
ture and the violence committed against Chinese people during the Cultural
Revolution; eradicating the “four olds” was often an excuse for attacking
intellectuals whose thought was supposedly “feudal” or “reactionary,” in-
dividuals with a Western education, and those who interacted with Western
businessmen and missionaries.136 Here, in an ironic twist, eradicating “olds”
is an excuse for felling old trees.
The young men do not appear convinced that the symbolism inherent in
destroying the tree will trump the symbolism of the tree, and the conversa-
tion quickly changes course; when the crew treks up the mountain to the
King of Trees soon thereafter, some—including the team leader and party sec-
retary (zhishu)—leave their tools at home.137 Disturbed with what is trans-
piring above them, those at lower elevations cannot converse with or even
look at one another. Speechlessness stemming from absolute wonder at the
landscape here becomes speechlessness at its destruction. The narrator re-
veals his own emotions as deeply torn, something likely true of many others
in the valley and up in the mountains: “My heart and mind were in turmoil. I
couldn’t quite figure out whether cutting the tree was right or wrong.”138 It is
only now, with conditions bordering on the extreme, that he stops to ponder
the morality of the group’s behaviors. On the other hand, despite the large
number of people visibly uncomfortable with the proposed demise of the
King of Trees, Knotty Xiao alone actively tries to prevent its destruction. The
only person voicing outrage, much less fighting for the life of this tree, is the
 Accentuating Ambivalence  153

one absolutely certain that it should not be cut down; the rest of the group’s
ambivalence over its future guarantees its demise.
People become even more agitated after the forest is set ablaze to clear
land for farming. As the flames spread fiercely up the mountain, the narrator,
other educated youth, and villagers alike begin to empathize with the trees,
the narrator commenting simply, “The sight of the trees all silently lying
there made people feel anxious for them.”139 The landscape responds differ-
ently here from in the American writer W. S. Merwin’s poem “The Last One”
(1967), which features the earth “swallowing” large numbers of people after
they have felled an ecosystem’s one remaining tree and attempted unsuc-
cessfully to destroy its shadow; and in the Indian poet Gieve Patel’s “On
Killing a Tree” (1966), which depicts a tree silently succumbing to being dis-
membered.140 Resembling a boiling cauldron, the mountain in King of Trees
screams out in pain; its surface scalded, it “released all kinds of strange cries,
an entire universe alarmed.”141 For a brief period Li Li and his friends are
the only individuals not concerned; instead they talk and laugh together as
though nothing has happened. But soon they too are affected. The narrator
observes, “The conflagration had burned everyone’s spirits.”142 King of Trees
suggests that although for some people even relatively minor human-induced
ecological damage is intolerable, most are not moved until confronted with
widespread devastation. And finally there are a few, like Li Li and his friends,
who appear impervious to all but the most severely damaged environments.
Especially interesting is that Li Li does not harbor any notable animosity
toward mountain vegetation. Similar to the hunter in the Japanese writer
Miyazawa Kenji’s short story “Nametoko yama no kuma” (Bears of Mount
Nametoko, published posthumously) who tells each bear he slaughters that
he does not hate it but that he has to make a living, Li Li is not the most
dedicated logger because of any animosity toward trees or the nonhuman
more generally.143 In fact, as he paradoxically comments when arguing that
the King of Trees should be cut, “In the end, it doesn’t matter whether we
actually fell the King of Trees.”144 Rather, the flourishing trees and other
mountain greenery, for him and to some extent most of the educated youths,
first are part of the awe-inspiring scenery and then symbolize an “old thing”
that must be destroyed. But when the trees finally are felled, they lose much
of their numinous symbolism and become, in the young men’s understand-
ing, beings in distress. After summiting his first peak, the narrator likened
the surrounding mountains to the ripples of the human brain and wondered
what they were thinking. Only when their once-inaudible brain waves are
translated into the “strange cries” of distress does he discover what they are
thinking. But by then it is too late.
154  ecoambiguity

The environmental actualities of King of Trees are substantial, the novella

referring explicitly to destroying trees on the many mountains surrounding a
rural village. The cultural actualities are also significant; depicting the trau-
mas inflicted on both educated city youth and rural Chinese, A Cheng’s text
blatantly condemns the Cultural Revolution. Yet as noted at the beginning
of this section, King of Trees, unlike much creative work on this period, does
not use the nonhuman as a metaphorical vehicle for discussions of Chinese
culture or history. Instead, it highlights the destruction of the nonhuman,
making its environmental possibilities substantial. King of Trees nowhere
suggests that what transpires on these mountains is unusual for this place or
age, not surprising since forests across China were felled during the Cultural
Revolution and at many other points in Chinese history. A Cheng remarks
on this phenomenon in comments appended to the Japanese translation of
his novella:

It’s well known that the result of the reckless deforestation that took
place during China’s Cultural Revolution was recurring, extraordi-
nary floods and the destruction of ecosystems. Master of the Moun-
tain [Yama no nushi; the title of the Japanese translation of King of
Trees] is unusual in Chinese literature for dealing directly with this
problem. [The characters of this novel—including] Knotty Xiao, who
put up with the cruel fate of an inflexible bureaucracy, loved nature
and the mountains, lived with the mountains, died with the moun-
tains; Knotty’s Xiao’s wife, who silently followed him; and their child,
who didn’t know impurity—should garner the sympathy of the read-
ers in my country who are confronting the problems of environmental
destruction accompanying rapid modernization.145

A Cheng does not give himself enough credit; it is not just Chinese readers
who are confronting the problems of ecological degradation in the wake of
modernization. Many outside China, including some of his Japanese readers,
share the plight of characters such as Knotty Xiao. And many more would
have sympathy for such an individual. King of Trees is one of numerous cre-
ative works addressing ecodegradation whose focus on a particular scenario
of ecological destruction belies the duplication of this destruction and human
attitudes toward it in multiple sites—an excellent example of implicit ecocos-
mopolitanism that highlights environmental ambiguity.

Creative texts that discuss anthropogenic environmental degradation regu-

larly feature conflicting attitudes about the nonhuman and about relation-
 Accentuating Ambivalence  155

ships between people and the nonhuman as occurring within and among
individuals and communities. Most obvious are the differences in beliefs,
emotions, and perceptions between seemingly cohesive groups. More com-
plex but no less frequent is the environmental ambivalence of individuals and
groups, especially those culturally closest to the natural world. The creative
works examined in this chapter depict people perceiving nature—whether re-
garded highly or deemed worthless, whether “loved” or “hated”—as existing
to serve themselves. While these texts suggest that such conflicting attitudes
can deeply affect how we understand the actual conditions of the environ-
ment, other literature highlights the pervasive ambiguity of basic knowledge
about ecological health. These informational disjunctures form the topic of
the next chapter.
three / Underlining Uncertainty

Ours is not the first age to feel flooded by information. Ecclesiastes 12:12
(dating to the fourth or third century B.C.E.) laments, “Of making books
there is no end,” while in the first century, Seneca declared “the abundance of
books is distraction” (distringit librorum multitudo).1 The sixteenth-century
humanist Erasmus likewise despaired about the growing profusion of printed
matter circulating in Europe, asking, “Is there anywhere on earth exempt
from these swarms of new books?” “Information overload” is a buzzword of
our times, with the amount of information on the planet’s electronic devices
soon to surpass the zettabyte mark.2 More does not necessarily mean more
certain, and much of today’s multitude of information—including that on
environmental health—is notoriously ambiguous. In response, many have
advocated that people narrow their focus, believing this will facilitate the
resolution of social and environmental problems. But in fact, specializing can
cause more problems than it solves; if people are concerned only with their
own silos, buckets, and wells, and fail to recognize the interdependence of
their knowledge, their areas of expertise with those of others, then societies
jeopardize their future and that of the nonhuman world.
The Korean writer Kim Kwanggyu’s environmentally cosmopolitan poem
“Saenggak ŭi sai” (Relationship of Thoughts, 1979) takes up this phenom-
enon, prophesying the downfall of a planet where people, from poets to sol-
diers, engineers, and farmers, willfully or incidentally think only of their own
specialty and where no one considers the relationships among different fields
of endeavor. Yet in doing so this text paradoxically becomes nearly as short-
sighted as the occupational obsessions it criticizes. It is so concerned with
feeding the reader information on what will become of the world if people
obsess over their professions (i.e., close themselves to other bodies of infor-
mation and knowledge), rather than think about the relationships among
professions, that it fails to address what will happen if people actually do
ponder these interconnections, much less other facets of existence. Informa-
tion overload is trumped by informational lacunae, leaving environmental
and other conditions and futures even more uncertain:

156
 Underlining Uncertainty  157

Poets think solely of poems and

politicians think solely of politics and
businessmen think solely of the economy and
laborers think solely of labor and
judges think solely of the law and
soldiers think solely of war and
engineers think solely of factories and
farmers think solely of farming and
government officials think solely of government office and
scholars think solely of scholarship

if this were the case it might seem that this world would become a
paradise, but in fact the truth is that

the relationship between poems and politics

the relationship between politics and the economy
the relationship between the economy and labor
the relationship between labor and law
the relationship between law and war
the relationship between war and factories
the relationship between factories and farming
the relationship between farming and government office
the relationship between government office and scholarship

if there is no one who thinks of these, then

scraps of paper and

power and
money and
exploitation and
prisons and
ruins and
environmental pollution and
agrochemicals and
oppression and
statistics

are all that remain3

A scholar and translator of German literature as well as a prolific poet and

one of the first Korean creative writers to give sustained attention to ecologi-
158  ecoambiguity

cal degradation, Kim Kwanggyu wrote “Relationship of Thoughts” in the

early years of his people’s environmental consciousness, as Koreans became
increasingly intolerant of the pollution engulfing their peninsula.4 This poem
identifies environmental pollution and agricultural chemicals as the ecologi-
cal destiny of a world where information and specific bodies of knowledge
are not contextualized.5 It declares self-assuredly that environmental pollu-
tion is unavoidable if no one considers the links between war and facto-
ries and between factories and farming; agricultural chemicals are likewise
deemed inevitable if no one thinks about the relationships between factories
and farming or farming and government. But pollution and agrochemicals,
like everything else mentioned in the fifth stanza, are also part of more com-
plex entanglements. “Relationship of Thoughts” suggests that the connec-
tions among all occupations must be considered if the planet is to avoid
becoming a morass of waste paper, prisons, ruins, oppression, and damaged
environments. In other words, contrary to what some might think, isolating
specialties creates not a paradise but a wasteland.
Repetition governs “Relationship of Thoughts,” giving the illusion of
certainty. But the poem undermines this confidence in key places, indicating
how easily discourse on any number of subjects, including environmental
degradation, can be read as valid information when in fact it is anything
but. Kim Kwanggyu’s stylistics highlight just how easily conditions can be
conditional and thoughts can be manipulated, even in exhortations to think.
Each of the first nine lines of the opening stanza begins with a type of
profession (poet, politician, etc.), followed by the subject marker ŭn/nŭn,
and then “solely” (oroji), their specialization (poems, politics, etc.), “only”
(man), the object marker ŭl, and the continuative form of the verb “to think”
(think and; saenggak hago). The tenth and final line of the first stanza is
identical to the nine that precede it except for its final word; saenggak hago
(think and) is replaced by saenggak handamyŏn (lit. if think). That is to say,
the lines of the first stanza all read: “[Type of employee]은/는 오로지 [their
field]만을 생각하고/ 생각하다면.” But it is not until the first stanza’s final
line that we learn that the information we thought we had been given (i.e.,
poets think solely of poetry, politicians think solely of politics) is actually
not information at all in and of itself, but instead is part of a conditional: “If
poets think only of poems . . . // It might seem that this world . . .”6 Moreover,
this is a provisional statement with numerous strings attached: for the world
to seem to become a paradise, all ten groups of individuals must think only
of their professions, an unlikely prospect. What on first reading appears to
be a series of declarative statements is in reality little more than the setup for
an improbable scenario.
 Underlining Uncertainty  159

The third stanza accentuates this dynamic. Its nine lines pair up the fields
of endeavor found in the ten lines of the poem’s opening stanza. Following
the order of fields given in the first stanza, each line of the second stanza be-
gins with a field (e.g., poems, politics) followed by “and” (gwa/wa), the field
that appeared in the next line of the first stanza (e.g. [poems and] politics,
[politics and] the economy), by the possessive ŭi and then by “relationship”
(sai). I.e., [field 1]과/와 [field 2]의 사이, which translates literally as “The
relationship between poems and politics / the relationship between politics
and economics . . .” The ninth line of the third stanza concludes with the
object marker rŭl, only here letting the reader know that the text is not sim-
ply listing relationships, but that these relationships are the object of a verb,
albeit one that does not appear until the next stanza. Moreover, unlike the
first stanza, which concludes with “if” (myŏn), here it is not until the follow-
ing stanza—“if there is no person [saram] who thinks of this [relationship]/
these [relationships]”—that the text employs the conditional. The scope is
broadened from the ten types of employees to people in general. But even so,
the likelihood of this scenario is unclear. It is of course doubtful that any one
person would think of all of the relationships listed in the third stanza. Yet it
is uncertain whether the object of the verb “thinks” is simply the relationship
between government office and scholarship (given in the final line of the third
stanza), or all the relationships listed in the third stanza. Chances are it is the
latter, making the conditional likely (i.e., “if there is no person who thinks
of [all these relationships]”), but the poem’s language is sufficiently flexible
to allow for the former: unlike in the first stanza, where lines are linked with
saenggak hago (to think and), the lines of the third stanza end simply with
“relationship” (sai).7
This complicates the fifth stanza, whose ten lines each list one by-product,
mostly negative, of each of the ten professions enumerated in the first stanza
(e.g., scrap paper [for poets/poems], power [for politicians/politics]). As in
the first stanza, but unlike the third stanza, these lines are linked with “and”
(gwa/wa). The poem’s sixth stanza, its final line, claims that these phenomena
are “all that remain” if the conditions listed in the third and fourth stanzas
are met. Unlike the second stanza, which states simply that if a particular
condition is met the world will not be the paradise that had been anticipated,
the fifth stanza articulates the precise composition of the resulting world. But
again, it is unclear whether the list has any chance of being actualized.
Indeed, the tidy packaging and parallel structure of “Relationship of
Thoughts” belies its loose ends, strands that leave many questions unan-
swered and hint at the confusion enfolding social as well as environmental
degradation. Most significant, however, is the poem’s failure to address what
160  ecoambiguity

will happen if people do in fact think about the relationships among different
disciplines; although it predicts the consequences of ignoring the relation-
ships among disparate fields, Kim Kwanggyu’s text is silent on the outcomes
of actually contemplating these connections, much less reflecting on other
matters. The poem implies that social and biophysical environments will be
in jeopardy if people remain myopically attached to their narrow niches.
But not addressing what will happen if they actually think about the larger
picture means that much remains indistinct. The poem leaves open the pos-
sibility of a world that would be imperiled even if people were to consider the
connections among different pieces of information and bodies of knowledge.
“Relationship of Thoughts” gestures to the uncertainties of how to dis-
cuss the environmental problems facing human societies and the natural
world with which they and their cultural products constantly interact. The
poem posits that multiple threats to the planet are deeply intertwined, that
behind every social and ecological condition is a complex set of precondi-
tions. To be sure, Kim Kwanggyu’s text does not obviously privilege dam-
age to ecosystems. Only two of the ten consequences of ignoring overspe-
cialization directly implicate the nonhuman—environmental pollution and
agricultural chemicals. But these two likely will suffuse the world that the
poem anticipates. The other eight phenomena listed in the fifth stanza occur
on or within contaminated soil and polluted air, and all are potentially in-
volved in environmental degradation: wastepaper and ruined buildings litter
terrain already full of agrochemicals; prisons confine both industrialists and
environmental activists; and power, money, exploitation, and oppression all
shape environments just as they are shaped by them. The lists in “Relation-
ship of Thoughts” are only examples; there are far more types of employees,
professions, and professional by-products than the text enumerates. But the
choices given suggest that limits on potential damage are few.

Informational Ambiguity

Today we can see that damaged environments are ubiquitous. So too are nar-
ratives, including creative texts, that speak of blighted ecosystems. Imparting
and analyzing information and building knowledge about the conditions of
environments, especially about detrimental changes to them, is a spatially
or conceptually significant part of much discourse.8 Even more prevalent is
rhetoric in which information on ecodegradation occupies a relatively pe-
ripheral position. But regardless of its conceptual weight or spatial presence,
information on environmental damage often is ambiguous. With ecosystems
 Underlining Uncertainty  161

always in motion, with so much destruction and regeneration of the nonhu-

man occurring seemingly regardless of people’s behaviors, the precise human
role in environmental transformation is often virtually impossible to deci-
pher. Even when conditions are extreme, with industrial pollution visibly per-
vading the skies and agrochemicals the soil, data on ecodegradation, much
less the human role in instigating it, often are contradictory or fragmented;
interpretations and particularly policy implications of these data can be even
more convoluted because so much is unknown and unknowable, at least at
present. Still more ambiguous are data and interpretations of data on less
noticeable human-induced changes to environments. And the preconceptions
of researchers/observers, writers, and readers shape how they understand
ecological information in complex and often contradictory ways.
Information on human-induced environmental degradation can be am-
biguous regardless of where it appears: a peer-reviewed scientific publica-
tion, a newspaper article or editorial, a literary work based on considerable
research or one that relies on liberal doses of imagination. Comments by
the narrator of Mahasweta Devi’s novella Ṭeroḍyākaṭikala, Pūraṇa Sahāẏa
o pirathā (Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha, 1989) on the contrast be-
tween the rhetoric and the reality of tribal welfare apply as well to uncer-
tainties about environmental conditions: “These pictures will reveal some
truths and some lies. The truths and the lies are the same.”9 With their di-
minished claims to accuracy, creative texts that address the damage people
inflict on the nonhuman tend to expose, negotiate, and even exploit the in-
consistencies of information on human changes to ecosystems more than do
other discourses. In creative texts, as in much narrative, uncertainty about
the condition of environments results from incorporating contradictory and/
or fragmentary information about the etiologies, current status, patterns of
progression and regression, and consequences of this degradation, as well as
possible forms of remediation and prevention.
Contradictory information on ecodegradation can be found extratextu-
ally, intertextually, and intratextually. Much discourse on damaged environ-
ments, especially creative discourse, is contradicted within the same text. For
instance, a narrative might at one point call a river polluted only to speak
of it at another point as flowing clearly, whether or not there has been any
change to the river itself; likewise, a text might speak of a chemical as hav-
ing one effect on the nonhuman only then to say it has another notably dif-
ferent effect, whether or not the actual impact of this chemical has altered
significantly. A more subtle intratextual inconsistency might take the form
of a character suffering no side effects from swimming in a polluted river or
eating polluted fish.10 Intratextual contradictions stem from changes in the
162  ecoambiguity

narrator’s and the characters’ observations and opinions, as well as from dif-
ferences in the observations/opinions among various characters and between
narrators and characters. Intertextually inconsistent information refers to in-
formation that passively or dynamically, explicitly or implicitly, contradicts
discourse in another text.11 For example, a creative work might speak of
river pollution as responsible for the deaths of people and animals, challeng-
ing government or industry reports that declare the pollution insignificant or
deny it altogether. At times, these latter reports are actually included in the
creative text. More frequently, they are referenced and discussed, whether in
depth or in passing, or simply alluded to.
Extratextual inconsistency arises when information intentionally or in-
advertently contradicts phenomena in the experienced world. For instance,
a text might declare a river polluted when it is not (or at least is not ob-
viously polluted and has not been discussed as such), or it might describe
a space as resplendent with foliage when actually it has been deforested.
Perhaps the most famous example of the latter is Thoreau’s Walden (1854),
which transforms “a busy commercial and agricultural site with a long and
complex history of human settlement into a remote forest lake.”12 More in-
triguing are creative works that forecast environmental harm by predicting
the consequences of failing to remediate existing environmental damage and
neglecting to impede anticipated ecodegradation. Such texts include every-
thing from narratives set in the future or in clearly imagined spaces, including
apocalyptic texts and much science fiction, to those set in the present that
feature narrators/characters foretelling the future. Descriptions of impending
ecodegradation are almost by default extratextually inconsistent because the
world they envision has not (yet) been experienced. The certitude these texts
display often masks great uncertainty about environmental futures.
Intratextual and particularly inter- and extratextual inconsistencies often
are deeply integrated. A river can be “known” to be unpolluted largely as a
result of narratives, both written and oral, that claim it is clean; often it is
“known” to be unpolluted simply by the absence of talk about its pollution.
Thus, a creative text that posits this river as polluted contradicts both empiri-
cal conditions and extant narratives. Similarly, because a space is “known”
to be deforested largely through narratives that claim it to be so, creative
texts that speak of this space’s brilliant foliage are at odds with both the ex-
perienced world and discourse on this space.
Some creative works highlight these intra-, inter-, and extratextual in-
consistencies in information about human-induced damage to environments
by referring to them explicitly. A narrator or character might speak openly
about the difficulties of determining the characteristics or significance of
 Underlining Uncertainty  163

damage to an ecosystem; a narrator or character also might draw attention to

conflicting reports on the status of an ecosystem. But in literature, as in life,
many of these inconsistencies are subtler and require additional sleuthing.
With ecosystems always changing, and with interpretations of these changes
always shifting, information on ecodegradation that once might have ap-
peared inconsistent later no longer seems so, and information that once
seemed straightforward later poses contradictions.
In contrast with contradictory information on human-induced dam-
age to ecosystems, which appears most often in texts with extended refer-
ences to environmental harm or texts that conceptually prioritize ecological
problems, fragmentary information about this degradation usually consists
of brief or vague references to ecodegradation embedded in discourse on
another subject, often one with only indirect connections to environmental
harm. Its brevity and vagueness often render this information ambiguous.
Further complicating matters, fragmentary discourse on environmental prob-
lems often is not immediately recognizable. Instead, most such information
appears as simile or as (apparent) metaphor. For instance, creative texts often
embellish accounts of human suffering with references to nonhuman suffer-
ing, but these works frequently are misread as concerned solely with human
suffering. Other texts speak primarily of nonhuman suffering, but this suffer-
ing is interpreted, and often seems intended, as a metaphor for human suffer-
ing. Yet these writings too are potentially fruitful sources of information on
the conditions of environments. Unlike contradictions, which usually result
from a surfeit of data or interpretations of data, fragments typically stem
from a deficit of information or even from obscurity about the focus of this
information. Much information can be both fragmentary and contradictory:
fragmented information often lends itself to contradictory interpretations, in
addition to being intra-, inter-, and extratextually inconsistent.
This chapter analyzes how ambiguous information about damage to the
nonhuman is incorporated into works ranging from texts that mainly de-
scribe devastated ecosystems to those with only brief and often opaque refer-
ences to environmental changes. I focus on the informational ambiguity of
literary works that implicitly and explicitly raise but generally leave unan-
swered questions central to understanding human-induced ecodegradation.13
First I look at three texts that emphasize just how little people and animals
know, and are capable of knowing, about the reasons—both immediate and
more fundamental—for environmental change. I then turn to literary works
that provocatively suggest the presence of human-induced ecodegradation
but are pointedly ambiguous as to whether ecosystems are actually damaged.
After this I take up writings—including creative works about human-on-hu-
164  ecoambiguity

man violence—that underline the complexities of a similar problem: assess-

ing degrees of ecological damage. The chapter’s remaining two parts, like its
opening section on Kim Kwanggyu’s “Relationship of Thoughts,” explore
textual ambiguities involving environmental futures. I focus on writings that
question the resilience of the nonhuman and works that, although declaring
environmental disaster imminent or at least inevitable, leave notably vague
the longer-term consequences of such calamity.
In this chapter I am primarily concerned with the uncertainties of infor-
mation about ecodegradation that appear in poetry, short stories, and novels.
Where appropriate, I examine how texts depict informational ambiguity as
shaping attitudes and behaviors toward environments, as well as the condi-
tion of ecosystems more generally. But I defer discussions of how creative
texts negotiate the ways people act on the actualities of damaged environ-
ments to chapter 5 and analysis of the conflicts between information on eco-
degradation and attitudes toward ecosystems to chapter 6.

The Unknown and Unknowable

Many creative works explicitly address ecological uncertainty: the narrator

asks why the landscape is damaged or claims that characters, whether people
or animals, are unaware of the reasons behind this damage. Such uncertainties
can be rhetorical, the answers to questions obvious and the reasons for envi-
ronmental change clear, at least to most readers if not also to characters. But
such narratives also often expose the many lacunae in knowledge about envi-
ronmental damage, especially those concerning both the immediate and the
underlying causes of changes to ecosystems. Although conceptually significant,
these questions usually do not occupy much textual space. Two notable excep-
tions are the Korean writer Kim Ch’unsu’s poem “P’unggyŏng” (Landscape,
1988) and the Taiwanese writer Xin Yu’s poem “Bao” (Leopard, 1972). The
former is a series of questions about ecological changes, interrupted by the
declaration that conditions are “incomprehensible”; the latter consists of state-
ments on an animal’s ignorance of the reasons behind changes to ecosystems.
A sense of helplessness pervades both poems; without knowing the proximate
and underlying causes of transformed environments, reconciliation, much less
amelioration and prevention, are virtually impossible.
Kim Ch’unsu began publishing poetry in the 1940s, after having studied
art in Japan; many of his texts celebrate the natural world but some, like
“Landscape,” depict it as having been compromised.14 “Landscape” refers
immediately to gaps in human understandings of the nonhuman. The poem
 Underlining Uncertainty  165

focuses on a single field, but its perspective is environmentally cosmopolitan;

little effort is made to identify the field, which could be located almost any-
where. In the first and second stanzas the poem questions why the earth and
sky are crying; in the first line of the third stanza it declares this situation
unintelligible but then asks again why the earth weeps so plaintively:

Why in this, the dead of night

in the blue light of the moon
is that field
crying like that?

Why
does the wind that gusted about during the day
also cry so plaintively
after coming to that field?

This is incomprehensible.
Why in this, the dead of night,
is that field, quieter than the sea,
crying like a sad beast?15

Like many creative texts featuring landscapes in pain, Kim Ch’unsu’s poem
generally is understood as personifying the natural world, as substituting
nonhuman for human agony, or as indicating that the agony people have en-
dured on the field was so overwhelming that it has spilled onto and changed
the characteristics of both the field itself and the wind that goes there to spend
the night. But if the origins of grief were so clear, the poem likely would not
be a series of three questions, the first two separated from the third with the
assertion “This is incomprehensible” (al su ŏmnŭn ilida). The fact that the
wind seems to cry plaintively only after arriving at the field of the first stanza
suggests that the suffering of/on this field surpasses the suffering of/on other
spaces, but we are not informed of the nature of this suffering. Also vague
is the volume of the field’s cries. The poem asks, “Why in this, the dead of
night / is that field, quieter than the sea / crying like a sad beast?” It is unclear
whether the field usually is quieter than the sea; or that the field’s cries are
loud, but still softer than the usual sounds of the sea; or even perhaps that
the sea is crying, like the field and the wind, although its cries are even louder.
The poem’s questions are clearly rhetorical, encouraging the reader to
contemplate the sorrows that suffuse the landscape that is the focus of the
poem, as well as neighboring spaces. But the questions also can be taken
166  ecoambiguity

more literally, as genuine queries. What puts landscapes in distress? A field,

or at least the animals residing there, could be in agony from having wit-
nessed human trauma, but likely also from having been harmed; perhaps
the field’s cries sound like those of a sad beast because the animals on the
field are the ones crying. Chances are that the wind cries, and cries plain-
tively after arriving at this field, because it has witnessed suffering below, or
noted the remnants of suffering; the wind also likely has been afflicted by
and itself is transmitting some of this suffering. To be sure, the poem does
not speak directly of human damage to environments. Yet its explicit focus
is on nonhuman expressions of suffering, expressions perhaps intended to
be taken figuratively but that also can have more literal significance. Re-
peating the verb “to cry” (ulda) personifies suffering. But ultimately the
text’s three questions—“Why is the field crying like that,” “Why does the
wind cry so plaintively,” and “Why is the field crying like a sad beast”—go
unanswered. The only resolution is a poetic one, the gradual discovery of
how to describe nonhuman sorrow: while the opening stanza asks chŏrido
ulgo innŭnga (lit. [why] is it crying in that way), and the second stanza
chŏrŏk’edo sŭlp’i unŭnga (lit. [why does the wind] also cry so plaintively),
the final stanza declares sŏrŏun chimsŭng ch’ŏrŏm ulgo innŭnga (lit. [I
don’t understand why] it is crying like a sad beast). In other words, “in that
way” (chŏrido) becomes “so plaintively” (chŏrŏk’edo sŭlp’i) and finally
“like a sad beast” (sŏrŏun chimsŭng ch’ŏrŏm). Ironically, the only way
to describe the pain of the natural world appears to be through similes of
nonhuman suffering. But even personifying the grief of the personified field
provides no resolution.
The ambiguity behind wailing ecosystems haunts many creative articu-
lations of damaged landscapes, including the Taiwanese writer Xin Yu’s
implicitly ecocosmopolitan “Leopard.”16 Like “Landscape,” this poem by
a Chinese émigré to Taiwan written in the early days of Taiwanese environ-
mental consciousness focuses on the damage of a single space, but one that
could be situated nearly anywhere leopards once roamed, including most of
Africa and the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia, and eastern China
and Korea. Xin Yu’s text first sketches disappearing vegetation and then the
extinction of the grassland itself. “Leopard” explicitly addresses the paucity
of available information on dramatic changes to environments:

A single
leopard     on the edge of a grassland
crouching
does not know why
 Underlining Uncertainty  167

many flowers    fragrant
many trees        verdant
the firmament opens
and contains everything

This leopard
that once roared and plundered
does not know what fragrant flowers are
or what verdant trees are

A single leopard     that crouches

not knowing why
the firmament deserted and silent
the flowers and trees quiet

a grassland
d i s a p p e a r s17

Confusion about the condition of environments begins in the final line of the
opening stanza: “[the leopard] does not know why” (bu zhi weishenme). The
reader is not told what is puzzling the leopard. Instead, the following stanza
moves back in time, indicating that the heavens opened and enveloped all the
grassland’s flora and fauna. It is possible that the phrase “firmament opens”
indicates a “natural” disaster such as a typhoon that would radically change
a landscape, but considering information presented later in the poem it is
more likely that “firmament opens” is a euphemism for sweeping human-
induced environmental devastation. In the third stanza the poem reveals that
the leopard is unfamiliar with “fragrant flowers” and “verdant trees.” Not
only did the leopard not witness the opening of the firmament itself, but ac-
tually “fragrant flowers” and “verdant trees” disappeared some time ago.18
They disappeared not simply from the particular grassland featured in the
poem but from all the grasslands the leopard has traversed. If only one space
had been affected, the animal would not know why there are no flora here,
but it would be familiar with flora more generally.
Fragrant flowers and verdant trees are not the only nonhuman bodies
that disappeared from this and other landscapes. The third stanza also indi-
cates that in the past the leopard captured prey. Animals apparently outlived
healthy vegetation, since the leopard encountered the former but not the lat-
ter. But this was not the case for long; the poem’s use of the term “once [i.e.,
in the past]” (ceng) suggests the leopard’s quarry has also disappeared or at
168  ecoambiguity

least become so dispersed that the leopard no longer can catch it. The life of
this one remaining leopard is clearly in danger. In the fourth stanza an even
direr picture emerges—the leopard is still alive and crouching as before, but
the “firmament” is now “deserted and silent.” The nonhuman was displaced
from the grassland to the “firmament” only to be obliterated into silence.
On the other hand, by speaking of flowers and trees as “quiet” (jiji), not as
nonexistent, this stanza also suggests either that not all flora were displaced,
thereby contradicting claims made two stanzas earlier, or that some have re-
generated. To be sure, these are not the “fragrant” and “verdant” trees of the
second and third stanzas, but they do point to the possibility of revival. On
the other hand, this possibility is quickly undermined. In the fifth stanza the
poem claims simply that the grassland “disappears” (xiaoshi), presumably
taking with it the leopard at its edge, the leopard that does not know why si-
lence pervades heaven and earth and why the remaining flowers and trees are
quiet. Xiaoshi (消失) is written with a space between the characters (i.e., 消
失), suggesting that the obliteration of the grassland was gradual, but total.
In some ways Xin Yu’s poem is a relatively straightforward exposé of
changing and eventually disappearing ecosystems: what once was a space
of fragrant flowers, towering trees, and contented carnivores has been razed
and transformed into a place with few if any traces of its former existence.
Yet a great deal remains unspecified. The poem says the leopard is unfamiliar
with vegetation and does not know why the landscape appears the way it
does, but it leaves unclear whether the animal’s ignorance stems from the
shortcomings of this particular creature, from the fact that it is an animal, or
because nobody/nothing can know, human or nonhuman.
From its perch on the edge of a grassland the leopard would have had
no difficulty observing humans and their cultural products transforming and
replacing their nonhuman counterparts. The underlying causes are less ap-
parent to people and animals alike. Destroying landscapes without really
knowing the deeper reasons why (i.e., why the desire to occupy more space,
if this desire is even recognized as such)19 has potentially lethal consequences
for people and nature alike. The concluding stanza of “Leopard” suggests
that both the animal at the edge of the grassland and the grassland itself now
exist only in the poem and in the memories of the poem’s readers. As the
Italian poet Daria Menicanti writes in “Felini” (Felines, 1986), “The long
lustrous tiger, the blooming leopard /—the wary, the silent grace— / still they
threaten us / but with their extinction” (La lunga tigre lucente, il leopardo
fiorito /—la guardinga, la silenziosa grazia— / tuttora ci minacciano / ma
della loro scomparsa).20 Readers cannot but wonder when the same will be
said of the landscape that replaces the grassland in Xin Yu’s poem. Knowing
 Underlining Uncertainty  169

how but not really knowing why the grassland disappears augurs poorly for
the new inhabitants of this space.
The brevity of Kim Ch’unsu’s “Landscape” and Xin Yu’s “Leopard”
belies their significance. Both texts invite attention to how little is known
not simply about the immediate causes of damage to environments but also
about the more fundamental reasons people drastically reshape them. To
some extent this uncertainty haunts all creative works concerned with en-
vironmental degradation. Although Kim Ch’unsu’s and Xin Yu’s texts both
feature situated damage, they are notably vague as to when and where this
damage occurs, and even more so as to why. These implicitly ecocosmopoli-
tan poems describe phenomena that have been replayed on multiple conti-
nents, with similar obscurity.

Making Sense of Symptoms

Closely related to why environments change is whether observed phenom-

ena signal environmental damage, either human- or nonhuman-induced.
Kim Ch’unsu’s crying field and Xin Yu’s silent, empty, and then disappearing
grassland have clearly been injured, although they are not explicitly identi-
fied as sites of ecodegradation. Yet many other symptoms are more difficult
to decipher. Anyone familiar with trees likely would not see anything out of
the ordinary in a grove of bare trees, presuming it is winter and these trees
are deciduous.21 But instead of observing these trees or seeing photographs of
them from which season and type of tree can be discerned, what if one were
simply told about the existence of a grove of bare trees? It would be impos-
sible to know—without other information—whether this condition was part
of the trees’ annual cycle or whether trees without foliage were unusual or
unexpected for a particular time and place, the result perhaps of a forest fire,
an insect blight, or soil poisoned by agrochemicals.
Many creative works raise similar ambiguities: narrators and characters
lament current conditions, including the absence of particular flora or fauna,
but do not provide sufficient information to indicate whether this absence
signals environmental damage, whether it is to be expected, or whether, in
cases where the absent nonhuman has been replaced, this absence in some
sense is canceled out. A further complication is that damaged environments,
such as lands inundated by seasonal floods or hills blackened by frequent
fires, can themselves be “usual” or “expected” parts of a cycle, however ir-
regular. Likewise, spaces such as agricultural fields, where particular species
have been eradicated to promote the growth of other species, or even spaces
170  ecoambiguity

assumed hostile to biodiversity, often can become thriving places of ecologi-

cal splendor. Taking this idea to an extreme is the narrator of the Japanese
American writer Karen Tei Yamashita’s novel Through the Arc of the Rain
Forest (1990), who declares,

[A team of entomologists] had mistakenly discovered [a] metal cem-

etery [in the Amazon] while chasing after only one of several thousand
rare forms of butterfly. The machines found all dated back to the late
fifties and early sixties—F-86 Sabres, F-4 Phantoms, Huey Cobras,
Lear Jets and Piper Cubs, Cadillacs, Volkswagens, Dodges and an
assorted mixture of gas-guzzlers, as well as military jeeps and Red
Cross ambulances. After so many years in the forest, the vehicles were
slowly crumbling, piece by piece, bit by bit, into a fine rusty dust . . .
What was most interesting about the discovery of the rain forest park-
ing lot was the way in which nature had moved to accommodate and
make use of it. The entomologists were shocked to discover that their
rare butterfly only nested in the vinyl seats of Fords and Chevrolets
and that their exquisite reddish coloring was actually due to a steady
diet of hydrated ferric oxide, or rusty water. There was also discovered
a new species of mice . . . Finally, there was a new form of air plant . . .
There were, along with these new forms of life, a myriad of traditional
varieties of flora and fauna that had somehow found a home, a food
source or way of life in this exclusive junkyard. It was an ecological
experiment unparalleled in the known world of nature.22

At heart are the inherent difficulties and multiple ramifications of identify-

ing a body, much less bodyscape, as damaged; determining the existence of
ecodegradation might at times be a matter of opinion, but such opinions can
significantly affect policies and (further) human shaping of environments.
Speaking of landscapes as lacking particular (a)biotic nonhuman enti-
ties, yet leaving ambiguous the implications of these absences, the Korean
writers Chŏng Hyŏnjong’s poems “P’um” (Protective Embrace, 1989) and
“Tŭlp’an i chŏngmak hada” (The Field is Forlorn, 1992) and Song Sugwŏn’s
poem “Chirisan ppŏkkuksae” (Mount Chiri’s Cuckoo, 1991) provide im-
portant perspectives on this phenomenon. Unlike “Mount Chiri’s Cuckoo,”
Chŏng Hyŏnjong’s poems are not specific to Korea. On the other hand, Song
Sugwŏn’s poem could just as easily have been titled “Mount Fuji’s Cuckoo”
or “Cuckoo of the Matterhorn.” Like Kim Ch’unsu’s “Landscape” and Xin
Yu’s “Leopard,” these creative works focus on events that transcend particu-
lar times and places.
 Underlining Uncertainty  171

Chŏng Hyŏnjong’s “Protective Embrace” features an individual longing

to be held or at least to witness an embrace.23 The poem consists of his
speculations about where contact might actually take place: initially, where
he personally might be held, and then where he might find the rain, the tree,
and finally the embrace of rain and tree:

Like trees standing in the rain,

I wonder where
I can be held.
I wonder where the rain is,
and the location of the tree(s).
And the protective embrace they make,
I wonder where it is.24

Unlike the speaker in Kim Ch’unsu’s “Landscape” and the animal in Xin Yu’s
“Leopard,” who do not know why ecosystems exhibit particular characteris-
tics, the speaker in “Protective Embrace” wonders where parts of ecosystems
have been relocated.
“Protective Embrace” raises a number of questions. Most obvious, and
forming the core of the poem, are those concerning the (new) locations of
trees, the rain, and their mutual embrace. More subtle and significant in
identifying actual ecodegradation are questions about the condition of the
observed ecosystem, not to mention its dimensions: the speaker could be
referring to a backyard or to an entire planet. He wonders where the rains
have gone but gives no indication that the ground is parched. Perhaps the
rains are long overdue; perhaps they are only several days late. Perhaps the
land is suffering, perhaps not. Even more uncertainty surrounds how much
of this landscape’s vegetation has been relocated. In the opening line the
poem refers to “trees” (namudŭl) standing and being held by the rain, yet
the next reference to flora is not to “trees” but instead to “tree(s)” (namu),
the Korean noun namu signifying either a single tree or multiple trees. So
it is possible that the landscape is devoid of trees. It is equally possible that
the poem is commenting on the removal of a single, perhaps favored tree.
The swapping of namudŭl with namu suggests the latter but leaves open the
possibility of the former. Also interesting is that in the first line the poem’s
speaker compares himself, a single being, to “trees [namudŭl] standing in
the rain” rather than to a single tree standing in the rain, as the word namu
would imply. The awkwardness of this phrasing suggests a deliberate move
in the poem from plural to singular, one that paradoxically could indicate
either intensified or decreased damage to the ecosystem where the poem’s
172  ecoambiguity

speaker stands: perhaps only one tree has survived its removal or perhaps
only one tree has been removed. On the other hand, considering the context
of the fifth line, “tree” is itself a clumsy translation of namu—it is much
more likely that the poem’s speaker, when mentioning the embrace of rain
and flora, would ask about the location of trees, not a single tree. Fogging
its references to rain and trees, “Protective Embrace” suggests but does not
confirm ecodegradation.
On the other hand, the poem implies that even if the ecosystem as a
whole is damaged, its component parts might not be; the poem’s speaker
wonders where trees have been relocated, not whether they exhibit distress
or have disappeared. This is in contrast with Chŏng Hyŏnjong’s environ-
mentally cosmopolitan “The Field Is Forlorn,” where animals have been de-
stroyed so as to allow plants to flourish. “The Field Is Forlorn,” one of sev-
eral poems Chŏng Hyŏnjong wrote on longing for grasshoppers, bemoans
the absence of these animals on an otherwise seemingly healthy, anonymous
autumn field:25

In the autumn sunlight, in the autumn air

in the ripening rice
dazzling heaven and earth,
but
ah, the field is forlorn—
there are no grasshoppers!

Oh this inauspicious silence—

Life’s golden link has been severed······ 26

Heaven and earth are dazzling (nunbusida), and the rice is ripening, but the
poem indicates that such conditions neither conceal nor compensate for the
lack of grasshoppers. In fact, the absence of this insect affects the speaker so
deeply that he declares forlorn (chŏngmak hada) a field he just has identified as
dazzling and fertile. Interesting here is the speaker’s momentary delay, despite
his title “The Field Is Forlorn,” in noting the absence of grasshoppers. He
claims he became aware of this lack only after soaking in the wonders of the
autumn scenery. Then, his sorrow penetrating more deeply, he hyperbolically
intones the severing of “life’s golden link” (saengmyŏng ŭi hwanggŭm kori).
Chŏn Hyŏnjong’s poem is nothing if not intratextually contradictory,
a broad frame painting desolation, then destruction (the poem’s title and
second half) surrounding a portrait of brilliance and fecundity (the poem’s
first half). Grasshoppers might once have thrived here, but they probably
 Underlining Uncertainty  173

have been eradicated by agrochemicals; the poem does not speak of these
substances explicitly, but the combination of a flourishing rice crop and an
absence of grasshoppers—a known rice pest easily controlled with chemi-
cals—strongly suggests their use. Removing grasshoppers has made the field
forlorn by dissolving a vital part of its ecosystem. But sunlight, air, and rice
all dazzle even as grasshoppers disappear; rice production, in fact, depends
on their disappearance. Although the title and second half of “The Field Is
Forlorn” attempt to negate the first half, and the first half undercuts the title
and second half of the poem, neither position dominates: vital links are bro-
ken but heaven and earth still amaze. The contradiction between the casing
and the center of Chŏng Hyŏnjong’s poem elucidates one of the great am-
biguities of farming: the coexistence of production and destruction, indeed
the nearly constant reliance of production on eradicating animals and plants,
including many designated as “weeds.” “The Field Is Forlorn” shows how
ecosystems can be damaged, even to the extent of having their most vital
parts removed, without losing their vitality.
“Mount Chiri’s Cuckoo”—written by one of Korea’s most revered lyri-
cists—is more ambiguous. It suggests but neither confirms nor denies the
disappearance of animals, and is even more unclear about the damage to
ecosystems.27 Song Sugwŏn’s text begins with the claim that “On many
mountain peaks, many cuckoos / were crying, crying / as a group were cry-
ing, crying.”28 The speaker then states that this was an illusion, that “Three,
three, three springs passed / before I, seasoned with sorrow / discovered / that
the truth was [silsang ŭn] it was a single bird [han mari ŭi ppŏkkuksaeim ŭl
/alanaetta].” Although its title identifies a specific site—Mount Chiri, South
Korea’s second-highest peak and one of its three most celebrated moun-
tains—the poem begins with a more global perspective. But the geographic
scope narrows in the second stanza, where the fantasy is blamed on echoes
at a particular site:

At the foot of Mount Chiri

when on a single summit, the actual, hiding cuckoo
emits a single cry
it’s echoed by the next peak
and echoed by the next peak after that
so I knew [alatta]
that the cries were those of many cuckoos.29

Echoes convinced the speaker that the single cry of a single bird was multiple
cries of multiple birds. By using alatta, the past tense of the verb alda (to
174  ecoambiguity

know), to indicate his relationship with this fantasy, the speaker underlines
its power; he discovered (alanaetta) the truth but knew (alda) as truth what
turned out to be fantasy. Certain geological configurations, including Mount
Chiri and surrounding peaks, can produce this effect, and if people expect
only to hear but never to see birds, they can easily make the mistake the
speaker describes, believing there many birds when in fact there is just one.
“Mount Chiri’s Cuckoo” emphasizes how easily people can be fooled into
believing a species more robust than it actually is. The poem’s language ac-
centuates the power of echo, the first two lines reading literally: yŏrŏ [many]
sanponguri [peaks] e [on] yŏrŏ [many] mari [counter for animals] ŭi [posses-
sive] ppŏkkugiga [cuckoo, subject marker] / ulŭm [n. crying] ulŏ [vb. crying].
The first two stanzas repeat the words many (yŏrŏ), peaks (ponguri), animal
(mari), cry (ulda), three (sŏk/sam).
Symptoms given in the remaining three stanzas of “Mount Chiri’s
Cuckoo” are more difficult to decipher; the poem’s speaker suggests but does
not state explicitly that the one remaining bird has vanished. In the third
stanza he claims that he saw Mount Chiri’s chain of peaks “settling in still-
ness / the cuckoo’s crying gone.” He then notes, “For the first time a silent
river opened up” and in the fourth stanza says he sees the Sŏmjin River,
which enters the sea at Kwangyang Bay off South Cholla Province (extreme
southwest South Korea), rolling down in swelling waves and lapping the
shores of the South Sea’s many islets.30 In the fifth and final stanza attention
returns to the cuckoo’s cry, but this cry is seen, not heard:

One day in spring, those tears having vanished,

at the foot of Mount Chiri the cry of one crying cuckoo
the cry left over as the very last sad color of this life
the cry incinerating this entire pebbled flower garden of
rhododendrons—all this I saw.31

The speaker’s synesthesia does not preclude the existence of an actual bird,
but it does leave open the possibility that no bird remains, that the echoes of
the final bird’s cries have been absorbed into other parts of the natural world.
In contrast with Chŏn Hyŏnjong’s “Protective Embrace” and “The Field Is
Forlorn,” Song Sugwŏn’s poem never speaks explicitly of cuckoos as hav-
ing been anthropogenically displaced or destroyed. In fact, in an interesting
twist, it is the bird’s cry that “incinerates” (taeuda) flowers, albeit those in
a human-constructed space. But the phrase “very last sad color of this life”
(isŭng ŭi sŏrŏun maen majimak pikkal) suggests that the bird itself might
have disappeared. That this has happened on Mount Chiri (Chirisan), part of
 Underlining Uncertainty  175

Korea’s Chirisan National Park and one of the peninsula’s most revered sites,
bodes ill for the nation’s other ecosystems.
The Taiwanese writer Luo Qing’s poem “Liuxing gequ” (Pop Songs,
1972) demands, “Tell me / what kind of river is a river without branches
/ what kind of lake is a lake without reflection / what kind of sea is a sea
without living things.”32 By itself, this request for information suggests that
the poem’s speaker is confronted by ecologically devastated terrain. The lines
that follow, although not referring explicitly to environmental destruction,
reinforce this interpretation: “Tell me, tell me (But we’re all selfish and think
only of our own gain) / (A swarm pursuing money, sex, fame, and power
) / (We’re all . . .).” On the other hand the references to a river without
branches, a lake without reflection, and a sea without living things are pre-
ceded by lines suggesting that at least the land-based natural world has not
changed significantly: “Tell me / what kind of flowers are the flowers about
to bloom in the wind and rain / what kind of trees are the trees about to crack
in the lightning and rain / what kind of moon is the moon about to rise in the
clouds and rain.” The ambiguity is significant. As in the other texts examined
in this section, symptoms of environmental harm appear undeniable, but no
clear diagnosis can be made.33

Assessing Damage

Song Sugwŏn’s “Mount Chiri’s Cuckoo,” Chŏng Hyŏnjong’s “Protective

Embrace” and “The Field Is Forlorn,” and similar texts highlight the difficul-
ties inherent in making sense of symptoms of possible ecological significance.
Other creative works underline the complexities of another source of uncer-
tainty, namely the degree of ecological damage. Most noteworthy are those
texts that at once set up and undermine dichotomies in ecohealth between
spaces, between species, between subsets or individual members of species,
and between spaces and species. Establishing the presence of ecodegrada-
tion and determining its severity often involve contrasting clearly “damaged”
bodies with their seemingly “healthy” counterparts—rivers littered with de-
bris with those flowing clearly; birds dying from gunshot wounds with those
flying freely; tigers dying from gunshot wounds with those cavorting play-
fully; a healthy animal inhabiting an otherwise devastated landscape. But
many creative works establish these contrasts only to destabilize them, cast-
ing doubt on the actual condition of presumably spared plants, animals, and
spaces. Some, such as the Taiwanese writer Rongzi’s poem “Chong de shijie:
zhameng de huaxiang” (Insect World: Portrait of a Grasshopper, 1983), ex-
176  ecoambiguity

plicitly distinguish between polluted and unpolluted zones. Yet their descrip-
tions of the latter suggest that these spaces also have been at least somewhat
affected. Other texts, such as the Taiwanese writer Shang Qin’s prose poem
“Ji” (Chicken, 1993), contrast different members of a species, one group suf-
fering at human hands and the other leading an apparently peaceful life, that
nonetheless have much in common. Creative works such as the Taiwanese
writer Yang Mu’s poem “Zuotian de xue de ge” (Song of Yesterday’s Snow,
1985) similarly contrast the fates of different members of a species but leave
unclear how much damage has been done to the species as a whole and how
severely the landscapes both subsets inhabit have been damaged. The extent
of injury to environments is also ambiguous in poems such as Yang Mu’s
“Xiatian” (Summer, 1971), which describes a scene of seemingly thriving
green—whether literal or figurative—only to declare the space ecologically
compromised. This is in contrast with Chŏng Hyŏnjong’s poem “The Field is
Forlorn,” which although also featuring a landscape in which some groups
(albeit of different species) are killed and others thrive, is less ambiguous
than “Song of Yesterday’s Snow” concerning the overall health of the ecosys-
tem both groups share. Yang Mu’s poem points to the problems inherent in
equating green with ecological health.34 Together, these and related narratives
challenge diagnoses of environmental health, suggesting but not elaborating
on the ubiquity of ecodegradation and the near impossibility of isolating and
maintaining spaces untouched by its tentacles. The damage discussed in these
texts is spatially pervasive. Leaving the location of this damage for the most
part unspecified, each of the poems examined here reaches far beyond its
origins and in so doing has transnational implications.
Rongzi was one of the first women to make her name in postwar Tai-
wanese poetry, and her oeuvre depicts diverse relationships between people
and the natural world.35 One of her most important texts from an ecological
perspective is “Insect World: Portrait of a Grasshopper,” written in the early
days of Taiwanese antipollution protests and nature conservation move-
ments and narrated by a grasshopper. Contentedly surveying its “extremely
prosperous kingdom” (wo de wanguo jiqi fanchang) from its perch on a
tree in summertime, the insect announces a sharp dichotomy between “my
plentiful green world” (fengying lüse shijie) and the “polluted world of hu-
man beings” (renlei wuran le de shijie). It asserts that people “often must
eat the fumes of smoke from burning coal / and their own sulking air.” In
contrast, the grasshopper claims, here in its plentiful green world “I enjoy
glittering and translucent celestial dew / often with fragrant, cheerful flowers
as companions.”36 While humanity swallows thick, murky, poisoned air, the
grasshopper feasts on nearly transparent, twinkling drops of nectar. Not sur-
 Underlining Uncertainty  177

prisingly, given these conditions, the occupants of the “polluted world of hu-
man beings” are sullen, while those of the “plentiful green world” are jovial.
The grasshopper understandably declares that it “truly does not want to
exchange [jiaohuan]” this prosperous world for the defiled human world. But
the language of the poem suggests that the two worlds might be closer than
expected, and the border between them not so impermeable. The grasshopper
states that from its perch in the green world it can identify the moods of the hu-
man realm and even see what people are eating. This suggests that people live
not so far away. Furthermore, although the grasshopper asserts that its world
is one of plenty, it does not substantiate this claim, leaving open the possibil-
ity that the “insect world” might already be one in name alone. In the poem’s
opening stanza the grasshopper emphasizes that it is sitting by itself (du zuo).
As the self-anointed “king” of the realm, there presumably are times when it
must perch alone above its subjects. But it is noteworthy that when the ani-
mal descends from its branch, its companions (ban) are limited to “fragrant,
cheerful flowers.” The grasshopper speaks eloquently of its “green” world,
one that enjoys verdant vegetation, but there is no sign that it shares this space
with other animals. To be sure, the insect gives no indication that its realm
has experienced mass exterminations. But the “cheerfulness” of the flowers
easily could provide a short-term barrier against the sullenness creeping in
from the human world. So it is possible that the insect’s home already has
been damaged and that it might eventually have no choice but to “exchange”
worlds. Also important, considering the human tendency throughout history
to invade “green worlds,” is the possibility that people soon will infiltrate the
grasshopper’s realm. The “exchange” will be asymmetrical: pollution generally
penetrates less polluted areas more readily than flowery fragrances penetrate
smoggy spaces. In fact, a major difference between the two, more important
than their smog levels, is the fragility of the grasshopper’s realm compared
with the robustness of the “human” domain. This difference is highlighted in
the third stanza, where the grasshopper contrasts “glittering and translucent
celestial dew” (jingying xianlu) and “fragrant, cheerful flowers” with “fumes
of smoke from burning coal” and “sulking air” (menqi). The future of the
grasshopper’s Eden hardly seems secure.
“Insect World” suggests that the planet cannot be bifurcated into “green”
(nonhuman) and “polluted” (human) realms, however seductive and com-
forting this division might be. Rongzi’s poem is ambiguous about the ex-
tent to which human behaviors have already transformed the grasshopper’s
“green world.” But it leaves open the possibility that this space, like so many
“green” spaces before it, soon will become indistinguishable from the “pol-
luted world of human beings.” More than a simple exposé and condemnation
178  ecoambiguity

through the voice of a grasshopper of how people have damaged their envi-
ronments, Rongzi’s poem invites readers to ponder the seemingly inevitable
spread of these spaces and their continued absorption of other spaces near
and far. The uncertainty of “Insect World” underlines the ambiguity of these
happenings and highlights the need for greater vigilance and knowledge.
In the same way that “Insect World” contrasts the condition of differ-
ent spaces, the Taiwanese modernist and surrealist writer Shang Qin’s prose
poem “Chicken”—written a decade later with the burgeoning of Taiwanese
environmental consciousness—contrasts that of different subsets of a species,
in this case chickens.37 “Chickens” portrays one group of poultry as suffering
at human hands while indicating that the other, before its eradication, led a
peaceful life. But in fact, not only has the latter group not disappeared, it too
is at the mercy of people; the first-person narrator’s concern with the most
obviously abused animals has literally deafened him to the voices of those
in a more ambiguous position. As is true of Chŏn Hyŏnjong’s “Protective
Embrace,” “Chicken” refers directly to humans killing animals, but unlike
its Korean counterpart it does not temper this discourse by describing other
flourishing creatures. Instead, it focuses on animal abuse, and chickens con-
fined to factory farms in particular.
The narrator of “Chicken” states that while eating a fast-food lunch in a
quiet corner of the park, “it suddenly occurred to me that it had been several
decades since I’d heard a rooster crow.”38 The peacefulness of his surround-
ings is punctuated by loss. Using the bones that came with his meal, he at-
tempts to reconstruct the animal’s skeleton, hoping to create a “bird capable
of summoning the sun” (yi zhi nenggou huhuan taiyang de qinniao). He is
disappointed that he cannot find the animal’s vocal cords, but he readily
explains this absence, claiming that birds bred solely to eat and (re)produce
themselves have no need to cluck; nor does the artificial sunlight of factory
farms allow for dreams or dawns that might inspire birdsong. “Chicken”
condemns the poultry industry, a significant presence in Taiwan, where
chicken is a staple of many diets. Shang Qin’s text also raises questions about
the fate of this animal more generally.
The narrator of “Chicken” suggests that because he cannot find traces
of vocal cords in his fast-food meal, the chicken he is eating must not have
possessed them. But in fact he cannot find traces of vocal cords because birds
have no vocal chords; they make sounds by tightening the muscles of their
syrinx, a structure located at the divide of the trachea.39 By itself, the nar-
rator’s ignorance of basic avian anatomy would not result in a loss of cred-
ibility. Yet this unawareness accentuates how little he knows about chickens,
and, even more important in this context, about how people treat them. The
 Underlining Uncertainty  179

narrator depicts factory farms as spaces devoid of animal cries, when in fact
they are notoriously cacophonic. Moreover, even if birds had vocal cords, it
is unlikely they would be intact and recognizable in a fast-food meal. Of even
greater significance is the narrator’s implication that for decades all chickens
have been confined to factory farms. In Taiwan, as in most of the world,
chickens are raised in a variety of spaces, on a variety of scales, both in the
countryside and in large cities. It is unlikely that chickens have been inaudible
in every place the speaker has been in the last few decades; even in Taiwan’s
urban areas, where their squawks must compete with a plethora of other
sounds, they can often be heard.
The narrator has good intentions; he laments the fate of suffering animals
and addresses the implications of this suffering for human lives. In the final
stanza he claims that “under artificial sunlight / there are neither dreams /
nor dawns.” He is clearly referring to the practice at factory farms of de-
nying chickens exposure to natural light. He also could be commenting on
what has or is likely to become of the spaces people inhabit: deprived of
the sounds of animals, or at least chickens, they next might be robbed of
sunlight. But it is relatively simple to condemn obvious mistreatment and to
strengthen accusations of abuses by exposing significant differences, in this
case between animals confined to factory farms and those allowed daylight.
The cruelty to which chickens in factory farms are subjected is easily imag-
ined even by those who have never visited one; the narrator misconstrues
the precise nature of conditions, but there is no denying that chickens suffer
there. More difficult to discern are the traumas endured by animals closer to
home. Confusion about the condition, even the existence of these creatures is
symptomatic of larger lacunae in understandings of environmental problems.
It is hard enough to stimulate interest in obvious abuses; learning about more
clandestine exploitation is even more challenging.
Shining somewhat different light on the uncertainties surrounding degrees
of ecological damage is the Taiwanese avant-garde writer Yang Mu’s “Song
of Yesterday’s Snow,” written like Rongzi’s “Insect World” in the early days
of Taiwan’s environmental movements. A passionate reader of John Keats
and William Butler Yeats as well as Chinese literature of all eras and genres,
Yang Mu is known in part for his celebration of nature worship among Tai-
wan’s indigenous cultures, but he also has written on the destruction of eco-
systems in Taiwan and around the world.40 Similar to “Chickens,” “Song of
Yesterday’s Snow” contrasts the conditions of different subsets of a species,
in this case standing and felled evergreens, but leaves unclear how much
damage has been done to the species as a whole, as well as to its larger eco-
systems. Opening with a description of a mountain landscape in early winter,
180  ecoambiguity

the poem speaks of the gradually descending snowline and of people hur-
rying home from a day of skiing and sledding. The dark green conifers are
capped in white; together they are “a type of guide, desire of the universe” (yi
zhong zhiyin, yuzhou zhi yu).41 All appears well. But the ambience changes in
the final line of this verse, where wind, accompanied by the sporadic sounds
of a whirring saw, resonates from the streets below. The following stanza
elaborates on the damage these saws inflict on trees:

Power saws? That is the unfinished work of autumn, in

the cold, continuing diligently, like the
teeth of the Taotie [an ancient Chinese monster known for being
gluttonous and ferocious].
Work not finished before summer, it
ferociously gnaws into the fibers of falling leaves, like senses
following the track of a bundle of hair bound in red cloth
lucid and lively saws pass through dusks and dawns of times past42

Although the saw’s teeth first slice their way through the veins of falling (i.e.,
dead) red autumn leaves, they soon reach living wood. “Song of Yesterday’s
Snow” sharply contrasts natural with human-induced death; while the falling
red leaves are likened to hair wrapped in red cloth (red is the color of joy and
good fortune in Chinese culture), the teeth are demonized, accused of cutting
through a historical repository. Talk then returns to the descending snowline;
the remainder of the second stanza and all of the third discuss the deepening
drifts and how the people, now housebound, entertain themselves. Snow is
several times said to be “falling happily” (kuaile de xiazhe) and to “envelop
our spirits with its happy form” (yi kuaile de xingtai longzhao le women de
jingshen).43 Spared the Taotie, the snow’s happiness (kuaile) is contagious.
But this comforting vision is quickly shattered. “Song of Yesterday’s
Snow” concludes:

I am free to imagine, when just a moment ago snow touched

distant conifer forests, I can hear the voice of
blood gushing, the breath of love and beauty, and
a lucid and lively power saw intermittently from the street below
a loud voice arrives—autumn’s unfinished sonata.
When I go deep into this region of mountain chains and valleys,
passing above the snowline
that melody seems to be the theme of our anticipated new songs
massacring, destroying conifer forests: desire of the universe.44
 Underlining Uncertainty  181

The narrator is certain of the fate of the evergreens. With even a blizzard ap-
parently unable to quiet power saws that tear into trees like a fierce and glut-
tonous Chinese monster, with the sounds of these machines and the voices
of agonized flora providing the melodies of the foreseeable future, the two
groups of trees—those slaughtered and those topped with snow—soon will
become one.
Less evident from “Song of Yesterday’s Snow” are current conditions,
both of the trees and of the ecosystems they inhabit. Although power saws
show the trees no mercy when they attack, it is unclear how frequently these
assaults occur. More important, it is not certain just how many conifer forests
have been affected.45 In the final line of the first stanza the poem describes
the noise of these machines as resonating “from the street below,” suggesting
that until now the damage has been localized. But the lines that precede this
claim hint that even these sounds might be imagined:

When I also slid down, freely imagining like this

my ears hearing the sounds of the rivers and seas, wind
that barely blows and stops, and the intermittent sounds of a power
saw coming from the street below.46

The speaker does not specify which sounds, if any, echo only in his mind
and which are audible in the empirical world. He imagines sliding snow, but
the poem is vague as to whether he also imagines the voices of water, wind,
and whirring saws, or whether he actually hears these sounds. His graphic
description in the second stanza of saws viciously biting into trees suggests
the latter, or at least that he recently has been exposed to such destruction.
After claiming that “the lucid and lively saws pass through dusks and
dawns of times past,” the speaker hints that the damage might have been
widespread, involving not only trees on neighboring streets but also those
in faraway courtyards, and perhaps even near the water and beyond. The
poem’s final stanza is similarly ambiguous as to the range of woodlands af-
fected. Midway through this verse, after noting the tenderness of the falling
snow, the poem’s speaker claims himself free to imagine the snow gracing
distant conifer forests. Then, blending discussion of trees in remote sites with
those on the street below, he suggests but does not say for certain that the
former have met the same fate as the latter. The concluding lines of “Song of
Yesterday’s Snow” appear less vague. The poem’s speaker states that when he
goes far into the mountains the sounds of chainsaws and the cries of conifer
forests being massacred—what he terms autumn’s unfinished sonata—seem
to him the melody of the future. But it is unclear whether he actually hears
182  ecoambiguity

these sounds while in the woods, which would indicate that evergreens are
being attacked even in remote spaces. Seeing trees in the mountains could
simply make him think of the slaughter of those closer to home, leading
him to fear for trees everywhere, including those in his new line of vision.
Supporting this interpretation is the privileging of sound in this stanza to
the virtual exclusion of sight. Unlike the second stanza’s discussion of dying
trees, which intermingles phrases on the visible with those on the audible, the
exposé in the second half of the final stanza focuses entirely on sounds. The
emphasis on sound in the concluding lines of this stanza also contrasts with
that on sight and touch in the first half of the verse, where the poem describes
the snow as softly blanketing hills and hearts. To be sure, the poem’s speaker
could just as easily carry into the mountains memories of sight as he could
those of sound. But since he gives no indication of having encountered de-
forested landscapes away from home, since he does not mention witnessing
the destruction or remains of a single tree, and since he does not describe the
physical attributes of these spaces, it is possible that much of the damage to
groves and their ecosystems is yet to come.
Adding to the ambiguity about general environmental conditions are the
poem’s two references to “desire of the universe” (yuzhou zhi yu). Initially,
the poem refers to dark green conifer forests topped with white as “a type of
guide, desire of the universe” and then concludes: “massacring, destroying
conifer forests ·· desire of the universe.”47 The first reference suggests that the
“universe” longs for the leadership (inspiration) of trees topped with snow;
groves are valued for what they can do while alive. In contrast, the second
reference could mean either that conifer forests, having been destroyed, are
something for which the universe (human and nonhuman alike) now longs
or that the desire of the universe (people) in fact is to destroy them. As with
Shang Qin’s “Chicken,” Yang Mu’s “Song of Yesterday’s Snow” contrasts
and blurs the fates of two subsets of a species, leaving unclear how much
damage has been done to the species as a whole. The latter poem also raises
questions about injuries to the environments this species inhabits: the poem’s
ambiguity about the conditions of mountains and valleys far from home and
the absence of any description of these places except their blankets of snow
both leave room for speculation.
Yang Mu’s poem “Summer,” written amid the unchecked exploitation of
Taiwan’s ecosystems, likewise features a landscape of indeterminate condi-
tion. But in contrast with “Song of Yesterday’s Snow,” in the final line “Sum-
mer” suddenly declares ecologically compromised a space whose “green-
ness” it had highlighted:
 Underlining Uncertainty  183

Some smoke
so much, so much green
circling mosquitoes, tuberose
Mr. McDonald smokes a pipe
and repairs his fence. Young elm seeds falling in fragments.

At some distance from the pond, full of green moss

Because the woods are so deep

it seems as though the great efforts of the woodpecker are
drumbeats forecasting evening rain.
With the exception of this, a four-acre space
almost everything else is crushed nature, suffering.48

The first stanza portrays verdure as overwhelming the smoke from Mr. Mc-
Donald’s (Makedongna xiansheng) pipe. Smoke (yan) opens the poem, but it
is only “some smoke” (yixie yan) and is quickly diluted by the second line’s
profusion of green (hen duo hen duo de lü). Mosquitoes circle, tuberose (lit.
night fragrance, an herb of the agave family admired for its spike of fragrant
white flowers) grows, and young elm seeds fall, seemingly unperturbed by
the farmer and his pipe as he repairs his fence. Farther away sit a pond full of
green moss (lü tai) and deep forests (shulinzi tai shen le), their soundscapes
punctuated not by chainsaws, as in Yang Mu’s “Song of Yesterday’s Snow,”
or even by the woodcutter’s ax, but instead by the reverberations of a drilling
woodpecker. The nonhuman appears in good shape. Then suddenly, in the
final two lines of the poem, in a classic case of intratextual contradiction, the
poem declares that almost everything outside Mr. McDonald’s four-acre lot
is “crushed nature, suffering” (jihu dou shi bing le posui de tian).
As is true of many of the creative works examined in the following chap-
ter, the role of people in bringing about this state of affairs is left unclear.
Everything might be sick and crushed because of a “natural” storm, fire,
or insect blight, but pesticides leaking out from the farmer’s green plot also
could be to blame. More significant is how the incongruity of the final two
lines highlights the pitfalls of interpretation. “Summer” plays with under-
standings of green, particularly the color’s conventional use as a sign of
environmental health. The phrase “so much, so much green,” particularly
following the line “some smoke,” suggests that human behaviors have had
little effect on the ecosystems the poem treats; green, in other words, over-
whelms human traces. This reading is reinforced in the poem’s second and
184  ecoambiguity

third stanzas, with their references to a pond full of green moss and deep
(and presumably green) woods, respectively. Mocking expectations, the final
lines of “Summer” reveal green as far more ambiguous, as potentially just
as much a sign of abuse as one of health. That is to say, the green within the
farmer’s fence could result from extensive use of agrochemicals rather than
from “natural” vigor. It is also possible, albeit unlikely, that the green spaces
are flourishing in the conventional sense, but that the thriving foliage makes
the poem’s speaker uncomfortable, causing him to call sick and crushed what
others might see as healthy. Ultimately, as in the Japanese writer Yamano-
guchi Baku’s poem “Mo no aru keshiki” (Scenery in Mourning, 1940), the
poem speaks of nature as ailing but does not provide a specific example of
this phenomenon (e.g., dying plants), instead describing only what would ap-
pear to be “healthy” ecosystems. Thus it is impossible to know just what to
make of the environments in Yang Mu’s text.49 “Summer” calls attention to
how difficult it is to determine degrees of ecological damage and the facility
with which a particular space can be interpreted as both healthy and dis-
eased. Also noteworthy is the poem’s environmental cosmopolitanism. Yang
Mu’s text does not specify place, and in fact, by speaking generally of mos-
quitoes, tuberose (native to Mexico but also prominent in Asia), elm, mossy
ponds, and woodpeckers, and, even more important, featuring a farmer with
the Anglo name McDonald (Makedongna; 馬克東納), echoing but not to be
confused with the global fast food chain McDonalds (Maidanglao, 麥當勞),
suggests that this scenario is not specific to Taiwan and instead could be tak-
ing place on multiple continents.

Assessing Collateral Nonhuman Damage

Creative works discussing violence among people also underline the compli-
cations of evaluating damage to ecosystems by touching briefly on collateral
destruction of the nonhuman. Unlike Rongzi’s “The Insect World,” Shang
Qin’s “Chicken,” and Yang Mu’s “Song of Yesterday’s Snow” and “Sum-
mer,” which at once set up and undermine dichotomies between “healthy”
and “damaged” bodies, many literary texts draw analogies between the
abuses people inflict on one another and incidental human damage to non-
human species.50 Yet references to the latter, particularly when they function
primarily to reinforce the former, are often ambiguous. For instance, the Chi-
nese writer Zheng Chouyu’s poem “Canbao” (Fortress in Ruins, 1951), play-
ing on Du Fu’s “Spring View,” claims that “The guards already have gone
 Underlining Uncertainty  185

home, leaving behind / a border fortress in ruins / discernable, nineteenth-

century grasslands / now are a patch of sand dunes.”51 It is unclear whether
battles among people or other human behaviors (as in Jiang Rong’s Wolf
Totem) transformed grasslands into dunes or whether this change occurred
relatively independently; the poem’s focus on the fate of humans and their
cultural artifacts and its silence about the natural world, except for the moon
in the penultimate line, leave such matters open to conjecture.52 Similarly,
even though the phrase “bloodied forest” literally refers to the discoloring
of an expansive ecosystem (a woodland), in a text on war that does not
otherwise mention damage to the nonhuman it almost certainly serves as a
metaphor for the deaths of entire regiments. “Bloodied forest” could refer
simply to foliage spattered with but not drowned in human blood, or it could
indicate actual damage to plants and animals: foliage drooping or dying from
heavy concentrations of human blood, incidental deaths of animals such as
insects and other species readily trampled upon, even the intentional mass
slaughter of larger creatures. More specific examples of nonhuman suffering
in writings about violence among people can invite comparable confusion.
A writer might mention hearing the plaintive song of a single bird, but if this
reference is not substantiated by mention of other nonhuman suffering, it
too reveals more about nonhuman responses to human trauma than actual
trauma to the nonhuman.
Often appearing either as sweeping generalizations (a bloodied forest) or
as details not placed in broader ecological context (the sorrowful cries of a
single bird), these references highlight the difficulties of assessing ecodegra-
dation in spaces of considerable human-on-human violence. This dilemma
is particularly prominent in late twentieth-century war and political poetry
from Korea, including Chŏng Hyŏnjong’s “Kwisin ch’ŏrŏm” (Like a Ghost,
1989), Kim Kwanggyu’s “Yuryŏng” (Ghosts, 1979), Ko Ŭn’s “Ch’ŏt nun”
(First Snow, 1988), Pak Inhwan’s “Kŏmŭn kang” (Black River, 1955), and
Mun Tŏksu’s “Saebyŏk pada” (Dawn Sea, 1976).53 Discussions of war and
other forms of human-on-human abuse predictably tend to focus on the hu-
man cost. But often just as significant for the long-term health of people and
other species is the accompanying damage to the nonhuman world.54 The
poems discussed below, written between the mid-1950s and late 1980s, as
Korea was recovering from civil war and embarking on extraordinary in-
dustrial and urban growth, offer varying perspectives on the ambiguities of
judging this damage. Although these texts focus on Korea’s environments,
many reach far beyond the peninsula.
Chŏng Hyŏnjong’s “Like a Ghost”—which describes the abuse of Korean
186  ecoambiguity

people under the Park Chung Hee and Chun Doo Hwan regimes—interjects
several lines on the disappearance of birds into a discussion of the suffering
of students and teachers whose school has been gassed. By explicitly asking
not why schools are gassed but instead what has happened to the birds, the
poem highlights just how much more is understood of affliction to humans
than to animals, even in cases of situated damage. The traumas inflicted on
people are relatively clear, the poem’s speaker opening with a description of
the changes to his own body:

How I live like a ghost

The tear gas grenade that enters, shattering the glass window
inside, explodes instantly
within the building transformed into a gas chamber
within eyes tearing nose running
unable to see
unable to breathe
on the verge of suffocating
Really, how I live like a ghost55

Eyes tear and the nose runs; sight, then the ability to breathe, and then con-
sciousness are lost. The speaker somehow survives, but only as a ghost (kwi-
sin), a spirit, a faint and shadowy trace. Soon thereafter he describes what
has happened to his colleagues. One teacher bleeds from the neck, another
has difficulty breathing, another develops serious allergies, and another no
longer can keep down his food: “Dermatitis, rhinitis / Nose inflamed, throat
inflamed, windpipe inflamed / Always short of breath, blood coming out /
X-rays tried all around.”56 But at least people appear to have their beings
largely intact. The text concludes with the poem’s speaker seemingly resigned
to his new existence as a ghost: “This must be a ghost / I will keep living this
way . . . / Gradually, little by little / truly you are killing me / Really, I keep
living like a ghost / —It’s hell if I get attached.”57 He cannot understand the
reasons behind such brutal assaults. Between his account of the wreckage to
his own body and to the bodies of his colleagues, the poem’s speaker includes
several lines, in parentheses and in prose, asking the authorities why they
tore the school to shreds, why they used substances too poisonous to export
to other nations, in other words, why they showed so little restraint even to-
ward their compatriots. The reasons are clear for those familiar with Korean
history—for several decades the Korean government systematically repressed
suspected internal opponents of the state to preserve its own sovereignty.
 Underlining Uncertainty  187

These questions are transformed later in the text by queries about the
fates of animals:

This spring
I cannot hear the sounds of birds
Where have all the naïve pheasants gone?
Have the magpies all taken off?
The magpies’ nests and the schoolyard are both in ruins58

Traces of the birds’ nests remain, mixed in with fragments of the shattered
schoolyard, but the animals themselves have disappeared; it is uncertain even
whether they were able to escape the gas attacks and now are living else-
where, or whether they perished and their remains have become unrecog-
nizable. Whereas the speaker has the relative luxury of asking a question
to which he already knows the answer (why people were attacked so bru-
tally), he is unaware of the present locations of the pheasants, magpies, and
other birds that once nested in the schoolyard. In contrast to Kim Ch’unsu’s
poem “Landscape” and Xin Yu’s poem “Leopard,” which explicitly question
the proximate and underlying causes of ecodegradation, Chŏng Hyŏnjong’s
“Like a Ghost” is confined to asking what has happened to the birds whose
homes are now in ruins.59 Primarily concerned with the effects of gas attacks
on human health and well-being, “Like a Ghost” also underlines the relative
ambiguities surrounding nonhuman suffering. The text focuses on events in a
specific space, the school where the speaker works, but its dearth of identify-
ing details gives it more environmentally cosmopolitan heft than its environ-
mental actuality would suggest.
Kim Kwanggyu’s seven-stanza poem “Ghosts” likewise depicts a land-
scape spatially pervaded with violence, in this case kidnapping and murder.
The poem’s first and final verses read simply “Shh!” (쉿!; shwit), framing the
verse with orders to be silent and to give the poem and the human suffering
it describes undivided attention. In the first four lines of the second stanza
the poem instructs people to observe the “black cars” that dash through
the night and the men who “disappear” up side streets. These orders are
complemented and complicated in the first five lines of the sixth stanza by
the command to “hear” the voices of corpses rotting in ponds and rising
as smoke from chimneys, as well as those of bodies with mouths clenched
shut; these silent voices, it is implied, are all that remain of the abductees.
They are contrasted, in the final line of the sixth stanza, with the “clanging
commands” of those who perpetrate violence. In the third and fifth stanzas
188  ecoambiguity

the poem declares blind those who cannot see the shape of the ghosts, and
deaf those who cannot hear their voices.60 “Ghosts” portrays an environ-
ment filled with the remains of tortured human bodies; the poem argues that
it is the duty of the living both to “see” and to “hear” those who survive
only as phantoms, whether as dust in the air, mute bodies on the ground, or
decomposing corpses on the bottom of a pond.
The poem includes two references to environmental pollution. In the
final third of the second stanza it advises, “Look at the oil stains spread
over the devastated earth / and the scraps of iron spread on every road.”61
Likewise, as stated in the fourth stanza of Kim Kwanggyu’s “Ghosts,” the
physical center and intellectual pivot of the poem: “Every time we breathe,
infiltrating our chests / as though ultimately it will suffocate us / within flying
dust and cement powder.”62 Segments of these references connect directly to
the atrocities committed against people described elsewhere in the text. The
“oil stains” and “scraps of iron” presumably are from the cars that abduct
unsuspecting men, the subject of the first two-thirds of the second stanza;
the “flying dust” is presumably from the smoke rising from burning bodies,
described two stanzas later. But there is more to these references to environ-
mental pollution. By speaking of “scraps of iron” as littering “every road”
the poem most obviously underlines the frequency with which abductions
take place. Yet it also points to the existence of more pervasive degradation,
of ruin on a larger scale. Even more significant, the poem speaks of oil stain-
ing not the littered roads where these cars drive but instead the “devastated
earth” (hwangp’yehan ttang), a much vaster space. While focusing on the
atrocities committed against people, “Ghosts” also depicts the entire land-
scape as ravaged. The poem does not elaborate, moving in the following
stanza to discussing the (human) ghosts that haunt this land.
But in the fourth stanza the poem reveals the air above as unbearably
polluted, and not only from “flying dust,” the disturbingly human origins of
which are revealed in the fifth stanza. The poem speaks also of flying cement
powder. This powder could be residue from the chimneys mentioned in the
fifth stanza. But it likely has more varied sources. As was true of the reference
to polluted land, the reference to polluted air is followed in the fifth stanza by
talk of the (human) ghosts that haunt this space, and then in the sixth stanza
with references to extreme human-on-human abuse. On the other hand, the
final line of this stanza, which is the last line of the poem, save for the final
“Shh!,” orders people to heed commands rising “from a sandy wilderness
without a single tree” (namu han kŭru ŏmnŭn morae pŏlp’an e ullyŏonŭn
chŏ kuryŏng sori rŭl tŭlŏbora).63 It is possible that these environmental con-
ditions have little to do with human behaviors. But considering the references
 Underlining Uncertainty  189

in the second stanza to “devastated land” littered with iron and soaked with
oil, and particularly the fourth stanza’s depiction of air so polluted it inevita-
bly will suffocate all who inhale it, the poem suggests that people have had a
hand in shaping this bodyscape. The principal focus of “Ghosts” is violence
among people, violence so common it risks going unseen and unheard. Wo-
ven into the poem’s discussion of this type of brutality are fragments on dam-
age to the nonhuman. But these ecologically confusing references give only
a vague sense of environmental conditions. The poem refers to devastated
earth and polluted air, yet people are the only species depicted as actually
suffering. It is unclear whether any nonhuman species have been significantly
harmed. More apparent is this text’s environmental possibility, its applicabil-
ity to any number of landscapes.
Even more ambiguous than “Ghosts” and “Like a Ghost” about the im-
pact on environments of widespread human violence is “First Snow,” a poem
by Ko Ŭn, Korea’s most celebrated and prolific poet of the late twentieth
and early twenty-first centuries.64 Having moved from nihilistic to activist
verse in the late 1970s, Ko Ŭn here appeals to the present generation, which
has experienced immeasurable trauma, to abandon hatred and embrace love
and life. The poem begins by asserting that the falling snow, the first of the
season, implores people to stay alive: “The first snow is falling / telling this
age not to die!” (Ch’ŏt nun onda / i sidae chukchi mallago), two lines that
are repeated verbatim in the closing stanza.65 “First Snow” mixes references
to past abuses inflicted on Koreans—including arrests, imprisonment, and
even the division of their peninsula—with allusions to present emotions that
themselves risk further harming human communities. But the poem also in-
dicates that there has been significant damage to Korea’s nonhuman world.
After the two lines cited above, the first stanza continues: “The first snow is
falling / So much to do / on this bruised homeland of mountains and water /
the first snow is falling.” And the final stanza of “First Snow” follows “The
first snow is falling / telling this age not to die!” with “Telling this home-
land of rivers and mountains / to breathe fully.” The line “on this bruised
homeland of mountains and waters” (san i go mul in mŏngdŭn kangsan e) is
usually read metaphorically, the suffering as entirely human. The homeland,
synonymous with rivers and mountains—the term kangsan (강산), made up
of the characters for river and mountain (江山)—is snapped (잘리다) at the
waist (kangsan challin hŏri), but it is the people, not the physical landscapes
that suffer. Collateral damage to Korea’s ecosystems is undeniably signifi-
cant. But concerns are marginalized and conditions of ecosystems left am-
biguous. “First Snow” itself points much more to the “new” nonhuman (i.e.,
the snow) as healer of both people and nature; the poem depicts snow falling
190  ecoambiguity

on people, prisons, battlegrounds, hills, and water in addition to instructing

people and the land.
Whereas Chŏng Hyŏnjong’s “Like a Ghost,” Kim Kwanggyu’s “Ghosts,”
and Ko Ŭn’s “First Snow” are less ambiguous concerning the condition of
people than that of the nonhuman, texts such as Mun Tŏksu’s “Dawn Sea”
and Pak Inhwan’s “Black River” are notably circumspect about the status of
both. The speaker of “Black River”—written in the immediate aftermath of
the Korean War by a poet known in part for his engagement with Western
literatures and anxiety vis-à-vis modern civilization and war—is sitting on a
train he describes as “headed in the opposite direction of those going toward
death.”66 In other words, he is departing from a space of imminent or actual
destruction. But he does not elaborate on the experiences of new arrivals to
this place, commenting only: “A peasant’s son lacking even a facial expres-
sion / leaving for land of life and death filled / with explosion and gunsmoke.”
Later in the poem he again mentions encountering spaces of death, claiming
that a “fortress of freedom / brought about by the blood of human beings /
had no connection with those like us in retreat.”67 The speaker specifies that
the blood sacrificed is human, but he says no more about the suffering of
these individuals. Mention of nonhuman destruction is just as ambiguous.
The reference to air pollution via gunsmoke in the third stanza is echoed by
the comment in the fourth that “the moon is more dreary than quiet”; in
this context a “dreary moon” easily could be one seen through a shroud of
smoke. Likewise, the poem’s final line echoes its title, suggesting that the river
has been polluted by the same smoke that suffused the airspace above the
peasant’s land: “We saw in that moon / the gloomy black river flowing” (uri
nŭn chŏ tal sok e / amdamhan kŏmŭn kang i hŭrŭnŭn kŏsŭl poatta).68 The
land and air clearly have been polluted, but the damage to the inhabitants of
these spaces remains unclear; the speaker’s escape from the hardest-hit areas
suggests that it will be some time before questions about the conditions of
human and nonhuman bodies in these spaces can be answered.
Even more circumspect about these matters is Mun Tŏksu’s poem “Dawn
Sea.” This brief verse—written by a poet known for his portrayals of bleak
urban and rural landscapes and criticized for allowing ecological concerns to
take precedence over celebrations of the peninsula’s beauty—features a “rip-
ened” ocean that is “sizzling, seething, like crabapples” (nŭnggŭm ch’ŏrŏm
igŭn pada).69 Causing this turmoil are volleys of bullets emanating from the
edge of the water, bullets that transform the sea into a hole-riddled hive.
The morning light reflects off the rounds and the fissures they create; the
former are described as “many / suns / springing out from the edge of the
sea / like tiny balls” that transform the ocean, now “studded with sun,”
 Underlining Uncertainty  191

into a “casket of jewels.” It is doubtful that anything near the surface of the
water can survive. In this poem life exists only in simile, the bullets likened
to “animals / stampeding driven in / driven out.” But the actual damage
inflicted on ecosystems is ambiguous. The poem’s equating the ocean with
a cornucopia of seething crabapples suggests that it might be bloodied, and
thus that people and marine animals have been injured or killed. On the
other hand, crabapples come in many colors, from near purples and bright
reds to red-oranges, yellows, and greens. Unlike Pak Inhwan’s “Black River,”
which speaks explicitly of human blood as well as human and nonhuman
death, Mun Tŏksu’s poem does not specify whether bodies have bled, much
less perished. Ecosystems clearly have been reshaped, but the poem’s focus
on the sea’s new color, texture, and luminosity as contrasted with its silence
on the damage done leaves much room for speculation.
Writings on war and other forms of human-on-human violence frequently
address both intentional and incidental damage to nonhuman environments.
Many, like those examined above, highlight the relative ambiguities that sur-
round the conditions of the natural world. By adopting an environmentally
cosmopolitan stance, at least in part, they emphasize the ubiquity of these
phenomena; the texts in this section discuss conditions in Korea in the 1950s
to the 1980s, without being confined to that time or place. Needless to say,
no single text, particularly not a poem, can address every aspect of human
and nonhuman devastation. Most discourse in fact raises more questions
than it answers. But writings by Chŏng Hyŏnjong, Kim Kwanggyu, Ko Ŭn,
Pak Inhwan, Mun Tŏksu, and many others stand out because of their com-
plex and varied negotiations with this environmental uncertainty. One could
attribute these poems’ references to ecodegradation as simply reinforcing de-
pictions of human suffering. Yet ultimately such texts call for more nuanced
readings. Devastation of the nonhuman might occur incidentally to that of
human beings, but its consequences are rarely incidental.

Questioning Nonhuman Resilience

A common trope in many literatures is to contrast the relative resilience (en-

durance and revivability) of the nonhuman, whether individual species or
the nonhuman more generally, with the ephemerality of people and their
cultural artifacts. Numerous texts that establish this dichotomy allude to or
even highlight nonhuman endurance in the face of human transformation
of environments.70 Narratives often call attention to those parts of the non-
human that withstand or recuperate from damage imposed by people, and
192  ecoambiguity

those that exhibit resilience in the face of blizzards, typhoons, and shifting
tectonic plates. Yet many of these writings, despite their seeming optimism
about the prospects of the nonhuman, in fact leave ambiguous how long their
endurance can last. Doing so both explicitly and more subtly are the Korean
writer Mun Tŏksu’s poem “Yangsim” (Conscience, 2002); the Korean writer
Ko Ŭn’s poem “I ttang e ajikdo saemi itta” (In This Land There Still Are
Springs, 1986); the Taiwanese writer Yu Guangzhong’s poem “Xishuai he
jiguanqiang” (Crickets and Machine Guns, 1978); and the Japanese writer
Ishimure Michiko’s novel Tenko (Lake of Heaven, 1997). Whereas Mun
Tŏksu’s and Ko Ŭn’s texts raise questions about timetables of endurance,
and Yu Guangzhong’s poem interweaves uncertainties concerning endurance
and recuperation, Ishimure’s novel for the most part interrogates scenarios
of nonhuman revivability.
Mun Tŏksu’s deceptively simple poem “Conscience” features spatially
pervasive damage. An anonymous landscape has been torn apart by a ty-
phoon (not unusual in Korea) and sparkles with beer cans:

The typhoon pulled up the acacia tree by its roots, knocked it over,
and broke a poplar, its neighboring friend, in half.
It nicely combed down
even the thick roadside grasses and shrubs.
But empty aluminum beer cans glitter in the bushes.

“Scoundrels!”
it shouts.71

“Conscience” first highlights nonhuman strength, speaking straightforwardly

of a typhoon that not only uprooted and split apart trees but also reshaped
sturdy roadside grasses and shrubs. But ironically, as the poem moves from
larger to smaller foliage, questions as to the real strength of this storm begin
to surface. The fifth line remarks that empty aluminum beer cans clutter the
bushes. To be sure, the poem does not specify how many cans there are or
when or how the cans were deposited. The presence of empty beer cans in
the bushes after a typhoon suggests simple littering: people should of course
be recycling their aluminum cans (the poem was written after recycling pro-
tocols were implemented), but perhaps the storm blew in cans tossed else-
where, or people passing by the bushes after the storm threw their trash into
these plants. Such actions, particularly the former, complicate the poem’s
early endorsements of nonhuman strength and play up the stubborn tenacity
of human artifacts. Although the winds are stronger than the cans, the cans
 Underlining Uncertainty  193

emerge stronger than the trees: trees are explicitly torn apart, while cans ap-
pear to remain intact. Not only are they not disposed of as they should be,
they circulate through the landscape, weather patterns aiding and abetting
their journeys.
Undermining more seriously the poem’s early references to nonhuman
strength is the possibility that some of the cans were deposited in the bushes
before the typhoon and rode out the storm there, implying that some human
artifacts are so deeply imbedded among plants that they cannot be displaced
even by violent storms. The poem does not indicate that these cans have
changed anything other than the appearance of the bushes. Uncertain is how
much longer this will be the case—how much trash landscapes will be able
to support, and for how long. Mun Tŏksu’s poem depicts an environment
heretofore altered far more by a nonhuman phenomenon (a typhoon) than
by human actions (littering).72 At the same time, this text reveals people mak-
ing an imprint on even the most naturally devastated landscape; it appears
as though even a typhoon cannot liberate plants from their anthropogenic
burden. And by leaving so much unsaid, the poem raises questions as to
how long environments can resist human incursion; the broad scope of this
poem’s informational ambiguity deepens its import. For now, “Conscience”
suggests, human debris is confined to the bushes; moreover, although the
appearance of the roadside has been altered, the changes appear mostly cos-
metic. But when something seemingly as powerful as a typhoon is reduced to
shouting “Scoundrels!” (inomdŭl), referring most obviously to the cans but
also perhaps to the bushes for allowing the cans to nestle within them, and
when this accusation concludes the poem, doubt is cast on the strength of the
natural world.
Unlike Mu Dŏksu’s “Conscience,” where nonhuman phenomena have
retained considerable power even as this strength is questioned, Ko Ŭn’s “In
This Land” features a landscape ravaged by warfare and industrial pollution.
This poem highlights the endurance of Korea’s people and nonhuman bod-
ies. Although the speaker is optimistic that Korea is or soon will be a “new
nation” (sae nara) and a “new world” (sae sesang), the poem’s silence about
the future of the land’s ecosystems suggests that it might be in jeopardy. Even
more revealing are the repeated assertions, beginning in the title, that Korea
still (ajikdo) contains miles of clear, fresh, flowing water. The adverb still em-
phasizes continuity between past and present, accompanied in some sense by
wonder at this continuity. In this way it highlights the tenacity of the natural
world. But it also invites questioning about continuity between present and
future. The springs remain in motion, but for how much longer?
“In This Land” begins with a celebration of Korea’s long heritage, high-
194  ecoambiguity

lighting the fluidity and endurance of its natural wonders: “Here and there
along the shores of Cheju Island there are springs . . . / That water flows and
flows underground until it spurts up . . . / [In a valley of Mount Munsu] there
exists a spring, as innocent as a child / There exists a spring that flows from
beneath the frozen earth / Millennia of history! / In this land there still are
springs.”73 We begin on the country’s largest island, a beautiful province off
its southwestern coast created from volcanic eruptions and regarded by many
as the Korean Hawai‘i. The text quickly moves beneath the surface of both
earth and water, telling the reader that there are various freshwater springs
(saem) sprinkled along the shore; the lines that follow note that these springs
are visible in the ebbing tide, but even during high tide, they continue to flow,
defying gravity as they reach the surface and spurt forth. Ko Ŭn’s poem then
moves to Mount Munsu (east-central Korea), declaring that here too springs
flow, innocently as a child. All appears peaceful and eternal.
But immediately after declaring “in this land there still are springs,” echo-
ing its title verbatim, the poem declares, “Snapped land injured land / tram-
pled land” (challin ttang mŏngdŭn ttang / chitpalp’in ttang).74 Like “First
Snow,” written two years later, “In This Land” uses the adjective challida
(be snapped, i.e., divided) to describe Korea. While the waters flow as before,
the land has been harmed in various ways. Using the word ttang (lit. earth,
ground, land), rather than sesang (world) or nara (country) as it does in later
stanzas, the poem emphasizes the destruction wrought on Korea’s biophysi-
cal environments. The following five lines continue in this vein, highlight-
ing nonhuman endurance, retaining the distinction between living water and
suffering land, but emphasizing the endurance of the latter and its people.
The first, second, and fourth of these five lines describe damage to land and
air—skies reddened by industrial smog, spring drought, and soil poisoned
by heavy metals—while the third and fifth speak of a continuing revolution
and imprisoned workers and students. Each of these lines concludes with the
introductory nonfinal ending -n [-ŭn, nŭn] de (-ㄴ[- 은,는] 데 ), which here
gives the sense of “even though” (e.g., “even though the skies are red with
chemical smog [kwanghwahak sŭmogŭ]”). Following these five lines is the
refrain “In this land there still are springs.” The opening paeans to the Ko-
rean landscape here are transformed into evidence of its endurance.
This refrain is followed by two revealing questions: “How can gush-
ing water rot? / How can flowing water die?”75 In a way these questions
are rhetorical, the poem implying that it would be impossible for Korea’s
springs either to decay or to perish; after all, they already have showcased
their ability to withstand disaster. But in Ko Ŭn’s poem such queries, left un-
addressed, have bleak undertones. Rather than giving an answer, the poem
 Underlining Uncertainty  195

quickly switches topics, declaring “Yes / this land has people who fight /
fighting people / your words are always fresh and confident / Strangely / your
words have no hypocrisy.”76 Trading pure gushing springs for pure gushing
people, and explicitly declaring them always already to be this way, the poem
redirects attention from the nation’s waters. Water serves as a metaphor, its
resilience and wholesomeness obvious signs of these characteristics within
the Korean population.
The poem praises the tireless, honest struggles of Korea’s students and
the endless sincere protests of its workers before elaborating again on the
nation’s freshwater springs. But as in the opening section of “In This Land,”
these lines are followed by the refrain, “In this land there still are springs.”77
In contrast, the next line reads, “This land has fights.” By including the ad-
verb still the poem again calls attention both to the water’s resilience and
to its possible vulnerability, at least in contrast with the Korean fighters it
otherwise resembles; the absence of still in its reference to Korea’s fighters is
noteworthy considering the poem’s earlier mention of Koreans having fought
steadily for the past thirty years. These are the last words on Korea’s waters;
the poem concludes with the claim that so long as people fight,

This land is certainly a new world [i ttang ŭn kip’ilk’o sae sesang

ida]
This land [i ttang ŭn]
a new nation, that nation [sae nara kŭ nara ro]
with other nations together is a new world [nam ŭi nara wa hamkke
sae sesang ida]78

As its title and opening lines suggest, Ko Ŭn’s poem focuses primarily on
Korea. But this final reference to the new world of Korea joining with other
nations as a new world (i.e., planet) is an explicit expression of interdepen-
dence.79 Korea’s political future is depicted as tied deeply to the futures of
other nations; its ecological future is similarly intertwined but more ambigu-
ous.
Likewise overrun with human violence is the landscape featured in the
Taiwanese writer Yu Guangzhong’s “Crickets and Machine Guns.” Focus-
ing on the fate of crickets, this poem by one of Taiwan’s many cosmo-
politan writers, written before the swelling of Taiwanese environmental
consciousness, questions the resilience of animals.80 Whether this resilience
takes the form primarily of endurance or of regeneration is not clear: the
poem speaks not of the death of crickets but of their silence, which could
indicate their demise, their momentary stillness, or the temporary obscur-
196  ecoambiguity

ing of their ongoing song by the clamor of machine guns. “Crickets and
Machine Guns” draws attention to the frequently disregarded collateral
damage to the natural world that often accompanies human carnage. This
focus is accentuated by the poem’s featuring the human/nonhuman battle
as one between small insects and powerful weapons intended to kill people,
rather than between more obvious antagonists including insecticides and
crickets or hunting rifles and large mammals. By spotlighting a less likely
but possibly more lethal battle the poem alludes to the multilayered charac-
ter of much damage to the nonhuman.
“Crickets and Machine Guns” begins with the curious question, “In de-
bates between crickets and machine guns, which side loses, and which side
wins?”81 The answer is not surprising: “Of course it’s the machine guns
that win.” The lines that follow explain why this is the case; these weap-
ons possess “fierce and speedy eloquence,” “trenchant tongues of fire,” and
“glorious teeth that dazzle people,” all of which have until now made them
“debate champions.” Yu Guangzhong’s text personifies weapons and likens
the struggles between machine guns and animals to a verbal debate. It rein-
forces this analogy by referring to the magnificence of the guns’ eloquence,
tongues, and teeth. In so doing, it effectively dissolves distinctions between
people and their cultural artifacts. This poem also points to the power of ver-
bal discourse, suggesting that people’s words are perhaps just as intimidat-
ing as their weapons. It seems there is little hope for crickets; the following
lines explain that even mountains appear to cower before people and their
weapons: “Whenever the guns open their mouths, they cause a sensation,
the masses of mountains all answering / Ta-ta-ta, everywhere / Echoing hol-
lowly, unceasingly, like applause.” But then, itself mimicking so many other
creative works, “Crickets and Machine Guns” suggests that crickets, and
the nonhuman more generally, not only have a chance but also can triumph
over such weapons. The final third of the poem claims that there are times
when the crickets’ leisurely voices rise above the graves of heroes, that they
chant clearly among the foxtails, and that they “talk to the night, so deep in
thought.” Moreover, the text concludes, “perhaps singers endure longer than
sharpshooters / machine guns use screams to prove their existence / crickets
use only stillness.”
Perhaps, but not necessarily. The poem offers caveats nearly sufficient
to dismiss these suppositions as pure fantasy, caveats that together form the
middle third of the text. Yu Guangzhong’s verse declares that crickets are si-
lent unless gunsmoke disperses, gun barrels cool, and weapons point blankly
into the void; unless echoes suddenly stop, and gun shells fall to the ground.
In other words, crickets are only audible after “the powerful eloquence [of
 Underlining Uncertainty  197

the machine guns] shuts up.” Yet are these weapons ever quiet? Individual
spaces enjoy reprieves, many of which are long-lasting and unquestionably
overshadow relatively brief moments of violence. But, speaking solely of ma-
chine guns in mountains, Yu Guangzhong’s poem is pointedly ambiguous
about the location of the events it describes. If the poem refers to multiple
mountain regions where fighting occurs, then the possibility of nonhuman
resilience is greatly diminished. Lines in the final part of “Crickets and Ma-
chine Guns” provide a vision of hope, creating an enticing scene of gunfight-
ing brought to an end, of war as only a memory, one that is vanishing slowly
beneath gravestones encircled by thriving plants. On the other hand, sur-
rounding discourse deeply confuses such a vision. This includes the poem’s
final lines: jiguanqiang zhengming ziji de cunzai, yong huxiao / xishuai jinjin
yong jijing. That machine guns have to “use screams” (yong huxiao) to prove
their existence while insects need only “use silence” (yong jijing) points to the
greater legitimacy of the nonhuman; nature exists simply by being and has
no need actually to do anything, except, ironically, keep quiet. Yet its char-
acteristic silence, at least when surrounded by the clamor of weapons/people,
also threatens to mask its disappearance and leave its actual existence—and
its revivability—uncertain.
“Crickets and Machine Guns” declares machine guns victorious and
complicates the futures (revivability) of their insect opponents. Japanese
environmental activist and writer Ishimure’s novel Lake of Heaven further
questions nonhuman resilience by depicting the struggles of nature in sites
that have been greatly altered by people but whose greatest changes have
resulted from nonhuman phenomena—a typhoon and tectonic plate shift-
ing, respectively.82 While Mun Tŏksu’s “Conscience” points simply to the
tenacity of the human footprint amid tropical cyclones, Lake of Heaven
speaks at length of the actual damage people can do even to an environment
shaped by powerful nonhuman phenomena. Within this context it reveals
the uncertainty surrounding the revivability of the natural world. And while
Yu Guangzhong’s poem casts doubt on the mere possibility of regenerating,
the Japanese novel, which features successful nonhuman revitalization, casts
doubt on prospects for repeating this revival.
Written in 1997, three decades after Ishimure’s Sea of Suffering and in
a nation and world of increasingly threatened ecosystems, Lake of Heaven
describes the visit of Masahiko, a young Tokyo composer, to what remains of
his grandfather Masahito’s hometown of Amazoko (lit. bottom of heaven),
a village in Kyushu that thirty years earlier was buried under a lake created
by a dam. Amazoko is fictional, but it is modeled after the actual Kyushu
village Mizukami, submerged by the Ichifusa Dam, which was built in 1960
198  ecoambiguity

ironically to control flooding and generate power along the Kuma River in
Kumamoto Prefecture. Not surprisingly, the Ichifusa and other dam projects
in the area have been controversial; protests surrounding the Kawabegawa
Dam (located on an upstream section of the Kuma River) have postponed its
completion for several decades. On the other hand, in 2004 workers began
dismantling the Arase Dam, also located on the Kuma River, in part because
of opposition from local residents inspired by Ishimure’s writings.83
Lake of Heaven has rightly been described by Gary Snyder and others as
mythopoetical, incorporating as it does tales, dreams, myths, Noh drama,
poetry, and song as well as more straightforward narration. The novel speaks
explicitly of the power of words, of kotodama (言霊; lit. word spirit), as
“born of the union [gattai] of things such as morning light and the plants
of the hills and fields”; the novel calls residents of Amazoko “people in a
kind of ancient epic poem” (Amazoko no hitotachi wa sonna kodai jojishi
no naka no hitotachi da). Ishimure’s text celebrates rural peoples, the natu-
ral world in which they are enmeshed, and the power of the language used
to evoke both.84 The novel’s vivid, magnetic images captivate even its most
casual readers, underscoring all that has and will continue to be lost as na-
tions reshape ecosystems ever more dramatically; the text also highlights the
incredible resilience of both people and the natural world.
Ishimure’s narrator describes the villagers as quickly embracing Masa-
hiko, who is deeply impressed both by their rich spiritual lives and by the
healthy and abundant natural world—including trees, rivers, and moun-
tains—that physically and audibly permeates their communities. Lake of
Heaven vividly exposes the great traumas to both people and nature that
the dam has inflicted. But the novel also raises questions about the ability
of ecosystems to withstand human manipulation. People have irrevocably
transformed Amazoko’s landscapes, and many of the immediate changes are
described as having been quite painful. Yet the narrator gives little indication
that this landscape remained ravaged for long; in fact, it is repeatedly de-
scribed as a space of great harmony and beauty, one that inspires Masahiko’s
musical compositions. Even the novel’s title suggests nonhuman triumph
over extensive human manipulation of ecosystems: the lake (tenko) behind
the dam is one of heaven, not of hell. While condemning significant human
shaping of environments, such as damming rivers, Lake of Heaven seem-
ingly unwittingly highlights the relatively rapid recovery of the nonhuman in
Japan’s rural areas.85
In contrast, city lands have not fared so well; Ishimure’s novel sharply
condemns the air and noise pollution plaguing Japan’s urban spaces, depict-
ing metropolitan ecosystems as far worse off than those of rural areas. The
 Underlining Uncertainty  199

ambiguity lies in just how much human interference landscapes can endure.
Lake of Heaven addresses two extremes of transformed ecosystems: those
that after an initial period of adjustment regain their health and flourish
(spaces, including the lake, that are barricaded by concrete, as well as the
areas surrounding these spaces) and those that because of the density of their
human population are seemingly beyond repair (spaces, such as cities, that
are covered in concrete). Ishimure’s novel is more precise about both the
division and the integration of these spaces than are texts such as Rongzi’s
“Insect World,” which is ambiguous as to the extent the “insect world,”
somewhere supposedly separate from the “human world,” has already been
affected by it. Because the dam and new lake constantly exemplify human
transformation of environments, the narrator and characters of Lake of
Heaven harbor no fantasies that rural Japan has been left untouched. More
confusing is how much longer rural Japan, or at least that part of it closest
to the nation’s expanding metropolitan areas, will be able to withstand such
large-scale human projects.
Ishimure’s novel emphasizes the high human cost of inundating Am-
azoko. Not only did most villagers lose their homes, but gambling and finan-
cial mismanagement followed on the heels of dam construction with money
designated for relocation falling into the wrong hands and impoverishing
many. More significant, the deep attachment and sense of loss many former
residents, including Masahiko’s grandfather, feel toward the “village at the
bottom of the lake” do not erode with time; for some the memories are an
obsession and constant source of grief. Visiting this lake, Masahiko is sur-
prised to find that he too is moved: “All the places about which his grand-
father had told him—the Hall of Kannon, the monkey-seat rock, Oki no
Miya—where were they submerged? Trees, scattered here and there, were the
only things visible at the bottom of the water; the only thing he understood
was that there was the site of village. His heart was attacked by a crushing
sensation. He hadn’t expected to feel this way.”86 On the other hand, many
of the former residents of Amazoko have found new purpose in life: “Masa-
hiko felt as though among these people death was not extinction. They say
our generation is one of loss and ruin and that our mode is nihilism. But it
appears as though these people of Amazoko, who have lost their village, have
revived the meaning of existence.”87
Much of the nonhuman also has recovered from the traumas inflicted
on this landscape. Lake of Heaven highlights the devastation caused by the
dam: the narrative includes numerous graphic descriptions of the merciless
submerging of everything from grand and beloved trees to small and helpless
insects:
200  ecoambiguity

All the flowering clover, the Chinese milk vetch, and the innumerable
sweet flowerings of violets that grew along the ravines and ridges of the
field—everything was flooded together. For a moment, even when in
the water, the scene looked as though it were one of living vegetation.
What most surprised everyone was the variety of insects, creatures
that usually were overlooked, floating everywhere on the surface of
the water. Ants large and small, molting light-green dreamy small but-
terflies, with their wings, thinner than paper, torn apart were floating.
Mole crickets were swimming, lizards too were swimming. Even tiny
baby birds that appeared as though they’d just hatched were floating
in their nests . . . Together with the insects, which seemed as though
they were burning in hell, the villagers felt as though they too were be-
ing exterminated before they even knew what was happening.88

Unlike in Yu Guangzhong’s “Crickets and Machine Guns,” where insects

confronted with volleys of gunfire are simply described as persisting in
speechlessness and silence, Ishimure’s narrator vividly describes the pain-
ful physical mutilation of these animals’ bodies. The seemingly thoughtless
flooding of their ecosystems is contrasted with the villagers’ more respectful
plowing of the land. As Oshizu reminisces:

When they started letting in water, around the time that Sōsuke’s field
of Chinese milk vetch was submerged, inordinate numbers of green
caterpillars and mole crickets bubbled up from beneath the grass. Ev-
eryone gasped when they saw this. The insects were floating, covering
the surface of the water [mizu no ue ippai], choking us up. I’ve never
forgotten that scene. Oh, just think, when we built these fields, we
held proper memorial services for the insects.
There is a stone monument on the hill in the cemetery with the
words “memorial for the souls of the ten thousand beings.” By “ten
thousand beings” they didn’t mean just people. The stone monument
on the hill dedicated to the ten thousand beings was meant not just
for the insects and the birds; it was also for the souls of things we
can’t see, things that protect the village. Our ancestors built it for this
reason.89

Oshizu reveals not only her own conflicting attitudes, condoning the killing
of flora and fauna for agriculture while condemning their killing for the sake
of a dam that likewise aims to make human lives more comfortable. She also
exposes contradictions between the attitudes and behaviors of her predeces-
 Underlining Uncertainty  201

sors, namely the conflict between their killing and honoring a vast array of
nonhuman beings. This rural landscape has a long history of human habita-
tion and manipulation—not only have local peoples long been farming here,
but well before the dam was built, forest fires and a French lumber mill pol-
luted the region and triggered landslides. But the dam caused unprecedented
damage.
Even so, thirty years after the dam was built the ecosystems Masahiko
encounters show few if any signs of degradation. Looking at the lake for
the first time, Masahiko notes that, far from being a polluted cesspool, “the
submerged village has been made into a gathering place for fish.”90 The wa-
ter is clear and peaceful, so much so that some residents seem to believe that
“this manmade lake, constructed taking full advantage of modern technol-
ogy, was like a transparent cocoon that contained within it the chrysalis and
silkworms that the sleeping ancient village had become.”91 And surrounding
the lake the soil is rich and fragrant, the foliage luxurious, the air filled with
birdsong, and the mountains magical. Masahiko and the narrator can barely
contain their excitement. The region is occasionally afflicted by droughts,
but these are infrequent, do not seem to be human-induced, and do not cause
lasting damage.
In fact, much greater than the difference between the pre- and postcon-
struction landscapes is the gap between rural and urban areas, a dynamic
often overlooked in critical discussions of Lake of Heaven, which under-
standably focus on the disruption to rural lives, both human and nonhuman.
The narrator and Masahiko frequently contrast rural and urban sites, almost
always to the detriment of the latter. Masahiko is particularly captivated by
the sounds heard in the mountains and in what remains of Amazoko. Listen-
ing to the winds along the shore of the lake,

All the cacophony [騒音] of that frenzied city [狂暴な都市; i.e., To-
kyo] vanished [消えていた] from around him. The grating noises of
cars [車の擦過音], the sound of brakes [ブレーキの音], the noises of
shutters opening and closing [シャッターの開閉音] that had eaten
down to the marrow of his bones. Street noises [街の音]—things con-
stantly being torn up and smashed down—had all vanished [消えてい
た]. What kind of world was that? Could it be that I’ve been carried
off by the energy of the cacophony [騒音] of that giant city [巨大都市;
i.e., Tokyo] and made a soft landing here?92

Noteworthy is not only the jarring racket of Tokyo—the narrator repeating

the character for “noise” (音) six times in four lines—its omnipresence and
202  ecoambiguity

omnipotence, its ability to infiltrate the skin and, like the chemicals Ishimure
describes in Sea of Suffering, eat down to the marrow of the bones (hone no
zui made kuiitteita). Also striking is the healing power of the landscape: the
narrator describes not so much the presence of these sounds within Masa-
hiko’s body as their absence. They once had penetrated the very core of his
body, but they have since disappeared, the narrator concluding the first two
sentences translated above with the verb “vanished” (kiete ita; 消えていた).
Later in the novel the narrator again remarks on how the sounds of trains
and trucks would interrupt conversations in the city between Masahiko and
his grandfather, and on the sharp disparity between the forest of thriving an-
dromeda trees not far from the buried village and Masahiko’s own tiny pot-
ted andromeda, covered in soot, that wilted not long after his grandfather’s
death. Tokyo is so cacophonous, Masahiko reflects, that the cries of roosters
are audible only in zoos. Not long after arriving in the village he comes to
think of the “breaking, rapidly swelling Tokyo as a giant cancer cell.”93
The ground on which Tokyo is built and the air above the city are not
the only spaces implicated. Nearly all of Japan appears at risk. The narra-
tor comments that the Japanese islands have become “a conveyor belt car-
rying concrete scabs, all covered with swarms of shuddering vehicles.”94
Complaining that people do their best to disregard the machines removing
the very earth that once nurtured them, the narrator asks, “Doesn’t it seem
as though a giant, invisible hand is stretching out and grasping the epider-
mis, or rather even the dermis beneath it, of the densely populated area of
this archipelago, and peeling it away?”95 The ecosystems around the former
Amazoko have thus far been relatively spared. In fact, in the first chapter—
unlike in Sea of Suffering where as discussed in chapter 2 the narrator de-
clares that a “deep, fissure-like pathway . . . ran the length of the Japanese
archipelago”96— Masahiko declares that except for the dam this region has
“no straight line of human construction.”97 But the dramatic image of hands
grasping the epidermis of the Japanese islands ready to peel it away indicates
that environmental devastation is hardly confined to a few select spaces. New
roads are gradually infiltrating areas around Amazoko, and although they
so far have successfully blended into the mountainsides, and their vibrations
have stayed in tune with those of the earth’s skin, at least in Masahiko’s in-
terpretation, there soon will come a time when these roads are no longer so
inconspicuous. Interestingly, Masahiko initially had been disturbed that the
land was gashed to build the new road, but now he believes these changes
nicely complement those the terrain inflicts on itself in the form of volcanoes,
shifting land masses, and the like.98 Needless to say, it is such changes in at-
titudes—from being troubled by the human reshaping of the mountainside to
 Underlining Uncertainty  203

believing such transformations complement millions of years of nonhuman

upheaval—that allow for increased human manipulation of environments.
The elaborate discussion of the geological history of the region suggests that
Masahiko and the narrator feel somewhat uneasy about justifying human ac-
tivity in this manner. Although Lake of Heaven in many places highlights the
parallels between the pre- and postconstruction landscapes and underlines
the differences between Japan’s cities and its mountain regions, the novel
also makes clear that the latter are in jeopardy. These landscapes have for
the most part withstood and overcome the changes people inflict, but their
resilience cannot endure forever.
Creative texts such as the prominent Korean ecopoet Ch’oe Sŭngho’s
“Tamjaengi tŏnggul e hwipssain puldojŏ” (Bulldozer Wrapped in Ivy
Vines, 2000) depict the bulldozers that reshape the landscapes writers from
Ishimure to John Steinbeck describe, as well as the people whose lifestyles
are made possible by these bulldozers, as at the mercy of rain, wind, and
ravenous vegetation.99 “Bulldozer Wrapped in Ivy Vines” opens with rain
and wind rusting out iron; the poem concludes on a similar note: “The ivy
vines, with their sticky hands / wind around the bulldozer, and blazing under
the sun / are ready to gnaw on the scrap iron.” Here it is not machines or
their by-products penetrating human and nonhuman bodies but instead the
nonhuman eating away at human artifacts. These interactions are evidence
of nonhuman potency; most human mechanical and chemical products, even
those exceptionally harmful to the nonhuman, eventually disintegrate in its
grasp and become part of it. This means that the very landscape ravaged by
a bulldozer could one day devour this machine and that the adaptability of
the natural world cannot be underestimated. Indeed, as the quotation from
Karen Tei Yamashita’s Through the Arc of the Rain Forest cited earlier in this
chapter indicates, even literature focusing on massive human destruction of
environments emphasizes that much of the nonhuman ultimately survives,
albeit often in changed configurations. For its part Ibuse Masuji’s novel Ku-
roi ame (Black Rain, 1966), regarded by some as Japan’s foremost work
of atomic bomb literature, comments on the untimely deaths of Kokutaiji’s
ancient camphors: “They were said to be more than one thousand years old,
but today had been brought to an end.”100 On the other hand, like much
Japanese literature of the atomic bomb, this narrative also remarks on the
speed with which the flora and fauna of Hiroshima and Nagasaki reappear;
Black Rain defies assertions made directly after the bombings that it would
be decades before anyone or anything could live in these cities. Surveying
the ruins of Hiroshima, the novel’s protagonist remarks, “This bomb was
fostering the growth of plants and flies while increasing the power that deters
204  ecoambiguity

the essence of humanity. Flies and plants were raging unbelievably.”101 But
far from offering solace, or justification, these altered dynamics complicate
evaluating patterns of nonhuman resilience.
Imagining similar scenarios, many have argued that the continued exis-
tence of human society is far more precarious than that of nonhuman life on
the planet because the earth is still able to withstand whatever people do to
it and to themselves. People’s behaviors, it is said, put at tremendous risk not
the planet’s survival but their own. In contrast, Mun Tŏksu’s “Conscience,”
Ko Ŭn’s “In This Land,” Yu Guangzhong’s “Crickets and Machine Guns,”
and especially Ishimure Michiko’s Lake of Heaven suggest that nonhuman
resilience is at best ambiguous; these works invite us to reconsider familiar
tropes of nonhuman permanence, broadly speaking, as well as of human
impermanence. To distinguish among parts of the nonhuman, or even be-
tween these “parts” and the “planet,” is an uncertain exercise. Damage to
one nonhuman species affects the condition of countless others of greater and
lesser significance; when this damage is replicated in another site (e.g., similar
dams built in rivers at some distance from one another), when it stretches to
multiple regions, the number of affected species can increase exponentially.
In the end, Ishimure’s narrator suggests, the very epidermis of the earth is
peeled away, the planet itself tortured mercilessly.

Ambiguous Futures

Closely related to creative works that question the resilience of ecosystems

are narratives that point to the confusion surrounding both human and non-
human futures in the face of impending and severe environmental damage.
Such ambiguous texts, a subset of environmental apocalypse narratives, de-
pict ecological disaster as inevitable and in some cases imminent. On the
other hand, unlike many apocalyptic writings that describe in great detail
the future that awaits, not to mention those—such as the American author
Cormac McCarthy’s best-selling The Road (2006)—that actually are set in
such a future, the texts examined in this section remain notably ambiguous
about the conditions that follow disaster.102 They do so by forecasting out-
comes through broad generalizations, conflicting information, or silence. The
tension between certainty (of occurrence) and uncertainty (of resulting con-
ditions) is responsible for much of the intra- and extratextual anxiety about
environmental futures articulated in these creative works. This tension pen-
etrates texts as varied as the Chinese émigré writer Wang Ping’s short story
 Underlining Uncertainty  205

“Maverick” (2007) and the Japanese writer Sakaki Nanao’s poems “Itsuka”
(Someday, 1995) and “21 seiki ni wa” (In the 21st Century, 1996).
Written in English, “Maverick” is the final selection of Wang Ping’s an-
thology The Last Communist Virgin.103 It is one of many recent Chinese
creative works that address the high environmental price of the Three Gorges
Dam.104 Wang Ping’s story takes place on June 6, 2006; it begins six hours
before and concludes six seconds before the demolition of the Three Gorges
Dam’s cofferdam, the temporary barrier against the Yangzi River used during
construction that, when removed, unleashed the full force of the river on the
new dam.105 Although narrated in the early twenty-first century and antici-
pating an imminent event, the bulk of “Maverick” consists of reiterations
of ancient Chinese myths, legends, and folklore; background on Wushan, a
county on the northeastern tip of Chongqing municipality, Sichuan Province,
that was flooded by the Three Gorges Dam; and flashbacks to the princi-
pal narrator Wu Pan’s childhood experiences in the now flooded town of
Wushan, including his interactions with family, friends, fish, and Red Guards
(the “vanguard” of the Cultural Revolution, the young men and women
Mao Zedong sent to attack their elders and other counterrevolutionaries).106
The story also devotes significant space to the story of Shan Gui (Mountain
Spirit), not the elusive hill wraith in the lyric of the same name by the Chu
statesman Qu Yuan, but instead a massive Chinese sturgeon that Wu Pan
caught thirty-six years earlier.107 After being pulled from the water, the stur-
geon took on various guises, including those of a beautiful woman and a
fish waging a hunger strike because of its confinement in a tank in Beijing;
the fish even narrates part of “Maverick.” By devoting most of its space to
past events and employing a nonhuman narrator on occasion, Wang Ping’s
story provides multiple perspectives on the myriad parts of the natural world
likely to be or already significantly affected by the dam and other human
reshaping of environments. But setting Wang Ping’s story apart from most
other narratives that address ecodegradation—including many that speak of
the devastation caused by or expected from the Three Gorges Dam—is its
methodical countdown to devastation that will be anything but methodical;
ruin is certain to be followed by even greater chaos, the timing and nature of
which are highly uncertain.
Framing “Maverick” is a sequence leading to demolition. The story be-
gins with an epithet on wizards gathering herbs on Soul Mountain from the
Shanhai jing (Classic of Mountains and Seas), a principal source of Chinese
mythology that combines fragments of ethnography and natural history with
folklore from shamanistic visions.108 This is followed by: “This is it, Shan Gui
206  ecoambiguity

[mountain spirit], June 6, 2006. In six hours, the Coffer Dam will explode.
The river will rush in and we’ll all go under . . . In six hours the river will rise
to the red mark—175 meters, and everything will go—the gorge, the slopes,
the mist, and our home under the dawn redwood. The river will become a
lake: tame, servile, worthless.”109 Six pages later Shan Gui announces, “In six
hours when the Coffer Dam blows up and the water rises, everything along
the river will go—the fields, the roads, the villages, the cities, the mountains,
and our water fir.”110 With about a page to go before the end of the story,
the narrator declares, “The time has come, Shan Gui. In six minutes, the
river will rise to the red mark on the trunk.”111 The countdown ticking, on
the final page the narrator states: “It [the river] has six seconds to go. In six
seconds, the river will no longer be.”112 The lines that follow this declaration
and bring “Maverick” to a close take more than six seconds to read:

But it will never die.

At your grave I wait. When the hot wind blows in from the North
Pole, the sea will rise like mountains, shattering every chain [dam] on
the river’s throat and limbs. And you, my mountain spirit, will come
home in your original form, free, naked.113

The cofferdam thus implodes—or is imagined as imploding—as the reader is

finishing the story.
Yet these concluding sentences not only point to washing away the Yang-
zi’s countless dams, which Shan Gui earlier had described as numbering in
the tens of thousands, essentially clogging the “artery of my home.”114 The
final lines of “Maverick” also provide a vision of the future at odds with
earlier predictions. The forecasts following the announcements that six hours
and six minutes remain focus on the more immediate effects of a rapidly ris-
ing river: the burial of human history and the destruction of innumerable
ecosystems. Just before announcing that there are six seconds to go, the nar-
rator again speaks of these consequences, noting that archaeologists working
feverishly along the gorge are upset over the imminent loss of so many traces
of human history, but that it is just as important to think about the damage
being inflicted on living human and nonhuman beings:

Yet who will cry for the tree that survived the ice age and is about
to go under? And the green sturgeon that has been spawning in the
Gold Sand River for millions of years but is blocked forever behind
the dam? Who will cry for the one million people displaced from their
 Underlining Uncertainty  207

homes and land? And you, Shan Gui, who will bring you back from
the far north?115

The reference in this passage to human-on-human abuse resonates with those

earlier in the narrative to the suffering Chinese endured at the hands of their
government and its minions, particularly the Red Guards. Elsewhere in the
story, the narrator reinforces such sentiments, quoting Shan Gui’s mother as
urging her to sacrifice herself for the sake of all other sturgeon:

[Mama said:] You’ll hurl yourself against the dam over and over, your
flesh splashing over the concrete. You’ll be shredded by the turbines,
your blood dyeing the reservoir scarlet red. Your violent death may or
may not be enough to shock them into finding a new home, but it’s the
only chance for those stubborn prehistoric creatures. They have seen
the rise and fall of dinosaurs, the coming and going of the big ice and
floods, the birth of mammals and humans. Will they survive this? We
can only hope, before they disappear, before we all disappear . . . We
want to help them. Those ancient noble souls deserve to have a place
on the planet.116

Mama reveals the likely fate of a species that has endured for millions of
years, that has witnessed the rise and fall of countless other species, surviving
violent nonhuman phenomena including massive floods and ice ages. This
species now has seemingly met its match and is threatened with extinction.
The contrast the narrator makes between the sturgeon and most other spe-
cies is noteworthy in how it highlights not only the unprecedented power of
the Three Gorges Dam (i.e., even the sturdiest animals are no match for its
turbines) but also the vulnerability of most of the nonhuman, especially to
human behaviors.
In contrast, the narrator’s final prophecy—following his announcement
on the last page of “Maverick” that six seconds remain—describes a some-
what different future: in time, it is said, the structures that bury will them-
selves be buried. This prediction is itself prefigured. Several pages earlier,
Shan Gui had claimed that, trapped in a tank of blue chemicals, she has
“shut down my body to save my heart. I’m saving my heart for the big wave.
When it arrives, a path will open through the steel and glass and concrete. It
will take me home.”117 The sturgeon at last will be free; animals at last will
triumph. Yet matters ultimately are more complicated. A path might open
to take the sturgeon home, one that can penetrate steel, glass, and concrete;
208  ecoambiguity

the sturgeon might at last recover its “original form,” but with just one lone
animal remaining it is unlikely that this species has a future. More important,
if the seas actually do “rise like mountains” they will shatter “every chain
on the river’s throat and limbs,” or at least make these dams irrelevant. The
terrestrial species that can survive such upheaval are few, and the fate of most
aquatic species is likely not so different.
What makes the scenario outlined in the final lines of “Maverick” so
frightening is that it is not entirely hypothetical. The narrator asserts that
what will trigger rising sea levels is “hot wind [blowing] in from the North
Pole”—in other words, global warming. Earlier in the story, describing the
floods, droughts, and famines that plagued Wushan in the 1960s and killed
more than a million people, the narrator claimed that his father “[in those
days] couldn’t look further into the future, because it was just one dark wave
after another until the whole place went under.”118 The futures the narrator
and Shan Gui predict—both immediate and more distant—are analogous.
Entire landscapes will be submerged, and soon. Yet it is unclear just what
will be flooded, and when, and with what effects on survivors, both people
and the natural world, particularly over time. The narrator does not address
these ambiguities explicitly. But the contrast between the story’s anticipatory
structure and its largely retrospective content (reversing to some extent the
dynamic of Ishimure’s Lake of Heaven), together with the contrast between
its precision about the timing of the cofferdam’s demolition and its relative
silence on the effects of this implosion, not to mention its silence on the
timing and effects of the massive flood that is predicted, show how much is
unknown and unknowable about the future conditions of ecosystems. The
background information on Wushan makes clear how much already has
been lost, as well as how much there is to lose, but beyond the guaranteed
flooding of particular spaces, confusion surrounds the prospects for human
and nonhuman survivors.
Sakaki’s “Someday” exhibits even more anxiety and uncertainty about
the future.119 This poem features an individual whose visit to nuclear power
plants in and around Tsuruga (Fukui Prefecture, on Japan’s western coast)
on January 12, 1995 so frightens him that the following day he mistakes a
thunderclap and lightning flash for the explosion of a nuclear power plant.
He does so even though he likely has experienced countless thunderstorms,
so should be able to identify the storm for what it is, and even though the
sky itself suggests an impending storm, with turbulent clouds, occasional
snow, gusting wind, and confused birds. On the other hand, in midwinter it is
understandable that the speaker might not immediately attribute a clap and
flash to a thunderstorm. In any case, relieved that the boom and flare were
 Underlining Uncertainty  209

false alarms, the speaker nevertheless asserts that it is only a matter of time
before an atomic energy facility actually does explode. He then wraps up the
poem by noting that these false yet prophetic alarms occurred four days be-
fore the Great Hanshin (Kobe) earthquake of January 17, 1995, which killed
well over 6,000 people:

Sun in the dead of winter   sinking

following the shore along the Sea of Japan
I visited  Fukui Prefecture’s Mihama nuclear power plant
then  the fast-breeder reactor  Monju  The next day
storm-threatened sky  dawning
January 13, noon    nuclear power plant Ginza120
On the platform of Tsuruga Station   waiting for a train

Clouds turbulent   snow off and on   the wind gusting

birds confused · · ·   Suddenly
    gwoonbari    bari   bari
   Flash    dazzling  the eyes
   Deafening roar  piercing the ears

Ooh  God!  Buddha!
   sudden  shock
   sudden  cold sweat

I’m so thankful  that  God  God
thunder  rumbling

I’m so thankful   that

the nuclear power plant did not explode

But   someday · · · 　[だが いつか · · ·]

    Four days later [四日のち]

    Kobe’s large earthquake [神戸大地震]
    6,300 dead [死者6,300]

                1995.1121

“Someday” depicts environmental trauma as inevitable. Although under-

standable considering the troubled histories of the Mihama and Monju
210  ecoambiguity

nuclear facilities, both of which have suffered serious accidents and been
plagued by scandals, the speaker’s exaggerated reaction to a mere thunder-
storm so soon after visiting these sites reinforces the terror nuclear power
plants can instill in people.122
Yet the reference to the Kobe earthquake does not shift the source of the
traumas the speaker envisions from human behaviors to “natural” phenom-
ena—as is true of the poem’s brief move from nuclear power plants to thun-
derstorms—so much as it underscores the involvement of both people and
the nonhuman in environmental upset. The human death toll of the Kobe
earthquake was so high not simply because of the tremendous tectonic en-
ergy released but also because the low-lying areas of the city had not been
built to withstand extreme shaking.123 Following the warning, “But someday
· · ·” (da ga itsuka · · ·) immediately with “Four days later / Kobe’s massive
earthquake / 6,300 dead” reinforces both that disasters are imminent and
that nuclear power plant accidents are not the only tragedies awaiting human
and nonhuman communities. The poem is visually striking, the warning a
single line written in kana, while information on the earthquake is mostly in
characters, three lines compressed tightly together; “someday” is no longer
simply a matter of speculation.
“Someday” remains notably silent on when the next disaster will occur
and what form it will take. The poem concludes with an ambiguous mix of
finality and anticipation: finality in that a “someday” has arrived, sooner
than expected; anticipation in that there are many more “somedays” to
come—including those where nuclear power plants melt down, triggered by
earthquakes, as happened in the July 2007 Niigata–Chūetsu Oki Earthquake
and even more dramatically in the March 2011 Tōhoku earthquake catastro-
phe—and that these likely will be more devastating to the planet.124
Taking on not the global but the galactic, Sakaki’s “In the 21st Cen-
tury” is place-stamped “Korea Pusan / United Nations Army Cemetery” and
time-stamped October 1996, the forty-fifth anniversary of this thirty-five-
acre site commemorating Allied servicemen who died in Korea.125 But as in
so many of Sakaki’s poems this grounding is overwhelmed by the text itself.
Unlike Kim Kwanggyu’s poem “Relationship of Thoughts,” which lists what
will happen under certain conditions (i.e., people thinking only of their own
specialties), Sakaki’s poem lists seemingly assured attributes of the twenty-
first century. “In the 21st Century” is a visually striking two-page text that
consists of eleven numbered sections, six on the first page, divided into two
columns (1–3/4–6), and five on the second page, also divided into two col-
umns (7–9/10–11). This relative crowding of information—as though the
speaker had lifted material from an official pamphlet, perhaps one obtained
 Underlining Uncertainty  211

at the cemetery—gives the text an aura of authority. The first ten sections
begin with the refrain, “In the 21st century” (21 seiki ni wa). This refrain is
followed by a catalog of ten items, followed first by the subject marker ga
(が), several spaces, and then the word nai (ない; is/are no/will be no). For
instance, the first stanza begins:

(1) In the twenty-first century 21 世紀には

There will be no true intentions ほんねが　ない
There will be no pretenses たてまえが　ない
There will be no string pulling 根まわしが　ない
There will be no faking やらせが　ない
There will be no bullying いじめが　ない126

Appearing to have none of the ambiguity of hanging chads, the hanging nai’s
here reinforce that there will be no real intentions, no pretenses, no string
pulling, no fakes, no bullying. Cataloged in the following sections as not ex-
isting in the twenty-first century are everything from political shenanigans, so-
cial problems, and sales taxes to diseases, weapons, environmental pollution,
and sites of nuclear disaster such as Chernobyl, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki.
The first nine sections also list more desirable phenomena including every-
thing from health drinks and the Internet to Valentine’s Day, Nobel Prizes,
and peacekeeping organizations, but these are the exceptions. In contrast,
the tenth section both lists more positive phenomena, and specifies that these
things will be absent only in specific places. The ten lines following the open-
ing refrain “In the 21st century” begin with a type of person/animal or place
(e.g., children, birds, fields), followed by the preposition ni (in, at, on), sev-
eral spaces, characteristics of these places (e.g., smiles, songs, earthworms),
the subject marker ga, and then the hanging negative nai. This section de-
clares that that there will be no smiles, songs, earthworms, dragonfly nymphs,
mushrooms, fish, sun, cloud shadows, color, or stars in places one would
expect them—children’s faces, birds, fields, rivers, forests, coral reefs, des-
erts, the ground, rainbows, and the Milky Way, respectively. So the future of
smiles, stars, and so on is uncertain. Perhaps smiles still will exist, just not on
children’s faces, and stars will have vanished, but only from the Milky Way.
Dashing these hopes, the eleventh and final section gives two different
predictions:

(11) In the 21st century

there will be absolutely nothing nothing will be absolutely
 nothing
212  ecoambiguity

yet  somewhere
—tidings of wind—
Somewhere   in the 21st century

Urashima Tarō and Otohime

   are likely to exist
Urashima Tarō and Otohime
   are likely to exist.127

The section first asserts that in the twenty-first century there will be abso-
lutely nothing (nai nai zukushi naizukushi). But then it unexpectedly changes
course, indicating that the legendary figures Urashima Tarō and Otohime are
likely to exist (iru sō na) somewhere (doko ka ni).128
Certainty becomes ambiguity. Sakaki’s poem does not state how or when
in the next century these various disappearances will occur, far from idle
concerns for a text published in the mid-1990s. More explicitly ambiguous
are the longer-term consequences of these disappearances for both people
and the nonhuman realm. “In the 21st Century” makes the intratextually
contradictory claims that “somewhere” in this postapocalyptic world there
are “tidings of wind,” that “somewhere” on the globe Urashima Tarō and
Otohime are to be found. If taken literally, the evocation of Urashima and
Otohime implies that the bottom of the sea might be spared, remarkable
considering the damage done even to the Milky Way. But mention of the two
legendary characters also suggests that stories themselves have a chance of
surviving. It is unclear whether the stories might exist as tangible or intan-
gible objects (books or oral tales), but their continued presence means not
only that people have survived but also that creative production remains part
of their lives. After all, “In the 21st Century” repeats the verb nai (is/are no,
will be no), a word used for the nonexistence of everything but people, leav-
ing the human condition uncertain. The poem appears unwilling to declare
its own demise a certainty, much less the demise of the species on which
it depends for creation and circulation. Like Wang Ping’s “Maverick” and
Sakaki’s “Someday,” “In the 21st Century” asserts that broad environmental
destruction is inevitable, but at times the poem is subtly, at times notably,
ambiguous as to conditions in a postapocalyptic world. Many futures con-
sidered to be known are in fact anything but.

Discourse on ecodegradation is nothing if not abundant, and most liter-

ature that engages with environmental problems draws directly from per-
sonal observations and local predecessors, even as it frequently strives to
 Underlining Uncertainty  213

become more ecologically cosmopolitan and address concerns with global

resonances. But much of this creative writing, even texts that exude self-con-
fidence (e.g., those that assert the future will be one of extremes), interweaves
undeniable ambiguities. Creative works that address damage to ecosystems
just as often confuse environmental conditions as they depict conditions that
are confusing. That is, they feature nonhuman bodies and landscapes whose
actualities are difficult to assess, often because of their conflicting attributes
(e.g., bodies that appear healthy but display symptoms that suggest they are
not; landscapes where some species are obviously thriving and others clearly
struggling). They also can confuse the reader by providing fragmented or
contradictory information on the conditions of individual bodies and envi-
ronments about which much more is clearly known (e.g., nonhuman bodies
of which only a single facet is described). Such discourse points to the inevi-
tability of uncertainty in both literary and physical environments. Yet only
rarely does it suggest that in such a milieu human behaviors ultimately do
not matter. On the contrary, even creative works that feature the actual or
anticipated demise of large ecosystems generally depict missed opportunities
for people both to exacerbate and to forestall if not prevent environmental
trauma. Behaviors do matter, but their own discrepancies can be even more
ambiguous than those of the discourse that describes them. It is to literary
negotiations of these behavioral contradictions and their evaluations that I
now turn.
four  /  Capitalizing on Contradiction

Although increasingly conscious of environmental degradation, we remain

remarkably unaware of how our behaviors affect ecosystems near and far.
We know surprisingly little about the effect of human actions on the eti-
ologies, the patterns of progression and regression, and the consequences of
damaged environments. Felling trees clearly kills them, but to what extent
does felling trees injure the flora and fauna that live in them or rely on them
for sustenance? How much do these injuries matter? How many dead trees
does it take to matter? If trees are left where they fall, their bodies can pro-
vide homes for other species; if they are removed, space is made for other
plants to grow. It is uncertain whether this regeneration can compensate for
taking down trees, regardless of why they were felled. Even more complex is
determining the ecological cost of possessing an object constructed of trees
logged elsewhere. Daniel Goleman points out concerning the “objects” with
which we surround ourselves:

We go through our daily life awash in a sea of things we buy, use, and
throw away, waste, or save. Each of those things has its own history
and its own future, backstories and endings largely hidden from our
eyes, a web of impacts left along the way from the initial extraction
or concoction of its ingredients, during its manufacture and transport,
through the subtle consequences of its use in our homes and work-
places, to the day we dispose of it. And yet these unseen impacts of all
that stuff may be their most important aspect.1

Goleman suggests that the effects of our acquisitions terminate the day “we
dispose of [them].” Yet some cultural products languish for millennia.
Human behaviors are nothing if not ambiguous: the acts themselves,
as well as their causes and motives; their relationships with other actions,
whether human or nonhuman, whether performed by a single individual or a
group of people; their effects on human and nonhuman bodies; and the reac-
tions they provoke. Behaviors tend to be some combination of unpredictable,

214
 Capitalizing on Contradiction  215

inconsistent, contradictory, and unclear. General patterns exist, but ambigui-

ties are often a basic component of even the most expected, repeated actions.
This is part of what makes human damage of environments so difficult to
prevent or remediate.
As the Korean writer Ch’oe Sŭngho’s “Saeu ŭi nun” (Shrimp Eyes, 1993)
suggests, even something so seemingly innocuous as writing a poem can have
ambiguous consequences. This prose poem—which like so many of Ch’oe
Sŭngho’s texts is situated in an indeterminate location and whose only spe-
cifically “Korean” feature is the language of its composition—depicts an
individual anxious that his efforts to celebrate a crustacean in verse might
backfire and ultimately harm the very creature that has so mesmerized him.
Admitting that he is still captivated by the two protruding, gleaming golden
eyes of a shrimp he spotted one night swimming toward him while he was
standing “on a lakeshore” (hosukka e sŏ), the narrator claims that these
eyes are more beautiful than any he has ever seen. He wonders what to do
with this vision: he questions whether it might be better to have it remain in
memory, since translating it into written language could, he believes, “ruin
the shrimp’s eyes” (saeu ŭi nun ŭl mangch’ida).2
The narrator does not elaborate on how writing about eyes might “ruin”
them, but there are several possibilities. Perhaps his literary skills are not
up to the task of describing something so magnificent, so any attempt to do
so would be doomed and figuratively destroy the shrimp’s eyes. A greater
concern from an ecological perspective is that alerting people to the splendor
of this animal paradoxically might hasten its downfall. To be sure, if this
individual has spotted an endangered species of shrimp, then publicizing its
distinctiveness could result in increased protection of the animal. But how
many times have people who have stumbled on spectacular plants, animals,
and geological features regretted sharing their findings; word of magnificent
landscapes spreads quickly and awakens desires to see them at first hand,
which in turn can increase the possibility of devastating the very parts of
the nonhuman that are being celebrated.3 In contrast with the Korean poet
Chŏng Hyŏnjong’s “Kŭge mwŏni” (What’s That?, 1995) on the Union Car-
bide disaster in Bhopal, India (1984), where writing about ruined eyes prom-
ises to save other, healthy eyes, writing about glorious eyes in “Shrimp Eyes”
is not without danger.4 So Ch’oe Sŭngho’s narrator strikes a compromise: he
writes that he has seen eyes of great beauty but neither elaborates nor gives
his location.
Creative works highlighting ambiguities in human behaviors and their
effects on environments are an important part of literature that addresses
ecodegradation. This chapter analyzes some principal ways in which behav-
216  ecoambiguity

ioral ambiguities are textually negotiated: in discourse on the uncertainties

of human responsibility (causality and accountability), on the contradictions
that characterize many human interactions with environments, and on the
difficulties of assessing human behaviors.

Determining Cause, Assessing Accountability

Some of the greatest behavioral ambiguities surrounding ecodegradation in-

volve responsibility—both physical cause and moral accountability. Even the
most basic questions often are difficult to answer. It can be challenging to
determine whether human behaviors, nonhuman actions/phenomena, or a
combination of the two brought about the adverse transformation of a par-
ticular landscape. If both people’s behaviors and nonhuman processes are
involved, it can be difficult to ascertain the precise ratio, or even the principal
cause. If nonhuman factors are the chief culprits, it is often unclear whether
people could have done something to thwart destruction. In any situation
where people could have tried to prevent environmental damage, to what
extent should they be accountable for the resulting harm?
Certain groups are most obviously at fault—government units that per-
mit and even encourage exploitation of ecosystems, corporate bodies that
fund this abuse, and individuals who directly harm the nonhuman. But other
bodies, including financial and religious groups, also play fundamental if
more obscure roles in degradation. The role of necessity also must be exam-
ined. If need is presumed but not actual—if an individual or group deems a
particular behavior essential to survival when in fact it is not—accountability
can be even more difficult to establish. These questions, frequently addressed
by creative texts that depict damaged landscapes, are important for both al-
leviating current environmental debilitation and preventing it in the future.

Among People

Much creative writing spotlights human behaviors that facilitate environmen-

tal degradation. But while they are unambiguous about human as opposed to
nonhuman responsibility, these texts also frequently are vague about exactly
which people and behaviors are to blame. Even those writings that condemn
particular groups and practices for harming environments often show that
cause and accountability are multifaceted. A corporate board might plan,
finance, and oversee a factory that disgorges poisonous chemicals and dam-
ages surrounding ecosystems. But the board members rely on the conscious
 Capitalizing on Contradiction  217

and unconscious cooperation of many other individuals and groups, includ-

ing people who are adversely affected by the factory’s chemical effusions (e.g.,
factory workers and residents living in the vicinity of the plant). Determining
which individuals and groups are involved, not to mention the extent of their
involvement, is often virtually impossible. Many creative texts underline this
conundrum not by intricately subdividing responsibility but instead by impli-
cating people and behaviors tout court. By holding everyone accountable for
ecodegradation, these texts raise an important question about collective cul-
pability—if all are responsible, to what extent is any single person or behav-
ior responsible? It is one thing to maintain that environments are damaged
by far more human groups and behaviors than generally are acknowledged;
it is another to blame everyone for everything.
The Nobel Prize winner Gao Xingjian’s hefty novel Lingshan (Soul
Mountain, 1989) provides valuable perspectives on this phenomenon. A nov-
elist, dramatist, director, and painter, Gao Xingjian was born and raised in
China and graduated from the Beijing Foreign Languages Institute in 1962
with a degree in French language and literature; he first traveled to France
in 1979 as interpreter for a delegation of Chinese writers. In the 1980s he
pursued theory and experimental drama in China despite constant battles
with the authorities, but in 1987 he relocated to Paris and in 1997 became a
French citizen, three years before receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature. Un-
like other prominent émigré writers of Chinese heritage in France—including
the best-selling author Dai Sijie and Académie française member François
Cheng—Gao Xingjian has continued to write most of his work in Chinese
and publishes largely in Taiwan.5 His work is banned in China but is widely
available there; it also has been translated into numerous languages, includ-
ing Japanese and Korean.
Although Gao Xingjian is not known primarily as an environmental
writer, many of his texts at least touch on ecodegradation. His most overtly
ecological work is the drama Wild Man (1985), which addresses many of the
environmental problems facing China and the world. Its characters condemn
habitat loss and species eradication; they speak as well of the paradoxes of
nature conservation. The play’s lead figure—referred to simply as The Ecolo-
gist (Shengtaixuejia)—denounces conventional human interactions with
landscapes, particularly deforestation, and attempts to convince loggers that
transforming woodlands into nature reserves is in their best interest.6 More
ecologically ambiguous is Soul Mountain, which in many ways is “typical
roots literature [xungen wenxue] in that it explores or imagines a Chinese
tradition counter to the orthodoxy and based on the heritage of the ancient
state of Chu, Daoism, and the cultures of minority groups.”7 This somewhat
218  ecoambiguity

convoluted but engrossing novel is narrated by a young urban Chinese man

who, not unlike Gao Xingjian, after a misdiagnosis of cancer travels to the
lands of the Qiang (northwestern Sichuan Province, southwest China), Miao
(southern China), and Yi peoples (southwest China), three of China’s offi-
cially recognized ethnic minority groups.8 On his journey he meets fascinat-
ing individuals from diverse backgrounds who deepen his understanding of
himself, his nation, humanity, and the natural world. The principal concerns
of the protagonist—who refers to himself alternately as “I,” “you,” “he,”
and “she”—are self-reflection, discovery, and analysis. His often profound
insights into his own life are augmented by shrewd discussions of China and
the Chinese, past and present. He also incorporates a thorough ornithological
and botanical taxonomy of China’s natural realm and comments throughout
the novel on the ecological problems that plague his country and the planet
more generally. Critical studies of Soul Mountain seldom refer to the novel’s
passages on environmental abuse, which to be sure often are overshadowed
by discourse on interactions among people or between people and environ-
ments that are not obviously damaged. But the ways Gao Xingjian’s text
addresses ecodegradation, including the novel’s entangling of environmental
and social problems, offer important insights into human relationships with
the natural world. Not only does this work, unlike A Cheng’s King of Trees,
discursively reorder nature “through the use of a degree of taxonomic detail
beyond that in most contemporary Chinese literature,” ultimately suggesting
that “no register of language can bring nature fully into human comprehen-
sion.”9 It also raises questions of culpability and accountability concerning
environmental degradation. Soul Mountain attacks both Chinese people’s
treatment of one another, including during the Cultural Revolution (1966–
76), and their exploitation of their natural environments. Yet by speaking
generally of people (ren) as responsible, by implicating everyone, including
in some cases humanity in general, this novel spreads culpability so broadly
that it at times paralyzes judgment and at others threatens to become nearly
meaningless.
Soul Mountain opens with the narrator arriving on a rickety bus in an
unnamed “small southern mountain town.”10 He was enticed to this region
by a chance conversation on a train with a man who claimed to be headed
to Lingshan (Soul Mountain), a place he described as replete with wondrous
phenomena including ancient, seemingly untouched forests. Confused as to
how to reach Lingshan from the town and finding the bus station shuttered
with no one available to assist him, the narrator contemplates both the iro-
nies of visiting a place that has yet to become a tourist destination and his
disdain for tourist sites and the hordes of people who flock to them:
 Capitalizing on Contradiction  219

There were no tourists like you among those who got off the bus.
Of course, you’re not that type of tourist. It’s just your attire . . .
there’s no one else dressed like you coming and going on the streets
. . . You haven’t come to have fun at one of those places on the sunny
side of a mountain where people watch people, people are next to
people, people jostle people, and where people leave behind the skins
of melons and fruits, soft drink bottles, cans and boxes, sandwich
wrappings, and cigarette butts. Sooner or later this place too presum-
ably will be unable to escape such spectacle. You’re here before they
build brightly colored, eye-dazzling pavilions and terraces, before re-
porters come with their cameras, before celebrities leave their inscrip-
tions. You can’t help secretly rejoicing good fortune. At the same time,
you’re also a bit anxious. There’s no indication here of anything for
tourists.11

The narrator is quick to distinguish himself from the ordinary tourist, and
this small town from more established tourist sites, where the center of at-
tention is people (ren; 人), a focus he highlights with a sentence whose first
half repeats the character ren six times—人看人，人挨著人，人擠人—and
concludes with a list of six things that people discard.
But before long the narrator discovers that the small town where he has
disembarked is not as untouched by visitors as he originally imagined. On a
nearby bridge he finds a plaque, affixed in 1983, marking repair work done
in 1962. He comments that this sign “surely is a signal of the beginning of
the tourist industry here,” emphasizing that it is only a matter of time before
the hordes descend.12 The narrator also reveals that the tourist industry is
not the only source of pollution. Walking along a road in town, he is passed
by trucks whose drivers mercilessly honk their horns and hang outside their
windows, yelling at pedestrians to clear the track. This village might be re-
mote, but it is hardly an ecological paradise.
Indeed, from the very beginning of Soul Mountain the reader is cautioned
that primeval (old-growth) forests, spaces virtually untouched by human
hands, exist mostly in the imagination. This becomes more apparent as the
novel progresses. The narrator celebrates the beauty of China’s landscape
while also showing how many of the nation’s ecosystems have been devas-
tated. A botanist (zhiwuxuejia) he befriends early in the novel regales him
with the Daoist Dao de jing, proclaiming loudly, “People [ren] follow [fa]
earth [di], earth follows sky [tian], sky follows the Way [dao], and the Way
follows nature [ziran]. Don’t do things that go against nature’s character
[ziran benxing].”13 But this is only after telling him that in the maple and
220  ecoambiguity

linden forest he is visiting: “They’ve [already] chopped down every tree that
can be sold as timber . . . Strictly speaking, there are no longer any primeval
forests here [yuanshi senlin]. At best these are secondary forests [yuanshi
ci senlin].”14 Daoist sayings, however forcefully asserted, are no match for
loggers. The botanist then tells the narrator what he thinks of efforts to save
the giant panda, the deforesting of surrounding landscapes, the effects of the
impending construction of the Three Gorges Dam on both people and the
natural world, and human interactions with environments more generally.
Expressing his frustration at ambiguous, contradictory, and self-defeating
human behaviors, the botanist declares:

It’s just symbolic [saving the giant panda], a kind of consolation.

People [ren] need to deceive themselves. On the one hand, we rush
to rescue a species that already has lost its ability to survive, but on
the other hand we’re intensifying our destruction of the very environ-
ment of human survival. Look at the banks of the Min River where
you entered. The forests all have been logged bare. Even the Min has
become black, but the Yangzi is much worse—and yet they’re going to
build a dam in the Three Gorges. Of course it’s romantic to let one’s
imagination run wild. But there are many historical records of this
ground’s geological fault collapsing. It goes without saying that block-
ing off the river and constructing a dam will destroy the entire ecology
of the Yangzi River valley. Once a large earthquake is induced, the
hundreds of millions of people living on the middle and lower reaches
of the river all will become fish and turtles. Of course no one will
listen to an old man like me. But when you plunder nature like this,
nature always gets its revenge! . . . It’s not animals that are terrifying
[kepa], it’s people [ren] . . .Young man, it’s not nature that’s terrify-
ing [kepa], it’s people [ren]. So long as you become well acquainted
with nature [ni zhiyao shuxi ziran], it will be close to you [ta jiu tong
ni qinjin]. People [ren] of course are intelligent. There’s nothing they
can’t manufacture, from rumors to test tube babies. And yet every
day people [ren] destroy two or three species. This is the absurdity of
people [ren].15

This sermon on anthropogenic environmental degradation highlights human

absurdity (ren de xuwang) and declares people (ren) more frightening than
wild animals (yeshou) or nature (ziran); it is delivered by a botanist, whose
claims cannot be easily dismissed and which add legitimacy to the novel’s
subsequent critiques of human behaviors. People might have a tradition of
 Capitalizing on Contradiction  221

speaking of harmony between themselves and nature, but they thoughtlessly

annihilate the nonhuman bodies on which they depend for survival; they
possess an unlimited capacity for both creating and destroying themselves
and other species. The botanist believes that nature will seek revenge and
likely will harm people considerably, but in truth many parts of the natural
world appear in jeopardy. He claims that learning about nature will create
close bonds between people and the natural world, but he remains silent on
whether these ties can forestall ecological degradation.
Similar comments on human greed and environmental damage appear
throughout Soul Mountain, voiced by both the narrator and the individuals
he encounters. The narrator describes forests that no longer exist, lakes that
are a fraction of their former size, fish that are too toxic for consumption,
and putrid rivers that have wiped out dozens of species.16 He also cites a
recent prediction that because of ever-increasing silt accumulation brought
about by land reclamation, in a few decades Dongting Lake, one of China’s
largest, will exist only in map and memory. At one point in the second half of
the novel, having traveled to a site that was logged for two years (1971–73)
during the Cultural Revolution and remains denuded more than a decade
later despite the fact that it is in the middle of a nature reserve, the narra-
tor comes upon an expanse of “beautiful alpine marshland.” Moved by this
sight, he stands for a long time in the cold wind, “thinking about the bit of
primitive ecology that’s perhaps remaining in this piece of nature.”17 He then
comments: “[The classical philosopher] Zhuangzi, who lived more than two
thousand years ago, has already said that useful timber [youyong zhi cai] dies
young by the ax [yao yu fujin], and useless timber [wuyong zhi cai] enjoys
good fortune [fangwei daxiang]. People today are even greedier than those of
old, calling into question Huxley’s theory of evolution.”18
This episode is revealing in several respects. As dramatized in Ah Cheng’s
King of Trees (examined in chapter 2), during the Cultural Revolution “use-
less” trees were felled, at times to make room for more “useful” counter-
parts, thereby reversing Zhuangzi’s parable of the tree (cited in chapter 1),
where “useless” trees are spared precisely because of their uselessness. Gao
Xingjian’s narrator contrasts ancient peoples, who showed mercy on at least
a small fraction of the nonhuman, albeit for utilitarian reasons, with their
modern counterparts, who profit from ruthlessly felling entire landscapes.19
That a space within a nature reserve remains bare long after the Cultural
Revolution highlights just how little attention has been paid to restoring
landscapes. For its part, the reference to Thomas Huxley takes the reader
back to the Chinese scholar Yan Fu’s Chinese-language translation of the
English biologist’s Evolution and Ethics (1893; Chn. trans. 1896). This text
222  ecoambiguity

and others on Social Darwinism had a tremendous effect on late-Qing and

early-Republican intellectuals, including the famed reformer Liang Qichao,
who was optimistic that with the proper changes to their societies people
could “steadily improve.” Gao Xingjian’s narrator is not the first to question
the accuracy of Huxley’s theories; after witnessing the bloodshed of World
War One and the failures of the Chinese republic, Yan Fu himself declared
that “three hundred years of evolutionary progress have all come down to
nothing but four words: selfishness, slaughter, shamelessness, and sleaze.”20
Soul Mountain draws attention to the effects of human avarice and selfish-
ness on people and the nonhuman alike.21
Addressing the many ways China’s ecosystems have been and will con-
tinue to be compromised, Gao Xingjian’s novel depicts a nation whose peo-
ple and natural world are both at risk. In some cases the narrator identifies
the persons who directly caused environmental degradation, and in many
others these agents can be inferred (loggers chop down trees, fishers deplete
stocks). But as suggested in the passages cited above, he more often assigns
responsibility to people in general; although his travels, at least in this novel,
are limited to China and the brutalized ecosystems to which he refers are
mainly Chinese, he often blames not the Chinese but instead “people.” To
be sure, in some cases by “people” he clearly means Chinese, but often he
appears to be implicating all of humankind. In this the narrator resembles
many who condemn human transformations of environments; speaking gen-
erally of “people” as culprits, numerous creative works label environmental
degradation as anthropogenic but fail to identify the particular individuals
or behaviors behind it. This environmentally cosmopolitan strategy has im-
portant consequences.
Most frequently, it can free individuals, groups, and entire nations from
culpability. If everyone is to blame, is anyone really to blame? Individual and
specific group responsibility rapidly evaporates, and there is little motivation
to change behaviors. Even more sobering, if everyone plays a part in degrad-
ing ecosystems near and far, a single individual appears unable to do much
to ameliorate existing ills and prevent future damage. Although some people
he encounters on his journey share his beliefs, Gao Xingjian’s narrator sees
himself as struggling alone, not against a particular social system but rather
against humanity, an even more impossibly large target. This leads not to
determined resistance to ecological abuses but instead to further contempla-
tion and then despair that nothing he does will make a difference, a common
sentiment among post–Cultural Revolution Chinese intellectuals.
Listening to the Yangzi’s waters in the still of night about two-thirds of
the way through his trip, the narrator ponders what to do with the rest of his
 Capitalizing on Contradiction  223

life. He considers collecting the Daqi people’s archaeological remains scat-

tered along the riverbed but then abandons the thought, deciding there is no
meaning in shards of an ancient civilization because soon the Three Gorges
Dam will submerge even walls dating to the Han dynasty.22 After proclaim-
ing that he perpetually searches for meaning, the narrator asks, “What in
fact is meaning? Can I block people [ren] from constructing this large dam
as an epitaph of their self-extermination? I can only search for my own self,
ordinary, paltry grains of sand.”23 Declaring his “own self” (wo de ziwo)
tiny grains of sand, the narrator highlights his ambiguous position. Far from
verging on becoming half a world through his protests, per the Asian Ameri-
can folk music trio A Grain of Sand’s famed “Yellow Pearl” (1973),24 much
less as an entire world or collection of worlds, per the opening line of the
English poet William Blake’s environmentally conscious “Auguries of Inno-
cence” (1803)—“To see a world in a grain of sand”—the narrator of Soul
Mountain emphasizes his insignificance and unwitting complicity.25 He is
at once small and vulnerable, like the grains of sand that line the river soon
slated for damming, and implicated in the dam’s construction, sand being an
essential component of the concrete that forms the dam.
Questions about the possibility of thwarting ecological devastation are
replaced by resignation. The narrator wonders how much sense it makes to
create more cultural products, including books, when they are likely to be
destroyed: “I might as well write a book on the human self [ren de ziwo]
regardless of whether it will be published. What’s the significance of one
more or one less book being written? Is it possible that still too little culture
has been annihilated? Do people [ren] need so much culture? And what is
culture?”26 He complicates what could have been a simple critique of the
Cultural Revolution (and its destruction of culture) by indicating that the
revival of “culture” is no panacea and that certain cultural constructions,
including dams, might still need to be destroyed.
Several chapters later, conversing with leaders and cadres at a forest re-
serve, the narrator reminds himself that he is not someone who can mobilize
people to protect ecosystems. Feeling helpless, he confesses in his narrative
what he cannot tell officials directly:

I’m neither a leader of writers nor a writer who leads other writers
. . . I can’t even protect myself, so what can I say? I can say only that
protecting the natural environment is an important undertaking and
has important implications for future generations. The Yangzi has al-
ready become a yellow river, bringing down silt and sediment. And
still they’re going to build a dam on the Three Gorges! I of course
224  ecoambiguity

can’t say this. I can only switch the topic to the Wild Man [yeren, a
semihuman creature and obsession of the forest employees].27

Of course by writing Soul Mountain the narrator does say much of what
needs to be said. But he can only write about the importance of changing
behaviors and has little hope that his words will reach others, much less
motivate them.
Gao Xingjian’s narrator makes no secret of his frustration with what
people have done to themselves and to the nonhuman. He goes so far as to
follow a description of a torture technique used during the Cultural Revolu-
tion (people tied together with wires like fish on hooks and then executed)
with the remark, “Strangely, the more people are killed the more people
there are, but the more fish that are caught the fewer fish there are. What
if things were reversed? This would be much better.”28 Reminiscent of Han
Yu’s espousing depopulation during the Tang dynasty, cited at the beginning
of chapter 1, this is a powerful statement regardless of provenance. But it is
particularly noteworthy coming from a man who has shown such empathy
toward both people and the nonhuman. In fact, after this assertion the nar-
rator comments that “People and fish actually have something in common.
Big fish [dayu, 大魚] and big people [daren, 大人; people of great virtue] are
all gone, showing that this world isn’t meant for them.”29 He suggests that
the “teeming masses” thrive at the expense of people of great virtue. Here
and elsewhere in Soul Mountain the narrator speaks of atrocities committed
during the Cultural Revolution, but he makes it clear that abuses have not
been confined to that era.
Soul Mountain unearths many ambiguities of human behaviors vis-à-vis
environments. The narrator roundly condemns people for destroying the
nonhuman bodies on which they depend for their increasingly comfortable
lives and issues warnings that even the most stalwart ecophobe would find
difficult to ignore.30 Yet in blaming everyone he leaves unclear just who and
what are responsible for the environmental degradation he describes, and he
also reveals the ambiguous role of the individual, like himself, who is deeply
disturbed by what has been done to ecosystems everywhere. By positing him-
self alone, pitted against humanity, without plans to change his own behav-
iors vis-à-vis environments in any significant way, the narrator in some ways
condemns himself to failure. But in writing about his inner struggles despite
knowing that his book, like so many cultural products, might be discarded
before it is read by anyone who can learn from his experiences, he suggests
possibilities and exhibits confidence: possibilities that he might one day be
capable of altering his own behaviors, if not voice his concerns openly, and
 Capitalizing on Contradiction  225

confidence that articulating his sentiments might allow others to express their
own, at first in writing and then ultimately in speech and in other (changed)
behaviors.

Necessity and Accountability

Gao Xingjian’s Soul Mountain nearly negates the concept of personal ac-
countability for harming ecosystems, at the same time that it questions in-
dividual responsibility for condemning ecodegradation. The novel points to
the ambiguities inherent in identifying precise agents of damage (beyond the
human/nonhuman dichotomy) and assigning the duties of prevention and
remediation. In contrast, the Japanese writer Miyazawa Kenji’s “Nametoko
yama no kuma” (Bears of Mount Nametoko, 1934) makes clear the indi-
vidual’s role in harming animals (in this case anthropomorphized bears) but
implicitly questions accountability for this damage in light of both actual
and perceived (human) necessity. This short story by early twentieth-century
Japan’s most prominent ecologically conscious writer, and one of modern
Japan’s first literary figures to regularly chastise the nation’s industrialization,
queries the degree to which human need mitigates accountability.31 If neces-
sity is presumed but not actual, if an individual or group genuinely believes
a particular behavior is required for survival when it in fact is not—either
because there is no chance of survival or because there are unrecognized
alternatives—the story asks how accountable people are for their behaviors,
what difference access to alternatives makes, and whether tenacity in pursu-
ing alternatives matters.
“Bears of Mount Nametoko” features Kojūrō, an impoverished and re-
luctant hunter convinced that killing bears is the only way he can make a
living. He spares some bears he encounters and apologizes to those he kills,
but in the end he is slaughtered by a bear that seems to be disturbed by his hy-
pocrisy.32 Miyazawa’s short story most obviously highlights contradictions
both between attitudes and behaviors and between empirical conditions and
behaviors (how people interact with animals). On the one hand, like many
boreal peoples who revered the bear as Lord of the Animals yet hunted it
because of its mythological dimensions—such as the Ainu, who until the
early twentieth century practiced a bear ritual that involved raising and then
killing and eating a bear cub to celebrate the benevolence this species dem-
onstrated toward people—Kojūrō hunts bears despite his deep respect for
them.33 Accentuating this disjuncture between attitudes and behaviors is the
gap between Kojūrō’s feelings toward his hunting dog and toward bears: un-
like Biyari in the Taiwanese aboriginal writer Topas Tamapima’s “The Last
226  ecoambiguity

Hunter” (1987) who shares a special bond with his dog Yifan (discussed in
chapter 2), Kojūrō’s connection with his companion dog is less profound
than his ties with the bears, his prey; the dog is loyal to Kojūrō and the two
make an effective hunting team, but Kojūrō’s feelings for the bears are de-
picted as much more intense than those toward his dog. On the other hand,
Kojūrō kills bears even though he knows that his buyer already has a surplus
of bearskins, so he will receive a much lower price than he deserves for his
take. But even more intriguing are the conflicts in behaviors, most notably
between Kojūrō’s interactions with bears and with people, and secondarily in
Kojūrō’s treatment of the various bears he encounters. These contradictions
accentuate deeper ambiguities threading through the story about relation-
ships among people and environments, especially human responsibility for
their destruction.
The narrator of “Bears of Mount Nametoko” claims that Kojūrō feels
great sympathy for bears yet believes that he has no choice but to hunt them;
Kojūrō says that were he not to hunt bears he would have to resort to forag-
ing, a lifestyle for which he almost certainly would pay with his life. So it is
with a heavy heart that he skins bears and extracts their livers. He apologizes
to the animals he kills:

Bear, I didn’t kill you because I hate you. I have to make a living, just
as you have to be shot. I’d like to have a different job, work with no
sin attached, but I don’t have land, and they claim the trees belong to
the authorities, and when I go into town nobody wants anything to do
with me. I’m a hunter because I don’t have a choice. It’s your fate that
you were born a bear and my fate that I have this job.34

Kojūrō feels guilty for killing bears until his last breath; the narrator claims
Kojūrō’s final conscious thought is “Bears, forgive me” (kumadomo,
yuruseyo).35 Kojūrō even thinks that he can understand what the bears are
saying to one another. Watching a mother bear staring at a distant valley with
her two cubs, he imagines that the animals are discussing various features of
the landscape. The sight moves him, and he slinks away stealthily, hoping
that the bears remain unaware of his presence.
As this scene suggests, Kojūrō’s treatment of bears varies depending on
how he relates with these animals.36 Following standard hunting practice,
he does not kill the mother or her cubs.37 But Kojūrō also spares a cornered
bear that shouts at him: “What do you want? Why do you have to kill me?”38
When Kojūrō responds that he hunts only with great reluctance, the bear
asks him to wait, claiming there are things it still needs to do; the bear prom-
 Capitalizing on Contradiction  227

ises that if Kojūrō frees him now, in two years it will deposit its dead body
on Kojūrō’s doorstep. The animal honors its commitment; two years later
Kojūrō notices a familiar brownish-black shape by a hedge and quickly real-
izes this is the same bear whose life he had spared. Here the narrative forces
the reader to suspend disbelief; it is simpler to imagine Kojūrō believing he
converses with animals than to imagine him thinking he finds a dead bear
outside his door that has deliberately sacrificed itself for him. How the bear
landed there so punctually remains uncertain.
More important is the disjuncture between how Kojūrō treats this bear
and the way he deals with the many bears whose voices are not audible to
him. The narrator suggests that it is a bear’s behavior that determines the
hunter’s reaction: bears doting on their cubs and those exhibiting unusual
behavior are heard and spared.39 In other words, how Kojūrō handles a bear
is directly related to how the bear conducts itself. The narrator of “Bears
of Mount Nametoko” does not depict bears as endangered; Kojūrō travels
far to find the animals, but only because their habitats are distant from his
home. Yet this short story brings to light how differently a single individual
can treat members of the same nonhuman species, not to mention members
of different species. Also significant is the gulf between Kojūrō’s interactions
with bears and his dealings with people: he cuts a strong, adaptable, and
compassionate figure while in the mountains, particularly face to face with
bears, but he cowers when before other people and shows no flexibility in
his understanding of human bonds. His lack of confidence in interpersonal
relations paradoxically results in a conviction that he has no choice but to
kill the animals he so reveres. Kojūrō’s inability to interact productively with
people results in unnecessary nonhuman deaths.
The narrator describes Kojūrō as completely at home in the mountains.
He is not always the most agile climber, but he does not think twice about
roaming far over rough terrain to find his prey. He remains composed even
when the fiercest bears rear up at him and begin to charge: “Kojūrō would
stay perfectly calm [under these conditions]. Aiming at the bear’s forehead
from behind a tree, he would fire his rifle. The forest would roar, the bear
would fall to the ground, dark red blood would gush from its mouth, its
nose would make a sniffling sound, and it would die.”40 But most of the con-
fidence Kojūrō displays in the physically demanding mountain ecosystems
disappears when he returns to town. The narrator candidly remarks: “When
he went to town to sell his bearskins and bear liver, this powerful Kojūrō was
a wretched, pitiful figure.”41 Although in the mountains Kojūrō acts like a
“master,” in town he is reduced to genuflecting before his buyer, who habitu-
ally pays him far less than Kojūrō believes his take is worth.
228  ecoambiguity

Anticipating the reader’s bewilderment about why Kojūrō does not search
for another buyer, the narrator explains: “There are many who would not
understand. But in Japan there is an [old] game called kitsuneken [lit. fox
fists; a game played with the hands, the positions of which can represent
a fox, a man, or a rifle]. Just as the fox is defeated by the hunter and the
hunter is defeated by his master, so too the bear was damaged by Kojūrō [i.e.,
here Kojūrō is the rifle] and Kojūrō was damaged by his [urban] master.”42
All buyers likely would do the same; it is Kojūrō’s fate, as the hunter, to be
fleeced. The reader also might wonder why Kojūrō seems never to challenge
his station in life, why he never moves into the village but instead believes
himself fated to live on the margins, where his only choice is to kill bears or
starve. The narrator’s answer probably would be the same—this is just the
way things are. Although readily adapting to the wilderness, when it comes
to negotiating the terrain of human society Kojūrō proves notably rigid. This
inflexibility paradoxically leads him to destroy residents of the landscapes
where he feels most at home; if Kojūrō fought or at least in his youth had
fought for a better position in society, he might have been able to encounter
bears without killing them. The nonhuman loss is compounded by the fact
that because Kojūrō kills bears for their skins and livers, so much of the ani-
mal goes to waste. Most of the skins also are unused; Kojūrō’s buyer claims
that he has more than enough and needs no additional stock. Animals are
killed so a man can earn income to ward off starvation, but animals them-
selves are not used for human nourishment.
Miyazawa’s short story raises essential questions of accountability not
limited to prewar Japan. Except for the bear that sacrificed itself for him,
Kojūrō fires the shots that kill the bears he brings back to town. Unlike
Soul Mountain, “Bears of Mount Nametoko” does not hesitate to name in-
dividual culprits. Yet it remains unclear to what degree Kojūrō can be held
accountable for his behavior. He could be accountable simply because what
he believes necessity is in fact likely not so. He could also be culpable be-
cause he never attempts, or even investigates, alternative occupations. His
talents might have been redirected to a different job, if only he had made an
effort. Miyazawa’s narrator does not explicitly address these questions. But
Kojūrō’s resignation to conditions in town undermines the narrator’s other-
wise sympathetic portrayal of him. Ultimately, however, the extent to which
this makes him accountable for slaying bears, particularly because the bear
population does not seem in danger of extinction, remains uncertain.
Capitalizing on the confusion surrounding cause and accountability
regarding much more severe human abuse of both people and the nonhu-
man world is the Taiwanese engineer and poet Bai Ling’s “Wen weianfu zi-
 Capitalizing on Contradiction  229

yuan shuo” (Hearing the Claim That the Comfort Women Were Volunteers,
2001).43 As its title indicates, what triggers this poem is the claim—made by
those attempting to refute charges of sexual abuse by the imperial Japanese
army (and generally condemned as apologists for imperial Japanese aggres-
sion for so doing)—that tens if not hundreds of thousands of Taiwanese,
Chinese, Korean, and other Asian women volunteered to be comfort women
(sex slaves) for the Japanese military during World War Two Former com-
fort women of all nationalities have vocally denounced wartime Japanese
treatment of non-Japanese Asian comfort women and continue to this day to
call for reparations and a formal apology. In 2010, on the centenary of Ja-
pan’s annexation of the Korean peninsula, people from Japan, South Korea,
the Philippines, and several Western countries signed a petition calling for an
official apology and legislated compensation.44 Written a decade ago, at the
turn of the twenty-first century, Bai Ling’s poem anticipates the continued
tenacity both of Japanese politicians and of former comfort women and their
governments.45
Echoing late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Korean, Chinese,
and Taiwanese rhetoric on comfort women, “Hearing the Claim” declares
it absurd to assert that women volunteered (ziyuan) to become sex slaves.
But ironically, in the years since the publication of this poem evidence has
surfaced that many women were forced into sex slavery not by the Japanese
but by local procurers, and, even more significantly, that some women—es-
caping abuse at home—were in fact volunteers in the strict sense of the word.
As C. Sarah Soh has argued, “the abuse and maltreatment of daughters and
wives in the [Korean] patriarchal system, with its long-standing masculinist
sexual culture, contributed as much as did the colonial political economy to
the ready commodification of these women’s sexual labor.”46 At the same
time, Soh explicitly warns rightists and militant nationalists against taking
her book out of context to promote their own “partisan positions” and jus-
tify clinging to their distorted partisan versions of “partial truths.”47
Despite the convoluted history to which its title points, the body of “Hear-
ing the Claim” is not bound to a particular time or place. Bai Ling’s poem
is even less obviously environmentally oriented than the Japanese writer Itō
Hiromi’s “Haha ni tsurerarete arechi ni sumitsuku” (Settling on the Waste-
land Where Mother Led Us, 2005) discussed below. Yet it draws implicit
parallels between misunderstandings of people’s abuse of one another and
misunderstandings of their abuse of the nonhuman:

Forests voluntarily ignite

so lightning can sharpen its whip
230  ecoambiguity

Buildings tremble of their own accord

to make it convenient for the cow-earth to yawn48

Bodies open their own wounds

because bullets need to pass through

Heads plan to fall down

all because of the penetrating benevolence of the samurai’s sword

All the sweet potatoes peel themselves

then lie down across the island and say

“Come on, history, trample on me

Let me better worship your footprints!”49

The third and fourth stanzas (the middle two stanzas) of “Hearing the
Claim” sardonically tweak the preposterousness of asserting that people in-
vite their own suffering; the poem implies that women during wartime no
more volunteered to be sex slaves than bodies open their own wounds to help
bullets pass through, or heads plan to tumble to the ground because of the
compassion of their attackers’ swords. The two preceding stanzas (the first
two stanzas of the poem) speak of both the nonhuman realm and human
cultural products as inviting destruction by a nonhuman phenomenon: for-
ests set themselves ablaze for the sake of lightning; houses initiate their own
trembling to facilitate earthquakes. Repeating zi (自; oneself), the third char-
acter in each of the first three lines, underlines the intentionality of forests (
森林自願著火), buildings (房子自動搖晃), and bodies (肉體自己打開傷口);
the verb ziyuan (act voluntarily) used to describe the intentionality of forests
in the first line echoes the ziyuan of the title. Like the third stanza, the fourth
stanza also speaks of premeditated bodily rupture: heads “plan” (jihua) to
tumble. Also noteworthy is why forests, buildings, bodies, and heads act
this way: they allegedly are thinking of “enabling” (rang) the “convenience”
(fangbian), and the “needs” (yao), or, in the case of heads, the “benevolence”
(renci) of their opponents. The sarcasm intensifies.
“Hearing the Claim” takes an intriguing twist in the fifth stanza, where
attention returns to the nonhuman. This time the subject is cultivated sweet
potatoes, which are said to peel themselves (剝光了自己), lie down across the
island, and call on history to trample them so that they can worship its foot-
prints (rang wo hao hao de ai nimen de jiaoji). These anthropomorphized
sweet potatoes are the only part of the nonhuman that invites destruction
 Capitalizing on Contradiction  231

by people; and unlike the forests, buildings, bodies, and heads of the first
four stanzas, they not only peel themselves, but they do so to enable (rang)
themselves, as opposed to their attackers, as did the forests of the first stanza.
To be sure, the reference to a “history” (lishi) that tramples vegetables need
not implicate people; hailstorms can trample sweet potatoes just as easily
as shoes or machines. But the mention of peeling indicates human presence:
people are depicted as literally and figuratively stomping on one another and
on their crops, yet not on a more uncultivated nonhuman, such as the forest
of the first stanza. This omission stands out in a poem featuring the other
three trajectories of intra- and interspecies violence: human-on-human, non-
human-on-human, and nonhuman-on-nonhuman. It suggests that the idea of
nonhuman bodies voluntarily harming themselves for the sake of humans is
so ludicrous that to include it would divert attention from the poem’s princi-
pal concern, the falsehood that comfort women invited their own suffering.
The text’s silence speaks loudly.
The deep ironies of Bai Ling’s poem, as well as the story of the comfort
women more generally, remind us how readily damage to bodies can be dis-
missed as self-inflicted, and more generally how blithely responsibility can be
assigned and reassigned, often with little regard for empirical circumstances.
Similarly, as other creative texts examined in this section indicate, often what
makes it so difficult to determine cause and accountability—vital for both
preventing and remediating human harm of environments—is the flexibil-
ity of the very ideas of cause and accountability themselves. Three points
are salient. First, often the greatest challenge is determining whether human
or nonhuman behaviors and processes are largely to blame and, if human
behaviors are involved, their precise bearing on ecodegradation. Second, in
cases where human involvement is readily confirmed, the most troublesome
task is to identify the roles of particular individuals or behaviors not only
in damaging environments but also in repairing them and preventing fur-
ther deterioration. And third, when the roles of particular individuals and
behaviors are relatively clear, questions of accountability soon arise. Posing
these questions is only the beginning of the long pathway toward human and
nonhuman recovery from human abuse of ecosystems.

Human, Nonhuman, or Both

As is true of Soul Mountain, creative works that portray or predict damaged

bodies—anything from a planet in ruins to burned farmlands to a single life-
less animal—often indicate whether the damage was instigated by people,
natural phenomena, or both. And, as with Ishimure Michiko’s Sea of Suf-
232  ecoambiguity

fering, they also frequently highlight a human penchant to shirk account-

ability by blaming degraded ecosystems on factors beyond human control.
But many literary texts that address ecodegradation are more ambiguous.
Some explicitly question whether human (or nonhuman) behaviors are at all
responsible, while others depict environments whose injuries just as likely
result from human behaviors as from nonhuman factors.
This section analyzes three illuminating examples of these contradic-
tions: the Korean writer Ch’oe Sŭngho’s prose poem “Ch’amsaedŭl ŭn ŏdisŏ
chungnŭn ga” (Where Do Sparrows Die?, 1993), Itō Hiromi’s prose poem
“Settling on the Wasteland,” and the Japanese writer Sakaki Nanao’s poem
“Kōdo 10,700m” (Altitude 10,700 Meters, 1992). Ch’oe’s prose poem, fo-
cusing on sparrows, comments on the impossibility of knowing just who/
what causes their deaths, while Itō’s prose poem, featuring acres of devastated
landscape, remains silent about the human role in transforming this space.
Sakaki’s poem predicts the earth’s annihilation but leaves unclear whether
responsibility lies with people or the nonhuman. All three texts, portray-
ing environments in obvious distress, reveal the ambiguous role of people in
instigating and enabling damage.50 They also describe conditions duplicated
in multiple spaces. These works show why it is vital to assess more fully the
anthropogenic causes of distressed ecosystems, wherever they might be.
The first part of Ch’oe Sŭngho’s brief, straightforward text “Where Do
Sparrows Die?” speaks compassionately of the death of a single sparrow
(ch’amsae han mari). But halfway through the text one sparrow becomes,
as the title anticipates, sparrows in general (ch’amsaedŭl). In the lines that
follow the text talks about where sparrows die and the near impossibility of
completely hiding their corpses. The opening and closing lines of this text
identify several places these birds take their last breaths: between ceramic
pots on terraces, at the bases of cherry trees, at the feet of scarecrows, and
elsewhere on the ground since, as the poem notes, “in the sky there is no
place to bury even a feather.”51 The narrator here shows how easily the place
sparrows died can be identified. Less certain is why sparrows die and what
the human role has been in hastening their deaths. The text begins: “Al-
though impossible to know whether it starved to death, froze to death, or
was poisoned to death by agricultural chemicals, a single sparrow lies dead
on a pile of snow in the gap between jars on the terrace.” Later the narrator
suggests the sparrow might simply have succumbed to old age; if this bird
was not one of the many that begged for food set out for the family dog, it
might be one that simply “grew old and died.”
Just as it is impossible to determine how this particular bird died, “Where
Do Sparrows Die?” implies that the cause of death for most sparrows is
 Capitalizing on Contradiction  233

equally unclear. The narrator suggests that this uncertainty stems from many
factors. Because the sparrow died in the gap between jars, freezing tempera-
tures might be the cause; the bird might have seen this space as a refuge, how-
ever temporary, from the cold. But even if wintry weather was the immediate
cause of death, it is possible that the sparrow succumbed because it already
was weak from a human-induced food shortage, from having been poisoned,
or from some combination of the two. Several lines later the narrator indi-
cates that malnutrition was a real possibility; he asks whether this sparrow
was one of those that regularly visited the dog’s food bowl, with “begging
eyes and bobbing tail to peck at the tips of bean sprouts.” The appearance of
an animal at a feeder does not mean it is in danger of starving to death, but
the modifier “begging” (tongnyang) signals that the sparrows vying for dog
food might not be particularly well fed. Although human behaviors did not
cause the freezing temperatures, and in fact their artifacts likely prolonged
the bird’s life or at least offered it protection from the cold in its final mo-
ments, chances are good that human behaviors decreased this animal’s food
supply.
After all, much of the ground this sparrow traverses probably is suffused
with agrochemicals, as is “all the earth” (on ttang) that forms/serves as the
grave of these animals (on ttang i kŭdŭl ŭi mudŏm ida).52 Ch’oe Sŭngho’s
prose poem suggests that little prevents the earth from being covered with the
corpses of poisoned sparrows. Yet because the sparrow on the terrace could
simply have died of old age, it is uncertain why these birds die or, even more
important, what role people play in their deaths. The narrator speaks of
holding the bird, feeling its stiffened body, and thinking, “Being dead means
that it no longer is warm. Being dead means that it no longer can fly. Being
dead means that it no longer can tweet.”53 Not only does the bird lose its life,
but people lose familiar sights and sounds. By including references to agro-
chemicals and presumably poisoned birds, “Where Do Sparrows Die” am-
plifies the narrator’s concern for the fate of a single sparrow and its broader
implications far beyond the sparrow’s point of death.
The renowned Japanese ecofeminist Itō Hiromi’s prose poem “Settling
on the Wasteland Where Mother Led Us”—part of her prizewinning narra-
tive poem Kawara arekusa (Wild Grass on a Riverbank, 2005)—provides an
interesting contrast with “Where Do Sparrows Die?”54 Like many of Itō’s
works, credited with igniting postwar Japanese women’s verse, “Settling on
the Wasteland” speaks graphically of female sexuality and bodily functions.
Whereas the narrator of Ch’oe Sŭngho’s text immediately notes the ambi-
guities surrounding the death of a sparrow, then tackles the general fate of
the species, the focus of Itō’s prose poem is cultural identities and human
234  ecoambiguity

relations. But this work raises important questions about how we interpret
creative depictions of changed or damaged ecosystems.
“Settling on the Wasteland” describes a pair of young Japanese siblings
who follow their mother to the American Southwest so she can live with
her English-speaking boyfriend. Much of the text’s physical and conceptual
space is devoted to the struggles of these children with language, especially
their resolve to continue speaking Japanese. The narrator’s terse description
of the desert and surrounding mountains reveals a landscape devastated by
unknown forces. This text is more ambiguous concerning damage to eco-
systems than much of Itō’s work, but its imprecision makes the story more
penetrating. Featuring a burned hillside without assigning cause, this text
exemplifies how little the human role in blackening landscapes is pondered
and how much the existence of such severe places is taken for granted.
Itō’s prose poem begins with a journey to the desert: “We drove for hours;
we drove for hours under the blue sky, before arriving at a large home in
the wasteland.”55 This landscape is ribbed with sprinklers that green small
patches of desert: “In the garden there’s a sprinkler that operates in the eve-
ning. Oh my, it soaked everything.”56 Depictions of people spurting liquids
recur later in the text, the narrator describing her mother nursing their half-
sibling and then forcing her adolescent brother to suck her (his mother’s)
breasts: “The little baby moved its little head and began sucking on one
of her breasts . . . Mother released her other breast . . . The milk flew out,
its shower tracing an arc [nyūjū ga shūuto ko o kaite tobimashita] . . . My
mother seized my little brother and pushed her breast into his mouth . . .
Milk bubbling from [her breast’s] smiling, broken, pointed end showered
and flooded [emiwareta sentan kara awa no tatsu nyūjū ga shushushuto afu-
retekimashita] . . . [My brother’s] mouth dripped [taretenagaremashita] with
white milk.”57 Speaking of breast milk as showering (shūuto), flying (tobi-
mashita), bubbling (awa no tatsu), showering (shushushuto), flooding (afu-
rete), dripping (tarete), and flowing (nagaremashita), the narrator portrays
a woman not only abusing her son but also metaphorically irrigating her
surroundings even more thoroughly than do sprinklers. The contrast with
landscape that has not been irrigated is stark; immediately after describing
the flood emanating from her mother’s breasts, and switching from prose to
poetry, the narrator speaks of desiccated terrain:

The wind changed direction

The wind blew from the desert
Parched dry [karakara ni kawaita],
In the distance a mountain burned
 Capitalizing on Contradiction  235

A mountain burned and ashes rained down

Ashes covered the sun
The sun was visible with the naked eye
Parched dry [karakara ni kawaita],
Vegetation became corpses
Sagebrush emitted strong odors
Rabbits and coyotes become corpses and
Parched dry [karakara ni kawaita]58

Irrigation soaks through small ecosystems and breast milk soaks through
and drips down human bodies, but these minute liquid islands float in an
infinitely more vast arid and fiery sea.
Subsequent lines further complicate matters. After repeating the refrain
“parched dry” (karakara ni kawaita) the narrator comments: “When the
winter came with its rains / Soaking, moss grew, shoots came up, and flow-
ers bloomed.”59 Burning mountains thus are sandwiched between dripping
human breasts and plants sprouting from rain-drenched as opposed to sprin-
kler-soaked ground; human acts are bracketed by more “natural” phenom-
ena, although it is possible that human behaviors played a role not only in
the desiccation of landscapes but also in their “natural” greening (via rain as
opposed to sprinklers). This placement allows for human complicity, but by
no means sole responsibility, for the bone-dry, burning landscape; the precise
role of human behaviors in altering these ecosystems remains uncertain.
This ambiguity points to an even more fundamental dilemma. What if
the damaged landscapes or ecological phenomena a text describes resulted at
least in part from human behaviors but were not recognized as such in the
society where the text was written? What role should authorial knowledge
or its lack play in how we discuss the environmental implications of creative
works? The same questions should be asked of how we interpret other tex-
tual phenomena, but contemplating human responsibility in changing eco-
systems seems to be a particularly important endeavor in today’s critical en-
vironment. A creative work such as “Settling on the Wasteland,” written by
an individual with high ecological awareness yet not itself environmentally
oriented, thus provides a perfect opportunity for this sort of analysis.60
Also highlighting the ambiguities of responsibility is Sakaki Nanao’s “Al-
titude 10,700 Meters.” Flying high above Japan, pondering the landscape be-
low, the poem’s speaker declares: “December 31, 1999 / planet earth   will
explode / go up in flame and return to nothing.”61 In the concluding lines, he
describes the view as his plane descends into Nagoya:
236  ecoambiguity

Japan   stretching up
dismal forests     vinyl hothouse fields     golf courses
without fail      the Kii Peninsula

Before long—
heavy gray   smog
to the invisible    airport
to the invisible    tomorrow
the boom    of the jet engine . . .

The earth   still   turns62

“Altitude 10,700 Meters” provides a disturbing yet familiar description of

how people have reshaped Japan’s ecosystems. Forests are endangered and in
many areas have been replaced with golf courses or fields shrouded in vinyl;
murky smog blankets the city and its environs, rendering place invisible and
the future unforeseeable. And yet, as the poem affirms, “The earth still turns”
(chikyū wa sore de mo mawatteiru).
On the other hand, resonating through these stanzas, particularly the line
“to the invisible tomorrow” (mienai ashita e), is the speaker’s claim that
everything on the planet, and the planet itself, will be obliterated with the
coming of the new millennium.63 While human responsibility for foul air and
deforestation is indisputable, the imagined and even potential roles of people
in the planet’s annihilation are far from clear. Thanks to ever larger arsenals
of ever more powerful nuclear weapons, by the time “Altitude 10,700 Me-
ters” was published people had the ability to destroy everything on the earth
many times over. But even today, were the planet itself suddenly to explode
into nothingness, direct human responsibility for this cataclysm could not
immediately be assigned. Sakaki’s narrator invokes an obviously extreme
and most unlikely scenario, one that clearly did not come to pass in 2000.
Yet in juxtaposing the human-induced degradation of Japan with global dev-
astation of unknown origin, “Altitude 10,700 Meters” exposes the large gray
area of human responsibility for wrecking ecosystems.
It is often relatively simple to determine whether the proximate agents
of particular ecological damage are people or the nonhuman: bacteria kill
human and nonhuman bodies alike; people and nonhuman bodies kill bacte-
ria. Animals slaughter other animals and occasionally people; people slaugh-
ter one another and animals. Nonhuman entities damage ecosystems, as do
people. But as texts such as Ch’oe Sŭngho’s “Where Do Sparrows Die,” Itō
Hiromi’s “Settling on the Wasteland,” and Sakaki Nanao’s “Altitude 10,700
 Capitalizing on Contradiction  237

Meters” suggest, the causes of much ecodegradation are harder to explain.

And even when immediate agents can be identified, they generally are not the
only ones involved. Human behaviors doubtless play a part, but the extent to
which they are culpable usually is difficult to determine. The creative works
examined in this section, like many others that address damaged ecosystems,
hesitate to assign blame, much less rigorously analyze the relative roles of hu-
man and nonhuman behaviors in abetting ecodegradation. Instead they pose
possibilities, both implicitly and explicitly.
Poetry and prose by the East Asian writers Gao Xingjian, Miyazawa
Kenji, Bai Ling, Ch’oe Sŭngho, Itō Hiromi, and Sakaki Nanao—like writings
by many of their predecessors, contemporaries, and successors globally—
grapple with some of the countless ambiguities inherent both in identifying
human behaviors that damage environments and in evaluating these behav-
iors and their significance. Other creative works, examined in the second part
of this chapter, reveal more clearly the trade-offs that are a constant presence
in interactions between people and nonhuman worlds.

Contradictions: Trading Off

The Japanese plant immunologist and writer Masuda Mizuko’s short story
“Dokushinbyō” (Single Sickness, 1981) concludes with the narrator and
her protagonist Fukue, a technician in a research laboratory who conducts
experiments on mice, making the case for systematic, predictable bodily
replacement: “People and animals lived and died, the numbers completely
canceling one another out.”64 This cliché is reassuring but inaccurate. The
continued upsurge in both human population and nonhuman extinction has
shown that neither intra- nor interspecies numbers necessarily cancel one
another out. Impacts of behaviors on environments, generally more ambigu-
ous than statistics, are even less amenable to such formulas. A hallmark of
healthy ecosystems is precisely their ability to juggle numbers and adapt to
changes, but that homeostasis is often difficult to maintain. Projects suppos-
edly affording individuals and groups means of offsetting their environmental
(especially carbon) footprints have proliferated in recent years, but their ef-
ficacy often is questionable; purchasing corporate carbon offsets might allow
an individual a measure of carbon neutrality, but even if complete “carbon
neutrality” is attained, this does not necessarily translate into overall “envi-
ronmental neutrality.”
One of the most common instances of behavioral ambiguity in literary
works that address ecological degradation is how they navigate the inevitable
238  ecoambiguity

trade-offs in virtually every human interaction with environments. Such texts

often depict people as living directly or indirectly to the detriment of nonhu-
man species and frequently of other people, and nonhuman species as living
directly or indirectly to the detriment of other nonhuman species and often
of people. Robust bodies generally are presented as requiring even more sac-
rifice from surrounding ones than their less healthy counterparts. Patterns of
suffering are similar: the suffering of one person/group often benefits others,
just as that of one nonhuman body often benefits other bodies, human or
nonhuman, directly or indirectly. The sections that follow analyze these and
analogous trade-offs as they are articulated in a variety of twentieth-century
East Asian creative texts.

Decreasing Human Numbers,

Helping Environments

A criticism of some environmental rhetoric is its apparent neglect of human

welfare, at least in the short term. Groups, often those not directly involved
in drafting policies, are asked to sacrifice in the name of nonhuman health.
The sacrifices can be relatively minor, involving bans on consuming products
that people prefer but are by no means vital to their survival. Or they can
be considerable, including loss of home and livelihood. Creative works such
as the Taiwanese writer Topas Tamapima’s short story “The Last Hunter,”
discussed in chapter 2, reveal the potential impact of sacrifices on individuals
and communities. But while the principal ambiguity of “The Last Hunter”
lies in attitudinal conflict (i.e., the lover of nature who believes hunting his
prerogative), other texts—including the Taiwanese writer and biologist Jia
Fuxiang’s essay “Ren yu hai” (People and the Sea)—draw attention to ambi-
guities inherent in behavioral trade-offs themselves.65
In “People and the Sea,” part of Kan hai de ren (Sea Watchers, 1999) and
published just as Taiwan’s environmental movements were starting to see
results, Jia Fuxiang engages in one of the most controversial forms of ecologi-
cal discourse: he appeals to people to have fewer children so as to reduce the
world’s human population, and thus lessen damage to ecosystems. Advocat-
ing what some might find liberating but many would deem a considerable
sacrifice if not downright offensive, he first assumes that making the world a
more hospitable place for people requires remediating and preventing further
destruction of environments and states that in his opinion this cannot be ac-
complished without reducing the birthrate, because human damage to land-
scapes is directly proportionate not only to per capita consumption but also
to the number of consumers. Reducing the birthrate is seen as indispensable
 Capitalizing on Contradiction  239

to increasing the quality of the lives of both human and nonhuman beings.
Jia Fuxiang’s “People and the Sea” laments that Hong Kong’s Polytechnic
University has polluted the once supposedly pristine ocean; like counterparts
in Taiwan and Europe, Hong Kong’s white beaches now are littered with hu-
man debris, from condoms to cooking ranges and sanitary napkins to sofas.66
Jia Fuxiang decries as well the changes over the years in fishing and whaling
techniques that have sacrificed millions of fish and nearly wiped out several
species of whales, animals that once were “rulers of the sea.”67 He condemns
the world’s rabid hunger for plastic, acknowledging this substance’s seeming
indispensability in contemporary life but exposing its encompassing effect on
ecosystems:

We rarely think that these items, indestructible for centuries, will end
up there after we abandon them. Setting aside for a moment the gar-
bage that flows from the land to the sea, large merchant ships toss a
thousand pounds of plastic into the ocean every day. The world’s na-
val vessels, merchant ships, fishing boats, offshore oil platforms, and
private pleasure boats throw out no less than millions of pounds. Even
if the sea were larger, the day will come when it is filled to capacity
. . . Garbage on the shore can sometimes be cleaned up, but what are
we to do about garbage on the bottom of the sea?68

We are reminded of how much remains unknown about the effect of human
behaviors on ecosystems; often damage cannot be readily or accurately seen,
measured, or calculated. To those who wonder why this matters, Jia Fuxiang
asserts that decreased biodiversity negatively affects not just animals but peo-
ple themselves. He explains the biological and emotional/spiritual functions
of these large bodies of water, and he makes a heartfelt plea for the survival
of the world’s oceans, claiming that human life would lose much of its mean-
ing were it to be deprived of the sentiments triggered by the sea.
Like many individuals concerned with the effects of people on ecosystems,
Jia Fuxiang calls for changes in behavior. But he goes one step further than
most, concluding “People and the Sea” with a plea: “The sea is the home of
human beings. This home is already too crowded and too dirty. Have fewer
children and do a huge spring cleaning!”69 Noteworthy here is that Jia Fux-
iang declares the sea the home of humanity (hai shi renlei de jia), rather than
of the nonhuman, or even of both people and nature, despite the obvious fact
that people do not actually live in the ocean. In so doing, he stresses not only
human perceptions of ownership, perceptions akin to those of the fishers in
Ishimure Michiko’s Sea of Suffering, but also the pervasiveness of the human
240  ecoambiguity

imprint on ecosystems. The comment on reducing family size echoes ear-

lier remarks in “People and the Sea” on population; contrasting the relative
brevity of human with nonhuman history, Jia Fuxiang notes that the world’s
human population has spiraled in the twentieth century and claims that there
are too many people and too little land: as population increased it became
“the crux of the problem.”70
Jia Fuxiang is one of only a small number of environmentalists who ac-
tively encourage people to have fewer children for the sake of the planet;
many, in fact, do their best to avoid the issue.71 It is significant that he does
so in nonfiction, rather than fiction, where—like Ruth Ozeki in My Year of
Meats—he could have attributed such sentiments to an imaginary charac-
ter.72 His entreaty in the final lines of “People and the Sea” could not be more
succinct and rational, reinforced as it is by information provided earlier in
the essay. People are to prevent increases in human numbers to give more
room for nonhuman life, actions that someday might make their own lives
more peaceful. Yet the trade-offs this plea demands are significant: people the
world over are encouraged to resist dominant familial and social expecta-
tions, and frequently their own biological or emotional longings; they are
to risk being ostracized from their families and communities for what many
would consider little immediate or obvious benefit.73

Increasing Human Numbers, Harming People

and Environments

Whereas Jia Fuxiang explicitly advocates bringing fewer children into the
world, most creative writing concerning overpopulation simply depicts
the effect of this phenomenon on human societies. Texts such as the Brit-
ish writer John Brunner’s futuristic science fiction novel Stand on Zanzibar
(1968), for instance, set in the United States in 2010, speak of the horrors
of a planet characterized by “densely crowded cities, sudden outbreaks of
violence, savage social inequalities and eugenic laws.”74 As Ursula Heise has
noted, most novels addressing issues of population growth “focus on the
plight of individuals trapped in overcrowded megacities that either extend
around the globe or function as a metaphor for a global society that threatens
individuality and privacy.”75 Yet a number of creative works on overpopula-
tion address the plights of both people and the nonhuman under such condi-
tions. These include the Korean poet Kim Kwanggyu’s “Inwangsan” (Mount
Inwang, 1983), written in the early years of Korea’s first comprehensive en-
vironmental movements. This text depicts people first as living harmoniously
within ecosystems dominated by the nonhuman, particularly those of Mount
 Capitalizing on Contradiction  241

Inwang (lit. Benevolent King Mountain), a major site of Korean shamanism

and folk religion in northwestern Seoul once famous for its tigers. “Mount
Inwang” laments that people eventually commandeered these spaces and
transformed them radically. Rockfaces disappeared, clear streams were re-
placed by bodies of water littered with broken glass and plastic bags, and air
pollution obscured mountains whose surfaces were covered by asphalt roads.
As human numbers rose, so too did both human and nonhuman suffering.
The speaker compares the fate of Mount Inwang and the nonhuman more
generally with that of his aging grandfather: both are literally “imprisoned in
the middle of a population of 8 million.”76
“Mount Inwang,” which concludes simply “Pitiful Mount Inwang”
(pulssanghan Inwangsan) is fairly straightforward, but other poetry and fic-
tion concerned with rising human populations is more nuanced. Some works
address women’s contradictory position in ecodegradation. These texts de-
pict women as at once creators and nourishers, damaged by their offspring,
and indirect destroyers of the nonhuman, all by creating and nourishing
people, who inevitably destroy ecosystems. Creating and nourishing one life
is depicted as destroying other life, including that of the individual doing the
creating and nourishing. Many people would argue that this is a necessary
sacrifice. A small group of literary works suggests otherwise, including the
two poems analyzed in this section, written not long after “Mount Inwang”:
the Korean writer Ch’oe Sŭngja’s explicitly ecocosmopolitan poem “Kyŏul
e pada e kassŏtta” (Went to the Sea in Winter, 1984) and the Korean writer
Kim Hyesun’s implicitly ecocosmopolitan poem “Kkŏpchil ŭi norae” (Song
of Skin, 1985).77 Both Ch’oe Sŭngja and Kim Hyesun rose to prominence
in the 1980s and are celebrated in part for their graphic and at times vulgar
evocations of the female body.
“Song of Skin” likens nursing to being sucked dry. At the beginning of the
poem the speaker remarks that “open lips discover milk / and extract sweet
water from my body.” But they do not stop here. The lips almost immedi-
ately want to nurse again. And so, “First / the saliva in my mouth dries up /
tears vanish from my two eyes / my veins dry up / flowing blood vanishes.”
The desiccation of her body is even more pronounced in the second half of
the poem, where she complains:

My entire body is completely squeezed out

even though you throw up everything you’ve eaten
the open lips of you people
latch onto my nipples
until in the end my entire body is emptied
242  ecoambiguity

with only bones and skin remaining . . .

until no thoughts rise to the surface
and even my spirit withers and dies.78

The reference to “you people” (nŏhŭidŭl) suggests that the speaker is nursing
not only her child but multiple individuals, if not society. Nursing metaphori-
cally captures this woman’s position in her home and community: constantly
nourishing others, she never has the opportunity to replenish her own body.
She is drained, physically and emotionally, until nothing but skin and bones
remain. “Song of Skin” dramatically portrays women as sacrificing their own
bodies for the people around them, regardless of age.
At the same time, this text points to some of the broader consequences
when women bear and nourish offspring. In the first half of the poem, after
indicating that as she nurses her veins dry up and her blood vanishes, the
woman declares: “nature [then] collapses / the water of the Naktong River
dries up, and the riverbed / hollering a shriek of distress, breaks apart.” Simi-
larly, in the second half of the poem she inserts lines on exploding heavens and
galaxies between predictions that her body will be drained until only skin and
bones remain and that her mind and spirit will be leached until both disap-
pear: “[you latch onto my nipples] until the heavenly castle splits apart / and
the Milky Way shatters.” These lines highlight the narrator’s own distress; she
feels as though both her body and her universe are being ripped apart. But
when taken more literally, the references to landscapes collapsing and a river
drying up and its riverbed cracking apart (particularly the Naktong, South
Korea’s longest, a significant source of drinking water and home to wetlands
that provide habitat to endangered species) also indicate what can happen
when the very people the woman is nourishing leave her side and extract not
milk from their mother but water from rivers, trees from forests, and minerals
from mountains. “Song of Skin”—like many texts on environmental degrada-
tion that speak of the earth as literally being sucked dry—depicts nonhuman
bodies as being plundered in the same manner as those of nursing women.79
But even as women’s bodies suffer like their nonhuman counterparts, they are
paradoxically complicit in the latter’s distress: women’s bodies are precisely
what fortify the individuals who violate environments. Kim Hyesun’s poem
could be read as the planet’s own plea for mercy.80
Ch’oe Sŭngja’s poem “Went to the Sea in Winter” addresses not the para-
doxes of nursing but instead those of giving birth, a more rapid and dramatic
draining, if not emptying of the female body. This graphic exposé of human
and nonhuman suffering begins by juxtaposing white birds dropping guano
near the polluted sea with a woman’s floating corpse ejecting wan offspring:
 Capitalizing on Contradiction  243

Went to the sea in winter

Seagulls mewed and dumped white poop
The corpse of a woman drifting for three days
was caught by a Coast Guard patrol boat
the woman’s uterus pointed at the sea, opened to the sea
(the polluted sea)
From the open uterus sickly, pale children
gushed out, staggering, blinded by the sea’s bright sun
They rode the foam of the waves
and scattered to the five continents and six oceans
The dead woman lingered as a flabby empty shell
drifting like vinyl81

“Went to the Sea in Winter” portrays a woman who is at once a creator

and a double casualty. She produces new life even after her own death; it is
her corpse, not her living body, that gives birth. Giving birth does not bring
about her death, but it converts her already degraded, aimlessly drifting body
from a “corpse” (sich’e) into a dehumanized “flabby empty shell” that drifts
like vinyl (hŭmulhŭmulhan pin kkŏpttegiro nama / pinil ch’ŏrŏm ttŏdolgo
issŏtta). Moreover, the poem strongly implies that the authorities lose in-
terest in the body after the transformation from pregnant corpse to empty
shell; the Coast Guard is said to have “caught” the body, but the twelfth line
indicates that it continues to drift. The woman is deemed worthy of recovery
only when pregnant. The comparison to vinyl suggests that her body/shell
has itself chemically altered, perhaps by the polluted sea but also likely even
before it entered the water.
Reconfiguring East Asian and other stereotypes of women as polluted,
“Went to the Sea in Winter” suggests that this woman defiles her own chil-
dren as well as the sea where she floats.82 And ultimately, through her chil-
dren, she is in some ways a polluter of landscapes around the world. Ch’oe
Sŭngja’s poem depicts the woman’s children, after they become adults, as
destroying environments; to be sure, they initiate supposedly invincible revo-
lutions, but these appear to arise more from boredom than from conviction,
and they have no clear objectives:

The children who scattered separately all over the world

in South Africa’s Pietermaritzburg and Odendaalsrus
they weave tenacious spider webs, in the jungles of the Philippines
they peel eggs in the ground, in Berlin, Germany and
on the Haussmann boulevards of Paris
244  ecoambiguity

in the dead of night they spread syphilis, while giving birth to

illegitimate children,
now and then, on a night so long, so wearisome, they will stir up a
revolution
invariably, abortive revolutions
Went to the sea in winter
(the polluted sea).83

“Went to the Sea in Winter” does not speak explicitly of the children who
gush out of this woman as eventually themselves polluting ecosystems. But
the reference to weaving “tenacious spider webs” (chilgin kŏmijip ŭl ch’igo)
in Pietermaritzburg (KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa), noted for its timber and
aluminum production, and Odendaalsrus (Free State, South Africa), with its
long history of gold mining, suggests that as the woman’s offspring become
adults, they transform lands far from the site of their birth. The mention of
peeling eggs in Philippine soil (Pilyulbin ŭi chŏnggŭl e sŏ / ttang sok e da al ŭl
kkanok’o) intimates that the women’s grown children are disturbing natural
habitats there. In Paris and Berlin her offspring spread venereal disease and
give birth to children who likely will follow the same trajectory as their par-
ents, continuing and expanding the radius of the cycle by scattering to other
lands, damaging ecosystems on a vast scale, and bearing ever more children.84
The poem predicts that the children will occasionally stir up revolutions
but that these will be unsuccessful. Taking the text full circle and suggesting
that very little will be changed, the concluding two lines repeat the title and
first and sixth lines of the poem: “Went to the sea in winter / (the polluted
sea)” (kyŏul e pada e kassŏtta / (oyŏmdoen pada)). These lines bring the
reader back to the beginning: a polluted woman creates new life only to be
emptied and abandoned herself; this new life in turn threatens other life.
Revolution is unsuccessful. Just as significant, the seas remain polluted.
Creative works such as Kim Kwanggyu’s “Mount Inwang,” Kim Hye-
sun’s “Song of Skin,” and Ch’oe Sŭngja’s “Went to the Sea in Winter” il-
luminate some of the trade-offs for people and the nonhuman alike when
both the global human population and per capita waste increase. By speaking
explicitly not only of the potential traumas to the female body of giving birth
and nursing but also of the damage women’s offspring inflict on the planet,
“Song of Skin” and “Went to the Sea in Winter” argue that producing life
damages both people and the nonhuman. In contrast, as examined in the
following pages, other creative works focus on trade-offs where one species
flourishes at the expense of another, or where a single species is alternately
harmed and helped.
 Capitalizing on Contradiction  245

Helping Environments, Harming Environments

Creative works that address human-induced environmental devastation ne-

gotiate a variety of trade-offs taking place among nonhuman bodies, every-
thing from replacing one plant with another, or grasslands and forests with
cultivated fields, to certain nonhuman species thriving because of the same
human behaviors that threaten other nonhuman species, or nonhuman spe-
cies being reintroduced to a space (e.g., via afforestation) at the expense of
other nonhuman species and the overall health of existing ecosystems. Texts
that underscore these offsets clearly reveal the ambiguities of human actions
vis-à-vis the nonhuman. Most discuss both the contradictory nature of hu-
man behaviors toward environments and the problematic effects of these be-
haviors. Poetry and fiction focusing on behavioral contradictions include the
Japanese writer Masuda Mizuko’s short story “Tsuno” (Horn, 1995), the
Korean writer Hwang Sunwŏn’s short story “Hak” (Cranes, 1953), and the
Taiwanese writer Liu Kexiang’s brief verse “Xiwang” (Hope, 1984); creative
works calling attention to contradictory impacts include the Chinese writer
Jia Pingwa’s short story “Linqu” (Songs of the Forest, 1979) and the Taiwan-
ese writer Chen Huang’s narrative Gezi Tuoli shi weiyi xiwang (Pigeon Tuoli
Is the Only Hope, 1994). Unlike Kim Hyesun’s “Song of Skin” and Ch’oe
Sŭngja’s “Went to the Sea in Winter,” these texts all feature relatively situated
damage to specific ecosystems, and they do not explicitly reach out to other
sites or eras. But even though, like Kim Kwanggyu’s “Mount Inwang,” they
locate themselves in particular times and places, they neither claim nor sug-
gest distinctiveness. In describing conditions akin to those in multiple venues,
theirs is a more implicit environmental cosmopolitanism.
Masuda’s “Horn,” narrated by an employee of the botanical information
center in one of Tokyo’s municipal parks, brings to light the inconsistent
ways people treat different plant species. Much of this fantastical short story
focuses on the narrator’s own experiences as a single woman who, after be-
ing knocked over by a malicious fellow pedestrian, begins growing a horn
on her forehead. Her horn allows her to read the minds of those around her,
a mixed blessing for someone who before the accident had no interest in the
thoughts or feelings of others. Even as her horn begins to wither, the narrator
is plagued by prophetic nightmares. “Horn” concludes with her agonizing,
“What should I do if my dreams are all prophetic? Sleep brings no rest, and
I can’t help but have a bad foreboding.”85
Although “Horn” is largely concerned with relationships among people,
three of the narrator’s experiences at the botanical center stand out because
they expose human-instigated trade-offs among nonhuman bodies. Near the
246  ecoambiguity

beginning of the story the narrator explains that she and her colleagues are
responsible for “the upkeep and management of the park’s trees, shrubs, and
flowering plants.”86 This includes everything from planting, watering, and
fertilizing to weeding, trimming, and uprooting, the latter often followed
by installing new plants. “Horn” emphasizes that the park is not a place of
freely growing vegetation or even one that allows annuals to complete their
cycles; instead it is a carefully regulated space, periodically subjected to up-
rootings and replantings for solely aesthetic reasons.
Not surprisingly, certain species of flora are considered weeds and simply
discarded. In contrast, the park strives to recycle its more desirable castoffs
by offering them to residents of the city. In the final pages of the story, the
narrator notes:

In preparation for replanting, all flowerbeds in the park, both large

and small, are being dug up, and flowers uprooted, extracted, and
moved to a spot in front of the information center. A huge quantity
of marguerite daisies [a perennial], earth still clinging to them and
roots intact, have been piled on the ground in a heap about as tall as
a small child. There are several thousand flowers, all of them lying
facing in the same direction. The hot sun has been shining on them
since morning, so the soil around them has dried, their leaves have
lost their moisture, their color is fading, and their weakened stems
are bending pliantly. Floating inside our building is the distinct sharp
odor that plants give off when they’re injured . . . There is a sign on
the wall by the mountain of flowers reading “Please help yourself.”
One after another, visitors to the park carry off armfuls of flowers.
Now officials have gone out to plant new flowers in the park’s empty
flower gardens.87

“Horn” describes the flowers as being attacked, first by people and then by
the sun; not unlike the nursing/birthing women of Kim Hyesun’s “Song of
Skin” and Ch’oe Sŭngja’s “Went to the Sea in Winter,” they are gradually
stripped of their essence. The text describes transformations in shape, color,
and scent as the flowers taken from their plots and the soil that clings to them
lose their moisture and crumble away. “Horn” depicts the uprooted margue-
rites and other flowers as surviving, or at least as being rescued; the narrator
notes that by dusk all that remain are some wilted leaves fluttering in the soil.
The beds are quickly replanted, this time with beautiful pale purple flowers.
Taking into account other evidence in the story, this episode could be
read as a metaphor for the narrator’s own life; in many ways she too was
 Capitalizing on Contradiction  247

cast aside by society while in full bloom, or at least while still having con-
siderable potential, abandoned perhaps because she did not conform to
often capricious social expectations. But the flower subplot also spotlights
a common characteristic of interactions between people and the natural
world: people tend to discard even the most vibrant flora if society’s aes-
thetic vision for a particular space differs from what nature, however ma-
nipulated, provides. To be sure, plants are not being replaced by human
cultural products such as tennis courts or additional buildings, which in
Japan would most likely be libraries, museums, and civic centers.88 More-
over, the uprooted flowers are given another chance at life when eager
housewives and commuters scoop up handfuls as they pass by the park.89
These flowers were themselves replacements for an earlier crop; they have
no more claim to the flowerbeds than do their predecessors or successors.
Yet it is striking how easily and rapidly plants are manipulated to meet
human needs. “Horn” reminds the reader that this intervention not only
can involve destroying nonhuman bodies but also can entail a much less
obvious but often equally significant maneuver: substituting one nonhu-
man body for another. Much of the nonhuman is disrupted as human color
preferences change with the seasons.
Ultimately, however, “Horn” reveals the park’s treatment of plants as am-
biguous on an even more fundamental level: the behaviors of park officials
toward trees differ from their behaviors toward flowers. Whereas healthy,
blooming flowers are removed, tree branches are allowed to grow in what-
ever direction they please, leaves and twigs remain where they fall, and tree
parasites are left to enjoy the resulting buffet.90 Early in “Horn” the narrator
describes an irate woman coming to her office to complain about unfamiliar
red swellings on the leaves of the park’s evergreen witch hazel. The woman
had thought the bumps so beautiful that she took home some leaves. But
cutting into them, she was shocked to discover that these were no decorative
growths: “I cut it to find out just what kind of fruit it is. Insects poured out
one after the other. They kept coming and coming. I was horrified. . . . What
the hell is this?”91 The narrator calmly explains that these are insect galls
(outgrowths of plant tissue usually caused by parasites), which can almost be
taken for granted on evergreen witch hazel. Becoming even more irate, the
woman demands to know whether the evergreen/insect relationship is symbi-
otic or parasitic. When the narrator admits that theirs could be considered “a
one-way parasitic relationship” the woman’s outrage intensifies:

Why can’t you just fumigate and kill all the insects? I took this leaf
from this park. To have aphids feeding in a public park? How is this
248  ecoambiguity

acceptable? Now the flowerbeds on my veranda are terribly infected.

It’s unsanitary. Doesn’t this bother you?92

The woman demands that the city do to the insects precisely what she con-
demns the insects for doing, namely, kill living things. She also complains
that the city is planting trees but not maintaining them as she believes it
should: “Do you think you can just plant trees anywhere you like and go
merrily about your business? Recently you haven’t even been cleaning up the
leaves that have fallen from roadside trees. The same is true about pruning
and spraying insecticides. And I’ve already heard your line on being short-
staffed, so don’t even start with me.”93 Having finished her rant, the woman
leaves the building without giving the narrator the opportunity to respond.
The narrator claims this woman had just wanted someone to listen to her
grievances. But her criticism of park officials is revealing: the same individu-
als who micromanage flowers apparently let trees do as they please; while
flowers are uprooted if they do not coincide with a particular color scheme
or have reached their natural peak, trees can host obvious parasites, drop
leaves, and extend limbs—in other words can both themselves be violated by
parasites and overstep what some might regard as their proper boundaries—
without a second glance from the authorities. Calls for pruning, removal, and
extermination are met with silence.
These differences in behavior can be easily explained. Some disparities re-
sult primarily from structural differences: it is much easier to replace flowers
than it is trees, and since the insect galls do not appear to be harming the ev-
ergreen witch hazel (which blooms early and often looks like forsythia), park
officials would have little motivation to replace these with trees less likely to
become infested. Other disparities result primarily from variations in scope:
the plants in the park’s flowerbeds are more easily managed than the millions
of trees that grow across town. But additional circumstances are also at play.
Although the grumbling woman is horrified that the trees on her veranda are
infected with insect galls, the only reason they trouble her is that she knows
what lies inside; she took leaves home and cut open the bodies attached to
them. And the only reason she brought leaves home and cut open their lumps
is that she thought the latter looked beautiful. In other words beauty, or per-
ceived beauty, has a more powerful effect on behavior than does concern for
the nonhuman. It is only when these lumps turn out to be clusters of insects
that they are declared parasitical and are stripped of their beauty. “Horn”
reveals the predictable randomness in how people treat the nonhuman. This
short story depicts nonhuman bodies as being easily exchanged: the survival
 Capitalizing on Contradiction  249

of any one entity depends on perceptions of its appropriateness for a particu-

lar human-defined space.
Hwang Sunwŏn’s short story “Cranes” describes similar contradicting
behaviors toward animals, featuring two young men who capture, amuse
themselves with, and then liberate a crane, only to resume crane hunting.94
Written by one of twentieth-century Korea’s most celebrated authors in Janu-
ary 1953 and published in May 1953, just months before the armistice that
brought a temporary end to the Korean War (July 1953), “Cranes” antici-
pates the many Korean creative works that expose the green paradox of the
space designated as the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ): as described in chapter
1, the DMZ, established as part of the Korean War Armistice Agreement,
is both the world’s most fortified border region and, until recent years and
largely by chance, one of its great ecological preserves. Hwang Sunwŏn’s
story centers on the relationship between Sŏngsam and Tŏkjae, two young
men who were close childhood friends in North Korea, but after Sŏngsam’s
recent defection to the South find themselves on opposing sides. During the
Korean War (1950–53) Tŏkjae was captured by southern forces just north of
the 38th parallel. After recognizing him as his former companion, Sŏngsam,
now a member of the South’s Public Peace Corps, has volunteered to take
him to Ch’ŏngdan (a city in western Korea, slightly north of the 38th paral-
lel), where he will be imprisoned. Early in their journey the two stop to look
at cranes in nearby fields: “In the center of the field, resembling people with
bent backs and wearing white clothing, was without doubt a flock of cranes.
This place had become the 38th parallel’s demilitarized zone. Even though
people no longer lived there, cranes still did, as before.”95 Echoing much lit-
erature that contrasts people with nature, the text here depicts human societ-
ies as fleeting and the natural world as enduring. Seeing these cranes triggers
a childhood memory. When they were about twelve, Sŏngsam and Tŏkjae
trapped a Tanjŏng crane. They tied it up, binding even its wings, and they
visited it daily to pet and ride it. When rumors began to spread that a man
was coming from Seoul with the permission of the governor-general to shoot
cranes as specimens, the boys were terrified that the crane they had captured
would be among those killed. So without a second thought they untied the
bird and encouraged it to fly away. At first the animal was so weak it could
barely walk, and its initial attempt at flight was unsuccessful, but before long
it flew off to freedom: “[It] stretched its long neck, let out a cry, flew up into
the sky, swept in a circle over the heads of the two boys, and vanished into
the distance. For a long time the boys could not tear their eyes away from the
blue sky [p’urŭn hanŭl e sŏ] where their crane had disappeared.”96 Sŏngsam
250  ecoambiguity

and Tŏkjae are mesmerized by the animal, and especially by its rapid disap-
pearance, after a final circling above its captors, into the firmament.
This memory is complemented several paragraphs later by the story’s final
sentence, which takes place in the present: “Just in time two or three Tanjŏng
cranes, spreading out their huge wings, went soaring leisurely through the
clear autumn sky [nopp’urŭn kaŭl hanŭl e k’ŭn nalgae rŭl p’yŏgo yuyuhi
nalgo issŏtta].”97 Repeating the image of cranes flying through clear sky,
albeit not one bird but several and not disappearing into the heavens but
instead advertising their freedom by spreading out their large wings, flying
leisurely (yuyuhi), and remaining visible, Hwang Sunwŏn’s story implicitly
contrasts the fate of Tŏkjae, who is being led off to prison, with the seeming
freedom animals enjoy.98 More generally, it contrasts the arduous lives of
the Korean people with the apparently more tranquil lives of the peninsula’s
animals, at least those able to evade ropes and rifles. But Hwang Sunwŏn’s
story also gives important insights into the frequently contradictory ways
people treat animals. As children, Sŏngsam and Tŏkjae snare a crane and tie
it up, harnessing even its wings. Unable to move, the crane sits alone except
for Sŏngsam and Tŏkjae’s daily visits. These visits cannot be enjoyable for
the animal, which initially must carry the boys around on its back and then
appears too weak to do even this; that the bird can barely walk when the
boys set it free suggests that it has been some time since it has carried them
anywhere. The boys show concern for the crane only when they believe its
life is at stake; the narrator sympathetically depicts Sŏngsam and Tŏkjae as
so worried that the shooter from Seoul will reach the crane before they do
that they hurry to turn the animal loose, “[not caring] whether the adults
found out and scolded them. All they could think about was their crane dy-
ing.”99 The crane is granted its freedom, freedom the boys know they should
not have taken away in the first place, precisely because the animal’s life is so
obviously in danger; unable to fly with its wings bound, the bird would have
been easy prey for the visitor from Seoul.100
But in fact it already was easy prey—the crane’s life was in danger from
its first day of confinement. Anyone could have stumbled on the bound ani-
mal and killed it while Sŏngsam and Tŏkjae were otherwise occupied. It is
also likely that being held in captivity greatly reduced the crane’s lifespan but
that its deterioration would have been gradual enough to go unnoticed be-
fore becoming irreversible. The narrator remarks that once untied the crane
could barely walk, and although it eventually manages to fly away, it is un-
clear how far it can travel. Reversing their behavior, Sŏngsam and Tŏkjae
first capture and then release an animal, taking away its freedom and threat-
ening its life only to return the former and give new lease on the latter. The
 Capitalizing on Contradiction  251

boys do so even as their feelings toward the bird remain the same. They are
fascinated by it and do not want it to die, even though they are the ones who
from the start have put it at risk.
“Cranes” demonstrates how readily an individual’s behaviors toward
the same animal can contradict and perhaps even cancel each other out.
Rehabilitation looks possible, at least if begun in a timely manner. On the
other hand, having the adult Sŏngsam and Tŏkjae interrupt their journey to
Ch’ŏngdan to try to catch another crane suggests that the two have learned
little from their previous experiences. They know, or can imagine, what it
feels like to be bound. And yet they show no qualms about attempting to
inflict this condition on animals. Hwang Sunwŏn’s story ends on a positive
note, at least for the cranes, which show no signs of descending from the
clear autumn sky and seem well out of reach of the two childhood friends.
But it is uncertain how much longer these birds will be able to escape human
clutches. The next soldiers to venture by these fields might be more successful
than Hwang Sunwŏn’s two protagonists.
Revealing even greater contradictions of human behaviors toward birds,
and the nonhuman more generally, are texts that expose not contradictory
treatment of a particular species but instead the ambiguity of attempts to
“green” environments.101 Many, like Liu Kexiang’s “Hope,” suggest that en-
vironmentally “friendly” actions are accompanied by or even inspire behav-
iors likely to harm the nonhuman.102 Taiwan’s preeminent nature writer, Liu
Kexiang is known especially for his narratives on the island’s birds, and in
“Hope” he speaks briefly of his vision of the future habitats of these animals.
This short poem reads simply:

One year there finally will be a spring

when our children and grandchildren can read the following front-
page story:
Birds and small ducks are returning north from their winter
migration
Vehicles passing by the Danshui River
are forbidden to sound their horns.103

“Hope” was published in the mid-1980s, when the Danshui River—which

flows from the mountains of Taiwan’s Xinzhu County through Taoyuan
County, Taipei, and into the Taiwan Strait—suffered from significant pol-
lution.104 The narrator does not specify how the conditions described in the
anticipated front-page article differ from present circumstances, conditions
he suggests through his use of the word “finally” (zhongyu) that have long
252  ecoambiguity

been anticipated. But it seems he believes that in a generation or two the

area will have been sufficiently restored for birds and small ducks to return;
their presence suggests that other species also might find a welcome home or
at least a temporary resting place on the river’s banks. It is also likely that
vehicles passing through areas with considerable bird populations will be
newly prohibited from honking their horns, the highly anticipated return
of several avian species having triggered even more stringent environmental
regulations.
At the same time that it references temporally pervasive damage, “Hope”
expresses dreams for future generations and for their soundscapes in par-
ticular. The speaker’s vision sounds ideal: honking birds replacing honking
horns. Interestingly, however, the poem says nothing about reducing vehicu-
lar traffic along the Danshui. In fact, if ducks and other birds have recently
returned to the region, traffic might even increase, fueled by people’s desire
to gawk at these newly returned animals. And the potential damage caused
by auto exhaust aside, sounds from increased traffic could conceivably offset
the decrease in noise brought about by prohibiting the use of vehicular horns.
Indeed, the poem remains silent concerning what many environmentalists
would consider a significant piece of the puzzle, one that if not acted on risks
undermining the improvements that have been made to the river’s ecosys-
tems: without reducing the number of vehicles on the road, bird populations
will continue to be threatened and could once again disappear. Although
“Hope” itself is relatively optimistic and does not explore these possibilities,
readers aware of the fates of other recently rehabilitated spaces might pause
to consider the significance of the loud silences inherent in this text.
Whereas Masuda’s “Horn,” Hwang Sunwŏn’s “Cranes,” and Liu
Kexiang’s “Hope” point to the contradictory nature of human behaviors to-
ward environments, Jia Pingwa’s “Songs of the Forest” and Chen Huang’s
Pigeon Tuoli bring out the ambiguous results of such behaviors. “Songs of
the Forest” initially seems to depict a clear case of ecocontradiction. This
work, by one of China’s most popular and prolific authors and a leading
writer of roots-seeking literature, opens with a description of a seemingly
unsullied mountain area, the Small River, where “the river water is extremely
clear, so clear you can see the rocks, the shadows of fish on the rocks, and
if you throw in a pebble you can see the reflection of trees trembling drunk-
enly.”105 But the narrator also reveals that the surrounding mountains are
devoid of trees; he and his colleagues have been assigned to reforest the land-
scape, which likely was denuded during the Cultural Revolution: “We all
agreed that the water here was good, as were the people [zher shui hao, ren
hao], but this would be a truly good place [nei zhen jiao ge hao difang le] if
 Capitalizing on Contradiction  253

the mountains once again sent forth forests [shanshang ruguo zai zhangchu
shulin]!”106 Indicating that the mountainsides once were home to groves of
trees, the narrator nevertheless does not specify why the landscape lost its
forests—whether this was the result of a “natural” blight such as fire from
lightning, of human actions like incessant logging, or possibly of a nebu-
lous intertwining of human and nonhuman behaviors. Also important is the
phrase “if the mountains once again sent forth forests,” indicating that how-
ever much people attempt to repair the landscape, it is from the mountains
that vegetation ultimately must sprout.
The narrator reveals that since the land will be seeded from the sky, he
and his comrades must build an airfield, houses, and other structures for
the workers. Remediating spaces by planting trees necessitates reshaping of
other spaces; the human footprint on environments extends well beyond the
new groves of trees, both vertically (airplanes above deforested ground) and
horizontally (airfields and houses adjacent to these spaces). This construction
does not seem to disturb the people who live nearby. They are delighted that
outsiders have come to their village; more workers means more clothing to
be washed, profiting local women. One of the villagers confesses her disap-
pointment that the airfield is so close to completion; she wishes construction
would continue for another two years. At the same time, there is no real
desire to forestall the arrival of airplanes. The locals are excited to see these
craft overhead, children especially.
Yet the final lines of Jia Pingwa’s story suggest that despite local excite-
ment, this construction and in particular the machinery it brings to the region
entail more ominous consequences; the “songs of the forest” (linqu) change
from those of girls playing and women doing laundry to the roar of machines
on the ground and overhead. The story concludes: “I couldn’t distinguish the
rumbling sounds coming from the airfield. Which were the sounds of trac-
tors? Which were the sounds of bulldozers? Had they also heard the voices
of these children?”107 This final question is rhetorical, since children’s voices
were easily overwhelmed by the racket of tractors, bulldozers, and other
equipment. The landscape where the men are working had an audible hu-
man presence even before their arrival, one that appears to have been stron-
ger than the presence of the nonhuman. In his description of the river, cited
above, the narrator focuses solely on how it looks to the naked eye and on
how people are interacting with it; he says nothing about the sounds it makes
or those emanating from animals living within it. But now one human sound-
scape is gradually being drowned out by another. Other changes are less
clear. The men release seeds above hillsides to restore them, to make these
“truly great places.” Ensuing compromises, including changes to noise levels,
254  ecoambiguity

likely are not few. Portraying ecological destruction amid reconstruction, Jia
Pingwa’s narrative presents a complicated picture of interspecies nonhuman
trade-offs: trees are planted but only at the expense of other species.
Articulating related phenomena yet focusing more closely on nonhuman
dynamics is Chen Huang’s Pigeon Tuoli.108 This volume of essays by one of
Taiwan’s premier nature writers centers on the adventures of Tuoli, a pigeon
that abandons the relative security of its coop to live in “wilderness” that has
been subjected to substantial human damage. In the volume’s preface Chen
Huang explains: “Through the adventures and course [maoxian licheng] of
a pigeon named Tuoli I have sought to show the twists and turns [bozhe] of
a life in the wild, as well as the fond dreams [meimeng] pursued. It is reality
[zhenshi] and also fantasy [huanxiang]. Pigeon Tuoli is reality; the circum-
stances that occur [fasheng de qingjing] are also reality. But the fantasy has
to do with the connotation [neihan] and significance [yiyi] of nature and the
wilderness [ziran huangye].”109 Itself contradictory, indicating at once that
the environmental conditions depicted are “real” but their connotations and
significance are “fantasy,” this statement prepares the reader for the ambi-
guities that follow.
Championing environmental preservation, in the preface Chen Huang
also consistently laments the fact that many urban residents have little mean-
ingful contact with wildlife. They watch television in isolated air-conditioned
rooms and know wilderness only through electronic images. However mov-
ing, these virtual images generally cannot compete with economic growth
and the allure of more comfortable lifestyles; even people fascinated by the
nonhuman often do not want to experience it directly. And so, Chen Huang
argues, “Industrialists invest in the wilderness and transform it into tour-
ist amusement areas . . . There have been many brutal instances of system-
atically exploiting wilderness and expanding recreation spaces for people’s
enjoyment.”110 Since most people have not experienced environmental ca-
tastrophe, they cannot understand the importance of minimizing the human
impact on ecosystems, especially ecosystems outside urban centers. Chen
Huang claims that composing the essays in his collection was enjoyable in
many ways. But he admits that he still feels “helpless in face of the difficulties
admitting the harm civilized society has inflicted on wilderness.”111 Writing
in the mid-1990s, he expresses many of the same concerns as the protagonist
of Topas Tamapima’s “The Last Hunter,” who fears that the forests near his
home will be compromised even more severely after being designated recre-
ation areas.
“Gezi Tuoli zhi yi” (Pigeon Tuoli, Part 1, 1990), the first essay in Pi-
geon Tuoli, paints a slightly different picture of interactions among people
 Capitalizing on Contradiction  255

and environments from that offered in the volume’s preface.112 Chen Huang
cites numerous examples of deliberate or inadvertent damage to the natural
world. Yet the essay’s title character, although not particularly excited about
its vocation of performing acrobatics for people, seeks freedom from its cage
only after considerable negotiation. Unlike the captured birds in Huang
Chunming’s story “Set Free” and Hwang Sunwŏn’s story “Crane,” Tuoli the
pigeon is not depicted as suffering while under human care. Food is plentiful,
and the bird comes and goes from its pen whenever it desires. Although the
essay concludes with Tuoli deciding the time has come to leave the coop per-
manently, “Pigeon Tuoli” reveals human relationships with the nonhuman as
more complicated than the volume’s introduction suggests.
Interested in the experiences of animals that live in the wild, Tuoli lis-
tens avidly to the stories they share about human invasion of the wilderness
and consequent environmental damage. The bird also flies over nearby land-
scapes, observing this degradation himself. Hunters set bird and other traps
hundreds of meters long, capturing numerous species including those that
are nearly extinct; loggers work in droves to deforest acres of land so that
it can be used for agriculture; truckers deposit mounds of urban garbage on
hillsides; high-voltage boxes electrocute birds that use them as perches and
electric shocks render frogs unconscious; and the mountain deer have disap-
peared even from Deer Hut (Luliao; 鹿寮), a site named in their honor.
The examples of environmental degradation listed in “Pigeon Tuoli” are
all too familiar. Tuoli’s reactions, on the other hand, are notable but not un-
expected considering the dependence of this species on people. Far from be-
ing outraged at the human incursion, the pigeon almost seems pleased. This
bird associates people with food:

The gray starlings, hawks, and falcons had protested [the degradation
of their environments], but people seemed as though they were still
sticking to their old ways. Pigeon Tuoli perhaps was worried that it
soon would lose some feathered friends, but it wasn’t so much con-
cerned about people spoiling the hills. At least it didn’t have to be
anxious about running out of food.113

Similarly, rather than being outraged when it discovers there are no moun-
tain deer at Deer Hut, no traces of deer, nor any memory of deer even among
the most senior pigeons, Tuoli hypothesizes that there might not have been
any deer to begin with: “In Pigeon Tuoli’s small mind, if even people didn’t
leave records [of deer having lived here] then the appearance of mountain
deer perhaps in truth was only a beautiful legend.”114 Considering not only
256  ecoambiguity

how much damage is revealed but also the tenor of Chen Huang’s introduc-
tion, Tuoli—at least as depicted by the narrator—is quite unconcerned with
how people are reshaping the terrain outside its coop.
Even more intriguing are Tuoli’s apprehensions about and reasons—im-
mediate and enduring—for flying away. Having spent much if not all of its
life as a domestic pigeon, and seeming to believe itself already relatively free,
it understandably finds it difficult to make a final break with human soci-
ety.115 The fact that the “wilderness” now is replete with obvious human
traces makes it more appealing to an animal that has spent its life among
people. This perhaps is part of the dream to which Chen Huang refers in
the preface: the bird’s perceptions of nature and wilderness appear to be
largely fantastical when compared with the degradation of these spaces. But
also at play are factors that highlight Tuoli’s isolation from the other birds
and complicate the human/nonhuman binary Chen Huang establishes in the
preface. Part of what motivates Tuoli’s departure is simple boredom; the bird
is perhaps too comfortable, with food always available and a roof to protect
it from the rain. Tuoli wonders if there is not more to existence. Its human
handlers are at least partially responsible for the tedium of its life. But apart
from making it repeat the same acrobatic routine, the people who feed and
house it do not have much control over how it spends his days; Tuoli roams
at will and flies wherever it wishes.116 It is the bird’s choice to return to the
coop every night.
Also motivating Tuoli to liberate himself is the fear of being labeled spine-
less. Pigeons already appear to be the laughingstock of the avian community.
Their diet is a frequent target; sparrows, even as they feed freely from the
pigeons’ food supply, ridicule these birds for eating “monotonous man-made
fare.” Thrushes too mock the pigeons’ diet. The narrator comments, “What
most saddened Tuoli was how its completely wild neighbors were fond of
loudly poking fun at the pigeons for not earning their own food and hinting
that man-made feed just didn’t compare with what was available everywhere
in the wild—tasty, delicious insects.”117 Tuoli decides to leave the coop to
prove to birds of other species that pigeons are strong enough to survive in
the wild. Few birds believe the pigeon can accomplish this feat. They claim
that no pigeon ever has tried to do so, and many taunt Tuoli for its efforts.
This is not to say that the wilderness itself holds no appeal for the pigeon
protagonist. There are times when it feels its magnetism. For instance, watch-
ing adult barbets teach their young how to find insects, Tuoli experiences a
“strange feeling of identification spontaneously rise up inside. It had never
felt anything like this.”118 But recognizing that it might be romanticizing a
life it scarcely knows, Tuoli immediately asks, “Was life in the outdoors re-
 Capitalizing on Contradiction  257

ally so fascinating?”119 Believing nature not nearly as captivating as others

have made it out to be, it determines not to leave permanently but instead to
make short trips away from home to see if it can adapt to a new environment.
But then a fortuitous encounter with an extraordinary bird that literally be-
comes one with the wilderness, rather than a deep-seated desire to separate
itself from human society, prompts Tuoli to make the final break. The essay
concludes with Tuoli so captivated by the sight of a beautiful green pigeon
flying away and merging into the foliage that it decides to do the same. “Wil-
derness” draws it in, or at least the fantasy of becoming one with a wilder-
ness that absorbs such a seductive bird:

As Pigeon Tuoli gazed at the green pigeon’s departing silhouette, it

suddenly was deeply attracted by the animal’s not looking back, its
insistent primitiveness and wild nature [jianzhi de yuanshi he yexing]!
This was the most beautiful view of an animal’s back that Tuoli had
ever seen. The green pigeon quickly merged into the hues of the rainy
wilderness; it and the wilderness were almost an organic whole [nei
jihu shi yu huangye yiti de].

At that moment Tuoli decided on something.

The pigeon therefore immediately spread out its damp wings, and dis-
regarding the rapid and intense rain it launched its body and soared
into the sky.120

This is not the first time Tuoli has taken off and flown far. But earlier epi-
sodes ended in its return to the coop, to which it was “drawn back by an
invisible force,” a force not unlike the eventual magnetism of the wilder-
ness.121 It is unclear at the conclusion of this section of Pigeon Tuoli whether
this time will be any different, whether the pigeon will again change its mind
and, losing sight of its green inspiration, once more return to life among
people. The narrator makes no apology for the havoc people have wreaked
on the ecosystems surrounding the pigeon’s pen, but complicating his picture
of unrestrained ecodegradation is the figure of Tuoli itself—a bird that in
many ways benefits from the human presence, that alternately is drawn to its
familiar home and to the “wilderness,” or at least the fantasy of wilderness.
In fact, it suggests that the latter space has become more appealing precisely
because of its increased human presence.
Trade-offs, whether in behaviors, effects of behaviors, or both, are a hall-
mark of human interactions with environments. Whatever the intent, most of
258  ecoambiguity

these contacts involve both helping and harming the natural world, directly
and indirectly; offsets can also occur among nonhuman bodies or within a
single body. Impacts on people from human behaviors and from nonhuman
acts display similar dynamics. Advances in the life sciences have shown that
processes of trading off are exceptionally complicated. But the more that is
known the more difficult it becomes to determine how profoundly individu-
als and societies have a bearing on environmental health. The diverse texts
examined in this section show how often literature grapples with these issues
and the multiple ways it does so. It also points to the contingencies inherent
in assessing behaviors and the environmental changes these behaviors inflict,
and it shows how much these assessments depend on social, temporal, and
physical standards.

Assessing Assessments of Behaviors

Believing his days numbered, the speaker of the Korean writer Ko Ŭn’s poem
“Nunmul han pangul” (A Single Teardrop, 1974) laments that he has failed
to comfort even the smallest nonhuman bodies. He declares that he hates
leaving the world in such a desultory state:

I have lived without being able to comfort even a single insect . . .

I have lived without being able to comfort even a single plant of
knotgrass . . .
I have lived without being able to comfort even a single brook . . .
When I turn around and look at this world
it’s so dreary
that I don’t want to leave.122

“A Single Teardrop” is mainly a tribute to the speaker’s wife, and the speak-
er’s discourse on failing to comfort insects, knotgrass, and creeks is easily
read as a couched reference to his belief that he has failed to show his spouse
even the smallest kindness. But if taken more literally, the poem also reveals
regret about not having done more for the nonhuman.
Ko Ŭn’s poem points to the ambiguousness of assessing human behav-
iors and how these behaviors affect people and the natural world. Depicting
his impotence as a given, the speaker does not explain why he thinks he
has been unable to comfort (wirohada) a single plant, animal, or geological
body. Interesting as well is his silence on whether he has actively harmed the
nonhuman, whether he attempted to comfort nature and failed, or whether
 Capitalizing on Contradiction  259

he did not even try. More important, the poem’s speaker leaves unclear why
he believes it his duty to console. Commenting on the world’s “dreariness”
(ssŭlssŭlhada), he elsewhere indicates why he thinks people and the non-
human need consolation, but he does not specify why he personally feels
remorse for not having acted. The speaker is silent about the standards by
which he judges his behaviors and their effects on environments.
A number of creative works that address people’s relationships with the
nonhuman, and particularly human damage to ecosystems, go one step fur-
ther by drawing attention to the contingencies on which assessments of en-
vironmental degradation are based. Assessments can be made by analyzing
statistics and scientifically gathered data, but literature offers another set of
perspectives on how to evaluate environmental damage. Revealing the fre-
quent arbitrariness of nonscientific appraisals of human behaviors, creative
texts expose the extent to which evaluations of damage to people and nature
both rely on and vary according to social, temporal, and physical standards
of the normal. Normality, in turn, is based on previous observation or ex-
posure to discourse; we often evaluate damage based on what we a priori
assume we should find, not on absolute standards.

Standards

The standards of individuals and groups from the local to the global—stan-
dards often based on available knowledge, past experiences and practices,
and cultural codes (legal, religious, etc.)—provide the basis for most determi-
nations about the significance of environmental degradation found in literary
texts. For ecological harm even to be recognized, much less managed, we
need to determine not only how ecosystems have been transformed but also
that these changes constitute damage. The natural world is not identified as
having been anthropogenically compromised until it is established that it has
changed significantly; that people have played a notable role in enacting these
changes; and that the changes are harmful. All three determinations rely on
some combination of temporal standards: understandings of what consti-
tutes a “natural” rate of change; physical standards: perceptions of what
comprises a “manipulated” as opposed to a “natural” environment, a “com-
promised” as opposed to a “healthy” environment; and social standards:
norms of appropriate human behavior and effects on particular species or
other subsets of the nonhuman.
Concluding that the nonhuman has changed significantly is usually the
simplest and least arbitrary undertaking. But even this determination de-
pends to some degree on standards. As certain of the texts analyzed in this
260  ecoambiguity

chapter reveal, in addition to physical standards, time is often a key variable.

Since ecosystems change constantly regardless of human behaviors, decid-
ing whether changes are significant often is based on how quickly they take
place. Even when the total land area affected is identical, gradual expansion
of cities into spaces with low or no human population generally receives far
less notice, not to mention criticism or celebration, than rapid spread. Judg-
ments as to what constitutes rapid as opposed to gradual development vary
depending on perspectives: long-term residents of a city that has been slowly
widening its borders for years might barely notice the deforesting of several
additional hectares, whereas recent arrivals from rural areas that have expe-
rienced little urban encroachment might argue that forests are being rapidly
cleared and that environmental degradation is significant.
Creative works discussed earlier in this chapter show the second determi-
nation—the role of people—as relatively straightforward, but it can also be
problematic. Even in cases where human involvement is obvious, the deep in-
termingling of human behaviors and nonhuman phenomena makes it difficult
to judge the relative changes people inflict on landscapes. For example, when
a single misplaced ski triggers an avalanche, the skier is the immediate cause
of snow plummeting down the mountainside, destroying trees, and burying
animals and occasionally people in its path.123 But an avalanche also needs a
highly unstable arrangement of snow, something that usually develops with-
out human involvement. Most avalanches are not induced by people; at best,
the skier might have merely accelerated this “natural” event. On the other
hand, human-induced climate change has been implicated in increasing the
likelihood of avalanches in certain spaces: the skier easily could have speeded
an event stemming from anthropogenic atmospheric changes. Suppositions
about human involvement in transformations of environments rely largely on
physical standards, ideas of what constitutes the “natural” condition of ev-
erything from a particular nonhuman body to a broad landscape. When parts
of the natural world look “abnormal,” human behaviors often are presumed
to be involved. Assessing the precise role people play in changing environ-
ments is likely to become more difficult as more is understood about all that
underlies environmental change. For instance, it may be only a matter of time
before industrial nations are held accountable for flooding halfway around
the world caused by rising sea levels resulting directly from global warming.
The third determination—that changes are harmful—seems simple but
often is the most difficult and arbitrary, relying as it usually does on both
physical and social standards. Sensory evidence can be overwhelming: belch-
ing smokestacks, roaring trucks, malodorous and discolored bodies of water,
suspiciously textured and odd tasting crops. But the effects of these changes
 Capitalizing on Contradiction  261

on human and nonhuman bodies are often highly contested. Thus, a corpo-
ration is more likely to admit to changing environments than it is to declare
these changes detrimental to people and the nonhuman realm; a government
or corporate board might not be able to deny that a factory’s emissions are
blackening the skies, and that people and animals living in close proxim-
ity to this factory disproportionately contract serious diseases, but persistent
lobbying and conclusive scientific evidence are generally required to force
an admission that these blackened skies actually caused the diseases (i.e., a
government or corporate board would see the smoke as coincidental, not
causative). After human damage to environments has been determined, even
more complex questions arise as to its justifiability. Millions of people world-
wide as well as untold numbers of animals and plants suffer from various
pollution-induced conditions. Many have argued that this suffering is jus-
tified by the jobs and products that polluting industries provide, no small
number of which ease human and sometimes nonhuman suffering. Standards
as to what constitute appropriate human behaviors toward the nonhuman
regularly ambiguate accusations of environmental degradation.

Physical Standards

Numerous creative works weighing the import of human damage to environ-

ments reveal the relationship of assessments to physical standards. They do
so in two particularly intriguing ways: by portraying landscapes as defying,
even directly contradicting expectations; and by describing nonhuman be-
ings that maintain their identities even after they have been radically trans-
formed. These texts probe how assessments of behaviors, and especially of
the impacts of behaviors, relying as they do on physical appearance, can vary
considerably according to the standards used in evaluating this appearance.
They also suggest the extent to which assessments of environmental degra-
dation, difficult enough to make because of the coexistence of thriving and
struggling nonhuman bodies, can be further complicated and compromised
by fluctuations in standards.
Narrators and characters often highlight those parts of landscapes that
diverge from expectations. Two revealing examples are the Japanese writer
Masuda Mizuko’s “Kemuri” (Smoke, 1995) and the Korean writer Yu
Hyŏnjong’s “Pimujang chidae” (Demilitarized Zone, 1964). At first sight the
two stories make an unlikely couple: the former speaks of changes to ecosys-
tems in Tokyo after the passage of new garbage-bag regulations, while the
latter addresses environmental changes in Korea’s DMZ after its transforma-
tion from a space of villages and farms into one of the most dangerous places
262  ecoambiguity

on earth. But “Smoke” and “Demilitarized Zone” demonstrate alternate

perspectives on diverging from expectations and downplaying conformity
to them. While the narrator of “Smoke” tries to minimize the ecological
benefits of using the new garbage bags by emphasizing the harm they cause,
the narrator of “Demilitarized Zone” attempts to downplay the dangers of
the demilitarized zone by emphasizing just how many species can thrive in an
area nearly bereft of people. In both stories, efforts to play down how spaces
conform to expectations reveal the relative arbitrariness of assessing injuries
to environments.
Among the most thought-provoking creative works about the ambiguities
of human changes to environments are those that expose people’s misguided
attempts to “green” their surroundings. Many of these literary texts negotiate
the very real trade-offs—between human and nonhuman health, or between
the health of individual nonhuman bodies or nonhuman species—inherent
in implementing environmental policies. Others, like Masuda’s short story
“Smoke,” stress not trade-offs but inefficacies: narrators demonstrate how
earlier behaviors are modified or counteracted, but with potentially negligi-
ble and even negative consequences to ecosystems.124 What makes “Smoke”
stand out is the narrator’s disproportionate emphasis on backpedaling by
Tokyo citizens when faced with policies intended to improve environmen-
tal health. Their evasiveness obviously mocks attempts to reduce the human
impact on ecosystems. But in the context of “Smoke” and similar creative
works it also shows up the potential bias of attempts to mock such efforts.
“Smoke” centers on Ginko, a young woman several years out of a brief
but troubled marriage who is fascinated with garbage bags. The text begins
with her buying a package of bags and wrapping herself in them after being
knocked down the stairs to her apartment by a man who then laughed at
her as she lay on the ground; “Smoke” concludes with the woman in her
bath, enveloped in water, but feeling as though she is inside a garbage bag.
Masuda’s story is not environmentally oriented per se, but it does interweave
important subplots related to human changes to ecosystems; “Smoke” is an
excellent example of a creative work that addresses significant environmental
concerns while containing very few if any references to the nonhuman. One
of the text’s important subplots ridicules Tokyo’s new garbage regulations;
another mocks a “recycling zealot” who benefits from the noncompliance of
residents with these regulations.
Early in “Smoke” the narrator notes that beginning in January 1994
Tokyo’s garbage collectors accepted only semitransparent calcium carbon-
ate bags. Officials claimed that calcium carbonate lessened the damage the
bags inflicted on the city’s incinerators and that semitransparent bags made
 Capitalizing on Contradiction  263

garbage safer. Since contents would be more visible, people were believed
to be more likely to sort their garbage according to city regulations, which
include separating out recyclables and nonburnables. Moreover, as Ginko
learns from a television program she watches shortly after extricating herself
from the garbage bags, these new containers make it more difficult to dispose
of criminal evidence. The newscaster explains that a suburban housewife
alerted authorities to a bag at her local collection site that was coated inside
with bloody streaks; upon investigating, the police discovered that the bag
and others in the neighborhood contained the remains of a human body.
On the other hand, when incinerated, these bags are said to increase ash
production, and they provoke an allergic skin reaction in some individuals,
including Ginko. Moreover, the narrator mentions that the city reassured res-
idents that if they wanted to dispose of items they did not wish others to see,
they should wrap them in cloth or paper. “Smoke” suggests that with some
advance planning people can discard almost exactly what they did before,
even the dismembered corpses of crime victims. In fact, meticulous criminals
can use these new bags to their advantage because semitransparency creates
the illusion of innocence.
Most strikingly, the new bags become near death traps for traumatized
and disturbed individuals. Walking around her apartment gathering trash
and frustrated that as a woman living alone she cannot possibly fill such
a large garbage bag in the brief time between trash collection days, Ginko
climbs into the bag herself. Its effects are mesmerizing: “Being wrapped in-
side was surprisingly nice. The lower half of her body grew warm, her ten-
sion released.”125 So she pulls another bag over her head and finds this even
more relaxing, but she soon is nearly smothered; it is the knowledge that
plastic suffocates, rather than any alarming physical symptoms, that eventu-
ally prompts her to free herself:

“What the hell am I doing?” Ginko muttered to herself. Her mind was
hazy, as though she’d been asleep. Still she made no move to extricate
herself from the bag. She felt strangely comfortable . . . Although her
breathing sounded rough, in fact there was no indication that it was
labored. Even so, whether the bag was calcium carbonate or ordinary
plastic didn’t matter, being covered in it for long would result in suf-
focation. . . . Ginko wished she could tie up the top of the bags with
string and sit still inside for hours on end.126

Masuda’s story gives an extreme example of how the materials designed to

regulate waste disposal and increase recycling are potentially quite harm-
264  ecoambiguity

ful to people. But this scenario works in concert with earlier references in
“Smoke” to increased skin irritation and even more significantly ash pollu-
tion to show the disparity between the positive motivations behind promot-
ing these containers and their actual negative effects on environments.
Yet in highlighting the ambiguous overall effect of the new garbage bags
on environments “Smoke” disproportionately emphasizes their dangers. The
bags are exposed not only as provoking allergic skin reactions and increasing
certain types of contamination, common criticisms of many new materials,
but also as harboring murdered bodies and as potential death traps for those
not familiar with their properties. The narrator does not balance exposés
of the extreme harm these bags can cause with discussion of how they can
reduce environmental problems. She simply cites the official claim that these
bags are easier on the city’s incinerators.
Equally significant are the references in Masuda’s story to a “recycling
zealot” (risaikuru katsudō ni nesshin na jūnin), a man in Ginko’s building
who forages in the trash for the newspapers and magazines that others are il-
legally attempting to throw away. The man piles these periodicals behind the
building’s staircase; his stacks are twice set on fire, but as the narrator wryly
notes, “For some reason no one complained when shortly over a year later
a mountain of old newspapers began piling up in the same place. Even now
bundles of comic books and old newspapers were lined up there.”127 The
behavior of the residents is consistent. The volume of the recycling zealot’s
accumulations reveals that the new trash bags have yet to change ingrained
habits: people continue to toss away recyclables. Moreover, the residents do
not seem to mind that the zealot does not actually recycle, even when his
packrat habit threatens the safety of their building. It is the “recycling zealot”
whose behavior is contradictory. On the one hand, he is determined that no
periodicals be incinerated with burnables. On the other hand, he does not
turn in these materials, which would allow them to be used to produce new
products. Instead, he has transformed the space behind the staircase into
his own trash disposal site, where recyclables are burned just as they would
have been in the city’s official incinerators. As in her discussion of the new
garbage bags, the narrator does not attempt to balance discourse on a single
misguided recycling aficionado, whose extreme behavior is abetted by neigh-
bors too preoccupied to sort their own trash, with discourse on the recycling
that takes place in other buildings. The narrator suggests that no one recycles
printed matter when in fact this is far from the case. References in “Smoke”
to the newly implemented waste disposal policies and residents’ reactions to
them reveal some of the contradictions that inhere in efforts to remediate en-
vironments, especially how rapidly these attempts can backfire, both in Japan
 Capitalizing on Contradiction  265

and in sites around the world. At the same time, the narrator’s eagerness to
minimize successful remediation reveals the biases prompted by her aversion
to sanctioned schemes.
Whereas “Smoke” downplays the benefit to ecosystems of using new gar-
bage bags, Yu Hyŏnjong’s story, written just a decade after the armistice
between North and South and the creation of the DMZ, goes to the opposite
extreme by downplaying some of the dangers of this space.128 “Demilitarized
Zone” narrates the tale of Han Pilgu, a North Korean boy whose father
defected to the south and whose mother, as the former wife of a deserter,
has been ordered to relocate to Ryanggang Province, a remote and impov-
erished region on the Chinese border. Rather than accompany his mother,
with whom he has a strained relationship, Pilgu runs away. He travels to the
DMZ, sneaks inside, and spends the night. The next day he is discovered by
South Korean soldiers who treat him kindly and promise they will help him
find his father; that night he falls asleep hoping his dreams will be realized.
He has a bad premonition the following morning when he discovers that his
kitten P’engŭmi has vanished. Desperate to find the animal that has accom-
panied him for much of his journey, he hurries back to the barbed-wire fence
that runs along the border of the demilitarized zone. Climbing over the fence,
he is killed by North Korean soldiers; alarmed by the sound of gunshots, the
South Korean troops who had taken care of him venture out only to discover
his lifeless body dangling on the barrier’s uppermost wire. Men from both
sides are crushed at his death, and the story concludes solemnly and straight-
forwardly, giving measurements in Korean and “Demilitarized Zone” in
misspelled English: “Width 4 km, Length 155 miles. D M Z (Demiliterized
Zone), an unmistakable new day had begun above this abandoned land of
exile where the funeral bell rang.”129 “Demilitarized Zone” dramatizes the
grim toll the Korean War has had on individuals, families, and on Korean
society as a whole. Interwoven with this discourse on trauma to people is that
on trauma to nonhuman bodies both large (the ecosystems of the DMZ) and
small (Pilgu’s captured kitten). The damage people inflict on one another is
far less ambiguous than what they do to the nonhuman.
Pilgu’s treatment of P’engŭmi is a microcosm of human treatment of the
DMZ: “Demilitarized Zone” leaves unclear whether this boy is ultimately
the animal’s liberator or kidnapper. The story describes Pilgu as walking
along a mountain road not long after embarking on his journey to the South.
He spots a kitten crouching between some rocks and wonders whether it
might be waiting for its mother. Not waiting to find out, he grabs the animal
after a brief game of hide-and-seek; the feline initially puts up a struggle but
soon settles down. Several pages later, the narrator shows Pilgu anthropo-
266  ecoambiguity

morphizing P’engŭmi, assuming the animal is as delighted to escape from

its mother as he is to escape from his own; when Pilgu tells P’engŭmi that
he presupposes that the cat does not want to see its mother and the cat only
meows in return, Pilgu imagines he knows exactly what it is thinking. Pilgu
transposes his own feelings and desires onto this helpless animal, never stop-
ping to consider that it has its own familial background, its own story, and
its own desires.
Despite the inauspicious beginning of their relationship and Pilgu’s keep-
ing the kitten on a short leash, the two bond quickly; the narrator includes
several touching scenes of their time together in the DMZ. But P’engŭmi,
seemingly tired of Pilgu, runs away after they reach the South. Discover-
ing that the cat has escaped, and determined to recapture it, Pilgu hurries
back to the border and rashly climbs the fence, where he is killed by North
Korean soldiers. It is unclear what happens to P’engŭmi, but the cat obvi-
ously wants something different from what Pilgu has in mind. Pilgu does not
appear to have hurt the animal, and if it so desires, P’engŭmi likely will be
able to return home without incident, assuming it does not trigger any mines
along the way. But it is also possible that P’engŭmi, having no wish either to
return home or to remain with Pilgu, instead had other hopes. This is not to
suggest that Pilgu should have been able to decipher the cat’s meows. Yet Yu
Hyŏnjong’s story highlights how readily people can presume they know what
is best not just for other people but also for animals, and even perceive them-
selves as rescuing them, when in fact they might be doing quite the opposite.
But the narrator does not comment on this puzzle and instead highlights the
close bond, at least from Pilgu’s point of view, between the boy and his cat
and the boy’s deep sadness at the cat’s departure. The reader must deduce
P’engŭmi’s suffering from its behaviors. The text’s convincing depictions of
Pilgu as victim first of historical circumstance and then of an uncooperative
feline threaten to overshadow the fact that Pilgu kidnapped the cat and en-
dangered its life to satisfy his own desire for companionship.
“Demilitarized Zone” similarly wavers between people as preservers and
destroyers of the ecosystems along the border of North and South Korea.
At the time of the story’s writing in 1964 the extent of the DMZ’s ecologi-
cal potential was not yet known, but it goes without saying that benefiting
endangered nonhuman species was not a consideration in establishing the
region. The narrator’s subtle downplaying of the harm Pilgu inflicts on his
kitten mirrors his attempts to minimize, however shrewdly, the harm Korean
armies have inflicted on the ecosystems of the DMZ. He by no means sugar-
coats either Pilgu’s relationship with his kitten or the human presence in the
DMZ, and in fact he paints a relatively ambiguous picture of both. But in em-
 Capitalizing on Contradiction  267

phasizing how P’engŭmi benefits from Pilgu’s care and how some flora and
fauna flourish in the DMZ, and by seldom commenting on how P’engŭmi
and other nonhuman beings must be suffering because of human actions, the
narrator mocks expectations.
The ambiguities in this story regarding how human behaviors change the
ecosystems of the DMZ somewhat resemble those in such texts as Rongzi’s
“Insect World,” examined in the previous chapter. Rongzi’s poem and Yu
Hyŏnjong’s story both bring out the difficulties inherent in assessing degrees
of human damage to ecosystems. But there is an important difference be-
tween the environmental ambiguity of the two. Rongzi’s poem declares that
two separate worlds exist—the polluted human world and the unpolluted
insect world—only to intimate that the latter has not been unaffected by
human behaviors; the principal ecoambiguity of “Insect World” lies in the
extent to which people have compromised the grasshopper’s supposedly
“green world” of plenty. Although highlighting the greater biodiversity of
the demilitarized zone compared with other spaces, Yu Hyŏnjong’s narrator
does not attempt to depict the DMZ as an ecological paradise. He speaks
explicitly both of the impressive range and health of nonhuman species in the
region and of this space’s degradation. The main environmental ambiguity in
this story is how to classify the overall military bootprint on the ecosystems
of the DMZ.
Yu Hyŏnjong’s story points out the damage people have done even to Ko-
rea’s mountains, the most majestic part of its landscape. Early in his journey,
Pilgu observes:

The screen-like mountains piled up one atop the other, layer upon
layer, like a folding screen. To his amazement, he saw that on the
barren summit of every mountain there were tunnels, around whose
cavernous holes sandbags had been piled like low earthen walls. Sol-
diers in golden yellow military uniforms were coming in and out. In
addition, he observed that traveling along the mountain roads were
several oxcarts loaded with something he couldn’t discern. Also on the
road heading both up and down were open trucks carrying soldiers.130

So while the mountains continue to pile up, one after the other, layer upon
layer, like a folding screen (pyŏngp’ung kat’ŭn sandŭl i ch’ŏpch’ŏbi kyŏpch’yŏ
issŏtta), their insides have been reshaped by tunnels and their outsides by
roads; this folding screen (pyŏngp’ung), like its smaller wood/cloth/paper
counterparts, has been decorated, and punctured, to accommodate human
demands.
268  ecoambiguity

The human presence is less immediately apparent in the demilitarized

zone itself, but it is no less significant. To be sure, the narrator initially gives
the impression that this is a wondrous nonhuman haven, free not only from
living people but also from human traces. Describing Pilgu at the border, he
comments: “Inside the barbed wire fence was a luxurious forest. The boy
nearly shouted for joy. This was because in the forest on the other side of the
barbed wire fence there was a deer that looked as though it had come out of
a fine mold, bathed in the glow of the sun. The deer was standing there ab-
sentmindedly, its beautiful smallish body tinged with reddish luster.”131 Pilgu
is so excited that he digs his way under the fence. Having crossed into the
DMZ he finds its ecosystems somewhat overwhelming: the weeds are so tall
they block his view, and the aroma of the grass irritates his nose.
“Demilitarized Zone” contrasts nonhuman resilience with the ephemer-
ality of human cultural products. The natural world appears to be thriving
and occasionally menacing. The paragraphs that follow Pilgu’s entrance into
the demilitarized zone underscore its wonders: there are rainbows during
the day, glorious sunsets in the evening, and stars at night; the sounds of
beautiful pheasants, whistling wild birds, and numerous species of chirping
insects create a seductive soundscape; thick weeds growing on former rice
fields make travel difficult, but they too indicate that the nonhuman is flour-
ishing. This sentiment is reinforced later in the story, when Pilgu falls asleep
surrounded by a grassy field of the greenest green, where a cuckoo cackles,
and a pair of deer nuzzle each another while dense forests stand peacefully
in the distance.
To be sure, after a night in the DMZ, Pilgu discovers that the elm under
which he slept in fact is not a thriving tree but is instead the skeleton of one
that was tarred and burned long ago. But nearby are acacias with leaves so
thick with sap they risk dyeing hands green; soft sunlight and exquisite bird-
songs envelop this tree; and milk-white mushrooms grow out of it, damaged
or destroyed nonhuman bodies providing homes for other species. In con-
trast, the piles of scrap iron thirty meters from the tree and the abandoned
village some thirty meters beyond are disintegrating, soon to be consumed by
tenacious vines. “Demilitarized Zone” draws attention not only to nature’s
resilience but also to its remarkable ability literally to cover up human tracks:
sap soaks not only leaves but also people’s hands, sunlight and song embrace
the devastated but still standing tree, and mushrooms and other plants en-
velop its frame, while vines wrap themselves tightly around piles of scrap.
Human changes to the DMZ itself are more ambiguous. Almost immedi-
ately after Pilgu enters this space the narrator comments that it is a region of
great human-induced danger, of which the boy is blithely unaware: “There
 Capitalizing on Contradiction  269

were land mines buried and concealed everywhere around the circumference
of the barbed wire, ready to snatch life away from anyone or anything that
stepped on them. But the boy didn’t know about this, didn’t know that he
was walking a tightrope.”132 The astonishment of the South Korean soldiers
on learning of Pilgu’s uneventful crossing builds on the fact that the mines
remain a threat not only on its borders but throughout the DMZ, both to
people and to animals large enough to trigger them.133 Yu Hyŏnjong’s story
contrasts the impressions of a young, somewhat naive boy with the realities
of this zone. On the other hand, not only does Pilgu successfully navigate the
tightrope, but there also is no sign that he discovered animals killed by land
mines. References to buried land mines, reminders of how rapidly lives can
be annihilated, are greatly outnumbered by passages on the biotic glories of
the DMZ.
Noise pollution also appears to be a menace, with loudspeakers from the
northern and southern borders of the DMZ battling for dominance through-
out the night. Yet the changes they inflict on the environment are not ad-
dressed explicitly. The narrator cites the announcements coming one after
another from loudspeakers along the DMZ, and he does not depict nonhu-
man sounds as interrupting or even accompanying those made by people.
Unlike the mountains described early in the story as piling up one atop an-
other only to be punctured by human activity, the announcements building
up from the DMZ’s loudspeakers are not interrupted by nonhuman activity.
It is noteworthy that although the pages of “Demilitarized Zone” preceding
the lengthy transcript of these announcements contain numerous references
to melodious animal songs, these quickly fade once the human-generated
sounds become audible. More significantly, nonhuman voices remain silent
even after the narrator’s attention turns to Pilgu and the announcements
fade from the forefront of the text. That night the voice of a turtledove is
heard, but this is the last nonhuman sound mentioned in Yu Hyŏnjong’s
story. When Pilgu awakens he imagines he hears the voice of his cat, while
“Demilitarized Zone” concludes with a reference to a recently rung funeral
bell. It is unlikely that the noise pollution from both sides of the DMZ has
permanently silenced the region’s fauna, but the story suggests that it will
continue to make a powerful mark. At the same time, just as he did not speak
about or even speculate as to the harm Pilgu likely was inflicting on his kit-
ten, the narrator does not balance his eloquent discussions of thriving foliage
with comments on silenced animals. The narrator reveals the existence of
nonhuman silence by describing only human-generated sounds, but he does
not refer explicitly to this stillness.
“Demilitarized Zone” depicts Pilgu as using P’engŭmi to help assuage his
270  ecoambiguity

personal conflicts (loneliness and isolation from his family) and as caring lit-
tle about the animal’s desires or about how his behavior affects its well-being.
The story similarly depicts Koreans as using the ecosystems of the demilita-
rized zone to help mediate interstate conflicts, regardless of what their behav-
iors do to these spaces. Yu Hyŏnjong’s narrator portrays Pilgu’s treatment of
the cat as merciful, suggesting that the animal was a stray that benefited from
the companionship. Human behaviors in and toward the bodyscapes of the
DMZ likewise are depicted as merciful; “Demilitarized Zone” asserts that
many parts of environments benefit greatly, even profit remarkably, from the
changed human presence. With home replaced by a stranger’s arms (for the
cat P’engŭmi), and villages, farms, and people supplanted by land mines and
the clamor of competing announcements (for the DMZ), the story implies
that human behaviors bring about far more nonhuman suffering than is ex-
plicitly addressed.
The narrator of Masuda’s “Smoke” mocks the reader’s expectations that
new garbage bags will help protect environments, yet she paradoxically pre­
sents a distorted picture of their actual advantages. Similarly, Yu Hyŏnjong’s
“Demilitarized Zone”—an early foreshadowing of the DMZ’s potential as
an ecological reserve—mocks the reader’s expectations that this heavily for-
tified space is bereft of thriving flora and fauna, yet it ironically presents a
shadowy picture of the suffering occurring there. Numerous differences sepa-
rate Masuda’s and Yu Hyŏnjong’s stories. But both texts suggest the extent
to which conditions that defy expectations can be overemphasized and those
that match expectations minimized. At times this downplaying highlights
and at other times it undervalues ecodegradation. Yet these stories remind us
just how readily assessments of human damage to environments rely on and
vary according to what is expected, more than actual physical conditions.
Exposing quite different ambiguities about evaluating human destruction
of the nonhuman are creative works such as Kim Kwanggyu’s “Sawŏl ŭi
karosu” (April’s Roadside Trees, 1991) and the Taiwanese writer Bai Qiu’s
“Shu” (Trees, 1971). The trees in these texts in some ways stand in for hu-
mans: both poems use battered trees as metaphors for abused yet resolute,
indomitable people. But “Trees” and “April’s Roadside Trees” also can and
should be read more literally as depictions of anthropogenic environmental
degradation. Neither gives any indication as to time (except, in Kim Kwang-
gyu’s poem, for the month of April) or place; these texts could be situated
wherever there are trees. As in Yu Hyŏnjong’s “Demilitarized Zone,” they
depict heavily damaged trees that nevertheless refuse simply to disappear.
But in so doing they reveal the uncertainties inherent in determining what
people do, not to the existence (shape) of these trees, and by extension other
 Capitalizing on Contradiction  271

nonhuman bodies, but instead to their essence (identity). These texts are re-
lated to those that negotiate ambiguities about the endurance of nonhuman
resilience, as examined in the previous chapter. But Kim Kwanggyu’s “April’s
Roadside Trees” and Bai Qiu’s “Trees” differ in their emphasis on the sur-
vival of nonhuman bodies after death. Understandings of what constitutes
a “tree” or for that matter any part of the nonhuman are challenged, with
varying ramifications.
“April’s Roadside Trees” describes trees that continue to stake their claim
as trees even as their bodies are gradually being dismembered. Speaking of
a stand of trees of indeterminate location and number, the text begins by
noting that years ago their crowns were removed to make room for power
lines. Next to fall were their limbs. The speaker does not explain why their
branches were cut, remarking only that “even when the spring wind blows,
they cannot move / only their torso-like trunks remain / and they have diffi-
culty breathing.”134 Come April, the shoots poking out from these trunks are
removed, rendering the trees “unable to grow even new leaves / impatiently
kicking and screaming / but unable to let forth even a cry.” Yet even so,
“April’s Roadside Trees” concludes, “leaves sprout from their trunks.”
This contradiction, an instance of informational ambiguity, also could
be a reversal; fighting to retain their identities, the trees despite everything
eventually were able to produce new leaves. After all, felled tree stumps often
sprout shoots and leaves even if they have been cut to grade level. It also is
possible that the trunks themselves are not sprouting new leaves but instead
are providing homes for other plants growing around them, or even within
them; the decapitated and dismembered trees now might be seen more as
bodies that nourish other bodies rather than as remaining verdant. The poem
leaves uncertain the precise condition of the trees but points to their tenacity
when decapitated.
More significant, and providing an intriguing spin on the Chinese “White
Horse” paradox (白馬非馬; baima fei ma, lit. white horse not horse) and
“White Horse Discourse” (白馬論 ; baima lun)—that complicates, among
other things, understandings of fei (非; which here can mean both “is not a
member of” and “is not identical to”)—are the questions “April’s Roadside
Trees” raises about what people do to the trees’ essence or identity and how
this essence/identity is understood. The trunks are still recognizable as trees
and are identified as such in the poem’s title. In the poem itself, these trunks
are referred to as “roadside weeping willows” that are explicitly described as
unable to weep: “the roadside weeping willows . . . / cannot utter so much as
a cry” (kilga ŭi suyangbŏdŭl / ulŭmchoch’a t’ŏttŭril su ŏpsŏ). Even reduced
to silent trunks—with heads, limbs, and branches removed—the trees retain
272  ecoambiguity

at least one of the characteristics associated with their species. Kim Kwang-
gyu’s poem thus questions what makes a tree a tree and when a tree becomes
something other than a tree (firewood, woodchips, sawdust, ashes). It also
makes the reader ponder the extent to which such names and identities mat-
ter, since in some cases they can distract from the damage species suffer. A
tree’s retaining its essence as a tree can draw attention away from its dis-
figuration, whether for power lines or lumber. Highlighting the resilience of
the species known as “tree,” Kim Kwanggyu’s poem also inspires important
questions concerning their fate.
The Taiwanese writer Bai Qiu’s “Trees” provides an important twist on
the dilemma of what happens when a trunk is reduced to a stump and even
transformed into ashes.135 This poem, by one of Taiwan’s early proponents
of experimental verse, features trees that appear to have been dismembered
(the trees compare themselves to stakes) claiming that there is nothing people
can do to weaken their tenacious hold on the land:

We’re standing, standing, standing [zhanzhe, zhanzhe, zhanzhe], like

stakes [zhuangding]
driven in the ground, stubborn and unwavering
Oh, heaven, this is our land, our burial vault
Even if you saw us, piece by piece
and order us about, without restraint
This is our land, our burial vault
Sentence us to become torches
burn to ashes every shouting pore,
we’ll still, with stubbornly resistant claws, grab firmly
this place where we’ve established ourselves.
This is our land, our burial vault136

A group of standing trees challenges people to do to them what they have

done to so many of their predecessors: cut them down, saw them apart, use
them as they please, even burn them to soot. The trees assert an intriguing
form of resilience. To begin with, they liken themselves to stakes that have
been driven into the ground (ru yizhi rutu de zhuangding), suggesting that
not only their shapes but even their existence in this space was determined
by people; rather than sprouting out of the soil, they might have been forced
into it. In other words, their resilience stems at least in part from how people
have planted them. Furthermore, they claim that no matter how much people
manipulate them, this land is still theirs, and they plan on forever grasping
hold of it. Their tops might be carted away, but sufficient traces of root ten-
 Capitalizing on Contradiction  273

drils remain for the land to serve as their “burial vault.” In the third, sixth,
and eleventh (and final) lines the trees repeat: “This is our land, our burial
vault” (zhei shi women de tudi, women de muxue). The trees might no longer
exist as standing trees, trunks, or even stumps, but the residue they leave is
enough for them to remain legitimate parts of the landscape. While alive, the
trees claim themselves “stubborn and unwavering” (guzhi er budongyao);
as ashes and roots, they believe their “stubbornly resistant claws [will still]
grasp [the land] firmly” (reng yi wankang de zhao, jinjin de juezhu). Their
shape might change dramatically, but their character will remain the same.
What makes the narrating trees so convinced this will be the case? They
appear only to have been dismembered, not yet to have been sawed apart,
much less burned; they claim they are standing like stakes, not that they
already have been reshaped into stakes. It is clear from their discourse that
they have witnessed or at least heard about the degradation they describe.
The poem does not specify how successful the disfigured and destroyed pre-
decessors of the narrating trees have been at accomplishing what the latter
claim they will do when confronted with human abuse. So in many ways
the trees’ assertions can be dismissed as nothing more than speculation, or
simple bluster.
But by blurring boundaries among damage, obliteration, and transforma-
tion, these declarations intensify the questions concerning human impacts
on trees asked in Kim Kwanggyu’s “April’s Roadside Trees.” Doubts are
raised as to whether trees ever really disappear. Even as the visible parts of
their physical bodies are yanked from the land, fragments are left behind,
some tangible, some not, including those of human and nonhuman memory.
Perhaps then people are incapable of destroying or even fundamentally trans-
forming these parts of the nonhuman. Like Kim Kwanggyu’s “April’s Road-
side Trees,” Bai Qiu’s “Trees” points to the fine line between celebrating the
resilience of nonhuman bodies and facilitating their destruction. Doing so to
an extreme are texts such as the Nigerian writer Owiti K’Akumu’s “A Green
Tree”:

I am a tree
A green tree
Of bloody petals
Roost for songbirds
Once struck by the evil thunderbolt
Crown half-covered with dry leaves
Cracking and crackling in the rifle
Of the cruel harmattan
274  ecoambiguity

I am a tree
A green tree
Cut from the land
Left hanging in the air
Blown away by wind
Withered by tropical sun.

I am a tree
A green tree
Tunis to Accra
Boughs extending to
Mogadishu Maputo
Libreville Luanda
On my trunk
Gargantuan!
Shaped by severance axe
Cape Town the tip.

I am a tree
Unlogged tree
Looking for its roots
Black roots

This green tree, this person, this (inverted) continent has been attacked from
all sides, has been uprooted, yet its branches still reach from Somalia and
Mozambique in the east to Gabon and Angola in the west and as far as Cape
Town in the south, as it continues to search for its roots in the north. “April’s
Roadside Trees,” “Trees,” and “A Green Tree” all portray nonhuman beings
that maintain their identities as trees even after undergoing radical physical
transformations. Although in many ways metaphors for human resilience,
they also powerfully reveal the extent to which physical standards, even
those imposed by the affected bodies, can complicate assessments of social
and environmental degradation.

Social and Temporal Standards

Even more complex are scenarios, such as the one addressed in the Korean
writer Ch’oe Sŭngho’s “Sŭlp’ŭn twaeji” (Sad Sow, 1993), where harming
the nonhuman appears justifiable, even desirable. Whereas Kim Kwanggyu’s
and Bai Qiu’s texts focus on trees suffering from blatant and indefensible hu-
 Capitalizing on Contradiction  275

man abuse (at least from the nonhuman perspective), Ch’oe Sŭngho’s prose
poem exposes the ambiguities of determining justifiability and the extent to
which these determinations depend on social standards. “Sad Sow” features
a farmer who purposely killed an animal on which he had been relying for
revenue. According to the narrator the slaying was “unnecessary” and “fool-
ish,” sentiments seemingly shared by the farmer. But narrating the story be-
hind the murder, “Sad Sow” indicates that the farmer killed an animal in
considerable pain; dispatching this animal might have spared it years of suf-
fering. “Sad Sow” is most obviously a fable designed to warn people of the
consequences of acting rashly and especially to refrain from biting the hand
that feeds. Yet this text also raises important questions about interpreting
human treatment of animals.
Ch’oe Sŭngho’s prose poem begins with the news that one day a sow,
feeding its eight newborn piglets, suddenly bit them to death, “as if it were
crazy” (mich’in tŭsi). At first distraught over this seemingly incomprehen-
sible event, the sow’s owner became angry when he thought of all the in-
come he could have earned selling the young pigs. So in a rage he cut their
mother’s throat. “Sad Sow” notes that although the owner’s emotions are
understandable, his actions resemble those of a madman; the text comments
that people should watch out for this type of insanity (kŭ kwanggi rŭl chosim
haeya handa). But the text then takes an interesting turn, revealing both the
reason behind the sow’s seemingly irrational murder of its own offspring and
sympathy for domestic animals: “It was later discovered that a large, thick
nail had become lodged in one of the sow’s molars. Because it was a beast
that couldn’t speak, its anguish and frustration would have been even more
extreme.”137 The prose poem empathizes with the sow, assuming that its
inability to translate its pain into words intensified its mental and physical
agony; the accuracy of this postulation is unclear, but its presence suggests
compassion for the pig. “Sad Sow” also notes that villagers have been put-
ting steel objects into the troughs where animals feed, a practice they vow to
abandon after learning the fate of their neighbor’s pig. Domestic animals are
revealed as victims both of their owners and of their own inability to voice
their pain. And people are shown to regret their treatment of these creatures;
“Sad Sow” concludes, “the farmer embraced the pitiful sow’s head and cried
sadly. And he cried over his own foolishness, which couldn’t be reversed even
were he to cut his own throat.”138
The narrator and the pig’s owner both seem to believe that killing the
animal was an irrational and unjustifiable act. And most readers likely would
concur, considering that the pig’s owner was not aware that the animal was
in pain and there was no sign that it posed a threat to other animals. Anger
276  ecoambiguity

at the sow for killing her shoats is understandable, but few would argue
that this rage justifies murder. “Sad Sow” would have been a far simpler
tale had it stopped with the murder of the sow and not disclosed its condi-
tion. Deeply complicating matters are the animal’s undeniable agony and the
uncertainty surrounding the treatability of its wound. Because the text does
not specify time or location, saying in the first line that the events narrated
happened “one day” (harunŭn), it is unclear whether the episode occurs in
a period or place where the wound could have been treated and the animal’s
pain managed. So in many ways the owner’s act, although questionable in
motivation, might have been one of mercy: it could be argued that under the
circumstances killing the animal was the kindest action to take. Alluding to
but not explicitly examining the multiple complexities of human relation-
ships with farm animals, “Sad Sow” asks what determines the morality of
human behavior vis-à-vis the nonhuman. It also queries the extent to which
motives, intent (what if the owner had meant only to punish rather than kill
the pig), and actual impact (both immediate and long-term) matter. Finally, it
asks who determines the answers to these questions and the extent to which
these questions can even be answered.
As science fiction by the Japanese writer Hoshi Shin’ichi suggests, in addi-
tion to questions of morality, motives, intent, and impact, the speed of both
damage and recovery plays an important role in determining the significance
of harm to environments.139 Hoshi’s short-short story “Genzai” (The Pres-
ent, 1973) speaks of damage that greatly harms generations of human and
nonhuman beings. For these particular entities, environmental degradation is
noteworthy and considerable. But “The Present,” written in the first heyday
of Japanese environmental science fiction, amid the first boom in environ-
mental protection laws, interrogates the significance of this degradation to
the landscape when viewed across time. It depicts the earth’s soil as cycling
from genesis to dumping ground to graveyard of human civilization across
several millennia, only to repeat the pattern as though there had been no
previous cycles. In so doing, “The Present” suggests that human transforma-
tions of environments might ultimately have an insignificant impact on the
planet. Covering several thousand years in two pages, during which people
move from toiling in the soil to managing their leisurely lives via computer,
Hoshi’s story clearly engages in generalities and extremes. Yet it encourages
the reader to reconsider the temporal perspectives from which judgments on
environmental as well as social degradation are made.
“The Present” begins with a conversation among unidentified individu-
als who decide to assemble a time capsule containing “materials revealing
the troubles of the present age” (genzai no nayami o shimesu shiryō). These
 Capitalizing on Contradiction  277

problems include wars, pollution (kōgai no mondai), discrimination, and the

“various kinds of deterioration of environments that accompany urbaniza-
tion” (toshika ni tomonau samazama na kankyō akka).140 Concerned that if
they bury the capsule in the ground it will be forgotten, or that the earth’s
shifting crust will render it irretrievable, they decide to launch it into space.
Not unlike buried Buddhist sutras, which are expected to bubble to the surface
when Maitreya (the successor of Śākyamuni Buddha, Buddhism’s founder)
comes to earth, these capsules have been programmed by the computer to
return to earth at a precise moment, several thousand years in the future
(sūsennen ato ni oite, futatabi, pitari to chikyū e modotte kimasu. Konpyūtā
ni yotte, kono keisan o kakunin shimashita).141 The narrator describes how
while the capsule wanders through space preserving “‘the present’. . . just as
it is” (“genzai” . . . o sono mama), conditions on earth are changing. Cour-
tesy of powerful computers, life is becoming implausibly comfortable, which
makes people indolent and leads eventually to the collapse of human societ-
ies the world over: “People died one after the other. Culture was destroyed;
cities lost their functions and were abandoned. Even well-built structures
weathered and returned to the soil [tsuchi ni kaette itta].” The few people
who survive start from the beginning, working this same earth (daichi) and
devoting all their energy simply to staying alive; in time their descendants are
able to engage in more intellectual pursuits. The narrator describes civiliza-
tion as slowly advancing, albeit with numerous false starts, and science even-
tually flourishes. Not long thereafter the capsule returns to earth. The story
concludes: “Filled with curiosity, interest, and expectation, people opened it
up and said, ‘This is strange. What’s going on? Isn’t this the present [genzai
sono mono de wa nai ka]?’” By giving the planet but not individual genera-
tions repeated chances, Hoshi’s story suggests fundamental incentives and
disincentives to safeguarding against environmental degradation.142
Imagining human history as an endlessly repeating cycle, Hoshi’s story
speaks explicitly of the extensive damage people inflict on one another. Lo-
cal wars are eventually superseded by global meltdown: “The world moved
toward collapse and cataclysm. Tranquility disappeared . . . Brute strength.
This was the only way to live.”143 Soil, the principal nonhuman body fea-
tured in “The Present,” is depicted as genesis and graveyard. In between, the
soil is the ground people damage with pollution and urbanization, not unlike
the waters featured in the Korean writer Ch’oe Sŭngho’s poem “Below the
Water” (1983), analyzed in the following chapter. The fact that the individu-
als who open the time capsule find that its contents reflect precisely their
current conditions (genzai sono mono) shows that ecosystems have come full
circle. Whatever damage they currently are experiencing comes from rela-
278  ecoambiguity

tively recent human behaviors; destruction of environments in the previous

round(s) of human history does not appear to have carried over into the pres-
ent. Hoshi’s story thus points out the arbitrariness of the time frames that can
be employed when assessing human changes to and particularly degradation
of the nonhuman. Considerable damage can be detected if one looks solely at
the differences between “the present” and a moment in the “past.” But once
the gaze begins to pan out across large spans of time, injury can become more
difficult to ascertain. If an ecosystem is damaged but then seemingly fully
repaired, the significance of its injuries varies depending on the time required
for remediation. Much more than an exposé and hypothesizing of the cycle(s)
of human civilization, Hoshi’s “The Present” also problematizes the criteria
used to evaluate human changes to bodies both human and nonhuman.

Contradictions are at the crux of a diverse array of environmental prob-

lems and their assessments. As the clamor for limited resources becomes ever
more insistent, the trade-offs that characterize many human interactions with
ecosystems, the ambiguities of human responsibility, and the variability of
assessing behaviors all are likely to become more pronounced. Analyzing
ambiguities like those in the creative works discussed above can provide us
with valuable insights into processes of preventing and remediating dam-
aged environments. Negotiating the intertwining conflicts between behaviors
and conditions, behaviors and attitudes, and conditions and attitudes, un-
derstood broadly, is another hallmark of intercultural conceptual networks
of ecological ambiguity. These various entanglements and the fascinating
interactions they spotlight are the focus of the second half of Ecoambiguity.
five / Acquiescing

The lights [on the river from nearby buildings] were only surface reflections
and had no connection with the river itself. Still, reflecting the lights, the river
was beautiful. Likewise, the lights reflected on the surface of the river were
beautiful. The filth at the bottom of the river was hidden from sight. Ichiko
believed all that mattered was that the river appeared beautiful.
光は水の表面に映っているだけで川そのものとは何の関係もない。それ
でも、光の映っている川は美しい。川に映っている光も美しい。川の底
に積もったきたないものは人の目には映らないのだ。見かけが美しけれ
1
ばいいではないかと衣千子は思う。
The narrator of the Japanese writer Masuda Mizuko’s short story “Ka-
gami” (Mirror, 1996) here depicts a young woman admiring a polluted river
that by day is repulsive but by night is glorious. Reflections of lights from
nearby buildings make it possible to dismiss the detritus below the water’s
surface. By stating explicitly that the lights from nearby buildings have “no
connection” with the soiled river (kawa . . . to wa nan no kankei mo nai),
yet depicting these lights as making the river appear beautiful, and in fact
repeating the word “beautiful” (美しい; utsukushii) three times in the five
sentences cited above, “Mirror” emphasizes the relative ease with which ap-
pearances can be distorted; mirrors, including the surface of the water, reveal
as much as they conceal. Ichiko also believes that if she were to commit sui-
cide by throwing herself into the river, “it wouldn’t matter how filthy the wa-
ter was” (水なんかいくらきたなくてもいい). The filthier the better, in fact,
since “there would be no worry of living people swimming in the river, and
she could have it all to herself” (この川で、生きている人間が水泳をする心
配はないから、のびのびできることはまちがいない). Interestingly, Ichiko
keeps away from this river when it is raining, because “raindrops churned
up the water and the river gave off a bad odor” (水が雨粒にかきまわされて
いやなにおいをたてる).2 The visual is more easily dismissed than the olfac-
tory, which is purposely avoided. Masuda’s text depicts ecological problems
as either overlooked or avoided, Ichiko exhibiting the myopic vision—both
literal (the inability or unwillingness to see beneath the surface of the water)

281
282  ecoambiguity

and figurative (the failure to think of anything beyond the well-being of the
vanishing self)—that often leads individuals to acquiesce to the realities of
ecological degradation.
Conflicts between people’s behaviors and actual environmental conditions
are widespread in literature that addresses human damage to ecosystems.
Most common are creative works such as “Mirror” that feature individuals
acquiescing to environmental distress. The reasons for this phenomenon are
varied: some people appear not to notice the injuries inflicted on environ-
ments, some are profoundly troubled by changes to ecosystems but think they
are powerless to challenge the status quo, and some believe their own safety
or financial gain justifies devastating ecosystems and condoning the resulting
human and nonhuman suffering. For those who stand to profit significantly
from injured environments, or for whom attempting to repair or prevent
damage to such ecosystems would prove life-threatening, reconciling oneself
to ecodegradation might not signify a disjuncture between conditions and
behaviors. But as the writings analyzed in this chapter suggest, acquiescence
is part of the problem. However undesirable, environmental degradation all
too frequently goes unchallenged; it is frequently accepted, both passively
and actively, as a price that must be paid for progress, security, and in many
cases human happiness. The creative works discussed below mediate five of-
ten deeply interconnected types of acquiescence to environmental damage:
being unaware or feigning ignorance of significant ecological transformation;
being aware of and even disturbed by environmental harm but resigning one-
self to it; recognizing and actively enhancing ecodegradation despite knowing
the likely consequences; being aware of environmental damage yet disavow-
ing its presence; and engaging in practices that do nothing to address the
imperiled nonhuman and in fact increase human suffering. Whereas chap-
ter 3 focused on the uncertainty of environmental conditions, this chapter
looks at creative texts where circumstances are relatively clear and where the
principal contradictions are between people’s behaviors and environmental
conditions. The analytical distinctions in acquiescence to ecodegradation ex-
amined here are finer than ecocritical scholarship generally posits. Together
the writings discussed in this chapter illustrate these distinctions by depicting
a broad spectrum of conflicts between behaviors and ecological realities in
literature that addresses how people harm the natural world.

Myopia and Myopic Hyperopia

Many creative texts highlight how readily humans unconsciously or delib-

erately ignore ecological degradation. They portray people as unconcerned
 Acquiescing  283

even with visible damage to environments; people simply look away and
pretend not to see threats to nonhuman and often human welfare, or they
become blasé about the changes in their landscapes. Desire for instant gratifi-
cation, hunger for immediate profit, and, as in Masuda’s “Mirror,” obsession
with surface appearances—in short, the limited perspectives characteristic of
myopia—often are shown to lie behind this indifference toward ecological
damage.
An important subset of texts concerned with the relationship between
myopia and environmental degradation reveals myopia as frequently accom-
panied by hyperopia, in the form of what I call myopic hyperopia. Unlike the
term myopia, which refers both to ocular nearsightedness and more generally
to a narrow perspective or lack of foresight and discernment, the term hyper-
opia conventionally refers to only ocular farsightedness. But hyperopia can
point also to a fixation on distant vistas, temporal or spatial, at the conscious
or unconscious expense of more immediate realities. These distant vistas are
not necessarily seen or understood clearly, as with ocular hyperopia, but
they are the center of attention. The modifier myopic underlines the frequent
short-sightedness of such a fixation.
The Japanese writer Tanikawa Shuntarō’s poem “The Day Small Birds
Disappeared from the Skies” (1977) focuses more insistently than Masuda’s
“Mirror” on the conflicts between conditions and behaviors that characterize
myopic hyperopic perspectives. Tanikawa is one of Japan’s most esteemed
and prolific postwar poets, and one of that nation’s most global; not only
has he participated in numerous international workshops and projects, his
oeuvre has been translated into Chinese, Korean, Mongolian, Nepalese, He-
brew, and most major Western languages. He writes in a variety of styles on a
panoply of topics, including environmental degradation.3 “Small Birds,” part
of Japan’s 1970s boom in conservation literature, has attracted considerable
attention worldwide.4
This poem provides an exceptionally strong parody of focusing on the fu-
ture at the expense of seeing clearly immediate conditions.5 It features people
so deeply engaged in increasing infrastructure (building for the future) that
they are undaunted by the radical transformations of their society and sur-
rounding ecosystems; they never pause to acknowledge the disappearance of
animals from the forests, fish from the oceans, birds from the skies, or even
children from the streets and selves (individuality) from human bodies. The
repetitive structure of “Small Birds”—the poem is divided into five four-line
stanzas, each of which has identical first and third lines and contrasting sec-
ond and fourth lines—highlights the tenacity and accentuates the absurdity
of obsessing about economic development, in other words, of focusing on
only one aspect of the future:
284  ecoambiguity

The day animals disappeared from the woods

woods secretly bated their breath
The day animals disappeared from the woods
people continued building roads

The day fish disappeared from the seas

seas vacantly swelled and moaned
The day fish disappeared from the seas
people continued building ports

The day children disappeared from the streets

streets were even livelier
The day children disappeared from the streets
people continued building parks

The day individuality disappeared from people

people resembled one other
The day individuality disappeared from people
people continued believing in the future

The day small birds disappeared from the skies

skies wept quietly
The day small birds disappeared from the skies
people, without knowing, continued singing6

“Small Birds” is silent on time and place, its environmental cosmopolitanism

providing a haunting vision of unacknowledged ecological degradation on
a potentially global scale. This poem surrounds its third and fourth stanzas,
which address direct losses to human society (children and selves), with three
stanzas on nonhuman losses (terrestrial animals, fish, and birds). The scope
and degree of these changes is unclear; the text does not identify the loca-
tion or extent of the devastation and does not specify how many people and
nonhuman beings have disappeared. For instance, referring to forests simply
as mori, the poem could be speaking of everything from a single grove to all
of the world’s forests; referring to fish as sakana and birds as tori, it could
be pointing to everything from the disappearance of a single fish and bird to
the extinction of both species. As in Gao Xingjian’s novel Soul Mountain,
discussed in the previous chapter, it is also unclear what the poem means
by “people” (hito)—all people, large numbers of people, small groups of
people, a single person? “People” is written in katakana (ヒト, vs. 人 or ひ
 Acquiescing  285

と) throughout “Small Birds,” a usage that among other things accentuates

the separation of human beings from their environments.
The repetitive structure of Tanikawa’s poem emphasizes the consistency
of myopic hyperopic outlooks. Each stanza concludes with the line, “people
continued doing X” (hito wa X tsuzuketa), where X is building infrastructure,
believing in the future, and singing. The verb “continue” (tsuzukeru) refers
explicitly to actions that persist regardless of empirical conditions; echoing as
it does throughout the poem, this verb also intensifies the perception of myo-
pia as a repeated phenomenon. Moreover, each stanza’s first and third lines
read, “The day Y disappeared from X” (X ni Y ga inakunatta hi), X moving
from forests to seas, streets, people, and skies, while Y moves from animals
to fish, children, individuality, and small birds. The disappearing entities
cover much of sentient life, and the locations from which they vanish include
most of the earth’s surface. Although translated here as “disappeared,” the
term inakunatta has a stronger connotation, meaning more literally “ceased
to be/exist.” This makes the contrast between the final words of half the
poem’s lines—“the day” and “disappeared” (inakunatta and hi; いなくなっ
た and日)—particularly stark. By confining the phenomena it exposes to a
single day “Small Birds” suggests that while myopic hyperopic outlooks are
consistent, and widespread, they need not be permanent. On the other hand,
by speaking of any number of species as “ceasing to exist,” “Small Birds”
implies that even if people no longer build roads, ports, and parks, even if
they stop believing and singing, the human and nonhuman losses might be
permanent. Interestingly, the things from which other things vanish appear
more frequently than the things that disappear. Although not duplicable in
the English translation, the first three lines of each stanza begin with the body
that remains: forests, seas, streets, people, skies (森に [lit. in the woods] . . .
/ 森は [lit. as for the woods] . . . / 森に [lit. in the woods] . . . // 海に. . . / 海
は . . . / 海に. . . // 街に . . . / 街は . . . / 街に . . . // ヒトに . . . /ヒトは . . .
/ヒトに . . . // 空に . . . / 空は . . . / 空に . . .).7 In contrast, the bodies that
disappear are mentioned only in the first and third lines of each stanza.
Tanikawa’s poem stresses the chasm separating apathetic and even cal-
lous human reactions to despoiled ecosystems from the emotive responses of
anthropomorphized nonhuman elements/phenomena. Whereas people con-
tinue to build roads and ports and keep singing as though there has been
no change in the welfare of other species, the forests, seas, and skies mourn
their losses by secretly holding their breath (hissori iki o korashita), vacantly
swelling and groaning (utsuro ni uneriumeita), and silently weeping (shi-
zuka ni namida nagashita), respectively. The silence of the natural world is
contrasted with the cacophony of the human world. Similarly, while some
286  ecoambiguity

nonhuman species grieve that other species have disappeared, people appear
delighted that children vanish and nonchalant about adults losing their indi-
viduality; the day children disappeared the streets became livelier (nao sara
nigiyakadatta) and people continued building parks, and the day people lost
their individuality they continued believing in the future.
Left unclear in “Small Birds” is the extent to which people are conscious
of the environmental transformations the text describes. The poem’s final
line—“people, without knowing, continued singing” (hito wa shirazu ni uta-
itsuzuketa)—can be read in several ways. It most likely indicates simply that
people do not realize that birds have disappeared from the skies. But this line
also could be pointing out that individuals are unaware that they are sing-
ing, that they are unaware of even their own behaviors. The preceding four
stanzas are silent on whether people know what has happened. They might
be fully cognizant but for various reasons willfully overlook disappearances,
or they could be completely ignorant. If the latter is the case, most disturbing
would be not people’s failure to react but instead their basic lack of aware-
ness of such extensive damage.
More likely than either total oblivion or full consciousness is limited
knowledge accompanied by indifference. If travelers confine themselves to
roads, they might not be aware that animals have disappeared from the sur-
rounding forests, at least not on the day of this disappearance, since the
forests would not yet have had time to alter their appearance. The forests
respond to the absence of animals by “quietly bating their breath,” so people
likely would pay these landscapes no heed, at least at first. Similarly, if when
people go to the ocean they limit themselves to ports, they might not notice
that fish have disappeared, at least not right away; the sea’s vacant swells and
moans might be evident from shore, but visitors would probably not realize
what is happening to animal life beneath the surface. Likewise, if people are
singing loudly enough, their voices will obscure those of animals, making the
absence of the latter difficult to discern.
Although many individuals might not detect these changes, it is doubtful
that everyone in society is unaware of them. Those who interact regularly
with nature—loggers, conservationists, hunters, birdwatchers—could not
help noticing. Ordinary people thus likely not only fail to observe environ-
mental damage but also fail to listen to the reports of specialists. Another
possibility is that experts who do know have not publicized their findings,
constrained by censorship or indolence. The vagueness of “Small Birds” even
concerning the numbers of people and animals, much less the geographic
area involved, allows this poem to subsume a variety of environmentally cos-
 Acquiescing  287

mopolitan scenarios. Some are more extreme than others, but all point to a
pattern of nonchalance vis-à-vis destruction of the nonhuman, one that Tani-
kawa’s poem suggests already is widespread and risks becoming endemic.
“Small Birds” emphasizes how people’s indifference to environmental change
allows them to pursue ever greater human comforts. Their myopic hypero-
pia shows in their commitment to a future with increased material infra-
structure and their refusal to consider what these projects have done to both
themselves and their increasingly disappearing offspring. To be sure, “Small
Birds” does not specify whether people consider changing what they are do-
ing but ultimately reject these thoughts and continue on as before, or whether
it never occurs to them to alter behaviors. But the poem suggests the latter.
A more specific instance of myopic hyperopia is the Korean writer Ch’oe
Sŭngho’s “Mul wi e mul arae” (Below the Water That’s above the Water,
1983). Whereas in Tanikawa’s verse people construct roads, ports, and
parks while singing and looking cheerfully to a joyous future, those in Ch’oe
Sŭngho’s poem, a group of tourists en route to a recreation park, are intoxi-
cated by the hotels and mountains that surround the heavily polluted lake
across which they are traveling. This poem describes ecological degradation
near at hand as being ignored, deliberately or unconsciously, in favor of
distant landscapes. Written in the early years of Korean environmentalism,
“Below the Water” adopts an ecologically cosmopolitan approach, featuring
a scenario that could occur anywhere there are lakes, mountains, and hotels.
The lake the poem describes could be a single lake or stand in for the earth’s
many bodies of water:

While the tourists are crossing the tranquil lake

divers descend to the bottom of the lake

to recover a corpse,
and at the bottom a colossal tomb of garbage
with a fat belly that’s growing silently, steadily, bigger,
inside the muddy water filled with silt
in which are kneaded discarded fetuses and larvae
and some cats and dogs,
the belly of the colossal tomb of garbage that’s getting fatter
because it ate a shoe, broken plastic containers, pieces of vinyl, etc.,
a tomb that with time swells to a corpse-like body,
they see, small, melancholy pond snails, their intestines rotting,
poisoned by poison in the wastewater,
288  ecoambiguity

evidence of civilizations born on the waterfront

festering together with all kinds of untreated excrement coming out
the rear hole.

While the tourists are crossing the tranquil lake

headed toward a recreation park
drunk on the view of the hotels and mountains surrounding the
lake.8

Mountains rising above the shores of the lake mesmerize, at least from afar,
while those growing below the water’s surface are ignored, except by the
divers.
“Below the Water” vividly exposes human abuse of environments: people
have transformed a lake into their dumpster, injecting it with solid and liq-
uid waste. Ch’oe Sŭngho’s poem draws attention to the increasing heft of
the rubbish mound, equating it first with a “colossal tomb” (ŏmch’ŏngnan
mudŏm) that has a “fat belly that’s growing silently, steadily, bigger” (sori
ŏpsi chŏmjŏm pulŏnanŭn / paettaegiga ttungttunghaejin ssŭregidŭl ŭi
ŏmch’ŏngnan mudŏm), then with a “colossal tomb” with a “belly . . . that’s
getting fatter” (paettaegiga / ttungttunghaejin ssŭregidŭl ŭi ŏmchŏngnan
mudŏm), and then with “a tomb that with time swells to a corpse-like body”
(kalsurok sich’e ch’ŏrŏm mŏmjip i pŭlŏnanŭn mudŏm). The pregnant burial
mound does not give birth, instead transforming itself into a corpse-like body
(sich’e ch’ŏrŏm mŭmjip); read metaphorically, these lines imply that “life”
dies before it has a chance to live. Significant as well is the absence of such
qualifiers as ch’ŏrŏm (like) before paettaegi (belly) and mudŏm (tomb); the
body of the tomb might be “like” a corpse, but the pile of garbage creates
both an (actual) abdomen and a tomb, redefining these objects.
Not surprisingly, this inflating tomb disrupts the lake’s ecosystems, and
nonhuman beings begin to disintegrate. While the tomb’s abdomen continues
to swell, the insides of marine animals decompose; the text speaks of “small,
melancholy pond snails, their intestines rotting, / poisoned by poison in the
wastewater.” These diminutive snails are utterly overwhelmed by the lake’s
contaminated waters. “Below the Water” refers as well to discarded cats
and dogs, indicating that human abuse of the nonhuman spreads beyond the
lake’s shores. Significant too is how Ch’oe Sŭngho’s text intertwines human
abuse of nature with people’s abuse of one another; “Below the Water” is
one of many texts addressing human-induced damage to environments that
feature people disappearing in polluted bodies of water.9 It is unclear how the
human body of the early lines of the poem became a corpse, much less one on
 Acquiescing  289

the bottom of a lake that divers have been sent to retrieve. While the burial
mound swells into a “corpse-like body,” the divers are searching for a hu-
man corpse. Is this a case of murder, or suicide? Is it the result of an accident?
After several weeks, most corpses float if not weighted, suggesting either foul
play or that the dead body has not been dead for long.
The reference near the end to festering civilizations is far less subtle: hu-
man cultures, like lakes, are rotting away because of people’s behaviors. Peo-
ple risk drowning themselves and their environments in human waste. Ch’oe
Sŭngho’s poem does not merely liken the ends of sewers to anuses; instead it
explicitly labels them as such, albeit with the euphemism twikkumŏng (lit.
rear hole); industrial waste is not said to resemble excrement, it is excrement
(paesŏlmul). These metaphors establish human bodies as at once polluter and
polluted. “Below the Water” depicts the risk of total submersion in actual
and metaphorical excrement as increasing rapidly: the burial mound is said
to swell from a growing belly into an expanding cadaver faster than a boat
can cross the lake. It appears to be only a matter of time before the top of the
mound breaches the surface and creates a mountain similar in shape but very
different in consistency from those surrounding this body of water.10
Contributing significantly to this risk is the disjuncture between condi-
tions (considerable ecodegradation) and behavior (failure to acknowledge
this degradation). Even more noteworthy than the poem’s descriptions of tan-
gible garbage is its exposé of myopic hyperopia. Although not reflected in the
English translation, the first and final lines of “Below the Water” are identi-
cal: “While the tourists are crossing the tranquil lake” (kwanggwanggaekdŭl
i chanchanhan hosu rŭl kŏnnŏgal ttae). The following lines (the second
stanza) depict a scene that is anything but peaceful; the adjective “tranquil”
(chanchan) describes solely the surface of the lake, if that. While tourists
cross this allegedly calm surface, divers go to the bottom of the lake to re-
cover a corpse, and there they find a literal tomb of garbage. The vast major-
ity of “Below the Water” describes the horrors seen by the divers. Before its
third and final stanza, Ch’oe Sŭngho’s poem seems primarily to expose the
hidden abuses of a body of water; the text suggests that despite the nearly
bursting garbage hills growing out of the lake’s bottom, the surface remains
for the most part unaffected.
This changes in the text’s concluding stanza. Here we learn what the tour-
ists observe and how they observe it; they are transfixed by the human con-
structions and nonhuman peaks that line the shores of the lake: “[The tourists
were] drunk on the view of the hotels and mountains surrounding the lake”
(hosu rŭl tullŏssan hot’el kwa sandŭl ŭi kyŏnggwan e / ch’wihamyŏnsŏ). And
we also are informed that they are headed to a recreation park (yuwŏnji).
290  ecoambiguity

They are so transfixed with faraway scenery and likely so preoccupied with
going in a particular (horizontal) direction— the poem stating that they are
“headed toward” (hyanghada, lit. facing), rather than “going to” a recre-
ation park—that they do not notice the (vertical) detritus overtaking the lake
much less recognize its menace to their own health, let alone to ecosystems
more generally.
“Below the Water” suggests that these and similar failures are intricately
connected with intensified degradation of environments. People are so preoc-
cupied with distant bodies, bodies whose degradation is not visible because
of their distance, that damage closer at hand goes unnoticed until a real cri-
sis erupts. Considering the extent to which the lake’s ecosystems have been
damaged, it is doubtful that the land on which the hotels are built has been
spared; garbage likely has washed up on the shores outside the hotels, but
too much space separates the boat and the hotels for it to be visible to the
tourists. And the hotels themselves, part of the “civilizations born on the
waterfront” (mulga e palsanghaettŏn munmyŏng) likely pollute the lake with
their own “untreated excrement.” This too would be difficult to detect, al-
though not necessarily infer, from the deck of a boat sailing in the middle of
the lake. One of the great ironies of Ch’oe Sŭngho’s poem is that the tourists
are preoccupied not simply with human constructions but also with geophys-
ical bodies. Unlike the divers who simply “see” (ponda) what lies beneath
the surface of the water, they are quite literally drunk on nature (ch’wihada).
“Below the Water” shows appreciating the nonhuman as having little to
do with protecting it; the text reveals how focus on far away spaces at the
expense of those nearby can even enable destruction of the natural world.
To be sure, the poem does not indicate whether the tourists are unaware of
how polluted the lake has become or whether they know about this damage
but have chosen to gaze at more distant landscapes. The tourists might be
so accustomed to pollution that they see nothing unusual here; particularly
if they are from the “civilizations born on [this or other] waterfront[s],” the
trip across the lake might be an opportunity to look at something other than
fouled aqua.11 Or the tourists might know very little about environmental
degradation and never suspect that great damage has been done to the lake
beneath their boat. The poem also does not clarify whether it would be pos-
sible to tell the lake’s condition from the boat deck or whether only divers
can see the mountains of waste piling up on the bottom of the lake. But these
ambiguities are precisely the point. For the tourists not to have heard or read
about the filth would be significant in itself. Such a scenario suggests that
those in the know covered up or at least failed to publicize their knowledge,
perhaps succumbing to political or corporate pressures or to simple lethargy.
 Acquiescing  291

If information on the damaged ecosystems was widely available, the tourists’

ignorance might indicate indifference to the landscapes they traverse. Tour-
ists can hardly be expected to research the ecology of every place they visit;
and mountain views are almost certain to capture attention. Yet the contrast,
the irony of “Below the Water” is so stinging—mounds of garbage bloat
like cadavers while people float nonchalantly overhead toward a recreation
park—as to compel greater ecological consciousness, or at the very least to
begin to stir individuals from their comfort zones.
Environmental discourse often assails myopia for its excessive concern
with the proximate, for its failure to consider long-term consequences of
choices. Myopic behavior drives much ecological degradation. Damage to
environments, especially their nonhuman components, is well nigh inevi-
table as long as concerns of the moment outweigh those of the future, as
long as demands of the self and immediate social group overshadow those
of others, and as long as regard for human welfare prevails over the health
of other species. But by portraying divers with myopic vision as seeing a
mountain of garbage and tourists with myopic hyperopic vision as drunk
on actual mountains, the poem surprisingly stresses the value of myopia, in
the sense of attention to conditions close at hand. Myopia is not depicted
as a panacea; the divers appear as blind to the landscapes surrounding the
lake as the tourists are to the ecosystems of the lake itself, even its surface.
Moreover, the divers are merely described as “seeing” the pile of garbage,
not as reacting to it in any way, except to recover a corpse. Yet in even the
most extreme environments, including spaces devastated by nuclear attacks,
(ocular) myopic perspectives can be just as valuable as their (ocular) hyper-
opic counterparts.12

Accepting Environmental Degradation

Although rarely welcome, environmental problems are often accepted.

Whereas Tanikawa Shuntarō’s “The Day Small Birds Disappeared from the
Skies” and Ch’oe Sŭngho’s “Below the Water That’s above the Water” fea-
ture individuals who are unaware of ecological transformations or at least
feign ignorance of them, other creative texts addressing how people dam-
age landscapes portray individuals who are conscious of, even disturbed by
environmental degradation but do not actively struggle against it. In some
cases the reasons for this discrepancy are unclear. But often the inconsis-
tencies between human behaviors and incontrovertible physical conditions
derive from emotions that paralyze the individual. This phenomenon is most
292  ecoambiguity

readily apparent in early twentieth-century American literature that features

protagonists—including Willa Cather’s Jim Burden (My Ántonia, 1918),
William Faulkner’s Isaac (Ike) McCaslin (Go Down, Moses, 1942), F. Scott
Fitzgerald’s Nick Carraway (The Great Gatsby, 1925), and Ernest Heming-
way’s Nick Adams (The Nick Adams Stories, 1972)—who grieve over the
destruction of the American wilderness but do not confront their own com-
plicity in this degradation.13 Instead, as Louise H. Westling notes, “they all
participate in a cultural habit of gendering the landscape as female and then
excusing their mistreatment of it by retreating into a nostalgia that erases
their real motives, displaces responsibility, and takes refuge in attitudes of
self-pitying adoration.”14 While these texts depict gendering environments
as allowing individuals to justify abuse, others, including twentieth-century
East Asian literatures, implicate a variety of additional factors. These include
sorrow over a personal loss that denies an individual broader perspectives; a
false sense of security, including the perception that physical distance from
polluted sites negates the need for vigilance; and most frequently a sense of
helplessness—the damage is too acute or too remote, and political and social
systems are too inflexible to allow for prevention and remediation.15
Literary works such as the Chinese writer Chen Jingrong’s “Dushi huang-
hun jijing” (City Scene at Dusk, 1946)—a powerful evocation of (post)semi-
colonial Shanghai’s treacherous soundscapes—suggest that even the most
obvious and harmful environmental disruption can be accepted or taken
for granted by those living within it. Similarly, this poem’s reliance on dis-
passionate albeit powerful description to expose damage suggests that the
poem’s speaker has become resigned to conditions, believing them impos-
sible to change. Chen Jingrong wrote poems on numerous topics, including
deteriorating human and nonhuman environments.16 “City Scene at Dusk”
is one of her early texts on noise pollution, a common theme in her 1980s
poetry; it also predates Chinese environmental literature by several decades:

The noises of the city have drowned dusk.

Like tides
The fire engine and the fire brigade
With their shrieking bronze bells
Passed in frenzied speed.
Then came the radio’s
Teasing girlish voice
Teasing and tearing the city’s nerves apart . . .
The high officials of the government, the compradors of foreign
firms,
 Acquiescing  293

And cars in a long row like a snake

Are eating up the heart of the metropolis . . .
The chime of the bell of the customs office by the river
Low and lonely
Lands like a tiny needle
On the tides of the city noises.17
—Shanghai, September 11, 1946

“City Scene at Dusk” is situated in semicolonial Shanghai, most likely early

in the Sino-Japanese War (1937–45).18 By 1930, the city had become the
world’s fifth largest and an international legend, the so-called “Paris of Asia,”
“Paris of the East,” and “New York of the East.”19 It was, in the words of
Leo Ou-fan Lee, “a cultural matrix of Chinese modernity . . . a world of
splendid modernity set apart from the still tradition-bound countryside that
was China.” As depicted in Mao Dun’s celebrated novel Ziye (Midnight,
1930) and other creative writing from this period, Shanghai was a world
of cars, radios, and electric lights, as well as publishing houses, hotels, de-
partment stores, coffeehouses, dancing, Turkish baths, and film stars.20 But
Western modernity had entered the city through its concessions, urban dis-
tricts reserved for foreigners by treaty. Chen Jingrong’s poem speaks of the
“customs office by the river,” likely the Customs House, located on the Bund.
One of the most pompous edifices in Shanghai, the Customs House since
its construction in 1927 was a bastion of British colonial power. Indeed, as
China’s treaty port par excellence, Shanghai was also a “constant reminder
of a history of national humiliation.” Shanghai’s star began to fall in the
early 1930s, accelerated by Japanese attacks on the city beginning in 1932,
followed by Japanese occupation during World War Two; by 1945 the city’s
urban glory had come to an end.21 To be sure, by 1943 the unequal treaties
with Western powers had for the most part been eradicated, but leftist writ-
ers perceived the city as “a bastion of evil, of wanton debauchery and ram-
pant imperialism marked by foreign extraterritoriality, and a city of shame
for all native patriots.”22
Shanghai in many ways was such a stronghold, but Chen Jingrong’s “City
Scene at Dusk” highlights another often overlooked downside of the city’s
modernity: severe noise pollution. The poem lyrically describes waves of ve-
hicular sounds and human voices, especially those that have been mechani-
cally and electronically augmented, as now comprising the city’s principal
tides, tides that are so deafening as to have “drowned dusk.” They have
overwhelmed not only other sounds, both human and nonhuman, but also
entire portions of the day, as well as geophysical phenomena (ocean/river
294  ecoambiguity

tides). These surging noises tease and tear the city’s nerves. At the same time,
people and their cultural products—high-ranking government officials, in-
termediaries of foreign firms, and cars lined up in long rows—devour the
heart of the metropolis. With heart and nerves compromised, the city risks
collapse, physically and psychologically.
Even so, there is no evident public outcry or even feeble protest against
current conditions, which instead seem to be accepted by the people of the
city. The only human voices are those of a girlish announcer on the radio
(a woman or emasculated man) urging people to buy the evening paper, a
young woman riding a jeep ridiculously declaring that the moon is larger
over China than over other countries, and unidentified voices advertising the
arrival of inexpensive American fashion. Frivolous discourse dominates this
compromised space, while dissenting voices are nowhere to be heard. Per-
haps the latter have been rendered inaudible, overwhelmed by the city’s other
sounds, but more likely these voices, if they ever existed, have disappeared.
“City Scene at Dusk” suggests that Shanghai is populated by individuals
who seldom think for themselves, the noise perhaps too overwhelming for
them to do otherwise. Apparently one of the few times the city’s residents
protest conditions is when they reject the fashionable “glass windows, glass
commodities” just arrived from the United States that are being advertised
at bargain rates. The poem criticizes these individuals—“What! You shake
your head at such offers? / You yokel!” Yet perhaps they are being eminently
practical: glass windows and other consumer goods, no matter how fashion-
able, will only shatter in such a soundscape.
But except for turning down glass objects, the people of Shanghai appear
to accept the status of their city, the changes brought about by Westerniza-
tion and war. Just as noteworthy is the poem’s own response to these cir-
cumstances. To be sure, its stark portrayals of this city submerged in clamor
can be read as an attempt to jolt people out of their passivity. Yet the text
does not actively deplore the transformations it describes, despite its open-
ness about pollution’s devastating effects on Shanghai, its residents, and the
nonhuman world.23 Also worth noting is the poem’s implicit environmental
cosmopolitanism, at least in retrospect. “City Scene at Dusk” is situated in
Shanghai, but the conditions described are not unlike those of most urban
spaces, at least those located near the water; the city is gradually becoming
engulfed by noise, and even threatens to become nothing but clamor: the
final stanza depicts distinct sounds such as the chime of the customs bell
themselves no more than tiny needles “on the tides of the city noises.” These
minute pricks can hardly penetrate the noises that engulf the city.
Written nearly two decades later, as Taiwan was industrializing rapidly
 Acquiescing  295

and thoroughly exploiting environments, the Taiwanese writer Rongzi’s

(Wang Rongzhi) “Women de cheng bu zai fei hua” (Flowers No Longer Flut-
ter in Our City, 1965) likewise depicts urban environmental degradation that
continues relatively unchallenged by the people living within it. Rather than
designating a specific site, the poem speaks only of “our city” (women de
cheng); this most likely is a city in Taiwan, but the poem could be located in
most any of the world’s urban centers. Featuring an individual who observes
from afar, “Flowers No Longer Flutter” exposes resignation to damaged en-
vironments more clearly than “City Scene at Dusk.” Ecological injury is criti-
cized yet not actively resisted by the first-person speaker:

Flowers no longer flutter in our city in March

Crouching everywhere, those colossal beasts of buildings – – –
Sphinxes in the desert spy on you with mocking eyes
And packs of urban tigers roar
From morning until dusk

From morning until dusk

Rain of soot thunder of urban noise
Discord among gears
Jostling among machines
Time broken into fragments life increasingly fades … …

Night falls, our city like a large poisonous spider

Spreads its flashing, rippling, seductive net [zhangkai ta shanyang de
youhuo de wangzi]
Trapping the steps of pedestrians
Trapping the loneliness of hearts
The void of the night

I often sit quietly on the dreamless night field

And watch the city at the bottom of the night like a gigantic
diamond brooch
Displayed in the glass showcase of the commission house
Waiting for a high price.24

“Flowers No Longer Flutter” draws a vivid portrait of an evening urban

landscape even more inhospitable than what Chen Jingrong depicts. People
not only are assaulted during the day by a deafening soundscape and filthy
deluge, by night they are trapped in a web of lights, the tides portrayed in
296  ecoambiguity

“City Scene at Dusk” having sprouted intertwining tentacles. People are like-
wise ensnared by the city’s buildings, which surround them wherever they go.
While the modern in Chen Jingrong’s poem tears apart the city’s nerves, here
the city is suffocated by its own modernity. Nature survives largely in meta-
phor and simile in this space where flowers no longer flutter: buildings have
taken the place of beasts and even images of beasts, vehicles have replaced
tigers, and spider webs have been swapped for undulating lights.25
More noteworthy even than the damage to this space is the reaction of
the poem’s speaker to it. Whereas in “City Scene at Dusk” the speaker does
not reveal her positionality, her counterpart in “Flowers No Longer Flutter”
describes herself as “often [sitting] quietly on the dreamless night field / And
[watching] the city at the bottom of the night.” Here she discloses not only
her distance from the metropolis but also how often she simply sits and looks
at it. Although fully conscious of the dangers of the city and the high price its
construction has exacted from people and the natural world, she does noth-
ing but watch and talk about the degradation of this urban space. Discussing
damage is not an insignificant act; discourse on damaged environments is
vital in increasing awareness of compromised spaces. Even so, the speaker
seems to acquiesce: as the city waits for a high bidder, she too simply waits,
perhaps for someone to appreciate her true value; the “loneliness of hearts”
(xin de jimo) that in the third stanza characterizes the lives of city people
could be something she also is experiencing.
Chen Jingrong’s “City Scene at Dusk” and Rongzi’s “Flowers No Longer
Flutter” depict individuals who are relatively passive vis-à-vis urban envi-
ronmental degradation. The Korean writer Ko Ŭn’s poem “Yŏngil man–1”
(Yŏngil Bay–1, 1991) portrays a similar reaction to the destruction of a body
of water, although here comfort is found in establishing common origins. The
poem’s speaker declares himself so despondent over the loss of his mother
(the bay of the poem’s title) to industrial pollution that he declares himself
bereft of dreams and any hope of averting apocalypse. In the poem’s first two
stanzas he indicates that some thirty years ago Yŏngil Bay—located north of
Ulsan/Onsan on Korea’s western coast and heavily polluted in the 1980s and
1990s—had been “like a mother to me” (na ŭi ŏmŏni kat’atta) or “like my
friend’s mother” (nae ch’ingu ŭi ŏmŏni kat’atta), and that twenty years ago
“it was my mother” (na ŭi ŏmŏni yŏtta), someone on whom he could call
when needed. These images of nature as mother, or at least comforter, echo
those in much classical East Asian literature. Circumstances change in the
third stanza, where the poem’s speaker reveals that factories have robbed him
of his mother (the bay) and that he suffers considerably as a result:
 Acquiescing  297

But now
factories have killed my mother
Here
sun and moon
there is no mother to welcome you
Because I have no mother
No matter how long I sleep, I have no dreams
For millennia now, sand
has been telling us about the end of the world
Who has understood?
Those grains of sand
were the mother of every person and beast.26

Ko Ŭn’s “Yŏng-il Bay” reconfigures the first line of Blake’s poem “Auguries
of Innocence”—“To see the world in a grain of sand”—to blur more com-
pletely traditional hierarchicalizing categories.27 In the Korean poem sand
(morae) is depicted not as containing entire worlds but instead as prophesy-
ing the world’s end (sesang ŭi kkŭt’ŭl allryŏ chuŏtta). But echoing Genesis
3:19—“from the ground you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you
will return”—the poem also depicts sand as participating in beginnings. De-
claring grains of sand (moraedŭl [plural]) “the mother [ŏmŏni (singular)] of
every person and beast” (kŭ moraedŭl i modŭn saram kwa chimsŭngdŭl ŭi
ŏmŏni yŏttŏn kŏsŭl), the poem stresses both the humbleness of human ori-
gins and the shared ancestry of people and animals, if not other nonhuman
beings. On the other hand, moving his own beginnings from the bay killed
by factories (kongjang ŭn ŏmŏni rŭl chukyŏ pŏryŏtta) to the tenacious sands,
the speaker diverts attention away from polluted spaces; by the end of the
poem these spaces not only have been replaced (as mother) but also appear
to have been forgotten.
Ko Ŭn’s “Yŏngil Bay” depicts an individual lamenting environmental
destruction yet like the speaker of Rongzi’s “Flowers No Longer Flutter”
finding solace in less compromised spaces. Other creative works feature ac-
quiescence to ecological degradation that takes the form of being aware of
and even decrying the destruction of distant sites but being blinded to the
threats to more immediate ecosystems. These texts feature individuals who,
lulled into a false sense of security, fail to seek remediation of existing dam-
age, whether sweeping yet distant or minor yet proximate. They also do not
call for safeguarding areas that to date have remained relatively unaffected.
An excellent example is the Chinese writer Han Shaogong’s “Nü nü nü”
298  ecoambiguity

(Woman, Woman, Woman, 1986), an important part of China’s 1980s envi-

ronmental fiction, which tells the story of Aunt Yao, a once vibrant woman
who has been physically and mentally incapacitated by a stroke. Most of
“Woman, Woman, Woman”—like much of Han Shaogong’s oeuvre—focuses
on relationships among people, particularly life in a mountain village and
the difficulties Aunt Yao and her family confront because of her illness.28 But
“Woman, Woman, Woman” also includes several illuminating passages on
human changes to the region and local responses to these changes. Through-
out, people acquiesce to and even participate in raiding timber from nearby
forests, as well as building roads and bridges across land and waterways that
once carried primarily animal traffic. Earlier changes appear to have had
minimal impact on ecosystems, at least when viewed across time:

An ancient, bluish-green river flowed through a slice of fertile moun-

tain land, ancient pebbles of every color in its bed. They say that in
earlier days the river was flanked by thick, dark forests . . . Later,
although no one knows when, local authorities sent people to chop
down trees along the river, and only then was there a cautious, eva-
sive, government-financed road [jinshen duoshan de guandao], and
only then were there cars and horses passing through. Later, and again
no one knows when, the local authorities sent people to build a glori-
ous border wall . . . By now, of course, this little great wall [xiaochan-
gcheng] had fallen apart, [its pieces barely visible].29

The thick forests that once graced riverbanks were compromised, but they
later recovered. Nor is there any indication that the road, intriguingly de-
scribed as “cautious, evasive, [and] government-financed” has noticeably dis-
turbed either people or animals. And the wall, like so many ruins described
in literature, is barely visible; its stones are enveloped in lichen and buried
from view by tall, thorny grass. The remains of this structure “crouch and
hide quietly, harboring ulterior motives,” but this is the extent of their effect
on the landscape. Likewise, the narrator associates the mounds of earth that
once supported bricks with toothless gums, asking, “What had they eaten to
make their teeth fall out?”30 The depressions bricks made in the ground have
yet to be filled, but this will doubtless occur eventually.
As time passes, however, the price of acquiescence rises. The following
passage, appearing midway through “Woman, Woman, Woman,” is em-
blematic of how many literatures express submission to anthropogenic harm
to ecosystems:
 Acquiescing  299

As one walked along what was left of the embankment, one could
hear the clang of stones being mined and a bridge being built. Before
long a brawny and tenacious highway probably would extend into
these mountains. One could hear the thuds of trees being felled and
bound. The mountain people were preparing to send golden cypress
and camphor out of the mountains as boards [to be sold downstream]
. . . Here, “city” is a vague and remote concept. Breathing the emerald
green air one wonders: Why do people want to leave the mountains
and rivers for cities, where they are crowded and jostled? Could the
city be nothing more than a pile of feces pooped from the sun’s golden,
shining anus, then roasted in the sun and becoming a hard shell—Is
that all it is?31

The environmental degradation of this site is impossible to miss: the sound-

scape is punctuated by the reverberations of stones being unearthed, bridges
being built, and trees crashing to the ground. It likewise is easy to find golden
cypress and camphor being prepared for downstream markets. The narrator
is horrified and disgusted by these behaviors, asking rhetorically whether the
city is anything more than a pile of feces excreted by the sun: 難道它不僅僅
只是太陽那金燦燦的肛門拉出的一堆糞便—還曬出了硬硬的殼兒—如此而
已嗎? But this metaphor, as shocking as it is, essentially frees people from
responsibility for creating, much less remediating toxic (built) environments.
Unlike Ch’oe Sŭngho’s poem “Below the Water,” which likens sewers to rec-
tums excreting human waste, here excrement simply falls from a distant star.
As the narrator remarks, in rural areas, the concept of “city” is fuzzy (mohu)
and remote (yaoyuan); there is little sense of immediacy, of the need to do
anything more than question why people would want to leave the country-
side.
Such colorful yet ultimately detached responses to past, present, and fu-
ture transformations of ecosystems can be attributed partly to desires for the
riches to be reaped from increased commerce and infrastructure. People also
can remain indifferent because ecosystems are able to withstand consider-
able damage before noticeably collapsing. The paragraphs after the narrator
refers to quarrying stone, building bridges, and felling trees offer a glori-
ous vista of a river winding its way through mountains, a panorama where
the only visible human presence is that of a boat on the water. Human and
nonhuman are in graceful harmony, the mountains like portals that open
and close as the river moves people along: “They call these the Mountain
Gates. When the boat arrived, the gates opened; when the boat left, the gates
300  ecoambiguity

closed.”32 The water is clear, so whatever pollution exists is still undetectable.

Even so, the narrator’s apathy about what might happen to these ecosys-
tems is noteworthy, since he indicates he knows what can become of even the
most pristine spaces when commandeered by infrastructure and large num-
bers of people. He does not seem to understand that as highways and bridges
link this mountainous area ever more closely with urban spaces, the local
economy will improve but the region also will likely begin mimicking cities in
undesired ways. In certain respects it already has: the narrator describes some
of the riverside rocks as “making people associate them with charcoal.” Then
he fancifully imagines a fire ignited by ancient gods that “had already burned
the peaks and smashed them to pieces, scorched them, transformed them into
the black lumps of charcoal piled up on the sands along the river.”33
Interesting here is the narrator’s move from describing the rocks as mak-
ing people think of charcoal to suggesting that they already have been trans-
formed into charcoal. The story indulges in informational ambiguity, blurring
lines between association and actuality. What the narrator sees is probably
not charcoal, but the story leaves unclear how much time remains before
conditions are reversed, before the rocks no longer remind people of char-
coal but the charcoal on the riverbank makes them think of rocks. Perhaps
this conversion will not happen for many years. But the narrator’s disregard
of ecological transformations bodes poorly for both human and nonhuman
health. Located far from the blighted city, he fails to appreciate just how rap-
idly the urban plight is likely to become his own. Han Shaogong’s “Woman,
Woman, Woman” critiques the blindness to their own probable fate of those
physically and psychologically separated from damaged environments.
Some texts—including the Korean writers Yi Hyŏnggi’s poem “Eksŭrei
sajin” (X-ray Picture, 1985), Chŏng Hyŏnjong’s poem “Munmyŏng ŭi sasin”
(Death God of Civilization, 1991), and especially Cho Sehŭi’s short story
“Kigye tosi” (City of Machines, 1977)—feature perceptions of powerlessness
and feelings of helplessness as also playing a large role in fostering resigna-
tion. Severity of decay is compounded by distance in “X-ray Picture,” which
describes an individual looking at an image of a nearly ruined landscape,
rather than at the landscape itself; he does not specify just how far he is from
this terrain physically and temporally and whether this distance is involun-
tary or self-imposed, but he suggests that in either case collapse is inevitable.
In “Death God of Civilization” helplessness vis-à-vis ecodegradation stems
from a conviction that people have lost their minds, while in “City of Ma-
chines” it derives from a belief that the oppressive social system responsible
for environmental harm is immutable. “X-ray Picture” and “Death God
 Acquiescing  301

of Civilization” are implicitly ecocosmopolitan: like Rongzi’s “Flowers No

Longer Flutter,” they focus on the degradation of a single, yet unidentified
city, while “City of Machines” is more rooted in the circumstances of a par-
ticular nation (Korea).
Yi Hyŏnggi’s “X-ray Picture” uses graphic imagery to highlight the dis-
integration of an unnamed city. This poem, by a writer known in part for
his bleak depictions of human and nonhuman life, is a classic expression of
simultaneous awareness and acceptance of ecological disaster:34

This picture of a ruined landscape

has a breathtaking angle.
Between the haggard ribs
of skeleton skyscrapers
it shows the city that, having died, has become a lead ingot.
That scenery
a flock of crows
gathered across the overcast sky
are gouging and eating something.
The human heart,
it’s a lie
that blood flowing in the heart is red.
Bursting black, inky water,
and the ruins are muddy.
Tomorrow they will collapse.
Once more, tomorrow, the ruins will become swamp.
The enigmatic beaming X-ray
in this way, it testifies only to the truth.35

“X-ray Picture” translates into words a picture that, however enigmatic (su-
sukkekki), “testifies only to the truth” (ojik sasilman ŭl chŭngmyŏnghanda).
This painful truth is that of a devastated city near total collapse. Skyscrap-
ers resemble skeletons, their ribs soaring high above the streets. It is unclear
whether these buildings were under construction when the city was reduced
to ruins, with meat being added to their bones, or whether they were already
completed structures that had their flesh stripped away as the city declined.
The poem suggests that people, gouged by crows, are also being reduced
to skeletons. Damage to the nonhuman is not engaged with as explicitly as
that to people, but it appears substantial. Crows seem to be thriving, yet
the claim that the city not only has died but also has turned into “lead in-
302  ecoambiguity

gots” (napttŏngi) points to significant environmental pollution. Moreover,

the “black, inky water” (kŏmŭn mŏngmul) of the thirteenth line likely is
not only the fluid that gushes from contaminated human hearts as they are
pecked by hungry birds but also the poisoned liquid that inundates and de-
stabilizes the ground on which the city is built. “X-ray Picture” declares that
tomorrow everything will disintegrate into swamp; those people and struc-
tures still standing will sink into the inky lead-studded waters, creating a
marshy environment with an ever larger human footprint.
The poem’s final line celebrates the X-ray’s uncompromising disclosure
of the “truth” (sasil): its detailed picture provides not only a privileged view
of a city but also foreknowledge of its final days. Although impressive, this
vision is of questionable value: in general, the more imminent an event, the
greater its inevitability. The picture suggests that nothing can be done to
forestall or prevent what is about to transpire. Moreover, the speaker’s tem-
poral and physical distance from the city in the photograph is unclear. He
could be looking at a picture of his own city or a picture of an unfamiliar
metropolis half a world away. The speaker asserts that the buildings in the
photograph will fall to pieces “tomorrow” (naeil) and that the day after to-
morrow (tasi naeil) all will become a swamp, but “tomorrow” on which
calendar? “Tomorrow” could be the day after he sees the picture, or the day
after the picture was taken, or some unspecified point in the future. Even
so, the speaker’s apparent acquiescence to the city’s ruin is noteworthy. He
simply describes what the X-ray reveals about this place. At no point does he
offer an opinion on what should have been done to prevent conditions from
deteriorating to such a degree, let alone what could be done to forestall their
recurrence elsewhere. Perhaps he believes that so doing would be pointless,
that the information has arrived too late and that nothing can be done in the
short time remaining. But the poem does not lament even this lack of op-
portunity. Similar to many creative works dealing with damaged ecosystems,
“X-ray Picture” paints a grim portrait of environments allowed to decline to
the point of no return. The poem suggests that this situation stems from their
being regarded not only with sorrow and frustration but also with compla-
cency. “Truths” of environments are known, and tolerated.
Written several years later, Chŏng Hyŏnjong’s poem “Death God of Civi-
lization” describes a deafening yet nearly lifeless unnamed city drowning not
in a swamp but in infrastructure; this is a city “blanketed in the black asphalt
/ of development headed toward death.”36 “Death God” also exhibits frus-
tration and despair with current conditions. By including several rhetorical
questions in the first part of the poem, it initially demands more of its read-
ers than does “X-ray Picture”; it attempts to engage readers more deeply,
 Acquiescing  303

to have them think more carefully about the implications of replacing soil,
water, and other “natural” substances with asphalt. Yet the poem stops here.
It describes and criticizes, but, with a nod to acquiescence, does not indicate
how or even whether conditions might be improved.
“Death God” begins with a chicken strolling on the asphalt that surrounds
an apartment complex. The poem first claims this sight “pitiful” (ch’amdam),
then asks, “A chicken / on / as, phalt— / isn’t something wrong?” (아스, 팔
트/ 위의/ 닭이여—/ 모든 게 어긋나 있잖어?). Not pausing long enough to
answer his question, leaping from a single chicken to life itself, the poem’s
speaker exclaims, “Life, / aha, / life / aha—isn’t it / entirely unpleasant? /
Epileptic vigor resolutely / passes by, the universe bubbles / then collapses.”
The speaker divulges the source of his cynicism and his basis for concluding
that all has disintegrated: except for one strolling chicken and flowers atop
graves, there are no plants or animals in this paved-over city. Nor is there
water or soil. Even human hearts and minds have disappeared. The chicken’s
only companions are cars, sulfur dioxide, and noise:

Alas! Where is the soil?

Where are the insects?
Where is the water?
Where are the other chickens?
Too joyful, asphalt
Ludi, atop, crous, being this way
chicken,
in this city blanketed
in the black asphalt
of development headed toward death . . .
What do you peck at?
Do you peck at a car?
Do you peck at sulfur dioxide?
Do you peck at noise?
We now have neither
human hearts nor wriggling life
to peck.
There are not
even minds like genuine blood
to be pecked with living blood scattered.

Baffled by the absence of soil, insects, water, and other chickens, and declar-
ing the asphalt “too joyful” (nŏmu pangapko, asŭp’alt’ŭ), the poem stumbles
304  ecoambiguity

over its words; it replaces “[chicken] atop asphalt / ludicrous” (asŭp’alt’ŭ

wiŭi / usŭkkwangsŭrŏpko) with “asphalt / ludi, atop, crous” (asŭp’alt’ŭ /
usŭkkwang, wiŭi, sŭrŏpko), breaking up the word “ludicrous” as it earlier
did “asphalt.” The speaker is mystified as to how the chicken has managed
to stay alive with so little to eat.
Questions about the location of soil, insects, water, and other chickens
are followed by those concerning the chicken’s diet, the speaker asking rhe-
torically whether the animal pecks at their replacements: cars, sulfur dioxide,
and noise. He then declares that neither human hearts nor “wriggling life”
(kkumt’ŭlkŏrinŭn saengmyŏng) remain, the blackened hearts of Yi Hyŏnggi’s
“X-ray Picture” having disappeared. Blood too has vanished, and with it
minds to peck for sustenance as well as solutions. The lost minds appear to
include the speaker’s own. Indeed, rather than indicate how the transformed
internal and external environments might be offset, the speaker instead sud-
denly turns on the chicken, making the animal his scapegoat. “Death God”
ends ironically, labeling this “flightless bird,” rather than those who paved
over landscapes and their machines, as the “bringer of ruin” and the true
“death god of civilization” (munmyŏng ŭi sasin). Questions for the chicken
have been replaced by declarations, making the speaker’s desolation appear
absolute. Writing about the conditions of this city smothered in pavement
has transformed his frustration into despair, allowing no room for question-
ing, much less remediation; the poem resigns itself to current conditions,
giving no solutions and in fact going so far as to suggest their impossibility.
Underscoring impossibility even more boldly is Cho Sehŭi’s “City of Ma-
chines.”37 This popular story, published in the final years of Park Chung
Hee’s oppressive regime and part of Cho Sehŭi’s legendary and well-traveled
linked-story novel Little Ball Launched by a Dwarf (1978), is a trenchant
exposé of the human-induced environmental demise of the imaginary Ko-
rean city of Ŭngang and the abuse of its residents, many of whom have little
choice but to work in the city’s toxic factories. Written in clear and simple
syntax, “City of Machines” also includes several tables providing statistics
on such things as motive for employment (ch’wiŏp tonggi) in the factories
and degree of job-related fatigue (chagŏp p’irodo).38 These numbers are ulti-
mately overpowered by narrative, “City of Machines” showing that statistics
communicate very little of the actual suffering to which people have been
subjected. Reflecting the human and environmental tragedies of Korea and
Koreans in the 1960s and 1970s, the narrative depicts most individuals as
trapped within unforgiving political and social systems that make altering the
status quo nearly impossible. To be sure, when asked, 41.3 percent of work-
ers claim that they believe that in Korea anyone who works diligently, con-
 Acquiescing  305

sumes frugally, and saves can live well (chal sal su itta); only 3.8 percent be-
lieve this “utterly impossible” (tojŏhi an doenda).39 But in truth, resignation
becomes almost a requirement of survival. “City of Machines” highlights the
near-universal axiom that people with the most incentive to enact change
have the least ability to do so and those with the greatest ability have the least
incentive. The story takes place in a single Korean city, but it is primarily a
narrative about Korea under Park Chung Hee. On the other hand, many of
the dynamics it describes have counterparts in other industrializing societies.
Conditions in Ŭngang severely compromise both human and nonhuman
lives: abuse of nature is deeply intertwined with harm to people. In an arche-
typal case of informational ambiguity, children learn about the city’s history
as an international trading port and subsequent development into a leading
industrial hub. They are told that “The Ŭngang Industrial Zone flourishes
with the metal, ceramic, chemical, oil and fat, shipbuilding, lumber, sheet
glass, textile, electronic, automobile, and steel industries. Particularly the
sheet glass industry, which is given in textbooks as Korea’s best.”40 This
impressive if tedious list of prosperous industries belies the tremendous price
they have exacted from both people and their nonhuman surroundings, a
cost children are not taught in school but one they know all too intimately
from their daily lives:

Jet black smoke ascends from countless soaring smokestacks, and ma-
chines whirl in factories. Workers labor in the factories. So too do
the children of the dead dwarf. Mixed into the air of these places are
noxious gases and smoke, as well as dust. All the factories spew out
a dark to yellowish-brown river of wastewater and waste oil, propor-
tionate to the volume of their production. Factory wastewater emitted
upstream is used by other factories. Spewed out again, it flows down-
stream until it enters the ocean. Ŭngang’s inner harbor has festered
into a rotten sea. Organisms that live around the factory are gradually
dying off.41

What the children also are not told in school but what their parents witness
regularly is that factory workers not only are made ill by toxic substances but
also are physically abused by their superiors.
Unlike the degradation described in Tanikawa’s “Small Birds” and Ch’oe
Sŭngho’s “Below the Water,” which is serious yet not life threatening so can
go unobserved, the cumulative damage to those who live and work in Ŭngang
cannot escape notice. Responses to pollution vary among the four key players
featured in “City of Machines”—the factory workers (most of whom live in
306  ecoambiguity

Ŭngang and its environs), residents of Ŭngang who do not work in the factories,
Yunho (a young man from a privileged background with considerable interest
in the workers’ welfare), and those in power (industry leaders). Significantly,
although motives differ, acquiescence and resignation dominate throughout.
Industry executives appear well aware of the damage their factories have
inflicted on their employees, on the other residents of Ŭngang, and on envi-
ronments.42 They are the one group that could effectively remediate and pre-
vent future destruction. But they instead actively thwart any such attempts.
Not only are these men concerned almost solely with financial gain, but also
they live and work from the safety of Seoul, unaffected by the pollution for
which they are responsible. Like other residents of Seoul who visit Ŭngang to
catch clams and crabs, species unavailable closer to home, they presumably
“try not to see the oil floating on the surface of the water.”43 In this they re-
semble the tourists depicted in Ch’oe Sŭngho’s poem “Below the Water” who
ignore the mound of garbage growing on the lakebed below. Chances are
that only after they or their families become ill from eating poisoned seafood
will they consider adopting business practices that protect environmental
health. As is true of many texts that address human damage to environments,
Cho Sehŭi’s story depicts those with the greatest discretion to enact change as
having the least inclination to upset the status quo.
Feelings of powerlessness prompt the other three (groups of) potential
activists in “City of Machines”—Yunho, factory laborers, and residents of
Ŭngang who do not work in the factories—to acquiesce, except for moments
of revolt or thoughts of revolt.44 These individuals believe the economic, so-
cial, and political systems behind environmental corruption impossible to
reform, and thus the corruption itself impossible to overcome. Variations of
the phrase “nothing can be done” (uriga hal su innŭn il ŭn ŏpsŏ), repeated
throughout the text by different characters, haunt this fatalistic narrative.
Early in “City of Machines” Yunho’s apathy toward poverty and pollu-
tion resembles that of the factory owners. The story opens with comments
on how removed he is from the harsh realities of the destitute underclass
that supplies labor for Ŭngang’s prestigious factories. Poverty, pollution, and
population are simply vocabulary words that he needs to know for his uni-
versity entrance examination but that he ironically appears to find somewhat
challenging to learn. As the nation suffers from drought and record heat,
Yunho sits in the comfort of his quiet, air-conditioned home, with “nothing
to worry about”:

The air conditioner his father had installed blew out cold air without
a sound. If one day he heard that the city looming largely in his mind
 Acquiescing  307

had suddenly ceased to exist, he would simply have studied for the
exam in his comfortable setting. The city of Ŭngang remained like a
dark picture in Yunho’s mind . . . This high school graduate preparing
to retake the entrance examinations hadn’t ever thought about injus-
tice. Even pingon [빈곤] he had understood only as the English word
poverty, included in Current English. Because poverty often came up
together with population and pollution, he had memorized them as
the 3P’s [3P빈곤] in the hopes of remembering them. In school, at
the cram school, or in study groups, these were the things that were
taught.45

In contrast, “City of Machines” concludes with Yunho “colliding against

some moral core” (ŏttŏn todŏkchŏgin haeksim kwa matpuditch’yŏtta). The
quiet of the opening pages has disappeared. Instead, surfacing in Yunho’s
mind is “the city of Ŭngang, stuffed with jet black machines.” Unlike before,
Yunho mutters to himself that “this [oppression] must end right now . . .
Let’s get organized.”46 As the curtain falls on the text, he leaves open the
door for active efforts to transform environments. The changes in Yunho
between the opening and closing of “City of Machines” are readily appar-
ent. Cho Sehŭi’s story begins and ends with the city of Ŭngang “surfacing in
Yunho’s mind” (mŏrissoge . . . Ŭngangsiga ttŏollatta).47 But while in the first
paragraph the narrator claims that if Ŭngang suddenly disappeared Yunho
would barely notice (something he shares with the people featured in Tani-
kawa’s “Small Birds”), in the final lines of “City of Machines” he commits
himself to assisting those who toil in the city’s factories.
Early in the story the narrator reveals that as a result of his interactions
with an impoverished dwarf and his family Yunho begins to think more about
the city and its people; the 3 P’s become more than words to him. Yunho is
so obsessed with the dwarf’s death, believing it marks the “end of an era,”
that he talks about it even while intimate with women.48 His girlfriends chas-
tise him for so doing, but he insists on respecting the humanity of those less
privileged. When one woman beseeches him to stop talking about the dwarf
because he sounds like an insect, Yunho counters that she should show the
dwarf more respect: the dwarf is a human being, he argues, and she is an in-
sect. Yunho likewise feels sympathy for the dwarf’s children, who are forced
to work in abominable circumstances. But he believes himself powerless to
help them. He speaks with the dwarf’s eldest son about conditions in the
factories and is surprised at what he hears. The narrator declares that Yunho
“knows what the dwarf’s eldest son wants [namely, a new labor union]” but
is convinced that “there wasn’t a single thing [he] could do for the dwarf’s
308  ecoambiguity

children.”49 This sentiment is repeated several pages later, when the dwarf’s
eldest son asks Yunho if he can use the latter’s home as a staging area for
an assassination; the dwarf’s son believes he must murder Yunho’s neighbor
because the latter is the director of the Ŭngang Group. Yunho refuses to
comply, and the narrator reiterates that “there is nothing he can do to help
the dwarf’s son.”50 What Yunho does not yet recognize is that helping this
young man, and by extension this young man’s neighbors, coworkers, and
even the natural world, does not necessarily mean submitting to demands for
violence or even for a new labor union.51 There might be “nothing” Yunho
can or wants to do to help this young man form a union, much less kill the
person largely responsible for his misery, but there likely are other possibili-
ties. Yunho recognizes this in the story’s final lines, when he declares that
conditions can no longer continue unchanged, that protestors must organize.
His belief that assisting others requires following their precise demands is
replaced with confidence in his own convictions. In addition to providing
him close physical access to the managers of Ŭngang’s industries, Yunho’s
privileged background affords him insights into their practices and personali-
ties that might be helpful in devising effective reform strategies. Even so, the
extent to which Yunho will be allowed to follow through is unclear. Consid-
ering the record of factory management, it is doubtful he will get far.
Even more defenseless than Yunho are the laborers and other residents
of Ŭngang. Signaling his desperation, the dwarf’s eldest son believes that his
only recourse is murdering the director of the Ŭngang Group; he judges his
dream of forming a new labor union unattainable and cannot conceive of any
other way to improve the lives of the workers. He laments to Yunho “There’s
nothing we can do” before revealing his assassination plans.52 The narrator
confirms that this is likely the case, noting that Yunho just has learned that
the factories in Ŭngang are managed by the same small group of people who
control the economic lives of all Koreans. Petitions, protests, and strikes, not
to mention the slaying of someone of national importance by a disgruntled
employee, would probably result in even harsher working conditions and
hardly curtail damage to ecosystems. The laborers do nothing because there
seems to be nothing they can do.
More complex is the situation of the people who live in Ŭngang but do
not work in the factories. The narrator initially comments on their procliv-
ity for the word “stifling” (kapkaphada), which accurately describes both
the physical position of their town (surrounded by ocean on three sides)
and their personalities (plagued by doubts). Living in a socially managed
society, these individuals are depicted as having resigned themselves to being
 Acquiescing  309

smothered by the natural world, by others, and by themselves. As the narra-

tor notes: “There is not a single person there who would voice displeasure at
restrictions on individual activity for the sake of maintaining order.”53
In many ways these people are as helpless as the laborers. Residents of
Ŭngang depend on the wind to drive out to sea the toxic gases and smoke that
hover above the industrial district. One night the wind unexpectedly changes
direction and smog settles over the residential district, inciting chaos. Nearly
suffocating inside their homes, people throng the streets, hoping for cleaner
air in other parts of town but finding little relief. Although long aware of the
factories as polluters, they at last realize that they are living amid “perilous
biological conditions, without precedent in Ŭngang’s history.”54 For the first
time they decide to do something to remedy their situation but not surpris-
ingly are quickly deterred: “[These people] thought that the following day
they would attempt to solve the problem. But they immediately crashed into
a large barrier and ended up retreating dejectedly. The leaders of Ŭngang
were in Seoul.”55 The residents of Ŭngang rally their strength, hoping to
convene a public meeting or put on a display of force, only to discover that
such acts are prohibited. Their response, the narrator indicates, is simply to
“open their mouths” (ibŭl pŏllyŏtta).56 This phrasing suggests that they have
not yet given up but do not know how to proceed; their mouths are open as
if to speak, but words have yet to be formed. On the other hand, the nar-
rator soon reveals that Ŭngang residents actually have been and likely will
continue doing no more than checking on the direction of the wind before
turning in for the night: “The people of Ŭngang stop here. They don’t think
about the workers of the industrial zone that daily spills more than a hundred
thousand tons of wastewater into the ocean. As long as the wind stays over
the industrial zone and does not again blow toward the residential district,
they will not be awakened from their deep sleep.”57 In other words, as long
as they think they personally are not affected by the poisonous gas and smoke
emanating from factories, the people of Ŭngang will do nothing to help the
workers, much less the natural world.
Acquiescence is easy to castigate, particularly when the welfare of so
many is at stake. Certainly it might be argued that the factory workers could
be more imaginative in combating abuse by their employers, that Ŭngang
residents could be more proactive in attempting to curb factory emissions,
and that Yunho could take better advantage of his family’s high standing
to improve conditions for both people and the environment. But “City of
Machines” suggests that even if workers were more imaginative, residents
more proactive, and Yunho a better schemer, the tyranny of those in power
310  ecoambiguity

is so great that it would be almost impossible to effect change. The fleeting

calls for action indicate a desire for reform, but the narrative suggests that it
cannot be actualized anytime soon.
Like many creative works concerned with environmental justice, “City
of Machines” depicts human suffering and nonhuman devastation as deeply
intertwined. Cho Sehŭi’s story most obviously critiques the many sacrifices
to human and nonhuman welfare that have been made in the name of rapid
industrialization. It also clearly censures a social system that prohibits cri-
tique of these sacrifices. But, just as important, it negotiates human responses
to human and nonhuman suffering and devastation in light of such prohibi-
tions. It depicts the powerlessness of people who have done very little to
repair environments both inside and outside the factories not because they
do not recognize the dangers of current conditions, not because they do not
want conditions to improve, but because there are virtually no opportunities
for them even to attempt to do so.

Necessity, Compulsion, and Actively

Damaging Environments

Writings such as “City of Machines” highlight ecological degradation that,

although disparaged, for various reasons goes almost unchallenged. Other
texts take this conundrum to a logical extreme: damage not only is accepted
unchallenged but also is accelerated, regardless of predictable and undesir-
able consequences. Powerfully depicting this phenomenon is the Chinese
writer Jiang Rong’s Wolf Totem (2004).58 Despite Jiang Rong’s refusal to
help market his novel, and despite harsh critiques of the novel’s aesthetics,
Wolf Totem was an overnight best-seller, received numerous literary awards,
was adapted into other media both in China and abroad, and was quickly
translated into nearly twenty languages, thereby enjoying a truly cosmopoli-
tan following.59 Not surprisingly, considering Jiang Rong’s long-standing
interest in literature, Wolf Totem draws on an array of Chinese and foreign
writings on wolves.60 It also is one of many Chinese creative texts—includ-
ing A Cheng’s King of Trees (chapter 2) and Gao Xingjian’s Soul Mountain
(chapter 4)—that expose both the human and the environmental abuses that
took place during China’s Cultural Revolution. The novel is based on Jiang
Rong’s experiences in Inner Mongolia between 1967 and 1978, the Cultural
Revolution and its immediate aftermath. Unlike many of the creative works
examined in this book, most of the social and environmental problems it
discusses are particular to China, especially Inner Mongolia. Without ques-
 Acquiescing  311

tion, Wolf Totem’s explicit condemnations of Chinese society, elaborated on

below, are part of what makes it a novel of great consequence. But as Jiang
Rong himself argues in the afterword of the Japanese translation of his novel,
the dynamics he describes have counterparts throughout the world; the trau-
mas portrayed are not unique to China: “The novel’s popularity wasn’t sur-
prising. The vitality of the world’s cities is withering, and life is becoming
increasingly hollow. Readers show strong interest in this work, filled as it is
with wild, primitive vitality. And themes such as the spirit of freedom and
independence, consciousness of environmental protection, the clash of civi-
lizations, and national characteristics are global hotspots [hottosupotto].”61
Wolf Totem is a work of world literature that attempts to encompass the
world.
The novel follows Chen Zhen, a young Beijing intellectual who during
the Cultural Revolution is sent to Inner Mongolia’s Olonbulag as part of a
production team and becomes enthralled with the region’s human and non-
human occupants.62 He witnesses an influx of Han Chinese (hanren, 漢人;
hanzu, 漢族; China’s most populous ethnic group) into the Inner Mongo-
lian grasslands, the resulting transformation of the landscape from a space
of nomadic herding to grain cropping, and the extermination of the area’s
wolves.63 Decades later, when Chen Zhen and his friend Yang Ke return to
Inner Mongolia, they discover that much of the grassland has become des-
ert. Particles from this arid region spread well beyond the Olonbulag; Wolf
Totem concludes in 2002 with Beijing shrouded in its sand. In the words of
the Chilean writer Luis Ramiro Sepúlveda, the settlers have “constructed the
masterpiece of the civilized man: the desert” (construyendo la obra maestro
del hombre civilizado: el desierto).64 Desertification counters sinicization:
just as the Han Chinese brought chaos to the people and landscapes of Inner
Mongolia, so too are sands from Inner Mongolia wreaking havoc on the Han
Chinese capital.65 Throughout Wolf Totem the narrator explicitly contrasts
the Mongols not with Chinese but with the Han people, or Han Chinese.
Moreover, although differences between Red Guards and the many Chinese
forced to relocate to the countryside were often substantial, Wolf Totem
minimizes these gaps to underline those between the Mongols and the Han.
The degradation of the Inner Mongolian grasslands evokes a variety of
ambiguities, those between attitudes and behaviors (e.g., loving nature to
death, discussed in chapter 7) and the focus of this chapter, those between
behaviors and physical conditions: Mongols knowingly allow and even par-
ticipate in the destruction of their own grasslands; Han Chinese destroy mul-
tiple ecosystems in Inner Mongolia despite the Mongols’ repeated warnings
that so doing is unnecessary and will have undesired, enduring consequences;
312  ecoambiguity

both in Inner Mongolia and China proper the Han Chinese continue to birth
more children than they can feed or ecosystems can sustain. All three envi-
ronmental ambiguities result from some degree of (perceived) necessity and
compulsion. The first stems primarily from (perceived) necessity; the Mon-
gols believe themselves out of options, that improving their standard of living
and providing a better future for their children depend on following Han
Chinese directives to reshape the grassland’s ecosystems. In contrast, the sec-
ond ambiguity arises partially from (perceived) need but largely from the
compulsion for self-aggrandizement. The Han Chinese think that radically
reshaping the grasslands will allow for the most efficient use of Inner Mon-
golian territory. On the other hand, their behaviors are depicted as regularly
and unnecessarily bordering on the extreme; rather than attempt to live in
harmony with the land, they are obsessed with completely overturning its ex-
isting social and biological environments. The third ambiguity derives mainly
from willful compulsion; the novel depicts Han Chinese as aware that over-
population is a significant problem, yet as excessively driven to procreate.
Throughout Wolf Totem the narrator and characters sharply contrast
Mongol and Han Chinese attitudes and behaviors toward environments. The
Mongols for centuries have respected the delicate ecological balance of the
grasslands and engaged in symbiotic relationships with animals and vegeta-
tion. In contrast, the Han Chinese do not appreciate the region’s ecosys-
tems and recklessly decimate them in their quest to transform the land from
a space of nomadism to one of agrarian settlements.66 Differences between
Mongol and Han Chinese attitudes toward and treatment of wolves are par-
ticularly striking. The narrator and characters of Wolf Totem repeatedly em-
phasize how the Mongols believe that the wolves are not only responsible for
centuries of Mongol glory, which paradoxically included killing more people
and taking over more territory than the Chinese, but are also indispensable
in maintaining the homeostasis of the grasslands.67 The Mongols do hunt
wolves; early winter, with its fresh snows that the animals have some dif-
ficulty navigating, is dubbed “funeral season for wolves” (xinxue chudong
shi lang de sangji).68 But the Mongols hunt judiciously and are careful to
safeguard wolf populations. Han Chinese, on the other hand, are depicted as
fearing and even despising wolves. These attitudes, stemming from baseless
yet allegedly inherent prejudices, play a large part in the Han Chinese resolve
to eradicate wolves from the Mongolian grasslands.
The relationship of the Mongols with nonhuman inhabitants changes
dramatically as the Han Chinese advance into Inner Mongolia. The Mongols
know all too well that exterminating wolves and converting the rangeland
into farms eventually will have devastating outcomes for both the human
 Acquiescing  313

and nonhuman residents of the region. Yet they believe themselves helpless
to stop or modify the Han Chinese agenda. Many in fact collaborate with the
Han Chinese, assenting to and even actively participating in transforming the
region. The most obvious example is Bao Shungui, “a Mongol who long ago
forgot about his Mongol forebears [and who] hates wolves even more than
the Han Chinese,” who now serves as a “military representative” for the Han
Chinese.69 Mongols also participate in the Inner Mongolian Production and
Construction Corps, organized by Han Chinese. The first group of cadres
from this corps sent into the field are “half Mongols, half Han Chinese”
(yiban mengzu yiban hanzu) and their first duty is exterminating wolves.70
The Mongols greatly revere wolves, recognizing the vital role they play in
maintaining the health of the region’s ecosystems. Yet Han Chinese rhetoric
against wolves is so persuasive that most Mongols do not actively protest
the extermination of these animals. The Han Chinese argue that removing
wolves from the grasslands is necessary if these spaces are to be reclaimed for
mechanized agriculture. Converting grazing land to farms, they assert, will
“eradicate damage caused by wolves, diseases, insects, and rats, and greatly
strengthen the ability of the grasslands to resist natural disasters such as bliz-
zards and shortfalls of snow [which dry out the land in winter], drought
[during other seasons], windstorms, conflagrations, and insect pestilence.”71
This in turn will make life easier for the Mongols. One of their top priorities,
the Han Chinese claim, is “allowing the herders, who for thousands of years
had lived under difficult conditions and had experienced much hardship
and suffering, gradually to settle down to lives of stability and happiness.”72
To sweeten the deal, the Han Chinese promise to build the Mongols brick
houses with tiled roofs, as well as “roads, schools, hospitals, post offices,
auditoriums, stores, movie theaters, etc.,” creating livable towns.73
Mesmerized by lists of disasters that will be averted and catalogs of build-
ings and infrastructure that will be constructed, all the Mongolian educated
youth and young herders, and the majority of the women and children, are
said to look forward to the arrival of the Han Chinese. In contrast, the major-
ity of middle-aged and elderly herders, described simply as “keeping silent”
(mo bu zuo sheng) appear to have resigned themselves to a future on Han
Chinese terms.74 The Mongol elder Bilige’s lament to Chen Zhen captures the
ambivalent attitudes of the older men:

We’ve long hoped for a school for our children and that our sick would
no longer have to be taken to the banner alliance hospital by oxcart
or horse-drawn wagon. We don’t have a hospital, so many have died
who shouldn’t have. But what’s to be done with the grassland? The
314  ecoambiguity

grassland is too flimsy. The volume of livestock being transported is

already too heavy. The grassland is a wooden-wheeled oxcart that
can carry only a certain number of people and animals. If more people
and machines are added, the cart will overturn. When the grassland is
overturned, you Han Chinese can return to your original homes. But
what are the herders to do?75

Bilige and other herders know that Han Chinese plans for the region are not
sustainable, that the stability and happiness they have been promised will be
fleeting. At the same time, they—unlike their counterparts in the American
writer Frank Waters’s People of the Valley (1941) and the Maori writer Pa-
tricia Grace’s novel Potiki—succumb to promises of a more comfortable life
for themselves and their families.76 So they not only do not resist the Han
Chinese incursion, they also join in transforming the region along Han Chi-
nese guidelines.
Wolf Totem depicts Han Chinese environmental ambiguity—destroying
multiple ecosystems in Inner Mongolia despite warnings from the Mongols
that so doing is unnecessary and will end badly—as stemming less from (per-
ceived) necessity than from self-aggrandizement and desire for profit. The
German writer Christa Wolf similarly questions this conundrum in Störfall:
Nachrichten eines Tages (Accident: A Day’s News, 1987), a novel that juxta-
poses description of the protagonist’s brother’s brain surgery with the news
of Chernobyl: “At which crossroads did evolution with us humans possibly
miscarry, that we have coupled satisfying desires with the urge to destroy”
(An welchem Kreuzweg ist womöglich die Evolution bei uns Menschen fehl-
gelaufen, daß wir Lustbefriedigung an Zerstörungsdrang gekoppelt haben).77
Han Chinese move into Inner Mongolia for many reasons, not the least of
which is their putative need for more land for their rapidly growing popula-
tion. They believe that it is in the Chinese national interest to populate the
Olonbulag and to use its rich soil for farmland. The Mongols warn them
that this will result only in disaster, that the land will not be able to support
such activities for more than a generation, but the Han Chinese pay no heed.
Significantly, Han Chinese are not simply searching for additional farm-
land. Wolf Totem depicts them as obsessed with overturning ecosystems,
even delighting in the mass slaughter of entire species, regardless of the con-
sequences. Han Chinese relationships with canines, and wolves in particular,
are revealed as particularly fraught. From the novel’s opening chapters the
narrator features Mongols emphasizing to the new arrivals that the grass-
lands depend entirely on wolves; without wolves, these landscapes will perish
within several years. The grasslands, the Mongols argue, have flourished for
 Acquiescing  315

thousands of years because wolves have controlled gazelle, squirrel, rabbit,

field mouse, and other animal populations; if wolves are wiped out and these
populations grow too large, they will soon destroy the grassland’s ecosys-
tems and transform the Olonbulag into a lifeless desert. The Mongols also
explain to the Han Chinese that were it not for wolves, both natural and
human-induced disasters would have exacted a far greater toll on people,
animals, and vegetation. For instance, a severe blizzard can claim large quan-
tities of livestock. When this happens, after the snow melts, carcasses of dead
animals litter the ground. Without wolves to consume the carcasses, their
stench quickly contaminates the air. Even worse, carcasses are prime breed-
ing grounds for epidemics such as the plague. Likewise, in past wars fought
on the Olonbulag wolves disposed of thousands of bodies, both human and
nonhuman; this too spared survivors from the plague. The Mongol view that
wolves strengthen the ability of grassland inhabitants to resist natural and
human-induced disasters ironically contradicts Han Chinese assertions that
slaughtering wolves and reclaiming grasslands for mechanized agriculture
will fortify the landscape against devastation.78
But Wolf Totem depicts hatred of wolves as having penetrated the Han
Chinese psyche so deeply that the Mongols cannot convince them that noth-
ing justifies the mass slaughter of these animals.79 The Han Chinese see
wolves as a destructive, evil force, one that must be exterminated as rapidly
as possible. Their misconceptions of these animals are profound, creating
beliefs that sharply contradict the evidence presented by the Mongols. The
narrator cites the example of a Red Guard leader who claims that wolves are
class enemies and as such must be destroyed: “Wolves truly are class enemies
[lang zhen shi jieji diren]. Reactionaries [fandongpai] in all parts of the world
are all wildly ambitious wolves. Wolves are too ruthless . . . We need to
organize the masses to hunt them down and apply the proletarian dictator-
ship [wuchan jieji zhuanzheng] against all wolves. We must resolutely and
thoroughly wipe wolves off the face of the earth.”80 The term “class enemy”
here refers primarily to so-called reactionary elements, particularly techno-
crats, within the Chinese Communist Party.81 When the Red Guard speaks
of “reactionaries,” he means those with elitist, antiegalitarian attitudes who
prioritize education and other bourgeois practices over reliance on the sheer
energy of the people, and by so doing increase the gap between rich and poor.
As the Red Guard’s comments suggest, these individuals (reactionaries, class
enemies) were heavily persecuted during the Cultural Revolution. Interesting
here is how the Red Guard mixes metaphors and species: just as “wolves” are
“class enemies,” so too are “reactionaries” wolves, and “wildly ambitious”
ones (yexinlang) at that. Conflating and attacking everything that stands in
316  ecoambiguity

their way, both human and nonhuman, the Red Guards ruthlessly eradicate
seemingly subversive elements. Not all Han Chinese in Inner Mongolia were
convinced that wolves were real enemies of the people; many of the individu-
als sent to rural China did not yield to the rhetoric of the Red Guards, but
most believed wolves needed to be destroyed.
More striking even than the disjuncture between attitudes and conditions
is a second ambiguity: the gap between behaviors and conditions. Despite the
Mongols’ many warnings, the Han Chinese, both Red Guards and students,
maniacally massacre the wolves of the Olonbulag. As Chen Zhen’s friend
Zhang Jiyuan angrily exclaims:

Everyone’s gone mad about skinning the wolves. Marksmen and

members of the people’s militia use trucks and cars because of all the
gasoline and ammunition they need. Even doctors are participating.
They inject into the bone marrow of dead sheep a powerful color-
less and odorless poison they’ve gotten from Beijing. Then they throw
the sheep back into the wild. I don’t know how many wolves they’ve
killed. Even more terrible are the road repair crews that accompany
the Han Chinese troops. They’re versatile with their weapons. They
even invented a way to blow up wolves: they insert the explosives
they use to destroy mountains and mine stone into sheep bones, cover
the bones with sheep fat, and leave them where groups of wolves ap-
pear. The wolves need bite only one of these bones for their heads
to fly off. The workers have put the sheep-bomb bones everywhere.
They’ve also blown up many of the dogs belonging to the herders. The
wolves of the grassland have landed themselves in the boundless open
sea of the people’s war [caoyuan lang xianru le renmin zhanzheng de
wangyang dahai]. Everywhere people are singing, “Generation after
generation, we won’t stop fighting until we’ve exterminated all the
chailang [cruel and evil people, lit. jackals and wolves].”82

Zhang Jiyuan not only outlines techniques Han Chinese use to slaughter
wolves, he also underlines the interconnectedness between abuse of people
and that of animals. Likened to counterrevolutionaries, wolves and other
canines are equally at the mercy of rabid revolutionaries.
Han Chinese behaviors correspond to their perceptions of wolves, grass-
lands, and national dynamics, indicating yawning disengagement from Mon-
gol realities. Initially, the land supports crop growth. This, together with the
increased infrastructure and machinery provided by the Chinese, temporarily
makes the Mongols’ lives more comfortable. But in the end, the concerns of
 Acquiescing  317

Bilige and other Mongols prove well founded. Parts of the grasslands soon
enough become barren. The narrator notes that by 1975, a mere six or seven
years after the great wolf extermination, farming had turned the once lush
Majuzi River area into desert. When several decades later Chen Zhen and
Yang Ke revisit Inner Mongolia, their worst fears are realized. And in the
spring of 2002 Chen Zhen learns that 80 percent of the Olonbulag pasture-
land has become desert. Refusing to listen to people most familiar with the
land, the Han Chinese severely damage the very territory to which they had
been seduced by the prospect of developing a flourishing, “modern” fron-
tier.83
The third ambiguity addressed in Wolf Totem concerns human popu-
lation. Late in the novel one of the Mongols urges his people to practice
birth control, arguing that the grasslands cannot sustain a further increase in
population. But most of the comments in Jiang Rong’s narrative concerning
population have to do with the excessive numbers of Han Chinese: Han Chi-
nese bear more children than they can feed or ecosystems can sustain. Having
exhausted resources in other parts of China, they believe Inner Mongolia a
last hope. As one of Chen Zhen’s friends laments, “Millions of peasants risk
their lives giving birth, and risk their lives opening up new land. Each year
the population of an entire province is born. Who can block that much excess
population from forcibly entering the grasslands?”84
The Mongols also criticize the Han Chinese for their large population,
one emphasizing to Chen Zhen:

Hinterland Chinese are having too many children. The entire nation
is short of meat and is short of fat. The entire nation depends on the
beef and lamb of Inner Mongolia . . . When you demand our meat,
what you in fact are demanding is our grass. If you continue demand-
ing it, the grasslands will be destroyed . . . Several banners [qi] in the
southeast quickly were overburdened and became desert.85

Mongols are very aware of how ecosystems function, and they are quick
to condemn what China’s fast-growing population has done to landscapes
in Inner Mongolia and elsewhere in China. The repeated references to Han
Chinese as producing more people than they can feed, then relieving popu-
lation pressures by damaging already fragile landscapes, invoke one of the
most fundamental environmental ambiguities: failing to restrain population
growth in even the most extreme conditions. Han Chinese criticize the Mon-
gols for their “primitive” methods and ways of thinking, stressing that China
and the world have entered the atomic age, an age in which satellites circle
318  ecoambiguity

the earth and animals such as wolves are no longer needed. But the novel
stresses that for all China’s scientific advances, problems as basic as how to
feed its burgeoning population are becoming more acute. The Han Chinese
are well aware of the environmental problems caused by their high birth-
rates, but for a multitude of reasons, some related to necessity but others to
desire, they do not attempt to moderate reproduction. In this and other ways
Wolf Totem highlights some of the many contradictions between behaviors
and ecological conditions that are implicated in the degradation of environ-
ments. Jiang Rong’s novel depicts people as readily dismissing information
on environmental degradation; it shows them disregarding incontrovertible
physical evidence of the ruinous results of harming ecosystems out of a desire
for increased power and profit, or simply more comfortable lives.

Denying Disavowals

Many literary works that address human-induced environmental disruption

portray disavowing this damage—acquiescing to it by denying responsibility
for ecodegradation and/or knowing about but dismissing (potential) ecodeg-
radation—as a common response to and facilitator of compromised ecosys-
tems. This disjuncture between behaviors and irrefutable physical conditions
is evident in Wolf Totem, where Han Chinese refuse to recognize that annihi-
lating the wolf population of Inner Mongolia and transforming its grasslands
into farms will destabilize ecosystems in the region as well as in other parts
of China. In some literary texts, disavowal plays an even more central role:
certain narratives accentuate the extent to which governments, corporations,
citizens’ groups, and individuals will go to refute that environmental degra-
dation exists or, when overwhelming evidence to the contrary makes such
denial impossible, to reject responsibility for it, minimize its seriousness, and
strive to expunge it from public consciousness. The Japanese writer Ishimure
Michiko’s Sea of Suffering highlights this process. In chapter 2, the discus-
sion of this novel focused on the contradictory attitudes toward the nonhu-
man exhibited by the narrator and many residents of Minamata.86 Here I am
concerned with how Ishimure’s novel shows disconnects between obvious
physical evidence (nonhuman spaces that are clearly polluted; people who
are unquestionably disfigured) and the behaviors (disavowals, including both
active denials and conscious indifference) of many in the Japanese govern-
ment, the Chisso Corporation, and residents of Minamata and surrounding
towns. More so than many creative texts on environmental degradation, Sea
of Suffering interweaves scientific, medical, and journalistic reports with sto-
 Acquiescing  319

ries, including deeply personal accounts, not only to underscore the interde-
pendence of these different narrative strategies but also to emphasize the need
to understand devastated environments from many perspectives.87 Often, the
relatively detached rhetoric of science, medicine, and journalism is exposed
as insufficient to capture the true tragedies of Minamata disease. But as the
following pages reveal, these more “objective” reports make the behaviors of
those in government and industry, as well as of local residents, appear even
more reprehensible.
Although most creative texts concerned with damage to environments
acknowledge indifference toward and denials of this damage, Sea of Suffering
is one of a subset that stresses the central role of these behaviors in causing
and facilitating environmental degradation. More so than many narratives,
it also specifies the reasons behind such disavowals, as well as their conse-
quences. The novel devotes significant attention to alternatives, contrasting
denials of Minamata disease with the great compassion for the afflicted dem-
onstrated not only by the families and close friends of Minamata patients
but also by the Japanese medical community and sometimes by members of
groups known primarily for their disavowals.88 Incorporating other instances
of industrial pollution both in Japan and abroad, Ishimure’s text eloquently
exposes denial of environmental degradation as a nearly global phenomenon,
one endemic in human societies. On the other hand, the disavowals do not go
unchallenged. Many individuals featured in Sea of Suffering, not to mention
the narrator and the novel itself, actively reject their validity.
Early in the novel the narrator cites Sensuke, an elderly man who suc-
cumbed to Minamata disease, as having declared his a “disgraceful, unsightly
illness” (水俣病のなんの、そげん見苦しか病気). The narrator claims that
these terms describe not only the disease but also those “who caused this inci-
dent, concealed it, disregarded it, and tried to make people forget about it.”89
Most reprehensible, according to the narrator, is the Chisso Corporation. In
1959 scientists prepared a report indicating that Chisso’s daily discharges of
toxic, mercury-laden wastewater into Minamata Bay were the likely cause
of Minamata disease.90 Yet rather than cooperate in subsequent investiga-
tions, for many years the corporation did everything it could to deny its
role in propagating this disease, including pumping wastewater under cover
of night and prohibiting scientists from taking samples from the bay. The
narrator describes some Chisso employees as sympathetic to the plight of
Minamata patients, even alerting residents of Minamata to Chisso’s plans
to divert their wastewater channel to another location; similarly, researchers
from the Chisso company hospital contribute to efforts to understand the
disease better. And at its August 1967 meeting the Chisso First Union issued
320  ecoambiguity

a declaration condemning its own failure to fight Minamata disease and af-
firming its commitment to do so in the future. But for the most part, Sea of
Suffering paints Chisso as an absolute villain, one that denies any connection
between factory wastewater and Minamata disease yet prohibits scientists
from studying the wastewater; one that does everything it can to avoid pay-
ing indemnities and instead continues to discharge poisonous effluent, thus
expanding the number of people who may demand compensation; and one
that delays dispatching employees to visit hospitalized Minamata patients
until 1965, more than a decade after the outbreak of the illness. The narra-
tor comments: “Looked at from today’s perspective, the noble and strong
personality and the superior investigative research of Dr. Hosokawa [one of
the premier researchers of Minamata disease] into the outbreak and spread
of Minamata disease provides a fantastic contrast with all the attitudes [and
behaviors] exhibited by the Chisso Corporation.”91
Acknowledging Minamata disease belatedly in 1968 and only with great
reluctance, the Japanese central government is described as largely respon-
sible for facilitating Chisso’s disavowals. This contrasts with local political
bodies, which although relatively ineffective, show considerable concern with
the spread of Minamata disease and establish various investigative groups.
Yet throughout Sea of Suffering the narrator highlights the tragedy of this
situation: the greater and more widespread the suffering of those affected
physically or economically (fishers with no market for their contaminated
catch, or even with nothing to catch), the greater and more persistent the
efforts of those not affected to disregard their suffering, both Chisso and by-
standers in the local population. Commenting on the presumably deliberate
misperceptions of the local Public Health Department concerning Minamata
disease, the narrator notes that “The strange illness continued to work its
way steadily along the coast of the Shiranui Sea, moving from one village to
another. The true nature of the strange illness was not officially declared, but
the incidents and their ramifications slowly continued to tear apart people’s
lives and hearts.”92
Sea of Suffering underscores how national politicians and other govern-
ment employees downplay if not disavow Minamata disease. To be sure, the
central government is depicted as initially being concerned about the illness.
The narrator notes that in 1957 the Ministry of Education established the
Minamata Disease Comprehensive Research Group, a unit composed pri-
marily not of Chisso officials but instead of presumably impartial doctors
from Kumamoto University Medical School. The group’s report identified or-
ganic mercury as the most likely cause of the disease and pointed to Chisso’s
practice of pouring untreated wastewater into Minamata Bay. Despite these
 Acquiescing  321

findings, the Japanese government for many years did not prohibit Chisso
from continuing to deposit outflow, nor did it enact measures to clean pol-
luted waters or to help those stricken with Minamata disease. These dis-
avowals of the significance of this illness marked the beginning of decades of
frustrating struggles by Minamata patients and their families, with both the
central government and Chisso.
Like Chisso officials, national politicians and bureaucrats are depicted as
disavowing Minamata disease for a variety of reasons: financial dependence
of the town, region, and nation on industries like Chisso; inability to appre-
ciate the suffering of Minamata disease patients and the significance of the
damage inflicted on local ecosystems; and simple heartlessness, including the
belief that because Minamata disease affected such a small, rural, and impov-
erished segment of the Japanese population it did not merit attention.93 This
is particularly true of Japan’s central government. In his report on the Mina-
mata Disease Policy Committee’s visit to Tokyo in 1957, City Assemblyper-
son Hirota Sunao recalls that officials in the Welfare Ministry not only had
never heard of Minamata but upon learning that the disease affected mostly
indigent fishers, claimed it too trivial a matter to pursue. Those who listened
to their petition did so only to be polite and were eager to see them depart.94
The meeting in Minamata between Diet representatives and the Municipal
Assembly two years later (November 2, 1959) is no more productive. The
narrator describes this encounter as resembling a “cross-examination.”95
Diet members take advantage of the recently elected mayor’s inexperience
with politics and his relative unfamiliarity with Minamata disease and its
effects on the town. The narrator laments: “Both the regional administration
and the Diet were supposed to be looking out for the people, but it was in-
evitable that the meeting between the two sets of officials, with their different
agendas, would become a confrontation between the authority of the Diet
and the powerless impoverished.”96
The narrator speaks on several occasions of the national government’s
long history of disavowing industrial pollution, of its failure to confront
much less prevent such occurrences. She reminds readers of the Ashio copper
mine incident (1880s) and how the rights of local farmers near Ashio have
yet to be recognized nearly a century later, indemnities have yet to be paid,
and a commission has yet to be established to study Japan’s first modern pol-
lution event.97 And she accuses the Japanese government more generally as
having “a policy of abandoning its people” (kono kuni no kimin seisaku).98
In 1968—fifteen years after the first instances of Minamata disease and four
years after the first cases of mercury poisoning in Niigata (Niigata Minamata
disease)—the Japanese government at last declares Chisso entirely respon-
322  ecoambiguity

sible for Minamata disease. But the narrator is quick to note that this admis-
sion by no means resolves the struggles of those afflicted with the disease.
The most troubling disavowals of Minamata disease come from residents
of the Minamata area who fear that acknowledging both the severity of wa-
ter pollution and Chisso’s culpability in instigating it will further destabilize
the region’s already precarious economy. Although a number of local govern-
ment bodies take the disease seriously, many individuals chastise Minamata
patients and other activists for threatening the welfare of their town. The
narrator includes an article from the October 19, 1968 Kumamoto edition
of the Mainichi shinbun (Mainichi Newspaper) describing the Development
of Minamata City Citizens’ Conference. The conference prospectus chastises
those residents who have been intent on having Chisso admit its wrongdoing
and modify its behavior; conference participants support those afflicted by
Minamata disease but insist on continued cooperation with Chisso.
Significantly, disavowals by Chisso, the central government, and resi-
dents of the Minamata area forestall not only the prevention of further out-
breaks of the disease, compensation to Minamata patients and their fami-
lies, and remediation of environments but also further protests by Minamata
activists. The narrator emphasizes what a difference it makes to be taken
seriously by the authorities, not only in the form of increased outside in-
tervention (more government regulation of and sanctions against polluters)
but also in empowering the afflicted. One sad example is a meeting with
Minamata fishers when Diet members visit the town (November 2, 1959).
The fishers are delighted at the opportunity to share their experiences with
the Japanese authorities, who treat them with respect and listen solemnly as
they detail the crises facing their community. They are so emboldened by the
compassion shown by Diet members that later that day several thousand of
them hold a protest rally at the Chisso factory; the rally quickly turns vio-
lent, injuring several factory workers and dozens of fishers and police. The
narrator declares it unlikely that the principal cause of these riots, as often
is argued, was the inability of union leaders to control their subordinates.
Instead, she claims that “The real essence of the problem lay elsewhere.
The situation probably resulted from the fact that measures to fight Mina-
mata disease have until today been almost entirely neglected . . . We can say
that responsibility for the inauspicious incidents of November 2 lies with
the lethargy of the authorities.”99 Had authorities at almost every level not
had a history of disavowing the seriousness of Minamata disease, the meet-
ing with Diet officials likely would not have made as deep an impression
on the fishers and would not have inspired a riot. Yet the question is not
whether the fishers storm the Chisso factory, but when. Had their problems
 Acquiescing  323

been taken seriously by the authorities from the outset, those physically and
economically affected by Minamata disease might, as the narrator suggests,
never have felt the need to resort to violence. But there is also a strong pos-
sibility that they might have marched on the factory sooner. Earlier activism
could have resulted in increased repression, as was the case in Cho Sehŭi’s
“City of Machines,” but it also might have motivated the authorities to re-
spond more quickly to the pollution of the waters around Minamata, saving
no small number of lives.
Sea of Suffering exposes not only the terrible suffering experienced by
those stricken with Minamata disease but also the many political, social,
and economic forces that, in denying this suffering, allow it to proliferate.
Ishimure’s novel trenchantly reveals that even the most obviously debilitat-
ing conditions—as photojournalism such as W. Eugene Smith and Aileen M.
Smith’s revealed, Minamata disease is anything but a silent killer—are re-
pudiated in the name of social stability and commercial profit. People are
depicted not only as doing nothing when faced with ecodegradation but also
as actively fighting against measures to remediate existing damage and pre-
vent future harm to environments. In discussing Sea of Suffering, chapter 2
noted the ecoambivalence of individuals who on the one hand idealize symbi-
otic, mutually beneficial contacts between people and their environments and
on the other hand are concerned about the health of nonhuman bodies pri-
marily because people depend on them.100 The present chapter’s analysis of
Ishimure’s novel reinforces the concept that if even those with the strongest
emotional bonds to the nonhuman are concerned with environmental health
almost entirely because of its connection with human well-being, those who
easily disregard human health are likely to show virtually no concern for the
welfare of the natural world. In her afterword, the narrator of Sea of Suffer-
ing declares hers a “fragment of a book.”101 The novel is hardly a fragment.
But one important question it raises yet leaves unanswered is whether, with
disparities between conditions and behaviors so extreme, with even the most
obviously debilitating and painful disease so readily disavowed, there is any
real hope of diminishing, much less preempting, environmental crises.

Arresting Behaviors

The Japanese actor and author Tsutsui Yasutaka’s “Tatazumu hito” (Stand-
ing Person, 1974), written not long after Sea of Suffering, humorously spins
the act of readily disavowing environmental problems by featuring a city that
“greens” its streets and parks not by planting actual vegetation but instead
324  ecoambiguity

by transforming into pillars and ultimately trees its cats, dogs, and people.102
The city vegetizes individuals who criticize the status quo; the more people
who complain about anything from living conditions to government policy,
the “greener” the city becomes; the city’s “greenness” paradoxically signals
not its environmental health, but instead the discontent of its residents and
the authoritarianism of its leaders. Tsutsui’s first-person narrator does not
specify why particular cats and dogs are transformed into trees, but he sug-
gests that vegetizing these creatures is the city’s way of controlling its animal
populations, both pets and strays. This short story most obviously parodies
Japan’s official ideal of shakai kanri (lit. [benign] social management), or
the bureaucratically managed society. Such a culture retains order not by
persecuting its people but instead by shaming them into conformity and in
extreme cases figuratively vegetizing them. But in featuring a society that tries
to establish ecological balance among people, animals, and plants through
forced metamorphosis, “Standing Person” also satirizes the frequent superfi-
ciality and potential lethality of attempts to “green” urban spaces where the
nonhuman population is for the most part confined to the animals people
nurture (pets) and those they abandon (strays).
Tsutsui’s short story features a city so crowded and so lacking in greenery
that people are excited to spend time in a small space among just a hand-
ful of trees. In the opening paragraph the narrator comments: “I turned my
feet toward the park. In the morning no children came to that small space
of fewer than 70 square meters in the middle of a cramped residential area.
It was quiet there, so I made it part of my morning walk. These days in the
small city even the limited green of the park’s ten or so trees is priceless.”103
These three sentences (in Japanese) draw attention to the city’s oppressing
confinement: the park is “small” (chiisai) at less than 70 square meters and
the residential area that houses it is “cramped” (sesekomashii). The number
of real trees is unclear; not all the park’s trees originated as trees, and the
vegetation in this space consists at least in part of former dogs. “Standing
Person” quickly reveals that this phenomenon is not confined to this particu-
lar site. The narrator speaks with an elderly gentleman who is feeding one of
the park’s dog-pillars (犬柱; inubashira) and learns that he does so because
it reminds him of his own pet, who at three years old was transformed into
one of these plants and now, set beside the coast road, has “completely veget-
ized” (完全に植物化; kanzen ni shokubutsuka).104 At age four the narrator’s
own dog was commandeered but was not fed properly, so died shortly after it
was planted. The city attempts to nourish animal-pillars with a fleet of liquid
fertilizer trucks but is not always successful.
 Acquiescing  325

Not understanding why the city is intent on turning its animals into
plants, the narrator offers several possibilities:

I went out onto the main thoroughfare, where there were too many
passing cars and few pedestrians. A cat-tree about 30–40 centimeters
high had been planted by the sidewalk. Sometimes I catch sight of a
cat-pillar [猫柱; nekobashira] that has just been planted and hasn’t
yet become a cat-tree . . . Perhaps, I thought, it’s better to turn dogs
into dog-pillars. Dogs become vicious and harm people when there’s
no food. But why did they have to turn cats into cat-pillars? Had the
number of strays grown too large? Were they trying to improve the
food situation just a bit? Or were they doing this to green the city
[toshi o ryokka; 都市を緑化]?105

The narrator does not condemn the city for vegetizing its cats and dogs and
even helps justify these actions: dogs become dangerous when hungry, so
turning them into plants makes the city not only safer but greener.
Motives for vegetizing humans are more explicit. Plants are easier to
control than people, so the city turns into plants individuals who challenge
authority. The narrator gives several examples: a postal worker whose boss
overheard him complaining about his salary; the narrator’s own wife, who
at a meeting of housewives complained that prices were too high, criticized
the government, and was subsequently informed on by another woman at-
tending the gathering; and, alluding to the protests that take place outside
the Diet building in Tokyo, both a progressive critic and the students who
protested his arrest and threatened violence at the Diet (kokkai e gebaruto
o kakeyō to shita).106 The postal worker has been planted near the hospital
between two “human trees” (nin no ki),107 the narrator’s wife beside a hard-
ware store, and the critic in the middle of the bustling Ginza, for the simple
reason that he likes the countryside, has always lived there, and thus will
have difficulty adjusting to the confinement of a metropolis. The narrator
overhears a report that students will “be planted like rows of trees on both
sides of Student Street, the street in front of their university.”108 “Standing
Person” suggests that with so many people sentenced to life as human trees
it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between trees that have
always been plants and those that began life as people.
Tsutsui’s short story most obviously exposes and critiques oppressive so-
cial systems, however seemingly benign, particularly the ease with which they
figuratively vegetize their populations and the frequent complaisance of their
326  ecoambiguity

residents. The postal worker reveals just how readily people succumb to their
new position:

“You don’t feel all that much,” he [said] with no expression on his
face. Everyone who becomes a human pillar becomes expressionless.
“Even I think I’ve become considerably plantlike [植物的; shokubu-
tsuteki] not only in how I feel but also in how I think. At first I was
angry, and sad, but now it doesn’t matter. I used to get really hungry,
but they say that vegetizing [植物化; shokubutsuka] goes faster if you
don’t eat.” He said this while staring at me with his lightless eyes. He
probably was hoping that he soon could become a human tree. “They
say that those guys who have radical ideas are given a lobotomy
before they are transformed into human pillars. [Even though that
wasn’t done to me,] about a month after being planted here not only
did I no longer get angry, I also became for the most part completely
indifferent to matters relating to human society. However one might
put it, I was just an onlooker [傍観者; bōkansha].”109

People might not actively desire to become vegetation, as they do in other

fiction—including the Korean writer Han Kang’s story “Nae yŏja ŭi yŏlmae”
(The Fruits of My Woman, 2000)—but they do not actively resist.110 Signifi-
cantly, most human pillars, uncomfortable with being only semiconscious,
long not to regain consciousness but instead to become human trees, to have
their hearts “completely sink into the quiet world of plants.”111 And watch-
ing this happen to others makes even those who are not officially targeted
believe themselves pillars, bled dry of feeling and passion and no longer ca-
pable of resisting injustice. The narrator concludes the story: “As I left the
coffee shop and headed home, I realized that I had the feeling that I already
had been made into a human pillar [人柱; hitobashira] . . . ‘I am the road’s
human pillar. You too are a human pillar. In any event, the two of us, in this
world.’”112
“Standing Person” describes an authoritarian leader’s dream: contrarian
voices silenced, emotions eradicated, nothing but indifference from once cen-
sorious individuals, even perhaps those who have not been literally veget-
ized. But Tsutsui’s story does more than parody Japan’s social management;
the transformation of people and animals into vegetation is not simply a
metaphor for society’s tapping into an inherent human desire for calm by
silencing individuals believed to represent threats to the status quo. Touching
on the absence of “natural” plant life in the city, on the great value placed
by its residents on even the smallest parks and clusters of trees, discourse
 Acquiescing  327

in “Standing Person” highlights human reconfiguration not simply of other

people but also of physical spaces and their nonhuman populations. This
dystopian narrative depicts a radical method of remediating decimated tree
populations—after all, had the city not wanted the inconvenience of planting
trees, officials could simply have imported synthetic greenery, as they are de-
picted doing in other creative work on damaged environments.113 Had they
done so, there would have been no need for fertilizer trucks, nor would there
be any risk of plants starving to death. In featuring such an extreme system,
one that greatly exaggerates circumstances in Japan, Tsutsui’s story points
to the irrationality with which societies often face potential, perceived, or
actual disruption, regardless of whether this disruption stems from a surplus
of people or a dearth of flora.

Much literature that addresses human damage of ecosystems portrays con-

flicts between people’s behaviors and environmental conditions. Most strik-
ing are creative works that depict human beings who accept and at times
encourage ecodegradation, even when it harms them and their loved ones.
Many of the texts discussed in this chapter parody how people behave when
confronted with damaged environments, particularly their tendency to pro-
crastinate, to grapple with problems only when they become too large to
ignore, to assume that the nonhuman exists for human benefit, and to ap-
prove remediation only if it does not in any way adversely affect human
lives. Literature points to the near inevitability of such reactions. This sober-
ing fiction and poetry invite us not only to ponder the complex motivations
behind such behaviors and their frequently ambiguous implications but also
to think more deeply about the long-term consequences of interacting with
environments in this way. While such creative texts highlight behaviors that
at best maintain the status quo and at worse destroy landscapes, the next
chapter discusses others that draw attention to our tendency to believe that
our interactions with environments are as they should be, despite consider-
able evidence to the contrary.
six  /  Illusions and Delusions

Some of literature’s most incisive commentaries on human abuse of the non-

human arise in texts that appear to have very little to do with ecodegradation.
Writings such as Bai Xianyong’s “Anlexiang de yi ri” (A Day in Pleasantville,
1964), for instance, would not seem to hold much of interest to the ecocritic.
This short story describes the oppressive uniformity of American suburbia
and the challenges faced by an immigrant Chinese housewife thrust into such
a milieu. But conformity, this story suggests, harms animals, plants, and the
abiotic nonhuman as much as it does people. Conformity also creates the
illusion of environmental well-being: people in Pleasantville, as elsewhere,
physically or discursively enhance the appearance of the natural world to
give the impression of environmental health and in so doing both damage
and mask damage to ecosystems. This chapter analyzes literary engagement
with these and other conflicts between perceptions/outward appearances and
actual environmental conditions, discussing creative texts where human per-
ceptions, the nonhuman, or both are manipulated to enable people to dis-
avow ecodegradation, especially its severity but at times its mere existence.
“A Day in Pleasantville” draws on Bai Xianyong’s own experiences as an
expatriate writer to address both the conceptual and the physical maneuvers
that can lead to delusions of human and nonhuman well-being.1 This story
takes place in the wealthy New York suburb of Pleasantville, a village in the
town of Mount Pleasant, New York and a place of hermetically sealed air-
conditioned houses not unlike the refrigerators of Ch’oe Sŭngho’s “In the
Refrigerated City,” discussed below.2 The narrative centers on Yiping, her
husband Weicheng, and their eight-year-old daughter Baoli, a young Chinese
immigrant family living on one of the town’s elegant culs-de-sac. Like many
of the suburb’s middle-aged men, Weicheng works in New York City, where
he is a successful stockbroker. In stark contrast with his wife, he has become
thoroughly Americanized (yiqie de xisu dou caiqu le meiguo fangshi) and
even speaks English with his daughter. Born and raised in the United States,
Baoli considers herself American, a belief that deeply upsets her mother. As
the only Chinese woman in an otherwise seemingly homogeneous town, Yi-

328
 Illusions and Delusions  329

ping insists that her daughter too is Chinese; the story concludes with a stri-
dent argument between mother and daughter and Weicheng chastising his
wife for demanding Baoli conform to her expectations:

“I want Baoli always to keep firmly in mind that she is Chinese.

Baoli, listen, say this with me: ‘I am Chinese.’”
“No! I am not Chinese!” Baoli’s feet were both kicking and her
distorted body was struggling desperately. Yiping’s face turned pale,
and with trembling voice she sternly shouted:
“You must say this with me: ‘I—am—a—Chin—ese’” [我— 是一
個— 中國—人].
“I am not Chinese! I am not Chinese!” Baoli’s screams grew stron-
ger. Yiping let go of one hand and fiercely slapped Baoli’s face . . .
[Weicheng said] “We have to educate our child, but not like this.
Baoli’s only eight. How can she understand the distinction between
Americans and Chinese? In school all her classmates are American.
So of course she thinks she’s also American. Rose [Yiping’s English
name], to tell the truth, Baoli was born in the United States. She is
being raised in the United States, and after she grows up all her habits
will be American. The more she can adapt to her environment [neng
shiying huanjing], the happier she’ll be. You’re afraid of her becom-
ing an American because you don’t want to become an American,
but this is your own anxiety. It’s not fair to transmit this to your
child. Certainly you want Baoli to grow up to be a person who is psy-
chologically sound, who can adapt to her environment [neng shiying
huanjing], right?!3

Weicheng equates being psychologically sound (xinli jianquan; lit. mentally

in perfect health) with the ability to adapt to one’s environment, a phrase
repeated twice in the passage cited above; most likely thinking of his own
situation, he believes that the more his daughter can adapt to her seemingly
homogenous environment, the happier she will be (ta yu neng shiying huan-
jing, ta jiu yu kuaile). Highlighting both the prevalence and the importance of
conformity/uniformity, “A Day in Pleasantville” wraps up several lines later
with Yiping swallowing a tranquilizer and drifting off to sleep to the sounds
of the television: “Sounds began to come out of the television—what began
was once again that Winston cigarette commercial that every day sang with-
out ceasing: ‘Winston tastes good, / Like a cigarette should!’”4 With these
sounds another day in Pleasantville comes to an end, a day like any other.
The narrator’s language emphasizes the commercial’s repetition and consis-
330  ecoambiguity

tency—開頭又是那天天日日都在唱個不休的Winston香煙廣告 (lit. what be-

gan was again the Winston cigarette commercial that every day every day all
sang without stopping). For its part, the famous albeit ungrammatical and
controversial slogan “Winston tastes good, / Like a cigarette should!”—tran-
scribed in English in Bai Xianyong’s Chinese-language story—points to the
importance of reliability; even cigarettes conform to expectations.
To be sure, “A Day in Pleasantville” suggests that there is much Yiping
could do to adapt actively to life in the suburbs and attempt to make it more
bearable: learning how to drive would give her greater freedom, spending
time in New York would allow her to reconnect with the friends she left
behind when the family moved to Pleasantville, taking English lessons would
enable her to communicate more easily with her neighbors and participate
in more of their pastimes, and acquiring new skills would help her find a job
that might link her with people who have similar interests. But Bai Xian-
yong’s narrative also points to the real pressures placed on immigrants to
the United States, particularly women, to conform to American expectations
both by “Americanizing” (i.e., engaging in activities such as bridge and Sun-
day church services that are of little interest to them but often are de rigueur
for their neighbors) and by confirming every stereotype Americans have of
their homelands, in this case China. The narrator describes housewives in
Pleasantville as welcoming Yiping not as one of them but instead as a curi-
osity, an individual whom they treat as a “rare visitor” (xike) even though
she is a resident of the town and her daughter attends school with their chil-
dren. Not only do these women feign interest in everything Chinese, they also
make a point of explaining to her every nuance of American life, as if they
were her tour guides and she knew nothing of their town. This not surpris-
ingly makes Yiping even more aware of her Chinese heritage and leads her to
dress and act more “Chinese” than she would otherwise:

[Being treated this way] made Yiping even more conscious that she
was Chinese and that she was different from the crowd. Thus she
became even more careful, often subconsciously carrying herself in a
way that emphasized her Chinese features. At every get-together Yi-
ping wore long Chinese gowns, hung a smile from her face, spoke in a
gentle voice, and answered the same questions from those wives again
and again . . . Yiping had to exert considerable effort to put on the
appearance of a Chinese.5

In short, unlike some immigrants, who believe they need to become more Amer-
ican than Americans, Yiping must become more Chinese than the Chinese.
 Illusions and Delusions  331

So too must this town’s trees and lawns become greener and lusher than
greenery. In the opening paragraphs of “A Day in Pleasantville” the narra-
tor describes the vegetation surrounding the town’s perfectly symmetrical
homes, underscoring the importance residents put on consistency and high-
lighting the difficulties that face anyone not capable of immediate confor-
mity. Not only people but also plants growing on suburban properties are
manipulated to become at once “less” and “more” of their former selves. The
narrator emphasizes that the phenomena he describes are not unique to this
one New York suburb:

Pleasantville is just like any of America’s thousands upon thousands of

big-city suburbs. The town was built according to an architect’s plans,
utterly tidy [shifen zhengqi]. The air is clear [qingche], the streets, the
houses, the trees, all are especially clean [fenwai de qingjie]. There’s no
dust [meiyou huichen]. There’s no soot [meiyou meiyan] . . . Woods
and lawns have been planted on both sides of every street. The leaves
are extraordinarily green and lush [lüwo de chuqi], probably because
the soil went through a good chemical fertilizing [lianghao de huaxue
shifei]. The leaves are all so shiny, plump, and swollen that they re-
semble the waxy green artificial potted landscapes sold by decorating
stores. And the lawns go through so many repairs, trimmed every-
where, laboriously manicured, all to the same height, and of the same
style, as though everyone had spread a green plastic carpet they’d
brought home from Macy’s department store [家家門前都如同鋪上一
張從Macy’s, 百貨公司買回來的塑膠绿地毯].6

The trees that line the streets of Pleasantville appear in the best of health
precisely because they are not. They have been doused with chemicals, so
much so that they look nearly identical to the waxy artificial potted greenery
sold by decorators. Lawns likewise have been so meticulously groomed that
homeowners might as well have covered their properties with green plastic
carpets.
This passage most obviously lampoons the conformity required in Ameri-
can suburbia. Yet even as it ridicules the extremes to which people go to fol-
low a suburban ideal, “A Day in Pleasantville” reveals more. Its discourse on
woods and lawns forced to become greener than green, to become both more
and less of themselves to give the appearance of ecological health, captures
the immigrant experience for individuals like Yiping. But it also points to
one of the major outcomes of reshaping landscapes: the harm to lawns and
trees themselves and to the spaces affected by chemical runoff. The narrator
332  ecoambiguity

notes that in the winter, “It looks as though everyone in town has gathered
up the green carpet [lü de tan] from in front of their houses. The grassy
hillsides expose dry yellow land [luchu le jiaohuang de tudi; 露出了焦黃的
土地].”7 Repeating the analogy of suburban lawns to green carpets that can
be rolled and unrolled at will, the narrator reveals what hides beneath this
cover: “dry yellow land.” It is not unusual for grass in suburban New York
to turn yellow-brown in winter, particularly in years of little precipitation.
But the reference to the land, as opposed to the grass as being this color, sug-
gests that something more could be at stake. The “good chemical fertilizing”
to which lawns were subjected during spring and summer appears to have
damaged the earth. Although the phrase jiaohuang de tudi (焦黃的土地) is
more commonly translated “sallow land” (rather than “dry yellow land,” as
above), the character jiao (焦) means scorch, and the compound jiaotu (焦
土) scorched earth, as in the scorched earth policy of wartime, where land
and property are intentionally destroyed in anticipation of invasion. “A Day
in Pleasantville” of course nowhere suggests that this is what people have
done to their town, and residents clearly have not intended to damage their
properties, but the story does strongly imply that chemicals have singed the
landscape. Of course the more yellow the soil, the more vigorously home-
owners, addicted to artificial green, will apply chemicals the following year,
something that will only exacerbate environmental damage.
The narrator’s description of the road outside Yiping and Weicheng’s
home also suggests that the terms “clear” (qingche) and “clean” (qingjie), at
least to describe the ecosystems of Pleasantville, are relative at best and likely
mere illusions. Alternatively, showing the mutability of perceptions, the de-
scription suggests that if these terms do describe the town’s environments,
they are not characteristics to be celebrated. After noting that the family’s
street is a dead-end road connecting their small hill with the highway lead-
ing to New York, the narrator comments, “This is a quiet, asphalted street,
exceptionally broad and clean [qingjie], pale gray, likely resembling a river
course that’s on the verge of drying up [kujie de hedao], the gray of bound-
less river water that has completely stagnated [wanquan zhizhu].”8 Two sen-
tences later the narrator compares the sound of a car door shutting to the
plop of a rock thrown into this “dead water” (sishui). Since everything in
Pleasantville is supposedly identical, the road on which Yiping and her fam-
ily live is presumably no more stagnant or dead than other streets in town.
Just as hillside lawns yellowing in winter are not unusual, so too pale gray
roads are common; black asphalt lightens from frost and salt spread to melt
ice and snow. On the other hand, several lines after describing the road, the
narrator comments that the town is still a few days from the first snow of the
 Illusions and Delusions  333

season; the fact that the roads are already pale gray suggests that something
might be amiss. Moreover, just as “dry yellow land” signals actual damage,
not simply a seasonal change of color, so too the comparison of the street first
to a nearly parched riverbed, then more significantly to a stagnant river, and
finally to dead water implies environmental harm. The road’s slope makes
this comparison particularly noteworthy; the river is so sluggish, the narra-
tor implies, that it even defies gravity. Most people believe the streets are as
clean and aseptic as they are broad and quiet. But the road surface could also
be stained with chemical fertilizers that have overflowed from neighboring
lawns. The fact that the narrator does not speak of these processes directly,
instead comparing the street to a river, something it resembles in appearance
but not in physical properties, is a reminder of the ambiguities involved in
actually identifying environmental damage.
Perhaps the most powerful indicator that environments are not as they
seem is the putative silence that envelops the town. The narrator comments
that the hill where Yiping and Weicheng live “has its own unique quiet”
(dute de jijing): “You can’t hear the sound of the wind. You can’t hear hu-
man voices. It’s only once an hour or half hour that there’s the deafening
sound of a car door closing . . . [This] stirs up a momentary echo, but soon
afterward, boundless, limitless deathly stillness [wu bian wu lang de siji] re-
turns.”9 This stillness is described as “unique” (dute), but chances are that
it in fact is widespread. The town’s residents spend most of their time inside
climate-controlled spaces, so it is not surprising that few human voices are
audible outdoors. But what about animals? The phrase “deathly stillness”
(siji), although a figure of speech, bodes poorly for other species. In fact, “A
Day in Pleasantville” contains not a single reference to an animal—a note-
worthy absence for a suburban town of broad lawns and woods, where one
would expect to find at least birds, squirrels, rabbits, deer, and the occasional
red fox. Yiping and Weicheng’s house is on White Pigeon Hill (Baigepo),
but birds appear to live here in name only. On the other hand, perhaps no
animals are heard not because there are none but because their voices are
obscured by the noise of vehicular traffic.
Even more significant than the absence of animal sounds is the presence
of those created by people. As one might expect on a hill directly above a
well-traveled freeway, likely the Saw Mill River Parkway, the soundscape
is not as blank as initially claimed. Almost immediately after mentioning
the neighborhood’s “distinctive quiet” and “deathly stillness,” the narra-
tor acknowledges the white noise of vehicles racing on the highway below:
“The sound of rubber tires sharply rubbing against the paved road. This goes
on twenty-four hours a day, day and night, these sorts of wheels driving at
334  ecoambiguity

high speeds, never letting up, never varying. This kind of monotonous, ear-
piercing sound [cier de shengyin] long ago became one part of the quiet of
White Pigeon Hill [Baigepo jingji de yi bufen le].”10 The sentences translated
above repeatedly alert the reader to the incessant noise pollution, first men-
tioning that the sounds continue around the clock (ersi xiaoshi), then that
they make no distinction between day and night (bufen zhouye), that they
never stop (meiyou zhongduan), that they never change (meiyou bianhua),
and that they are monotonous (dandiao). But the final sentence translated
above says it all. Sounds are not just audible, but ear-piercing (cier), yet their
monotony paradoxically renders them a part of the neighborhood’s “quiet”
(jingji). Residents have deluded themselves into believing their town is silent
despite its being anything but. Seemingly the only person aware of the noise
is Yicheng, who hearing the roar of the highway below is often reminded that
there is more to life than Pleasantville, that not everyone remains sequestered
like herself. But she too appears paralyzed.
“A Day in Pleasantville” propagates multiple stereotypes about Ameri-
can suburbia circa 1960, particularly the conformity, indeed monotony, of
culture, behavior, and the built environment. Bai Xianyong’s short story is
particularly concerned with the challenges faced by immigrant housewives
living in such places. Unlike many narratives on American suburbia, the story
does not discuss the troubles of Pleasantville’s American housewives, instead
portraying these women as a happy homogeneous group, in sharp contrast
with Yiping. But the text also addresses the paradoxical condition of the non-
human environment. It is hardly as green, clean, and quiet as it appears. The
narrative lures the reader into its own seeming uniformity, initially giving the
impression that descriptions of physical landscapes serve merely as backdrop
for the town’s monotony. Yet when examined more closely, these references
reveal far more complicated developments, most importantly the seduction
of sameness in concealing empirical conditions. “A Day in Pleasantville”
demonstrates the ease with which the damage to bodies and bodyscapes—
people, lawns, woods, roads, and soundscapes—can be disguised by their
seeming uniformity.
As Bai Xianyong’s story suggests, conflicts between people’s perceptions
and environmental conditions are inevitable, the more so because societies
are reluctant to align their beliefs with available evidence. Tenacious illusions
and delusions make it difficult to change perceptions, particularly in the face
of disagreeable information. Many forms of discourse on ecological dam-
age take up conflicts between people’s beliefs and environmental realities. At
times, crisis is declared imminent without supporting data, but far more fre-
quently ecodegradation and the significance of this damage are downplayed
 Illusions and Delusions  335

or even denied despite evidence to the contrary.11 Like “A Day in Pleas-

antville” yet addressing environmental concerns more explicitly, some texts
highlight the human proclivity to manipulate the nonhuman to create the im-
pression of environmental health or at least minimal damage to ecosystems.
The most forceful literary exposés of conflicts between perceptions and actu-
alities are poems that dramatically stress the chasms between people’s beliefs
and the actual condition of environments. Other texts emphasize the indiffer-
ence of those who actually damage environments toward the consequences of
their behaviors. Finally, some literary works that examine the abyss between
perceptions and actualities of environmental degradation highlight the tena-
cious fallacy that the nonhuman can sustain even the most excessive human
behaviors in the names of culture and civilization. Together, the creative texts
analyzed in this chapter reveal a broad spectrum of artistic negotiations with
illusion and delusion as they concern environmental conditions. By empha-
sizing how texts and characters (un)consciously downplay the severity of
ecodegradation, this poetry and prose show literature’s engagement with the
human tendency to minimize what has been done to environments.

Physically and Conceptually Manipulating Environments

Many creative works addressing environmental degradation—including the

Korean writer Kim Kwanggyu’s prose poem “Hwae namu” (Pagoda Tree,
1986) and the Korean writer Ch’oe Sŭngho’s poem “Naenggak doen tosi e
sŏ” (In the Refrigerated City, 1991)—show how readily perceptions can be
manipulated to downplay damage to the nonhuman. Kim Kwanggyu’s text
explores why people deny change, while Ch’oe Sŭngho’s points to the dis-
juncture between the desired, consumable appearance of nonhuman bodies
and the effects of this appearance on these bodies and on ecosystems more
generally. In contrast, other creative works depict a vibrant nonhuman as
paradoxically having the potential to propagate suffering. These include the
Japanese writers Isakawa Masaomi’s poem “Kosumosu no hana” (Cosmos
Flower, 1970s) and Nakaoka Jun’ichi’s poem “Midori ga shitatari” (Green
Trickles, 2000s), both of which appear in Nagatsu Kōzaburō’s anthology
Atomic Bomb Poetry.12
The first-person narrator of Kim Kwanggyu’s prose poem “Pagoda Tree,”
which like Bai Xianyong’s “A Day in Pleasantville” is not an obvious choice
for the ecocritic, describes a pagoda tree (Chinese scholar tree) that has for
decades shaded people and their artifacts.13 On the one hand, this brief poem
highlights the tree’s resilience, surviving a war and numerous changes to the
336  ecoambiguity

built environment. On the other hand, “Pagoda Tree” indicates how easily
perceptions can be misguided and suggests that although the tree appears to
have escaped unharmed, its vigor might be an illusion. Explicitly said to have
survived the Korean War, this tree is clearly in Korea. Yet nothing else about
it makes it a “Korean” tree; its experiences are like those of much other flora
that survive wars and other serious human encroachments. As in many cre-
ative texts on damaged environments, local history is important; published
in the mid-1980s, “Pagoda Tree” in some ways reflects Korea’s awakening
environmental consciousness. But with just a single reference to “Korea” in
the form of “6·25 ttae” (lit. the occasion of June 25 [1950]; the day North
Korean forces invaded South Korea), the poem does not dwell on its Kore-
anness and instead focuses on the relationship between a person and a tree.
“Pagoda Tree” is divided into three sections of two paragraphs each. The
tree is introduced in the opening sentence/paragraph as the place where “ev-
ery evening the owls came to howl.”14 It has provided shade for decades, all
while supposedly not changing in the slightest. The narrator remarks, “The
pagoda tree cast a broad shadow over the well. The well’s bucket went miss-
ing, and a pump took shape, and then public waterworks took over, and
some time ago a gas station came into being in that space, but even today the
pagoda tree remains standing there, unchanged [pyŏnham ŏpsi kŭ chari e sŏ
itta].”15 Animals seem to have disappeared, the poem’s first paragraph stat-
ing that this is a place owls “came to howl”; bodies of water have changed
shape and consistency as technology moved from buckets to pumps to public
waterworks; a gas station now stands nearby. Names have also changed, the
first sentence stating that people living near the tree “used to call it” a pagoda
tree. This does not preclude people continuing to call this a pagoda tree, as
the narrator does himself, or owls continuing to hoot, but it does suggest that
these things are probably part of the past.
The second section of Kim Kwanggyu’s prose poem elaborates on the
tree’s endurance. During the Korean War the tree shaded the remains of a
bombed and abandoned army truck; the soil eventually absorbed the rusting
metal that scrap dealers deemed worthless until the entire vehicle “finally
was dismantled and faded out of sight.”16 As before, the tree appears entirely
unaffected by what happens around it. The narrator then admits that several
shards became imbedded in its bark but claims that this iron rusted and was
consumed by the tree’s sap. Soon the only indications that the tree suffered
human-induced damage were gnarls on its surface, warts that easily could be
attributed to normal aging. Ironically the most noticeable difference is the
“nature protection notice board” (chayŏn poho p’aenmal) that has recently
been attached to its trunk.
 Illusions and Delusions  337

Every time the narrator looks at this tree he feels its magnetism and longs
to stroke it, lean against it, climb it, and sometimes even become its roots and
branches. On the other hand, whether he hurries by on foot or in a vehicle,
he feels ashamed. This is because “The thought that the body in motion was
that very pagoda tree, and that the body standing in a single spot for years
was in reality I myself comes repeatedly to mind.”17 A large part of his dis-
comfort likely stems from feeling that his life is going nowhere and realizing
that even something as rooted as a tree in fact is always moving, always
changing. As revealing as this passage is of the narrator’s insecurities about
his life, it is even more illuminating of his perceptions of the pagoda tree and
the nonhuman more generally.
The narrator appears to need the tree to remain unvarying, or at least to
convince himself that it is unvarying, so that his own stagnancy will be better
camouflaged. His efforts to paint the tree in this manner are an important
part of this endeavor, but like any declaration of extremes, they are easily
discredited. One can imagine a tree, assuming it is not situated on a battle-
field, making it through a war with only minor and easily disguised injuries.
Yet the only type of tree that could remain completely “unchanged” in even
the most inert environment would be artificial, akin to the plastic greenery
featured in Bai Xianyong’s “A Day in Pleasantville.” And even these replicas
can be altered by pollutants and other air particles, albeit often more subtly
than their live counterparts.18 Interestingly, the narrator is not ashamed at
making such statements, only at the thought that foliage is in motion while
he stands still. “Pagoda Tree” shows how assessments of nonhuman perma-
nence both cloak human changes to environments and divert attention from
personal insecurities.
Uniformity is replaced in Ch’oe Sŭngho’s poem “In the Refrigerated City”
by the anonymity of a supermarket in an undisclosed location.19 Recounted
in the first person, “In the Refrigerated City” discusses dead and dying ma-
rine animals in both the ocean and the store; it brings out the misunderstand-
ings of human impacts on environments that can result from the sight of
diced, processed, and anonymous cuts of meat. The opening stanza contrasts
water made bloody from harpooned whales with store displays of packaged,
labeled, and refrigerated whale meat:

A summer day, when blood spouts into the sea

from whales pierced and overturned by the harpoons of whaling
ships
when supermarket doors open
goods in refrigerated air currents
338  ecoambiguity

there are surveillance cameras above my head

surveillance mirrors reflect me here and there20

Although easily visible to whalers and sea animals, the gruesome ocean scene
the poem describes—not ascribed to whaling ships of any particular nation-
ality—is hidden from most people.21 Whale meat is sanitized for visual and
gastronomic consumption, landing in supermarket refrigerators looking
nothing like whales, living or slaughtered. Security equipment records every
move shoppers make, but society obscures the legal, economic, and physical
processes that enable some of the world’s largest mammals to be transformed
into anonymous slabs of flesh. Few people stop to think about the origins of
this meat and how it arrived in their stores.
The third and final stanza of “In the Refrigerated City” describes the
shopping experience in more detail:

A summer day, when the city’s supermarket—

where women with shopping baskets
crane their necks, roaming between goods and labels –
travels like a merchant ship, in the noise and sun.

These lines depict the supermarket as a place of commodities to be deposited

in baskets, a place where a person can peacefully wander about, miles from
sites of carnage. To highlight this difference, the poem likens the supermar-
ket to a merchant ship, not to a whaling vessel; the former generally car-
ries goods made more presentable for sale, not freshly killed animals. Ch’oe
Sŭngho’s poem can be read as a statement against whaling, but it is an es-
pecially pungent comment on the disparities between living animals on the
one hand and their deaths and reconfiguration for store shelves on the other.
“In the Refrigerated City” begins with whales but quickly broadens to in-
clude other animals. The first stanza concludes with two lines on crustaceans
that suggest these animals just might be spared the fate of their larger marine
counterparts. Whereas whales are spouting blood, crabs are spouting sea
foam; whereas whales are harpooned, crabs are resisting, indicating that they
might have somewhat more control over their lives. Yet the second stanza
reveals that they are not in open water but confined in a bucket, facing a fate
similar to that of the whales:

and the small crabs that refuse to be ransomed

swarm and spout sea foam
 Illusions and Delusions  339

The small crabs

dying in a barrel

Caught on camera, their deaths are available for human visual consumption;
the crabs might first “refuse to be ransomed” (momkapsŭl kŏbuhada), a curi-
ous phrase suggesting agency, but they cannot thwart death. The demise of
other animals is better disguised. Listing the contents of one of the store’s
refrigerators, Ch’oe Sŭngho’s poem reveals animals placed among a variety
of plant foods, all kept reasonably fresh by the machine’s chilled air. Refrig-
erator currents are noiseless, a far cry from the din outside the case, much less
the plaintive sounds almost certain to accompany deaths that occur outside
the refrigerated city:

curled onions
swarms of silent anchovies
spruced up leeks and crown daisies
the refrigerated currents silently flow
my consciousness touches the icy bones
of the dead fish inside the refrigerator

Unlike the swarms of crabs mentioned in the opening lines of the stanza, the
anchovies have already been killed. Nearly frozen and therefore nearly odor-
less, they rest peacefully, waiting to be scooped up by customers.
Most interesting is the speaker’s comment that his consciousness touches
the icy bones of these dead fish (na ŭi ŭisik ŭn naengjanggo sok chugŭn
mulgogi ŭi / ch’agaun ppyŏ e tak’o itta). He elaborates on this remark at the
end of the third stanza, in the text’s final lines: “Warm blood that begins in
the bones / cosmic current of swirling blood.”22 It is not clear which bones
are meant—his own, those of the fish in the supermarket’s refrigerators, or
both. The narrator could be suggesting that witnessing the transformation of
sea animals into a form belying the traumas they have suffered has awakened
within him deep emotions. Or he could be referring to the physiology of these
animals when they are alive. Either way, the reference to cosmic currents
(ujuryu) recalls the circulating refrigerated air and bloodied water currents of
earlier stanzas. The “swirling blood” (soyongdoli ch’inŭn p’i ) of the poem’s
final line echoes the “spouting blood” (p’ippum) of its second line. Swirling
blood becomes spouting blood when these animals are killed; bloody water
currents are replaced by chilled drafts. That Ch’oe Sŭngho’s poem is titled
“In the Refrigerated City,” not “In the Refrigerated Supermarket,” expands
340  ecoambiguity

the spatial scope of the text. So too does the poem’s speaking generally about
a “city,” rather than identifying one particular urban space. These strategies
encourage awareness of the greater attention people are likely to pay to the
refrigeration (preservation) of pieces of animals than to preserving the ani-
mals themselves in their original habitats. They likewise highlight the human
proclivity to think less about the slaughter of animals than their processing
and packaging. Describing how the sight of icy bones in a refrigerator makes
the speaker think of warm and swirling, not warm and spouting blood, the
poem suggests that even when people stop to consider earlier incarnations of
the animals inside their refrigerators, they imagine living animals, not car-
casses. The more spaces become refrigerated, literally and figuratively, the
more perceptions of animals and of human transformations of animals are
altered and sanitized and the more illusions and delusions are propagated.
Fortifying these insights, creative works such as Isakawa’s “Cosmos
Flower” and Nakaoka’s “Green Trickles” expose some of the potential dan-
gers of similar altered perspectives, even when they result from “natural”
improvement or recovery of environments. “Cosmos Flower,” written in the
1970s, cites the sentiments of a Japanese school principal shortly after World
War Two about the rapid restoration of certain nonhuman species; his sur-
prise that nature is recovering so quickly echoes numerous voices in postwar
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Ultimately, however, the human and nonhuman
recovery of the bombed city is linked to the failure to prevent the outbreak
of war elsewhere:

For ten years even grass won’t grow at the epicenter of the blast
Despite rumors like this
already by autumn weeds had sprouted from the rubble
In a corner of the desolate ruined school building
I saw a cosmos flower . . .
All right, [I thought], I’ve somehow got to rent a school building
quickly
and start up classes again . . .
It’s already been thirty years [since that speech]
Hiroshima has been remarkably restored [mezamashiku fukkō]
but there always is a war going on, somewhere in the world.
Yet every year cosmos flowers bloom everywhere.23

Witnessing nature coming to life a decade before he expected it would in-

spires the principal to resume educating the city’s children. But the poem’s fi-
nal lines reveal the paradoxes and suggest potential unintended consequences
 Illusions and Delusions  341

of rapid recovery: thirty years after the blast, and in fact long before that, the
city looked nearly “normal,” flowers bloomed around the world, but com-
bat, far from eradicated, had simply changed venues.24 “Cosmos Flower”
does more than lament the prevalence of war. It paradoxically suggests that
if Hiroshima had remained a wasteland, future conflicts elsewhere on the
planet might have been forestalled.
Nakaoka’s “Green Trickles” addresses this conundrum more directly. Re-
flecting the environmental cosmopolitanism so prominent in Atomic Bomb
Poetry, this work criticizes the makeshift measures to control radioactive
waste implemented at Chernobyl after its 1986 nuclear power-plant disaster.
The poem then remarks: “The dripping green of ‘Beautiful Japan’/ Completely
conceals this danger-filled scene.”25 The “dripping green” (shitataru midori)
of many landscapes, both physical and textual, conceals abuse and destruction
of both people and the nonhuman. “Green Trickles” points out not only the
global consequences of the explosions at Chernobyl but also global respon-
sibility for these events and for the recovery of the region’s ecosystems. Just
as significant is the poem’s evocation of “Beautiful Japan”; Nakaoka appro-
priates the term from the Japanese writer Kawabata Yasunari’s Nobel Prize
acceptance speech “Utsukushii Nihon no watakushi” (Myself from Beautiful
Japan, 1968), an eloquent celebration of Japanese aesthetics and Japanese ap-
preciation of nature. He also echoes or at least anticipates the irony both of
remarks by former Japanese Prime Minister Abé Shinzō, on assuming office in
2006, about Japan’s “beautiful natural environment”26 and of Sakai Izumi’s
recent poetry anthology Genbaku shishū—hachigatsu (Collection of Atomic
Bomb Poems—August, 2008), which juxtaposes poems on the horrors of the
atomic bombings with color photographs of thriving landscapes.27 Nakaoka’s
poem reveals both the superficiality and hypocrisy and the potential lethality
of rhetoric such as Kawabata’s. Inherently ambiguous, “beauty,” particularly
beauty evident after a disaster, often is a sign of rebirth. But regeneration of
environments does not preclude future devastation of either people or the
nonhuman. In fact, by giving a false sense of security, it easily can mask dis-
tressed areas and divert attention from preventing future damage, allowing
for continued degradation of both humans and the natural world.

Gaping Chasms

Literary works often intensify the dynamics of the texts analyzed in the previ-
ous section, taking illusions and delusions to an extreme. Some, such as the
Japanese writer and environmental activist Sakaki Nanao’s poem “Nabete
342  ecoambiguity

yo wa koto mo nashi” (All’s Right with the World, 1980), depict individuals
who insist that everything is “all right” even when confronted with nearly
apocalyptic conditions. Others, such as Sakaki’s poem “Ee ja nai ka ee ja nai
ka” (What the Hell What the Hell, 1987), do so by opening with a stereotype
that the remainder of the text then deflates. Whether or not the scenarios they
depict are realistic, by ridiculing false perceptions of ecohealth these texts
suggest that such outlooks not only make environmental degradation easier
to bear but also risk facilitating it.
Sakaki’s “All’s Right with the World”—like the American writer Stephen
Vincent Benét’s much earlier “Metropolitan Nightmare” (1933)—exagger-
ates the human tendency to believe that nothing is amiss when in fact both
people and their environments are disintegrating rapidly.28 This poem brings
out the potential consequences of continuing to assert that all is well in the
face of radically transforming ecosystems. “All’s Right with the World”
opens by adapting a well-known quotation from Robert Browning’s drama
Pippa Passes (1841): “Snails crossing roses / Larks rising high dancing
in the skies / God’s reigning in heaven / All’s right with the world.”29
The situation described by the quotation—animals frolicking, leading the
observer to think that a deity sits above and all is well—contrasts sharply
with the one facing the individual featured in Sakaki’s verse.
“All’s Right with the World” is divided into six two-stanza sections, one
each for Monday through Saturday and a final one-stanza section for Sunday.
In the first stanzas the poem’s speaker reveals which parts of the nonhuman
are missing from their customary spaces; in the second stanzas, he indicates
what is on television that night, followed by the refrain: “God’s reigning in
heaven / All’s right with the world” (kami ten ni shirashimesu / nabete
yo wa koto   mo nashi). Taking an ecologically cosmopolitan approach, the
poem’s speaker does not identify where he is located; the situation he describes
could be anywhere there is television reception. Unlike many of Sakaki’s po-
ems, “All’s Right with the World” does not conclude with a note on its date
and place of publication. As its title suggests, this poem eventually encom-
passes the world; the Monday through Thursday sections report on the con-
dition of an individual’s property and that of his neighbor, but on Friday the
speaker leaves his city and by Saturday he laments the loss of the planet itself.
The first section focuses solely on human absences, both confirmed and
suggested:

Monday morning
in my house no one
in the neighbor’s house no one
 Illusions and Delusions  343

call the police

phone rings for three minutes no answer

Tonight’s TV, “Frankenstein”

God’s reigning in heaven
All’s right with the world.30

Possibly the lack of people at his and his neighbor’s houses is nothing out of
the ordinary—it being Monday morning, they might simply be at work—but
the speaker’s call to the police indicates that he believes something is wrong.
The unanswered phone in the station more ominously implies that the po-
lice are simply derelict, have been called away by an emergency, or perhaps
even have disappeared. Despite these anomalies, the following stanza deems
everything all right.
The second through fifth sections of the poem follow a similar pattern.
Each begins with the day of the week, followed by “morning.” In the fol-
lowing two to three lines the poem’s speaker lists the parts of the nonhuman
that now are missing. He then telephones the professionals who should be
able to provide answers or at least begin investigating the absences. But he
cannot reach anyone. The second stanza of each section is virtually identical,
one television show simply replacing another, contrasting with the ever more
serious absences noted in the first stanza of each section. On Tuesday not
only are people missing, but dogs, cats, and mice are nowhere to be found, at
least inside the speaker’s dwelling; he calls the animal hospital, but receives
no response. On Wednesday, absences have spread to the areas immediately
outside his home and his neighbor’s—insects, fish, and birds are all gone.
On Thursday, nearby fields are bereft of flowers, vegetables, and trees. The
speaker is clearly troubled by these losses; otherwise he would not be calling
the animal hospital, the zoo, and the botanical garden. But still he proclaims
that all is right with the world, presumably because television broadcasting
blares on. The more these lines are repeated, the higher they build one atop
the other, the more ridiculous they appear.
Conditions become severe on Friday, when the speaker declares that moun-
tains and rivers have disappeared from both his and neighboring towns. He
telephones the central government but receives no answer. Regardless, he con-
tinues to assert that things are as they should be. By Saturday, even the planet
has disappeared, yet he claims not to recognize the gravity of the situation:

Saturday morning
mother earth nowhere [hahanaru chikyū sugata nashi]
344  ecoambiguity

call the psychiatric hospital

phone rings for three minutes no answer

Tonight’s TV, “Shogun”

God’s reigning in heaven
All’s right with the world.31

“All’s Right with the World” then concludes:

Sunday morning
God walks back to church
Good morning good morning good morning
––no answer.

Whereas Monday through Saturday are marked by absence, Sunday is char-

acterized by presence, with God coming down from heaven. But God is alone
on earth and has no more success contacting people than did the poem’s
speaker. Little here is “right.”
Sakaki’s text leaves many questions unanswered, including what has hap-
pened to everyone/everything. But even more disconcerting is why, despite
being disturbed that so many familiar bodies have disappeared, the speaker
continues to delude himself into thinking that nothing is wrong with the
world. This is not a case of an individual simply not seeing what is happening
around him or seeing what is happening but believing that conditions do not
warrant further attention. That the speaker makes initial calls to report ab-
sences as they occur indicates his discomfort with what is transpiring. But his
inability to follow through, to recognize the significance of these unexplained
absences and change his perceptions of the condition of the world around
him, points to real insecurities about his own future. His defensive optimism
also prevents him from investigating more deeply the silences he confronts
and instead leads him to rely on television for comfort. “All’s Right with the
World” clearly parodies the human proclivity to pretend that conditions are
satisfactory, even as the planet collapses.
In contrast with “All’s Right with the World,” which satirizes the shibbo-
leth “all’s right” as it concerns environmental degradation, Sakaki’s “What
the Hell What the Hell” focuses on overturning stereotypes about a specific
place. The title comes from the Japanese peasant uprisings of 1866–69, called
both yonaoshi ikki (lit. world [yo]-fixing [naosu] revolts) and ee ja nai ka (lit.
“why not?” or “anything goes”). These rebellions occurred in the midst of
intense social and political deterioration, at a time when conventional val-
 Illusions and Delusions  345

ues and meaning needed to be renegotiated.32 Sakaki’s poem, written amid

considerable environmental degradation, launches its own revolt against the
status quo. But its title refers to the attitude many have concerning their rela-
tionships with the natural world.
“What the Hell” topples the perception, articulated in the poem’s opening
line, that Japan is a country solely of beautiful scenery, alluring female bod-
ies, and cutting-edge cultural products. It declares that the nation is rapidly
destroying even its most precious natural resources, sometimes for the sake
of tourism, sometimes for national defense, and sometimes for no particular
reason. “What the Hell” also speaks of Japanese and American complicity in
damaging each other’s ecosystems. The sarcastic refrain “What the Hell” in-
vites attention not only to Japanese and American nonchalance about abused
environments but also to the absurdity of claims that Japan is “great,” at
least in its treatment of the natural world.33 Written straightforwardly and
incorporating a number of statistics, Sakaki’s poem grounds itself in evidence
while at the same time appealing to people’s emotional responses to environ-
ments.
“What the Hell” begins with stereotypes of Japan, followed immediately
by lines that paint a very different picture:

Cherry blossoms and geisha and computer country

the quantity of its food superpower Japan produces 30 percent
the quantity of grains imported equivalent to all of Africa
the motive for 90 percent of Japanese to be middle class
        What the hell
          What the hell34

Those unfamiliar and even many familiar with Japan often embrace stereo-
types of the country as a place of flowers, female entertainers, and technol-
ogy. Puncturing the expectations of the unsuspecting, the poem immediately
exposes Japanese excess. It notes that Japan has lost the capacity or the will-
ingness to produce enough food to sustain its own people. The following
line—“the quantity of grains imported equivalent to all of Africa”—can be
read to mean that Japan imports as much food as does all of Africa or that it
imports as much food as Africa produces. Either way, Sakaki’s poem points
to Japanese gluttony in comparison with other countries and to its troubled
relationships with the planet’s resources more generally.
Sakaki’s poem declares Japan’s objective to be ensuring comfortable lives
for its citizens. The next stanzas reveal that to meet this goal, Japanese are
destroying ecosystems throughout the archipelago and potentially even as
346  ecoambiguity

far away as the United States. They are accused of cementing half of Japan’s
waterfront to ensure the deaths of the country’s five remaining sea otters, de-
stroying 90 percent of their coral reefs, and building thirteen nuclear power
plants within a 200-kilometer radius of Kyoto. They also are hewing sacred
woods in Nara to build a tourist parking lot, waiting for nuclear fallout from
a research facility 140 kilometers north of Tokyo, and building an airbase
deep in California’s Yosemite National Park. Impending destruction awaits
both the Shiraho coral reef (Ishigaki Island, Okinawa), which will be buried
under a new airport handling larger tourist flights, something that Sakaki
himself vocally opposed, and Miyake Island (part of the Fuji-Hakone-Izu
National Park, 180 kilometers south of Tokyo), which will become the site of
a U.S. Navy airfield for night training.35 Seven of the nine stanzas describing
this degradation conclude like the poem’s first, chanting tauntingly “What
the hell / What the hell.” Irony permeates Sakaki’s poem: the text notes that
predatory crown-of-thorns starfish assist Japan in destroying coral; that
unlike contemporary Japanese, American bombers so revered Kyoto’s and
Nara’s architecture and gardens that they spared the cities during World War
Two; that Kyoto is “protected” (mamorareru) by thirteen “holy” (seinaru)
nuclear power plants; that the U.S. Navy is building an airfield on Miyake
Island to “praise the beauty of the divine volcano” (kōgōshii kazan no
bi o tataete); and rather fantastically that Halley’s Comet has just announced
that Americans have asked the Japanese to construct an airbase in Yosemite
National Park.36
The sarcasm of “What the Hell” is deadly serious. Some Japanese ac-
tions, such as cementing waterways, primarily affect sites within Japan, while
others, such as destroying coral reefs, harm broad areas of nearby oceans.
Even more disturbingly, the Japanese are depicted as damaging some of the
world’s most fragile, beautiful, and important ecosystems. Such behaviors
reinforce the fact that the Japanese not only lack homegrown food but also
are so desperate to be an entirely middle-class society that they plunder even
their most precious landscapes. “What the Hell” reveals that behind Japan’s
pleasant facade is a nation headed toward self-destruction, its most impor-
tant cities in danger of nuclear fallout, national parks threatened by foreign
(U.S.) airbases, rivers polluted, animals dying, sacred groves felled, and coral
reefs eroded. Yet despite everything, the poem suggests, people refuse to ac-
knowledge this aspect of Japan, their perceptions diverging significantly from
actual conditions.
Texts such as Sakaki’s “All’s Right with the World” and “What the Hell”
parody the human proclivity, even need, to believe that their interactions
with environments are as they should be, in defiance of overt evidence to the
 Illusions and Delusions  347

contrary. These poems also highlight the flexibility and seductiveness of peo-
ple’s perceptions of environmental health, whatever the empirical evidence.
Such outlooks rhetorically protect societies from having to face up to obvi-
ously damaged environments. Equally enticing are physical and conceptual
alterations that shelter people from noticing these entities. The illusion that
ecosystems are little harmed is based on appearances that mask actualities
and sometimes worsen or even trigger degradation.

Signifying Indifference

Texts that address how people harm the environment often feature conflicts
between perceptions of ecohealth and evidence of ecodegradation. Expand-
ing on these gulfs are contrasts between perceptions and actualities involving
the delusion that behaviors are insignificant when they are anything but.
While Sakaki’s “All’s Right with the World” simply claims everything to be
“all right” when it is clearly not, the creative works examined in this sec-
tion—the Japanese writer Miyazawa Kenji’s “Frandon Nōgakkō no buta”
(The Frandon Agricultural School Pig, 1934), the Chinese writer A Cheng’s
short-short story “Zhouzhuan” (Turnover, 1988), and the Japanese writer
Hoshi Shin’ichi’s short story “O–i dete ko–i” (He–y, Come on Ou–t, 1971)—
offer more nuanced analyses of the indifference exhibited by those who actu-
ally damage particular animals and the natural world more generally.
Miyazawa’s story “The Frandon Agricultural School Pig” (1934) high-
lights several common contradictions between how people regard their inter-
actions with animals and the realities of these contacts. This short story by
early twentieth-century Japan’s most celebrated environmentally conscious
writer in some ways prefigures the English author George Orwell’s famously
satiric novel Animal Farm (1945), written to destroy “the Soviet myth” and
inspired by Orwell’s recognition that “men exploit animals in much the same
way as the rich exploit the proletariat.”37 While in Orwell’s text animals suc-
cessfully overthrow their human oppressors, the pig in Miyazawa’s story is
abused and killed by people, never having been granted such agency.38 Nar-
rated by an individual who transcribes the thoughts and emotions of a York-
shire pig being prepared for slaughter at the Frandon Agricultural School in
addition to describing the behaviors of both the pig and its handlers, this text
features people who believe they treat animals admirably when in fact they
abuse them, who believe that animals owe their lives to people, and most
important who believe that killing animals is of no consequence. Describ-
ing in detail the psychology of an articulate, terrified hog while remaining
348  ecoambiguity

nearly silent about the thoughts of the people who interact with this animal,
“The Frandon Agricultural School Pig” provokes compassion for a suffering
creature and urges readers to acknowledge that nonhuman perspectives exist
and to take them seriously. Miyazawa’s story relies on sympathetic human
perceptions (the narrator’s) of animal experience even as it critiques callous
perceptions (those of the school’s employees and students). In so doing it also
reveals the possibilities and the limitations of human narratives in hypoth-
esizing and transcribing the full range of animal experience, both conscious-
ness and observed behavior. Setting the story in an undisclosed location,
very likely outside Japan (especially considering the name of the agricultural
school), allows the narrator to address more directly human, as opposed to
Japanese, mistreatment of animals.39 Indeed, the narrator speaks of pigs as
conversing in “human language” (ningengo), rather than in any single na-
tional tongue.40
“The Frandon Agricultural School Pig” opens with a pig peacefully re-
flecting on its life and thanking the heavens for all of the happiness it has
enjoyed.41 When a group of students declares pigs the organic equivalent
of platinum, the animal immediately calculates that, given its weight and
current commodity prices, its body is worth about 600,000 yen. It is de-
lighted by this, but its joy is fleeting; several days later it learns that it has
been marked for slaughter. The remainder of Miyazawa’s story narrates the
thoughts and experiences of the pig before its death, with which the text
concludes. Because the animal begins losing weight and refuses to sign the
Certificate of Consent, it is force-fed, whipped, and otherwise abused by its
human handlers until it reaches the shape they desire, at which point it is
beaten to death with a sledgehammer, sliced into eight pieces, and buried in
the snow.42
Throughout this story the pig is depicted as very well spoken and edu-
cated by human standards. Not only are its math skills superb, it is a de-
voted student of language: “The pig possessed quite advanced linguistic skills
[gogaku mo yohodo susunde ita]. Moreover, because its tongue was soft and
it had a natural aptitude for speech [soshitsu mo jūbun atta], it could speak
fluent humanese [ryūchō na ningengo].”43 The pig is also revealed as hav-
ing a rich emotional life; because a large portion of Miyazawa’s story takes
place within the animal’s mind, the reader is granted a privileged view of
its thoughts and feelings as it resists, then readies itself for death. Near the
conclusion of the text the narrator remarks, “It seemed as though the cold
was stabbing through the pig . . . Its eyes were closed, and its head was re-
ally ringing. Various dreadful memories from the Yorkshire pig’s entire life
went through its mind, lighting up and going out like a revolving garden lan-
 Illusions and Delusions  349

tern. It heard various frightening noises.”44 Told in large part from the pig’s
imagined point of view, the narrative underscores the depths of the animal’s
suffering.
Even more significant, the story exposes the disconnect between actual
human treatment of the nonhuman and people’s perceptions of this treat-
ment. Trying to convince the pig to sign the Certificate of Consent, the prin-
cipal of the Frandon Agricultural School asserts that his school treats ani-
mals more humanely than does any other facility: “Your friends are scattered
around, and I’m well aware of this, and it might sound ridiculous, but there
is no place that treats animals better than our school.”45 Here the principal
attempts to forestall accusations that perceptions are inconsistent with real-
ity, but the pig, rendered speechless, is not persuaded. It is true that until it
was marked for slaughter the animal appeared to lead a comfortable life, yet
this comfort was always provisional.
Another key instance of dissonance between people’s treatment of the
nonhuman and their perceptions of this treatment occurs later in the story,
when a lower-ranking employee of the school claims that the pig has nothing
to do with the existence of its own body. Attempting to persuade the animal
to sign the Certificate of Consent, he commands it to stop thinking solely of
itself, since “Your entire body exists thanks to the efforts of everyone at this
school [sono karada wa zentai minna, gakkō no okage de dekita].”46 This
being the case, the pig’s body not only belongs to those who feed and house
it (as is true of most livestock) but also is believed to exist solely because of
them. There is some truth to the claim that the school both owns the pig (in
accordance with local laws) and is entirely responsible for the shape of its
body, but the latter is accurate only after school employees begin forcing
food down its throat, something the narrator graphically depicts.47 Featuring
such an intelligent, articulate, emotional pig, Miyazawa’s story deeply chal-
lenges the notion that animals should be grateful to people for their mere ex-
istence. Aspects of animals’ bodily health and form, especially weight, often
correspond precisely to the way they have been treated by people, and human
behaviors can prove lethal, whether by killing animals directly or by reduc-
ing their ability to produce offspring. Even their conception is often arranged
by people; livestock are among the most controlled of animals, monitored
as they are from birth to death. But “The Frandon Agricultural School Pig”
suggests that this does not mean that as they grow, their bodies are entirely
human creations for people to do with as they please.
The most significant ambiguity in Miyazawa’s narrative is the incongru-
ity between perception and actuality: on the one hand, the school’s assump-
tions that asking the pig for permission to kill it is routine and abusing and
350  ecoambiguity

killing the pig are to be taken lightly, and on the other hand the reality of
what these behaviors do to the animal. In his conversations with the pig, the
principal repeatedly refers to the latter’s signing the Certificate of Consent
as a “very small request” (hon no chiisa na tanomi da) and a “truly trivial
matter” (taishita koto mo nakatta).48 After all, he argues, no organism can
escape death. The pig, however, recognizes the difference between dying at an
unspecified time in the future and being killed; overwhelmed by its perilous
situation, it refuses to provide its hoofprint. It is depicted as an astute reader
of human motives and texts, a being all too aware of what is happening to
it: “The pig knitted its eyebrows, and for a short time looked fixedly at the
document with which it had been confronted. If things were as the principal
had said, then it was nothing, but when it read carefully the words of the
document, it realized that what he was proposing was totally dreadful . . .
In tears, the pig screamed, ‘I won’t do it, I won’t do it, I won’t do it. I simply
won’t do it [iya desu, iya desu, sonnara iya desu. Dōshitemo iya desu].’”49
Unswayed by his handler’s claims, the pig is all too conscious of the gravity
of the principal’s request.
Shortly thereafter an employee assigned to force the pig into submission
begins whipping the animal while himself pacing nonchalantly and whistling
the wartime British marching song “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary.” The pig
is disturbed by this display of indifference:

The whip came down on its back with a snap, and the pain was intol-
erable. The Yorkshire pig could do nothing but flop out of the shed,
but its heart was filled with sadness and as it walked its heart felt as
though it were being ripped apart. As for the assistant, he walked ca-
sually behind the pig whistling Tipperary. The whip swung, dangling
by his side.
How can he sing Tipperary when I’m so full of sadness, wondered
the pig while twisting its mouth . . .
(This life is truly so difficult, so difficult, it’s truly a world of suf-
fering and hardship.) The pig reflected on this carefully while walking
along and being beaten . . .
[The assistant left] smiling and whistling Tipperary. The window
had been left wide open, so the pig suffered from unbearable cold.50

Impersonating an Irishman in London longing for home, an individual who

several times declares that despite the distance “my heart’s right there [at
home],” “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary” is an especially cruel tune to whistle
to a pig destined for slaughter. The Irishman yearns for his land and his love,
 Illusions and Delusions  351

but he can repeat with confidence “Goodbye, Piccadilly, / Farewell, Leicester

Square,” knowing that chances are great he will eventually return home.
The pig, ever contemplative, cannot understand how the employee can be so
heartless as to whistle this tune blithely in its presence.
The succeeding pages of “The Frandon Agricultural School Pig” elabo-
rate on the physical and emotional abuse to which this intelligent animal
has been subjected. People are under the illusion that what they are doing
to the pig matters little. Because its body is not human, it is seen as hardly
more than a piece of merchandise, and the employees of the agricultural
school estimate its value.51 By transcribing the pig’s anguished thoughts, Mi-
yazawa’s story most obviously attempts to increase sympathy for the animal.
If the reader is willing to suspend disbelief, this story for the most part is
convincing. Today’s technology allows people to understand only a minus-
cule fraction of nonhuman languages; people have virtually no access into
one another’s minds, much less into those of animals. Anthropomorphizing
often plays down the traumas animals face, but in Miyazawa’s story it explic-
itly accentuates their pain. This stems from the similarities between the pig’s
thoughts and those readers can imagine themselves having in an analogous
situation. The pig and, the story implies, animals more generally are not so
different from people, at least in desiring freedom from oppression. Yet just
as significant, “The Frandon Agricultural School Pig” reveals the contradic-
tion between human perceptions of their treatments of animals and the ac-
tual pain they suffer. Understanding this contradiction, Miyazawa’s narrative
suggests, is essential to reconfiguring human behaviors vis-à-vis ecosystems.
The indifference of those who exploit environments is treated more subtly
in A Cheng’s “Turnover” (1988). Unlike this Chinese writer’s earlier King
of Trees (1985), discussed in chapter 2, which exposes the environmental
tragedies of the Cultural Revolution, “Turnover” engages with the perennial
problem of trash.52 The narrator gives little indication of when the events he
describes take place, his discourse and title suggesting instead that they are
a never-ending cycle. Place is also nebulous. The opening line of “Turnover”
locates the story in a specific city, Yuyin, which the narrator immediately
claims is “a semi-important city in Xi’nan Province.”53 The story’s spatial
focus belies its broad applicability: Yuyin is an imaginary city and Xi’nan
an imaginary province. Ah Cheng’s story, containing few cultural markers,
in fact addresses environmental conflicts facing urban sites across China and
around the world.
“Turnover” focuses on the creation, collection, transportation, and sal-
vaging of garbage. In the first part of the story the narrator emphasizes the
wastefulness of Yuyin’s residents, who eagerly consume and discard tangible
352  ecoambiguity

items without thinking about the environmental impact. The second part, in
contrast, highlights the gusto with which both the people of Yuyin and those
outside the metropolis salvage the city’s waste from its mountain landfill, lo-
cated thirty miles away. They ponder the origins of this waste, take it home,
and at times resell it back in Yuyin; for these individuals, one person’s trash is
truly another’s treasure. “Turnover” highlights both behavioral and attitudi-
nal contradictions vis-à-vis the natural world. In a classic case of behavioral
ambiguity, the people of Yuyin are portrayed as both extremely wasteful
and extremely resourceful. Similarly, the narrator’s attitude toward tangible
items differs significantly from the attitudes of both urbanites and those who
live closer to the city’s landfill.
But even more important than such disparities is the disjuncture between
how much trash the city can handle in its landfills and people’s indifference
to the afterlives of their rubbish. Likewise, the story suggests that people’s
passion for salvaging trash simply encourages its continued production and
further strains the area’s ecosystems. Although in some ways similar to the
creative works examined in chapter 7, A Cheng’s narrative does not contrast
attitudes about the importance of “greening” environments with behaviors
that compromise environments. Characters in “Turnover” are obsessed with
using and salvaging things, not with improving ecosystems. Stating only that
although impoverished, Yuyin “strives not to be filthy” (wushi qiong er bu-
zang), the narrator gives no indication that the people residing there are envi-
ronmentally conscious.54 Far from protesting the city’s practice of depositing
its garbage so close to their villages, people living in the mountains near
Yuyin eagerly await the refuse trucks. The principal dissonance expressed in
“Turnover” is therefore between the myopic attitudes of the characters to-
ward the life cycles of tangible things (celebrating the mere existence of these
objects, whether new or trashed, and indifferent to the effects of behaviors)
and the long-term implications of such attitudes (overflowing landfills with
too much trash for even the most ardent salvagers).
A Cheng’s story addresses this incongruity implicitly if not explicitly. The
opening paragraph, describing the creation of trash in Yuyin, highlights the
city’s wastefulness:

Eating and drinking go on day and night, and things that can’t go into
people’s mouths are discarded, piling up like mountains [ru shan]. All
sorts of manufacturing thrives there, and materials that aren’t used
are gathered into mountainous piles [ru shan]. In addition, there are
new ways of consuming, both homegrown and imported, that have
to some degree seeped into the city and excited people but that have
 Illusions and Delusions  353

increased assorted garbage. In this way, Yuyin’s daily trash nears one
hundred tons . . . There are many mountains [shan] in Yuyin.55

Garbage piles up like mountains, as do references to it doing so. The ratio

of people to garbage is also revealing: one hundred tons of trash for more
than a million people computes to less than one-fifth of a pound of trash per
person a day. This amount seems both inconsistent with the behaviors that
have just been described, and by itself insignificant. But here and in following
paragraphs the narrator reveals just how rapidly even the smallest per capita
increases can translate into massive overflows.
Fortunately, the narrator comments, as talented as the city is at creating
trash, Yuyin’s greatest strength at present is getting rid of it. The city has
transformed an arid, enclosed valley into a dump several hundred yards deep
and ten miles in diameter, which can hold 10,000 tons of trash. Dozens of
deafening and polluting garbage trucks travel to this landfill daily, discarding
the city’s latest hundred tons of trash. The trucks gallop through the streets
of Yuyin, “shaking heaven and earth” and rendering alarm clocks obsolete;
they parade up a winding road into the mountains, where they frighten dogs,
chickens, and pedestrians; and finally they methodically circle the dump’s
perimeter and disgorge their filthy loads into the mouth of the valley:

The world suddenly falls into silence. A ray of golden light hauls up
the wheel of the sun, the sun that sits precisely in the mountain pass.
Many golden rays then pierce the morning mist and one after the
other shoot at the trucks. Looking as if it’s about to ignite, the orange
paint on the trucks now shines brilliantly, blindingly. A wave of heat
goes through the entire body of each truck. With a great blast dozens
of truck beds gradually begin to rise up to forty-five degrees. Having
a premonition, hundreds of mountain birds let out a yell and soar
into the sky like smoke. The hundred tons of trash gradually begin to
slide, sounding like muffled thunder. Once the trash leaves the trucks
it builds speed and drains straight down the mountain like a water-
fall [bian pubu ban shunshan zhi xiexiaqu]. Obstructed by rocky out-
croppings on its journey, the garbage splashes like spray [ru shuihua
yiyang jiankai], dissolving some of Yuyin’s secrets. The sun’s rays stir
up the trash and gild the mountain slopes with glimmering colors of
every hue. And then smoke and dust seethe, churn, and swirl around,
purplish red and green powder forming colored, low-hanging clouds
in the mountains. After giving their salute, the truck beds gradually
return to their original positions. The trucks move.56
354  ecoambiguity

At first the natural world reigns, morning sun attacking the trucks. But the
nonhuman is quickly overwhelmed. No sooner do the truck beds tilt than
hundreds of mountain birds scream and take flight. Their rise is accompa-
nied by the fall of a hundred tons of trash, this waterfall (pubu) and its
spray (shuihua) nearly overpowering the natural world. Just as mountains of
garbage obscure “real” mountains, so too do garbage waterfalls threaten to
replace their more “natural” counterparts. The sun returns, but only briefly;
it stirs up trash and colors the mountain slopes, but it soon is defeated by
the smoke and powder released by the trash, which color the sky and create
low-hanging clouds.
A Cheng’s narrative claims this dramatic series of events occurs daily, the
enclosed valley treated as a bottomless pit. But its capacity is actually only ten
thousand tons. This might seem quite substantial, but if no trash is removed
from the landfill, it can hold only a hundred days’ worth of refuse. Even if the
people of Yuyin create only three ounces of garbage per person per day, their
garbage pit will quickly overflow. Yet they continue consuming and discarding
trash, under the illusion that there is no risk of running out of space.
Characters in “Turnover” salvage items with the same excitement that
they consume and dispose of them. But salvaging both enables and consid-
erably obscures the inevitable fate of the valley. The narrator detracts at-
tention from the impending overflow by describing how more than a thou-
sand people eagerly await Yuyin’s garbage trucks and, after the garbage has
been unloaded, run down into the landfill faster even than the birds, greatly
frightening the animals. What might be assumed to be a chaotic, unpleasant,
and malodorous experience instead is described as a celebration. People sort
through the trash meticulously, rescuing items of all kinds. Once back at the
top of the valley, they discuss the likely origins of their findings—everything
from love letters to metal scraps—and exchange items they do not want for
themselves. And then, when they no longer can bear the heat, they begin the
long walk home, trash on their backs, attendants at waste-buying stations in
Yuyin eagerly awaiting their arrival. The merriment continues to the end for
both people and their trash:

Trash is the luckiest of all. Coming and going it doesn’t have to rush
or worry. Particularly on the return journey, it sits on a palanquin like
a wealthy man. And it doesn’t get lonely, since people are singing the
whole way.
All the hills are listening to those songs. Trash on their shoulders,
the local people are exceptionally happy. The road is long, after all, so
raising their varied voices, they sing:
 Illusions and Delusions  355

Sun up in the east

Sun down in the west
So good! . . .
Unearth golden fruit
Return home, greet my wife
So fast!
A-hei-hei!57

Delusion brings with it great joy. Removing thousands of pounds of garbage

from the valley each day, these people extend somewhat the life of Yuyin’s
landfill. But their festive mood and paean to the sun belie the very serious
consequences of their existing relationships with tangible items; even if every
person salvaging trash were to remove fifty pounds from the valley each day,
the pit’s life would be prolonged by only about one month. The indifference
of people who produce this trash toward the realities of their landfill enables
continued exploitation. It is likely that the residents of Yuyin do not think
about the limitations of this site because they believe it can contain whatever
they discard; and perhaps they assume that should the valley ever fill up, they
can readily turn another bodyscape into a second landfill. On the other hand,
a comment early in the text suggests that the latter is easier said than done;
the narrator indicates that the geological formation the people of Yuyin now
are using as their landfill is somewhat of a rarity. The paradox persists, unre-
solved and probably irresolvable.
Some texts—including the Japanese writer Hoshi Shin’ichi’s “He–y,
Come on Ou–t”—parody indifference to environmental degradation even
more forcefully.58 This short-short story features a mysterious opening in
the ground that is discovered after a typhoon sweeps away a small moun-
tain shrine. Although only one meter across, this fantastic cavity appears
infinitely deep. Delighted that they have discovered seemingly limitless space
for their waste, people rapidly transform the hole into a repository for ev-
erything from photographs of former lovers to classified documents, forensic
evidence, bodies of deceased vagrants and animals used in contagious disease
experiments, and, most notably, nuclear waste. The narrator indicates that
residents of both the village and a nearby city harbor some concern about the
long-term effects of these behaviors. But villagers are appeased with assur-
ances that “there would be absolutely no above-ground damage for several
thousand years.”59 They also are promised a portion of the profits of the
newly created hole-filling company, so they give their approval. Although
the opening gives city dwellers a “sense of peace,” they are said to “dislike
thinking about how things would wind up.”60 So instead they “do nothing
356  ecoambiguity

but zealously produce one thing after another . . . aiming at the heavens, new
buildings are constructed, one after the other.”61 People believe that the cav-
ity not only solves current waste disposal dilemmas but also will resolve any
problems that it itself creates.
“He–y, Come on Ou–t” is clearly a parody of the human obsession with
production and consumption: people attempt to allay fears about the conse-
quences of such behaviors on environments by intensifying rather than tem-
pering them. This story also parodies the illusion that there is no human be-
havior the nonhuman cannot endure. Even more important, it calls attention
to a frequent yet overlooked enabler of this perception: environments that
not only fail to provide any obvious physical evidence of damage but also ap-
pear to have improved. Unlike Miyazawa’s story, where the pig’s suffering is
readily visible to those who abuse the animal, or A Cheng’s narrative, where
the gradually rising garbage level should be apparent to those who gener-
ate and salvage trash, people in Hoshi’s text cannot physically observe the
consequences of their behavior until it is too late.62 Instead, they notice that
environments seem in better condition than before. As the narrator remarks:
“People thought this was preferable to throwing trash into the ocean . . .
No matter what one wished to throw out, the hole accepted it all [nandemo
hikiuketekureta]. The hole flushed out the city’s pollution [ana wa, tokai
no yogore o arainagashitekureta]. The seas and the skies looked as though
they had cleared up a bit [ikura ka sundekita].”63 But the story’s conclusion,
echoing the scene of the hole’s initial discovery, suggests that even though the
sky is clear blue and the horizon grows ever more beautiful, the earth itself
has begun to resemble the garbage hole people had hoped would accept their
refuse into eternity. Early in the story a young man looks into the opening,
shouts “He–y, come on ou–t,” throws in a pebble, and is met with silence;
the story similarly concludes with a construction worker high atop the frame
of a new building who hears a voice shouting “He–y, come on ou–t.” A peb-
ble follows from the skies, but, “idly gazing at the city’s increasingly beautiful
skyline, the man failed to notice.”64 Even if he had noticed this lone stone, it
is unlikely he would have recognized its significance.
Miyazawa Kenji’s “The Frandon Agricultural School Pig” focuses on the
plight of a single pig at an imaginary agricultural school, A Cheng’s “Turn-
over” on the movement of trash between a fictional city and its landfill, and
Hoshi Shin’ichi’s “He–y, Come on Ou–t” on the accumulation of trash in a
single, fantastic cavity. But all three narratives have much broader signifi-
cance. Revealing the actual and potential consequences of people’s indiffer-
ence toward how their behaviors affect ecosystems, these works paint a so-
 Illusions and Delusions  357

bering and ambiguous picture of past, present, and potential human shaping
of the nonhuman.

Culture, Civilization, and Damaged Environments

Creative and other discourse on environments has long negotiated the com-
plex relationships between “nature” and “culture”/“civilization.” Some
texts, such as the Jamaican writer Olive Senior’s poem “Seeing the Light,”
depict the two as completely incompatible:

Gardening in the Tropics nowadays means

letting in light: they’ve brought in machines
that can lay waste hundreds of hectares
in one day . . .
The animals are gone too . . .
By the time they’ve cut
the last tree in the jungle only our bones
Will remain as testament to this effort to bring
light (though in their chronicles they might have
recorded it by another name: Conquista?
Evangelismo? Civilización?)65

Others, such as the Taiwanese writer Yu Guangzhong’s essay “Shatian

shanju” (Shatin Mountain Residence, 1974), attempt to depict “culture” as
comfortably ensconced in “nature” and even adding to its allure.66 Celebrat-
ing Hong Kong’s Shatin Mountains and claiming to have become a “moun-
tain man,” the first-person narrator describes deep connections with the non-
human world:

The blue mountains and green waters, I never get tired of looking at
them . . . Let the wind blow, let the eagles fly, let my blurred sight ex-
tend and go back and forth. As for me, I’ve been in the middle of this,
looking down at earth and up at heaven, breathing sunrise and sunset
. . . People ask why I stay in the emerald mountains. I smile but don’t
respond. The mountains have already answered [da le] for me. In fact,
it’s not the mountains that have answered [huida]. It’s the birds that
answered [da le] for the mountains, it’s the insects, it’s the winds in the
pines that answered [da le] for the mountains.67
358  ecoambiguity

The wonders of the landscape speak, literally, for themselves; it is readily ap-
parent why the narrator chooses to live here.
But in truth, he is not as isolated as the opening of his essay implies. He
eventually reveals that he not only basks daily in the wonders of the country-
side but also commutes to the art school of United College at The Chinese
University of Hong Kong. Talk quickly returns to the wonders of the land-
scape surrounding his home and glorious mountain sunsets. But with the end
of the essay approaching, the narrator begins commenting on the presence
of human cultural artifacts within proximate landscapes, some of which he
claims to be seeing for the first time. He again attempts to return to describ-
ing the nonhuman but is soon lured back, claiming: “Even if they shake the
world, all tides and the sounds of the wind are really doing is adding a little
excitement and rustic charm to the boundless quiet of the countryside. The
noises that most fascinate the bottom of the human heart are made by human
beings [renwei de saoyin].”68 The narrator romanticizes the trains that run
between sea and mountains from morning to night. Even today, these “vet-
eran conveyances of the industrial age retain the enchanting affect of the old
world, hauling flowing hair of black smoke and winding slender, thirteen-car
figures.”69 Neither the trailing hair-like smoke nor the iron and steel sparks
described elsewhere disturb the region’s ecosystems. Instead, the narrator of
“Shatin Mountain Residence” indicates that when he looks out from his deck
he sees mountains, green mountains everywhere, their layers folding one into
another. He admits to spotting smoke but claims that it is overwhelmed by the
mountains and the waters. This space has been home to 5,000 years of Chi-
nese history and billions of Chinese people, but its greenery allegedly endures.
Yu Guangzhong’s essay suggests that apathy regarding the actual resil-
ience of environments to the incursions of modern society significantly en-
hances the belief that ecosystems can sustain human behaviors, no matter
how excessive; “Shatin Mountain Residence” does not itself speak of eco-
logical degradation, but 1970s Hong Kong, like other parts of East Asia,
suffered from numerous environmental ills and was hardly the paradise Yu
Guangzhong describes. In contrast, many creative works explicitly condemn
striving for “culture” or “civilization” not only for playing a central role in
degrading environments but also for encouraging illusions that this degrada-
tion is necessary and will not adversely affect human futures.70 These texts
generally use the terms “culture” and “civilization” without precision, but
they often are euphemisms for modern, industrial societies, societies that are
dedicated to creating ever-more sophisticated artifacts but that are founded
on destroying both human and nonhuman lives. Creative works expose peo-
 Illusions and Delusions  359

ple as believing themselves civilized but in many ways as being anything but.
They implicitly put forward the problem Rachel Carson addresses directly
in Silent Spring: “Incidents like the eastern Illinois spraying [of the Japanese
beetle] raise a question that is not only scientific but moral. The question is
whether any civilization can wage relentless war on life without destroying
itself, and without losing the right to be called civilized.”71 These texts, like
many others engaging with environmental issues, also suggest that “civiliza-
tion” has not been worth the high human and nonhuman cost.72
Some writings, including the Korean author Ko Ŭn’s poem “Pŏpsŏngp’o
e sŏ” (At Pŏpsŏngp’o, 1991), directly chastise societies for destroying ev-
erything in the name of civilization. Others, including the Korean writer
Ch’oe Sŭngho’s “Mulso kajuk kabang” (Buffalo Hide Bags, 2005), depict
civilizations as profiting from unnecessary human-induced ecodegradation.
But many more texts portray the destruction of the nonhuman as deeply
intertwined with that of human civilizations, despite people’s frequent per-
ceptions to the contrary. These include the Korean writer Chŏng Hyŏnjong’s
poem “Kip’ŭn hŭlk” (Deep Soil, 1992), the Japanese writer Sakaki Nanao’s
poem “Nihonjin no senzo” (Ancestors of the Japanese, 1986), the Korean
writer Ch’oe Sŭngja’s poem “Yŏŭido kwangsigok” (Rhapsody of Yŏŭido,
1984), and most dramatically the Chinese writer Wang Lixiong’s three-vol-
ume novel Yellow Peril (1991).
Ko Ŭn’s brief poem “At Pŏpsŏngp’o”—sited at a port on the western
coast of Korea’s South Chŏlla Province, in the country’s southwest corner—
scathingly critiques human destruction of life in the names of culture and
civilization while admitting that there might be no alternative.73 The text
begins with an individual being forced into the ocean by the darkness (ŏdum)
of “life that loathes light” (pich’ŭl miwŏhanŭn saengmyŏng) but rescued by
strong waves that push him back, declaring, “Not you! / Not you!” (nŏnŭn
andwae).74 These lines are repeated at the end of the poem, where the speaker
reiterates the ocean’s message to him, “Not you! // The depths of the sea also
rejected me / Not you!” Sandwiched between the rejections is a fundamen-
tal question followed by a blanket excoriation of human behaviors: “What
should human beings [in’gan] do? / Until now human beings [in’gan] / kill-
ing everything / have called it culture or civilization [hogŭn munhwa hogŭn
munmyŏng].” Although its title refers to a specific place in Korea, Ko Ŭn’s
poem speaks of people in general. “At Pŏpsŏngp’o” depicts culture/civiliza-
tion as primarily concerned not with creation but instead with destruction.
Even more disparagingly, the text suggests that “killing everything” and mis-
labeling what comes after as culture/civilization might be the only behaviors
360  ecoambiguity

people can envision. Emboldened by the perceived importance of their acts,

humans—even those who are assaulted by the same darkness that the poem
depicts as destroying everything—are at a loss to do otherwise.75
Much more specific about how human societies rely unnecessarily on
nonhuman death are creative texts such as the Korean writer Ch’oe Sŭngho’s
“Buffalo Hide Bags,” which describes bison being slaughtered and processed
for people’s consumption; these animals are reincarnated not only as pack-
aged meat but also as leather bags that hold the papers of treacherous gov-
ernment officials and company employees. The poem opens by declaring,
“Civilization needs your death” (munmyŏngen nŏ ŭi chugŭm i p’ilyo hada)
followed by several lines that explain just how civilization—here in the guise
of various industries—uses dead buffalo:

Civilization needs your death

When your bones
are smashed into cow bones for industry
and your body is split up into packaged meat
workers in the leather factory
will begin to tan and dye your hide

buffalo
graves of hides, exhibited in display windows76

The opening two stanzas of “Buffalo Hide Bags” depict civilization as origi-
nating in behaviors that could be considered decidedly uncivilized—pulver-
izing bones, tearing apart bodies, and reshaping skin for shop windows. Like
the whale meat depicted in Ch’oe Sŭngho’s poem “In the Refrigerated City,”
these origins naturally are concealed when the reconfigured buffalo are put
on display as hides.
Echoing the poem’s opening line, the first line of the third stanza—
“Civilization needs your appetite” (munmyŏngen nŏ ŭi sigyogi p’ilyohada)—
asserts that society needs not just the bison’s death but also its hunger. The
following lines explain that just like the living animal, bags made of its hide
must swell with all manner of materials; range grasses are replaced by sheaves
of documents and company and personal seals. People rely on the large ca-
pacity of buffalo bags to conceal the evidence of their various schemes, in-
cluding murder. So dependent are people on buffalo that the animals are
implicated in these plots, the poem claiming, “You [buffalo] now participate
in murder conspiracies.”77 This change of roles has taken its toll on the buf-
 Illusions and Delusions  361

falo, the third stanza concluding: “Your numbers swell with that of / merce-
naries holding bags / company employees holding bags.” Civilizations profit
directly from the unnecessary slaughter of these animals.
Most telling in this regard is the final stanza, which contains the poem’s
third reference to civilization and a clear parody of it: “Oh iron-horned,
powerful civilization / strike down and kill buffalo with bags.” Buffalo trans-
formed into cultural products are themselves expected to murder other buf-
falo on the assumption that their numbers easily can withstand such treat-
ment. But when in the third stanza the poem speaks of numbers swelling,
it is referring to numbers of buffalo-hide bags, not to numbers of buffalo,
since the latter decrease as the former increase. “Buffalo Hide Bags” ridicules
“civilization” for relying on both the appetite and the death of the buffalo;
the buffalo’s numbers being numbered, it is likely that this dependence and
thus perhaps even civilization itself will no longer be sustainable.
Speaking more explicitly about the flimsiness of human creations if not
industrial civilizations are texts such as the Korean writer Chŏng Hyŏnjong’s
deceptively simple “Deep Soil.”78 The opening, middle, and closing stanzas
of this five-stanza poem contrast the physical and spiritual depth of both the
natural world and earlier human societies with the shallowness of modern in-
frastructure, while the second and fourth stanzas point alternatively to dam-
age to the nonhuman and to its resistance. Whereas Chŏng Hyŏnjong’s poem
“Death God,” discussed in chapter 5, depicted a city drowning in asphalt,
the flimsy pavement of “Deep Soil” is confined to a rural road:

When it was a dirt road, the ascending road

was deep, deep.
After it was paved,
the depth disappeared from that road.

Forest spirits have also disappeared.

Deep soil
flimsy asphalt.

Animal convenience
human inconvenience

Deep nature
shallow civilization79
362  ecoambiguity

Using asphalt as synecdoche of industrial civilization and soil as synecdoche

of the nonhuman, “Deep Soil” explicitly contrasts the shallowness and su-
perficiality of the former with the physical and spiritual depth of the latter. At
the same time, the poem confirms that modernizing infrastructure necessarily
damages environments; while deep dirt roads are at least somewat rooted in
nature and can be relatively undisruptive to local ecosystems, even physically
shallow manifestations of industrial civilization such as “flimsy asphalt” can
cause significant destruction.
“Deep Soil” notes that asphalt, applied to the ground in thin layers, has
nowhere near the thickness of the soil it covers. But Chŏng Hyŏnjong’s poem
also indicates that its impact on the ground is more than its physical depth
would suggest. The first stanza states that paving the road destroyed its thick-
ness. This line can be interpreted in several ways. Most simply, now that the
road is paved, its top layer is nowhere near as thick as before. More impor-
tant, the poem suggests that with the paving of the dirt road—a relatively
harmonious contact space between people and the nonhuman—the natural
world has also been affected. This reading is substantiated in the following
line, which declares that “the forest spirits have also disappeared.” Although
the poem does not say so explicitly, the absence of “forest spirits” (sup’ŭi
chŏngnyŏngdŭl) suggests that notable damage has been inflicted on the forest
itself. Regardless, the text makes it clear that paving the road has done more
than simply cover soil: asphalt readily leaches chemicals into the ground,
fouling spaces well beyond the visible. This is not surprising, considering that
mountain roads can cause more damage to local ecosystems than other parts
of the built environment.80
Chŏng Hyŏnjong’s fourth stanza speaks intriguingly of “animal con-
venience / human inconvenience” (chimsŭngsŭrŏn py’ŏlli / saramdaun
pulp’yŏn). These lines suggest that despite what people have done to the soil,
they are the ones who are ultimately inconvenienced, not their nonhuman
counterparts. “Deep Soil” here implies that human damage of environments,
damage done to increase the convenience of daily (human) life, could have
been much worse. Instead, with soil still covering far more ground than as-
phalt, ecosystems remain more “convenient” for animals than they do for
people. Convenience does not imply health, but it does indicate a certain
amount of resilience. Thus when the poem concludes simply “deep nature
/ shallow civilization,” it is unclear whether the term “shallow” (yat’ŭn
munmyŏng) refers not only to the physical and spiritual depth/resilience of
human civilization but also to the overall human shaping of environments.
While in the third stanza the term “flimsy” belies the effect of asphalt on sur-
rounding landscapes, the term “shallow” in the final stanza could be taken
 Illusions and Delusions  363

more literally. Even so, by calling attention to superficial and flimsy human
civilization, as well as to the damage to the nonhuman inflicted in the name
of civilization, “Deep Soil” points to the potential degeneration of both.
This intertwining is more explicit in Sakaki Nanao’s poem “Ancestors of
the Japanese,” a scathing indictment of Japanese for abusing landscapes both
at home and abroad as well as a satire of the destruction of these spaces, and
ultimately the human societies that inhabit them, for the sake of happiness,
future generations, and above all “culture” (bunka). “Ancestors of the Japa-
nese” begins with an intoxicated man in a spotless, explicitly cockroach-free
kitchen announcing, “Ainu are the ancestors of Japanese.”81 In the following
stanza the poem declares this claim absurd. Instead, it argues, “The ancestors
of the Japanese are neither the Ainu nor Americans / they are cockroaches.”
Likening contemporary Japanese to these resilient insects that feed on almost
everything, and distinguishing them from both indigenous Japanese and rela-
tively recent foreign arrivals, the poem’s third stanza alleges that in Hokkaido
there now are villages that, in order to create a joyous society, consume even
the most lethal substances. These include radioactive waste, which comes to
Hokkaido from other parts of Japan; only one of Japan’s dozens of nuclear
power plants is located on its northern island, and this plant (in the village
of Tomari, on Hokkaido’s southwestern seacoast) did not begin commercial
operation until June 1989, three years after Sakaki wrote the poem:

Collapse of Ainu peace,

now in Hokkaido
there are communities that say
let’s make a cheerful happy society [akaruku tanoshii shakai
o tsukurō to]
that eats even the irradiated
garbage of nuclear power plants.

“Ancestors of the Japanese” does not specify whether the Ainu are the only
people in Hokkaido consuming radioactive waste (i.e., food that has been
tainted by this waste) or whether other Japanese there eat a similar diet and
have their tranquility destroyed as well. The poem also leaves open several
troubling possibilities: villages seeking a happy society are voluntarily con-
suming poisonous substances, under the illusion that this will help build
such a community on a national scale; villages working hardest to establish a
peaceful society ironically are the most poisoned; villagers are echoing official
Japanese rhetoric that justifies poisoning sparsely populated spaces and mi-
nority populations in order to create a harmonious, peaceful national society.
364  ecoambiguity

Possibly communities in Hokkaido have become convinced they must

bear this burden for the whole of Japanese society and have donated space
in their towns for waste depositories. Far more likely is that garbage from
elsewhere in Japan has been foisted on Hokkaido’s villages, leaving residents
little choice but to ingest the chemicals that leach from this refuse into the is-
land’s water, soil, vegetation (including crops), animals, and ultimately them-
selves. Even so, exhibiting exceptional tenacity, they remain determined to
create a cheerful society. It is also likely that in doing so they are mimicking
official Japanese rhetoric. Declaring that Ainu peace has collapsed (Ainutachi
no heiwa yabure), “Ancestors of the Japanese” highlights the ludicrousness
of the common argument that environmental destruction is the unavoidable
price of human bliss. Sakaki’s poem implies that the people who ingest poi-
son might be propagating the contention, however sarcastically, that pollu-
tion is a small price to pay for happiness. This shows just how far the Japa-
nese “cockroaches” have extended their reach and suggests just how deeply
such arguments can infiltrate human consciousness.
In the following stanzas, “Ancestors of the Japanese” gives some idea of
the physical and ecological breadth of Japanese-induced destruction; reveal-
ing the global reach of Japan’s environmental damage, the poem describes
how Japanese have plundered landscapes elsewhere in the archipelago, in
other parts of Asia, and in South America. It also offers another justification
for environmental destruction. Whereas radioactive waste was dumped in
Hokkaido and consumed by communities on the island purportedly to cre-
ate social concord, forests are leveled, rare animals and plants are devoured,
and land and water are devastated around the world allegedly for the sake
of Japan’s children:

There are government offices that suck to the bone

the woods called national forests
the treasures of all.
Even that being insufficient on the other side of the ocean
seeking toilet paper
they infest the Amazon jungle
swarms of Japanese cockroaches

They live in flower gardens of oil and plastics,

and from the Korean peninsula
50 billion yen of Matsutake mushrooms on which to smack lips,
and from China
 Illusions and Delusions  365

mamushi 10 million of the aphrodisiacal animal

cockroaches 100 million middle class Japanese

building the future for children

ground overflowing with agrochemicals
rivers and lakes of sludge
leaving behind the burial grounds of coral reefs
adults working energetically.82

Finding their own forests insufficient and filling even their gardens with oil
and plastics, the Japanese plunder Amazonian jungles for materials to pro-
duce such staples as toilet paper.83 They also purchase from Korea such luxu-
ries as the highly prized and extremely expensive Matsutake mushroom and
from China millions of poisonous snakes valued as love potions.84
The next stanza speaks of damaged, even destroyed land and water. Not
specifying the location of the devastated bodies, the poem—summarizing
what the Japanese have done to diverse ecosystems—suggests that they are
found globally. Soaked with irony, “Ancestors of the Japanese” alleges that
all this has been done “energetically” (genki de) in the name of “building the
future for children” (mirai o kizuku kodomora no tame). What people
fail to comprehend fully, the poem suggests, is that leaving their descendants
soil suffused with agrochemicals, severely polluted rivers and lakes, and coral
reefs in shambles is at best guaranteeing them years of environmental recov-
ery, should they wish to use these spaces productively, and at worst a planet
with ever-shrinking habitable space. The concern of Japanese adults for the
welfare of future generations, it is clear, is as shallow as their concern for
their ecosystems.
Justifying environmental disruption in order to create a cheerful society
and benefit future generations leads to asserting that destruction is necessary
to realize the cultured life, expressed in the concluding stanza:

Now living up to
the glorious Japanese constitution
for the happy cultural life
more koalas
more missiles.

Here “Ancestors of the Japanese” ridicules the Japanese for their claim that
more koalas for their zoos (relocating animals) and more missiles for their
366  ecoambiguity

arsenals (putting both people and animals at greater risk) will allow them
not only to live up to the expectations of their nation’s “glorious constitu-
tion” (kōeiaru / Nihonkoku kenpō ni nottori) but also to lead a “happy” and
“cultural” life (kōfukude bunkateki na seikatsu no tame). The poem no-
tably refrains from speaking of actual as opposed to sought-after happiness.
Japanese are described as living in “flower gardens of oil and plastics” and as
working “energetically,” not actually as being content.
Sakaki’s poem depicts Japanese as more successful with establishing cul-
ture than with attaining human happiness or ecological balance, although
the “culture” that has been achieved is not without problems. “Ancestors of
the Japanese” emphasizes that this “culture” depends on devastated ecosys-
tems. Producing toilet paper, plastics, and oil, three basics of contemporary
life, wreaks considerable damage on environments near and far. The poem
suggests that the same is true of Matsutake mushrooms and mamushi, which
despite their great expense are claimed to be part of the lives of most Japa-
nese.85 In addition to highlighting the inseparability of Japanese “culture”
and damaged environments, “Ancestors of the Japanese” also preempts any
claim that this culture is attractive, much less illustrious. It suggests that a so-
ciety founded on destruction, no matter how glorious its achievements, is not
something to be desired.86 Sakaki’s poem gives no alternatives. It portrays
Japanese claims that ecosystems are being destroyed to achieve happiness
and culture as at best misguided and at worst nearly diabolical.
The coda of “Ancestors of the Japanese” depicts a space that has been
relatively spared: “An ancient forest of red Hokkaido pines / a brown bear
looking at the moon.” This bear is simply looking, not howling at the moon
like Hagiwara Sakutarō’s sick, terrified, and plaintive canine in the acclaimed
Tsuki ni hoeru (Howling at the Moon, 1917); there is no sign in Sakaki’s
text that anything is amiss. And, not coincidentally, the old-growth forest in
which it stands is where poetry is being created; the coda is followed by the
place-stamp “Shokanbetsu sanchi, Hokkaido.” But does composing poetry
in Shokanbetsu sanchi, to which the writer has imported literary culture, in
some ways signal the beginning of the end for both? Poetry can be one of
the least obviously destructive forms of human culture, but is it entirely in-
nocuous? Describing a brown bear looking at the moon does not put either
the bear or the writer in immediate danger. But it does point to untapped
resources for which modern societies frequently hunger and when exploited
can jeopardize the future of human, not to mention nonhuman life.
As with “Ancestors of the Japanese,” the Korean writer Ch’oe Sŭngja’s
lengthy poem “Rhapsody of Yŏŭido” acerbically highlights the senselessness
and despair of human existence, ridiculing Koreans for deluding themselves
that they are cultured because of their metropolitan attitudes, behaviors,
 Illusions and Delusions  367

and lifestyles.87 Yŏŭi Island (Kr. Yŏŭido), often called Korea’s Manhattan,
is Seoul’s largest island and home to South Korea’s stock exchange and the
headquarters of numerous corporations, banks, and broadcasters. Also the
location of South Korea’s National Assembly, this island is a frequent site of
political protests. Now protected from the waters of the Han River by dikes
and boasting some of Seoul’s most valuable real estate, Yŏŭido for centuries
was used as farmland. During the colonial period the Japanese built an air-
field there, but it was not until the late 1960s that large-scale construction
began. Ch’oe Sŭngja’s poem argues that this “culture” of incessant consump-
tion and production injures both people and the nonhuman; like much Ko-
rean verse on devastated environments, from its opening section “Rhapsody
of Yŏŭido” integrates portrayals of human anguish with scenes of damaged
landscapes. In addition, the poem concludes its first, fourth, and sixth (and
final) sections with ironic declarations about Yŏŭido’s status as “bread of
heaven” (ch’ŏnsang ŭi ppang). “Rhapsody of Yŏŭido” converts the bibli-
cal “bread of heaven”—sent down by God to nourish starving people both
physically (e.g., Exodus 16; Psalms 78, 105) and spiritually, in the form of
Jesus (e.g., John 6)—into a polluted, fermenting, swelling mass. By doing
so, the poem accentuates the enormity of environmental destruction: people
have devastated the one thing that can save them, both physically and spiritu-
ally. The poem also accentuates conflicts between perceptions and empirical
evidence. People might believe this island is the “bread of heaven,” in that it
has brought wealth to so many, but they have transformed it into something
that quickly risks becoming the hellish world of shantytowns and trash so
graphically portrayed in the Turkish writer Latife Tekin’s novel Berci Kristin
çöp Masalları (Berji Kristin: Tales from the Garbage Hills, 1984), published
the same year.88
The opening stanza of “Rhapsody of Yŏŭido” likens protestors swarm-
ing across Wŏnhyo Bridge to heavenly dough in the process of fermenting; in
contrast, the fourth and sixth sections of the poem use the same metaphor to
describe the island’s rising trash heaps. People are replaced, if not buried, by
their garbage, which appears to have overtaken the island. The poem’s first
stanza concludes:

Gradually fermenting in the sunlight of noxious pigments

gigantic lump of dough, beginning to ferment
       —Yŏŭido bread [여의도는 거룩한]
         of the sacred heavens [天上의 빵].89

Here the dough is only starting to ferment, but it soon will begin rising un-
controllably. Following sections reveal people and landscapes as horribly dis-
torted, Ch’oe Sŭngja maximizing graphic language and imagery by speaking
368  ecoambiguity

of people walking around with “hearts, genitals, and anuses / hanging on

their faces.”90 By the conclusion of the poem, this bread gyrates frenziedly:

Yŏŭido, lying on its back,

is a giant myriopod.
Neon signs are attached to the end of each of its innumerable feet
and it wiggles tens of thousands of its toes toward the sky
its mouth that from morning to night has eaten all manner of filth
quietly vomits it up like crab’s froth

In the deepest part of Yŏŭido’s void

its dark gigantic mouth that assumes the shape of God [神의 형상]
chews on the remaining bones of this world.
   —Yŏŭido bread [여의도는 거룩한]
       of the sacred heavens [天上의 빵].91

Equating the island with an insect that tirelessly flashes infinite numbers of
neon lights and gorges itself on human waste, these stanzas reveal some of
the contradictions of civilization: tremendous glitter (Yŏŭido’s swarms of
brightly lit skyscrapers, which like those of most densely built cities resem-
ble a supine insect with flashy footwear) accompanied by endlessly swelling
garbage mounds. The waste that civilizations produce can be ingested by
the nonhuman, but it cannot be sufficiently digested. So it is spewed forth,
increasing the volume of the island and burying it even more deeply in gar-
bage. No part of this landmass is spared; even its most remote corners are
described as diligently chomping away on scraps.
More critical of the injuries people have inflicted on their environments
is the first stanza of the poem’s fourth section, which explicitly addresses the
question of culture:

Time flows efficiently, efficiently by itself

Look! Atop our garbage heaps,
atop the reeking and profound culture’s oven [구린내도 그윽한
문화의 오븐 위에서],
rapidly spread odor
hugely swelling and rising Yŏŭido
       —Yŏŭido bread [여의도는 거대한]
         of the colossal heavens [天上의 빵]92

Here the text not only satirizes perceptions that the island is heavenly bread,
capable of nourishing all who hunger, but also exposes the underside of
contemporary Korean lifestyles, which create and cook (shape) this bread
(waste); the oven of culture has replaced that of spirituality. Korean culture
 Illusions and Delusions  369

is at once “reeking” (kurinnae) and “profound” (kŭŭk), its sleek buildings

unable to mask either their trash or ultimately their gradual self-burial as
garbage continues to pile up and threatens to plug the spaces between edi-
fices. Ch’oe Sŭngja’s text portrays the destruction of ecosystems as deeply
intertwined with the demise of Korean culture. Fooling themselves that the
landscape can sustain behaviors intended to advance their civilization, people
jeopardize the future of both human and nonhuman lives.
“Rhapsody of Yŏŭido” vividly depicts a society nearly oblivious that it is
charging into oblivion. Even more dramatic, although somewhat less color-
ful, is the Chinese writer Wang Lixiong’s novel Yellow Peril, which was first
published anonymously in Taipei and Port Credit, Ontario in 1991.93 This
lengthy work is a scathing critique both of China’s increasing materialism
instigated by Deng Xiaoping’s post–Cultural Revolution economic reforms,
imagined correctly in the novel as reaching into the twenty-first century, and
of the individuals and groups protesting these policies.94 Deng’s market-ori-
ented reforms reopened China to the world and were responsible for the
nation’s sustained economic growth beginning in the 1980s, but they also
substantially increased gaps between rich and poor. The protests that resulted
in the June Fourth Incident (Tiananmen Square demonstrations, 1989) were
led in good part by labor groups incensed at these inequalities and ensu-
ing corruption; egalitarian socialists angered at the materialism of China’s
market-oriented policies also played an important role, as did student groups
seeking wider access to global information.
Wang Lixiong’s novel begins with people drowning not in garbage but in
water, dikes along the Yellow River breaching at the turn of the twenty-first
century; the novel concludes with human civilizations and much of the non-
human destroyed not long thereafter. The novel highlights numerous forms of
environmental ambiguity. Among the most significant is the contrast between
the view that no matter how much people abuse their environments they will
always have sufficient nonhuman resources to maintain their lifestyles and the
reality that environments cannot indefinitely withstand human abuse. Yellow
Peril takes up the alleged Chinese delusion that society’s efficiency at exploit-
ing resources will keep pace with population growth. The novel contrasts this
outlook with the actuality that ecosystems are already so compromised that
a sudden, large-scale catastrophe in China risks destroying human life world-
wide. Featuring floods that devastate parts of China and nuclear attacks that
annihilate multiple spaces, Yellow Peril illustrates worst-case yet not entirely
unimaginable scenarios. The text focuses on human tragedy, but throughout
it links human predicaments to destruction of landscapes.
The title of Wang Lixiong’s novel refers to the terror—felt by many Amer-
icans and Europeans, especially after Japan’s victory over China in the Sino-
370  ecoambiguity

Japanese War (1894–95)—of increased contact with East Asians; the term
“Yellow Peril” evokes a horde of Asians ready to invade white nations and
take jobs from white workers.95 The yellow peril became a popular theme in
European and American fiction, with the British writers Matthew Phipps Shiel
and Rudyard Kipling, the American writer Jack London, and many of their
contemporaries imagining East Asians taking over the world.96 As William
F. Wu has noted, “these xenophobic novels . . . [show the United States as]
seriously threatened, clearly doomed, or destroyed.”97 Wang Lixiong’s novel
similarly portrays events in China as ultimately harming the entire planet.
But in a notable reversal of their role in much Western yellow-peril fiction,
Chinese in Wang Lixiong’s Yellow Peril leave their country as impoverished
emigrants to foreign lands, not as conquerors. Human civilizations collapse
worldwide because of Chinese weakness, not because of Chinese strength.
Wang Lixiong’s novel presents global civilization as so unstable that
a single deluge can bring it to destruction. The narrator describes deadly
flooding along the Yellow River caused by record rainfalls, compounded by
breaks in dikes neglected by people who took city jobs that more obviously
enhanced “civilization.” Nearly twenty million people have been displaced,
far too many to be absorbed into neighboring provinces. This humanitarian
crisis triggers increasingly severe calamities including a Chinese civil war, the
nuclear annihilation of Taipei, a Taiwanese atomic strike meant for Beijing
but instead hitting Russia, and nuclear attacks on China by the United Na-
tions to destroy its nuclear capability. Hundreds of millions of Chinese are
forced to emigrate to Russia, Europe, Australia, the United States, and Latin
America. The ensuing chaos is unprecedented and nearly unimaginable; Rus-
sia and the United States engage in nuclear war, firing nearly 3,000 missiles
at one another. Nuclear strikes detonate around the world, with Iraq, Israel,
Pakistan, and India taking advantage of the melee to act on long-standing
rivalries. Recognizing that it cannot survive the impending nuclear winter
without adequate food supplies, the United States occupies Australia and
Latin America, while Russia attacks Europe with nuclear missiles and oc-
cupies Africa and South Asia. There is nothing anyone can do to ward off
further destruction. Ecosystems everywhere are obliterated:

The nuclear winter destroyed agricultural production the world over.

Livestock died in large numbers because herbage stopped growing and
the seasons were out of order. Marine products were sharply reduced
because the rivers, lakes, and seas grew colder. Even when the nuclear
winter had passed, it had a long-term influence on the climate.98

Lacking environments to sustain their people and manage their militaries,

states tumble one after another.
 Illusions and Delusions  371

Those who manage to survive have no choice but to craft lifestyles that
demand far less of their landscapes, attaining a balance that for centuries had
proved elusive. But theirs are revealed as only temporary solutions. Near the
end of the novel the narrator warns that it might be too late for ecosystems
and thus human civilizations to recover:

Civilization [wenming] was being destroyed on a large scale, people

were dying in large numbers . . . Would human society become com-
pletely extinct? Or would it regress more than 1,000 years? When
would a new equilibrium emerge? Or would the collapse be total?
Is there any possibility that things could turn around? Or even com-
pletely new life grow out of old decomposing organisms? These ques-
tions still before us that no one can answer.99

Unlike in Hoshi Shin’ichi’s short-short story “The Present,” discussed in chap-

ter 4, there is no assurance that total collapse will be followed by complete
recovery, or indeed by any regeneration at all. Instead, the narrator follows
his questions on everything from complete extinction to regression, equilib-
rium, utter annihilation, recovery, and ultimately entirely new life (quanxin
de shengming)—by declaring: “These [are] questions still before us that no
one can answer” (zhei shang shu yanqian shei ye huida bu liao de wenti).
In his preface to the English translation of Yellow Peril (China Tidal
Wave, 2008), published nearly two decades after its Chinese predecessor,
Wang Lixiong admits that the novel presents a vision of China’s future very
different from what actually has transpired; China enjoys far more stability
in the first decade of the twenty-first century than he had predicted. But he
also asserts that China’s single-party regime, like all authoritarian states, will
collapse and therefore that “the ‘Yellow Peril’ is not far distant and may oc-
cur at any moment.”100 On the other hand, reaching out to readers accessing
his book in translation, Wang Lixiong asserts that there is still time to stave
off annihilation. He concludes the preface: “I had always hoped that West-
erners would be able to read [the novel], not only because other countries
apart from China are bound up with the events I have described. But also
because the people of the whole world can help prevent the catastrophe for
China and the world from happening.”101 Interesting here is how Wang Lix-
iong seems at once to suggest that “Western readers” are the only ones who
do not understand the planet’s plight and therefore need such a book and
also to conflate “Western readers” with “the whole world.” In addition, not
only does Yellow Peril concern itself with the future of the world, it demands
the concern of individuals everywhere. The body of Wang Lixiong’s novel
implicates all people, while one of its introductions insists that people must
participate in efforts to forestall the very disasters described.
372  ecoambiguity

Yellow Peril suggests that although arrogance or ignorance can create

calamitous chasms between perceptions and actual conditions, awareness of
these chasms, particularly by outsiders, might allow for behavioral changes
that will improve human and nonhuman futures. The novel underscores the
tenacious but erroneous illusion that people can increase both their numbers
and their per capita extractions from environments without adverse conse-
quences: it features characters who cling to this conviction even when con-
fronted with overwhelming proof of the contrary.102 Throughout the novel
they argue with counterparts who try to convince them that China and the
world have reached the breaking point, that people cannot recover from cur-
rent crises in the same way they have overcome past setbacks because now
their numbers are too large and nonhuman resources are too scarce. Depict-
ing natural and human-induced crises that multiply exponentially, Yellow
Peril increasingly confirms the likelihood of these apocalyptic predictions.
Early in the novel, Shi Ge—the leader of the crisis-management agency
known officially as the State Security Research Institute, a unit with high
responsibility but little status in the official hierarchy—attempts to convince
the CCP general secretary and other key bureaucrats that China stands on
precarious ground. Flooding in the Yellow River catchment area, exacer-
bated by faulty dikes, has destroyed cities, businesses, oil fields, and railways.
It also has left nineteen million people homeless. While others want to discuss
the economic effects of this upheaval, Shi Ge is more concerned with what
these homeless survivors will do to the country. He predicts that hunger will
drive them to violence, with devastating effects on social stability, including
anarchy. The deputy director of the Central Government Policy Research
Center disagrees; he had assumed that like their predecessors, the flood vic-
tims would not plunder crops planted by others but instead would plant their
own. Shi Ge explains that growing new crops was possible in the past only
because the state had ample grain reserves to feed displaced peoples; now,
he notes, environmental damage and diminished production have caused an
acute shortage of grain at the government’s disposal.103 Shi Ge then draws at-
tention to the difficulty Chinese long have had balancing their human popu-
lation with their nonhuman resources:

It wasn’t just social injustice and political corruption that instigated

the great rebellions of the Qing. There was another catalyst of ut-
most importance—a massive population surplus . . . The fundamental
cause [of the rebellions] was the imbalance between population and
resources . . . Ours is a huge country. But a giant on a steel wire can
be pushed off with a single thumb. The steel wire is · · our population
[which] already has reached the absolute limit of what the resources
of our land can bear. The thumb is the Yellow River.104
 Illusions and Delusions  373

Shi Ge seems to confuse his metaphors: China’s population is the “giant”

that has been toppled by the Yellow River. In any case, the officials are no-
tably uncomfortable with Shi Ge’s depiction of their nation, one protesting:
“A country as great as ours, can it be as frail as you’ve played it up to be,
knocked to the ground by the tiny Yellow River [yige xiaoxiao huanghe]?”105
The general secretary is equally unconvinced and orders those assembled to
turn the discussion to practical solutions for current problems. When Shi Ge
argues that dismantling China’s army and particularly its nuclear weapons
program is the only effective way to fund the purchase of enough grain to
feed displaced people and preclude domestic violence, he loses credibility.
But his prescience is soon confirmed.
Ouyang Zhonghua, a writer and leader of the paradoxical environmental
movement Green Party (the ambiguities of which are discussed in chapter 7),
has similar disagreements with his subordinates. He predicts that China can
reasonably feed 500 million people, which would leave 800 million people
to emigrate or starve. The director of one of Ouyang’s Green Bases reminds
him that Chinese have always recovered, even from state collapse: “Histori-
cally, our society has broken down any number of times, and it hasn’t been
as terrible as you describe.”106 Ouyang counters that this is because earlier
generations had far more substantial safety nets; not only were there natural
resources to spare, there were fewer people clamoring for these resources:

The fundamental difference is the simple fact that our population is

now 1.3 billion. No other collapse has ever involved even a third of that
number of people . . . China’s present size and environmental conditions
allow it to fill 1.3 billion stomachs, but only if we depend completely on
a very organized and efficient system that works at the highest capacity
and bleeds natural resources . . . In the past, collapse of the state has not
led to the extermination of the people. Now, the land’s natural products
have decreased severalfold while the population has increased several-
fold. The terrifying discrepancy between population and products will
make the collapse how many times worse than in the past . . . The ba-
sic reason for the impending collapse lies in the contradiction between
population and resources. So we can foresee that no matter the particu-
lar course and form of collapse, the most fundamental orientation can
only be extermination of the population. Only when the population
falls—through wars, famines, pestilence, all means of creating death on
a large scale—to a level where it matches resources does the collapse
have its final chance of being brought under control.107

The first part of Ouyang’s argument is watertight: China’s natural resources

(ziyuan) simply cannot support its population (renkou), no matter how ef-
374  ecoambiguity

ficiently the latter use the former. More questionable is Ouyang’s prediction
that collapse is therefore inevitable and that the only recourse is widespread
extermination. There are other possibilities, however unsavory, including
sending people abroad and regulating childbirth more effectively, but in light
of people’s relative lack of foresight his prediction is likely correct. As he
makes his case Ouyang is interrupted by arguments that conditions are not
nearly as dire as he describes. One person claims that Chinese grain reserves
are greater than they have ever been; Ouyang explains that although this was
true before the flood and civil war, China’s reserves now have nearly flatlined.
Another says she simply cannot believe that only 500 million people will sur-
vive. Ouyang responds that he does not expect to be believed, but he insists
that he is telling the truth. This is a truth that his audience clearly does not
have the capacity to hear.
Like Jiang Rong’s Wolf Totem, discussed above and in chapter 4, Wang
Lixiong’s Yellow Peril counters the illusion that people can procreate and pro-
duce as they desire without consequence. Both emphasize that this attitude
is not unique to Chinese. China’s population is larger than that of any other
nation, but the narrator declares that what will prevent Chinese from ward-
ing off collapse by continuing to purchase grain from abroad is the world’s
burgeoning population, which makes demand of this substance far greater
than supply. The narrator comments: “The grain could come only from im-
ports. But these past few years the earth’s population has exploded, ecosys-
tems have degenerated, and grain is becoming frighteningly scarce.”108 The
disparities among population, per capita demand, and available resources
have become too great; environments around the world have reached their
breaking points. And so, ultimately, everything must collapse. The only hope,
the novel’s epilogue suggests, is that the planet will have a second chance, as it
does in Hoshi Shin’ichi’s “The Present.” Wang Lixiong’s final pages feature a
man walking by himself, carrying an “inflated baby/doll” (chongqi wawa).109
Stopping to rest, he puts down both bags (xingli) and baby/doll (wawa), the
latter of which is soon confirmed to be, or becomes, an actual child; two
paragraphs later the man, now sowing seeds, “hears the cries of the baby”
(tingdao le wawa jiao) and turns to see the baby stretch out his/her arms as
though it wants to be embraced. People, or at least this one infant, appear to
have somehow come back to life. And so too is the natural world beginning
to revive, however slowly, the novel ending with the man “suddenly notic-
ing the first pale green shoots” growing from seeds he had planted in the
skeleton-infused, destitute, barren, and literally dead soil (siwang de tudi).110
Presenting an extreme but not entirely implausible series of events, Wang
Lixiong’s novel depicts human societies as living on the brink of destruction,
at the mercy of one another and of the often exploited nonhuman. To be
 Illusions and Delusions  375

sure, by positing neglected dams as the trigger of the domino-like collapse

first of China and then of civilizations around the world, Yellow Peril sug-
gests that much of what transpires in the novel is not inevitable. On the
other hand, by describing people as generally ignorant and arrogant about
the sustainability of their behaviors, deluding themselves that there is no limit
to what ecosystems can support, the narrative implies that the flooding of the
Yellow River is only one of many thumbs that might topple China and the
world from their precarious high-wire performances, and that although at
least partial recovery might be possible, it will not be easily gained and might
have to be achieved one person, one set of green shoots at a time.

Much literature depicts an explosion of evidence on human degradation of

environments giving rise to a near crisis in perception. A large part of this
crisis involves conflicting evaluations: change interpreted by some as justifi-
able, if not desirable, is seen by others as unforgiveable, or even as a call to
overhaul social structures and institutions; change interpreted by some as
having no long-term consequences is seen by others as the beginning of the
end. These more extreme positions bookend a variety of other perceptions.
But no small number of creative works highlight the presence of illusions and
delusions, demonstrating how perceptions contradict perceived actualities
and revealing the implications of these disjunctions.
Many of the texts examined in this chapter posit a relatively clear if of-
ten convoluted dichotomy between illusions of environmental stability and
the realities of nonhuman instability because of ecodegradation. Desire for
nonhuman health or the illusion of health is so powerful that people often
do their best to make landscapes appear resuscitated, rather than actually
resuscitating them. The narrator of Bai Xianyong’s “A Day in Pleasantville,”
for instance, notes how the leaves in suburbia are so shiny, plump, and swol-
len that they resemble artificial potted landscapes, while the lawns in wealthy
towns are so perfectly uniform that it appears as though homeowners have
rolled out green plastic carpets.
Going one step farther, rejecting even vegetation made green with chemi-
cals in favor of chemical (artificial) vegetation, are the individuals populat-
ing such texts as Sakaki Nanao’s poem “Midori eien nari” (Green Forever,
1980). This work is particularly intriguing because it manipulates percep-
tions of what constitute “genuine” nonhuman bodies and what constitute
“artificial” human cultural artifacts. The opening stanza features what seem
to be purely artificial trees, chosen for Tama New Town, a large residential
development built in Tokyo in 1965, because they look like “genuine” trees.
Unlike their living counterparts they do not shed leaves and thus simply can
be planted and enjoyed. In contrast, speaking of events four centuries earlier,
376  ecoambiguity

the second stanza features what appear to be purely “genuine” trees, which
regularly shed their foliage. “Green Forever” begins:

10 years ago
New Town Tokyo suburb
wives gathered
really want green in the square
but fallen leaves are bothersome
so they planted plastic evergreen trees [プラスチック常緑の樹]

400 years ago

Kyoto autumn morning
fallen leaves cast off for his son
old maple tree shaken by Rikyū [楓の老木　ゆさぶる利休]111

The difference between the two types of trees seems clear: those in the first
group are human cultural artifacts, thus “fake,” while those in the second are
“real” nonhuman bodies with leaves that fall in autumn. To be sure, the latter
are not completely untouched by people, Sakaki’s poem depicting their leaves
as descending both by themselves and when shaken by Sen no Rikyū, Japan’s
most celebrated tea master, an individual noted for his distaste for ornament
(i.e., artificiality). Sakaki’s poem alludes to one of the stories surrounding
Rikyū: Expecting guests, the tea master instructed his son to clean the garden.
His son removed debris, pruned and shaped the plants, then swept until not a
leaf remained. Rikyū was displeased at this “perfection,” claiming that “This
is not the way.” So he shook a tree in the center of the garden, letting its
fallen leaves form a random pattern.112 In doing so he used the human hand
to mask the human hand. The “natural” only gives the illusion of being so.
Although first taking the reader far back in time—the line “150,000,000
years ago” contrasting sharply with “400 years ago,” the opening line of the
second stanza—the poem’s third stanza shuttles readers from the Jurassic
period back to the present day, and more deeply complicates dichotomies
between “real” and “artificial” trees and landscapes:

150,000,000 years ago

somewhere in a valley during the Jurassic period
one dinosaur drowned in a swamp
the magic of time turned it into a fossil
the mysteries of God turned it into plastic trees [プラスチックの
樹]
adorned Tokyo New Town
 Illusions and Delusions  377

dropping not a single leaf

green forever [緑　永遠なり]113

Plastic trees whose leaves never fade or fall are revealed as more “natural”
than generally is assumed. In fact, Sakaki’s poem asserts, through the magic
of time and the mysteries of a heavenly power they are transmutations of
dinosaurs, tangible reconfigurations of a long-extinct animal. Interestingly,
“Green Forever” removes people from this process. Common sense dictates
that it was people, or at least a deity working through people, who turned
disintegrated fossils into green plastic. But certainly it is people who adorn
their streets with these creations.
Similarly, although the third stanza exposes the “natural” origins of “ar-
tificial” bodies, subsequent stanzas do not speak explicitly of the “artificial”
origins of “natural bodies.” Instead, dramatically broadening the spatial
scope of the poem, and for the first time depicting trees growing outside
spaces inhabited by people, “Green Forever” continues with two verses on
evergreens growing everywhere from southern Japan to the Sierra Nevada.
These are trees that date back thousands of years and that long have inspired
great devotion:

Hot dry wind

east of the Sierra Nevada Mountains
near the summit of White Mountain
bristlecone Japanese white pine of 4,000 years
worshiping praying singing summer tomorrow

Born in the Jōmon raised in the Kuroshio current typhoon

treetops
the Japanese cryptomeria worshipping 7,200 years
under that umbrella dreams link [yume musubu]
sign of rain bewitching spring evening114

The poem includes as examples of “real” trees the bristlecone pine, which
can survive for nearly 5,000 years, longer than any other living organism;
as well as the Japanese white pine, one of the characteristic trees of Japan’s
subalpine areas and a species that covered much of Honshu (Japan’s largest
island) during the Pleistocene (2.6 million–10,050 B.C.E.); and the Japanese
cryptomeria, which also can live for thousands of years, growing as high as
seventy meters and sporting trunks up to four meters in girth.115 The ref-
erences to Japan’s Jōmon period (10,000–300 B.C.E.) and to cryptomeria
recall the Jōmon Sugi, a UNESCO World Heritage Site on Yakushima island
378  ecoambiguity

(south of Kyushu) and at 2,000 years old Japan’s most ancient cryptomeria
(volcanic eruptions in the region make it doubtful that the tree predates the
Common Era; it is most likely from Japan’s Yayoi period, 300 B.C.E.–250
C. E.). Sakaki’s poem exaggerates the endurance of Japanese cryptomeria but
rightly emphasizes the connections of these and other trees to the landscape
via such phrases as “dreams link” and references to people worshiping, pray-
ing, and singing beneath them.
Indeed, the lives of these trees are not entirely independent of people.
“Green Forever” juxtaposes the bristlecone, native to the Sierra Nevada, and
the Japanese white pine, native to Japan. This would be of little consequence
beyond expanding the scope of Sakaki’s text were it not for the implication
that the Japanese white pine has also been spotted near the summit of White
Mountain (the highest summit in the White Mountain Range, east of the
Sierra Nevada), somewhere it could be only if it had been transplanted there.
“Green Forever” is ambiguous concerning the location of the Japanese white
pine. The text at once suggests that the tree is in the White Mountains and
that it has been growing in Japan for 4,000 years. The latter option is more
likely, but the placement of the reference to the Japanese white pine is a re-
minder of the manipulation of even the most ancient flora. And it is likely no
coincidence that both the Japanese white pine and cryptomeria are popular
in bonsai, one of the most “artificial” renderings of “natural” trees.
“Green Forever” also highlights the close emotional and spiritual relation-
ships people have with these trees, which are respected, indeed worshipped.
There is no mention of their coloring. On the other hand, these organisms
are capable of living for centuries, if not millennia, so their green is enduring,
but unlike the green of the poem’s title, it is not everlasting.116 Disparities
between nonhuman bodies and human cultural artifacts, undermined in the
third stanza, are reinforced in the fourth and fifth stanzas. Even though the
plastic green of Tama New Town’s plazas originated in a long-extinct animal
and in that sense is millions of years older than even the planet’s most ancient
trees, the fourth and fifth stanzas emphasize that these transportable green
constructs simply cannot compare with their much more massive organic
counterparts. Yet once again matters are complicated, this time by the poem’s
final four lines:

Today
from a sunspot grows up [nobiagaru]117
a single young tree

green forever [緑　永遠なり]118

 Illusions and Delusions  379

It is unclear whether this tree, allegeded to spring from a sunspot, is a “genu-

ine” nonhuman body or whether it is as plastic as the trees in Tokyo’s Tama
New Town. But regardless, its future is imperiled, the sun even less hospi-
table to trees than industrialized earth.
Much environmental discourse highlights human contamination of land-
scapes; many narratives stress or at least imply that virtually no part of the
nonhuman is entirely unaffected by human behaviors, so that there is some-
thing “artificial” about even the most “natural” of organisms. “Green For-
ever” takes the opposite approach, arguing that boundaries between nonhu-
man bodies and human cultural products blur at least in part because of the
nonhuman origins of the latter. What is perceived to be entirely artificial in
fact comes from “nature,” however indirectly. This is a powerful statement
for a text written by so committed an environmentalist as Sakaki. To be
sure, the poem does not argue that the nonhuman origins of plastic justify its
proliferation. But it does encourage readers to think more deeply about how
resources are utilized. Juxtaposing plastic trees in public squares with ancient
pines in wondrous old-growth forests, “Green Forever” points to the poten-
tial absurdity of using fossil fuels to create replicas of organic trees simply
because the latter seem to require additional maintenance when integrated
into the built environment. While encouraging more flexible understandings
both of nature and of human creations, the indistinctness of the final stanza
likewise suggests what can happen when people become too inured either to
the nonhuman or to its replicas: they see only shape and color and ponder
neither origins nor how the natural world has been manipulated. Gone are
the days when belching smokestacks and other obvious environmental an-
tagonists were deemed beautiful. Many landscapes are or give the illusion of
being even greener now, at least in color, than ever before. But in most cases
efforts to downplay or deny ecodegradation only encourage further destruc-
tion of environments.
Illusions and delusions rising from conflicts between perception and actu-
ality, and between image and reality, characterize many human interactions
with nature and are staples of literature on environmental degradation. Fur-
ther exposing the paradox of green are disjunctions between perceptions and
behaviors, a crucial topic at the intellectual heart of ecoambiguity that forms
the subject of chapter 7.
seven / Green Paradoxes

One of the oddities of people’s interactions with their surroundings is that

individuals who love, respect, or show fascination with nature often con-
tribute, deliberately or inadvertently, to damaging or destroying it. Navajo
spiritual guides have claimed that “digging up the earth to retrieve resources
like coal and uranium . . . is tantamount to cutting skin and represents a be-
trayal of a duty to protect the land.” Anthony Lee Sr., president of the Diné
Hataalii Association, a group of about one hundred Navajo healers, has put
it more bluntly: “As medicine people, we don’t extract resources.”1 And yet
coal and uranium mining, the latter banned on their lands only in 2005, have
for decades sustained the Navajo economy. The consequences have long been
apparent—mining and power plant emissions have dirtied the waters and
dulled the skies of their reservations—but only recently has the Navajo Na-
tion made sustained calls to heal environments. In “Letter to Send in a Space
Capsule” (2010) the contemporary American poet Lucille Lang Day ampli-
fies this paradox: “We built enough nuclear bombs to incinerate or irradiate
all life and fill the atmosphere with ash / . . . As we burned fossil fuels / to run
our factories and cut down forests / to build our towering cities, the Earth /
grew warmer, the air turned grayer, / and the polar ice caps crumbled into the
sea. / One by one, flowers, frogs, worms, and birds / began to disappear. It
may sound strange, but most people cared deeply about the planet / and each
other.”2 It does sound strange, but as the speaker of “Letter to Send” suggests
by talking about “people” and by introducing herself simply as someone
who “lived on the third planet circling an ordinary star,” these ambiguities
characterize the relationships of many human cultures with the nonhuman.3
Environmental degradation would be difficult enough to contain if the
attitudes propelling it were entirely and obviously ecophobic. But damage
to landscapes is even harder to prevent and remediate because people’s ba-
sic sympathy toward the nonhuman regularly accompanies behaviors that
unleash (un)expected harm. Whether propagated by governments or private
organizations, popular environmental discourse often underscores the need
to respect other species, develop closer ties to the nonhuman, even learn to

380
 Green Paradoxes  381

“love nature,” on the assumption that such approaches will promote envi-
ronmental health. Sometimes these attitudes translate directly into actions
that benefit the planet’s ecosystems. Yet many literary works argue that little
prevents well-meaning individuals and even proclaimed environmentalists
from acting in ways that harm ecosystems.
The Chinese writer Jiang Rong’s Wolf Totem (2004) depicts this dynamic
most clearly, featuring an animal that is denied freedom, even life, by the
very individual who adores it; Chen Zhen imprisons and ultimately kills the
wolf to which he has become deeply attached. Chapter 5 discussed how Wolf
Totem shows human abuse of the environment accelerating even in the face
of easily predicted and highly undesired consequences. The present chapter
is concerned less with conflicts between conditions and behaviors than with
gaps between attitudes and behaviors, especially the phenomenon of loving
nature to death. Like most texts treating the relationships between indig-
enous peoples and their environments, Wolf Totem offers examples of people
(Mongols) with great respect for animals who nevertheless occasionally kill
them somewhat gratuitously. More significant in this novel is the ambiguous
relationship of an outsider with one of the grassland’s animals.
Unlike most Han Chinese, who openly detest wolves, Chen Zhen is fasci-
nated by them. Averting a wolf attack not long after his arrival on the Inner
Mongolian grasslands, and fascinated by the orderly retreat of the animals,
he “fell under their spell, experiencing a combination of fear, reverence, awe,
infatuation, and obsession toward the wolves of [this region]. For him the
Mongolian wolf was not at all a living thing that merely had touched his soul.
Instead, it was a living thing that had already struck his soul.”4 His soul not
just touched, but struck (jue bu shi jinjin chuji le ta de linghun, er shi cengjing
jichu le ta de linghun de shengwu), Chen Zhen is completely mesmerized
and wonders how the animal can exert such a powerful pull over him (ruci
juda de xiyinli). One night during his first winter on the grasslands, after
watching a dramatic struggle between a wolf and domestic animals plus their
human owners, he decides to learn as much as he can about these impressive
creatures and imagines raising one himself. He finds the perfect opportunity
during his second year in Inner Mongolia when he and his friends raid a wolf
den and bring home seven pups. Finally holding a wolf, Chen Zhen declares
the animal “the most noble, the most valuable, and the most beautiful small
life on the Mongolian grassland.”5 He decides to keep the strongest pup for
himself and raise it to adulthood.
Chen Zhen is aware of some of the many contradictions between his
feelings toward the wolves and his treatment of them. He truly admires the
animals and hopes that increased contact with wolves will lead to greater un-
382  ecoambiguity

derstanding of them. But the compromises begin with kidnapping the litter.
As he walks home, Chen Zhen recognizes that he has irrevocably changed
multiple nonhuman lives and fears that wolves, led by the mother of the
captured pups, will haunt him forever. The imagined reaction of the wolves
awakens him to the prospect that he has “committed a big mistake.”6 Chen
Zhen first blames his friends for absconding with an entire litter, claiming
there would have been nothing wrong with his simply taking the largest and
the strongest of the seven. But he quickly admits that even if he had acted
alone the outcome probably would have been the same: “Stealing a litter of
wolf pups represented victory, courage, profit. It brought him honor and
made others treat him with increased respect. Compared to this, the seven
small lives were as lightweight as grains of sand [xiao shengming jiu shi shali
yiyang jing de fama le].”7 Chen Zhen’s attitudinal conflict is conspicuous: he
believes wolves noble and beautiful while also deeming them insignificant,
and as plentiful and interchangeable as particles of sand; the comparison
with sand is ironic considering that the more damage Chinese inflict on the
grasslands, the more this sere substance replaces wolves. But of even greater
importance is the disjuncture between Chen Zhen’s reverence for the animals
and his mistreatment of them.
This conflict only intensifies after the young men return home. Chen Zhen
and his friend Daoerji each decide to adopt a pup, leaving the future of the
remaining five uncertain. Chen Zhen briefly contemplates raising all seven to
adulthood, the narrator noting that the young man’s feelings toward wolves
have intensified from delight to obsession. Recognizing that he cannot pos-
sibly rear the entire litter, Chen Zhen considers returning the five the young
men cannot keep but decides that this too would be unfeasible. The thought
process is revealing:

An idea suddenly flashed in his mind. Why not get back on his horse
and return the remaining five pups to their den? But with the excep-
tion of Yang Ke, there was no one to go with him, and he didn’t dare
go alone. Neither he nor his horses had the strength to endure the
round trip, which would total more than four hours. At that moment
the mother wolf was certainly crying, utterly despondent, howling
madly beside her damaged den. If he were to return now, wouldn’t
that be tantamount to looking for death?8

Chen Zhen is deeply attached to wolves. And he recognizes that his having
kidnapped the pups has likely devastated their mother. But not only does he
falsely claim himself and his horse too weak for the journey back to the den
 Green Paradoxes  383

despite their having recently completed the trip. He also does not ask his
friend Yang Ke, whom he asserts is the only one who might make the journey
with him, whether Yang would be willing to help him return the wolves. To
be sure, Chen Zhen declares that revisiting the den would be suicidal, but
coming when it does, this statement appears to be almost an excuse to ratio-
nalize his cowardice. And so they decide that Daoerji will kill the unclaimed
pups, while Chen Zhen sighs deeply, “There’s no other way [zhi neng zhei-
yang le].”9 Watching the murder of the first wolf is almost more than he can
tolerate: “It was as though Chen Zhen’s heart had fallen from his throat back
into his chest. The pain was devoid of consciousness.”10 But still he does
nothing. The narrative makes it clear that despite his protests to the contrary,
there of course are options—Chen Zhen could have left the pups in their den
in the first place, or, recognizing his mistake in separating them from their
mother, he could have at least tried to convince Yang Ke to help him return
them to their den. Yet his attraction to wolves in the abstract, combined with
little thought about the well-being of individual wolves and then with simple
cowardice, leads directly to the demise of five pups.
The contradictions continue as Chen Zhen begins to raise his wolf. He
knows from the outset that the Mongols will not approve of his keeping a
wolf as a pet and understands the reasoning behind their censure, but he
disregards their wisdom. He believes that raising the pup will help him and
ultimately Han Chinese gain a deeper understanding of wolves; this will
be no small accomplishment, since the Han Chinese allegedly have feared
and tormented these animals for thousands of years. Yang Ke believes that
there will be many benefits to raising this wolf: “It seems as though raising
wolves will be good for more than just studying them. We also can study
human nature [renxing], wolf nature [langxing], animal nature [shouxing],
and domestication [jiachuxing] . . . It seems as though our first day of doing
this has yielded impressive results.”11 Chen Zhen’s and Yang Ke’s goals are
noble. Yet their myopic hyperopia, their preoccupation with a distant future
of understanding not only wolves, or even just wolves and people, but both
animals and relationships between animals and people, blinds them to estab-
lished knowledge and present conditions, knowledge and conditions that if
not taken into consideration make the future they envision nearly impossible.
Enthralled by his quickly growing pup, Chen Zhen refuses to listen to his
Mongol friends. Citing both local tradition and Chinese law, they implore
him to liberate the animal while it is still young enough to reestablish ties
with wild wolves. Although initially enthusiastic about helping Chen Zhen
raise the wolf, Yang Ke soon recognizes that this is not a viable enterprise.
Yang Ke warns his friend that the Mongols are not the only ones who want
384  ecoambiguity

him to relinquish the animal; in a rare moment of solidarity, the resident

Han Chinese also want him to dispose of it. Yang Ke expresses dismay at the
inhumanity of Chen Zhen’s treatment of the pup:

“I’m not afraid of the responsibility. It’s just that it’s too pitiful to see
this little wolf tied up with shackles all day long like a little prisoner.
The animal that most loves freedom is the wolf. But now not a mo-
ment goes by when this wolf is not in chains. Are you hardhearted
enough to do this? . . . I can understand why father opposes your rais-
ing it. This truly blasphemes the gods!”
Chen Zhen’s heart was completely conflicted, but his words re-
mained unyielding . . . “How could I not think of freeing the wolf and
letting it return to the mountains? But I can’t release it now. There are
still too many things that haven’t been made clear. The freedom of one
little wolf is the freedom of a single wolf, but if in the future the grass-
lands are home to not even a single wolf, of what sort of freedom could
we then speak? If that were to happen, you also would regret it.”12

Likening the chained wolf to a prisoner and disturbed by what he sees, Yang
Ke declares pitiful (tai kelian le) the spectacle of this incarcerated animal.
More significant, he observes that wolves love freedom (ai ziyou) more than
any other animal, making Chen Zhen’s treatment of this creature especially
blasphemous (zhei zhen shi xiedu shenling a).
Chen Zhen’s heart is completely torn (xinli shifen maodun); although
their circumstances differ, like the elephant keeper in Murakami’s “The El-
ephant’s Disappearance,” discussed below, he keeps shackled an animal he
greatly admires and imagines would be more content if permitted to run free.
His rhetoric is grand and his aspirations lofty, yet his behaviors are anything
but. Facilitating this gap between attitudes and actions is a gulf between
beliefs and evidence, in Chen Zhen’s case the delusion that imprisoning this
single wolf will grant him sufficient insights into wolves to change people’s
behaviors toward them and ensure wolf populations freedom for years to
come. He is correct in asserting that if in the future the grasslands were wiped
clean of wolves the “freedom” of a single animal, something with which
Yang Ke is deeply concerned, no longer would be germane. But there is no
evidence that keeping the captured pup in shackles will allow Chen Zhen
to understand its true nature, much less the true nature of wolves. On the
contrary, there is considerable likelihood of the opposite: keeping a wolf in
captivity, particularly under the conditions favored by Chen Zhen, likely will
teach him far less about wolves in their “natural” state than about how they
 Green Paradoxes  385

react to internment. This, paradoxically, is the opposite of what Chen Zhen

seeks to accomplish.
With time, keeping the wolf becomes downright dangerous for both the
animal and the Mongols. But even when the cub learns to howl and its cries,
heard by wolves in the surrounding hills, put the village in jeopardy, Chen
Zhen does not relent. To be sure, the wolf comes to enjoy spending time with
its Chinese captor: “Whenever the little wolf heard Chen Zhen calling ‘Little
Wolf,’ it happily ran over to him, was very much attached to him [gen ta
qinre], licked his hand, rubbed up against his knees, pounced on his stomach,
even lay on the ground, opened up its legs, exposed its belly, and let Chen
Zhen scratch it.”13 And when Chen Zhen returns home in the evening the
wolf, having missed him (xiang ta), welcomes him warmly, its howls of old
“utterly distant” (shifen yaoyuan).14 Affection here goes both ways.
But this harmony is short-lived. Just several lines after declaring the cries
of the wolves nearly forgotten, the narrator abruptly declares, “Bears can
be led [qian], tigers can be led, lions can be led, elephants too can be led.
The Mongolian wolf cannot be led.”15 This is a lesson Chen Zhen learns
firsthand. The wolf refuses to accompany him to his new camp; the more
Chen Zhen pulls its chain, the more the animal growls and digs in its heels,
not surrendering until it has lost half the fur on its bleeding neck, rubbed
raw its paws, and blunted its claws. Chen Zhen’s tears at this sight are said
to “drip [di] into the wolf’s blood,” a very different form of intimacy than
the two have previously enjoyed.16 Despite everything, Chen Zhen still hopes
for a bright future, confessing to Yang Ke that he had dreamed of having a
“genuine wild wolf friend” (zhenzheng de yelang pengyou) that would frolic
with him in the grasslands, but that now he hopes to give the cub new teeth
and free him in the mountains of Outer Mongolia. Yang Ke chastises him for
harboring such idle fantasies and urges him to face reality (miandui xianshi).
And soon it becomes impossible not to do so. The larger the wolf grows,
the more frustrated it becomes with its chain, pulling and yanking it so des-
perately that it seems “the wolf wouldn’t stop until it attained his goal, and
wouldn’t hesitate to strangle itself to death [jihu buxi ba ziji lesi].”17 Even
though the wolf continues to fight its captivity and its injuries become in-
creasingly severe, even though Chen Zhen admits he knows just how cruel it
is to imprison this animal, he refuses to release it into the wild, claiming that
to do so would be lethal. He believes death in captivity preferable to dying
in the wild. Rather than give the animal even a moment of freedom, Chen
Zhen keeps it imprisoned to the bitter end, until finally, after enjoying one
last moment together, he has no choice but to kill the animal he had hoped
to “raise to old age”:
386  ecoambiguity

Chen Zhen fell to the ground in total despair . . . Bloody saliva dripped
from the wolf’s mouth, and he looked at Chen Zhen like an older
wolf, as though he wanted to say something to him . . . Tears rained
down Chen Zhen’s face. He embraced the pup’s neck and one last time
touched its forehead and nose closely against his own . . .
Chen Zhen suddenly stood up, ran to the side of the yurt, and
quietly grasped a spade with a broken handle. He turned his body,
holding the spade behind him, and ran back to the pup, which was
still sitting there panting hard, its legs shaking even more terribly.
Chen Zhen hurriedly stepped behind him, raised the spade, and, us-
ing all his strength, smashed the back of the wolf’s skull, by his neck
[hounao]. The wolf didn’t make a sound, softly falling to the ground,
like a true Mongolian grassland wolf [zhenzheng de menggu caoyuan
lang], holding out until the very end······
At that moment Chen Zhen felt as though his soul had been
knocked out of him. He seemed to hear again the clanking sound
of his soul rushing out of the top of his head. This time it seemed as
though the soul that flew out would never again return.18

The narrator accentuates the increasingly close bond between man and
wolf—the two first enjoy friendly physical contact (licking hands, rubbing
knees, scratching and pouncing on stomachs), then they mix bodily fluids
(blood and tears), and finally they entangle souls, as both are destroyed.
But even more important, Wolf Totem shows Chen Zhen’s intoxication
with wolves and insistence on understanding these animals coming at the ex-
pense of their well-being; the man who had described his soul as being struck
(jichu) by this animal himself strikes it to death. His acts have consequences
just as deadly, albeit on a much smaller scale, as the Han Chinese invasion
of Inner Mongolia. As discussed in chapter 5, Jiang Rong’s novel highlights
the trauma that can result from behaviors that defy transmitted knowledge
and indisputable evidence. Even more striking in the case of Chen Zhen is the
disparity between attitudes and the impacts of behaviors: Chen Zhen literally
loves an animal to death.
Chen Zhen and Yang Ke are not the only individuals in Wolf Totem
whose attitudes and behaviors conflict. In the case of the Mongols, who both
revere and kill wolves, these disjunctions stem largely from disparities in wolf
behaviors. The Mongols revere wolves because the animals help maintain
grassland ecosystems, but they kill them because the animals mercilessly
slaughter the Mongols’ animals. As one of the Mongol elders reminds Chen
Zhen, wolves are not to be killed en masse, but they in turn cannot be al-
 Green Paradoxes  387

lowed to kill indiscriminately: “The grassland is a battlefield . . . Doesn’t it

distress you that the wolves used deception to kill a large group of horses? If
we don’t use violent means, how will we ever match them?”19
Similarly, when Chen Zhen refuses to help kill the wolf cubs they have
decided not to raise, the Mongol Daoerji appears to misunderstand his mo-
tives and mocks what he perceives to be another example of Han Chinese
contradiction: “You Han Chinese have no courage. You really hate wolves,
but you don’t dare kill even a cub.”20 Yet in this instance the real contradic-
tion lies within Daoerji. Jiang Rong’s novel depicts Han Chinese as having
for centuries both hated wolves and killed them wholesale. Daoerji, on the
other hand, is concerned with the health of the same wolf pups that moments
later he delights in killing. When Chen Zhen asks him to postpone for several
days the death of the five wolf pups they have decided to kill, Daoerji asks
what he plans to feed them in the interim, noting that they all will quickly die
if they do not receive proper nourishment. He has no qualms about ending
the lives of wolves himself, but he does not want to see them starve to death,
however quickly. Not surprisingly, concern with the well-being of the wolves
evaporates when Daoerji is given the all clear to kill the pups. The exhilara-
tion he experiences at slaughtering the young animals is noteworthy:

The more Daoerji killed, the more excited he became, repeating [as
he threw the animals into the air], “Up to [the deity] Tenggeli [Tengri]
you go, up there you’ll enjoy a life of ease and comfort” . . . Five piti-
ful little wolf pups flew through the air, and five blood-drenched bod-
ies fell to the earth. Chen Zhen swept all five dead pups into a dustpan
and then looked up into the clouds and the sky for a long time, hoping
that Tenggeli had accepted their souls. Daoerji seemed to be utterly
enjoying himself . . . He said, “There aren’t many opportunities to kill
five wolves in a single day. People fall far short of wolves. If a fierce
wolf has a chance, it will kill a hundred, or even two hundred sheep at
a time. What does it matter that I killed five wolves. It’s getting late; I
have to get my cattle home.” After he finished speaking, he went over
to pick up his [living] wolf pup.21

This scene incorporates all manner of contradictions, including those be-

tween actions (Daoerji simultaneously tosses animals to their deaths and tells
them that he hopes they will enjoy a peaceful life post mortem; he kills some
animals and spares others) and those between attitudes (Daoerji believes
wolves in general are a vital presence on the grasslands but thinks there is
nothing wrong with killing five pups). Aspects of these contradictions are
388  ecoambiguity

understandable. Contrasting what Mongols do to wolves with what wolves

do to domesticated animals and the Mongols who depend on them, the text
makes a good case for the insignificance of Daoerji’s murder of the five pups.
More complex are other relationships between attitudes and behaviors.
On the one hand, Daoerji kills individuals from the same species that he
greatly respects. On the other hand, his anger at wolves for decimating do-
mesticated animal populations coincides not only with his delight at killing
these animals (attitudinal harmony) but on an even more basic level with the
act of killing these animals in the first place (congruence between attitudes
and behaviors). In the case of Daoerji and Mongols more generally, conflicts
between particular attitudes and behaviors are mitigated by the convergence
of the two in other arenas. The same cannot be said of the conflicts between
attitudes and behaviors exhibited by Chen Zhen, whose great attachment
to the wolf pup and even greater adherence to promoting his own agenda
result in the death of this animal. There is no question of his great respect for
wolves as an abstract concept and even as an actual species, but relationships
with individual wolves prove far more complicated. Fascination with animals
not only coexists with but also frequently results in damaging them.22

Admiration and even deep respect for the nonhuman can translate into ac-
tions that benefit or at least do not notably damage environments, but such
attitudes also can camouflage outlooks that trigger behaviors harmful to the
nonhuman world. This chapter analyzes how creative works negotiate re-
lationships between environmental degradation on the one hand and these
conflicts of attitudes and actions on the other.23 I begin with literary texts
that, like Wolf Totem, implicate human fascination with specific nonhuman
entities as largely responsible for their degradation. Such narratives often
contrast the attitudes of characters who respect the nonhuman with those
who care little about environmental health, yet depict both as damaging eco-
systems. The second section investigates texts that mediate attachment not
to a single nonhuman being, or a small group of such beings, but instead to
larger ecosystems. These creative works show admiration for the nonhuman
as launching behaviors that shape it in largely detrimental ways. The third
and final section examines texts featuring individuals whose worries about
environmental harm translate into attempts not to remediate but instead to
distance themselves from it, even by relocating to another planet. These cre-
ative works highlight the lengths to which some of the most environmentally
aware persons will go to avoid having to confront spaces in ecological de-
cline. The chapter concludes by discussing some of literature’s most scathing
parodies of environmental movements: texts that engage with extremes—
 Green Paradoxes  389

extraterrestrial environmentalists penalizing a nation for destroying forests

around the world by stripping this nation of its trees, and the megalomania-
cal leader of a green movement intent not on improving environments but
instead on increasing his own personal glory, regardless of the ecological
cost. Although fantastical, these writings powerfully attack the failings, hy-
pocrisy, and malevolence of those who protest environmental damage. To-
gether, the works examined in this chapter reveal some of the limits and perils
of environmental attitudes and rhetoric, particularly their unexpected role in
enabling damage to ecosystems. But far from suggesting that individuals and
societies abandon environmentalism, these texts confirm its strengths and
highlight its promise, if pursued more energetically and with greater aware-
ness of potentially harmful effects on ecosystems.

Injurious Fascination

While Jiang Rong’s novel Wolf Totem features a young man who kills the
very animal he loves, the Taiwanese writer Huang Chunming’s “Set Free”
(1987) depicts an older man who harms an animal whose heart beats in
tandem with his own. Both men imprison animals to fulfill emotional needs.
Ironically, Chen Zhen is much more concerned with the well-being of his
wolf than the aging Awei is with his egret, but the egret is liberated whereas
the wolf endures a prolonged death. As discussed in chapter 2, “Set Free”
centers around a couple—Jinzu and Awei—who live in a small town that has
been subjected to years of paralyzing contamination; their son has been im-
prisoned for protesting the destruction of the region’s soil, water, and skies.
Even so, Jinzu and Awei resent new government policies that designate their
land a conservation area in order to remediate pollution. The protected sta-
tus virtually guarantees an influx of birds, and since the couple is prohibited
from catching those that feast on their fields, they almost certainly will go
bankrupt. “Set Free” highlights the conflicting attitudes of family farmers
and fishers toward conservation laws; chapter 2 demonstrates how in this
story even individuals with the deepest attachments to ecologically ravaged
spaces paradoxically believe they should be allowed to use these spaces as
best suits them personally, with little regard for environmental health. In
this chapter I am more interested in the gap between individual attitudes
and actual treatments of the nonhuman. Although believing corporations
have no right to degrade environments, Awei himself purposely disrupts a
bird’s life; despite believing that the government has no right to imprison
his son Wentong, Awei imprisons an animal. To be sure, Huang Chunming’s
390  ecoambiguity

story nowhere suggests that the changes townspeople such as Awei inflict
on their surroundings even remotely approach the effects of the upstream
cement factories and chemical plants that have poisoned the land and water
near their homes. Nor does it imply that Awei’s mistreatment of the bird is
anything like the government’s mistreatment of his son. But Awei’s obsession
with catching and holding an egret hostage, the text’s principal subplot, is an
excellent example of the conflicts that frequently exist between attitudes and
actions. With outlooks on the natural world so contradictory, it is almost
inevitable that some will conflict with behaviors and that the nonhuman will
remain in jeopardy.
The title “Set Free” refers to events narrated in the final pages of the story:
the emancipation of people and the nonhuman from the ravages of pollution,
of Awei’s son Wentong from prison, and of an egret Awei caught several days
before his son’s release. Awei’s fixation on egrets dates back several decades.
Thirty years earlier, he had captured one for his young son Wentong, who
adored the bird and was crushed when it escaped. But preoccupied with a
birthing sow, Awei had shown his son little sympathy. Instead, pulling the
bawling Wentong away from the pig, he had ripped his son’s arm out of its
socket, something for which he had never forgiven himself. To make amends,
Awei has been trying for some time to catch another egret, but without suc-
cess. Seeing the egret in a paddy many years later awakens old feelings, and
he feels compelled to snare the animal and bring it home.
“Set Free” at first suggests that Awei is rescuing a poisoned bird that has
become trapped in the mud.24 Early in the story the narrator comments:

As Awei was hurrying along the field ridge, he startled a bird that
had ingested some recently sprayed snail pesticide. Flapping its wings,
rocking from side to side, the bird fled from the ridge and headed to-
ward the newly planted rice shoots. “An egret!” the old man shouted
joyously. Forgetting about the rain, he set off in pursuit . . . The egret
desperately flapped its wings but couldn’t fly away. In the end, its
wings were stuck to the surface of the water, and it couldn’t even rise
up, couldn’t even run.25

Initially, both Awei’s legs and the egret’s wings move speedily, but while
Awei sets off in hot pursuit (zhizhui), the bird is immobilized. And it quickly
becomes clear that Awei’s priority is capturing, not freeing, the animal. Fear-
ing that the egret will fly away just as he is about to grab it, Awei makes a
final desperate dive for the animal, falling face first into the muddy water
and making a spectacle of himself. Furthermore, rather than freeing the egret
 Green Paradoxes  391

from the mud and determining whether it can manage on its own, Awei
grasps it tightly.
The narrator notes that Awei does so even though he would have harshly
scolded any child he saw attempting the same thing. Indeed, until this episode
Awei gives every indication of believing that unless they are harming crops,
birds, like people, should not be deprived of freedom. For instance, after vis-
iting his son in prison Awei spotted an egret startled by an aging, backfiring
bus. He watched the bird run along a nearby levee and then take flight, soar-
ing into the distance over waves of rice plants until it was just a single black
dot. There was no thought of chasing after the bird. Instead, Awei imagined
himself becoming another black dot and disappearing into the wind, perhaps
anticipating Chen Huang’s Pigeon Tuoli, discussed in chapter 4. Walking into
town, Awei saw another egret, this time flying out of flowers bordering a
ditch. Once again, he followed it with his eyes until it nearly disappeared.
Yet his “primal impulse” (yuanshi chongdong), something he claims to have
lost long ago, returns with a vengeance while hurrying along the dike, so he
captures and needlessly imprisons an egret.
The complexities described here pose an ecological contradiction: Awei
empathizes with birds when he sees them fly off into the distance but when
one is closer at hand he captures it. Conflicts between attitudes and actions
continue. Awei senses an immediate connection with the egret, noting that
its nervous, thumping heartbeat is synchronized perfectly with his own (he
cike laorenjia de xintiao, huxiang huying er pengpeng zuoxiang).26 His heart
gushing with both guilt and joy, he feels great compassion for the bird; he
talks to himself about its capture with such kindness that listening to his own
voice makes him believe the trembling animal in his hands is a real treasure.
But compassion and empathy here translate into imprisonment, not freedom.
Rather than liberate the bird, Awei takes it home. His wife is clearly baffled
by his behaviors, which contradict not only his own feelings toward the ani-
mal but also those of his community. Egrets, she reminds him, are not eaten
even during famines, nor do people raise them as pets. “Set Free” highlights
Awei’s selfishness, depicting him as assuaging his own guilt toward his son
and fulfilling his own emotional desires, not assisting a poisoned bird.27
Awei’s emotional attachment to the animal likewise does not prevent
him from harming it. Still strong when it arrives at Awei’s home, the bird
struggles mightily to spring free of its captor as he stands in the doorway be-
ing chastised by his wife Jinzu. Awei must grasp the bird tightly to prevent it
from flying off. He recognizes that capturing and detaining the egret would
be justified only if he were nursing it back to health, so he weakens the bird,
keeping it in a chicken cage for three days and then claiming that the reason it
392  ecoambiguity

cannot stand up is that the effects of pesticides the bird ingested have not yet
worn off. But Jinzu is not persuaded, believing that the bird’s weakness stems
not from ingesting pesticides but rather from going for days without eating
fish; unsaid yet implied is that this lack of fish is as much Awei’s responsibil-
ity (for not feeding the bird) as it is the fault of the factories and the farmers
(for so polluting the waters that they no longer support fish). Pressured by
his wife, Awei improves the egret’s diet. The animal rapidly recovers and
once again begins flapping its wings, “fancying itself circling in the air.” Far
from delighted at this turn of events, Awei states simply: “It’s not going to
die. Now I’m worried that it will fly away, not that it will die” (bu hui si le.
xianzai shi pa ta feidiao, cai bu shi pa ta si).28 So he keeps the bird in a cage,
where it spends its time strutting around. The same individual angry with
the authorities for holding his son for protesting environmental degradation
consciously deprives an animal of its freedom and worries aloud that the bird
might escape. Huang Chunming’s story here points to the selfishness that of-
ten creates conflicts between attitudes and behaviors. Ideally, distress over his
son’s imprisonment would increase Awei’s sensitivity toward the confinement
of other human/nonhuman bodies, but instead he thinks only of himself, seiz-
ing and keeping captive a bird that reminds him of his son.
One evening, frustrated that his son has not yet been released from prison,
Awei suddenly decides to set the bird free. By this time it has been imprisoned
for so long that it does not quite know what to do when Awei opens its cage.
Awei has to take the bird in his hands and launch it into the air; as with
egrets in the past, Awei watches this bird fly off until it is nothing more than a
black dot far in the distance. Attitudes and behaviors here coincide. Yet when
Wentong finally returns home, Awei grows disappointed that he has freed the
bird. Revealing his still powerful desire to restrain this animal, he declares,
“[Wentong] if you’d come a bit earlier, I wouldn’t have released the egret.”29
The next, and final line of the story finds Jinzu watching Awei and Wentong
while chanting silently “Praise be to Amitābha Buddha” (南無阿彌陀佛), a
mantra from the Pure Land school that in Chinese Buddhism is used during
meditation to help clear the mind. Her husband appears to have learned little
from his son’s imprisonment, so Jinzu needs as much fortitude as possible.
“Set Free” concludes with the concurrent freeing of a man from prison,
of a bird from a cage, and, more generally, of both people and the environ-
ment from the ravages of pollution. These events suggest the beginnings of
new human/nonhuman relationships. They also contrast with the relative
stability of relations between people and their governments; the lives of the
residents of Dakenggu will not become any less regulated by official decrees.
Huang Chunming’s story here comments on Taiwan’s own shift—on July
 Green Paradoxes  393

14, 1987, just two months before the serialization of “Set Free” (September
12–15, 1987)—from a society under martial law to one regulated by a strin-
gent national security law, a move that in some ways changed everything,
and in some ways changed very little. On the other hand, the differences
between the changes in human/nonhuman relationships and the changes in
government/civilian relationships likely are not as great as they first appear.
A conservation area is being established, and Tianying tells Awei and Jinzu
that the factories “won’t be allowed to dump poisoned water.”30 But while
the former waste site turned conservation area might be off-limits, nothing is
said about prohibiting factories from releasing poisoned water elsewhere or
emitting pollutants into the atmosphere. Nor is there any indication of how
pesticide use will be affected, so possibly farmers will resort to killing birds
clandestinely. Much thus remains unanswered. Are people and animals set
free from one prison only to be herded into another, possibly more dangerous
space? The initial prisons were readily identifiable—Wentong is in an actual
jail, Awei keeps the egret in a chicken cage, and the villagers and their envi-
rons are enshrouded by unbreathable air. The shape of future prisons prob-
ably will not be so clearly apparent. Yet the story suggests that these spaces
are potentially no less menacing.
Broadening the focus of a caged animal’s relationship with an individual
to that of a town, and leaving uncertain the fate of this animal, the Japanese
writer Murakami Haruki’s short story “Zō no shōmetsu” (The Elephant’s
Disappearance, 1985) depicts trying to safeguard an elephant as actually
harming it and perhaps even bringing about its death. Contemporary Japan’s
best-known and most frequently translated creative writer, Murakami has
consistently emphasized writers’ social responsibility.31 In his Jerusalem Prize
acceptance speech (2009) he declared, “I have only one reason to write nov-
els, and that is to bring the dignity of the individual soul to the surface and
to shine a light upon it. The purpose of a story is to sound an alarm, to keep
a light trained on The System in order to prevent it from tangling our souls
in its web and demeaning them.”32 In “The Elephant’s Disappearance” Mu-
rakami depicts a System that has literally entangled animals within its grip,
a society where fascination with animals is at least partially responsible for
their death. This story does not expose nearly the degree of elephant abuse
found in other works of world literature, but the contrasts it posits between
fascination with and treatment of this animal are significant in their reminder
of the diverse sources of nonhuman suffering.33
“The Elephant’s Disappearance” opens with its first-person narrator
reading a newspaper article on the disappearance of an elderly elephant from
its pen near an elementary school in an unnamed affluent suburb of Tokyo.
394  ecoambiguity

The narrator, who long has been interested in the elephant and was one of
the last people to see it before it disappeared, summarizes events leading up
to this incident. Born in East Africa, the animal had lived most of its life in
a small private suburban zoo in Japan. When the zoo closed, its land was
sold to a real-estate developer and all the animals relocated except for the
elephant, which no facility wanted because of its advanced age. Local bu-
reaucrats agreed that they could not kill the animal since their constituents
would be outraged and the fallout substantial. So the town took ownership
of it, the developer provided land, and the zoo’s former owners continued to
pay the wages of its keeper. An elementary school gymnasium was relocated
and turned into an elephant house, dedication ceremonies were held, and
the elephant began its new life. It was cared for lovingly by its keeper and
visited frequently by schoolchildren, who gave it scraps from their lunches.
Murakami’s story describes how after a year in its new home the elephant
suddenly disappears, along with its keeper. The authorities assert that the
animal either “escaped or was snatched as the result of a clever and calcu-
lated plan.”34 The newspaper likewise claims that the animal “ran away.”
But the narrator determines that, since people went to great lengths to make
sure the animal could not escape, far more disturbing phenomena are at play:
“A composite of complexities and labored rhetoric, the newspaper article left
only one possible conclusion [essence; honshitsu] concerning the incident: the
elephant had not run away, it had ‘disappeared.’”35
Later in “The Elephant’s Disappearance,” recounting his conversation
with a young woman he recently had begun to date, the narrator justifies
his conclusion. The night the elephant disappeared he had been perched on
a cliff, looking into the animal’s dwelling through a vent he had recently
discovered, when he noticed that the size difference between the animal and
its keeper was not as dramatic as before. He initially thought the town might
have replaced the elderly elephant with a younger and smaller counterpart,
but the animal’s movements and interactions with its keeper remained as
they had always been, so he quickly dismissed this idea. His companion asks
him whether he believes that the elephant continued shrinking until it was
small enough to escape from its prison or whether the animal simply evapo-
rated into nothingness. The narrator has no answer but nevertheless wraps
up the story with “The elephant and its keeper have disappeared [shōmetsu],
and they will not be returning [modotte konai].”36
Murakami’s story suggests that if even something so massive and so pro-
tected can vanish without a trace, then there is nothing preventing other
human and nonhuman beings from a similar outcome; nothing is perma-
nently safe, yet neither is anything permanently confined. But in discussing
 Green Paradoxes  395

the extreme albeit futile measures taken to assure that what happened would
never happen, “The Elephant’s Disappearance” also underscores the fine line
between protecting and imperiling the nonhuman. The animal’s life is spared,
it gets a new home, and its familiar caretaker is retained, but its movements
are severely limited by physical restraints. Just as disturbing is the fact that no
one, including those closest to the elephant, seems to protest its confinement.
Fascination with the elephant is accompanied by silence over its shackles.
The narrator describes the ceremony dedicating the elephant house: the
mayor gives a speech on the town’s growth and the perfection of its cul-
tural facilities, a student reads an essay beseeching the elephant to live a long
and healthy life, contestants vie to see who can best draw the elephant, and
young women feed the elephant bananas, which it munches as its eyes glaze
over. When it finishes, everyone applauds. Perhaps too intent on enjoying the
festivities, people seem oblivious to the chains that bind the aging animal,
captured in the narrator’s iron-clad account:

On its right rear leg the elephant was fitted with a massive, heavy-
looking steel cuff. From this cuff there stretched a thick chain about
thirty feet long. This in turn was fastened securely to a concrete foun-
dation. Anyone could see what a solid steel cuff and chain these were.
It appeared as though the elephant could struggle with all its might for
a hundred years, and it still wouldn’t be able to destroy them.
I couldn’t tell whether the elephant was bothered by its shackles.
However, at least on the surface, it seemed completely unconcerned
that a steel lump was coiled around its leg. It kept its blank gaze fixed
on an indeterminate point in space; its ears and white body hairs trem-
bled softly in the wind.37

Discourse on confinement becomes progressively stronger: on one of the el-

ephant’s legs is a “massive, heavy-looking steel cuff” (gasshiri to shita omosō
na tetsu no wa o hamerareteita). This cuff is connected to a “thick chain”
(futoi kusari), albeit one that is thirty feet long. But this glimmer of hope is
quickly shattered, the chain attached “securely” (kotei) to a “concrete foun-
dation” (konkurīto no dodai). The narrator then reinforces the reinforce-
ments, noting that everyone can see clearly that the cuff and chain are solid
(ganjō), indestructible steel.
This passage contrasts sharply with the description of the elephant-house
dedication festivities. While the ceremonies feature an animal chomping on
bananas as schoolchildren and officials celebrate, this passage portrays an
animal bound and tethered. Only its ears and white hairs move; even its gaze
396  ecoambiguity

is said to be steadfast. Interestingly, the narrator admits he cannot tell (boku

ni wa yoku wakaranai) whether the elephant is bothered by its shackles,
then comments that—the antithesis of Chen Zhen’s wolf—the animal seems
completely unconcerned (kanshin o haratte inai yō ni mieta). At once point-
edly denying any visible signs of nonhuman suffering, this admission and
comment leave considerable room for speculation and reveal the narrator’s
doubts that the elephant remains unaffected by its constraints.
Later in the story, in remarks on the newspaper article about the ele-
phant’s disappearance, the narrator reveals that the massive leg iron was only
the beginning. And he tries to explain how it would have been impossible for
the elephant simply to “escape,” given the many barriers that were erected
around the animal. The iron cuff was discovered still bolted; the newspaper
says that the most logical explanation is that the caretaker unlocked it, freed
the elephant’s leg, then relocked it. But the narrator notes that this would
have been impossible. The caretaker did not have a key for the cuff; the
keys had been housed in safes at the police station and the fire station, so
there was no opportunity for the caretaker even to allow the elephant an
occasional clandestine stroll. The narrator also notes the virtual lack of an
escape path from the elephant’s pen. To be sure, the elephant arrived at this
site via trailer and thus presumably could have been taken away in similar
fashion by someone who had access to the key, an option the narrator does
not consider. Instead, he comments on the extensive security surrounding the
animal’s house and grounds:

The second problem was the escape route. The elephant house and
elephant grounds were surrounded by a solid fence about ten feet tall.
The question of security had been passionately debated in the town
council, and the town had settled on a patrol system that might be
considered rather excessive for a single old elephant. The fence was
made of concrete and thick iron bars . . . there was only a single en-
trance, which was found locked from the inside. There was no way the
elephant could have gotten over that fortress-like fence and escaped.38

Not only is the elephant excessively tethered to a building, the building itself
is surrounded by a high fence that is “solid” (ganjō) like the steel of the ani-
mal’s tethers, a fence worthy of a fortress (yōsai), not an animal pen. More-
over, as the narrator reveals, the elephant enclosure is located at the base of a
steep hill that the animal could not possibly have climbed. And no footprints
were ever found, confirming that the elephant did not walk outside its pen.
Ironically, security around the elephant enclosure becomes even tighter after
 Green Paradoxes  397

its disappearance. As the narrator comments, “A thick chain had been coiled
around the bars of the entrance to the iron fence. This was to keep people
out. Looking inside the fence, I could see that the door of the elephant house
had been chained in similar fashion . . . The chain coiled around the door of
the elephant house made me think of a large snake tightly guarding a rusted,
ruined palace in a dense forest.”39
The authorities had spared the elephant’s life, but not because they har-
bored any real concern for the animal. Instead, they focused solely on avoid-
ing a public outcry. While initial public sentiment allowed the elephant to
live, soon popular opinion ensured its imprisonment. Residents were well
disposed to having an elephant in their midst. As the narrator wryly notes:
“Adopting a homeless elephant was something about which people could feel
good. People feel more affection for old elephants than for sewers or fire en-
gines.”40 People also recognized that the elephant was feeble: “The elephant
was so old that its every move was a huge effort. It was so old that people see-
ing it for the first time feared it might fall down flat on the ground and take
its final breath . . . It looked as though it might drop dead of a heart attack at
any minute.”41 But as reactions to the elephant’s disappearance reveal, some
individuals still feared the animal. They thus did not object to the restraints
and most likely were even in favor of them. At the same time that enthusiasm
for the elephant preserved its life and immortalized it in image and verse, it
also resulted in the animal’s imprisonment.
Even more significant than the contrast between the sentiments and be-
haviors of the townspeople is the paradox of the caretaker. The narrator de-
scribes the relationship between elephant and keeper as exceptionally close.
They had an uncanny ability to communicate with each other: the caretaker
needed only tap the elephant on the leg and whisper something in its ear for
the animal to do exactly what he wanted. The narrator wonders whether the
elephant has learned to understand snippets of human language, reckoning
that it has lived long enough to do so. Elephant and caretaker appear so close
that the narrator even wonders whether the animal can read the mind of its
human counterpart. When he asks the caretaker how he communicates with
the elephant, the man responds simply, “It’s been a long companionship.”42
This is the public face of the two. Peering into the enclosure from his perch
atop a neighboring cliff, the narrator is granted a privileged view of the el-
ephant and its guardian:

What struck me right away when I saw the elephant and its keeper
alone in the elephant house together was the real closeness of the two,
a much stronger bond than they revealed in public. Their affection
398  ecoambiguity

for each other was clear in every move they made. It was almost as
though they saved up their deep feelings during the day, making sure
no one noticed their friendship, and let them out at night when it was
just the two of them . . . It was impossible to miss the special warmth
produced by the feeling of trust by which the two were bound. While
the keeper swept the floor, the elephant would wave its trunk and
lightly tap the keeper’s back.43

A profound connection clearly exists between elephant and keeper. But no-
where does Murakami’s text indicate that this man protested the town’s
treatment of the animal under his care; he does not seem to be troubled
even by the tight cuffing of the animal’s leg. Perhaps the caretaker is simply
relieved that the elephant’s life has been spared. Yet his utter silence con-
cerning the elephant’s confinement notably contradicts with his feelings for
the animal. The narrator’s silence is equally striking, considering his own
fondness for the elephant and his greater concern for the animal than its
caretaker after they disappear; elephant and caretaker vanish at the same
time, but as its title suggests the narrative focuses on the elephant, not its
human companion.
“The Elephant’s Disappearance” most obviously exposes corrupt and in-
efficient officialdom by highlighting the various deals made among zoo own-
ers, developers, the mayor, and politicians, as well as the town’s inability to
keep track of an animal so large and immobile as a feeble, heavily chained
elephant. Murakami’s story also underscores people’s ready disregard of in-
ept bureaucracy: the narrator states explicitly that even something as disturb-
ing as the elephant’s disappearance would not change society. He remarks,
“The earth continued its monotonous rotation, politicians continued issuing
unreliable proclamations, people continued yawning on their way to the of-
fice, and children continued preparing for exams.”44 Human behaviors seem
impervious to empirical circumstances. “The Elephant’s Disappearance” is
also rife with informational ambiguity, particularly concerning the elephant’s
disappearance. Although the narrator, as the last person to see the animal,
appears to have more insight into its disappearance than any other resident,
his only conclusion is that it simply vanished. The failure of anyone in the
story, from the narrator to the townspeople, the officials investigating the
incident, even the newspaper reporters, to propose the most obvious sce-
nario—someone with access to one of the keys unlocked the animal and
removed it from the enclosure the same way it came in—further mocks hu-
man foolishness. Yet little heed is paid to the well-being of the animal. The
 Green Paradoxes  399

real mystery is not what happened to the elephant after its last sighting but
why such a creature was treated so inhumanely in full view of supposedly
well-intentioned people.45
Literature charges even indigenous peoples with mingling respect and
mistreatment of animals. Touched on in Nitta Jirō’s Tale of Alaska and Topas
Tamapima’s “The Last Hunter,” discussed in chapter 2, this paradox is cap-
tured particularly well in the Japanese writer and Hokkaido native Oguma
Hideo’s twenty-four-section narrative poem “Tobu sori” (Flying Sled, 1935).
Oguma was active in Japan’s prewar proletarian literary movement, and al-
though he was not an especially prolific writer, what he did produce attracted
the attention of both his contemporaries and postwar scholars; “Flying Sled”
has been called “the finest long poem ever written in Japanese” and “virtu-
ally unparalleled in Japanese literature.”46 In some ways the ecoambiguity
articulated in this poem is more understandable than the contradiction high-
lighted in Murakami’s story: while the latter focuses on the admiration and
confinement of a single animal, Oguma’s poem contrasts concurrent respect
for the nonhuman in toto with abuse of a particular species. In so doing, it
addresses a common dilemma in relationships among people and the nonhu-
man: appreciating environments often facilitates condoning or even glorify-
ing damage to one of their component parts.
“Flying Sled,” written explicitly for the Ainu people, draws attention to
the plight of Ainu driven from Hokkaido onto Sakhalin.47 As David Good-
man has argued, the text attempts to describe, and make credible, “an al-
ternative, outward-looking, culturally tolerant way to be Japanese.”48 But
although grounded in a specific place and time, the poem reaches out to ad-
dress conflicts between indigenous peoples and more recent arrivals. “Flying
Sled” critiques Japanese incursion onto Ainu lands and rampant destruction
of northern forests, contrasting Japanese profligacy with the Ainu’s prudent
use of resources.49 At the same time, it depicts the Ainu as far more methodi-
cal and effective hunters than Japanese. “Flying Sled” exposes a common di-
chotomy between attitudes and behaviors toward the nonhuman: those more
respectful of the natural world (the Ainu) are in certain situations ironically
more responsible for its destruction (because they are such successful hunt-
ers, the Ainu kill more birds than the Japanese). Oguma’s poem by no means
depicts the Ainu as wasteful, and in fact it describes them innovatively utiliz-
ing as many body parts as they can from the other animals they kill: “The
Japanese were incompetent hunters. / Tearing off the pelts of the animals
they’d killed / they nonchalantly discard bones and carcasses. / But the Ainu
decorated the periphery of their homes / with countless animal bones.” The
400  ecoambiguity

narrator notes that the Ainu pray fervently over these bones day and night
and “never forget to reminisce over the death of the animals.”50 Interestingly,
here he gives one of the few examples of Ainu use of animal body parts that
might seem frivolous: the Ainu respect the bones of deceased animals, but
survival does not depend on homes decorated with skeleton fragments. By
emphasizing how successful Ainu are at killing certain animals, even if only
to survive, “Flying Sled” provides important perspectives on the delicate bal-
ance between harmony with and harm to environments.
“Flying Sled” opens tersely: “Winter attacked” (fuyu ga osottekita).51
The narrator depicts humans and much of nature both standing in blank
amazement, slapped by the suddenly brutal wind and snow. After describ-
ing a group of people preparing for winter, the narrator reveals their iden-
tity: early twentieth-century Ainu living in Sakhalin. He points out that the
wind and snow are less of a threat to Ainu and the natural world than are
the Japanese. The Japanese have driven Ainu and bears from their homes in
Hokkaido, and the populations of both are dying off. In both Hokkaido and
Sakhalin forests are just as endangered as their mammalian counterparts.
Although the displaced Ainu in Sakhalin cut down trees the state has claimed
as its own, they do so to survive. In addition, the damage they inflict on
landscapes is mild compared to that wreaked by Japanese lumber mills and
paper companies; the latter plunder forests purely for profit and then set fire
to remaining foliage to obliterate evidence of their crimes. Oguma’s poem
here establishes familiar contrasts between national governments and corpo-
rations on the one hand and indigenous peoples on the other.
Complicating matters is the description earlier in the text of the Ainu,
who are desperate for jobs, as delighted to hear that the Ōji paper company
is opening another factory on the island. The narrator’s description of hunt-
ing birds introduces further paradoxes. Emphasizing the difference between
Ainu and Japanese techniques, he reveals the Ainu as making a larger mark
on some nonhuman species than do the Japanese. Halfway through “Flying
Sled” the poem describes a Japanese forest ranger trying to shoot a flock of
birds. The ranger came to Sakhalin partly to take refuge in nature. And his
marksmanship leaves much to be desired. In fact, the narrator mocks his in-
ability to kill more than a few of the dozens of birds that swarm overhead
when he blows the birdcall:

His shooting position is good, and his rifle is of high quality,

he can almost reach out and touch his prey
the ranger aims and fires with a bang,
but what happens,
 Green Paradoxes  401

only one or two birds fall

and sometimes he can’t hit even a single bird . . .
[He wonders] to shoot one or two
do I have to blow on my flute
and draw as many as thirty?52

The ranger’s Ainu friend Ikubashui (Jpn. Gontarō) then steps forward,
calls the birds to the branches overhead, fires his gun, and the animals drop
around his feet like ripe fruit. Gontarō explains that the hunter must proceed
methodically, working from the bottom of the tree to the top, even if the
most desired birds are perched the highest:

the Ainu begins with the bird closest to him,

the first target,
he shoots birds one after the other
beginning with those on the lowest branches
and gradually working his way up the tree,
and after he shoots the mountain birds
perched in the treetops, he has shot them all.53

The Ainu’s instructions are cold and calculating; the hunter is simply to kill
whatever stands between him and his prize. In contrast, the narrator deco-
rates in rhetorical flourishes Gontarō’s relationship with his firearm: “When
the rifle was gripped in the large hands of the Ainu / steel and wood, gun-
powder and target / synthesized into a rifle / used as a living thing / like a part
of the Ainu’s body [Ainu ni totte wa nikutai no ichibu no yō ni / ikite tsu-
kawareteiru].”54 The rifle is virtually an appendage of the Ainu, much more
a “natural” part of his physique than is true of the Japanese. It is not clear
what Gontarō and the ranger do with the birds they have shot, but the text
implies that they leave them where they fell. Gontarō apparently took the
lives of these animals simply to show the ranger how best to kill large num-
bers of wildlife. This is only one of their many hunting expeditions together,
the ranger always using the Ainu as his guide. The gulf between the Ainu
people’s admiration for and killing of animals is readily bridged: they depend
on these animals for survival. Oguma’s poem nonetheless depicts instances of
wanton, meaningless slaughter.
The next sections of “Flying Sled” feature a devastating avalanche that
severely injures the ranger; the poem ends with Gontarō and his loyal sled-
dog team rushing their Japanese friend to safety. These lines, reminiscent of
the poem’s opening comments about winter’s sudden and fierce arrival, also
402  ecoambiguity

echo those earlier in the text that describe Gontarō’s close relationships with
his dogs. The concluding lines indicate a partial return to more expected, less
ambiguous relationships between Ainu and animals—Ainu are undaunted by
fierce weather and enjoy close connections with their dogs.
Oguma’s narrative poem contrasts Ainu and Japanese relationships with
landscapes, revealing inconsistencies in both sets of behaviors. Even more
noteworthy are the divergences these inconsistencies spawn between people’s
feelings toward the natural world and how they actually treat the nonhuman.
For the most part the Ainu profoundly respect animals, going so far as to
pray fervently to the animal bones decorating their houses. These attitudes
make Gontarō’s bird slaughter, and Ainu hunting techniques in general, seem
all the more disconcerting.55
Literature depicts not just animals as suffering from human respect for the
nonhuman. In contrast with Murakami’s “The Elephant’s Disappearance”
and Oguma’s “Flying Sled,” Kim Kwanggyu’s “Nŭlgŭn sonamu” (Old Pine
Tree, 1986) portrays people’s concern for a tree as underlying its agony. This
poem centers on an individual frustrated with the way society has treated a
weary pine that has stood for more than a century in the front garden of an
assembly hall. Contrasting his own compassion with the relative indifference
of those managing the tree’s care, the poem’s speaker claims to be the only
person who can empathize with the long-suffering tree. More important, he
exposes the significant gap between the feelings people have for the tree and
the effects of their behaviors on it: people value the tree and believe it impor-
tant, but they quite unintentionally damage it. “Old Pine Tree” reveals some
of the shortcomings of human attempts at “preservation,” at least from the
perspective of the nonhuman bodies being manipulated.
Unlike the trees in most creative texts on ecodegradation, the tree of Kim
Kwanggyu’s poem is protected under a “nature preservation” (chayŏn poho)
order, the second part of which (i.e., “preservation”; poho) those charged with
its care have taken literally. They have made sure the tree does not change, at
least outwardly; early in the poem the speaker claims that it has “remained
standing in that place / unchanged for more than a century” (paegyŏ nyŏn ŭl
pyŏnham opsi nŏnŭn / kŭ chari e sŏ issŏtta).56 But as pointed out in chapter
6 in the discussion of Kim Kwanggyu’s “Pagoda Tree,” a poem written in
the same year as “Old Pine Tree” that also features a tree which has been
“preserved” and “remained unchanged” for some time, even plastic trees
in hermetically sealed environments change color and shape unless manipu-
lated. Desperate to forestall outward transformation, and not considering the
long-term consequences of their actions, people increase the suffering of the
anthropomorphized old pine tree by postponing the inevitable:
 Green Paradoxes  403

Judging by your trunk, where even the resin has dried up

your roots too must be painful.
Having no idea of your exhaustion, association members
[hoewŏndŭl]
have enclosed your lower trunk in cement
and even while administering injections,
tell you just to keep standing there.57

“Old Pine Tree” not only records what has been done to the tree, noting
that its lower part has been encased in cement and that it has been subjected
to injections. Empathizing with the tree as most people cannot, the poem’s
speaker also speculates and then asserts how these acts have affected the
pine: its roots “must be painful” (ppuriga ap’ŭl ttaedo toeŏnnŭnde) and it
itself is “exhausted” (kodalp’ŭm). The tree has been altered chemically and
prosthetically to give the appearance of remaining unchanged, to its long-
term detriment.
In the second half of the text the tree is urged to defy these painful at-
tempts to prolong its life; the poem claims that nothing is more natural than
old age and that the tree should surrender to its presumed longing to “take
some time off” and can feel free to rest for several centuries.58 This is because
people can do virtually nothing to stave off its demise; the tree’s only respite
will come from rest and eventual death. “Old Pine Tree” concludes with the
tree heeding the speaker’s advice and finally allowing itself to relax:

After keeping them open for more than a century

you shut your green eyes
and at last have fallen asleep standing up
old pine tree
with your drooping red branches59

While in the opening of the poem the phrase “for more than a century”
(paegyŏ nyŏn) signaled continuity, here it marks the end of a life, or at least
of an era. In truth, the speaker has no more insight into how the tree is
actually feeling than the individuals who administer its injections and ap-
ply its body cast. Both groups appear to have its best interests in mind. But
unlike the efforts of city employees to preserve the tree’s appearance, the
speaker attempts to ensure the tree’s comfort; granting the tree agency, he
gives it permission to act as it desires. That it decides literally to “fall asleep”
(chamdŭnŭnguna) highlights the ignorance of officials who “preserve” the
flora they deem important. Ironically, only when sleeping is the tree depicted
404  ecoambiguity

as having color. In the early lines of the poem the speaker talks about how
it casts cool shade and moves with the breeze but does not mention its hues.
Only as it relaxes are its “eyes” said to be green and its branches red.
There are times, Kim Kwanggyu’s poem argues, where death is prefer-
able; treating nonhuman bodies humanely does not necessarily mean pro-
longing their lives. This text focuses on a single pine that it claims has stood
in the garden in front of Saemaŭl (New Community) Assembly Hall for more
than a century. Although the damage explicitly described is temporally, not
spatially pervasive, little separates this tree from any number of plants that
have been “preserved” to their disadvantage. As the Australian aboriginal
writer Oodgeroo Noonuccal’s poem “Municipal Gum” (1964) likewise la-
ments: “Gumtree in the city street, / Hard bitumen around your feet, / Rather
you should be / In the cool world of leafy forest halls / And wild bird calls /
Here you seems to me / Like that poor cart-horse / Castrated, broken, a thing
wronged, / Strapped and buckled, its hell prolonged, / Whose hung head
and listless mien express / Its hopelessness. / Municipal gum, it is dolorous
/ To see you thus / Set in your black grass of bitumen—/ O fellow citizen, /
What have they done to us?”60 Here too a tree has been preserved, only to
be trapped in bitumen (asphalt, tar), its hell prolonged like that of the cart
horse. As in many poems, including Kim Kwanggyu’s, the fate of the nonhu-
man is aligned with that of human societies: trees, horses, and aboriginal
peoples have been taken from their homelands and deposited in unfamiliar
and often hostile ground. In “Municipal Gum” the analogy is explicit, the
last line speaking of the tree as a “fellow citizen,” and in Kim Kwanggyu’s it
is more implicit, the irony of the “old” tree suffering outside the New Com-
munity Assembly Hall striking. Death would appear a welcome release for
a tree whose life has been forcibly extended by those who respect it not for
its own sake but for their aesthetic benefit. On the other hand, as Oodgeroo
Noonuccal’s poem reminds us, the tree would be more content in a “cool
world of leafy forest halls” than in the garden of an assembly hall, alive or
dead. Threads of life, death, and disappearance weave themselves through
these poems, complicating relationships between beliefs and behaviors and
ultimately muddying environmental possibilities.

Admiring Ecosystems, Longing for Control

Even more convoluted conflicts between attitudes and behaviors vis-à-vis the
natural world arise not out of concrete relationships with particular animals
or plants but instead out of admiration for larger ecosystems. Narratives
 Green Paradoxes  405

engaging with these dilemmas appear in many permutations, but most in-
triguing are those that feature appreciation as leading to behaviors that injure
environments.
The Korean writer Ko Ŭn’s five-stanza poem “Kkot” (Flowers, 1986),
for instance, shows desire for more greenery as resulting in behaviors that
contradict both each other and this yearning itself. Written several years
before the Seoul Olympics in response to government attempts to decorate
the city for foreign visitors, this text depicts officials importing mature flora
from the countryside, rather than planting seeds and bulbs. Rural residents,
displeased with these developments and hoping to evoke sympathy, then
claim that their landscape has been even more compromised than it actually
is.61 Both groups feel strongly about greenery, but “Flowers” depicts even
those most wishing to be surrounded by it as either displacing it or overstat-
ing its removal.
Like many creative works addressing environments damaged by people,
Ko Ŭn’s poem laments the absence of familiar vegetation (flowers) and the
prolific sprouting of human artifacts (televisions). The text begins with the
regretful comment:

Spring has come,

spring has come and gone,
but in the mountain valleys
there isn’t a single flower
not even a common magnolia or cherry blossom.62

The second stanza, relating the discovery that actually not all flowers have
disappeared from the mountains, injects ambiguity about conditions; the
poem casts doubt as to just how many spaces and species have been affected.
Several kinds of flowers are blooming on bushes, on seed plants, and even on
individual stalks in a nearby garden and in places that were not explored in
the first stanza:

Luckily, in the vegetable garden yellow flowers are blooming on a

plant gone to seed
How much joy! [ŏlmana nŏmch’inŭn kippŭminya]
Go around the mountain
aha, here are heaps of blazing mountain bush clover
and look, at that field, lying idle,
tiny shepherd’s purse thickly blazing [chauk’age p’iŏ inne]
of course, blazing, blazing [p’iŏ inne p’iŏ inne]
406  ecoambiguity

The speaker’s excitement is palpable: he is overcome with happiness at find-

ing yellow flowers in the garden, albeit on a plant in decline, and is so de-
lighted to see blazing mountain bush clover and shepherd’s purse that he
repeats the word “blazing” four times.
The claims in the third and fifth stanzas that not a single flower is visible,
that the entire landscape has been uprooted, thus come as a surprise. The
third stanza explains what has happened to the foliage:

Everything useful, even the flowers, has been pulled out and taken
away
all our nation’s landscape has been pulled out and taken away
to Seoul, to Seoul.63

And the poem’s fifth and final stanza laments what has replaced the missing
flowers in the countryside. Unlike in Masuda Mizuko’s short story “Horn,”
discussed in chapter 4, where flowers in the municipal parks are replaced by
other flora and are replanted in private gardens, here they are swapped for
artifacts of Seoul material culture, which become more abundant, or at least
more apparent in the countryside:64

Spring has come and gone

but ha ha, not a flower to be seen,
just TVs
just TVs.65

“Flowers” here reveals the subjective character of judgments about environ-

mental health, especially their reliance on spatial perspectives (the speaker
claims that no flowers remain but does not specify his geographical scope)
and species bias (the poem can claim that no flowers remain only by dismiss-
ing as insignificant those that do). Even more important, “Flowers” shows
that preference for a particular species can make an individual assert that a
landscape devoid of this species effectively lacks nature writ large.
The fourth stanza reveals reverse manipulation of perceptions of environ-
mental health:

Not only the flowers!

Not only the girls!
The big trees on the grounds of the township office,
even they
 Green Paradoxes  407

will soon be pulled out and taken away to the 1988 Olympics
their roots wrapped up.66

Believing it important to host the Olympics in a green metropolis, the gov-

ernment attempts to bring the countryside to the city rather than replicate
the countryside in the city. The repetition of “pull out” (ppop’yŏ kada) in
the third and fourth stanzas underlines the violence of this process; greening
cityscapes involves transplanting, not increasing national greenery. Ko Ŭn’s
“Flowers” most obviously exposes the hypocrisy of the Korean government
in decorating the capital with plant life from rural regions. Seoul’s new green
is not plastic, as it is in several works analyzed in this book, but it in many
ways is artificial. On the other hand, by showing the conflicting motives and
behaviors both of those who moved the plants from country to city and of
the rural people most deeply affected by this change, the poem also draws
attention to the convoluted processes undergirding green desire.
Written four decades earlier under very different circumstances, the Jap-
anese writer Dazai Osamu’s novel Tsugaru (1944) likewise addresses how
individuals with great attachment to flora end up displacing them.67 One of
Japan’s most loved and loathed literary figures, Dazai hailed from Kanagi, a
village in Kita Tsugaru county, one of Japan’s most isolated regions. Dazai
called Tsugaru a novel, but it reads more like a travelogue of a three-week
journey around the remote and impoverished Tsugaru peninsula, located at
the northernmost end of Honshu. While Ko Ŭn’s “Flowers” speaks simply
about going around an unnamed mountain, Tsugaru touches on the history
of a region, the lives and character of its people, and its topography, as well
as art, love, friendship, and family.68 Discussions of the nonhuman world
appear throughout, but only a few passages address environmental harm
caused by people. Instead, in this work the nonhuman often serves as meta-
phor or adornment. For instance, in the introduction the narrator describes
visiting Hirosaki Castle while a student at Hirosaki College. He remembers
being deeply moved by the sight of the town below, which he likens to one
of the “hidden ponds” featured in the Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves,
Japan’s earliest poetry anthology:

I stood in a corner of the castle’s courtyard, looking out at Mount

Iwaki, when I suddenly noticed a dream town spreading out beneath
my feet. I shuddered. Up until then, I had always thought of the castle
as standing alone on the edge of town. But look, right below the castle
was a classically elegant town, the likes of which I had never seen.
408  ecoambiguity

There it was, just as it had been for hundreds of years, its small roofs
lined up and crouching silently, holding its breath. Ahhh, there’s been
a town even in a place like this! I was young, but without thinking I
let out a deep sigh, as though in a dream. It was like those “hidden
ponds” [komorinu] that frequently appear in the Man’yōshū . . . I have
no choice but to shout out forcefully that Hirosaki Castle is a famous,
matchless castle because it has this hidden pond. Suppose flowers with
many branches bloomed on the shores of the hidden pond and the
white-walled castle tower rose mutely above them, that castle would
certainly be one of the greatest in the world. And a hot spring near this
famous castle would eternally preserve its simple, honest character.69

The narrator describes himself as stirred not by nature but instead by the
built environment; he looks dispassionately at Mount Iwaki while the dream-
like town spreads out beneath his feet, provoking a shudder. It is to him a
“hidden pond,” one not only hidden from view, as the town was for so long,
but whose water, like rooftops themselves, does not flow freely.70 Although
early Japanese poetry often compares hidden ponds to depressed and help-
less hearts, Dazai’s travelogue likens the built environment to such a body
of water. What makes the castle peerless is not a hidden pond but instead
the town below it, which resembles a hidden pond. The narrator backtracks
slightly when he claims that if flowers bloomed beside this town, then the
nearby castle “would certainly be one of the greatest in the world.” But the
built environment remains more enticing than the natural world.
In contrast, at other points in Tsugaru the narrator highlights the harsh-
ness of the land and goes so far as to declare its bleakness beyond description.
He gives a chronology of Tsugaru’s harvests which reveals that in the past 330
years there have been about sixty poor harvests or total crop failures, an aver-
age of one every five years.71 The narrator remembers the painful accounts
of starvation in Tsugaru that he heard as a child. Learning that nothing has
changed despite significant advances in agronomy, he protests to his friend
N: “This can’t be allowed to happen! . . . People are always talking about
the remarkable world of science, but they’re simply irresponsible if they can’t
teach farmers how to avoid these kinds of crop failures.”72 N reassures him
that researchers are doing all that they can to develop seeds better able to
withstand the cold, but he admits that poor harvests still occur regularly.
Parts of Tsugaru are even less amenable to human shaping, resisting not
only machines but also language. The narrator declares that the seashore at
the northernmost end of Honshu is not scenery, since unlike so many other
places on the Japanese archipelago, this landscape has not been tamed by art:
 Green Paradoxes  409

After we’d been walking for about two hours, the scenery around us
[atari no fūkei] became extraordinarily strange . . . It was no longer
scenery [fūkei de nakatta]. What we call scenery [fūkei] is something
that has been gazed at and described by people for many many years,
that has been, one could say, absorbed and softened by human eyes
[ningen no me de namerarete nanka shi], that has been reared and
tamed by people [ningen ni kawarete], so that even Kegon Falls, at
350 feet, gives off a faint human scent, like a fierce animal in a cage
[ori no naka no mōjū no yō na, hito kusai nioi ga kasuka ni kanzer-
areru]. Without exception, all the famous places and dangerous places
that from the days of old have been painted in pictures, written in
songs, or sung in haiku let you discover a human expression [ningen
no hyōjō]. But this seacoast at the northern end of Honshu is nothing
at all like scenery [fūkei ni mo nani mo, natte ya shinai].73

Tsugaru describes a truism of classical Japanese aesthetics: the poet’s pen and
the painter’s brush have humanized landscapes. The natural world not only
has been described; no matter how dramatic, it also has been “absorbed and
softened by human eyes” and “reared by people.” In other words, not only
have people physically shaped actual ecosystems, art allows its consumers
to discover a “human expression” in every landscape. Also interesting is the
narrator’s comparison of waterfalls to caged animals: even though the former
fall relatively freely and the latter often yearn to become free, both give off a
“human scent.” In contrast, Tsugaru is or at least appears totally untamed.
The narrator also notes that just as the Russian novelist and travel writer
Ivan Alexandrovich Goncharov could think only of the word “dreadful” (os-
oroshii) when asked by a ship’s captain to find a “wonderful adjective” (sub-
arashii keiyōshi) for the large waves pounding their vessel, he too is at a loss
for words to describe the rocks and waters of northern Honshu. According
to the narrator, like Goncharov’s sea and raging oceans or wild desert storms
everywhere, the landscape before him can be described only as “dreadful.”74
“Dreadful” is not more scientific a term than those used in poetry, and it
continues to anthropomorphize the nonhuman, but unlike much East Asian
aesthetic discourse, it does not idealize landscapes.
Untamable even by words, this of all lands would appear to be relatively
immune to environmental degradation. But in his discussion of Kanita, the
largest town on the western coast of the Tsugaru peninsula, the narrator
shows that conditions are more complicated. After a night with friends, he
sets off for a hill on the outskirts of town. Looking down from Hirosaki
Castle, he had been entranced by the rooftops below; looking out at the open
410  ecoambiguity

ocean, he had been repelled by its unruly rocks and water. But now, looking
down from the hilltop at Kanita, he is impressed with the fecund land and
water spreading out before him. People in Kanita and neighboring villages
enjoy seas that supply fresh fish and fields whose richness would surprise
outsiders. The narrator criticizes those who claim that the area should be
treasured because of its trees, but in fact he too expresses great pride in the
region’s foliage, its cypress in particular. He describes the woodlands: “The
branches of Tsuguru’s forests are so entangled and remain so green and luxu-
riant even in the winter that one would think Aomori [lit. green forest] Pre-
fecture had gotten its name from them. In times past it was counted as one of
Japan’s three great forest areas.”75 The narrator cites a 1929 volume on Japa-
nese geography and ethnography which notes that the region began manag-
ing its forests in the 1680s and subsequently established approximately one
hundred substantial woodlands. Seeking to capitalize on these resources, the
Meiji government (1868–1912) continued Tokugawa practices of forest man-
agement. Favorable reviews of Aomori Prefecture’s cypress spread loudly and
widely, leading to increased degradation. The 1929 report continues:

This area’s wood quality is suitable for all kinds of construction proj-
ects. The timber is especially good at withstanding moisture, produces
abundant lumber, and is comparatively easy to transport, all of which
contribute to its excellent reputation. The annual production is eight
million cubic feet of lumber . . . In the vicinity of the Kanita River
there is a national cypress forest that has been named one of Japan’s
three most beautiful forests. The harbor of the town of Kanita is very
active in transporting lumber. It is here that the forest railway leaves
the coast and enters the mountains, returning daily with large quanti-
ties of lumber. The lumber here is known for being inexpensive and
of good quality.76

This wood is at the mercy not of poets and painters, as is much scenery
(fūkei), but instead of loggers; the most desirable timber is quickly harvested.
The narrator claims that just fifteen years later, during wartime (1944), the
number of cubic feet of cypress taken from the region’s forests trebled. Cy-
press is not the only tree felled; cryptomeria, beech, oak, cinnamon tree,
horse chestnut, and larch are also taken. The reference to Tokugawa silvicul-
ture suggests that woodlands are being replanted, but the ability of the forest
ecosystems to withstand increasing deforestation remains questionable.
Most interesting here is the seemingly inevitable disjuncture between at-
titudes and actions toward the nonhuman, cypress trees in particular: echo-
 Green Paradoxes  411

ing Zhuangzi’s parable of the useless tree, discussed in chapters 1, 2, and 4,

Tsugaru asserts that the most highly valued species are killed most rapidly
and that nothing can be done about it. After noting the abundant tree har-
vests that pass through Kanita, the narrator comments, “Even if the people of
Kanita don’t want to be proud, they can’t help it.”77 He does not specify the
object of their pleasure: the townspeople could be proud that they live near
a national treasure or that their town has the infrastructure to transport vast
quantities of precious timber. Most likely, they are smug about their swell-
ing profits. No desire or even willingness to change behaviors apparently
exists. The narrator remarks that, having learned of the region’s bounty, the
reader might believe Kanita a “heaven of perfect contentment.”78 Actually,
he claims, the town and its people are gentle and notably lacking in vigor.
They supposedly have no control over their emotions and also are utterly
apathetic, so much so that they sadden visitors to the region.
Tsugaru implies that Kanita residents will be capable of change only
when times turn tough. Their mildness and lack of energy are blamed on
the town’s being “blessed by nature” (tennen no megumi ga ōi)—the easier
it is to extract resources from the nonhuman, the narrator posits, the more
lackadaisical people become.79 It is only after the landscape has been greatly
disrupted that they may have any chance of altering their behaviors. But by
then it could be too late. In the meantime, Dazai’s travelogue suggests, people
will destroy what they admire most and be proud of being compensated for
so doing.
Abé Kōbō’s best-selling Suna no onna (Woman in the Dunes, 1962), one
of Japan’s most celebrated avant-garde novels, points to the vulnerability of
the most tenacious parts of the nonhuman even more subtly than Tsugaru.80
This text features Niki Junpei, a teacher and amateur entomologist who one
August afternoon travels to a remote section of Japan’s seacoast looking for
insects. Residents of the dunes hold him captive, and although they eventu-
ally offer him a chance to leave, he decides not to return to the city. As is true
of most avant-garde writing, Woman in the Dunes proposes radical innova-
tion in the symbolic, artistic, social, and political fields.81 But it also calls
for innovation in how people think about and interact with environments,
particularly relationships between their sentiments and their actions. Gaps
between the two characterize the work of the entomologist, whether amateur
or professional: entomologists kill the insects by which they are most fasci-
nated. The sand provokes a different yet no less significant attitudinal/behav-
ioral contradiction: people believe the sand is completely overwhelming their
village, yet they behave as though they can control it, which they eventually
do to a limited degree. Just as insects die because people marvel at them, the
412  ecoambiguity

sand ends up being manipulated even though it is believed indomitable. To

be sure, the sand is at much less risk of obliteration than the valued forests of
Tsugaru. Even so, Abé’s novel suggests that no part of the nonhuman, even
one with a long history of dominating human society and (other) nonhuman
species, is beyond some measure of human control and degradation.
In Woman in the Dunes Niki Junpei finds himself in an impoverished
village—possibly near Tottori, Japan—where many houses are below sand
level: “Before long, all the houses seemed to be built in hollows dug out of
the slope of the sand. The slope of the sand became higher than the rooftops.
Each row of houses sank deeper into the sand hollows. The slope of the sand
suddenly got steeper. It must have been at least twenty meters to the roofs of
the houses. What kind of life did they lead down there?”82 Niki soon learns
more than he had bargained for about this village. An elderly resident ar-
ranges for him to spend the night at the nearly buried home of a local widow;
the following morning he discovers that the ladder from the top of her sand
hollow, down which he climbed the night before, has been removed and that
he is now imprisoned in the dunes. The remainder of the novel consists of
Niki’s experiences in the hollow—his unsuccessful attempts at escaping, the
Sisyphean battle against sand that threatens to bury him alive, his tumultu-
ous relationship with the nameless woman of the dunes, and his crow trap
turned water supply, which in the end gives him so much hope for the future
that he does not take advantage of the long-awaited rope ladder when it at
last is lowered into his hole. The novel concludes: “There was no need to es-
cape quickly. On the round-trip ticket he now held, destination and place of
return were blanks for him to fill . . . He might as well postpone his escape.”83
Seven years later, the narrator reveals, Niki has still not returned home.
A sensation since its publication, translated into several dozen languages
and adapted into a prize-winning surrealistic film by Teshigahara Hiroshi in
1964, Woman in the Dunes has garnered considerable critical attention both
in Japan and abroad.84 Niki has been discussed as “the very personification
of the alienation of modern life,”85 as a man who, “recognizing that loneli-
ness and impatience are nothing more than confusion and ignorance, antici-
pates finally being able to stand at the beginning of a new pathway of human
relations.”86 The village he encounters has been interpreted as “a critique of
the fate of the traditional rural village in modern, urban, capitalist Japan”87
and the sand dunes as signifying the “wasteland” of twentieth-century Japan.
And the novel itself has been said to force the reader “into an acute self-
awareness of the absurdity of the human condition.”88 These assessments are
based on readings of specific passages in Woman in the Dunes. For instance,
 Green Paradoxes  413

Niki’s obsession with insects is interpreted by both colleagues and strangers

as “proof of mental flaws”:

Even in children, unusual fancy for insect collecting often indicates an

Oedipus complex. Children compensate for their unsatisfied desires
by eagerly sticking pins into the dead bodies of insects that they never
need fear will escape. And not giving this up once they become adults
is a clear sign that the condition has worsened. So it is no accident that
entomologists often have a great appetite for possessions and that they
are extremely reclusive, kleptomaniacs, and gay. So from this point it
is but a step to pessimism and suicide . . . Actually, that the man had
never confided his hobby to anyone itself seemed to prove that he was
aware that there was something squeamish about it.89

Similarly, even before arriving in the dunes, Niki had likened himself, his
students, education, and the world to sand, since all are multifaceted and
often give the impression of being something they are not. Conversing with
one of his colleagues about the education system, he had declared, “An illu-
sory education [gensō kyōiku] is one that makes you believe that something
is when it is not [nai mono o desu ne, aru yō ni omoikomaseru, gensō kyōiku
desu yo]······So you see I’m very interested in sand in this respect since even
though it’s a solid, it has very clear hydrodynamic properties . . . I brought up
the example of sand······because ultimately isn’t the world like sand? . . . You
yourself become sand . . . I think my students also are something like sand.”90
In another inversion of William Blake’s famed line “to see a world in a grain
of sand,” Niki proclaims sand to be like the world. Not unlike the speaker of
Ko Ŭn’s “Yŏngil Bay,” who declares sand involved in both birth and death
(discussed in chapter 5), and the narrator of Gao Xingjian’s Soul Mountain,
who in comparing himself to sand highlights his ambiguous position vis-à-
vis environmental degradation (discussed in chapter 4), Niki underscores the
multiple properties, the literal and figurative fluidity of this substance.
Instead of entirely metaphorizing insects and sand—that is to say, reading
Niki’s interest in insects only as highlighting his failure to thrive in contem-
porary society, Niki’s and the villagers’ struggles with sand only as sym-
bolizing the absurdities of twentieth-century existence, and sand only as a
powerful illustration of illusion—what if we also analyzed insects and sand
as two tangible nonhuman components? Encouraging such readings are the
novel’s many passages about the physical properties of insects, including
their diverging physiologies and ability to survive under even the harshest
414  ecoambiguity

conditions, and of sand, including the diameter of its grains, its formation,
its endless movement, as well as its destructive capabilities. Such an approach
is fortified by Niki’s own fascination with both. He pays no heed to the
people watching him as he trudges along the unfamiliar dunes, the narrator
declaring: “The only things that interested him were sand and insects” (kare
ni kanshin ga aru no wa, moppara suna to mushi dake datta no de aru).91
Reading insects and sand as actual parts of the nonhuman provides a more
comprehensive appreciation of Abé’s novel and a better understanding of hu-
man/nonhuman dynamics and possibilities.92
Niki travels to the dunes hoping to discover and take back to the city a
new species of insect that will perpetuate his name. He grasps his net and
begins striking it against the clumps of grass that line his sandy path. Having
both admired and killed insects since childhood, Niki enjoys watching them
as much as he enjoys sticking pins into their bodies. Flies are depicted as
remarkably adaptable, the only organisms capable of surviving truly unfor-
giving desert ecosystems: “they were fine even in environments where other
insects could not live, places like deserts, where all other living things per-
ished.”93 But as invincible as they are vis-à-vis the sand, they are vulnerable
to people, some of whom imprison if not kill them; people can be more
threatening to insects than are the dunes, since even flies are imperiled by
Niki’s net.
The narrator stresses the irony of Niki’s position after the villagers capture
him in their own mesh; he highlights Niki’s failure to recognize the parallels
between his own situation and that of the insects he captures. Describing
Niki as “a big black fly that had believed it was assiduously flying but that
in fact was simply rubbing its nose against the window pane,”94 the narrator
claims that the imprisoned Niki is “an animal that finally realizes the gap in
the fence through which it was trying to escape in fact is nothing more than
the entrance to its cage······a fish that, after striking its snout how many times,
finally sees that the glass of the goldfish bowl is a wall it cannot penetrate.”95
This powerful metaphor of the caged animal draws attention to human con-
finement, even mistreatment, not only of people but also of animals. Niki
likewise compares his initial experiences in the dunes with those of a beetle
or mouse that has been lured to an inhospitable environment, although he
quickly reassures himself that because he is not an animal, the village leaders
and their minions cannot force him to work. But of course they take advan-
tage of him, just as they have taken advantage of so many others, and just as
he takes advantage of the woman in the dunes. Similarly, after binding and
gagging the woman, Niki declares, “I’m a human being and you can’t simply
chain me like a dog.”96 Yet he treats this woman like the very animal he de-
 Green Paradoxes  415

clares he is not. The most obvious commentary here is on people’s abuse of

other people: the village leaders abuse Niki and the villagers, and Niki abuses
the woman in the dunes, but Woman in the Dunes also addresses human
abuse of the nonhuman. Niki loudly protests his own imprisonment, lament-
ing that he cannot leave the sand hole even to purchase his own cigarettes
and saké, but he appears to take human mistreatment of animals as a right.
Woman in the Dunes reveals the many paradoxes of his actions.
Abé’s novel depicts sand as the antithesis of insects; whereas insects (as
individuals, but not as swarms) are readily crushed by people’s fingers, the
sand (as dunes, but not as individual grains) readily crushes human lives.
The narrative features people caught in a thankless struggle against a vicious,
nearly overwhelming nonhuman substance. Niki speaks abstractly about the
need to adapt to and move with the dunes, rather than fight against them.
He wonders, “Certainly, sand was not suitable for existence. Yet was a fixed
state utterly indispensable? . . . If we were to quit this fixed existence and
to give ourselves up to the fluidity of the sand, competition would come to
an end.”97 He even hallucinates about moving with the flow. But he quickly
discovers that although possible, human survival is precarious in this envi-
ronment; struggles are many and comforts few. Walking along the dunes,
Niki thinks to himself that “no matter what they did, there was no way to
escape the law of the sand” (izure, suna no hōsoku ni, sakaraeru hazu mo
nai no ni).98 And Niki observes that this has been true for generations; the
same sand currents that threaten his new home in the dunes also destroyed
and devoured prosperous cities and great empires, even those that seemed as
though they would endure forever: “The ancient cities, whose permanence
not a soul had doubted······could not overcome the law of the flowing ⅛
mm. diameter sand.”99 The sands also damage landscapes. As the narrator
remarks, “The sands never rested. Quietly, but surely, they assaulted and
destroyed the surface of the earth” (suna wa kesshite yasumanai. shizuka
ni, shikashi kakujitsu ni, chihyō o okashi, horoboshite iku).100 Winds shape
the uppermost layers of the dunes, but for the most part, like the expanding
desert in Jiang Rong’s Wolf Totem, they appear indomitable.
On the other hand, the well-grounded perception that the sand is virtu-
ally impervious to human manipulation does not prevent people from trying
to use it to their advantage. The woman in the dunes comments to Niki that
when the tide recedes, even military tanks can drive over the wet, solidified
intertidal sands.101 This casual remark reveals compacted sand as potentially
the most vulnerable to human use, but Abé’s text does not elaborate. The
woman in the dunes also tells Niki that the villagers have discovered how
to profit from the sand: they sell it to construction companies, which mix
416  ecoambiguity

it with cement to adulterate poured concrete. In so doing the villagers most

obviously jeopardize human safety. As Niki points out, anything built with
substandard concrete made of cement blended with such salty sand is al-
most certain to collapse prematurely. When Niki asks the woman how the
villagers can deliberately put people’s lives in danger, she inquires simply,
“Why should we worry what happens to others?”102 Niki for the first time
recognizes that the people of the dunes, having been virtually abandoned by
the outside world, see themselves as victims and thus that the line between
“friend” and “enemy” is not as clear as he formerly believed. But the topic of
disturbing the dunes by selling off the sand is quickly dropped.
Instead, Woman in the Dunes focuses almost entirely on the manipula-
tion of sand when it is perceived to be at its most threatening. In other words,
Abé’s novel mutes the conflicts between perceptions and the known proper-
ties of the sand (believing the sand completely overpowering when actually it
can sometimes support the weight of military vehicles) and between behav-
iors and conditions (selling sand to construction companies despite knowing
that this puts human lives at risk). And it highlights the incongruity between
attitudes and behaviors (believing the sand completely overpowering while
at the same time attempting to overpower it). The decision of the village el-
ders to remain in the dunes is the clearest example of the latter. Rather than
relocate to a more hospitable ecosystem after the dunes rise well above their
rooftops, the local leaders condemn much of their population to endless days
and nights of shoveling. The villagers somehow create a dystopian life for
themselves in their sand pits while manipulating slightly the movements of
the dunes. The narrator emphasizes the precariousness of their situation; if
only a single household fails to shovel out its hole, whole sections of the vil-
lage risk collapse. Yet this hazard seems only to encourage them to continue
to defy the movement of the sand. Having stumbled on a way to extract wa-
ter from the dunes, Niki, who spends most of the novel plotting and unsuc-
cessfully trying to escape, will contribute to and likely facilitate the villagers’
endeavor.
In this light, Niki’s earlier comments to one of the village elders about
turning the dunes into a tourist attraction have to be taken seriously. Niki
urges the elder to capitalize both on people’s fascination with the sand and on
the properties of the sand itself: “People today are drawn to the sand; it holds
a strange fascination for them······There’s a way of taking advantage of this
[kono ten o riyō suru tte iu te mo aru wake da]······You can develop a new
tourist spot······You don’t go against the sand, you follow it, you take advan-
tage of it [suna ni shitagatte, sore o riyō suru] ······In short, you have to try
to completely change your thinking.”103 Significantly, Niki conflates “follow-
 Green Paradoxes  417

ing” (shitagau) the sand with “taking advantage” of it (riyō suru; lit. use). It
rapidly becomes apparent just how much he and the villagers wish to exploit
the sand. When the village elder protests that they are leading the only lives
that can reasonably be led in the dunes, Niki responds that the town should
try “erosion-control construction, full scale erosion-control construction.”104
The elder objects to this idea because of the cost, not because he is opposed to
building a barrier to restrain the sand; he reminds Niki that the government
has not designated damage from wind-blown sand eligible for accident com-
pensation. Abé’s novel suggests that the dunes are only one political decision
away from being radically reshaped.
Woman in the Dunes features an ecosystem within which people must
devote considerable energy simply to staying alive. Reading the sand en-
tirely metaphorically and focusing exclusively on the novel’s depictions of
people’s relationships with other people diverts attention from its references
to human manipulation and mistreatment, both actual and potential, of
their nonhuman surroundings. By invoking human imprisonment and even
destruction of the nonhuman, the same discourse that highlights human-on-
human abuse (similes and metaphors comparing Niki to a trapped animal)
also signals anthropogenic abuse of both people and animals. Niki treats
insects much as he himself is treated, although he not surprisingly protests
his treatment and has no reservations about mistreating insects. Even more
significant is how the novel depicts fascination, indeed obsession, as facili-
tating manipulation, even destruction, of nonhuman bodies, no matter how
resilient. With merciless dunes and hardy insects susceptible to human shap-
ing, Woman in the Dunes suggests that it is only a matter of time before
the effects of people’s behavior on landscapes become greater than those of
landscapes on people. Abé’s novel in some ways has proved prescient. Un-
like many of East Asia’s deserts, which continue to expand and wreak havoc
far beyond national borders, Tottori’s dunes are shrinking; seawalls at a
nearby port have disrupted waterflows on which the dunes depend. For the
last few years, volunteers have been regularly weeding the dunes, attempting
to forestall the very infringement of greenery that was attempted after World
War Two, when authorities planted trees there and tried to transform the
area into farmland.105

Green Hypocrisy

Literature frequently interrogates such ineffective, even detrimental “green-

ing” of environments. Writings that exaggerate the failure, hypocrisy, and
418  ecoambiguity

even malevolence of environmental movements bring to light some of the

most unsettling contradictions between attitudes and behaviors. They suggest
that if even those individuals and organizations most explicitly trumpeting
ecological health do nothing to attempt to repair environmental damage, or
if they engage in behaviors harmful to both people and nature, then there is
little hope for remediation, much less prevention, of devastated environments.
Some texts—including the Japanese writer Sakaki Nanao’s poems “Kono
hana tanensō” (This Flower Perennial Plant, 1995) and “Yuki no umi
koide iku” (Snow Ocean Rowing, 1987)—focus on individuals who are
deeply concerned about ecological damage, both local and global, who nev-
ertheless choose not to try to repair it. These texts suggest that if even the
persons most disturbed by human shaping of ecosystems withdraw without
doing anything to remediate conditions, then finding people who actually
will help is almost futile.
“This Flower” (1995) depicts an individual who says he wants to depart
the world empty-handed and wonders how anyone can die “leaving behind the
shame [haji] of twentieth-century Japan,” a place he declares is on the verge
of becoming “garbage empire number one” (gomi teikoku nanbā wan).106 Yet
rather than doing anything to help repair this damage, he sets off on a long
hike with friends. The poem’s speaker is not the only one concerned with eco-
degradation who behaves in this way; he receives a letter from the American
poet and environmentalist Gary Snyder announcing the latter’s own imminent
departure for the Himalaya. The contrasts between knowledge and behav-
ior expressed in “This Flower” resemble those in several works examined in
chapter 5: awareness of environmental degradation leads to avoidance, not
action. But what distinguishes “This Flower” is the gap between the attitudes
of both the speaker and Snyder toward this knowledge and what behaviors
ensue. By featuring friends from opposite sides of the globe whose outlooks
and actions toward the nonhuman are remarkably similar, “This Flower” re-
inforces the cosmopolitanism of many ecoambiguities.
The poem’s speaker begins by celebrating the symbiosis among people,
human cultural artifacts, and the natural world that he observes one October
morning standing in a friend’s garden:

In the outskirts of Nagoya City welcoming this morning

in the skies of a perfect autumn day cirrus clouds flowing
in the garden of a friend dangling a 40-cm luffa
one small rice field the size of about one tatami mat enclosed in
cement
today we’ll first harvest rice harvest happiness.107
 Green Paradoxes  419

He then reveals that he plans to immerse himself further in nature by tak-

ing a two-week, 225-kilometer hike with friends along the Nagara River,
which empties into Ise Bay southwest of Nagoya and is famous both in Japan
and abroad for the Nagara River dam controversy.108 Pondering the lives
of people he might meet outside the city, the speaker imagines a woman of
nearly ninety saying that she would like to clean her house and garden before
she dies. Thinking of all that she must have collected over the years—books,
clothing, various plants, animals, and fungi—he claims her property is as
dense as London’s Royal Botanical Garden. The woman’s possessions are
concentrated in a single location, but his own are scattered around the world,
something he would like to resolve before he dies:

Well this I
Books music tapes clothing ice axes skis
located not only here and there in Japan
but as far as North America

I too
want to move to heaven with just my body.109

Significantly, like the elderly woman he imagines, the speaker does not indi-
cate what he wants to happen to these belongings, perhaps because he can-
not conceive of a viable solution. If he gives them away, they simply become
someone else’s possessions; they perhaps decrease the overall human burden
on the planet, but only indirectly, by causing the recipient to defer purchasing
similar objects. There is no way to compensate entirely for the resources used
to produce the objects he possessed.
After communicating frustration with the scope of his own tangible bag-
gage, the poem’s speaker suddenly realizes that more dangerous to Japan’s
environments than the belongings of a single person are the belongings of all
individuals. And still more menacing are large-scale human cultural artifacts
such as buildings, dams, nuclear power plants, and even athletic facilities,
which all will remain standing, at least in the short term. Immediately after
declaring that he wants to die without possessions, he implicates Japan, cit-
ing some of that nation’s recent environmental controversies:

Wait a minute!
The beginning of the twenty-first century the Japanese archipelago
garbage empire number one what’s more
Tokyo Tower Nagara River dam fast breeder reactor Monju
420  ecoambiguity

continuing with the Nagano Winter Olympics

leaving behind the shame of twentieth-century Japan
can anyone really die?110

The contradictory answers to this question—the import of which are accen-

tuated by references to the Nagara River dam, the Monju nuclear facility,
and the Nagano Winter Olympics (1998), all of which exacted a significant
environmental price—are that everyone dies leaving behind Japan’s shame,
and that no one dies: to the extent that people leave behind both objects
and shame, they never completely leave the world.111 The speaker not only
believes that he must put his own affairs in order but also suggests that he
and everyone else must tackle some of Japan’s large environmental burdens.
Despite such beliefs, he conveys no actual plans to address Japan’s eco-
logical culpability. Instead, he moves from asking who can really die amid
Japan’s shame to describing a letter from Snyder about his impending trip
to the Himalaya. Snyder says nothing about alleviating the environmental
problems plaguing that region, Mount Everest in particular. Instead, he cheer-
fully writes that he will “say hello to Chomolungma [Everest] for Nanao
[Sakaki].”112 Similarly, the poem’s speaker reveals that he thinks of Everest
as pressed against by the Indian subcontinent and forced to stand on tiptoe
(choppiri tsumasakidatsu yo); in contrast, no mention is made of the stress on
this mountain propagated by tourists, including Snyder.113 And like Snyder, he
is looking forward to his upcoming hike in Japan, concluding “This Flower”:

Wind north
I too stretch my back
Ah I will walk the Nagara River.114

This individual will be traveling along the same river whose dam he has
explicitly identified as a key source of Japan’s disgrace. But as with Snyder,
there is no mention of doing anything to alleviate the shameful degradation.
“This Flower” spotlights an individual deeply disturbed by Japan’s immi-
nent transformation into the world’s largest junkyard as well as by his own
contributions to this disgrace. Merely imagining an elderly woman trying
to settle her affairs before she passes away makes him doubt his own ability
to die in a manner he deems ideal, much less the ability of the Japanese as a
whole to live in greater harmony with their environments. But the behaviors
that follow on the heels of these attitudes suggest an individual who has lost
hope, someone who believes he can do nothing more than escape to unavoid-
ably compromised sites.
 Green Paradoxes  421

Sakaki’s earlier “Yuki no umi koide iku” (Snow Ocean Rowing,

1987) is narrated by an environmentally conscious individual plotting an
even more drastic getaway. Here “shame” is not confined to any particular
nationality; nations have melted into a distressed planet. Early in his text
the poem’s speaker claims there are two planet earths: Earth A, in the solar
system, and Earth B, which long ago flew to the other side of the Milky Way.
Earth A is now a “megaslum of several billion robots / . . . blue and green
faded.” Earth B, on the other hand, is allegedly a place where life and colors
have returned: “Forests and waters are abundant / Flowers birds ani-
mals are luscious / People wear figured rainbow silk / and talk with
dance and song.”115 Desperate to leave Earth A, the speaker finally receives
an immigrant visa from Earth B; Earth B tells him he can “come back [to
Earth B] anytime,” so he decides to travel there on Halley’s Comet. Notewor-
thy here is the speaker’s claim that he will be “returning” (kaeru) to Earth B;
that he sees himself as returning not to Earth A, where he lives, but instead to
a planet where he has not yet been, indicates his dissociation from his current
home. “Snow Ocean” concludes as it began, with a brief stanza describing
the speaker rowing in the “snow ocean” (yuki no umi), something he claims
he will do until 2062, when the comet is next scheduled to appear.116
The individual featured in “Snow Ocean” is clearly ashamed by what
people have done to the planet. He speaks of dropping his head in the pres-
ence of a rainbow, too embarrassed to confront it directly. But rather than
advocate changes in behaviors, or even resolve to change his own, he instead
says that he will spend the next seventy-five years with

Icicles on my beard
Snowshoes ski poles
snow ocean rowing
snow ocean rowing117

He will simply row along, waiting to return to a place he has been only in his
imagination. Accentuating his passivity is the poem’s informational ambigu-
ity about conditions on Earth A. Early in “Snow Ocean” the speaker declares
the planet devastated, but he later indicates that he is waiting for his immi-
gration visa not in a megaslum but in a national park that, although reshaped
by people, is hardly beyond repair:

Today Earth A Japonesia Daisetsuzan

Sakhalin fir larch shade of forested land
barely living oak Japanese poplar natural forest
422  ecoambiguity

long-tailed tit Eurasian nuthatch jay

flame of life lingering in their cute pupils
northern red fox Eurasian red squirrel hare
footprints written in the snow seen dimly
human world tomorrow how118

“Natural” forests are simply scraping by, having been mostly replaced by
forests planted by people, but the soil clearly is still capable of nourishing
vegetation. Likewise, although birds of various species appear to be in some
distress, life lingers in their eyes. So there is some hope of remediation. Even
so, the speaker yells desperately to Earth B to sanction his travel. As in Saka-
ki’s poem “This Flower,” shame at what people have done to the nonhuman
leads not to a resolve to rectify behaviors but to a powerful desire to abscond,
whether to a nearby riverside or a faraway planet. Sakaki’s texts are oddly
captivating emblems of a larger corpus of environmentally escapist literature
in East Asia and the world.
Neither “This Flower” nor “Snow Ocean” discusses the consequences of
such avoidance, although these can be readily imagined. In contrast, a num-
ber of creative works—including the Japanese writer Sakaki Nanao’s prose
poem “Haru wa akebono” (Spring Dawn, 1994) and the Chinese writer
Wang Lixiong’s novel Yellow Peril (1991)—take the opposite approach,
portraying environmentalists not as fleeing ecodegradation but instead as
among the world’s most destructive individuals. Although fantastical, these
parodies warn not only against extreme environmentalism but also against
placing too much confidence in environmental groups to repair ecosystems
effectively.119
“Spring Dawn” highlights the hypocrisy of a group of extraterrestrial
environmentalists. Reminiscent of the classic science fiction film The Day
the Earth Stood Still (1951, 2008), in this prose poem Black Angels (ブラ
ックエンゼル; burakku enzeru)—a superhuman people representing envi-
ronmentalists from outside Japan angry at that nation’s exploitation of for-
eign resources—avenge Japan’s worldwide destruction of ecosystems.120 But
whereas in The Day the Earth Stood Still the alien environmentalists target
people, believing they must be exterminated so that the planet can be saved,
in “Spring Dawn” they annihilate trees and threaten to attack nuclear power
plants. In doing so they depict behaviors destructive to the natural world as
universal. “Spring Dawn” also explicitly degenders these alien environmen-
talists. The first indication comes from a Beijing radio flash, midmorning on
April 8: “Their size and physique, like Japanese. They have no facial expres-
sions and no sign of gender [seibetsu wa shiriyō mo nai].”121 Similarly, the
 Green Paradoxes  423

April 9 noon report from Japan’s Inquiry Commission declares that the an-
gels “have no sexual characteristics or function” (seiteki na tokuchō to kinō
o motanai).122 And at 3:00 p.m. that afternoon the United Nations warns
against negotiating with the Black Angels, emphasizing that “we cannot be-
stow planet citizenship on a sexless and lifeless existence [seibetsu naku sei-
mei no nai sonzai].”123 While exposing prejudices against individuals who
do not map to one of the two recognized human genders, Sakaki’s “Spring
Dawn” also undermines stereotypes of female “innocence” and male “guilt”
in transforming human and nonhuman environments. This destabilizing is
reinforced in the poem’s own description of “Japan,” rather than “Japanese
men,” as responsible for destroying forests worldwide.124
Sakaki’s text is dedicated to the early Japanese writer and court lady Sei
Shōnagon, best known for her Makura no sōshi (Pillow Book, late tenth,
early eleventh c.).125 Pillow Book begins with a paean to the spring dawn;
the narrator declares daybreak the most beautiful attribute of the season and
celebrates how it subtly colors distant hills. Echoing its predecessor, Sakaki’s
“Spring Dawn” likewise opens with the phrase “In spring it is the dawn,” fol-
lowed by a note that “cherry blossoms are in mid-bloom, today is the Flower
Festival [Buddha’s Birthday], Friday, April 8.”126 But as with other literary
works on ecodegradation that cite classical predecessors, “Spring Dawn”
veers quickly from Sei Shōnagon’s verse.127 The following line describes a
band of 1,200 chainsaw-winged angels descending on Japan, carrying a flag
congratulating Japanese on the 1,200th anniversary of their former capital
city Kyoto.128 The Japanese presume that the Black Angels have targeted
them because they are world’s largest consumer of trees, relentlessly turning
trees to woodchips, woodchips to toilet paper, and then toilet paper to comic
books; the Black Angels are particularly concerned with the damage Japan’s
demand for woodchips has done to Australia’s primeval forests. Nothing
can stop this rogue environmental group: not the Japanese riot police, not
Japan’s Ground Self-Defense Force, not even the United Nations Special In-
quiry Commission Task Force.
Oddly for an organization avenging destruction of environments, the
Black Angels kidnap 1,200 Japanese cartoonists, perhaps as a protest against
the resources commandeered by this profession, or perhaps simply because
they are addicted to their manga and want these individuals in their service.
Even more significantly, the Black Angels use their chainsaw wings to fell
every tree in Japan—in forests, parks, private gardens, and along city streets.
Unlike many creative texts on ecodegradation, “Spring Dawn” refers to this
destruction tersely: “[April 8] 7:00 a.m. Parks, shrines, the imperial palace···,
ancient forests, merciless . . . // 11:00 a.m. . . . 1,200 angels with chainsaws
424  ecoambiguity

for wings, dressed in black, invade Kyoto’s forests . . . // 6:00 p.m. Spaceships
land on stumps in bare [maruhadaka; lit. stark-naked] Maruyama Park, Shi-
mogamo Shrine, and the imperial palace in Kyoto . . . All the trees and for-
ests have been razed // [April 9] 9:00 p.m. . . . I walked around all day. All
the trees at shrines, temples, and schools felled, felled to go to factories.”129
Maruyama Park (丸山公園), one of Kyoto’s most popular sites for cherry
blossom viewing, is now maruhadaka (丸裸; lit. stark naked; i.e., completely
razed), like everywhere else in Japan. The consequences are immediately rec-
ognized, as are additional culprits:

Bugs are chirping. Bats are flying. But how long will this continue?
Our garden violets are in full bloom but without trees, what will be-
come of them? Without trees, forests, and woodlands there’ll be no
dragonflies, beetles, deer, or bears, and so we perhaps won’t know
the seasons. A world without trees, can we call it planet earth [ki ga
nakunatta sekai tte, chikyū tte yoberu n yaro ka]? We can only call
it a mountain of concrete garbage [konkurīto no gomi no yama, tada
sore dake ya wa].130

Not only will plants and animals find it difficult to survive without trees, the
world (sekai) itself risks losing its identity as planet earth (chikyū; lit. soil
sphere); its soil soiled and garbage exposed, round mountain (Maruyama)
having become garbage mountain (gomi no yama), the planet now appears to
consist more of human waste than of earth. Important as well is the broaden-
ing of focus from Japan to the world, suggesting that the Japanese are not
the only people whose land will be flattened and not the only ones who have
compromised their environments.
The Black Angels do to Japanese ecosystems precisely what the Japanese
have done to ecosystems on other continents. Moreover, the damage Japa-
nese inflict on their own country is perhaps less obvious but likely no less
lethal than the devastation wreaked by the Black Angels. To be sure, while
Japanese consumption of trees is depicted as unjustified, rooted partially in
desire to read comics, the Black Angels—who eat comics—indirectly depend
on processed trees to survive. But “Spring Dawn” does not argue that this
difference justifies complete destruction of environments. Instead, it reveals
the avenging angels, whom it leaves circling above Japanese nuclear power
plants, as in many ways just as culpable as the people they attack.
Providing an even more brazen parody of environmentalists is the Chi-
nese writer Wang Lixiong’s Yellow Peril, whose satires of deluded official-
 Green Paradoxes  425

dom were examined in chapter 6. In contrast, the present chapter is con-

cerned with how this novel—through its devastating indictments of Ouyang
Zhonghua (歐陽中華; lit. Europe Sun China), his China Green Rescue Asso-
ciation (Zhongguo Lüse Zhengjiu Xiehui), and this group’s various “Green”
(綠; lü) offshoots—portrays environmental consciousness justifying extreme
attitudes and ruinous behaviors. Also illustrating the failure of even megalo-
maniacs to avert global social and ecological collapse, this novel underscores
the near impossibility of reversing present human habits of harming the en-
vironment and even of preventing total apocalypse. At the same time that his
rhetoric makes a powerful case for rejecting “material people” (wuzhiren) in
favor of what he brands “spiritual people” (jingshenren)—a likely critique
of the increasing materialism of Deng Xiaoping’s post–Cultural Revolution
economic reforms—Ouyang also comes to believe that spiritual humanity
will be possible only after the literal eradication, not just transformation, of
material humanity. He is seemingly so committed to realizing a greener, more
spiritual planet that he takes advantage of the collapse of China and other
societies around the world to engage in exploits that cause needless human
and nonhuman suffering.
Ouyang’s attitudinal conflicts are striking; he longs for a spiritual ex-
istence but also celebrates massive human casualties. His actions also are
frequently contradictory. The China Green Rescue Association is responsible
for developing shugua (薯瓜), a valuable substance that nourishes China’s
displaced population. By participating in such activities as the Green Ex-
hibition, this organization also works to increase public awareness of the
dangers of current lifestyles to environments, as well as introduces people to
the joys of the more spiritual life. But at the same time, the Green Rescue As-
sociation establishes supposed survival bases that in fact are death traps for
many. Most striking in this novel is the chasm between Ouyang’s rhetorical
advocacy of spiritual humanity on the one hand and his group’s merciless
destruction of people on the other. Ouyang’s frequent justifications of death
in the name of life, combined with the novel’s depicting a nation and planet
that appear beyond repair, make resolving the disparity between rhetoric and
behavior exceptionally challenging. Like the world from which they are at-
tempting to protect themselves, Ouyang and his organization become more
outrageous as the novel progresses.
Providing a foil in this novel for individuals advocating unchecked pro-
creation, industrialization, and consumerism are others committed to an
explicitly “Green” approach, including those embracing the Green Party
(lüdang), Green Rescue Association, Green philosophy (lüse zhexue), Green
426  ecoambiguity

religion (lüjiao), Green Exhibition, Green ideals (lüse lixiang), Green Uni-
versity (lüse daxue), even Greenpeace (Lüse Heping). Yet rather than depict
green groups and their individual proponents as offering viable solutions to
China’s and the world’s environmental crises, Yellow Peril highlights their
hypocrisy and malice, the gulfs between their alleged beliefs and (the impacts
of) their behaviors. The novel also ultimately underscores their fecklessness.
Wang Lixiong’s text depicts those committed to green lifestyles as professing
concern for the welfare of people and the nonhuman yet consciously acting
in ways detrimental to both. Green masks camouflage and justify injurious
behaviors. The narrator remarks concerning the tyrannical Ouyang:

He recognized that he was full of wild ambition, boundless wild ambi-

tion, capable of embracing the entire world . . . His ambition was not
ordinary wild ambition that could be satisfied with power and honor
. . . To be able to function he had to merge with the limitlessly im-
mense. Large, largest, as large as the universe, that was he! . . . He
wanted only the ultimate extreme; missing it by a step just wouldn’t
do. He had selected green [ta xuanze le lüse]. This is because he knew
that it was humanity’s only hope [nei shi renlei weiyi de xiwang].
Whoever grasped it first grasped the flagstick of the human future . . .
He wanted only to change human history, to arrange the world anew
[ta zhiyao gaibian renlei lishi, chongxin anpai shijie].131

Ouyang believes that green is not one of many possibilities but instead the
world’s only hope and that whoever controls it controls all humanity and
has the potential literally to overturn human history. The world (Jpn. sekai;
Chn. shijie) that Sakaki’s poem “Spring Dawn” depicts as about to lose its
planetary status here is taunted with the hope of a new beginning. The per-
fect disguise, green rhetoric for Ouyang is largely a means to power, not
something in which he truly believes. On the other hand, the future society
he envisions is not anathema to the green philosophy and in fact could not
exist without it. Wang Lixiong’s novel not only scathingly indicts individuals
and organizations most obviously responsible for degrading environments
but also modulates the many shades of green.
Yellow Peril initially portrays Ouyang and the Green Rescue Association
as welcome presences in post–June Fourth (1989) Chinese society. Early in
the novel the narrator notes that when political controls became severe after
the Tiananmen demonstrations, the group assumed an especially important
function even though just like the central government its real motives seemed
suspect:
 Green Paradoxes  427

The “China Green Rescue Association,” an organization that had as

its alleged aims [biaomianshang] ecology and environmental protec-
tion [shengtai he huanbao], became the only domestic source capable
of publicly announcing opinions that differed from those of the gov-
ernment. Its invariable concern was preventing the government from
ripping off its mask [lianpi de bianyuan; lit. the edges of its face]. It
thus was able to maintain itself and gradually developed national in-
fluence and received international attention. The year before, Ouyang
Zhonghua had won the world Greenpeace Prize [lüseheping jiang].
In the most recent political upsurge the “Green Rescue Associa-
tion” played only a moderate role. With the exception of declaring its
support for redressing the June Four Incident [Tiananmen Incident],
it did nothing to attract public attention and did not worry about the
momentum being seized by new arrivals. [For its work as peacemaker
between the two factions] the “Green Rescue Association” was re-
spected by all sides.132

The narrator’s comments that the Green Association has as it “alleged aims”
ecology and environmental protection, that it works actively to prevent the
government from ripping off its mask, and that it recently has permitted itself
to be engulfed by new arrivals, about whose motives and aspirations the text
remains notably silent, all suggest that this organization is not as “green”
as it wants outsiders to believe. On the other hand, at this early juncture,
Ouyang and the Green Rescue Association appear far more committed to
environmental health than the Chinese government. Not only has Ouyang
been accorded international recognition for his efforts to safeguard China’s
environment, he also recently was imprisoned for leading a protest against
the severe damage caused by an accident at a nuclear power station.133 In
fact, the novel’s first reference to Ouyang is as a person jailed for environ-
mental activism.
The narrator returns to Ouyang several chapters later, after describing
devastating floods along the Yellow River. Again, Ouyang is portrayed as
conscious of environmental hypocrisy, this time manifested by the nongov-
ernmental environmental organization Greenpeace; Ouyang develops his
own environmental theories in direct response to what he believes to be
Greenpeace’s failed rhetoric. The novel notes that he became interested in the
green movement during his earlier career as a writer. He admired the insights
and objectives of Greenpeace, depicted in Yellow Peril as “coming from the
West” (Greenpeace’s first China office did not open until 1997, six years after
the publication of Yellow Peril) and warning about ecological catastrophe,
428  ecoambiguity

condemning the pursuit of limitless growth, industrialization, and consumer-

ism, and urging self-control, respect for the fragile earth and other species
(zunzhong cuiruo de diqiu he qita wuzhong), and the creation of a new mode
of production and way of life. Ouyang agreed with these tenets but was frus-
trated with what he perceived as this organization’s “extremely feeble and
vague solutions”—the chasm between Greenpeace’s pronouncements and its
ability to effect environmental change. He believed strongly that

To make people abandon in a single day the creation and consump-

tion of material wealth, which had been the principal theme of hu-
man life for all of human history, would require more than empty
words [kongdong cihui] such as “peace,” “intelligence,” and “return
to nature” [huidao ziran]. Also worthless is making people feel satis-
fied with words urging restraint such as “morality,” “control,” and
“self-control.”134

Ouyang hopes to change human history and arrange the world anew; he
longs for the opportunity to transform “material society” (wuzhiren she-
hui) into “spiritual society” (jingshenren shehui). But he makes it clear that
Greenpeace, with its “empty words,” will be of little help in this endeavor.
His criticisms of Greenpeace are noteworthy considering this organization’s
history of radical environmentalism; Yellow Peril suggests that in a world on
the brink of ecological collapse even rhetoric and behaviors that have been
considered extreme are no longer sufficient. Greenpeace is not accused of
actively harming environments, but Ouyang is convinced that nothing good
can come from giving more attention to guidelines for behaviors than to
behaviors themselves.
Ouyang responds to Greenpeace’s lexicon with “spirituality,” a term that
has catapulted him to best-seller lists and bookshelves around the globe; a
true work of world literature, his foundational text Jingshen ren (Spiritual
People) has been translated into dozens of languages, and his theories al-
legedly have become a cornerstone of the international green movement
(guoji lüse yundong). According to Ouyang, the future depends on material
consumerism being superseded by spiritual aestheticism, material humanity
becoming spiritual humanity, and material forms of life becoming spiritual
forms of life. This is because, he argues, the “beauty” (mei) pursued by those
committed to the spiritual life is a source of energy just as forceful, just as
incessantly stimulating to human life as the desire for material wealth.
At the same time, Ouyang’s theories have some troubling loopholes and
contradictions that make them even more suspect than the rhetoric of Green-
 Green Paradoxes  429

peace. First, Ouyang believes that “spirit” (jingshen) differentiates people

and animals, that people have the ability to evolve into spiritual creatures
whereas animals are forever grounded in the material world. Even today, we
are only beginning to understand animal consciousness, and the narrator of
Yellow Peril does not indicate whether Ouyang’s comment actively rejects
recent findings on this topic or stems from his ignorance. But Ouyang’s per-
ception that animals are less evolved than people indicates anthropocentrism
that eventually is used to justify mistreatment of the nonhuman.
Second, and more disturbing, are the parallels between Ouyang’s quest
for a spiritual life and people’s pursuit of material wealth, which he is at-
tempting to reverse. He claims that because the search for a spiritual life is
“not confined by resources” (bushou ziyuan xianzhi) there are literally “no
limits to growth.” Ouyang also asserts that the principal objective of the new
society will be the “constant heightening of people’s spiritual life”; people
will be most satisfied by “pursuing the demands of unceasing progress.”135
To be sure, Ouyang makes clear that in the society of the future, material
life, while allowing people to be “warmly dressed and well fed,” also will be
maintained at a level that conforms to available resources; spiritual growth
will not come at the expense of environmental health. He likewise justifies
his emphasis on the ceaseless development of spirituality by presenting it as
redirecting into a less damaging course what has been deemed unalterable:
the human need always to be pursuing something, whether tangible or intan-
gible. Even so, it remains uncertain not only how definitively spiritual quests
will be divided from their material counterparts but also what constitutes be-
ing “warmly fed and well dressed” and what it actually means to “conform
to the environment.” Also unclear is what will happen when spiritual and
material objectives collide, as seems inevitable.
Finally, the narrator notes that despite the worldwide influence of Ouy-
ang’s book, he refuses to take part in the many debates surrounding it, par-
ticularly those concerning the proposed transforming of material humanity
into spiritual humanity. His silence stems not from the belief that he has
nothing to learn from others’ opinions. Instead, he feels that being a celebrity
prevents him from talking freely, from saying anything unassailable. He be-
lieves in spiritual humanity strongly enough to write about it but not to de-
bate it with others and develop more effective strategies. Yellow Peril reveals
the ambiguities of Ouyang’s green philosophy even before China’s expected
massive ecological and social collapse.
Implementing beliefs and rhetoric proves to be an even more convoluted
process. Immediately after describing Ouyang’s convictions, the narrator re-
veals that the recent massive human suffering caused by breached dikes and
430  ecoambiguity

unprecedented flooding along the Yellow River “appears to be an oppor-

tunity [shiji] for which Ouyang’s been waiting.”136 Rather than aspiring to
reform contemporary society, which has long adhered to behaviors harmful
to environments, Ouyang has yearned for a virtual tabula rasa. Understand-
ably, he believes that simply stepping back and allowing people to become
spiritual of their own accord will take millennia, by which time green poli-
cies will be meaningless because the planet already will have been destroyed
dozens of times over. Moreover, Ouyang is certain that even if he were to
work industriously under normal circumstances, he would not see results
within his lifetime and would have to entrust his life’s work to posterity,
something he is loath to do. Complete calamity, such as the floods China just
experienced, is by far the best scenario for allowing him to embark on his
project. So Ouyang parachutes into the flood zone, targeting an island where
people are temporarily isolated from outside political, economic, and social
forces and where he believes he can successfully propagate his green religion.
Asserting many parallels between the principles of the “green life” and con-
ventional Chinese values including “ardently loving nature” (reai ziran), he
believes the stranded citizenry will be easy converts.137 Discovering to his
dismay that the people here have no interest in such matters, within hours
he loses all hope and begins longing for a more dramatic collapse of society.
Ouyang drifts off into reverie: “If material ‘people’ couldn’t become spiritual
‘people’ the world was condemned to destruction [huimie]. He had worked
hard, but from early on had thought destruction could not be avoided . . .
A new idea came to him. Destruction and the green future [huimie he lüse
weilai] would go hand in hand, and death [siwang] would link these two
hands.”138 Ironically it is a voice of life, not death, that brings his mind back
to the scene at hand, that of a young woman urging him to eat dinner. But
Ouyang remains obsessed with death and obliteration:

Things here would run their course. Since destruction [huimie] was
inevitable, since destruction was necessary for new life [xinsheng], let
destruction come as soon as possible. Accelerating destruction was
spurring the advance of history. Since they were about to die, since it
was only after the complete annihilation of the material people [wu-
zhiren de damie] that the spiritual age [jingshen shidai] could begin,
the death of these people had a kind of ice-cold destiny. To save them
would be to go against history.139

As Ouyang’s repetition of “destruction” suggests, he has undergone a dra-

matic conversion. Unable to sway the minds of populations devastated by
 Green Paradoxes  431

flooding, he changes rapidly from encouraging people to “be pure of heart

and have few desires,” “be content with your lot,” and “love nature” instead
to promoting annihilation. Incapable of reconciling his vision of the future
with the realities of the present, he believes total cataclysm a prerequisite for
reform. Once longing himself to “change history,” he now is devoted to help-
ing destiny take its course.
Even more striking than the speed and entirety of Ouyang’s conversion
is the contrast between his preoccupation with his personal security and his
complaint that people are too obsessed with their own comfort to sacrifice
anything for the future.140 His obsession leads him to initiate brutality that
rivals and at times exceeds the violence of the very entities whose oblitera-
tion he believes necessary and inevitable. In his new book Nirvana Ouyang
repeats his assertion that destroying the present world is desirable because
it will hasten the arrival of its much improved counterpart; he envisions “a
completely new world being created on the ruins of the old world” (jiu shijie
de feixushang yunyu yige quanxin shijie).141 But he also recognizes that if this
new world of spiritual humanity is actually to materialize some people from
the current world must be saved. So Ouyang proposes that select individuals
be chosen to function as its progenitors, preferably “spiritual people with a
good education who have a high degree of intelligence and good measure of
self-control.”142 It is these people, fearful that the terrors of the old world
will be repeated, who will forever exercise self-restraint in everything they
do, from reproducing and learning to producing and living.
In other words, not only do Ouyang and the Green Association take no
steps to prevent the demolition of contemporary society, they actively en-
courage it, while sparing themselves and a chosen few. Replacing “material
humanity” with “spiritual humanity” thus has less to do with transforming
consciousness than with eliminating those who are not already “spiritual
people.”143 A complication is that “spiritual humanity” will quickly vanish
in a collapsing material world; those who allegedly live the life of the mind
and privilege the soul will be unable to endure what some call a deteriorat-
ing animal existence in an animal world. In this sense, Ouyang and his col-
leagues in the Green Association practice what they preach. The government
allows them to establish six experimental bases to test their theories. Al-
though known to the public as Nature Protection Regions (ziran baohuqu),
these spaces in fact become sites of considerable violence; those in charge,
and Ouyang in particular, demonstrate little if any spirituality or self-control.
The greater the chaos in the world outside his nature reserves, the greater
Ouyang’s megalomania. He initially makes it clear to his followers that al-
though they should stop at nothing, including violence, to protect themselves
432  ecoambiguity

from invaders, they are not to leave the compounds to attack others. But as
he develops a political party, additional bases, an army, and even a univer-
sity, his “violence principle” soon evolves into committing physical assaults;
violence becomes common not only outside the walls surrounding the bases,
as thousands of undesirables attempt to burst inside, but also within the
compounds themselves.144 When Ouyang’s girlfriend Chen Pan visits him at
one of the nature reserves, she notes how forbidding they have become and
realizes that her own future is in jeopardy: “The former ‘Beauty Bases’ [the
nature reserves of the Green Association] had become [under the control of
the Green Party] ice-cold subsistence bases . . . This was thanks to Ouyang’s
aspirations of becoming God [shangdi]. According to the standards he had
instituted as God, she would be eliminated.”145 Ouyang does not dispose of
her immediately, but he does inform her that he is more qualified than God
to choose survivors. And so when she demands—“Ouyang Zhonghua, let me
see you shoot someone! Let me see how you are as a butcher! Let me see your
pursuit of beauty and Green ideals!”—he willingly obliges until her universe
turns dark.146 Chen Pan survives but leaves the base, heading to an almost
certain death.
Since nature has already been virtually destroyed and the planet envel-
oped by nuclear winter, most of the green army’s victims are people.147 But
one of the novel’s final sections, titled “Nature Reserve—Dog Pens,” depicts
violence to both humans and animals so atrocious that the dissonance be-
tween green ideals and green practices could hardly be more vivid. The narra-
tor notes that the dog enclosure was wholly Ouyang’s idea and that he knows
well what happens there, but because he is too ashamed of the horrors he has
unleashed, he has no desire to see the pen for himself. The base feeds human
corpses to the dogs it is raising for food; many of these corpses are of people
who have perished trying to enter the reserve. Ouyang has commissioned
mentally and physically disabled individuals to staff the pen, since no one else
is willing to perform such work. In “Nature Reserve—Dog Pens,” Ouyang
operates the pen himself. He corrals the despised Green Guards, who have
raped women and beaten and needlessly executed people of both genders,
and puts them in a pen with a young woman and a rabid dog. The Green
Guards are excited, expecting they can watch the dog and woman copulate.
But instead, Ouyang releases 150 dogs on the guards, resulting in the deaths
of all of the men and most of the dogs. Ouyang is thrilled at this turn of
events, believing himself master of the world. Yet still unsatisfied, he rapes
the woman and unleashes the remaining dogs on a worker who witnessed
the attack. Suddenly terrified of what he has done and blurring boundaries
between people and animals, Ouyang asks, “Had he truly become a wild
 Green Paradoxes  433

animal? . . . Did the blood and flesh all around him indicate human defeat
of wild animals or the defeat of wild animals by wild animals?”148 Whereas
he earlier had declared that people’s ability to evolve into spiritual creatures
separated them from animals, he now recognizes that human and nonhuman
might not be so different after all.
Even more alarming than Ouyang’s transformation from an individual
advocating “spiritual humanity” into a “wild animal” is his utter powerless-
ness to forestall complete social and ecological collapse. As megalomania-
cal as he is, as carefully as he has designed his survival bases, he is unable
to assemble an adequate force to protect his chosen spiritualists from the
thousands of starving, desperate people storming the barriers. His actions
make talk of “spiritual humanity” replacing “material humanity” appear
ludicrous. Deceived by his own security forces, he seems to stand virtually
alone. The final section of the novel portrays a single unidentified man walk-
ing across a desolate earth; it is possible but unlikely that this man is Ouyang.
Instead, the novel suggests that he has simply disappeared, like so many oth-
ers. He and his dystopia have evaporated into nothingness.
Ouyang and his green movement obviously caricature not only some of
China’s unavailing protest movements but also more generally the extremes
to which individuals and organizations will go to further their own agendas.
Unlike Sakaki’s Black Angels, who destroy ecosystems on a vast scale, Ouy-
ang is not ultimately responsible for the planetary apocalypse described in
Yellow Peril. And this ecological collapse appears more hyperbole than an
accurate forecast of the chaos likely to descend on the globe if environmental
concerns are not addressed more responsibly and effectively. But even so,
the parodies of environmental activism in Wang Lixiong’s novel significantly
amplify many of the same concerns voiced in Sakaki’s poem “Spring Dawn,”
highlighting the contradictions and inconsistencies inherent in any attempt
to transform both mental and physical landscapes. Forming significant inter-
cultural conceptual networks, much literature on environmental degradation
reveals, in however exaggerated and parodic form, contradictions between
professed attitudes and actual behaviors toward the environment. In doing
so these writings expose the eternal gaps between human aspirations and
concrete actions. They also suggest that to aspire to something better even as
we undermine our own lives and that of the nonhuman is part of the essence
of being human.

Far from resolving the ecological conundrums it describes, most literature

on environmental distress further ambiguates these ambiguities, bringing to
light deeper discrepancies. In fact, poetry and prose regularly counter the
434  ecoambiguity

unstable, inverted pyramids of environmental Ponzi schemes with their own

mushrooming miasmas of environmental ambiguity. Creative writing often
makes matters even more confusing by remaining silent about its uncertain-
ties: many narrators and characters seem unaware of the discrepancies they
depict or exhibit. Indeed, to the extent that they are aware of them, people
often suppress the contradictions of their interactions with environments.149
Analyses of literature can provide sharp lenses for deeper insight into pro-
cesses of environmental degradation by highlighting creative articulations of
these disjunctions. Better appreciating the uncertainties and contingencies of
ecodegradation in literature, and in life, should allow for more productive
relationships among people and the natural world.
By teasing out intercultural conceptual networks of ecoambiguity, this
book has brought to light the tremendous variety of writing that engages with
ecological challenges in East Asia and beyond. Just as important, it has argued
for more fluidity and flexibility in literature scholarship. Ecoambiguity pro-
poses not only that we look more closely at how individual literatures address
urgent matters of global concern but also that we consider literary negotiations
with these issues regardless of the national corpus to which the texts belong.
In other words, this book suggests that even as we probe deeper into cultural
contexts we do more to use topics and concepts as the bases of analysis.
How we conceptualize global problems such as poverty, slavery, disease,
and environmental degradation is enriched by examining the multiple lit-
eratures of world regions and, to the extent possible, multiple regions and
ultimately the globe. Analyzing literary treatments of these phenomena as
expressed in various languages and cultural settings leads to clearer under-
standing of shared problems and a better basis for resolving them. This is
not to deny the importance of cultural specificity; it is crucial to be familiar
with the local and national contexts in which literature is produced. And
it is certainly true that even as literatures become more global they often
become more national. But beyond focusing on what is written in particular
languages or cultural spheres, we also should analyze how literatures from
multiple sites treat shared phenomena found in one form or another across
the world. The shift is in many cases subtle: for example, from studying
how Japanese and Chinese literatures discuss pollution to examining literary
engagement with pollution by incorporating examples from several cultures,
including Chinese and Japanese. But when we change frames of reference the
shift is nearly always significant: we start not with China, Japan, or any indi-
vidual nation or people but instead with the global problem of pollution. The
shift is even more significant when the focus is concepts (e.g., ecoambiguity)
rather than topics (e.g., pollution). Moving the spotlight away from looking
 Green Paradoxes  435

solely at what narratives tell us about specific peoples and cultures to what
they also reveal about widespread human and nonhuman phenomena—in
this case abuse to people and the natural world writ large—helps us break
down barriers of isolation, insularity, and exceptionalism. Such an approach
allows for new understandings, insights, and interpretations of cultural pro-
cesses across time and space.
Creative negotiations with ecological destruction tend to open themselves
or be more easily opened to the world than discourse on other global prob-
lems. Such texts speak bluntly about global apocalypse, or they liken condi-
tions in one place to conditions half a world away, or they focus on the trau-
mas inflicted on a particular space or nonhuman body that might infiltrate or
be located or duplicated in any number of sites.150 In both their origins and
their outlooks these and similar literary strategies can increase planetary con-
sciousness. This is true even if texts have not traveled far themselves, neither
translated, intertextualized, discussed, or even available in more than one
literary space. It is true even if they are written in a language not frequently
translated or even known by many outside a particular place. Literature on
ecological devastation, no matter its cultural and environmental origins, reg-
ularly reaches out to the broader world. And so too should the literary critic.
Discourse on environmental and disciplinary crises abounds. Many con-
tend that ecological calamities are likely to be the most pressing issues of
the twenty-first century. Many also argue that literature scholarship and the
humanities more generally are in flux.151 These dilemmas will not be eas-
ily resolved. But scholarship on individual cultures provides vital founda-
tions for comprehending specific contexts of ecological abuse. The fields of
comparative and particularly world literature help us appreciate more fully
how creative writing and scholarship on creative writing can both reinforce
and defy national, cultural, linguistic, geopolitical, and ecological divisions.
Ecocriticism and other branches of environmental humanities demonstrate
especially clearly the exciting possibilities for humanistic intervention in eco-
degradation. Yet there is much work to be done. Without abandoning our
time-honored approaches, humanists need to collaborate more with one an-
other to expand our cultural and disciplinary scopes, incorporating more
diverse materials and methodologies even while nurturing expertise in new
and specific areas. Ideally, working with colleagues in the social, physical,
and life sciences, we can develop deeper connections among disciplines with
the ultimate aims of embracing more fully the wider world—culturally, geo-
graphically, biophysically—and of analyzing how the cultural products to
whose study we devote our professional lives do the same.
Notes

introduction

1. http://www.shosenkyo-kankoukyokai.com/b/. Chichibu-Tama-Kai Na-

tional Park is mainly in Yamanashi Prefecture, approximately two hours west
of Tokyo.
2.  For clarity, and to highlight the impacts that human behaviors have on
the planet’s abiotic and nonhuman biotic components, in this book the terms
“environment,” “ecosystem,” “landscape,” “surroundings,” and “bodyscape”
are used to refer to spaces with a significant nonhuman presence. The term
“bodyscape” calls attention to the fact that most spaces contain a variety of inter-
dependent bodies, which are themselves ecosystems. Daniel Goleman, Ecological
Intelligence. In Bodily Natures, Stacy Alaimo stresses the transcorporeality of
bodies human and otherwise. See also Thongchai Winichakul’s discussion of the
geobody in Siam Mapped and Arjun Appadurai’s analysis of various scapes in
“Disjuncture and Difference.” Conversations with Julia Adeney Thomas clarified
the importance of bodies and bodyscapes in conceptualizations of the planet. Cf.
Andrew Bernstein, “Weathering Fuji,” 8; Nicholas Mirzoeff, Bodyscape, 3.
The terms “nonhuman”/“the nonhuman”—used relatively interchangeably in
this book with “natural world,” “nature,” “nonhuman world,” and “nonhuman
entities”—indicate (communities of) nonhuman biotic and abiotic entities. The
nonhuman biotic includes nonhuman animals (referred to in this book simply
as animals), plants, and other organisms, while the abiotic includes geophysical
bodies such as air, water, and soil, as well as chemical elements. These terms also
include the (in)tangible cultural artifacts of nonhuman animals, from chimpanzee
tools and beaver dams to agency, pain, attachment, memory, and other states of
consciousness experienced by animals, as these have been interpreted by people.
As Sarah E. McFarland and Ryan Hediger argue in “Approaching the Agency of
Other Animals,” “no matter how we consider agency [and consciousness], the
result is that either humans are more like the other animals or the other animals
are more like humans than we have comfortably thought in the past” (8). For
more on animal consciousness see Colin Allen and Marc Bekoff, Species of Mind;
Emily Anther, “Soft-Headed Intellectuals”; Marc Bekoff et al., eds., The Cogni-
tive Animal; Marc Bekoff, Minding Animals; J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace; J. M. Coe-
tzee, ed., The Lives of Animals; Donald R. Griffin, Animal Minds; Cary Wolfe,
“Human, All Too Human.” Some scholars prefer the term “more-than-human”
to “nonhuman,” believing it does a better job of defining animals, plants, and

437
438  note to page 1

geophysical entities by what they are rather than by what they are not. See, for
instance, David Abram, Spell of the Sensuous.
Many spaces are of course composed almost entirely of people and their (in)
tangible cultural products. Tangible human cultural products include any con-
structed material entity, including machines, robots, buildings, and artistic cre-
ations such as paintings, sculptures, and written literature. Likewise, as scholar-
ship on posthumanism has demonstrated, boundaries between people and their
creations are often constructed. See Karen Barad, “Posthumanist Performativ-
ity”; Neil Badmington, Alien Chic; Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto”;
Bruce Clarke, Posthuman Metamorphosis; N. Katherine Hayles, How We Be-
came Posthuman; Chris Hables Gray, Cyborg Citizen; Cary Wolfe, What is Post-
humanism? Cf. Barry Commoner, Making Peace, which distinguishes between
the “man-made technosphere” and the “natural ecosphere” (7). Ashlee Vance
discusses the BrinBot (an early experiment in the effortless and elegant merging
of people and machines) in “Merely Human?” For the animal as cyborg see Clay
McShane and Joel A. Tarr, “The Horse as Technology.” Intangible cultural bod-
ies include intangible human constructions such as beliefs (religious and other-
wise), biases, emotions, ideals, ideas, languages, memories, perceptions, theories,
and thoughts, as well as arts such as song, dance, and oral literature.
The concepts of “nature” and “natural world” often are seen as retrograde;
humans and their cultural artifacts are so deeply integrated with the nonhu-
man that distinguishing between the two often appears at best misleading and
at worst, in the words of Harold Fromm, “wholly factitious”: “There is not and
never has been such a thing as ‘the environment.’ Nothing ‘surrounds’ a human
being who is made of some special substance that can be distinguished from the
‘surroundings.’ There is only one congeries of earthly substance, and it comprises
everything from eukaryotes to Albert Einstein. . . . There is no environment, only
an ensemble of elements recycled through every existing thing.” Harold Fromm,
The Nature of Being Human, 189–90. In The Ecological Thought, Timothy
Morton highlights the interconnectedness, the ecological entanglement of all be-
ings, constructs, and objects.
On the other hand, there is no denying that human behaviors have harmed
other species and the natural world more generally, no matter the molecular and
other similarities and interconnections; as the physician-narrator in the Egyptian
writer Nawal El Saadawi’s (1931–) Mudhakkirāt tabībah (Memoirs of a Woman
Doctor, 1958) marvels while holding a human brain: “Could this piece of moist
tender flesh be the mighty human mind that had triumphed over nature and gone
down into the bowels of the earth and up into orbit with the sun and the moon,
which could split rocks and move mountains and extract enough fire from atoms
to destroy the world?” (28). In this book I use the terms “nonhuman,” “nature,”
etc. not to establish a hierarchy between people and everything else, nor to sug-
gest that people are intrinsically separate from everything else, but instead to
highlight the role of people in harming other species and the abiotic.
See also Gay A. Bradshaw, Elephants on the Edge; Matthew Calarco, Zoogra-
phies; Wai Chee Dimock, Through Other Continents, 168; Ian Frederick Finseth,
Shades of Green, 3–4; Harold Fromm, The Nature of Being Human, 95–103;
Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet, 3–4; Baz Kershaw, Theatre Ecology,
 Notes to Pages 1–2  439

147–48; Richard White, The Organic Machine. Helpful sources on cross-cultural

conceptions of “nature” include Hubertus Tellenbach and Bin Kimura, “The
Japanese Concept of ‘Nature’”; Arne Kalland, “Culture in Japanese Nature”;
Lorraine Daston and Fernando Vidal, eds., The Moral Authority of Nature; Peter
Marshall, Nature’s Web; Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature; Kate Soper,
What is Nature?; Julia Adeney Thomas, Reconfiguring Modernity. For a discus-
sion of changing conceptions of the relationship between people and “nature,”
see Michael Bonnett, Retrieving Nature, esp. 26–41. For different understandings
of the term “environment” see Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler, eds., Keywords
for American Cultural Studies.
3.  On the other hand, as Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee points out in Postco-
lonial Environments, the list of crimes against people committed in the name of
“preserving nature” continues to grow, from the “ethnic cleansing” of Yellow-
stone National Park to violence in India against refugees for the alleged purpose
of protecting tiger habitats (41).
4.  To give one example, to help restore forests razed by grazing deer in Ja-
pan’s Tanzawa Mountains the Kanagawa prefectural government has increased
efforts to cull the animals. On the other hand, environmentalists have argued that
also responsible for degrading these wooded ecosystems are air pollution and
growing numbers of hikers, as well as a wasp species that consumes beech leaves.
“Tanzawa Forests Endangered.”
5.  For many millennia most human-induced changes to environments were
relatively isolated local phenomena, but in the past several centuries these changes
have expanded into regional and ultimately global events. The greater the human
transformations of an environment, particularly its nonhuman components, the
more likely it is that this environment is regarded as damaged or in crisis. Since
the 1960s many have argued that the planet itself is in crisis, in large part because
of human behaviors. As Ernst Friedrich Schumacher writes in Small is Beauti-
ful (1973), “Already the environment is trying to tell us that certain stresses are
becoming excessive. As one problem is being ‘solved,’ ten new problems arise as
a result of the first ‘solution’” (43). For more on perceptions of environmental
crisis, see Frederick Buell, From Apocalypse to Way of Life. James Gustave Speth
comments on the paradox of the precipitous decline of environmental health
in face of the increasing strength of environmental institutions and movements
since the 1970s in “Environmental Failure.” Richard C. Hoffmann et al. discuss
definitions of environmental “crisis” in “AHR Conversation.” See also Barry
Commoner, The Closing Circle, 7; Greg Garrard, Ecocriticism, 93–107; Joachim
Radkau, Nature and Power, 265–72.
6.  Julia A. Ireland, “Annie Dillard’s Ecstatic Phenomenology,” 32. Ireland
is referring to a phrase in the American writer Annie Dillard’s (1945–) Pulitzer
Prize–winning narrative Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974), in which she reflects on
her year alone at Tinker Creek in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains and expounds
on the wonders of nature: “Then one day I was walking along Tinker Creek
thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with lights in it. I saw the backyard
cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzz-
ing with flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire,
utterly focused and utterly dreamed. It was less like seeing than like being for the
440  notes to pages 2–5

first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance . . . I have since only very
rarely seen the tree with the lights in it. The vision comes and goes, mostly goes,
but I live for it, for the moment when the mountains open and a new light roars
in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam” (33).
  7.  David P. Barash, “We Are All Madoffs,” B8.
  8.  See, for instance, Robert Bryce, Power Hungry.
 9. In Reading Autobiography, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson describe eco-
logical life narratives as texts in which “the story of the protagonist is interwoven
with that of the region itself” (150).
10. James Engell, “Plant Beach Grass,” 23. Paul R. Ehrlich and Donald
Kennedy are among the many scholars and activists who, alarmed at increas-
ing damage to environments, have called explicitly for cultural change. See their
“Millennium Assessment of Human Behavior,” 563. Michael Bonnet argues that
environmental education, properly conceived, “requires a radical transformation
of the nature of schooling and a re-examination of the idea of education itself.”
Michael Bonnet, Retrieving Nature, 4. Mary Evelyn Tucker notes the increasing
awareness of scientists and policymakers that science and policy are necessary
but “not sufficient in helping to transform human consciousness and behavior
for a sustainable future.” Mary Evelyn Tucker, “Preface,” 3. As Shirley M. Tilgh-
man, a celebrated molecular biologist and president of Princeton University, de-
clared at the university’s 2010 Opening Exercises: “Within the next few decades,
sustainable life on our planet will require that we discover alternative forms of
energy and ways to ameliorate the damage that has already been done to our eco-
system. At first blush you might think that this is the sole task of future engineers
and scientists, but nothing could be further from the truth. The development of
new energy sources and protection of the environment are challenges that call
out for expertise in everything from moral philosophy to legislative policymaking
to behavioral economics, in addition to . . . science and engineering.” Shirley M.
Tilghman, “Welcoming the Class of 2014.”
11. Lawrence Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism, vi. Jerry
Varsava also reminds us of the importance of art’s broad commercial appeal:
“there is a capacity for ameliorative influence in the literary work of art that,
however sadly, is not available to natural and social scientists whose readership
is counted in, perhaps, the hundreds, rather than [in some cases] in the millions”
(296). Jerry Varsava, “Jiang Rong’s Wolf Totem,” 296. Scholars making the case
for environmental humanities—including anthropology, ethics, history, human-
istic geography, and religion—include Jill Ker Conway et al., “The New Environ-
mentalisms”; Leo Marx, “Environmental Degradation.” For more on the “use”
of literature, see Marjorie Garber, The Use and Abuse of Literature.
12.  George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller, Animal Spirits, 6. As Mark Al-
lister notes in Refiguring the Map of Sorrow, a common feature of many texts
that intersect at the edges of autobiography studies, environmental literature, and
literary nonfiction is the desire of their writers “to explore the world and tell its
stories as an attempt to make sense of their own lives” (170).
13.  Njabulo S. Ndebele (1948–), South African Literature and Culture, 134.
As Lawrence Buell likewise asserts, “Narrative can both define and underscore
the gravity of actual or possible events by means of plotlines involving characters
 Notes to Page 5  441

the reader . . . is made to care about intensely. . . How a place gets imaged, what
stories about it get told, how they are remembered–all this can clearly make a
difference not just aesthetically but historically, for public values and behavior.”
Lawrence Buell, “Literature and the Environment,” 60-61.
14.  As James William Gibson has noted, “new ways of understanding and
relating to nature have preceded actual political changes,” sometimes by decades.
See James William Gibson, A Reenchanted World, 253.
15.  In Don DeLillo’s (1936–) White Noise the narrator observes: “The people
who relayed . . . pieces of unverified information [on the ‘Airborne Toxic Event’]
did so with a certain respectful dread . . . They were fearful that the stories might
be true but at the same time impressed by the dramatic character of things. The
toxic event had released a spirit of imagination. People spun tales, others listened
spellbound. There was a growing respect for the vivid rumor, the most chilling
tale. We were no closer to believing or disbelieving a given story than we had been
earlier. But there was a greater appreciation now. We began to marvel at our own
ability to manufacture awe” (153). For its part Günter Grass’s (1927–) The Rat
parodies the construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction of fairy tales in the
context of environmental degradation.
16.  George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller, Animal Spirits, 51.
17.  Documentary sources include government reports as well as journalistic,
scientific, and medical articles/information, some of which rely heavily on sta-
tistics. Precision does not guarantee fact and truth; it only reflects the desire to
appear as though fact and truth have been prioritized.
18.  This relates at least in part to literature’s “usability.” As Rita Felski urges:
“Instead of calling literature useful, let us call it ‘usable’—a word that better cap-
tures its chameleonlike ability to speak to diverse interests and desires, to morph
into different roles and functions.” Rita Felski, “Remember the Reader,” B8. See
also Rita Felski, Uses of Literature, 7–8. Significant as well is that most texts that
feature damage to ecosystems base their discussions on phenomena in the expe-
rienced world; many of these texts engage with actual environmental problems
and crises, explicitly or implicitly interweaving documentary sources into their
narratives. Creative works often highlight the contradictions and fluctuations of
this nonfiction discourse. They explicitly and implicitly underline the inability
of documentary sources to capture suffering, whether of people or the nonhu-
man. Even more important, they reveal the ambiguous and often controversial
ways information is assembled, interpreted, and distributed, the very ways that
knowledge itself is constructed by individuals and by social institutions and soci-
eties. For discussions of the usability of literature and stories in changing people’s
interactions with environments, see Jonathan Bate, The Song of the Earth; Wil-
liam Cronon, “A Place for Stories”; George B. Handley, New World Poetics, 8;
Joseph W. Meeker, The Comedy of Survival; Timothy Morton, Ecology without
Nature; Rebecca Raglon and Marian Scholtmeijer, “Heading Off the Trail”; S. K.
Robisch, Wolves and the Wolf Myth, xii; Keith Sagar, Literature and the Crime
against Nature; Terre Satterfield and Scott Slovic, eds., What’s Nature Worth?
61–81. Bate, for instance, notes the paradox of art itself: “art is an attempt to
recover the very thing which has been destroyed [raw materials] so that art can
be made” (92).
442  notes to pages 6–7

19. Although the two frequently overlap, attitudes are best understood as

mental states and behaviors as actions we carry out toward other entities, includ-
ing the nonhuman. Barbara Almond, The Monster Within, 8.
20.  Understandings of what constitutes ambiguity vary from culture to cul-
ture, as well as within individual cultures, but the term ecoambiguity captures
well the dynamics of a diverse range of texts, including those discussed in this
book. Cf. Josef A. Kyburz, “Magical Thought at the Interface of Nature and Cul-
ture.” Commenting on the long history—from the sixteenth century to the pres-
ent day—of Western reports on the “ambiguity” of “Japanese attitudes toward
nature,” Kyburz comments, “Deep familiarity, closeness and intimacy with the
natural environment are seen to coexist, without apparent contradiction, with
just as much careless neglect, disregard or abuse. But what appears to be a con-
tradictory or paradoxical attitude, might, on the antipodean side, be nothing else
than a spontaneous, ‘natural’ expression of a relationship so profoundly differ-
ent from its Western equivalent that it needs a complete change of perspective in
order to be perceived and fittingly interpreted” (257–58). I argue instead that the
“natural” expression of human relationships with environments is often ambigu-
ous, regardless of culture. Beliefs concerning ideal relationships between people
and environments can differ widely across and within cultures, but behaviors
toward these environments—given similar populations and capability to manipu-
late landscapes—have been strikingly similar.
21.  Cf. Clive Ponting, A New Green History, 15–16.
22.  Jared Diamond, Collapse, 9. J. R. McNeill believes human manipulations
of the planet’s ecosystems have taken place for much longer. See J. R. McNeill,
Something New under the Sun, 3. Some scientists have gone so far as to argue
that people triggered global warming thousands of years ago. See Josh Fischman,
“Global Warming before Smokestacks,” B11–12.
23.  Bill McKibben argues that altering distant places “[began] with the invis-
ible releases of radiation, and then the toxic pollutants like DDT, and then the
by-products of large-scale industrialization like acid rain.” Bill McKibben, The
End of Nature, xix. But in fact, people have been altering distant places long
before radiation, DDT, and acid rain.
24.  See Kamila Shamsie, “Not Just a Natural Disaster.” Shamsie describes
illegal deforestation in the Swat valley of north Pakistan as responsible for the
record floods that in 2010 devastated the region: “not only has the flooding been
intense in areas where the timber mafia is active but the felled trees, hidden in
ravines prior to smuggling them onwards, have caused havoc. Dislodged by tor-
rents of water, they have swept away bridges and people and anything else in
their path.” In Island in a Storm Abby Sallenger reveals the impact of human
changes to the Mississippi delta on patterns of disease and vulnerability to hur-
ricanes. An excellent contemporary example of an animal whose population has
exploded because of human behaviors is the mountain pine beetle, an insect that
kills mature trees. In recent years the beetle has damaged 6 million acres of forest
in the United States and 34 million acres in British Columbia. Some see this as an
“unmitigated disaster.” Others argue that the beetles are not an exotic or invasive
species, that “this is a native insect in a native host,” and that the attack on West-
ern forests is a “natural phenomenon” which plays a “vital ecological role.” But
 Notes to Pages 7–8  443

global warming, by opening up new territory to the beetles, has been blamed for
the severity and scope of the attacks. See Jim Robbins, “Some See Beetle Attacks
on Western Forests as a Natural Event,” D3. Cf. Anthony dePalma, “An Un-
sightly Algae,” D3. More “natural” devastation might be the nearly 600 square
kilometers of forest flattened by the eruption of Mount St. Helens.
25.  Clive Ponting, A New Green History, 31–34.
26. As late as the 1500s, hunters and gatherers occupied all of Australia,
most of North America, and large segments of Africa, Asia, and South America.
By the turn of the twentieth century most foraging societies had been absorbed
into surrounding agricultural regimes, but dozens were still viable; the turn of the
twenty-first century saw all such societies assimilated into agrarian state systems,
but some—like the Rautes of Nepal—remain relatively independent. Jana Fortier,
Kings of the Forest, 1. See also James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed.
27.  Clive Ponting, A New Green History, 67–86. Also discussing environ-
mental degradation in ancient societies are Louise Barry, “Water, Power, Technol-
ogy”; Jonathan Bate, The Song of the Earth; Jan J. Boersema, “First the Jew”;
Edmund Burke III and Kenneth Pomeranz, eds., The Environment and World
History; Barry Commoner, Science and Survival; Jared Diamond, Collapse; Paul
R. Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich, The Dominant Animal; Clarence J. Glacken,
Traces on the Rhodian Shore; A. T. Grove and Oliver Rackham, The Nature of
Mediterranean Europe; Ramachandra Guha, How Much Should a Person Con-
sume? 2–4; J. Donald Hughes, Ecology in Ancient Civilizations and Pan’s Tra-
vail; Heather Pringle, “A New Look at the Mayas’ End”; John F. Richards, The
Unending Frontier; Derek Wall, Green History, 2–3.
28.  World human population has more than doubled in the last fifty years,
from 3 billion in 1960 to 7 billion in 2011. Managing growing populations has
been a challenge for centuries. See Matthew Connelly, Fatal Misconception; Jared
Diamond, Collapse; Paul R. Ehrlich, The Population Bomb; Paul R. Ehrlich and
Anne H. Ehrlich, The Dominant Animal; Paul R. Ehrlich et al., Ecoscience; Ger-
maine Greer, Sex and Destiny; J. Donald Hughes, Pan’s Travail, 36; Karen L.
Kilcup, “Fresh Leaves”; Thomas Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of
Population; John F. Richards, The Unending Frontier; Elaine Scarry, Literature
and the Body; Bill McKibben, Maybe One; Scott Slovic, Going Away to Think,
157–63; Gary Snyder, A Place in Space, 32–33; Jacqueline Vaughn, Environmen-
tal Politics; Lynn White, Jr., “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis.”
29.  As Elizabeth Kolbert argues in “The Things People Say” concerning the
“birther conspiracy” surrounding President Barack Obama (1961–), “Here we
are, quadrillions of bytes deep into the Information Age. And yet information,
it seems, has never mattered less” (80–81). See also Joe Keohane, “How Facts
Backfire”; Cass Sunstein, Infotopia, On Rumors, and Republic.com 2.0. As Keo-
hane notes, “Our brains are designed to create cognitive shortcuts—inference,
intuition, and so forth—to avoid precisely [the] discomfort [of relentless self-
questioning] while coping with the rush of information we receive on a daily
basis. Without these shortcuts, few things would ever get done. Unfortunately,
with them, we’re easily suckered by political falsehoods” (C3).
30.  Daniel Goleman, Ecological Intelligence, 25, 74.
31.  James Gustave Speth, The Bridge at the Edge of the World, 1–2. Bodies
444  notes to pages 9–10

of water such as Africa’s Lake Tanganyika are at their warmest in more than a
millennium, threatening global food supplies. See “Lake Tanganyika.” Others
have predicted that the rapid disappearance of honeybee colonies on multiple
continents puts the planet on the brink of a biological disaster and threatens
the stability of human societies. Alison Benjamin, “Bee Decline a Calamity for
Humanity.” In its 2010 report on global biodiversity, the UN Convention on
Biological Diversity claimed that nearly a quarter of all plant species are threat-
ened. 2010 was declared the International Year of Biodiversity, but biodiversity is
threatened now more than ever before. See “U.N. Report.” For maps indicating
global distribution of contemporary environmental problems see E. O. Wilson,
“Problems without Borders”; www.worldmapper.org.
32. James Gustave Speth, “Environmental Failure”; Mark Dowie, Losing
Ground; Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, Break Through. As Rich-
ard Kerridge has likewise noted, “Popular concern about the environment finds
numerous cultural expressions . . . At times environmentalism seems to be ev-
erywhere—yet environmental priorities make so little political headway, so little
impression on economic life. It is as if environmentalism has been defined . . . as
a purely cultural practice, or even a leisure activity . . . Whether in the lives of
individuals or in social policy, environmentalism has great difficulty in moving
beyond these cultural spheres.” Richard Kerridge, “Ecothrillers,” 247. See also
Neil Evernden, The Natural Alien, 3–34; John Livingston, The Fallacy of Wildlife
Conservation.
33.  Jared Diamond, Collapse, 11.
34. Simon C. Estok, Ecocriticism and Shakespeare, 4. See also, Simon C.
Estok, “Theorizing in a Space of Ambivalent Openness,” 207–8.
35.  Simon C. Estok, “Theorizing in a Space of Ambivalent Openness,” 219.
See also, Simon C. Estok, Ecocriticism and Shakespeare, 129. The definition of
biophilia is from Edward O. Wilson, “Biophilia and the Conservation Ethic.”
See also Edward O. Wilson, Biophilia. Wilson echoes the American naturalist
John Muir’s (1838–1914) sentiments, in The Story of My Boyhood and Youth
(1913), that “the natural inherited wilderness in our blood ran true on its glori-
ous course . . . We have to look far back to learn how great may be the capacity
of a child’s heart for sorrow and sympathy with animals” (4–6). Muir disputed
the En­glish intellectual John Ruskin’s (1819–1900) cautions against “excessive
love” of mountains, but the two agreed “that a love of mountains was instilled
in every person.” Donald Worster, A Passion for Nature, 5–6, 187–88. Cf. Xing
Ruan and Paul Hogben, eds., Topophilia and Topophobia.
36.  As Martin W. Lewis argues in Green Delusions, indifference toward en-
vironments often contributes to their health.
37.  Cf. Simon C. Estok, “Theorizing in a Space of Ambivalent Openness,”
211. Estok believes the focus on ecophobia is a needed antidote to ecocriticism’s
own ambivalences and ambiguities: “A viable ecocriticism has little future unless
it deals with the ambivalence dragged in by its wide net—needs, in other words,
to begin theorizing its central matter of concern: ecophobia.” In contrast, I argue
that ambivalence, or ambiguity more generally—albeit that of the relationships
between people and the nonhuman—is precisely what needs theorizing. Among
other limitations, a focus on phobia risks overlooking phobias masked as philias.
 Notes to Page 10  445

For alternative reactions to the concept of ecophobia see Tom J. Hillard, “‘Deep
Into That Darkness Peering’”; S. K. Robisch, “The Woodshed.” In “Beyond Eco-
phobia” David Sobel proposes a different use of the term. For more on the impor-
tance of embracing ambiguity see Paul Wapner, Living Through the End of Na-
ture. Wapner acknowledges that “most of us hate ambiguity . . . [which] seems to
undermine us . . . seems to make us vulnerable to being swayed off our path.” But
he rightly proposes that “[even though] the last thing environmentalism seems
to need these days is ambivalence . . . ambiguity may be the movement’s saving
grace” (25). This is because it forces us to acknowledge the contradictions of our
relationships with both other people and the nonhuman.
38. In The Monster Within, Barbara Almond argues that ambivalence—a
“conflicted mental state” in which one person harbors both loving and hating
feelings for another individual—characterizes all human relationships (8). The
same might be said of most relationships between people and environments.
39. Of course, understandings of what constitutes “positive,” “negative,”
“uncertain,” and “indifferent”—on the part of both the interacting individual/
group and the interpreter(s) of these interactions—also are quite flexible. Some
of these uncertainties likely stem from the ambivalent position of people vis-à-vis
nature, often congruent with the ambivalent positioning highlighted in the work
of Homi Bhabha: “The ambivalence of colonial authority repeatedly turns from
mimicry—a difference that is almost nothing but not quite—to menace—a differ-
ence that is almost total but not quite.” Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture,
131.
40.  Peter C. Rollins cites American attitudes toward industrial development
as a key example of this ecological ambivalence, noting that “the feature film
Tulsa reflects a national mind divided between enthusiastic approval of economic
development and deep-seated anxieties about despoiling a Virgin Land. This
abiding ambivalence has been part of our heritage since the Romantic era when
America constructed an identity that proclaimed us to be Nature’s Nation.” Peter
C. Rollins, “Tulsa (1949) as an Oil-Field Film,” 81. Cf. Robin L. Murray and
Joseph K. Heumann, Ecology and Popular Film. For a succinct discussion of
the relationship among ambivalence, attitudes, and behaviors, see Stephen C.
Craig and Michael D. Martinez, eds., Ambivalence and the Structure of Political
Opinion.
41.  American treatment of animals is an excellent example of this phenom-
enon. Forty-six million American households own at least one dog and 38 mil-
lion at least one cat; Americans spend approximately $40 billion annually on
their pets, sometimes even leaving them generous trust funds. In the same period
they also consume the meat of close to 35 million steers. See Jonathan Safran
Foer, Eating Animals; Tristram Stuart, The Bloodless Revolution; Jeffrey Toobin,
“Rich Bitch.”
42.  Lawrence Buell identifies this ambiguity as a phenomenon of advanced
industrial societies: “The gap between environmental attitudes and behavior spe-
cifically is largely explicable by the alienation of modern daily living from the
processes of extraction and production, as well as by a lack of felt urgency among
even the moderately well-off, not to mention the truly affluent.” Lawrence Buell,
“Ecoglobalist Affects,” 231. See also Lawrence Buell, The Future of Environ-
446  notes to pages 10–12

mental Criticism, 244 n. 16. But in fact there have always been gaps between
environmental attitudes and behaviors.
43.  Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, 55, 64. Rachel Carson (1907–64) is also
known for her best-sellers The Sea around Us (1951), The Edge of the Sea (1955),
and Under the Sea Wind (1941).
44.  Alan Macfarlane, The Savage Wars of Peace, 387–88.
45.  Likewise, some of the same professionals (scientists, engineers) complicit
in environmental degradation represent some of the greatest hopes for environ-
mental remediation. See Leo Marx, “Environmental Degradation and the Am-
biguous Social Role of Science and Technology.” Stephen DeStefano addresses
the contradictory consequences of urban sprawl on different animal species in
Coyote at the Kitchen Door.
46.  See Jacques Leslie, Deep Water.
47.  In 2010, for instance, Toyota sold more than 315,000 Prius hybrids in
Japan, toppling the Japanese sales record for a single model, held by Corolla
since 1990. “Corolla’s 1990 Sales.” In early September 2011 Toyota officials an-
nounced plans to begin making the Prius in China. The same weekend, Chinese
leaders called for Chinese automakers to make fewer, and more fuel efficient
automobiles. See Keith Bradsher, “China Aims to Rein in Car Sales”; “Toyota to
Make New Prius in China.”
48.  Gordon Hempton compares quiet-spaces extinction to species extinction;
he argues that there is likely no place on earth—including the Amazon rain for-
est—that has not been touched by the sounds of people and their cultural prod-
ucts. Gordon Hempton and John Grossmann, One Square Inch of Silence, 13.
49.  “Toyota Device Alerts Pedestrians to Approaching Quiet Hybrid.” See
also “Shizuka na HV.” For more on other automakers working on “car tones” for
hybrids, see Jim Motavalli, “Hybrid Cars May Include Fake Vroom for Safety.”
Another form of environmentally friendly hazard is the LED traffic signal, whose
low heat emissions allow “snow and ice to accumulate more easily in certain
conditions.” These lights have caused several traffic fatalities. Susan Saulny, “An
Environmentally Friendly Traffic Signal,” A11. Wind farms also are not without
their drawbacks. They provide cleaner energy, but those who live near them have
reported health problems including insomnia, tinnitus, and tremors. See “Gov-
ernment to Study Effects.” Trash too is an “inherently contradictory material.”
Vivian E. Thomson, Garbage In. And global warming remains highly contested,
some arguing that its consequences are not particularly to be feared. Bjorn Lom-
borg, Cool It. Just as disturbing is that the rare earths used to make some of the
world’s greenest technology come from some of China’s most environmentally
damaging mines. See Keith Bradsher, “Earth-Friendly Elements,” A1, B5. And
devices that decrease dependence on paper, and thus on deforestation, harm the
earth in other, more significant ways; the environmental cost of a single e-reader,
for instance, is about the same as that of fifty books. Ted Genoways, “The Price
of the Paperless Revolution.” Similarly, although on a smaller scale, despite
their “green” reputation, Amish farming practices have been damaging local
ecosystems for decades. Sindya N. Bhanoo, “Amish Farming.” On the other
hand, some changes to bodyscapes once assumed detrimental have proven other-
wise. An excellent example is power line transmission corridors. These were long
 Notes to Pages 12–13  447

imagined to signal environmental degradation. But recently they have gained a

new reputation as “critical homes for faltering species of birds, bees, butterflies,
plants, and a host of other species.” See Beth Daley, “Green Lines.” At the same
time, they have been shown to cause cancer in humans.
50.  David Harvey, “What’s Green,” 331–32, 351. Ana Isla and others have
argued that “environmental conservation led by neoliberal governments and
large NGOs in the global North has become yet another instrument for the colo-
nization of Third World Resources—in particular, women’s work, and nature.”
See Ana Isla, “Who Pays for the Kyoto Protocol?” See also Patrick Hayden, Cos-
mopolitan Global Politics, 121–51; Stephan Schmidheiny, ed., Changing Course.
On the other hand, as Félix Guattari argues in Les trois ecologies (The Three
Ecologies, 1989), technology is necessary for the planet’s survival, and our best
option is to “engage in an ongoing process of transformation.” Verena Ander-
matt Conley, “Urban Ecological Practices,” 139.
51.  Richard Heinberg, Peak Everything, 192–98. Heinberg notes, “The re-
cent fossil fuel era has seen so much growth of population and consumption that
there is an overwhelming likelihood of a crash of titanic proportions. This should
be glaringly obvious to everyone . . . But language also keeps us most of us in the
dark. This is partly because magical thinking is alive and well . . . We live today
in a fog of words so thick that it largely prevents us from seeing where we are or
where we’re headed” (193–94).
52.  Timothy Hildebrandt argues in “Ambiguous Information” that “global
environmental cooperation is actually contingent upon ambiguous knowledge
. . . When knowledge of causation is limited and information emphasizes the uni-
versal effects of environmental problems, the relative cost of cooperation is low
and the likelihood of agreement high.” In Living through the End of Nature, Paul
Kevin Wapner argues that ambivalence can be a source of wisdom and political
strength: “Ambiguity seems anathema to clear thinking and determination . . .
[but it] can actually provide insight and the kind of perspicuity longed for in these
difficult times. It can, in fact, supply confidence and direction. It can do so to the
degree that it stretches environmentalists across the tensions that inflict environ-
mental decisions in ways that demand integrity” (26, 202–3).
53.  This flexibility includes advocating phenomena once believed anathema,
including nuclear power. Stewart Brand argues in Whole Earth Discipline, “En-
vironmentalists have much less to fear in reality from the current nuclear power
industry than they think, and much more to gain from new and planned reactor
designs than they realize . . . Nukes are Green; new nukes even more so . . . The
loom of climate change has altered everybody’s perspective on costs and risks”
(76, 100). Brand also discusses the damage caused by opposition to genetic en-
gineering: “In defense of a bizarre idea of what is ‘natural,’ we reject the very
thing Rachel Carson encouraged us to pursue—the new science of biotic con-
trols” (117). Brand’s comments predate Japan’s March 2011 Fukushima Daiichi
nuclear disaster, discussed in Chapter 1.
54.  Most notable in this context are paintings of people hunting animals. The
paintings that have been discovered “testify to a much longer track [of painting]
behind them,” extending back perhaps hundreds of thousands of years. Paul G.
Bahn, The Cambridge Illustrated History of Prehistoric Art, 283; Brian Boyd, On
448  notes to pages 13–14

the Origin of Stories, 76. For a synopsis of human representations of animals see
Laura Brown, Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes, 1–26.
55. This definition of world literature is from David Damrosch, What is
World Literature? 4. The Epic of Gilgamesh has conventionally been interpreted
as “a mixture of pure adventure, of morality, and of tragedy.” N. K. Sandars,
“Introduction,” 7. But, as Louise Westling has argued, “Ecological tragedy is
. . . the very ground of Gilgamesh’s heroism.” Louise Westling, The Green Breast
of the New World, 21. Robert Pogue Harrison writes, “The first antagonist of
Gilgamesh is the forest . . . Gilgamesh peers over the walls [of the Sumerian city
of Uruk] and sees human bodies floating down the river in funeral processions
. . . In revolt against the scene of finitude, Gilgamesh has a vision: he will go to
the forests, cut down the trees . . . Logs will become the cadavers. The hero who
dies within the city will project his own personal fate onto the forests . . . If he is
not wide enough to ‘cover the earth,’ yet may he still uncover it.” Robert Pogue
Harrison, Forests, 14–18. This exploit reflects historical conditions. As Harrison
comments, “We know from the written records that certain Sumerian individu-
als actually achieved considerable fame by undertaking expeditions to the cedar
forests and seizing huge quantities of timber.” Timber was a precious commod-
ity in the wake of rampant deforestation (17). See also Sharif S. Elmusa, “The
Ax of Gilgamesh”; John Felstiner, Can Poetry Save the Earth, 19. Interesting
in this context are the South African writer Douglas Livingstone’s (1932–1996)
poems “The Hero—Enkidu” (1968) and “The Hero—Gilgamesh” (1968). The
latter speaks of the monster Kumbaba (Humbaba) as guarding “something / or
the other with parochial jealousy: we think, some pieces of trash” (368), imply-
ing that the cedar forest already has been laid waste. Cf. Yusef Komunyakaa’s
(1947–) Gilgamesh: A Verse Play (2006). David Damrosch describes the loss and
rediscovery of this epic in The Buried Book. The Bible is another example of an
early work of world literature replete with references to environmental degrada-
tion, beginning with the advent of agriculture. Steven Stoll, “Agrarian Anxiet-
ies.” See Jim Dwyer, Where the Wild Books Are, for a synopsis of classical and
early European ecofiction (9–12).
56. In A Sand County Almanac (1949), a text celebrated for establishing
biocentrism, the American ecologist and environmentalist Aldo Leopold (1887–
1948) defines “land health” as “the capacity of the land for self-renewal” (221).
But the capacity for self-renewal is not the only measure of health, nor is it neces-
sarily an indicator of health. See also Gregg Mitman, “In Search of Health.” J. R.
McNeill summarizes several of the difficulties of evaluating change in Something
New under the Sun, xxv–xxvi.
57.  Many of the transformations the built environment inflicts on the nonhu-
man can be interpreted as damage.
58.  The term “ecocosmopolitan” is from Ursula Heise. My use of the term is
similar, but focuses less on human perceptions of ties to and identification with
the natural world on multiple scales than on engaging with ecodegradation be-
yond a single time or place. Heise argues: “Eco-cosmopolitanism . . . is an attempt
to envision individuals and groups as part of planetary ‘imagined communities’
of both human and nonhuman kinds . . . Ecocriticism has only begun to explore
the cultural means by which ties to the natural world are produced and perpetu-
 Notes to Pages 14–15  449

ated, and how the perception of such ties fosters or impedes regional, national,
and transnational forms of identification . . . The point of an eco-cosmopolitan
critical project . . . would be . . . to investigate by what means individuals and
groups in specific cultural contexts have succeeded in envisioning themselves in
similarly concrete fashion as part of the global biosphere, or by what means they
might be enabled to do so.” Ursula Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet,
61–62. Patrick Hayden’s similar notion of “world environment citizenship” is
also more focused on people than my own: “World environmental citizenship can
be viewed as a component of the more general cosmopolitan conception of world
citizenship . . . World environmental citizenship arises from an ethical concern
for the social, political and economic problems associated with the environment
and humanity’s dependence upon it, and from a recognition of our global re-
sponsibilities for the human condition in light of humanity’s interconnectedness
with the environment. Thus the world environmental citizen is concerned about
the common good of the human community and places particular emphasis on
the fact that we are all citizens belonging to both local environments and a single
global environment.” Patrick Hayden, Cosmopolitan Global Politics, 147.
Hayden’s ecocosmopolitanism is similar to engaged ecocosmopolitanism, by
which I mean believing and ideally acting on the belief that people have obliga-
tions not just to people beyond their own communities but also to other species,
regardless of their habitats. Cf. Kwame Anthony Appiah, who in Cosmopolitan-
ism declares “cosmopolitanism” is best understood as composed of two inter-
twining threads: “One is the idea that we have obligations to others, obligations
that stretch beyond those to whom we are related by the ties of kith and kind,
or even the more formal ties of a shared citizenship. The other is that we take
seriously the value not just of human life but of particular human lives, which
means taking an interest in the practices and beliefs that lend them significance
. . . There’s a sense in which cosmopolitanism is the name not of the solution but
of the challenge” (xv). In A Sand County Almanac Aldo Leopold posits an early
form of engaged ecocosmopolitanism: “Obligations have no meaning without
conscience, and the problem we face is the extension of the social conscience
from people to land” (209). Engaged ecocosmopolitanism can include the belief,
expressed in the Nicaraguan writer Rubén Darío’s (1867–1916) poem “Coloquio
de los centauros” (Colloquy of the Centaurs, 1896), that “Each leaf of each tree
sings its own song / and each drop in the ocean has its own soul.” In other words,
that all parts of the nonhuman matter.
59.  This is particularly true of Japanese literature, where the place conscious-
ness of discourse on the wonders of the natural world is especially strong.
60.  Lawrence Buell, “Ecoglobalist Affects,” 227.
61.  Critical judgments of this form of environmental possibility can be based
on the creative writer’s knowledge, or at least on what is known of the writer’s
knowledge of environmental problems.
62.  By this I mean that creative works, even literature with a bioregionalist
focus, rarely specify the precise spatial and temporal range of the environmental
degradation they describe. See, for instance, Tom Lynch, Xerophilia. “Bioregion-
alism” holds that the future of the planet depends on concern for ecological as
opposed to jurisdictional units.
450  notes to pages 16–17

63.  In addition, celebrations of nature, even those published by societies ex-

periencing severe environmental degradation, are not necessarily products of ig-
norance or of active desire to conceal damaged ecosystems; they instead at times
are protests against changes occurring in the experienced world. As the historian
Mark Elvin questions: “Do our sources mainly reflect the dominant tendencies
of an age, or are they more often reactions, by far-seeing and sensitive thinkers,
against these dominant tendencies? And, if a mixture, where, and in what pro-
portions?” Mark Elvin, The Retreat of the Elephants, 324.
64. As Axel Goodbody comments in Nature, Technology and Cultural
Change, literature and other cultural media can serve “as a site where the conse-
quences of prevailing and alternative value systems and conceptions of nature can
be staged and explored in fictional scenarios” (278).
65.  This is part of what gives teachers of literature the opportunity to raise
the environmental consciousness of society. Cheryll Glotfelty has gone so far as
to argue that “as Literature professors, we may even have more of an impact in
raising the environmental consciousness level of society than if we taught, say,
Conservation Biology or Wildlife Management, for students in those courses are
already ecologically inclined.” Cheryll Glotfelty, “The Strong Green Thread,” 3.
66.  Zhang Longxi and others have conflated thematic networks with those of
world literature, but in many cases it is more productive to distinguish between
them. See Zhang Longxi, “What is Literature?” 70–71. On the other hand, in-
tercultural thematic networks, like their conceptual counterparts, can overlap,
shape, and be significantly shaped by networks of circulation, reading, and trans-
culturation, those networks generally understood to be the hallmarks of world
literature.
67.  Werner Sollors, Neither Black nor White yet Both, 25–26. Wai Chee Di-
mock similarly speaks of “categories of experience . . . that seem not entirely
predicated on the temporal and spatial boundaries of the nation-state.” She asks,
“What would literary history look like if the field were divided, not into discrete
periods, and not into discrete bodies of national literatures?” and proposes that
the concept of genre can provide a new heuristic map: “Likeness here is proba-
bilistic and distributional; it has less to do with common ancestry than with a
convergence of attributes, issuing from environments roughly similar but widely
dispersed. What matters here is not lineage, but a phenomenal field of contex-
tually induced parallels. Born of the local circumstances that shape them and
echoing other forms shaped by circumstances more or less alike, they make up
a decentralized web.” Dimock’s observations concerning “affinities” are true for
multiple phenomena. Wai Chee Dimock, Through other Continents, 5, 74. In
The Making of Early Chinese Classical Poetry Stephen Owen likewise stresses
affinities, focusing on those that transcend genre: “What this poetry [of various
genres and authors] shares are themes, topics, sequences of exposition, templates,
and a range of verbal habits” (9).
68.  Examining literature on oil, for instance, allows us to uncover relation-
ships among texts by writers as diverse as the American authors Edna Ferber
(1885–1968), Linda Hogan (1947–), Joe Kane (1899–2002), and Upton Sinclair
(1878–1968); the Nigerians Ken Saro-Wiwa (1941–1995), John Pepper Clark
(1935–), and Tayo Olafioye; and the Jordanian-born Arabic novelist Abdelrah-
 Notes to Page 18  451

man Munif (1933–2004). See also www.poetsforlivingwaters.org. For additional

examples of intercultural thematic networks involving specific environmental is-
sues see Rob Nixon, “Environmentalism and Postcolonialism,” 245–46.
69. At its broadest, ecocriticism is “the scrutiny of ecological implications
and human-nature relationships in any literary text, even texts that seem (at first
glance) oblivious of the nonhuman world.” Scott Slovic, Going Away to Think,
27. See also Lawrence Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism, 138. Eco-
criticism is a diverse, interdisciplinary field, an eclectic and pluriform initiative
not bound to any single method of inquiry or to any one environmentalist doc-
trine or commitment. William Rueckert coined the term in “Literature and Ecol-
ogy” (1978). The field’s foundational texts include Leo Marx, The Machine in the
Garden (1964); Joseph Meeker, The Comedy of Survival (1972); Raymond Wil-
liams, The Country and the City (1973); John Elder, Imagining the Earth (1985).
Marx and Williams highlighted the important role literature plays in under-
standing the environmental transformations of modernity and urbanization. In
so doing they were partly responsible for ecocriticism’s early focus on pastoral
imagination, and on Anglo-American romanticism (late 1700s—mid-1800s) in
particular, especially the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth (1770–
1850) and Anglo-American successors such as Henry David Thoreau (1817–62).
Examples of this phenomenon include Peter A. Fritzell, Nature Writing and
America (1990); Jonathan Bate, Romantic Ecology (1991); Scott Slovic, Seeking
Awareness in American Nature Writing (1992); Karl Kroeber, Ecological Literary
Criticism (1994); Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination (1995); Terry
Gifford, Green Voices (1995); Terry Gifford, Pastoral (1999); James C. McKu-
sick, Green Writing (2000); Onno Oerlemans, Romanticism and the Materiality
of Nature (2002).
70. The conferences and publications of ASLE (The Association for the Study
of Literature & Environment, est. 1992), the United States’s “premier member-
ship organization in the field of literature and environment,” overwhelmingly
feature discussion of Western and especially Anglophone literatures. http://www.
asle.org/site/about/. East Asian scholars have a long legacy of writing about East
Asian creative portrayals of nature. But, with several notable exceptions, scruti-
nizing the ecological implications of East Asian creative texts and their treatment
of environmental degradation in particular is a relatively recent phenomenon.
For instance, the 2007 ASLE Japan-Korea Joint Symposium, subtitled “Place,
Nature, Language: Thinking about the ‘Now’ in Japanese and Korean Environ-
mental Literature” (ASLE Nikkan gōdō shinpojiumu: basho, shizen, kotoba:
Nikkan kankyō bungaku no ‘ima’ o kangaeru,” Kanazawa, Japan) focused on
East Asian literatures, with many papers looking at the ecological implications
of East Asian creative works. For more on East Asian ecocritical scholarship and
organizations see chapter 1. Maureen Devine and Christa Grewe-Volpp sketch
the field of ecocriticism in Europe in “Introduction,” 1. In India, ecocritical schol-
arship is likewise growing, most notably in languages other than English. See
Rājendra Śarmā Akshara, Vrkṣa mitra; Kamala Nārāyana Ārya, Vaidika vāṇmaya
˚
meṃ paryāvaraṇa aura pradūṣaṇa; Bholānātha, Yaha paryāvaraṇa hamārā
hai; Rādhā Cauhāna, Janarala bakarā; Aparnā Guptā, Rāmacaritamānasa
meṃ paryāvaraṇa-cintana; Vandanā Rastogī, Prācīna bhārata meṃ paryāvaraṇa‐
452  notes to page 18

cintana; Nañjalā Rāthaura, Purāṇa-sāhitya meṃ paryāvaraṇa-sarakaṇa; Pravesh

Saxena,Vedoṃ meṃ paryāvaraṇa-saṃrakṣaṇa. See also Rayson K. Alex, “OSLE-
India Update”; Mahesh Rangarajan, “Five Nature Writers.”
71.  See Neel Ahuja, “Postcolonial Critique in a Multispecies World”; Alan
Bewell, Romanticism and Colonial Disease; Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey, Carib-
bean Literature and the Environment and Routes and Roots; Rob Nixon, “En-
vironmentalism and Postcolonialism”; Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin, Post-
colonial Ecocriticism; Andrew Husband, “Post-colonial ‘Greenery’”; Upamanyu
Pablo Mukherjee, Postcolonial Environments; Rob Nixon, “Slow Violence”;
Bonnie Roos and Alex Hunt, eds., Postcolonial Green; Helen Tiffin, ed., Five
Emus to the King of Siam; Anthony Vital, “Toward an African Ecocriticism”;
Laurenz Volkmann et al., eds., Local Natures, Global Responsibilities.
72.  This issue was discussed at length at the February 2010 Officers’ Retreat
of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment. ASLE has an-
nounced that it is committed to encouraging and participating in the internation-
alization of the field. “ASLE Officers’ Retreat Summary.” See also Ursula Heise,
“Species, Space, and the Imagination of the Global.” Similarly, in Ecocritical
Explorations in Literary and Cultural Studies, Patrick Murphy calls for the de-
velopment of “transnational ecocritical theory,” by which he means “a theory
that would transect, that is, cut across, the limitations of national perspectives
and boundaries . . . Avoiding parochialism does not mean practicing universal-
ism, but it also does not mean abandoning the idea that ecocriticism in whatever
varied forms it may take is a crucial, relevant, and necessary literary and cultural
practice to be promoted worldwide” (63). Annie Merrill Ingram et al. call for
more scholarly attention to the ecological implications of Asian and Asian Ameri-
can literatures. See their “Introduction: Thinking of Our Life in Nature.” The
relative paucity of translations is a major hurdle. As Jim Dwyer admits frankly
in Where the Wild Books Are, a guide to ecofiction: “In some locales, such as
eastern Europe, South America, Asia, and the Arab world, it is difficult [for me]
to know whether the paucity of work that I have identified is primarily due to a
lack of material or to my own relative ignorance of their languages, literatures,
and cultures. There are dozens of excellent green authors from Africa, Asia, and
South America whose work has been only partially translated or has not been
translated into English at all” (79). One major exception is the Chinese writer
Jiang Rong (pen name of Lü Jiamin; 1946–), whose celebrated novel Lang tuteng
(Wolf Totem, 2004) was translated into English in 2008; this novel has been
discussed in publications by ecocritics without a background in Chinese studies.
Translations of course are only a stepping stone, and ideally in the years to come
scholars of non-Western literatures will publish more work with an ecological
focus and more ecocritics with a background in Anglo-American literatures will
take up study of non-Western languages.
73.  See Martine Batchelor and Kerry Brown, eds., Buddhism and Ecology;
N. J. Girardot et al., eds., Daoism and Ecology; Mary Evelyn Tucker and Duncan
Ryūken Williams, eds., Buddhism and Ecology; Mary Evelyn Tucker and John
Berthrong, eds., Confucianism and Ecology. See also Christopher Key Chapple,
ed., Jainism and Ecology; Christopher Key Chapple and Mary Evelyn Tucker,
eds., Hinduism and Ecology; Richard C. Foltz et al., eds., Islam and Ecology;
 Notes to Pages 18–20  453

John A. Grim, ed., Indigenous Traditions and Ecology; Dieter T. Hessel and
Rosemary Radford Ruether, eds., Christianity and Ecology; Hava Tirosh-Samu-
elson, Judaism and Ecology.
74. The interest of the American naturalist and author Henry David Tho-
reau in East and South Asian thought is well known. For a précis, see J. Gerard
Dollar, “In Wildness Is the Preservation of China,” 412–13. See Jincai Yang,
“Chinese Projections of Thoreau” for a summary of Chinese engagement with
Thoreau. Resonances of classical Asian poetry and philosophy echo in the writ-
ing of the American Beat poets of the 1950s and 1960s, including Allen Ginsberg
(1926–1997), Kenneth Rexroth (1905–1982), Gary Snyder (1930–), and Philip
Whalen (1923–2002). On the other hand, as Arne Kalland and Pamela J. As-
quith have pointed out, East Asian modes of thought have not themselves “been
concerned with understanding and preserving nature as a healthy ecosystem, nor
even as a self-perpetuating source of sustenance. They have, instead been used
to define humanness, morality, aesthetic appreciation and to explain noumenal
and metaphysical phenomena.” Arne Kalland and Pamela J. Asquith, “Japanese
Perceptions of Nature: Ideals and Illusions,” 29.
For varying uses of the term “environmentality” see Arun Agrawal, Environ-
mentality, 8, 20–24, 233 n. 15, and “Environmentality,” 166; Lawrence Buell,
The Future of Environmental Criticism, 11, 24–25, 131–32, and “Literature as
Environmental(ist) Thought Experiment,” 24; Ashley Dawson, “Another Coun-
try”; Edward Snajdr, Nature Protests.
75.  Rhoads Murphey, “Asian Perspectives of and Behavior toward the Natu-
ral Environment,” 36. See also Peter C. Perdue’s comments in Richard C. Hoff-
mann et al., “AHR Conversation,” 1437.
76.  Mark Elvin, The Retreat of the Elephants, 321, 323.
77.  Heiner Roetz, Mensch und Natur im alten China, 85. Cited by Mark El-
vin, The Retreat of the Elephants, 324. For more on disjunctions between beliefs
and behaviors see Rhoads Murphey, “Man and Nature in China”; Yi-Fu Tuan,
“Discrepancies between Environmental Attitude and Behavior.”
78. On the other hand, the shape of this degradation is likely to change, as
population sizes and distributions shift and lifestyles alter.
79.  Garbage trucks deliver trash to basement incinerators, where it is burned;
scrubbed emissions are released via tall smokestacks. The structures at the Ita-
bashi Botanical Gardens in Tokyo are powered by energy from a local garbage in-
cinerator. Another of Tokyo’s many incinerators is located across the street from
Kinuta Park but has no discernable effect on the park’s air quality. Kinuta Park is
one of the largest green spaces in Tokyo; its paths and sports facilities make it a
popular place for runners, walkers, cyclists, and other athletes.
80.  Comments made by Steve Sawyer, secretary general of the Global Wind
Energy Council in Brussels. Cited in Keith Bradsher, “Green Power Takes Root
in China,” B1, B5.
81.  Andrew Higgins, “China Tries Eco-friendly Alternative.”
82.  “London Bids to be Greenest City,” 10.
83.  The term “shadow ecology” refers to “the aggregate environmental im-
pact on resources outside [a nation’s] territory of government practices, especially
official development assistance (ODA); corporate conduct, investment and tech-
454  notes to pages 20–21

nology transfers; and trade, including consumption, export and consumer prices,
and import tariffs.” Peter Dauvergne, Shadows in the Forest, 2–3. Jim MacNeill
et al. define the ecological shadow of a country as “the environmental resources
it draws from other countries and the global commons.” Jim MacNeill et al.,
Beyond Interdependence, 58–59. MacNeill et al. give Japan as an example of a
nation with a substantial shadow ecology (59–61).
84.  Richard H. Solomon, “Foreword,” x. Complicating matters is the fact
that much of Japan’s sulfur emission comes from the Sakurajima volcano in Ky-
ushu. Reinhard Drifte, “Transboundary Pollution,” 78.
85.  Derek Hall, “Japan’s Ecological Shadow in Asia,” 85–86.
86.  Wentao Wang et al., “Atmospheric Particulate Matter Pollution during
the 2008 Beijing Olympics.”
87.  This wave of ecocriticism drew in part from deep ecology, including Arne
Naess’s “The Shallow and the Deep.” Timothy Morton discusses problems with
nature writing in Ecology without Nature. See also Glenn Adelson et al., eds.,
Environment, 676–705.
88.  First-wave ecocriticism was concerned with place-attachment at a local
or regional scale, seen in writings by Wendell Berry (1934–), including The Unset-
tling of America (1977) and Standing by Words (1983), and Gary Snyder, includ-
ing The Practice of the Wild (1990) and A Place in Space (1995). Lawrence Buell,
Ursula Heise, and Karen Thornber, “Literature and Environment.”
In The Future of Environmental Criticism Lawrence Buell distinguishes be-
tween “first-wave” and “second-wave” ecocriticism but cautions that there re-
mains significant overlap between the two. Lawrence Buell, Ursula Heise, and
Karen Thornber outline some of these continuities in “Literature and Environ-
ment,” including ecocriticism’s sustained interest in all expressive media, every-
thing from printed texts to visual, musical, and cinematic performance, as well as
legislative documents and NGO reports. Other ongoing interests include environ-
mental rhetoric studies; enlisting scientific models, particularly from evolutionary
biology, ecology, and information sciences; differences of environmental percep-
tion based on gender and heritage, including indigeneity; and literary imagination
of relations between people and animals.
Major ecocritical scholarship from the 1990s also includes Cheryll Glotfelty
and Harold Fromm, eds., Ecocriticism Reader (1996); Verena Conley, Ecopoli-
tics (1997); Patrick D. Murphy, ed., The Literature of Nature (1998); Michael
Bennett and David Teague, eds., The Nature of Cities (1999); Alan Bewell, Ro-
manticism and Colonial Disease (1999). Ecocritical scholarship from the 2000s
includes Jonathan Bate, The Song of the Earth (2000); Laurence Coupe, ed., The
Green Studies Reader (2000); Lawrence Buell, Writing for an Endangered World
(2001); Karla Armbruster and Kathleen R. Wallace, eds., Beyond Nature Writ-
ing; Joni Adamson et al., eds., The Environmental Justice Reader (2002); Terrell
F. Dixon, City Wilds (2002); Frederick Buell, From Apocalypse to Way of Life
(2003); Michael P. Branch and Scott Slovic, eds., The ISLE Reader (2003); Glen
Love, Practical Ecocriticism (2003); Greg Garrard, Ecocriticism (2004); Noda
Ken’ichi and Yūki Masami, eds., Kankyō bungakuron josetsu (2004); Lawrence
Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism (2005); Elizabeth DeLoughrey et
 Notes to Pages 21–22  455

al., eds., Caribbean Literature and the Environment (2005); Jennifer French, Na-
ture, Neo-Colonialism, and the Spanish-American Regional Writers (2005); Beth
Fowkes Tobin, Colonizing Nature (2005); Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Routes and
Roots (2007); George Handley, New World Poetics (2007); Robert Marzec, An
Ecological and Postcolonial Study of Literature (2007); Timothy Morton, Ecol-
ogy without Nature (2007); Ursula Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet
(2008); Brian Moore, Ecology and Literature (2008); Paul Outka, Race and Na-
ture (2008); Dorceta E. Taylor, The Environment and the People (2009); Stacy
Alaimo, Bodily Natures (2010); Lawrence Buell, “Nature and City” (2010);
Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin, Postcolonial Ecocriticism (2010); Upamanyu
Mukherjee, Postcolonial Environments (2010); Frank Stewart and Anjoli Roy,
Wild Hearts (2010); Laura Barbas-Rhoden, Ecological Imaginations in Latin
American Fiction (2011); Timothy Clark, The Cambridge Introduction to Litera-
ture and the Environment (2011); Simon T. Estok, Ecocriticism and Shakespeare
(2011). For synopses of the field see Lawrence Buell, Ursula Heise, and Karen
Thornber, “Literature and Environment”; Ursula Heise, “The Hitchhiker’s Guide
to Ecocriticism”; Loretta Johnson, “Greening the Library.”
89. Lawrence Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism, 130; Ursula
Heise, “Bloomington 2011.”
90. Lawrence Buell, “Literature as Environmental(ist) Thought Experi-
ment,” 24–25.
91.  Drawing boundaries among writers and literatures is often problematic.
Writers publish in lands in which they were not born or raised or with which
they do not identify most closely, in forms and styles not habitual to the lan-
guages used, and in languages that are not their ostensible “mother tongues” or
do not “match” their cultures. And although “Japanese literature” is now often
understood to be literature written in Japanese, regardless of a writer’s personal
identity, the terms “Chinese literature” and “Korean literature” frequently refer
to texts written by people of Chinese and Korean descent, respectively, no mat-
ter the language. But for clarity, and to highlight the interplays among what
conventionally have been discussed as the relatively separate spheres of modern
Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese literatures, in this book the modifiers
Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese preceding such terms as “literature,”
“literary work,” or “creative text” refer to the writer’s primary identity, regard-
less of the language or place of publication of his/her text. Exceptions and am-
biguities are discussed on a case-by-case basis. Nationality, culture, and national
and cultural identities can be notoriously arbitrary and are often multiple, par-
ticularly in cases of individuals who have spent substantial time in and identify
with multiple places, who are born to parents with different cultural identities, or
have not spent much if any time in their ostensible “homelands.” Moreover, the
constructed and often manipulated categories “Chinese,” “Japanese,” “Korean,”
and “Taiwanese,” not to mention “Western”—whether they refer to individuals,
societies, languages, or literatures—are far from discrete homogenous entities;
these designations obscure major differences within and highlight those between
nationalities. But separation along national lines also obscures distinctive trans-
cultural interfaces and contact spaces. Both knowledge of foreign languages and
456  notes to pages 22–23

the many divisions within Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese literatures
help to promote links with like-minded writers from elsewhere, both within and
outside East Asia.
92.  Silvia Spitta, Between Two Waters, 24. For additional uses of the term see
Anuradha Dingwaney, “Introduction,” 8; Fernando Ortiz, Contrapunteo cubana
del tabaco y el azúcar, xi; Phyllis Peres, Transculturation and Resistance in Luso-
phone African Narrative, 10; Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 7; Ángel Rama,
Transculturación Narrativa en América Latina.
93.  The present use of “contact space” (or “nebula”) differs slightly from its
articulations in my Empire of Texts in Motion. There I introduced the concept
of “artistic contact nebula” to designate the “physical and creative spaces where
dancers, dramatists, musicians, painters, sculptors, writers and other artists from
cultures/nations in unequal power relationships grapple with and transcultur-
ate one another’s output” (2) and the concept of “literary contact nebulae” to
designate “active sites of readerly contact [reading creative texts from cultures/
nations in asymmetrical power relationships with one’s own], writerly contact
[interactions among creative writers from conflicting societies], and textual con-
tact [transculturating creative texts in this environment], intertwined modes of
transculturation that depend to some degree on linguistic contact [engaging with
the language of the society oppressing or oppressed by one’s own] and often in-
volve travel” (2). Here I use the terms “contact space” and “contact nebula” to
refer to physical and creative spaces of interactions among peoples and cultural
products in a broader range of power relations.
94.  David Damrosch, What is World Literature? 4, 281, 300. See also Wai
Chee Dimock, “Literature for the Planet.” The transculturations (e.g., adapta-
tions, translations, intertextualizations) of creative texts that are circulated and
read beyond their “original culture” should also be seen as part of world lit-
erature. In addition, the concept of “original culture” is somewhat problematic,
since many works of literature, or at least their component parts, have “origins”
in multiple spaces. Not surprisingly, understandings of what constitutes “world
literature” vary both within and across cultures.
95. Examining how portrayals of environmental degradation have been
actively transculturated over time and across spaces opens new possibilities in
scholarly discourse on world literature, including the development of a subfield
on world literature and environment.
96.  Suman Gupta, Globalization and Literature, 145. For a recent discussion
of disease and the future of the humanities see Gregory Tomso, “The Humanities
and HIV/AIDS: Where Do We Go from Here?” See also Joseph Slaughter, Human
Rights, Inc.
97.  Proliferating worldwide crises impose an obligation on studies of litera-
ture not simply to expand their thematic scope but also to develop a keener
planetary consciousness. Cary Wolfe’s vision for animal studies is applicable to
ecocriticism more generally: “animal studies, if it is to be something other than
a mere thematic, fundamentally challenges the schema of the knowing subject
and its anthropocentric underpinnings sustained and reproduced in the current
disciplinary protocols of cultural studies (not to mention literature studies) . . .
The full force of animal studies, then, resides in its power to remind us that it is
 Notes to Pages 24–25  457

not enough to reread and reinterpret . . . the relation of metaphor and species dif-
ference, the cross-pollination of speciesist, sexist, and racist discursive structures
in literature . . . as long as [rereading and reinterpreting] leaves unquestioned the
humanist schema of the knowing subject who undertakes such a reading, then it
sustains the very humanism and anthropocentrism that animal studies sets out to
question.” Cary Wolfe, “Human, All Too Human,” 568–69.
  98.  Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 30–31, 37. In Against War Nelson
Maldonado Torres notes the precedents in earlier centuries for the European
planetary consciousness described by Pratt (210).
  99.  Rafal Serafin, “Noosphere, Gaia and the Science of the Biosphere,” 137.
The noosphere is literally “mind sphere” (nous sphaira; υοῦς σφαῖρα). Vladimir
Vernadsky (1863–1945); Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955).
100.  Likewise, although conceptions of the planet as noosphere (technocen-
tric, ecologically anthropocentric, with people in charge) often are contrasted
with those of the planet as Gaia (ecocentric, ecologically egalitarian, with people
at the periphery), the two viewpoints in fact overlap in intriguing ways: “In the
conceptions of both Gaia and the noosphere, the biosphere represents human
understanding of the biogeochemical cycles taking place on our planet. Thus,
the contradictions of technocentrism and ecocentrism become irrelevant with the
asking of common analytical questions about the functioning of the biosphere
. . . proponents of Gaia might concede that some portions of the biosphere and
biogeochemical processes . . . are within the partial control of humankind, while
others . . . may well become subject to human regulation in the near future. On
the other hand, modern proponents of the noosphere might concede that some
portions of the biosphere and biogeochemical processes . . . will remain forever
beyond the reach of human science and technology.” Rafal Serafin, “Noosphere,
Gaia and the Science of the Biosphere,” 138. See also Margaret McGurn, Global
Spirituality, Planetary Consciousness.
101.  Nelson Maldonado Torres, Against War, 210.
102. Wai Chee Dimock, “Planet and America, Set and Subset,” 5, 10–11.
For cautions against the self-aggrandizing such approaches can foster see Djelal
Kadir, “Comparative Literature in an Age of Terrorism,” 74–75, and “To World,
To Globalize.”
103. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline, 72–73. Spivak
and Paul Gilroy both explain their preference for a “planetary” as opposed to
“global” focus. See Paul Gilroy, After Empire, xii; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak,
Death of a Discipline, 72–73, 93. Vandana Shiva discusses differences between
the “global” and “planetary consciousness” in “The Greening of the Global
Reach,” 53–66. See also Alex Steffen, “Editor’s Introduction.”
104.  Paul Gilroy, After Empire, 4, 84. Gilroy draws from a variety of cul-
tural forms, including creative texts. See 13, 18–19, 162.
105.  Wai Chee Dimock, “Planet and America, Set and Subset,” 6. Research
on comparative slavery dates farther back than Dimock’s reference to Philip Cur-
tin’s The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex (1990) suggests. Frank Tan-
nenbaum (1893–1969) published Slave and Citizen in 1946. But Dimock’s larger
argument holds true.
106.  Dimock in Through Other Continents, Gilroy in After Empire, and Spi-
458  notes to pages 25–27

vak in Death of a Discipline acknowledge the importance of the nonhuman, but

reconceptualizing relationships among people and environments is only margin-
ally addressed in these works. Cf. Spivak’s translations of the writings of Bengali
environmental and social activist Mahasweta Devi (1926–) in Imaginary Maps
and Chotti Munda & His Arrow, which are concerned with problems of environ-
mental justice. Also noteworthy are efforts to combine world and environmental
history. See Edmund Burke III and Kenneth Pomeranz, eds., The Environment
and World History; Richard P. Tucker, Insatiable Appetite, 1–3.
107.  It is probable that planetary consciousness will need to be replaced by
universal consciousness, as more becomes known about the impacts of human
behaviors on spaces beyond the planet earth. Much literature already exhibits
this consciousness, including poems by the Japanese writer Sakaki Nanao (1923–
2008) such as “Sengen” (Declaration, 1986) and “21 seiki ni wa” (In the Twenty-
First Century, 1996), discussed in chapter 3, and Hoshi Shin’ichi’s short story
“Ijiwaru na hoshi” (Spiteful Planet, 1972), also discussed in chapter 3. Cf. Sakaki
Nanao, “Hoshi o tabeyō yo” (Let’s Eat Stars, 1988), discussed in chapter 2.
108.  See Joni Adamson et al., eds., The Environmental Justice Reader; Stacey
Alaimo, Bodily Natures, Undomesticated Ground; Andrea Campbell, ed., New
Directions in Ecofeminist Literary Criticism; Krista Comer, Landscapes of the
New West; Ian Frederick Finseth, Shades of Green; Greta Gaard, “New Direc-
tions for Ecofeminism”; Greta Gaard and Patrick D. Murphy, eds., Ecofeminist
Literary Criticism; Jack M. Hollander, The Real Environmental Crisis; Marti
Kheel, Nature Ethics; Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature and Earthcare;
Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson, eds., Queer Ecologies; Jeffrey
Myers, Converging Stories; Judith Plant, ed., Healing the Wounds; Laura Pulido,
Environmentalism and Economic Justice; Ariel Salley, ed., Eco-Sufficiency and
Global Justice; Catriona Sandilands, The Good-Natured Feminist; Scott Slovic et
al., eds., Ekotopia to kankyōseigi no bungaku; Rachel Stein, ed., New Perspec-
tives on Environmental Justice; Noël Sturgeon, Ecofeminist Natures; Michael
Ziser and Julie Sze, “Climate Change, Environmental Aesthetics.”
109. Transborder phenomena here are understood as both transculturated
phenomena (those that actually cross borders) and phenomena that exist in mul-
tiple spaces but which have more local roots in each of these spaces.
110.  Much has been written on “place,” “space,” and distinguishing between
the two. See Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination, 252–79, The Fu-
ture of Environmental Criticism, 62–96, and Writing for an Endangered World,
55–83; Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay; Michel de Certeau, The Practice of
Everyday Life, 117; David Harvey, Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Differ-
ence; William L. Howarth, “Imagined Territory”; Henri Lefebvre, The Produc-
tion of Space, 31–33; Saskia Sassen, ed., Deciphering the Global; James C. Scott,
Seeing Like a State; Neil Smith, Uneven Development. See also Edward S. Casey,
The Fate of Place. Modern constructions of space, particularly the imperial and
the global, often are thought to struggle against deeply rooted ideas of place,
including the local and colonized, but in many cases the space/place dichotomy
is a distinction without a difference. For more on this phenomenon see Thomas
R. H. Havens, Parkscapes, 4.
111.  A Cheng is the pen name of Zhong Acheng (1949–); Tian Yage is the
 Notes to Pages 28–33  459

Chinese name of the Taiwanese aboriginal writer Topas Tamapima (1960–).

Ishimure Michiko was born in 1927 and Huang Chunming in 1939.
112.  The dates for these writers are Chŏng Hyŏnjong (1939–), Kim Kwang-
gyu (1941–), Ko Ŭn (1933–), Rongzi (1928–), Xin Yu (1933–), and Wang Ping
(1957–). Rongzi is the pen name of Wang Rongzhi.
113. The dates for these writers are Ch’oe Sŭngho (1954–), Liu Kexiang
(1957–), Hwang Sunwŏn (1915–2000), Masuda Mizuko (1948–), Miyazawa
Kenji (1896–1933), Jia Fuxiang (pen name Zhuang Jia, 1931–), and Gao Xingjian
(1940–).
114.  The dates for these writers are Tanikawa Shuntarō (1931–),Yi Hyŏnggi
(1933–), Chen Jingrong (1917–1989), Han Shaogong (1953–), Tsutsui Yasutaka
(1934–), and Cho Sehŭi (1942–).
115.  The dates for these writers are Isakawa Masaomi (1930–), Ch’oe Sŭngja
(1952–), Hoshi Shin’ichi (1926–1977), Bai Xianyong (1937–), and Wang Lixiong
(1953–).
116. The dates for these writers are Oguma Hideo (1901–1940), Dazai
Osamu (1909–1948), Murakami Haruki (1949–), and Abé Kōbō (1924–1993).
117.  Lawrence Buell, “Ecoglobalist Affects,” 226.

chapter 1

   1. Thank you to Steve Owen for the reference and the translation, adapted
from H. G. Lamont, “An Early Ninth Century Debate on Heaven,” 67. Liu
Zongyuan (733–819) here is transcribing a conversation with Han Yu (768–824),
another celebrated Tang (618–906) poet and prose writer.
   2.  For more on East Asian religions and environmental ethics in general see
King-Tak Ip, Environmental Ethics.
  3. Cf. Jim Dwyer, Where the Wild Books Are, 95–97.
   4.  East Asia’s principal transboundary ecological problems include air pol-
lution, acid rain, and the “yellow dust” phenomenon in Japan and Korea, brought
about by Chinese industrial and power-plant emissions and desertification (the
latter caused by deforestation, overgrazing, and industrialization); marine pollu-
tion caused by oil spills, sewage, and industrial and radioactive waste originating
in China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan; depleted fisheries throughout the region
by fishers from all four East Asian sites; and nuclear waste disposal as nuclear
power production increases throughout the region. For more on these concerns
as well as the dynamics of cooperative environmental management in East Asia,
see Shin-wha Lee, “Environmental Regime-Building in Northeast Asia.” See also
Miranda A. Schreurs and Dennis Pirages, eds., Ecological Security in Northeast
Asia. Paruedee Nguitragool’s Environmental Cooperation in Southeast Asia pro-
vides an important comparative perspective.
   5.  For more on this phenomenon, see Karen Thornber, “Legitimacy and
Community.”
   6.  On the other hand, as noted below many of these writers have spent
significant time abroad, and questions of identity appear prominently in their
oeuvre.
460  notes to pages 34–35

 7. In other words, fish, turtles, and wood will remain plentiful. Mencius
(372–289 B.C.E.) expresses similar sentiments in the parable of Ox Mountain.
This mountain once was covered with vegetation, which attracted herders, wood-
cutters, and others who transported its resources to disparate sites. Not given
time to recover, the mountain gradually grew barren. This parable, based on ac-
tual events, emphasizes that people, like vegetation, need time to rejuvenate, but
this story also has environmental resonances. As explained later in this chapter,
the Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi (369–286 B.C.E.), Mencius’s contemporary,
also exhibits nascent environmental consciousness. Even earlier examples of calls
for sustainability include those by Guan Zhong (725–645 B.C.E.), prime minister
of the Qi State (?–645 B.C.E.) in the Spring and Autumn period (770–476 B.C.E.)
of the Eastern Zhou dynasty, who cautioned people “not to raise too many cattle
on the grassland, lest it fail to recover from over exploitation; and not to plant
crops too close together, otherwise the fertility of the soil would be insufficient.”
Yushi Mao, “Evolution of Environmental Ethics,” 43.
  8.  In its December 11, 1987 report to the United Nations, the World Com-
mission on Environment and Development defined sustainable development as
“meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future gen-
erations to meet their own needs,” recommending that this should be the “central
guiding principle of the United Nations, Governments and private institutions,
organizations and enterprises.” http://www.un.org/documents/ga/res/42/ares42-
187.htm. This definition has not been without controversy. See also Richard
Heinberg, Peak Everything, 85–96; Stephen M. Wheeler and Timothy Beatley,
eds., The Sustainable Urban Development Reader.
Sustainability is similar to conservation, in the sense of selective use of mate-
rial resources for human benefit. In some parts of the world, including the United
States, conservationists clash with strict preservationists, who struggle to save
wilderness for its own sake. In East Asia, pure preservation enjoys a small albeit
vocal support base that calls for protecting “pristine nature,” forgetting that the
“pristine” is itself always in flux, in no small part because of the human presence.
 9. Exceptions were regarded as aberrations in the discourse of national
strength and progress, an inevitable downside to the trajectory of increasing na-
tional wealth. Japan colonized Taiwan in 1895 and Korea in 1910. It never for-
mally colonized China but subjected it to severe cultural, economic, political, and
military pressure from the end of the nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth.
Japan seized Manchuria (northeast China) in 1931 and in 1932 proclaimed it the
nominally independent state of Manchukuo. But in fact Manchukuo was Japan’s
puppet state, an informal, de facto colony. Mariko Asano Tamanoi, “Introduc-
tion,” 8.
10.  Tu Wei-ming describes this dynamic in “The Continuity of Being.” See
also Ole Bruun, “Fengshui and the Chinese Perception of Nature.” For a sum-
mary of conventional Chinese perceptions of nature and relationships between
people and the nonhuman, see Feng Han, “Cross-Cultural Confusion,” 253–54.
11. In Topophilia, Yi-Fu Tuan gives the example of changing attitudes to-
ward mountains, noting that as in the West, “the change was from a religious
attitude in which awe was combined with aversion, to an aesthetic attitude that
shifted from a sense of the sublime to a feeling for the picturesque; to the mod-
 Notes to Pages 35–36  461

ern evaluation of mountains as a recreation resource.” Even so, as late as the

Tang (618–906), with the primary exceptions of Daoist images featuring people
dwarfed by large mountains, humans were the principal focus of paintings; it was
in the Song (960-1279) that “mountain and water” landscape painting achieved
dominance (71–72).
12.  Vaclav Smil, China’s Past, China’s Future, 142. Smil asserts that this has
been the case for 5,000 years, but because of the lack of historical records in the
region that predate approximately 1000 B.C.E., we can only be certain of the
last three millennia. See Mark Elvin, “Three Thousand Years of Unsustainable
Growth,” 29–68; The Retreat of the Elephants, 321. China’s population grew
from more than 50 million before the end of the first millennium B.C.E. to 100
million shortly after 1000 C.E., to 200 million in the early 1700s, to 400 million
by 1850, to 1.3 billion today. Mark Elvin, “Three Thousand Years of Unsus-
tainable Growth,” 30. See also John F. Richards, The Unending Frontier, 112.
Overpopulation has been a concern of Chinese intellectuals since well before the
Common Era. The philosopher Han Feizi (280–233 B.C.E.), for instance, com-
plained that people did not understand how having five children would result in
very little for any one person. Cited in Joel E. Cohen, How Many People Can the
Earth Support? 5.
13. Vaclav Smil, China’s Past, China’s Future, 142. Mining in China also
dates to prehistoric times.
14.  Elizabeth C. Economy, The River Runs Black, 36–37. For early exam-
ples of desertification see Eduard B. Vermeer, “Population and Ecology along the
Frontier in Qing China,” 237–38. Mark Elvin has observed that despite a wide
spectrum of attitudes concerning optimal human interactions with environments,
“The Chinese landscape was one of the most transformed in the pre-modern
world as the result of its reshaping for cereal cultivation, re-engineering by hy-
draulic works for drainage, irrigation and flood-defense, and deforestation for
the purposes of clearance and the harvesting of wood for fuel and construction.”
Mark Elvin, “The Environmental Legacy of Imperial China,” 9. Neither Confu-
cianism nor Neo-Confucianism promotes outright exploitation of environments.
In fact, leading figures such as Wang Yangming (1472–1529) aspired to bring
individuals into meaningful relationships with both people and landscapes. Mary
Evelyn Tucker, “Touching the Depths of Things,” 60. But Confucianism and
Neo-Confucianism, like Daoism, have been used to justify pollution. Hsin-Huang
Michael Hsiao, “Culture and Asian Styles of Environmental Movements,” 226.
15.  Some have even argued that seemingly benign institutions also harmed
environments. For instance, Buddhist temples have preserved trees within their
borders, even when the surrounding landscape has been deforested. But it was
Buddhism that introduced cremation to China, and from the tenth to the four-
teenth centuries cremation was so common in the southeastern coastal provinces
that it notably affected timber resources there. Likewise, the same poetry and
other writing that so lauded environments also allegedly contributed to their de-
mise. The black ink used in writing required soot, which came from burnt pine.
Even before the Tang the mountains of Shandong had been deforested to meet
this need. Yi-Fu Tuan, “Discrepancies between Environmental Attitude and Be-
havior,” 247. See also Yushi Mao, “Evolution of Environmental Ethics,” 45–46.
462  notes to pages 36–38

16.  See Nicholas Wade, “Adventures in Very Recent Evolution.”

17.  George Borgstrom, World Food Resources, 203. Cited by Donald Wor-
ster, Dust Bowl, 4. Worster dates this deforestation to 3000 B.C.E. As Clive Pon-
ting notes in A New Green History of the World, China was the second area of
the world to adopt agriculture (48).
18.  Elizabeth C. Economy, The River Runs Black, 29.
19.  Mark Elvin, “Three Thousand Years of Unsustainable Growth,” 39.
20.  Rhoads Murphey, “Asian Perceptions of and Behavior toward the Natu-
ral Environment,” 42. For more on deforestation in early China see Mark Elvin,
The Retreat of the Elephants, 19–85. Recultivating land left fallow by wars or
natural disasters was a priority for much of China’s imperial period.
21.  Rhoads Murphey, “Asian Perceptions of and Behavior toward the Natu-
ral Environment,” 40.
22.  Elizabeth C. Economy, The River Runs Black, 40.
23. Ming intellectuals deplored deforestation because of its effect on soil
quality and the lost ability to restrain “barbarians.” Yi-Fu Tuan, “Discrepancies
between Environmental Attitude and Behavior,” 242. The Qing attempted to
keep northeast China as a hunting preserve for Manchus. They also began to set
aside spaces for sightseeing and recreation, safeguarding species that otherwise
would have been endangered. Elizabeth C. Economy, The River Runs Black, 40.
24.  Kenneth Pomeranz, “The Transformation of China’s Environment,” 130.
25.  Rhoads Murphey, “Asian Perceptions of and Behavior Toward the Natu-
ral Environment,” 43. See also Mark Elvin, “Three Thousand Years of Unsus-
tainable Growth,” 51.
26.  See, for instance, the Song of Gold and Silver, translated in Mark Bender,
Butterfly Mother, 11–70.
27.  Randall A. Dodgen, Controlling the Dragon, 1. The interconnectedness
of hydraulics and state power in China led the scholar Karl Wittfogel to declare
dynastic rule “oriental despotism,” a type of government founded on the need to
negotiate between agricultural demands and scarce water resources. Randall A.
Dodgen, 3. Although many of Wittfogel’s ideas have been discredited, he rightly
distinguishes between farming economies that involve small-scale irrigation
(hydroagriculture) and those that involve large-scale and government-managed
works of irrigation and flood control (hydraulic agriculture). See Karl A. Witt­
fogel, Oriental Despotism, 3. For more on water control in early China see Mark
Elvin, The Retreat of the Elephants, 115–64.
28.  Mark Elvin, The Retreat of the Elephants, 11. King Wu (r. 1046–1043
B.C.E.).
29.  For more on the unsustainability of early Chinese agricultural practices,
see Robert B. Marks, “Commercialization without Capitalism,” 74, and Tigers,
Rice, Silk, and Silt. See also Peter Perdue, Exhausting the Earth; Joachim Rad-
kau, Nature and Power. Radkau emphasizes the subjectivity of value judgments
concerning China’s environmental crises.
30.  Mao Zedong lived from 1893 to 1976. Unless otherwise noted, my dis-
cussion of environmental crises under Mao is drawn from Elizabeth C. Economy,
The River Runs Black, 47–57, and Judith Shapiro, Mao’s War Against Nature.
 Notes to Pages 38–39  463

31. Needless to say, this policy had devastating consequences. Without

sparrows insect populations thrived and contributed to the famines that killed
millions.
32.  As Elizabeth C. Economy summarizes, “Mao’s vision for China as a great
power soon brought about a renewed cycle of population growth, accelerated in-
discriminate mobilization of resources in preparation for war, and grand schemes
for economic development, which, in turn, contributed to severe environmental
degradation and social turmoil.” Elizabeth C. Economy, The River Runs Black,
47. Mao celebrated China’s growing population, which increased from 540 mil-
lion in 1950 to 930 million in 1976 despite the massive famines resulting from
the Great Leap Forward. Economy, 50, 53. See also Lillian M. Li, Fighting Fam-
ine in North China, 343–44.
33.  Judith Shapiro, Mao’s War against Nature, 8. Afforestation was not un-
known in Maoist China; the Party claimed that annually 100 million citizens
worked to transform “deforested China into a green paradise” by planting mil-
lions of hectares. Vaclav Smil, “China’s Environment,” 169–74.
34.  Susan L. Shirk, China: Fragile Superpower, 19. Deng Xiaoping (1904–
1997).
35. A sampling of these posters can be found at http://chineseposters.net/
themes/environment.php. In the 1980s, the Confucian concept of “the unity of
Heaven and human” (tian ren heyi) occupied a prominent place in Chinese cul-
tural debates. Jing Wang, High Culture Fever, 100–106. It remains a cornerstone
of Chinese environmental consciousness. Thomas Moran, “Lost in the Woods,”
201–11; Judith Shapiro, Mao’s War against Nature, 213.
36.  Qu Geping and Li Jinchang discuss the relationship between population
and environmental issues in China in Population and the Environment in China.
See also Susan Greenhalgh, Just One Child and Governing China’s Population;
He Bochuan, China on Edge, 1–20; James Z. Lee and Wang Feng, One Quarter
of Humanity. For detailed demographic data see Baochang Gu, “The Arrival of
Low Fertility in China.”
37. Michael Wines, “Liang Congjie.” Liang Congjie (1932–2010) was the
grandson of the prominent Chinese reformer Liang Qichao (1873–1929). Zhu
Rongji was born in 1928. For more on NGOs in China see Peter Ho, “Sprouts of
Environmentalism in China?” Only a fraction of environmental NGOs in China
are registered with the government.
38.  Jim Yardley, “Beneath Booming Cities.” See also Charles C. Mann, “The
Rise of Big Water,” 122–40; Andrew C. Mertha, China’s Water Warriors; Mi-
chael Richardson, “Asia’s Shaky Water and Energy Balancing Act”; Jim Yardley,
“Choking on Growth, Water and China’s Future.” For more on water crises
worldwide see Alex Prud’homme, The Ripple Effect.
39. Sixteen of the world’s twenty most polluted cities are in China, while
two-thirds of 300 Chinese cities recently tested by the World Health Organiza-
tion failed to meet international standards and only 1 percent of the nation’s
560 million city residents breathe air considered safe by the European Union.
Joseph Kahn and Jim Yardley, “As China Roars, Pollution Reaches Deadly Ex-
tremes.” See also Andrew DeWit and Jonathan Watts, “Clean Coal and the Two
464  notes to page 40

Faces of China’s Coal Industry”; Andrew Jacobs, “As China’s Economy Grows.”
Lead poisoning also remains a problem. Sharon LaFraniere, “Lead Poisoning in
China.”
40.  Sun Yat-sen (Sun Zhongshan, 1866–1925) was the founding ideologue
of the Chinese republic.
41.  Kenneth Pomeranz, “The Transformation of China’s Environment,” 143;
Edward Wong, “Three Gorges Dam.”
42.  Shai Oster, “Floating Garbage Chokes Major Chinese Dam.”
43.  Jim Yardley, “Chinese Dam Projects Criticized for their Human Costs.”
See also Dierdre Chetham, Before the Deluge; Dai Qing, ed., The River Dragon
Has Come!; Gorild Heggelund, Environment and Resettlement Politics in China;
“TED Case Studies, Three Gorges Dam.” For more on the relationship between
dams and earthquakes in China see Sharon LaFraniere, “Scientists Point to Pos-
sible Link Between Dam and China Quake”; Peter Navarro, “Earthquake Reper-
cussions Spur Rethinking of China’s Dam Building Strategy.”
44.  For more on China’s trash concerns see Keith Bradsher, “China’s Trash
Problem May Also Be the World’s,” A1, A10. Unless otherwise indicated, sta-
tistics on China’s environmental degradation are from Susan L. Shirk, China:
Fragile Superpower, 33. See also Judith Shapiro, “China: A Foreword.” For con-
ditions circa 1990 see He Bochuan, China on the Edge. For conditions circa 2010
see Jonathan Watts, When a Billion Chinese Jump.
45.  Liu Yu et al., “The Politics and Ethics of Going Green in China,” 31;
Jianguo Liu, “China’s Environment in a Globalizing World”; Jianguo Liu et al.,
“Protecting China’s Biodiversity.” For more on biodiversity and conservation,
particularly in the post-Mao years, see Richard B. Harris, Wildlife Conserva-
tion in China. For a historical perspective see Micah S. Muscolino, Fishing Wars
and Environmental Change. Wang Tao and Wu Wei discuss contemporary de-
sertification in “Sandy Desertification in Northern China.” Measures such as
Toyota’s Green Greater Beijing Economic Zone Fengning Afforestation Project,
implemented the fall of 2011 and aiming to reduce desertification in the northern
part of Hebei Province, hardly seem sufficient to address China’s water shortages.
“New Toyota Afforestation.”
46.  Most notable were China’s “Green Olympics,” which were preceded by
significant tree planting in Beijing as well as temporarily removing automobiles
from city roads. On the other hand, as noted in the introduction, optimistic re-
ports of decreased air pollution during the Olympics have been questioned. For
more on environmental policy in China more generally, see Kristen Day, ed.,
China’s Environment; Lester Ross, Environmental Policy in China. Also signifi-
cant have been China’s efforts at wilderness conservation. See Feng Han, “Cross-
Cultural Confusion.”
47.  See Kristen Day, ed., China’s Environment; Richard Louis Edmonds, ed.,
Managing the Chinese Environment; Howard W. French, “Far from Beijing’s
Reach.” The subtitle to Bill McKibben’s article “Can China go green?” captures
well the ambiguity of Chinese relationships with environments: “No other coun-
try is investing so heavily in clean energy. But no other country burns as much
coal to fuel its economy” (117).
48.  Susan Shirk, China: Fragile Superpower, 256. Peter C. Perdue cites the
 Notes to Pages 40–41  465

recent poisoning of infants by tainted milk additives. Richard C. Hoffmann et

al., “AHR Conversation,” 1459. For more on the efforts of grassroots organiza-
tions in remediating degradation to China’s environments see Liu Yu et al., “The
Politics and Ethics of Going Green in China.” Cf. Bryan Tilt, The Struggle for
Sustainability in Rural China.
49. Richard C. Hoffmann et al., “AHR Conversation,” 1459–60. See also
Joseph Kahn, “In China, a Lake’s Champion Imperils Himself.”
50.  See Wen Fumin and Jian Rao, “Zhongguo shengtai wenxue gaishuo,” 13.
51.  Judith Shapiro, “China: A Foreword,” 27.
52.  In 2007, for instance, opponents of a chemical plant being built in Xia-
men (China’s southeastern coast) were able to suspend construction by texting
nearly everyone in the city on the dangers of the plant. See Xie Lei, Environmen-
tal Activism in China; Guobin Yang, The Power of the Internet in China.
53. In-Taek Hyun and Sung-Han Kim, “Introduction: The Environment-Se-
curity Nexus in Northeast Asia,” 4. China’s environmental problems have also
affected Russia. The 2005 explosion at the Jilin Chemical Industrial Company in
northeastern China resulted in one hundred tons of benzene and other chemicals
being spilled into the Songhua River, a tributary of the Heilong River (Amur
River), which forms the border with the Russian Federation, continues into the
Russian Federation as the Amur River, and flows into the Sea of Okhotsk. See In-
Taek Hyun and Sung-Han Kim, “Introduction: The Environment-Security Nexus
in Northeast Asia,” 5.
54.  Milton Osborne, “The Mekong River Under Threat”; Michael Richard-
son, “Dams in China Turn the Mekong into a River of Discord”; Geoffrey Gunn
and Brian McCartan, “Chinese Dams and the Great Mekong Floods of 2008.”
For more on what China has done to environments in Southeast Asia, see Amarjit
Kaur, “Race, Gender and the Tin Mining Industry in Malaya.” Although China
is not the only culprit in Southeast Asia (Laos recently submitted a proposal to
build a major hydropower dam on the Mekong), it has constructed more than
85,000 dams within its borders and plans to build many more, particularly in the
west and south. These dams weaken surrounding soil, making large areas subject
to devastating floods, landslides, and other “natural” disasters. The danger they
pose was brought home in August 2010, when massive mudslides in the Gannan
Tibetan autonomous district of Gansu Province killed more than 1,000 people.
See Furuya Koichi and Minemura Kenji, “China, Fearing Unrest.”
55. M. K. Bhadrakumar, “China Resets Terms of Engagement in Central
Asia.”
56.  “China Boss in Peru.”
57.  Howard W. French, “The Next Empire?”
58.  See, for instance, Ian Taylor, China’s New Role in Africa, 42–62. Chinese
have also been attracted to Africa’s nonferrous metals and fisheries. Taylor, 44.
Significant as well are their illegal imports of African ivory, which threaten to
drive Africa’s elephants into extinction. See Michael Casey et al., “Will Asian
Hunger for Ivory Doom Africa’s Elephants?”
59.  Peter Bosshard, “China’s Overseas Dam Builders.”
60. Jared Diamond, Collapse, 359; Jianguo Liu, “China’s Environment
in a Globalizing World”; Andrew Revkin, “As China Goes, So Goes Global
466  notes to pages 41–42

Warming.” China has also been implicated in deforestation in Russia. See Raffi
Khatchadourian, “The Stolen Forests.”
61.  Jared Diamond, Collapse, 370. See also Jianguo Liu and Jared Diamond,
“China’s Environment in a Globalizing World”; Joseph Kahn and Mark Landler,
“China Grabs West’s Smoke-Spewing Factories.”
62.  Orville Schell, “‘Self-reliance’ No Longer an Option for China.”
63.  Xiaoshan Yang, “Idealizing Wilderness in Medieval Chinese Poetry,” 94.
The Classic of Poetry contains writings that date back as far as the tenth century
B.C.E. Stephen Owen, ed., An Anthology of Chinese Literature, 10.
64.  Xiaoshan Yang, “Idealizing Wilderness in Medieval Chinese Poetry,” 94.
65.  Zuo Si’s (250–305) “Summoning the Recluse” differs notably from pre-
decessors. Whereas earlier recluses had been urged to return from wilderness, in
this poem an individual is called to return to wilderness. Underlying this change
was the replacing of shamanism with a combination of Confucian ethics and
Daoist teachings. Xiaoshan Yang, “Idealizing Wilderness in Medieval Chinese
Poetry,” 96–97. While Zuo Si’s work emphasizes the pleasures of wilderness
over those of human society, and farmstead poetry such as Tao Yuanming’s (Tao
Qian, 365–427) “Gui yuantian ju” (Returning to Live in My Gardens and Fields)
highlights nearly complete harmony with the cultivated nonhuman, landscape
poetry such as Xie Lingyun’s (385–433) “Yu nanshan wang beishan jing huzhong
zhan tiao” (What I Observed as I Crossed the Lake on My Way from Southern
Mountain to Northern Mountain) features appreciation of spaces with a limited
human presence.
66. David Hinton, Mountain Home, 5; Wendy Swartz, “Pentasyllabic Shi
Poetry,” 121.
67.  For more on poetry from this period, and Chinese landscape and nature
poetry in general, see Dai Qinxiang, Shanshui tianyuan shi zhuan; Donald Holz-
man, Chinese Literature in Transition from Antiquity to the Middle Ages, 1–189;
Ding Chengguan, Zhongguo shanshui shi shi; Gao Renxiong, Shanshui shici lun-
gao; Liu Hongling, Xing zai jianghai zhi shang; Tabei Fumio, Chūgoku shizenshi
no keifu; Yi-Fu Tuan, Topophilia, 127–28; Xiaoshan Yang, To Perceive and to
Represent; Zhang Maohua, Qi Lu shanshui shiwen daguan.
68. David Hinton, Mountain Home, xiii–xxi; Zong-qi Cai, “Introduction:
Major Aspects of Chinese Poetry,” 3. Although neglected in the centuries after
their deaths, Tao Yuanming and Xie Lingyun regained prominence in the Tang,
leading to the flowering of landscape and farmstead poetry in that period as well
as in the Song. For reception and reconfiguration of Tao Yuanming’s work in
later generations see Wendy Swartz, Reading Tao Yuanming; Xiaofei Tian, Tao
Yuanming and Manuscript Culture. David Hinton overviews trajectories in land-
scape poetry in Mountain Home, focusing on writings by Bai Juyi (772–846),
Du Fu (712–770), Du Mu (803–853), Han Shan (7th–9th c.), Jia Dao (779–
843), Li Bai (701–762), Liu Zongyuan, Meng Haoran (689–740), Meng Jiao
(751–814), Wang Wei (699–761), Wei Yingwu (737–792) from the Tang; and
Fan Chengda (1126–1193), Lu Yu (1125–1210), Mei Yaochen (1002–1060), Su
Dongpo (1037–1101), Wang Anshi (1021–1086), and Yang Wanli (1127–1206)
from the Song. For more on Tang poetry and ecology see Wang Zhiqing, Sheng
Tang shengtai shi xue. For more on the domesticated nonhuman in writing from
 Notes to Pages 42–45  467

the Tang and Song see Xiaoshan Yang, Metamorphosis of the Private Sphere. Ivo
Smits discusses reception of this poetry in Japan in The Pursuit of Loneliness.
For conceptions of nature in later Chinese cultural production see Brian R. Dott,
Identity Reflections, 222; Paolo Santangelo, “Ecologism versus Moralism.”
69.  For more on this phenomenon in Chinese landscape painting, see Mar-
tin Powers, “When Is a Landscape Like a Body?” Significant exceptions include
the Chuci (Lyrics of Chu, 1st c.), where wilderness tends to be demonized.
Most poems in the Lyrics of Chu are attributed to Qu Yuan (340–278 B.C.E.).
Xiaoshan Yang, “Idealizing Wilderness in Medieval Chinese Poetry,” 95, 99.
For comparative perspectives of wilderness see Max Oelschlaeger, The Idea of
Wilderness.
Scholarship on nature in premodern Chinese literature abounds. Helpful
sources in addition to those cited above include Li Jinghua, Ziran xiezuo yu
huanjing yishi yanjiu; Obi Kōichi, Chūgoku bungaku ni arawareta shizen to shi-
zenkan and Zhongguo wenxue zhong suobiaoxian de ziran yu ziranguan; Gary
Snyder, “Kichō kōen”; Maeno Naoaki, Fūgetsu mujin; Zhuti Wenxue Xueshu
Yantaohui, Ziran de shuxie. Allegory in classical Persian poetry on nature pro-
vides a fruitful comparison with the Chinese case. See Houman Sarshar, “From
Allegory to Symbol.” See also Stephen A. Norwick, The History of Metaphors
of Nature. Daniel J. Philippon discusses the power of metaphor in nature writing
in Conserving Words, while in “Literary Animal Agents” Susan McHugh urges
scholars to read literary animals literally, not only in terms of metaphor. This is
especially important in cases of severe animal abuse such as that described in the
British writer George Orwell’s (pen name of Eric Arthur Blair, 1903–1950) essay
“Shooting an Elephant” (1936).
70.  Mark Elvin, The Retreat of the Elephants, 42.
71.  “Mowing Grasses” begins, “We mow the grasses and fell the trees, / we
till the churning soil.” Stressing that trees are constantly being felled and grasses
forever being mowed, the song concludes, “It’s not that this is only temporary /
it’s not that this is something happening only now/ From times of old it has been
like this.” Translation adapted from Bernhard Karlgren, The Book of Odes, 250–
51. See also Stephen Owen, “Reproduction in the Shijing.” Cf. Donald Worster,
A Passion for Nature, 276–88.
72.  Translation adapted from Bernhard Karlgren, The Book of Odes, 193–
96. In the Classic of Poetry “Great Odes” (Daya) on the founding of the Zhou
invariably mention if not celebrate the clearing of grasses and trees for crops. For
more on ecological vision in the Classic of Poetry see Sridharan Madhusudhanan,
“The Joy of Being a Tree.”
73.  Zhang Yingchang, ed., Qing shi duo, 446. In “The Bell of Poesy” Mark
Elvin gives numerous examples of depictions in Zhang Yingchang’s (1790–1874)
anthology of fuel shortages and other forms of environmental degradation, in
writings by Jiang Tingyi (1602–1645) and others.
74.  This translation of Du Fu’s poem is from Stephen Owen, An Anthology
of Chinese Literature, 432–33. Perceived “uselessness” also saves the massive
oak in Zhuangzi’s famed parable: When asked by his apprentice why he passed
by a towering oak without a second glance, the carpenter responded, “It’s not a
timber tree—there’s nothing it can be used for. That’s how it got to be that old!”
468  notes to pages 45–49

Later that night, the tree appears to the carpenter in a dream, and it declares,
“The cherry apple, the pear, the orange, the citron, the rest of those fructiferous
trees and shrubs—as soon as their fruit is ripe, they are torn apart and subjected
to abuse. Their big limbs are broken off, their little limbs are yanked around.
Their utility makes life miserable for them, and they don’t get to finish out the
years Heaven gave them, but are cut off in mid-journey . . . And it’s the same
way with all other things.” Chuang Tzu, Basic Writings, trans. Burton Watson,
60. See also the Taiwanese writer Cai Zhizhong’s (1948–) adaptation Ziran de
xiaosheng: Zhuangzi shuo (The Music of Nature: Zhuangzi Speaks, 1987). Em-
phasis on the longer lives enjoyed by “useless” trees appear throughout literature,
including in the Japanese writer Itō Hiromi’s (1955–) novella “Hausu puranto”
(Houseplant, 1998), where the narrator attributes the proliferation of eucalyptus
trees in California to their perceived uselessness.
75.  Liu Zongyuan, “Xing lu nan,” 1240–41.
76.  Mark Elvin discusses this poem and numerous other premodern Chinese
literary depictions of ecodegradation in The Retreat of the Elephants.
77. See Xie Lingyun, “Shanju fu.” 318-34.
78.  Joanna F. Handlin Smith, “Liberating Animals in Ming-Qing China,” 52.
Bai Juyi (772–846); Su Shi (1037–1101).
79.  Ibid., 53. In a clear case of ecoambiguity, releasing animals can harm eco-
systems. For instance, in 1988, the Taipei Wild Bird Society called attention to the
environmental harm caused when liberated animals become so-called “invasive
species.” Thomas Moran, “Lost in the Woods,” 216.
80.  Joanna F. Handlin Smith, “Liberating Animals in Ming-Qing China,” 53.
81.  Wang Taiyue (1722–1785), “Tongshan yin,” 927–28.
82.  Lu Xun (1881–1936), “Qiuye,” 566. Lu Xun’s Wild Grass remains pop-
ular with East Asian readers, the Korean publisher Ŭlyu Munhwasa putting out
an illustrated version, titled Yach’o, in October 2010.
83. Henry David Thoreau, Journal 7: 514. Cited by Lawrence Buell, The
Environmental Imagination, 209.
84.  Lu Xun, “Qiuye,” 566.
85.  See “Nahan zixu,” the preface to Nahan (Call to Arms, 1922), Lu Xun’s
first collection of short stories.
86. Shen Congwen (1902–1988), “Wuge jun’guan yu yige meikuang gon-
gren,” 285.
87. Jeffrey Kinkley, “Shen Congwen and Imagined Native Communities,”
425.
88. David Der-wei Wang, Fictional Realism in Twentieth-Century China,
250–53.
89.  Mu Shiying (1912–1940), “Shanghai de hubuwu,” 255.
90.  Ibid., 249.
91.  Ibid., 259.
92.  See Shen Congwen’s “Biancheng” (Border Town, 1934) and “Zhangfu”
(Husband, 1930). Also important in this regard are Xiao Hong’s (1911–1942)
Shengsi chang (The Field of Life and Death, 1935) and Hulanhe zhuan (Tales
of Hulan River, 1942). One well known exception is Wen Yiduo’s (1899-1946)
poem “Sishui” (Dead Water, 1925), which urges people to continue polluting
 Notes to Pages 49–50  469

their “ditch of dead water” (i.e., China torn by civil war), a ditch completely
devoid of beauty, so that the hopeless world might be destroyed and a new ex-
istence created out of its ruins. Jiayan Mi, “Framing Ambient Unheimlich,” 17.
Other exceptions are writings on war, which tend to speak of traumas inflicted
not only on people and their built environment but also on the natural world.
  93.  Chen Jingrong, “Dushi huanghun jijing.”
  94.  Kirk Denton, “Literature and Politics,” 463–69.
 95. Xiaoshan Yang, “Idealizing Wilderness in Medieval Chinese Poetry,”
105.
  96.  Guo Moruo (1892–1978), “Zhou maque.” Also significant is Lao She’s
(1899–1966) drama Longxugou (Dragon Beard Ditch, 1951), adapted into a film
of the same name in 1952 and restaged at Beijing’s Capital Theatre in 2009 in
honor of the 110th anniversary of its author’s birth.
 97. “Socialist realism” can be understood as “revolutionary romanticism
combined with revolutionary realism.” See Ban Wang, “Revolutionary Realism
and Revolutionary Romanticism.” Perry Link identifies a “socialist literary sys-
tem” operating in China from about 1950 to 1990, with a ten-year hiatus during
the Cultural Revolution. See Perry Link, The Uses of Literature.
  98.  Yang Mo (1914–1995), Qingchun zhi ge, 5.
  99.  Immediate postwar Chinese writings on World War Two also reference
Japanese wartime abuse of Chinese resources. See Lao She’s novel The Yellow
Storm (1951), the abridged English translation of Lao She’s Si shi tongtang (Four
Generations under One Roof). The first two sections of Four Generations under
One Roof were published during the war, but the third part was first published
in The Yellow Storm, its Chinese-language version remaining unavailable until
1982.
100.  More prevalent than literature during the Cultural Revolution were the
yangban xi (model plays).
101. Kirk A. Denton, “Historical Overview,” 299–301. See Wang Ning,
“Globalizing Chinese Literature,” for a reperiodization of post-Mao literature.
102.  Jia Pingwa was born in 1952 and made his name in the 1980s.
103.  Wen Fumin and Jian Rao, “Zhongguo shengtai wenxue gaishuo,” 11.
Despite such claims, Japanese literature, like that from many other sites, both
exposes environmental woes and celebrates environmental protection. In recent
years Chinese scholars have followed Wang Nuo’s lead in speaking not of huanjing
wenxue (environmental literature) but of shengtai wenxue (ecological literature).
See Wang Nuo, Oumei shengtai wenxue (2003). Wang was inspired by Cheryll
Glotfelty and Harold Fromm’s edited volume The Ecocriticism Reader (1996).
See also Wen Fumin and Jian Rao, “Zhongguo shengtai wenxue gaishuo,” 11;
Zeng Fanren, ed., Ren yu ziran. Despite this trend most creative writers in China
continue to refer to their writings that address environmental concerns as “envi-
ronmental writing,” not as “ecological writing.” Personal communication from
ecocritic Long Juan, April 14, 2010. The term lüse wenxue (lit. green literature)
has been used in China since the early 1990s.
104.  Sugino Motoko, “Gendai Chūgoku no kankyō bungaku,” 262. Citing
Li Bingyin, “Wenxue yu huanjing suoyi,” 94. Strictly speaking, as references to
environmental degradation in premodern Chinese literature indicate, Chinese
470  notes to pages 50–52

“environmental literature” predates the 1980s by two millennia, but the term
huanjing wenxue does not appear to have been used before the late twentieth
century, nor is it regularly applied to writings from before 1980. For an alterna-
tive definition of environmental literature see Zeng Yongcheng, Wenyi de lüse zhi
si, 325. While much 1980s environmental writing took the form of reportage, in
the 1990s it became increasingly diversified. Zeng Yongcheng, Wenyi de lüse zhi
si, 325.
105.  Wen Fumin and Jian Rao, “Zhongguo shengtai wenxue gaishuo,” 11.
106.  Jeffrey Kinkley, “Shen Congwen and Imagined Native Communities,”
425; Sugino Motoko, “Gendai Chūgoku no kankyō bungaku,” 259–60. Japa-
nese have been translating Shen Congwen’s work since the 1930s. Although he
lived until the late 1980s, Shen Congwen stopped writing in 1949. Excellent
examples of roots-seeking literature are Zhang Chengzhi’s novellas Beifang de
he (Rivers of the North, 1984) and Hei junma (The Black Steed, 1982). Mark
Leenhouts, “Culture against Politics,” 537–38. Also admired by writers of roots-
seeking literature was the Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez (1927–),
whose Cien años de soledad (Hundred Years of Solitude, 1967) was translated
into Chinese in 1982.
107.  Sugino Motoko, “Gendai Chūgoku no kankyō bungaku,” 260.
108.  Judith Shapiro, “China: A Foreword,” 27.
109.  Some important figures who engaged with these concerns in their 1980s
and 1990s writings include A Cheng, Chen Yingsong (1956–), Cong Weixi
(1933–), Gao Hua (1954–), Gao Xingjian, Guo Xuebo (1948–), Han Shaogong,
Jia Pingwa (1952–), Li Qingsong (1966–), Liang Xiaosheng (1949–), Liu Xinwu
(1942–), Ma Bo (1947–), Shen Rong (1936–), Shi Tiesheng (1951–), Su Tong
(1963–), Wang Anyi (1954–), Wang Meng (1934–), Wang Lixiong, Xu Gang
(1945–), Zhang Jie (1937–), Zhang Kangkang (1950–), Zhang Wei (1956–), Zhe
Fu, and Zheng Yi (1947–). Many of their texts have been translated into English,
Japanese, Korean, and other languages.
110.  A Cheng’s King of Trees is analyzed in the following chapter.
111.  Shen Rong was born in 1936.
112.  Su Tong, “Shu nong,” 158.
113.  Ibid., 165.
114. Fujii Shōzō, “Kaisetsu,” 594. In his “Nobel Lecture” (1994), Ōe
(1935–) declared that he aligned himself with writers such as Zheng Yi: “For
me the brotherhood of world literature consists in such relationships in concrete
terms . . . I am now deeply worried about the destiny of those gifted Chinese
novelists who have been deprived of their freedom since the Tiananmen Square
incident.” The Japanese newspaper Asahi shinbun published the letters Zheng Yi
and Ōe wrote to one another.
115.  Cited by Fujii Shōzō, “Kaisetsu,” 594. Flaming Green Tree was trans-
lated into Chinese in 2001; Zheng Yi here indicates his familiarity with Japanese
literature, which was not limited to works by Ōe.
116.  Thomas Moran, “Lost in the Woods,” 215.
117.  “Loggers, Wake Up!” was not Xu Gang’s (1945–) first piece of envi-
ronmental reportage. It was preceded by such texts as “Chenlun de guotu” (Our
Sinking Land, 1985).
 Notes to Pages 53–54  471

118. See Dai Qing (1941–), Hongse jingbao; Harrison E. Salisbury, The

Great Black Dragon Fire. Other important nonfiction writers of the 1980s and
1990s who addressed environmental concerns include Li Yueshi, Liu Guixian
(1945–), Wei An (Ma Jianguo, 1960–1999), Zhao Xinshan (1938–), and Zhou
Yuming. Liu Guixian established himself as an environmental nonfiction writer
with his literary reportage “Zhongguo de shui wuran” (Water Pollution in China,
February 1989); he is best known for his nonfiction work Shengming zhi yuan de
weiji (Crisis of the Source of Life, October 1989). Although most concerned with
the contemporary global water calamity, this text draws from an array of Chi-
nese and foreign sources and speaks of environmental crises throughout history
around the world. Also noteworthy are Zhao Xinshan and Zhou Yuming’s col-
laborative nonfiction Bi tiankong geng guangkuo (Broader than the Sky, 1992)
and Diqiu zai kuqi (Earth is Sobbing, 1994); the latter condemns environmental
degradation the world over. Wei An’s embrace of deep ecology separates him
from most of his contemporaries. He is best known for his engaged ecocosmo-
politanism, vegetarianism, harsh censure of industrial society, and idealization
of rural, agrarian life. Only one volume of his writings was published during his
lifetime, Dadi shang de shiqing (All that Happens on the Earth, 1995). See Zhou
Yulin, “‘All that Happens on the Earth’”; Wei Qingqi, “Shengtai yizhi de wenxue
biaoshu.”
119.  Most members of ASLE are professors, while most members of China’s
Society of Environmental Literature are writers. Personal communication from
ecocritic Professor Long Juan, April 14, 2010.
120. Wu Dingbo, “Environmental Literature,” 302. For more on Green
Leaves and the challenges it has faced see Sugino Motoko, “Gendai Chūgoku
no kankyō bungaku,” 271–74; Sekine Ken, “Itan to shizen,” 288–90. For other
Chinese journals incorporating discussion of literature and environment see Wen
Fumin and Jian Rao, “Zhongguo shengtai wenxue zhi xianzhuang,” 78.
121.  See, for instance, Yang Mo, “Rang dadi chongman lü,” 6.
122.  Excellent examples are Yu Chaoran and Gao Hua’s Lüse sanchong zou
and Yang Zhaosan and Gao Hua’s Lü caodi, lü caodi. Both are composed of
texts published between 1984 and 1990 in the Zhongguo huanjingbao (China
Environmental News).
123. Jia Pingwa is also known for his novel, Tumen (Earth Gate, 1996),
where many “illegal” (unregistered) dogs are hanged.
124.  Tang Yaming [Tan Yamin; Tō Amei], “Hon’yaku kōki,” 504–5.
125.  An Boshun, “Henja no kotoba,” 13–14. Other prominent twenty-first-
century Chinese writing on wolves includes Guo Xuebo, Langhai (Wolf Child,
2006), Damo langhai (The Wolf Child in the Desert, 2001), following his Sha-
lang (Desert Wolf, 1996). Chinese also have been translating foreign writings on
wolves. See Chengzhou He, “Poetic Wolves and Environmental Imagination.”
Cf. The Korean writer Chŏn Sŏngt’ae’s (1969–) “Nŭkdae” (Wolves, 2006), a
short story that gives alternate perspectives on wolves, Mongolia, and transna-
tionalism.
126.  On their blogs China’s younger writers, including the youth-culture idol
Han Han (1982–), express anger at the ecological degradation of their country,
suggesting that environmental concerns will remain an important part of Chinese
472  notes to page 54

literary production in the decades to come. For more on Han Han in English
see Evan Osnos, “The Han Dynasty.” Also important in this context is the liter-
ary production of Chinese émigré writers such as Gao Xingjian and Wang Ping
(1957–).
127.  In the last decade, in addition to writing on environmental conscious-
ness in English-language literatures and translating Western ecocriticism, scholars
in China have published on the ecological sensitivity of Chinese writers ranging
from early luminaries such as Tao Yuanming to twenty-first-century figures. Scott
Slovic notes in particular the work of Lu Shuyuan and Zeng Fanren on ecological
consciousness in early Chinese writers. See Scott Slovic, “Editor’s Note,” 425.
Scholarship on the relationship between Asian thought on Western environmen-
tal writers likewise has flourished. See Timothy Gray, Gary Snyder and the Pa-
cific Rim; Zhong Ling, Meiguo shiren Shinaide [Snyder] yu Yazhou wenhua. Prin-
cipal texts and figures in contemporary Chinese ecocriticism include Long Juan,
Huanjing wenxue yanjiu; Lu Shuyuan, Shengtai wenyixue; Wang Nuo and Chu
Chen, “Shengtai weiji yu Zhongguo wenxue”; Wei Qingqi, “Zouxiang yizhong
lüse jingdian”; Zeng Fanren, ed., Ren yu ziran; Zeng Yongcheng, Wenyi de lüse
zhi si. For additional figures see Wen Fumin and Jian Rao, “Zhongguo shengtai
wenxue zhi xianzhuang,” 77–78.
Chinese scholars also have sponsored international conferences on literature
and the environment, drawing counterparts from across East Asia as well as the
Americas and Europe and increasingly from other continents. One of the earliest
such gatherings was held in Weihai in 1995 and was co-chaired by Wang Meng.
More recent meetings include the International Conference on Literature and En-
vironment, held in November 2008 at Central China Normal University in Wu-
han, and the Ecological Literature and Environmental Education International
Conference held in Beijing in August 2009. For a list of national conferences in
China on environment and literature see Wen Fumin and Jian Rao, “Zhongguo
shengtai wenxue zhi xianzhuang,” 78.
128.  For ecology and art in China see Gregory Levine, “Silenced by Aesthet-
ics?”; Wu Hung, Displacement. Chen Kaige’s (1952–) Huang tudi (Yellow Earth,
1984) is often regarded as China’s first ecologically oriented film. Recent Chinese
cinema addressing damming and water concerns in China includes Tian Zhuang-
zhuang’s (1952–) Delamu (The Last Horse Caravan, 2004) and Jia Zhangke’s
(1970–) Sanxia haoren (Good People of the Three Gorges [Still Life], 2006). The
documentary filmmaker Wang Bing’s (1967–) Tong dao (Coal Money, 2008) and
epic fourteen-hour film Caiyou riji (Crude Oil, 2008) highlight the difficult lives
of miners and oil workers while also revealing the damage these industries inflict
on ecosystems. Chinese films dealing with deforestation include Chen Kaige’s
Haizi wang (King of the Children, 1988), Lü Le’s (1957–) Meiren cao (The Foli-
age, 2004), and Qi Jian’s (1958–) Tiangou (The Forest Ranger, 2006). Jiayan Mi,
“Framing Ambient Unheimlich,” 293, n. 42. Noteworthy as well is the Chinese
Francophone writer and director Dai Sijie’s (1954–) filmic adaptation of his novel
Balzac et la Petite Tailleuse chinoise (Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress,
2000; film 2002). The novel and the film describe the experiences of two young
men sent to a village in Sichuan Province during the Cultural Revolution. While
the novel wraps up in 1974, the film concludes at the turn of the twenty-first
 Notes to Pages 54–55  473

century with the flooding of the village brought on by the Three Gorges Dam.
For more on Chinese film and environment see Sheldon Lu and Jiayan Mi, eds.,
Chinese Ecocinema.
129. Conrad Totman, Pre-Industrial Korea and Japan, 2. As Totman notes,
while early inhabitants of the spaces that today are known as Japan and Korea
might well have been partially responsible for the loss of the region’s mega-fauna,
and while their fires burned areas of woodland, their numbers were so small and
per capita demands on ecosystems so slight that they did not notably change
their environments (29–30). Unless otherwise noted, this section is drawn from
Totman’s discussion. Ann Kumar discusses Japan’s transition to an agricultural
society in Globalizing the Prehistory of Japan. For more on environment in early
Korea see Kim Ukdong, Hanguk ŭi noksaek munhwa.
130.  Conrad Totman, The Green Archipelago, 9.
131.  For more on land clearance in early Japan see William Wayne Farris,
Population, Disease, and Land in Early Japan.
132.  To give one example, in the eighth century there was a national cam-
paign to build temples in every province of Japan then under imperial control.
The three million cubic meters of wood that monasteries used between 600 and
850 was only a fraction of the wood commoners and nobles used in their homes.
See Paul Gleason’s discussion of timber usage in temple building in “Works and
Woods,” 47–48.
133. In Pre-Industrial Korea and Japan Conrad Totman notes that the exist-
ing environmental damage would have been remediable within several genera-
tions had these sites not continued to be exploited (94).
134.  For more on land use in Japan at this time see William Wayne Farris,
Japan’s Medieval Population. Medieval Japan likewise was one of the planet’s
most active mining nations. Nimura Kazuo, The Ashio Riot of 1907, 12.
135.  Ken Akiyama and Bruce Allen discuss Andō (1703–62) in “Pre-Modern
Japanese Nature Writing,” 281–83.
136.  By 1721 Edo (now Tokyo) was larger than any European city. Susan
B. Hanley, “Urban Sanitation in Preindustrial Japan,” 1. See also Gilbert Roz-
man, Urban Networks in Ch’ing China and Tokugawa Japan. Brett L. Walker
discusses ecologies outside Japan’s urban centers in The Conquest of Ainu Lands,
while Azby Brown examines the more “sustainable” lives of Tokugawa Japanese
in just enough.
137. John F. Richards summarizes Tokugawa strategies to limit forest de-
struction in The Unending Frontier, 148–92. See also Conrad Totman, The Lum-
ber Industry in Early Modern Japan and The Origins of Japan’s Modern Forests.
For more on recycling in the Tokugawa period see Azby Brown, just enough; Ei-
Ichiro Ochiai, “Japan in the Edo Period.” Gregory Levine notes that contribut-
ing to the air pollution and deforestation of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
Japan was the nation’s thriving ceramics industry. Gregory Levine, “Silenced by
Aesthetics?”
138. In The Lost Wolves of Japan Brett Walker documents the transforma-
tion of these animals in Japan from a revered to an extinct species.
139.  Both English- and Japanese-language scholarship on Japan’s modern en-
vironmental crises, movements, and policies abounds. For overviews of environ-
474  notes to pages 56–57

mental degradation in twentieth-century Japan see Pradyumna P. Karan, Japan

in the 21st Century, 359–75; Brett L. Walker, Toxic Archipelago. For a summary
of English-language studies of Japanese environmental history see Robert Stolz,
“Nature over Nation,” 417–18. See also Norie Huddle et al., Island of Dreams;
David Suzuki and Ōiwa Keibō, The Other Japan.
140. Pradyumna P. Karan, Japan in the 21st Century, 359.
141.  Kichiro Shoji and Masuro Sugai, “The Ashio Copper Mine Pollution
Case,” 22, 27; Fred Notehelfer, “Japan’s First Pollution Incident.”
142.  Brett Walker, The Lost Wolves of Japan, 158–59. For more on the Ashio
mine incident, Tanaka (1841–1913), and the shifts in Japanese consciousness
that resulted see Alan Stone, “The Japanese Muckrakers.” For more on Tanaka’s
thought see Robert Stolz, “Nature over Nation” and “Remake Politics, Not Na-
ture”; Kenneth Strong, Ox against the Storm.
143. Norie Huddle et al., Island of Dreams, 32–33; Tessa Morris-Suzuki,
“Environmental Problems and Perceptions in Early Industrial Japan,” 762–63.
Today the Yanaka reservoir is a site of “nature recreation.” Robert Stolz, “Re-
make Politics, Not Nature.” See also Nimura Kazuo, The Ashio Riot of 1907.
144.  Kichiro Shoji and Masuro Sugai, “The Ashio Copper Mine Pollution
Case,” 44.
145.  For more on Tatematsu (1948–2010) and the Ashio Green Growing As-
sociation see Robert Stolz, “Remake Politics, Not Nature.”
146.  See Tak Watanabe, “Corporate Environmentalism?” Shisaka Island is
located approximately 20 kilometers from Niihama.
147.  It was not until the 1950s that cadmium released from mines in Toyama
Prefecture in the Japan Sea was identified as the cause.
148.  Masako Gavin, “Nihon fūkeiron (Japanese Landscape).” For more on
Shiga (1863–1927) see Masako Gavin, Shiga Shigetaka; Kamei Hideo, “Nihon
kindai no fūkeiron”; Richard Okada, “‘Landscape’ and the Nation-State.”
149.  This belief is noteworthy considering that practices such as tree felling
were recognized as a menace even during the Tokugawa period. On the other
hand, concomitant with early twentieth-century urbanization were new forms of
appreciation; as in other regions, East Asian urbanites became interested in the
conservation of resources. City people tended to be the most outspoken conser-
vationists, whereas those living in rural areas advocated continued use of land
for fertilizer-assisted agriculture, hunting, and fishing. Also important is the dif-
ference between physical “environment” and “nature” as powerful political and
ideological elements in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Japan. As Julia
Adeney Thomas has pointed out, “nature in political terms moved from being
that which Japan must investigate in order to arrive at true political forms to that
which Japan is, the truth itself . . . There is no necessity of ‘nature’ to mean ‘envi-
ronment’ as we look back at past usages.” Julia Adeney Thomas, Reconfiguring
Modernity, 3, 5. See also Julia Adeney Thomas, “‘To Become as One Dead,’”
308–30.
150.  Much of Japan’s current forestland is a result of 1950s reforestation.
The Nature Conservation Society of Japan (Nihon Shizen Hogo Kyōkai) was
founded in 1951 to promote ecological and biological diversity and conservation.
151.  Pradyumna P. Karan, Japan in the 21st Century, 359.
 Notes to Pages 57–58  475

152.  Arsenic poisoning also became a significant problem in Japan, particu-

larly in Toroku, where arsenic mining began in 1920 and ended in 1962. As
Timothy S. George has noted, “The changes brought about by the intrusion of
this new age of chemicals [in the early twentieth century] into Toroku linked this
small hamlet and the poison produced there to global wars, the global economy,
and the global environment . . . Toroku was being poisoned because of the ex-
panding global market for arsenic.” Timothy S. George, “Toroku: Mountain
Dreams, Chemical Nightmares.”
153. Robert Hernan lists Minamata disease as the earliest of the fifteen
“worst environmental disasters around the world.” Robert Hernan, This Bor-
rowed Earth, 9–29. Minamata attracted the attention of literary artists across
Asia, writers in Thailand, for instance, publishing on the disease in the 1970s and
1980s. Hiramatsu Hideki, “Tai ni okeru Nihon bungaku.”
154. Timothy S. George, Minamata, xviii–xviv, 17. Scholarship on Mina-
mata disease is vast. See Kada Yukiko et al., “From Kogai to Kankyo Mondai,”
112–37; Jun Ui, “Minamata Disease”; Brett Walker, Toxic Archipelago, 137–75.
155.  On July 8, 2009, for the first time since 1995, the Japanese Diet enacted
a law offering financial relief to increased numbers of Minamata victims. How-
ever, this law also allows Chisso to divide into two parts, effectively “putting an
end to the liability saga” after it completes this most recent set of compensation
payments. Alex Martin, “New Minamata Relief Law Enacted.” On April 16,
2010 the Japanese cabinet approved a measure to provide relief to those who
claim to suffer from Minamata disease but until now have been ineligible for
financial assistance. See “Relief for Unrecognized Minamata Victims.” And on
May 1, 2010, Hatoyama Yukio (1947–) became the first Japanese prime minister
to attend a memorial service for those killed by Minamata disease. He took this
opportunity to apologize for the government’s failure to prevent the spread of
the disease. See “Hatoyama Apologizes.” By April 2011 nearly 3,000 additional
previously unrecognized Minamata disease patients had reached a negotiated
settlement of their compensation lawsuits against Chisso and the central and
Kumamoto prefectural governments; more than 41,000 people have applied for
these separate relief measures, but concerns remain that even more are eligible for
benefits yet are too ashamed to come forth. “Minamata Disease Settlement.” As
Timothy S. George explains: “Minamata is a story not just of the environmental
and human costs of rapid ‘modernization,’ but also of a callous and murder-
ous corporation hiding its guilt; of the collusion and confusion at all levels of
government and society, including the scientific community and the media, that
allowed the tragedy to happen and then to be covered up; of powerful pressures
against speaking out and taking action; of stigmatization and ostracism in the
local society of a company town; of popular politicization and grass-roots move-
ments; of the social constraints on these movements and on individuals; and of
the persistence and adaptation of ‘traditional’ uses of language and religion and
concepts of moral economy.” Timothy S. George, Minamata, 8. See Ikuta Shōgo,
“Kotoba, basho, kyōdōtai,” for the relationship between Minamata disease and
environmental justice concerns.
156.  See “Minamata Sufferers in Niigata to Get Relief”; Hisashi Satō, Ni-
igata Minamata Disease. By 2001, approximately 2,200 individuals had been
476  notes to pages 58–59

officially recognized as Minamata disease patients and 800 as Niigata Minamata

disease patients. The actual number of people who contracted Minamata disease
is unknown. See also Masazumi Harada, “Minamata Disease and the Mercury
Pollution of the Globe.” Mercury pollution has been a concern in Canada, China,
Brazil, East Africa, and the Philippines. In May 2010 the Japanese government
announced plans to promote an international agreement to regulate mercury use.
See “Japan Promotes Minamata Treaty.”
157.  “Minamata Exhibition.”
158.  See, for instance, Jeffrey Broadbent, “Movement in Context”; Hasegawa
Koichi, Constructing Civil Society in Japan; Margaret McKean, Environmental
Protest and Citizen Politics in Japan.
159.  Arne Kalland and Pamela J. Asquith, “Japanese Perceptions of Nature”;
Higuchi Kentaro, ed., PCB Poisoning and Pollution; Margaret McKean, Envi-
ronmental Protest and Citizen Politics in Japan.
160.  Pradyumna P. Karan, Japan in the 21st Century, 362. In 1999, Japan
emitted nearly 40 percent of the world’s dioxin and furan. As of 2008, only 7
percent of its sandy beaches were without any concrete, levees, or other human
structure and supported six or more types of plants. “Study: Only 7% of Nation’s
Sandy Beaches ‘Natural.’” For more on problems of trash disposal in Japan see
Vivian E. Thomson, Garbage In, Garbage Out.
161.  Richard J. Samuels, “Securing Japan,” 133. Okinawa has been particu-
larly harmed. See “Living with the Nightmare of Planes”; Hayashi Kiminori et al.,
“Overcoming American Military Base Pollution in Asia”; Koji Taira, “Okinawan
Environmentalists”; Kunitoshi Sakurai, “Okinawan Bases”; Yoshikawa Hideki,
“Dugong Swimming in Uncharted Waters.” For more on Japan’s troubled legacy
with nuclear power see Daniel Aldrich, “The Tohoku Disaster”; “Japan Nuclear
Disaster”; Kaneko Masaru, “Plan to Rebuild Japan.” Ōe has gone so far as to as-
sert that the nuclear meltdown at Fukushima was “like ‘a third atomic bombing’
that the country inflicted on itself.” See “Nobel Laureate Ōe.”
162. Stephen Hesse, “Accountability at Atsugi,” 13. See also Catherine
Knight, “Natural Environments, Wildlife, and Conservation in Japan.” For up-
to-date printed information on Japanese environmental conditions see the Japa-
nese Ministry of the Environment’s annual White Paper: Kankyōshō, ed., Kankyō
hakusho.
163.  Nakasone (1918–) was prime minister between 1982 and 1987.
164.  Pradyumna P. Karan discusses several of these movements in Japan in
the 21st Century, 366–75. See also Pradyumna P. Karan and Unryu Suganuma,
eds., Local Environmental Movements; Miranda A. Schreurs, Environmental
Politics in Japan, Germany, and the United States.
165.  Since the early 1990s, for instance, the theme of the Tokyo Motor Show
has been the environment. Kamahori Miki, “Cooling Japan.” In 2009 the Jap-
anese government announced its Green New Deal strategy to encourage both
economic growth and environmental conservation. See “Government to Em-
brace ‘Green New Deal.’” For more on Japan’s efforts to integrate economic
and environmental concerns see Brendan Barrett, ed., Ecological Modernization
and Japan. For more on environmental policy in Japan see Hidefumi Imura and
Miranda A. Schreurs, eds., Environmental Policy in Japan; Peng Er Lam, Green
 Notes to Pages 59–60  477

Politics in Japan; Klaus Vollmer, ed., Őkologie und Umweltpolitik in Japan und
Ostasien.
166.  For examples of ecopropaganda see the email newsletter Highlighting
Japan through Articles. See also Brian Moeran and Lise Skov, “Mount Fuji and
the Cherry Blossoms.” To promote more ecologically responsible consumerism
the Japanese government in 2009 established an ecopoint system whereby people
earned points for purchasing ecofriendly products, primarily energy-saving appli-
ances. The points were used to help purchase other appliances deemed environ-
mentally friendly. Slogans urging people to conserve resources now are paradoxi-
cally printed on many plastic shopping bags in Japan.
167.  Makoto Watanabe, “The Scientist Emperor and His Love of Nature.”
168. At the turn of the twenty-first century, for instance, Aichi Prefecture
proposed felling a large forest to build homes for the 2005 World Exposition;
the theme of this expo ironically was “Living in Harmony with Nature.” Prady-
umna P. Karan, Japan in the 21st Century, 363. See also Yoshimi Shun’ya, “A
Drifting World Fair.” Pressure from the World Expo ruling body and a citizens’
group defeated this proposal. Another more subtle example is the recent effort to
have spaces in Japan internationally certified as “global geoparks” or “geologi-
cal inheritance parks.” This designation allows landscapes to be “preserved and
utilized as natural parks,” something that will almost certainly increase tourism.
“Japan’s Green Zones Itchy to be Global Geoparks.” For more on the tensions
between lofty rhetoric and daily practice in Japan see Peter Wynn Kirby, Trou-
bled Natures.
169.  In September 2010 Japan proposed a resolution to the United Nations
General Assembly that 2011–20 be declared the United Nations Decade of Bio-
diversity to facilitate efforts to preserve various species. “Japan to Propose 2011–
2020 U.N. Decade of Biodiversity.” Japan likewise supports forest conservation
efforts in developing countries. “Japan Vows Forest Conservation.” See also Eric
Prideaux, “Japan’s Green Strides Belie Spotty Record,” 3; Hiroko Tabuchi, “Ja-
pan Sets Emissions Targets.” Before the March 2011 Fukushima disaster there
was hope that nuclear energy would help reduce the nation’s emissions. David
McNeill, “Out of the Shadows.” Global warming is a serious concern. The sum-
mer of 2010 was one of the hottest on record; August 2010 was Japan’s warmest
since 1946. “Japan’s Hottest.” The heat has decreased the food supply of black
bears, and more than 150 were killed in 2010 after encroaching on residential ar-
eas, even entering homes and schools. “Officials Warn of Spike in Bear Attacks.”
Bear encounters are becoming a problem in many parts of Japan, experts blaming
changing weather patterns, a decrease in hunters, and an increase in abandoned
farm fields. “Shiritai!”
170.  Pradyumna P. Karan, Japan in the 21st Century, 363.
171.  With two-thirds of its land area covered by forests, Japan is somewhat
greener than the world’s land surface as a whole; Japan meets about 80 percent of
its timber needs by import. See Yoshiya Iwai, ed., Forestry and the Forest Indus-
try in Japan. See also Peter Dauvergne, Shadows in the Forest; Owen Cameron,
“Japan and South-East Asia’s Environment”; Rene E. Ofreneo, “Japan and the
Environmental Degradation of the Philippines”; Joachim Radkau, Nature and
Power, 117. On the other hand Japanese NGOs such as the Japan Volunteer
478  notes to page 60

Center are assisting Southeast Asian communities in managing their forests. Reiji
Yoshida, “Helping Laotians Keep their Forests.”
The typical conservationist view of Japanese whaling popularized in the
American media in the 1980s is that of a devious Japan claiming to be doing
research but in fact pillaging the ocean. Japan countered, among other things,
that the Japanese hunted only the relatively plentiful minke whales, while the
Inuit of North America continued to hunt the endangered bowhead whale un-
der an exemption from the international moratorium. Jessamyn R. Abel, “The
Ambivalence of Whaling,” 330–31. These arguments have not made Japanese
whaling any less of an international target. In the Australian Robyn Williams’s
(1944–) novel 2007 (2001), which depicts global weather systems as devastat-
ing the planet, whales sink a Japanese whale-hunting submarine. In Whaling in
Japan Jun Morikawa discusses the disparities between the political fiction and
environmental realities surrounding Japanese whaling. Some industries in Japan
capitalize on whale populations without killing them. Whale-watching cruises off
Hokkaido bring in much needed revenue; these are quite popular since at certain
times of year tourists have a 50 percent chance of seeing a migrating killer whale.
It is probable that increased mercury content in whale and dolphin meat will
result in people consuming fewer of these animals. “Taiji Mercury Levels Ex-
tremely High.” As portrayed in the Oscar-winning documentary film The Cove
(2009) approximately 2,000 dolphins are killed in Taiji (southern Japan) each
year. Japanese take the lives of about 20,000 dolphins annually, but Taiji is the
only place in the country where they are herded and then killed. As shown in the
film, in a blatant act of environmental ambiguity, Taiji puts on dolphin shows
during which audience members can consume dolphin meat. Tremendous right-
wing opposition in Japan to showing The Cove delayed its release there. “‘The
Cove’ Back on Again.” In April 2010 officials at the Yokota Air Base (a United
States Air Force Base) canceled scheduled showings of the film so as not to of-
fend the Japanese. The film’s director responded by distributing free copies to
residents of the base. Hiroko Tabuchi, “Japan’s Noisy Far Right.” On November
2, 2010, Taiji hosted the first meeting between activists and hunters, but the event
was chaotic, despite being tightly controlled, and no compromise was attempted.
For a recent report on controversy concerning Japan’s overfishing of high-quality
tuna see Eric Johnston, “Seafood Policy Seen Negating Moral Authority”; Ya-
mada Takao, “‘Magurokyō’ jidai.” Japan likewise has a thriving black market
in African ivory. See Michael Casey et al., “Will Asian Hunger for Ivory Doom
Africa’s Elephants?”
172.  In 2009 the number of Japanese children under age fifteen decreased for
the twenty-ninth straight year; children are a smaller percentage of the Japanese
population than that of any other nation. “Japan’s Child Population Drops.” For
comparative perspectives on fertility trends in East Asia see Gavin Jones et al.,
eds., Ultra-low Fertility in Pacific Asia. Nearly all discourse on shōshika (declin-
ing birthrate) in Japan and elsewhere focuses on the demographic challenges this
phenomenon will instigate and remains silent on how it might improve ecosys-
tems. Even Florian Coulmas’s 1,189-page edited volume The Demographic Chal-
lenge includes virtually nothing on the effect fewer people will have on Japan’s
physical environment. For alternate perspectives see Robert Engelman, More:
 Notes to Pages 61–62  479

Population, Nature, and What Women Want; Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehr­
lich, The Dominant Animal, 140–57; Norie Huddle et al., Island of Dreams;
Ahihiko Matsutani, Shrinking-Population Economics; Fred Pearce, The Coming
Population Crash; Andre Sorensen, “Towards Livable Communities in Japan?”
Pearce, for instance, argues that the aging of the world’s population, because of
declining birthrates across the planet, is a positive development, one that will re-
sult in a “less frenetic and hopefully more humane—a kinder, gentler, wiser, and
greener world” (249).
173.  Julia Thomas, Reconfiguring Modernity, 8. Thomas gives numerous ex-
amples of Japanese assertions that the Japanese people’s unique love of nature
provides both the nation’s aesthetic guidelines and a foundation for environmen-
tal stewardship.
174.  The Japanese poet Masaoka Shiki (1867–1902) went so far as to de-
clare nature the center of Japanese literature and people the center of European
literature. Cited in Haruo Shirane and Unno Keisuke, “Ekokuriteishizumu [Eco-
criticism] to Nihon bungaku,” 126. Shirane and Unno caution that although
Shiki exaggerates, there is merit to his argument. For a succinct comparison of
views of nature in Japanese and European literatures see Nonaka Ryō, “Nihon
bungaku ni okeru shizenkan.”
175.  Nonaka Ryō, “Nihon bungaku ni okeru shizenkan,” 59.
176.  Ibid., 61–62.
177.  Sonja Arntzen, “Natural Imagery in Classical Japanese Poetry,” 66.
178.  Criticizing the constructedness of Japanese perceptions of nature in the
face of environmental crises is the Japanese writer Noma Hiroshi (1915–1991),
who in “Kankyō, shigen mondai” argues for reforming Japanese literature by
overthrowing conventional understandings of beauty. In “Natural Imagery in
Classical Japanese Poetry,” Sonja Arntzen argues that in classical Japanese lit-
erature nature often is more immanent than metaphorical, even when used meta-
phorically (54–67). See also Pauline Yu, “Metaphor and Chinese Poetry.”
179. Haruo Shirane and Unno Keisuke highlight the constructedness of nature
in early Japanese literature, noting for instance the differences between seasonal
phenomena as codified in creative work and as evident in the experienced world.
Haruo Shirane and Unno Keisuke, “Ekokuriteishizumu [Ecocriticism] to Nihon
bungaku,” 118–32. For an introduction to impermanence in Japanese literature
and culture more generally see Charles Shirō Inouye, Evanescence and Form.
180.  Notable exceptions to depictions of an innocuous nonhuman include
the waka poet Kamo no Chōmei’s (1155–1216) famed zuihitsu (loose, miscel-
laneous prose) Hōjōki (Ten-Foot Square Hut, 1212), which describes fires, ty-
phoons, floods, earthquakes, and aftershocks that devastate the city of Kyoto. At
the same time, Chōmei emphasizes that much of the human suffering that accom-
panies these disasters stems from attachment to impermanent human construc-
tions; Chōmei abandons the city and finds comfort in the hills, where he declares
flowers and the moon among his best friends.
181. Scholarship on perceptions and uses of nature in classical Japanese lit-
erature abounds. Some helpful sources include Baba Akiko, Kaku sakitaraba;
Furuhashi Nobuyoshi et al., eds., Shizen to gijutsu; Hiroshima Jogakuin Daigaku
Kōkai Kōza Ronshū Nihon Bungakka, ed., Shizen to Nihon bungaku; Komori
480  notes to pages 62–64

Yōichi et al., eds., Tsukurareta shizen; Hoyt Long, “Grateful Animal or Spiritual
Being?” 21–58; Nishida Masayoshi, Nihon bungaku no shizenkan; Satō Yasu-
masa, ed., Bungaku ni okeru shizen; Saitō Shōji, Nihonteki shizenkan no henka
katei and Nihonteki shizenkan no kenkyū; Seko Katashi, Nihon bungaku no
shizen kanshō; Ivo Smits, The Pursuit of Loneliness; Tokuda Susumu, Shinkō
Nitchū hikaku sansui bungaku. For general studies of Japanese perceptions of
nature, see Itō Shuntarō, ed., Nihonjin no shizenkan; Niwa Fumio, Nihonteki
shizenkan no hōhō.
182. Edwin Cranston, A Waka Anthology, 164. See also Sylvie Broseau,
“Perception and Representation of Famous Sites in Japanese Culture”; Kamigaito
Ken’ichi, Tōyōteki shizenkan no saihakken; Kawamura Kojirō, Man’yōbito no
biishiki; William R. LaFleur, “Saigyō and the Buddhist Value of Nature,” 203–4;
Noda Hiroko, Man’yōshū no jokei to shizen; David Shaner, “The Japanese Expe-
rience of Nature,” 165–66; Shimoda Tadashi, Man’yō no kachō fūgetsu.
183.  Man’yōshū 4, 9–11.
184. Haruo Shirane, ed., Traditional Japanese Literature, 64. As Torquil
Duthie has pointed out, the references to kunimi in Nara texts are so diverse that
they point less to a single, specific ritual than a “diffuse rhetoric of ‘envisioning
the realm’ that drew from a variety of disparate sources and models.” Duthie,
“Envisioning the Realm.”
185.  Ibid. Jomei’s ability to see what ordinary mortals cannot points to his
ties to the “other world” of spirits and gods. Mt. Kagu is a mere 152 meters high.
186.  Conrad Totman, The Green Archipelago, 11.
187. The Irish poet William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) intriguingly inverts
these tropes of occupation in the sixth part of “Vacillations” (1931–32): “A riv-
ery field spread out below, / An odour of the new-mown hay / In his nostrils, the
great lord of Chou / Cried, casting off the mountain snow, / ‘Let all things pass
away.’ // Wheels by milk-white asses drawn / Where Babylon or Nineveh / Rose;
some conqueror drew rein / And cried to battle-weary men, / ‘Let all things pass
away.’”
188.  Hara Sōkei (1718–67), “Lu pang mu,” 251.
189.  Oka Kunshō (fl. ca.1814), “Gu zhan chang,” 261.
190. Toriyama Shiken (1655–1715), “Chun ri jiao xing jing gu cheng mu
you gan,” 198.
191.  Du Fu, “Chun wang,” 43.
192.  Michael Fuller explores other ambiguities of Du Fu’s poem in “The Aes-
thetic as Immanent Assent to Pattern,” 74–78.
193.  Matsuo Bashō (1644–1694), Oku no hosomichi, 84. For more on this
phenomenon, see Karen Thornber, “Ambivalence, Ambiguity, and Environmen-
tal Crises.” Scholars have variously interpreted Sora’s rewriting Du Fu’s claim
that “grasses and trees grow deep” (cao mu shen) with “grasses grow green”
(kusa ao mitari). Also contesting Du Fu’s assertions are writers such as Sakai
Kozan (1798–1850), who in “Sengakuji” (Sengaku Temple) argues that “The
mountain peaks might crumble and the oceans might overturn, but the souls of
the forty-seven ronin will never fade.” Andō Hideo, Nihon kanshi hyakusen,
122–23.
194.  Matsuo Bashō, Oku no hosomichi, 81.
 Notes to Pages 64–67  481

195.  A similar phenomenon is at play in the Tokugawa Confucian scholar

and kanshi poet Itō Jinsai’s (1627–1705) verse on his journey to Ichijōji (1697).
The speaker first celebrates the gorgeous autumn scene—the vast green landscape
through which he travels features clouds mingling with trees, geese flying by,
crows feasting on ripe persimmons, and thickly growing mushrooms. He then
remarks: “The city so far away, I never see dusty haze.” The poem’s speaker
explicitly notes the absence of pollution where he is standing and alludes to its
presence elsewhere. See Itō Jinsai, “Ichijōji ni asobu,” 193.
196.  Yoshida Kenkō (1283–1350), Tsurezuregusa, 187.
197.  Karatani Kojin, Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, 29. Karatani
highlights the work of Kunikida Doppo, particularly “Musashino” (Musashi
Plain, 1898) and “Wasureenu hitobito” (Unforgettable People, 1898) and their
articulations of people-as-landscape. In these texts Doppo makes the case for
commemorating even the most ordinary of landscapes and people. As Richard
Okada has noted, the viewpoint valorized in texts such as Doppo’s is one of
“panoramic appropriation,” Doppo’s text not representing “landscape or ‘na-
ture’ that preexist their installation in discourse.” Richard Okada, “‘Landscape’
and the Nation-State,” 104. The construction of this landscape was accompa-
nied by that of Hokkaido, a supposedly vast, awe-inspiring wilderness that ap-
peared for the most part untouched by human hands. Karatani Kojin, Origins
of Modern Japanese Literature, 41. Hokkaido occupied a significant presence
in the Meiji literary imagination, including in works by Doppo, Arishima Takeo
(1878–1923), and Ishikawa Takuboku (1886–1912). For more on realism, sha-
seibun (sketching), impressionism, and early twentieth-century Japanese literary
portrayals of the nonhuman, see Nakada Masatoshi, Akutagawa Ryūnosuke
bunshō shugyō; Nakao Masaki, Taishō bunjin to den’en shugi; Saitō Shōji, Ni-
honteki shizenkan no henka katei; Sudō Matsuo, Kindai shiika no shizen; Suzuki
Sadami, “Nihon kindai bungaku ni miru shizenkan”; Watanabe Masao, “Kindai
ni okeru Nihonjin no shizenkan.”
198. As Hoyt Long notes in “On Uneven Ground,” Nagatsuka’s (1879–
1915) Tsuchi was “the first truly sustained and sympathetic account of Japanese
farming life to be written in fictional form” (275). See also Tomoko Aoyama,
Reading Food in Modern Japanese Literature, 48–57; Kajiki Gō, Nagatsuka Ta-
kashi; Kajiki Gō and Kawai Tōru, eds., Nagatsuka Takashi “Tsuchi” sakuhinron
shūsei.
199.  Arishima Takeo, Kain no matsuei, 94.
200.  Satō Haruo (1892–1964), Den’en no yūutsu, 50.
201. Miyazawa’s children’s stories frequently attempt to increase environ-
mental awareness in the younger generation. Karen Colligan-Taylor, The Emer-
gence of Environmental Literature in Japan, 51.
202.  See Shiga Naoya (1883–1971), Aru otoko sono ane no shi. For more
on environmentality in Miyazawa’s writing see Gregory Golley, When Our Eyes
No Longer See, 163–241; Komori Yōichi, Saishin: Miyazawa Kenji kōgi. For
more on animals in Shiga’s oeuvre, including his short story “Kinosaki ni te”
(At Kinosaki, 1917), which features a young man’s meditations on dead animals
and his accidental killing of a water lizard, see Sudō Matsuo, Nihon bungaku
no shizen, 185–201, and Shiga Naoya no shizen. As Alan Tansman notes in The
482  notes to pages 67–69

Aesthetics of Japanese Fascism, “At Kinosaki” proceeds through “simple asser-

tion—through kotodama, the magical power of words” (138).
Other Japanese writings on the Ashio mine include the Japanese Communist
Party cofounder Arahata Kanson’s (1887–1981) Yanakamura metsubōshi docu-
mentary text (History of the Collapse of Yanaka Village, 1902); Ōshika Taku’s
(1898–1959) documentary novel Watarasegawa (Watarase River, 1941) and its
sequel the historical novel Yanakamura jiken (The Incident at Yanaka Village,
1957); Shiroyama Saburō’s (1927–2007) Shinsan (Bitterness of Life, 1961) and
its sequel “Sōdō” (Strife, 1979). These texts celebrate Tanaka Shōzō and other
activists and focus primarily on human suffering.
203.  Yi Sang (1910–37), “Tonggyŏng,” 95–96.
204.  Ibid., 97.
205.  This was true of both creative work and nonfiction, including essays
by Kawai Masao (1924–), Kaikō Ken (Takeshi, 1931–1989), Takada Hiroshi
(1932–), Miki Taku (1932–), and Ishimure Michiko. Shōgo Ikuta, “Modern
Japanese Nature Writing,” 278. See also Takashi Kinoshita and Masataka Ota,
“Nature in Modern Japanese Literature.”
206. For more on ecological concerns in Japanese literature of the atomic
bomb see Karen L. Thornber, “Degendering Ecodegradation and Rethinking
Ecofeminisms”; “Ecocriticism and Japanese Literature of the Avant Garde”; “Re-
sponsibility and Japanese Literature of the Atomic Bomb.” Sharalyn Orbaugh
discusses images of the “atomic body” in Japanese literature of the atomic bomb
in Japanese Fiction of the Allied Occupation, 202–12.
207.  Hayashi Fumiko (1903–1951), Ukigumo, 195, 273. Also noteworthy is
Miyao Tomiko’s (1926–) novel Shuka (Red Summer, 1985), which depicts Japa-
nese in Manchuria as wasting so much water that they anger local gods.
208.  Hayashi Fumiko, Ukigumo, 234. Texts such as Floating Clouds provide
important corollaries to European colonial fiction. See Alfred W. Crosby, Eco-
logical Imperialism; Serpil Oppermann, “Ecological Imperialism”; Beth Fowkes
Tobin, Colonizing Nature.
209.  Kawabata Yasunari (1899–1972), Koto, 358.
210.  For more on Japanese reception of Rachel Carson, see Karen Colligan-
Taylor, The Emergence of Environmental Literature in Japan, 157–58, 224–25,
235. Reconfiguration of Western-language environmental writing has continued,
including that of J. M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals, translated into Japanese
as Dōbutsu no inochi by Mori Yukiko and Ozeki Shūji in 2003.
211.  Ishimure Michiko and Arahata Kanson, “Seimin no keifu,” 173. Cited
in Karen Colligan-Taylor, The Emergence of Environmental Literature in Japan,
79. The year 1970 also witnessed the republication of Ōshika’s Watarase River
(1941); its sequel was reprinted in 1972.
212.  Nitta (1912–1980) wrote a number of creative works on the dangers
facing ecosystems in Japan and elsewhere, including Arasuka monogatari (Tale
of Alaska, 1974), discussed in chapter 2.
213.  Ishimure’s writing does not focus solely on Minamata disease; she has
published on a variety of the challenges facing contemporary societies.
214. Published in 1969, Sea of Suffering and the Pure Land discusses the
first fifteen years of the Minamata tragedy. For analyses of this text see chapters
 Notes to Pages 69–71  483

2 and 5. Kamigami no mura (Villages of the Gods), the second part of Ishimure’s
Minamata trilogy and serialized between 1970 and 1971, takes the reader to the
December 1970 Chisso stockholders meeting. The third part, Ten no uo (Fish of
Heaven), was published in 1974. Both Villages of the Gods and Fish of Heaven
focus on the suffering of Minamata patients and the struggles of these individu-
als and other concerned parties against the Chisso Corporation and the Japanese
government. Also noteworthy is Ishimure’s Noh play Shiranui (2003), a requiem
to the victims of Minamata disease. Wakamatsu Michiko, “Ishimure Michiko’s
Tetralogy.” For a brief introduction to Ishimure’s life and writings, as well as
the cultural imaginary of Sea of Suffering, see Livia Monnet, “‘A Book for the
Future’”; “‘In the Beginning Woman Was the Sun.’”
215.  For more on Ishimure and Sea of Suffering, see chapter 2. For more on
Ariyoshi (1931–1984) and Compound Pollution see Tomoko Aoyama, Reading
Food in Modern Japanese Literature, 89–92; Karen Colligan-Taylor, The Emer-
gence of Environmental Literature in Japan, 146–90; Yoko McClain, “Ariyoshi
Sawako.” Compound Pollution was translated into Korean four times (in 1967,
1988, 1990, and 1991), and into Chinese (in Taiwan) in 1993; Sea of Suffering
was translated into Korean in 2007, but it served as a resource to Korean writers
long before then. Also noteworthy is the case of Morisaki Kazue (1927–), a Japa-
nese environmental activist, prolific writer, and former colleague of Ishimure’s.
Morisaki was born and raised in Korea. She had difficulty adjusting to Japan
after relocating there in 1944 so traveled around the country seeking out margin-
alized individuals and places. Her first book, Makkura: jokōfu kara no kikigaki
(Pitch Dark: Stories Narrated by Female Miners, 1961) is a collection of the oral
tales of women coal miners and addresses environmental justice concerns. Ma-
sami Raker Yūki, “New Life, New Language.”
216.  Karen Colligan-Taylor discusses Descendants of the Mist and Memo-
ries of Mountain Peaks in The Emergence of Environmental Literature in Japan,
191–214. Watanabe was born in 1933.
217. Nitta wrote extensively on Japan’s mountains and the importance
of conservation. For more on the place of Mount Fuji in his oeuvre see Naitō
Michio, Kobushi no hana, 157–96, and “Nitta Jirō to shizen”; Takahashi Chi-
haya, “Nitta Jirō to Fujisan.” See also Nitta Jirō Kinenkai, ed., Nitta Jirō bun-
gaku jiten. Tsuda Hiroyuki discusses the Japanese “discovery of nature” as this
phenomenon relates to Mount Fuji in Tōkokuzō kōsō josetsu.
218.  Karen Colligan-Taylor, The Emergence of Environmental Literature in
Japan, 211.
219.  Christopher Bolton, Sublime Voices, 2, 83.
220.  Charles Inouye, Evanescence and Form, 194. Komatsu’s (1931–2011)
Japan Sinks has been translated into Chinese several times; the first translation
was published in 1975. For background on Tsutsui and Komatsu see William O.
Gardner, “From Parody to Simulacrum.”
221.  Karen Colligan-Taylor, The Emergence of Environmental Literature in
Japan, 225–29.
222.  For more on Kayano (1926–2006) see Tsutomu Takahashi et al., “The
Conservation Movement and Its Literature in Japan,” 292.
223. In 1988 Amano (1953–) spearheaded a movement of fishers, nature
484  notes to pages 71–72

writers, and concerned individuals from outside the Nagara River area; this
movement grew into a coalition of approximately 16,000 members. Kada Yukiko
et al., “From Kogai to Kankyo Mondai,” 162.
224.  Distant Thunder was translated into Chinese in 1980 and other writ-
ings by Tatematsu in the 1980s and 1990s. Also noteworthy is Tatematsu’s more
recent Shiretoko mori to umi no inori (Prayer for Shiretoko Forest and the Sea,
2006).
225. Much of Itō Hiromi’s earlier writing also concerns animals, includ-
ing “Eigo, Nihongo, Kanokogo” (English, Japanese, Fawnese, 1987), “Kanoko
goroshi” (Fawn Murder, 1985), and “Koyōte” (Coyote, 1987). Taguchi Randy’s
(1953–) Konsento was translated into Chinese in 2003.
226.  See Yūki Masami Raker, “Mizu no oto no kioku,” for more on Tagu-
chi’s Yakushima.
227. Thank you to Michio Arimitsu for bringing Ikegami Eiichi’s (1970–)
work to my attention.
228. Until recently Japanese scholars of literature and environment have like-
wise focused largely on Western-language literatures. As Scott Slovic has noted,
“one of the oddities of this entire process of building a constituency for envi-
ronmental literature in Japan is the fact that most of the Japanese scholars in-
volved with ASLE are actually specialists in American or British literature.” “Of
Frogs, Old Ponds,” 234. An excellent example of this phenomenon is Kamioka
Katsumi’s “Kankyō bungaku nyūmon,” 1–22. Although titled “Introduction to
Environmental Literature,” this article focuses almost entirely on Western writers
and environmentalists such as Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Aldo Leopold,
and Carson, all of whom have long been popular in Japan. Kamioka, a scholar
of American literature, devotes fewer than two pages to Japanese literature and
environment. Most of the articles appearing in the journal Bungaku to kankyō
(Literature and Environment, est. 1998), published by ASLE-Japan (Bungaku
Kankyō Gakkai; The Association for the Study of Literature & Environment, est.
1994) continue to focus largely on Western writers and literatures. One notable
exception is the 2007 volume, which contains a number of articles on Korean lit-
erature and environment. Other Japanese journals publishing ecocritical articles
include Ekokuriteishizumu rebyū (Ecocriticism Review, est. 2008), published by
the Ekokuriteishizumu Kenkyūkai (The Society for Ecocriticism Studies [in Ja-
pan]). In addition, the July 2010 issue of the Japanese journal Suisei tsūshin was
devoted to “Ekokuriteishizumu” (Ecocriticism), while the journal Ajia yūgaku
dedicated its July 2011 issue to “Nihon bungaku to ekokuriteishizumu” (Japa-
nese Literature and Ecocriticism). And the theme of the 2010 International PEN
Congress, held in Tokyo, was “Environment and Literature.”
229.  American nature writers have been incorporating Asian ideals since at
least Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) and Henry David Thoreau. David Lan-
dis Barnhill, “East Asian Influence on Recent North American Nature Writing,”
291. As Barnhill suggests, the impact of East Asian religious and philosophic
ideals of relationships between people and landscapes has been more profound
than that of particular literary works. Scholarship on the connections between
Japanese and Western literatures abounds. For an early study see Earl Miner, The
Japanese Tradition in British and American Literature. A more recent work on
 Notes to Pages 72–73  485

the early history of these interconnections that includes discussion of environ-

ments is Susan Napier, From Impressionism to Anime. Napier notes how it “was
in depictions of nature or outdoor scenes that . . . Japanese art was most influ-
ential . . . it is in Monet’s varied portrayals of the natural world that critics have
found some of the most interesting and subtle influences from Japanese art” (41).
230.  Gary Snyder lived in Japan from 1956 to 1968, and his work has been
translated into Japanese by Sakaki and others since the mid-1970s; Sakaki’s Jap-
anese-language writing has been translated into English since the 1960s. Sakaki
wrote some of his poetry and prose in English. Other American poets who be-
friended Sakaki include Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997), Michael McClure (1932–),
and Joanne Kyger (1934–). The volume Nanao or Never: Nanao Sakaki Walks
Earth A, edited by Gary Lawless, collects photographs, poems, sketches, stories,
and reports by American, Japanese, and other writers and environmentalists on
their interactions with Sakaki; it foregrounds the appeal of Sakaki and his work
to a broad range of individuals. For more on Snyder and Japan, including inter-
textualizations of Japanese literature in his creative work, see Yamazato Kat-
sunori, “Seeking a Fulcrum.” See also Patrick Murphy, ed., Critical Essays on
Gary Snyder. For more on Snyder and East Asia see Yamazato Katsunori, “Gērī
Sunaidā [Gary Snyder] to Higashi Ajia.”
231. Yamao (1938–2001) was close friends with Snyder in the 1960s and
then from the mid-1990s until his death. He wrote on a variety of environmental
issues, including Chernobyl. See also Nagakari Mayuri, “‘Jijitsu’ to shite.”
232.  Gary Snyder, “Foreword by Gary Snyder,” ix.
233. Other East-West environmental/literary symposia include one orga-
nized in 1987 by the Russian ecologist, novelist, and politician Valentin Raspu-
tin (1937–), which brought together Tatematsu Wahei and other leading figures
from the Japanese and Soviet literary spheres; this was the first of a number
of dialogues between Russian and Japanese writers. Karen Colligan-Taylor, The
Emergence of Environmental Literature in Japan, iii. In 1996, writers and schol-
ars from the newly founded ASLE-Japan (Association for the Study of Literature
and the Environment, est. 1994) and ASLE-US (est. 1992) held a symposium
on Japanese and American environmental literature at the University of Hawaii.
Environmental writers who attended included Ishimure Michiko and Hino Keizō
(1929–2002) from Japan and W. S. Merwin (1927–), David Quammen (1948–),
and Linda Hogan from the United States. Scott Slovic, “Of Frogs, Old Ponds,”
234. Hino’s novel Yume no shima (Dream Island, 1985) depicts Tokyo as a beau-
tiful but empty shell. In September 2010 Japan hosted the 76th annual Interna-
tional PEN Congress, the theme of which was “Environment and Literature”; the
Japan PEN club selected one hundred volumes of Japanese environmental litera-
ture for a publication distributed at the congress. “Environmental Literature.”
234.  In 2005 members of ASLE-Japan and ASLE-Korea collaborated on a
panel session at ASLE’s biennial conference in Eugene, Oregon. Two years later,
ASLE-Japan and ASLE-Korea held a three-day joint symposium in Kanazawa,
Japan, where papers were given in Japanese, Korean, and English, with simul-
taneous interpretation. Sin Munsu celebrates the significance of this meeting in
“Bungaku/kankyō kenkyū no tame,” rightly noting that just as environmental
problems have many causes and readily cross national borders so too must peo-
486  notes to page 73

ple of different nations work together for solutions (283). He also calls for the
creation of an “environment network” of writers and scholars of literature from
across East Asia (Japan and Korea in particular). Similarly, in her plenary speech
at the 2008 conference on “Contemporary Literary Environmentalism in East
Asia,” Japanese scholar Masami Raker Yūki discussed the importance of build-
ing intra–East Asian ecocritical networks. See Masami Raker Yūki, “Towards the
East Asian Network of Ecocriticism.” In 2009 historians of East Asia founded
the Association of East Asian Environmental History; chances are this group will
provide a model for intra–East Asian scholarly collaboration on literature and the
environment. Members can find inspiration in the activities of transnational en-
vironmental activist networks such as those Maria Guadalupe Moog Rodrigues
describes in Global Environmentalism and Local Politics. And in the fall of 2010
(October 30—November1) ASLE-Japan and ASLE-Korea held their second joint
symposium, this time in Seoul, featuring speakers from Korea, Japan, China, Tai-
wan, and the United States; most of the symposium papers focused on East Asian
literatures. Ecology, Consumption, and Otherness.
Scholarship comparing environmental literature in Japan and Korea dates
at least to the mid-1980s, with such articles as Saitō Bun’ichi, “Kin Shika [Kim
Chiha] to Miyazawa Kenji.” Recent Japanese-language edited volumes on litera-
ture and the environment have included contributions from multiple East Asian
as well as Western nations. See Ikuta Shōgo et al., eds., “Basho” no shigaku,
which has a section on Japanese literature, one on Korean literature (including
an essay by the Korean poet Ko Ŭn), and one on Gary Snyder by scholars from
Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and the United States; Yamazato Katsunori et al., Shizen
to bungaku no daiarōgu, which contains essays by Ko Ŭn and the Taiwanese
nature writer Liu Kexiang. Significant as well is Ko Ŭn and the Japanese writer
Yoshimasu Gōzō’s (1939–) coauthored volume “Ajia” no nagisa de: Nikkan
shijin no taiwa (On “Asian” Shores: Dialogue between a Japanese Poet and a
Korean Poet, 2005) and particularly Sagawa Aki and Kwon Taekmyŏng [Kuon
Tekumyon]’s coedited and cotranslated Chikyū wa utsukushii: Nikkan kankyō
shisenshū (The Earth is Beautiful: Selection of Japanese and Korean Environmen-
tal Poetry, 2010), which includes the works of more than 350 writers in Japa-
nese and Japanese-language translation. Sagawa and Kwon’s volume also gives
not only the Japanese pronunciation of Korean poets’ names, as is customary in
Japanese-language translations, but also the Korean pronunciation of Japanese
poets’ names. On the other hand, it does not give Korean translations of the
Japanese poems. The sheer number of writers involved in this project suggests a
bright future not only for environmental literature in Japan and Korea but also
for collaboration between Japanese and Korean writers. Also very promising
is Simon Estok and Kim Won-Chung’s edited volume East Asian Ecocriticisms,
now in preparation. These and similar intra–East Asian contact spaces are likely
to strengthen in coming years as interactions among writers from China, Japan,
Korea, and Taiwan continue to increase and as local and global environmental
concerns become more urgent.
235.  Satō’s dates are 1957–2007; Katō was born in 1977. The first film on
Minamata disease—Tsuchimoto Noriaki’s (1928–2008) Minamatabyō—kan-
jasan to sono sekai (Minamata Disease—Patients and Their World, 1971)—
 Notes to Pages 73–74  487

was followed by many others on this illness. See Takamine Takeshi, “Ishimure
sakuhin o yomu,” 131–64. Another noteworthy film is Kamanaka Hitomi’s
(1958–) Rokkasho Rhapsody, focusing on individuals affected by nuclear power
plants. See Kamanaka Hitomi et al., “Rokkasho, Minamata and Japan’s Future.”
236.  For more on Miyazaki (1941–), anime, and apocalypse see Marc Hair-
ston, “A Healing, Gentle Apocalypse”; Susan Napier, Anime, 193–218.
237.  Susan Napier, Anime, 175–92. For more on anime and the environment
see Ursula K. Heise, “Miyazaki Hayao to Takahata Isao.”
238. Susan Napier, Anime, 180. Another intriguing example of anime ad-
dressing human encroachment on environments is Takahata Isao’s (1935–) Heisei
tanuki gassen ponpoko (Heisei Badger Wars, 1994). Threatened with extinction
as Tokyo’s Tama New Town continues expanding, badgers transform themselves
into a variety of creatures, some of which can survive in the new built envi-
ronment. Also noteworthy is Kawamori Shōji’s (1960–) animated television se-
ries Arjuna (Chikyū shōjo Arjuna; Earth Maiden Arjuna, January 9–March 27,
2001), which features a high school student entrusted with saving the planet.
After the March 2011 Tōhoku disaster the acclaimed female manga artist Yam-
agishi Ryōko (1947–) made her “Phaeton,” inspired by the Chernobyl accident
and published in 1988, available online free of charge; this manga has inspired
considerable discussion, indicating the continuing importance of creative works
in helping peoples grapple with environmental crises.
Television broadcasts have also played an important role in awakening Japa-
nese environmental consciousness, including the NHK special Amerika Walden
shisaku no tabi (A Meditative Journey to America’s Walden, 1994), which en-
couraged viewers to read Walden and to “call for the protection of their own
loved places.” Walden has been translated into Japanese more than a dozen times
since 1911, and it has inspired countless Japanese writers. Katsumi Kamioka,
www.thoreausociety.org.
239.  Carter J. Eckert et al., Korea Old and New, 271. Ko Ŭn speaks of one
of these dams in “Sup’ungho,” an intriguing poem that describes a man chip-
ping away at the immense Supung Dam (on the Yalu River, between China and
North Korea) for decades until the entire structure collapses. Supung Lake sub-
sequently drains to reveal ancient tombs from the Koguryŏ (37 B.C.E.–668 C.E.)
and Palhae (Unified Silla, 668–935) periods. The poem claims that the man long
ago had pledged “to demolish the Supung Dam and resuscitate the old river”; he
concludes with a comment that until the Supung Dam is rebuilt, “the Yalu River
will have returned to the Yalu River of old.” Yet as the poem highlights, there are
many “old” Yalu Rivers; people have been making their mark on the river for
several millennia (302).
240.  Carter J. Eckert et al., Korea Old and New, 345.
241.  Park Chung Hee (1917–1979) also is known as Pak Chŏnghŭi. In 1960,
only 28.3 percent of the Korean population lived in cities with a population
greater than 50,000; by 1990 the percentage had nearly trebled to 74.3. Dong-
Ho Shin, “Economic Growth and Environmental Problems in South Korea,” 236.
242.  Conrad Totman, Pre-Industrial Korea and Japan, 169. These changes
merely shifted rather than lessened planetary demands.
243. The best-known example of environmental damage from this period
488  notes to pages 74–76

is that to coastal areas around Ulsan (southeast Korea) and to the Taehwa
River (which runs through Ulsan) caused by discharge of industrial waste. Ul-
san became a center of the Korean petrochemical and machinery industries in
the 1960s. Dong-Ho Shin, “Economic Growth and Environmental Problems in
South Korea,” 241. Other cities reporting pollution illnesses in the 1970s include
Pusan, Chinhae, Masan, and Kwangyang. For more on Korea’s environmental
movements, see Ku Do-Wan, Kankoku kankyō undō no shakaigaku; Su-Hoon
Lee, “Environmental Movements in South Korea.”
244.  Su-Hoon Lee, “Environmental Movements in South Korea,” 90.
245.  Chun Doo Hwan (1931–) is also known as Chŏn Duhwan.
246. The Onsan industrial complex, constructed in the early 1970s, is lo-
cated on Korea’s southeastern coast near Ulsan.
247.  Dong-Ho Shin gives survey statistics in “Economic Growth and Envi-
ronmental Problems in South Korea,” 244–45.
248.  The Korean writer Ko Ŭn’s poem “Kkot” (Flowers, 1986), discussed in
chapter 7, provides a literary perspective on this phenomenon.
249.  Su-Hoon Lee, “Environmental Movements in South Korea,” 116. The
Korean Federation for Environmental Movements (KFEM) was established in
1993 as an amalgam of local environmental groups that organized in the late
1980s. This group has called attention to the importance of clean air, water,
and soil, as well as waste reduction and antinuclearism. Connecting the environ-
mental movement to democratization, members of the KFEM envision an active
citizenry keeping watch over government and big business. See Seungsook Moon,
Militarized Modernity. Another important group has been the Citizens’ Move-
ment for Environmental Justice, founded in 1992. The KFEM and CMEJ have
faced substantial challenges in the last few decades.
250.  Statistics on current environmental conditions in Korea can be found in
the Environment White Pages (Hwangyŏng paeksŏ), published by Korea’s Minis-
try of Environment (Hwangyŏngbu). See also Hwangyŏngbu, 2009 Hwangyŏng
t’onggye yŏnkam.
251. Lee Myung Bak (1941–) is also known as Yi Myŏngbak. Some of
the projects he instituted include a more comprehensive recycling program,
the creation of the 286-acre Seoul Forest Park (2005), and the restoration of
Ch’ŏnggyech’ŏn (2005), a stream in the middle of the city that was an open
sewer after the Korean War, was covered with concrete in the 1950s, and now
is popular with both ducks and tourists. See Bryan Walsh, “Saving Seoul.” The
Ch’ŏnggyech’ŏn River Project recently won the Harvard University Graduate
School of Design’s 10th Veronica Rudge Green Prize in Urban Design for its con-
tributions to the quality of urban life and the future of humane urban environ-
ments. The prize citation noted that the project represents a “sea change in Asian
attitudes toward city design . . . to a more qualitative program that incorporates
quality of life and environmental sustainability into economic development strat-
egies.” Joan Busquets, “The Cheonggyecheon River Project in Seoul, Korea.”
252.  Edward B. Barbier, “Toward a Global Green Recovery: The G20 and
the Asia-Pacific Region.” China was third, with 33 percent. China enjoys the
world’s largest total green stimulus spending.
253.  See Choe Sang-hun, “Doubts Raised on Ambitious Korean Rivers Proj-
 Notes to Pages 76–77  489

ect.” Another ecoambiguous endeavor is the New Songdo City project being built
by Gale International on 1,500 acres of land reclaimed from the Yellow Sea off
Incheon. South Korea’s answer to Shanghai and Dubai, Songdo is designated as
a “green” city, with 40 percent of its acreage “green,” including a hundred-acre
park at the center. This supposedly will be one of the planet’s cleanest urban
areas. But environmentalists have decried what it has done to neighboring tidal
flats. David McNeill, “Gravity Defying.”
254. The Korean sociologist Lee Hongkyun notes this paradox in “Envi-
ronmental Awareness and Environmental Practice in Korea,” 178. Cited in Ju-
lia Adeney Thomas, “The Exquisite Corpses of Nature and History.” Andrew
Szasz speaks more generally of this phenomenon in Shopping Our Way to Safety,
where he notes the difference between those interested in their own health and
that of the planet. Giving the example of bottled water he comments, “clean
consumption [clean water] is compatible with, even requires, dirty production
[plastic bottles, etc.]. It is an amazing contradiction” (197).
255.  This paragraph is based on Peter Hayes, “Enduring Legacies” and “Un-
bearable Legacies.” See also Peter Hayes, “Extended Nuclear Deterrence” and
“The Path Not Taken.”
256.  The DMZ was created under the 1953 armistice agreement that halted
the Korean War.
257. Kwi-Gon Kim and Dong-Gil Cho, “Status and Ecological Resource
Value of the Republic of Korea’s Demilitarized Zone,” 3. Similarly, Cuba’s eco-
systems are said to have benefited considerably from American embargoes and
the collapse of the Soviet Union.
258.  Seung-ho Lee, “A New Paradigm for Trust-Building.”
259.  Julia Adeney Thomas, “The Exquisite Corpses of Nature and History.”
See also Alan Weisman, The World without Us, 183–90.
260.  Kim Yŏngha (1968–) spent time near the DMZ thanks to his father, who
was a military officer. Michael Standaert, “Korean Author Speaks at US Writing
Program.” For more on defoliants in the DMZ see Lee Si-Woo, Life on the Edge
of the DMZ, 49–50, 210–12. As Lee notes, areas of the DMZ that should have
trees dating at least to the 1950s are treeless because of the defoliant gramoxone.
In addition, the area’s fortifications prevent animal migrations such as those de-
scribed in David S. Wilcove, No Way Home. Exposing the paradoxical condi-
tion of animals in the DMZ are creative works such as “Nae sarang DMZ” (My
Love, DMZ), performed in cities around the world in 2010 by the Korean theater
group Mokhwa to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the start of the Korean
War. This play features a group of animals who fear that their paradise will be
destroyed if land mines are removed and the DMZ is developed.
The ironies of the DMZ mirror those of other environmentally devastated
sites, including the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, and, to a much lesser extent,
Okunoshima Island, Japan, which was a base for Japan’s lethal gas production in
the 1930s and early 1940s but now is a rabbit paradise. See Steve Featherstone,
“Life in the Zone”; “Imperial Army’s Poison Gas.” The Japanese-American nov-
elist and filmmaker Ruth Ozeki (1956–) describes similar spaces in her novel My
Year of Meats (1998), an exposé of the American beef industry: “These sites [of
former nuclear testing and development] are hazardous. . . Paradoxically, they
490  notes to pages 77–80

have conserved these desolate parts of the country. Often these landscapes hide
underground bunkers, but on the surface they are rich with flora and fauna that
have flourished, protected from families with fat-tired recreational vehicles, graz-
ing cattle, and other ruminants” (247).
261.  Writers compared the transience of human existence with the seasonal
cycle. They also contrasted the linearity of human life with the cyclical patterns
of the nonhuman world. Ho-Min Sohn and Peter H. Lee, “Language, Forms,
Prosody, and Themes.”
262.  Peter Lee, “Early Chosŏn Eulogies,” 164.
263.  Emperor Yuri reigned between 19 B.C.E. and 18 C.E.
264.  Korean poets were as eager to withdraw from society as their Chinese
counterparts. See Kim Jong-gil, “Introduction,” 24. For more on nature in clas-
sical Korean literature see An Changni, Hanguk ŭi p’algyŏng munhak; Min
Pyongsu, Hansi nŭn ingan kwa chayŏn ŭi mannam.
265.  See Pak Chun, Akjang kasa, 76–78. Kwŏn Kŭn (1352–1409) was one
of many writers to celebrate Mount Hwa. See, for instance, Pyŏn Kyeryang’s
(1369–1430) “Hwa-san pyŏlgok” (Song of Mount Hwa, 1425). Peter H. Lee,
“Early Chosŏn Eulogies.”
266.  Yi Kyubo (1168–1241), “Tongmyŏng Wang p’yŏn,” 72.
267.  Ibid., 77–78.
268.  Ibid., 69.
269.  Ibid., 76.
270.  This contrasts with Yi Kyubo’s “Lines on Not Beating the Ox,” where
the poem’s speaker urges people to pity, not abuse these animals, both because
oxen work diligently for people and because people could not survive without
them.
271.  For more on this story in the context of Yi T’aejun’s (1904–?) oeuvre see
Tatiana Gabroussenko, Soldiers on the Cultural Front, 115–16. Gabroussenko
rightly notes that in the 1930s and early 1940s Yi’s writing turned away from
social criticism to more personal concerns. Although “Rabbit Story” focuses on
one couple’s relationship with the animals they have raised, it points more gener-
ally to human-animal interactions.
272.  Yuasa (1910–1972) was raised and educated in Korea. For more on eco-
logical consciousness in Korean creative work published in the 1930s and 1940s
see Cho Namhyŏn (Cho Nam-hyon), “1930, 40 nyŏndae sosŏl ŭi saengt’aeronjŏk
chaehaesŏk.”
273. Sin Sŏkchŏng (1907–1974), “San san san,” 65–66. Hwang Tonggyu
was born in 1938; Pak Tujin’s dates are 1916–1998.
274.  Sin Sŏkchŏng, “Chayŏn kwa Rousseau,” 75. “Nature and Rousseau”
is dated February 1953 and “Mountains Mountains Mountains” January 1953.
The understanding of “nature” exhibited by the poem’s speaker diverges signifi-
cantly from that of Rousseau.
275.  Kim Kwangsŏp (1905–1977), “Sŏngbuk-dong pidulgi,” 236. Cf. Mun
Tŏksu (1928–), “Pilding e kwanhan somun 3” (Rumors about Buildings 3, 1997),
which features pigeons attempting to become habituated to a city under construc-
tion. Also noteworthy is Hwang Tonggyu’s “Siment’ŭ nara ŭi kkot” (Flowers in
Cement Country, 1993), which depicts an individual admiring flowers planted or
 Notes to Pages 80–83  491

at least placed by cement walls, asking that others be patient since he is “suckling
at nature’s breast” (61).
276.  Sohrab Sepehri (1928–1980), “The Water’s Footfall,” 28. Yi Hoch’ŏl’s
(1932–) popular Sŏul ŭn manwŏn ida (Seoul is Full, 1966) is another excellent
example of 1960s Korean literature on crises brought about by rapid urbaniza-
tion and industrialization. This novel, written when Seoul had a population of
less than four million (compared with more than 20 million in the Seoul metro-
politan area today), depicts an urban space plagued by serious social and envi-
ronmental ills.
277.  Yu Hyŏnjong was born in 1940 and Mun Sunt’ae in 1941. For more
on the DMZ and literature see Cho Pyŏngmu, “DMZ saengt’ae pojon kwa
munhakchŏk taeŭng.”
278.  Won-Chung Kim, “Dystopia and Toxic Discourse in Wonil Kim’s ‘Med-
itation on a Snipe,’” 53–54. Kim Wŏnil was born in 1942.
279.  Kim Kwanggyu (1941–), “Kohyang,” 37.
280.  The first edition of Uri rŭl chŏksinŭn majimak kkum: Kim Kwanggyu
sijip (The Final Dream that Drenches Us: Collection of Kim Kwanggyu’s Poetry),
the anthology in which “Hometown” appears, was published on October 20,
1979. Park Chung Hee was assassinated on October 26.
281.  The emphasis is mine.
282.  Sales of poetry skyrocketed in the early 1980s, leading some to call this
the “era of poetry.” Readers welcomed the writings of a new generation “full of
hostility toward the establishment and authority . . . [that] dismantled existing
poetic language and grammar.” Yi Nam-ho et al., “Twentieth-Century Korean
Literature,” 72-73. Ch’oe Sŭngho was born in 1954, Ch’oe Sŭngja in 1952,
Chŏng Hyŏnjong in 1939, Kim Hyesun in 1955, Song Sugwŏn in 1940, and Yi
Hyŏnggi in 1933. Korean writers of ecopoetry in addition to those whose texts
are analyzed in chapters 2–7 include An Dohyŏn (1962–), Chang Sŏkju (1954–),
Chŏng Chaewan (1936–), Chŏng Inhwa, Ha Chŏng-ok (1953–), Kim Chongsam
(1921–1984), Kim Myŏngsu (1945–), Kim Suyong (1921–1968), Kim Yongt’aek
(1948–), Ko Hyŏngnyŏl (1954–), Mun Insu (1945–), Pak Mokwŏl (1916–1978),
Sin Kyŏngrim (1936–), Yi Hasŏk (1948–), Yi Sangguk (1946–), and Yi Yŏngch’un
(1941–). Additional writers of ecologically oriented fiction include Chŏng Ch’an
(1953–), Chŏng Chin-gyu (1939–), Hong Sŏngwŏn (1937–), Hwang Sŏk-yŏng
(1943–), and Kim Yujŏng (1908–1937).
283.  Examples of texts addressing harm to animals include Cho Kyŏngnan’s
(1969–) novel Hyŏ (Tongue, 2007), which contains an intriguing subplot on dog
abuse, and Han Kang’s (1970–) story “Ch’aesikchuŭija” (The Vegetarian, 2007),
which features a woman who suddenly is revolted by meat.
284.  Cho Sehŭi was born in 1942 and Yi Namhŭi in 1958. The orderly phys-
ical appearance of Kim Chiha’s (1941–) “Cry of the People” belies the anguish
and outrage of its speaker. Unlike much late twentieth-century Korean poetry,
this text is written not in free verse but in lines of four letters each, lines that are
stacked four to a column. An outspoken critic of the Park Chung Hee regime
and individuals promoting militarized industrial growth, Kim Chiha was arrested
on several occasions. In 1974, authorities asked for the death penalty, accusing
him of violating Korea’s National Security Law by promoting class division. An
492  notes to page 83

international campaign was launched to protest his proposed execution, an effort

that drew together writers and intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky, Edwin Reis-
chauer, and Jean-Paul Sartre, as well as Japanese critics, journalists, scholars, and
creative writers including Aochi Shin (1909–1984), Endō Shūsaku (1923–1996),
Nakano Yoshio (1903–1985), Oda Makoto (1932–2007), and Ōe Kenzaburō
(1935–). Kim Chiha was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1976 but was released
in 1980. For summaries of Kim Chiha’s politics see Bruce Cumings, Korea’s Place
in the Sun, 373–74; Seungsook Moon, Militarized Modernity and Gendered Citi-
zenship in South Korea, 99. For more on Kim Chiha’s writing, including compari-
sons with Western writers, see Chang Yŏnghoe, “Han-Mi hyŏndae saengt’aesi e
nat’anan saengt’aeŭisik pigyo”; Hong Yonghi, “Kin Shika [Kim Chiha] no shi no
sekai to ekorojī teki sōzōryoku”; Kang Yonggi, “Kim Chiha wa Gaeri Sŭnaidŏ
[Gary Snyder] ŭi t’och’ak munhwa kŭrigo chayŏn”; Kim Wŏnjung, “Kankoku
ni okeru Gērī Sunaidā [Gary Snyder] kenkyū”; Sagawa Aki, Kankoku gendaishi
shōronshū; Saitō Bun’ichi, “Kin Shika [Kim Chiha] to Miyazawa Kenji.” For
more on Kim Chiha’s transformation from resistance poet to ecopoet see Hong
Yong Hee, “Jeeha [Chiha] Kim’s Poetic World and Ecological Imagination.” See
also Yamamoto Yōhei, “Teikō shijin kara kankyō shijin e.” See also Kim Chiha’s
lengthy narrative protest poem “Piŏ” (Vicious Rumors, 1972), which integrates
several references to ecodegradation into a dark parody of the authoritarianism
of the Park Chung Hee regime.
Kim Chiha was one of the first postwar Korean poets to gain a following in
Japan, thanks to early transculturations of his work. The resident Korean author
Ri Kaisei (1935–) published a volume of his writings in Japanese translation in
1975; twelve additional volumes were published in the 1970s. Japanese-language
scholarship on Kim Chiha also dates to the 1970s. Not surprisingly considering
Kim Chiha’s politics, some of his early work was first published in Japan. This
includes the Kim Chiha chŏnjip (Complete Works of Kim Chiha, 1975), edited
by the Kim Chiha Chŏnjip Kanhaeng Wiwŏnhoe and produced by Hanyangsa,
a Korean publisher based in Tokyo that put out a number of works on Korean
literature and culture. Also noteworthy is Ōe Kenzaburō’s admiration of Kim
Chiha, expressed in his Nobel lecture. See Karen Thornber, “Legitimacy and
Community.”
285.  Just as Long Parting from the Sea draws attention to Japan’s continuing
role in Korea’s ecodegradation, “Cry of the People” cites foreign industries as at
least partially responsible for Korea’s pollution.
286.  So too does Korean cinema, including such films as Chang Chunhwan’s
(1970–) Chigu rŭl chik’yŏra (Save the Planet!, 2003). See Peter Y. Paik, From
Utopia to Apocalypse, 71–92. Although in general Korean cinema has not en-
gaged with environmental degradation to the extent of its Japanese and Chinese
counterparts, audiences embraced Koemul (The Host, 2006). This film, based
on an actual incident and alluding to American use of Agent Orange during the
Vietnam War, features an American military pathologist who orders his Korean
assistant to dump 200 bottles of formaldehyde down the drain, poisoning the
Han River and spawning a dangerous amphibious creature. Shown in Korea
between July and November 2006, The Host quickly became the highest grossing
South Korean film of all time; it also inspired renewed demands to clean Korea’s
 Notes to Pages 83–85  493

most famous river. For more on recent controversies over American military pol-
lution of Korea, including discoveries of dioxin, a component of Agent Orange,
see Mark McDonald, “Dioxin Traces.”
287.  Hwang Tonggyu, “SOS,” 59–60.
288. For more on Korean interpretations of Gary Snyder see Kim Won-
chung, “Gary Snyder Studies in Korea.” For more on Korean interpretations of
Emerson and Thoreau see Kang Gyu Han, “The Development of Thoreau Studies
in Korea.” Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring has been translated into Korean several
times.
289.  Korean-language scholarship on Korean literature and ecodegradation
has boomed in recent years. Most criticism organizes literature on ecodegra-
dation by genre, ecological problem (e.g., pesticides, water pollution, nuclear
proliferation), or the oeuvre of a particular writer. See Chang Chŏngnyŏl,
Saengt’aejuŭi sihak; Chŏn Hyeja, Hanguk hyŏndae saengt’ae sosŏl ŭi sŏsajŏk
yuhyŏng kwa punsŏk ; Gu Chahŭi (Koo Za-hee), “Hanguk hyŏndae saengt’ae
sosŏl yŏngu,” “Hanguk hyŏndae sosŏl e nat’anan saengt’aeŭisik ŭi han yang-
sang,” and Hanguk hyŏndae sosŏl kwa ek’olrojijŭm; Im Dohan (Lim Do-han),
“Hanguk hyŏndae saengt’aesi wa ‘mul’ imiji,” “Inmunhak kwa saengt’aejuŭi,”
and “Saengt’aesi ŭi kwacha wa chagak ŭi kyegi”; Kim Ilyŏng, “Hwangyŏng kwa
munhak kŭrigo munhak kwa hwangyŏng”; Kim Kyŏngbok, Saengt’aesi wa nŏk
ŭi ŏnŏ; Kim Namsŏk, “Haebang yihu mundae hwangyŏng e nat’anan saengt’ae
uigi” and “Hanguk hwangyŏng munhak yŏngu”; Kim Sŏnhak, “21 seki Hanguk
munhak kwa saengt’aejuŭi”; Kim Ukdong, Munhak saengt’aehak ŭl wihayŏ and
Saengt’aehakjŏk sangsangryŏk; Song Yonggu, Hyŏndae si wa saengt’aejuŭi; Yi
Chaesik, Hanguk ŭi saengt’ae hwangyŏngsi; Yi Sŭngjun, Hanguk hyŏndae sosŏl
kwa saengt’aehak. Kang Yong-ki summarizes environmental writing in South
Korea in “Contemporary Environmental Writers of South Korea.”
Korean scholars founded the Association for the Study of Literature and En-
vironment (ASLE-Korea) in 2001. This organization has always been open to
specialists of English, Korean, and other literatures, although, as in Japan, most
early members were scholars of English literature. ASLE-Korea has organized a
number of conferences and workshops and has begun to work closely with ASLE-
Japan. Publications include translations of Korean literature with environmental
themes as well as the journal Munhak kwa hwangyŏng (Literature and Environ-
ment, est. 2002), which contains articles on Korean and Western literatures and
the environment. Japanese scholars also have published on Korean literature and
the environment, including Sasaki Ikubo et al., who summarize Korean environ-
mental literature in “Kankoku kankyō bungaku o megutte.”
290.  Liu Ts’ui-jung discusses these phenomena in “Han Migration and the
Settlement of Taiwan.” This paragraph is based in part on her account.
291.  Ibid., 168. Koxinga’s dates are 1624–1662.
292.  For a concise history of Taiwan’s sugar industry, see Chih-Ming Shih
and Szu-Yin Yen, “The Transformation of the Sugar Industry.”
293.  Taiwan became a province of China only in 1877.
294. Taiwan’s high mountain forests fared better. The Qing adopted laws
against exploiting resources in these spaces, allowing only military lumberjack
chiefs and their employees to engage in nonreclamation deforestation. These in-
494  notes to pages 85–86

dividuals harvested trees in the forests of western and northeastern Taiwan, but
the scale of their activities was small. During this time very little illegal logging
took place. For more on deforestation in Taiwan before the twentieth century see
Ch’en Kuo-tung, “Nonreclamation Deforestation in Taiwan.”
295.  This number does not include mountain aborigines. John Robert Shep-
herd, Statecraft and Political Economy on the Taiwan Frontier, 161. See also
John F. Richards, The Unending Frontier, 89–111.
296.  See the data provided in Ch’en Kuo-tung, “Nonreclamation Defores-
tation in Taiwan,” 715–21. Cf. Rhoads Murphey, “Asian Perspectives of and
Behavior Toward the Natural Environment,” 51.
297.  Chih-Ming Shih and Szu-Yin Yen, “The Transformation of the Sugar
Industry,” 43. Japan at first advocated “industry for Japan, agriculture for Tai-
wan,” then in the late 1930s “industry for Taiwan, agriculture for Southeast
Asia.”
298.  This reservoir was established at Sun Moon Lake (Riyuetan) in central
Taiwan by raising the water levels of Sun Lake and Moon Lake eighteen meters
to create a single body of water. See An-chi Tung, “Hydroelectricity and Indus-
trialization.” Taiwan’s first electric generator dates to 1888; its first hydroelectric
plant was established in 1905.
299.  Information on postwar forestry in Taiwan is taken from Ch’en Kuo-
tung, “Nonreclamation Deforestation in Taiwan,” 721–27. All former lumbering
sites are now recreation parks.
300.  Hsin-Huang Michael Hsiao, “Environmental Movements in Taiwan,”
33. For summaries of Taiwan’s early environmental movements see Li Jinghua,
Ziran xiezuo yu huanjing yishi yanjiu, 27–28, 32–36; Xu Longmei, “Taiwan
dang­dai ziran xiezuo yanjiu,” 169–70.
301. Robert P. Weller and Hsin-Huang Michael Hsiao, “Culture, Gender
and Community in Taiwan’s Environmental Movement,” 83. On the other hand,
although controversial, nuclear power has been shown to have a lower environ-
mental cost than many other forms of energy production. A large number of
environmental organizations were founded in Taiwan within months of the lift-
ing of martial law. Moreover, 90 percent of the 1,211 antipollution protests that
took place between 1980 and 1996 occurred after 1988. Hsin-Huang Michael
Hsiao, “Environmental Movements in Taiwan,” 34. Shi Xinmin’s Taiwan huan-
bao yundong shiliao huibian is a comprehensive study of Taiwan’s environmental
movements. Also noteworthy is the founding of the Taiwan Green Party (Taiwan
Lü Dang) in 1996, a political party devoted to the promotion of ecological sus-
tainability and social justice.
302. The Taiwanese government currently recognizes fourteen aboriginal
tribes. Terrence Russell and Darryl Stark, “Rewards and Perils of Fieldwork in
Taiwan.”
303.  After the Taiwanese translation in 1972 of the Austrian zoologist and
ornithologist Konrad Z. Lorenz’s (1903–1989) volume on animal behavior and
psychology—Er redete mit dem Vieh, den Vögeln und den Fischen (lit. It Talked
with the Cattle, the Birds, and the Fish; Eng. trans. King Solomon’s Ring: New
Light on Animal Ways, 1949)—there was a fifteen-year hiatus before Taiwanese
published their next translation of a major Western text on environmental con-
 Notes to Pages 86–87  495

cerns, the American ecologist and environmentalist Aldo Leopold’s famed A Sand
County Almanac (1949, Twn. trans. 1987). Wu Mingyi lists Taiwanese trans-
lations of prominent Western texts in “Dangdai Taiwan ziran xiezuo yanjiu,”
435–42. Juxtaposing translations with publications of key environmental writing
in both Taiwan and the West from 1634 to 2001 highlights the relative separ-
ateness of the two corpuses until the late 1990s. See also Li Xuancang’s list in
“Xiandangdai Taiwan ‘ziran xiezuo’ yanjiu,” 269. For more on the engagement
of Taiwanese environmentalists, including writers, with Western environmental
texts see Cai Yiwen, “Taiwan shengtai wenxue lunshu,” 51–62. Interest in envi-
ronmental writings from elsewhere in East Asia has been less extensive.
304.  Hsin-Huang Michael Hsiao, “Environmental Movements in Taiwan,”
36.
305. Yang Ming-tu, “Ecological Consciousness in the Contemporary Lit-
erature of Taiwan,” 307. Taiwanese writers of nonhuman-centered nonfiction
include Chen Huang (1954–), Chen Guanxue (1934–), Chen Yufeng (1953–),
Chen Zhenzhong (1954–), Du Hong (1964–), Du Xinzi, Fan Qinhui (1965–),
Gu Mengren (1951–), Han Han (1948–), Hong Suli (1947–), Hong Yinshen,
Huang Dongren, Jiang Xun (1947–), Jin Hengbiao (1942–), Li Jiemu, Liao Hon-
gji (1957–), Liao Hongmu (1957–), Lin Junyi, Lin Shaowen, Liu Kexiang, Ma
Yigong (1948–), Meng Dongli (1937–2009), Shen Zhenzhong, Wang Jiaxiang
(1966–), Wu Mingyi (1971–), Wu Sheng (1944–), Wu Yonghua (1959–), Xin Dai
(1949–), Xu Renxiu (1948–), Yang Xianhong (1953–), Yin Ping, Zeng Guihai
(1946–), and Zhong Qiao (1956–). Husluman Vava (1958–), Koarnhak Tarn
(Chen Guanxue, 1934–), Neqou Sokluman (1975–), Syman Rapongan (1957–),
Walis Norgan (1961–), Xia Man-Lan Bo An, and Yaronglong Sakinu (1972–)
are some of Taiwan’s most prominent aboriginal writers of nonfiction nature
writing. See Tian Qiwen, Taiwan huanbao sanwen yanjiu for brief biographies
of many of these writers, 17–34. Huang Xinya has published on these writings in
comparative perspective. See, for instance, Huikan beimei yuanzhumin wenxue.
Nature writing includes both fiction and nonfiction although in Taiwan the latter
is more common.
306.  Liu Kexiang (1957–), “Taiwan ziran xiezuo yuyan chulun.” Cited by
Chen Sihe, “Taiwanese Writings with a Maritime Theme in the 1990s,” 154.
Likewise, the nature writer Chen Jianyi has argued that nature writing is “a type
of literary form that has been drawn out of a dialectical process between na-
ture language and nature experience.” Chen Jianyi, “Faxian yige xin de wenxue
chuan­tong—ziran xiezuo.” Cited by Chen Sihe, 154. See also Wu Mingyi, “Ganx-
ing de ziran dizhi,” 38–62.
307.  Liu Kexiang, “A Nature Writer in Taiwan.”
308.  Lin Wenyi (1953–), “Zai huchenghe youan,” 118.
309. Yang Ming-tu summarizes Taiwanese nature writing in “Ecological
Consciousness in the Contemporary Literature of Taiwan,” 304–9. For more
comprehensive discussions, see Chen Yulin, “Taiwan 80 niandai huanjing yun-
dongxia zhi wenxue fazhan”; Xu Longmei, “Taiwan dangdai ziran xiezuo yan-
jiu.” Key texts include Han Han and Ma Yigong’s Women zhi you yige diqiu (We
Have Only One Earth, 1983), Liu Kexiang’s Feng niao Pinuocha (The Wind Bird
Pinuocha, 1991), Houshan tanxian (Adventures into Back Mountains, 1993),
496  notes to pages 87–89

Taiwan jiu lu tachaji (Inspecting Taiwan’s Old Trails, 1995), and the Xiao lü shan
(Little Green Hill) series. Many recognize We Have Only One Earth as triggering
Taiwan’s ecological consciousness.
310.  See Xu Longmei, “Taiwan dangdai ziran xiezuo yanjiu,” 159–63. Par-
ticularly noteworthy is the reception of Liu Kexiang’s 1992 essay “Zuihou de
heimian wuzhe” (The Last Black-Faced Dancers, 1992), which prompted one
of Taiwan’s most effective grassroots environmental movements. Nick Kaldis,
“Steward of the Ineffable,” 100. Kaldis has argued, “If not for their conceptual-
ization and representation, their inscription—literary and otherwise—into social
discourse, most of us would not know or have cause to care about many species
that arguably have been saved by collective, textually enlightened environmental
agitation . . . Nor would we have learned to value, (and tried to) protect, and pre-
serve places we may never see . . . [Writers] immerse us in places, relationships,
and ways of being that we experience nowhere else but in their writings. In the
process of reading such works our relationship to living things and natural spaces
is literally incarnated or permanently altered.” Kaldis, 88.
311.  See, for instance, Yu Youhua, Taiwan huanjing yiti telun, and particu-
larly the Taiwan Environmental White Papers (Huanjing baipishu). Peter I-min
Huang summarizes current problems in “Local Resistance.”
312.  Li-hua Zhong, “Farmers Rally.” Cited by Peter I-min Huang, “Local
Resistance,” 358. Japan has already completed its expropriating and is a postin-
dustrial economy, as Taiwan will be soon.
313.  Export of nuclear waste from Taiwan to North Korea has been thwarted
by objections from South Korea. In-Taek Hyun and Sung-Han Kim, “Introduc-
tion: The Environment-Security Nexus in Northeast Asia,” 4. Also alleviating
pressure on Taiwan’s ecosystems is its low birthrate, something that deeply con-
cerns the island’s politicians and planners. In May 2010 Taipei Mayor Hau Lung-
bin (1952–) declared, “my top priority is to tackle the issues of low birth rates
and an aging population.” “Taipei to Pay Couples to Have Babies.”
314.  Diane Wilson (1948–), An Unreasonable Woman, 122. The novel de-
picts exiled Taiwanese as fighting for the environmental health of their country
from afar.
315.  Mark Elvin, “Introduction,” 12–13. Citing Chen Hanguang, ed. Tai-
wan shilu 1, 204. For more on the varying depictions of nature in early creative
writing on Taiwan by Lang Dingyuan (1680–1733) and others see Cai Qingbo,
“Taiwan gudianshi ziran xiezuo yanjiu”; Cai Yiwen, “Taiwan shengtai wenxue
lunshu”; Wu Mingyi, “Dangdai Taiwan ziran xiezuo yanjiu,” 53–100, 417–22;
Xue Shunxiong, “Taiwan chuantong hanyu jiushizhong de ziran shengtaiguan.”
Chinese, Japanese, and Western visitors also published volumes of nonfiction on
Taiwan’s ecosystems. See Wu Mingyi, “Dangdai Taiwan ziran xiezuo yanjiu,”
83–97, 429–42.
316.  Nishikawa Mitsuru lived from 1908 to 1999. Yu Yonghe (fl. 1691–
1697) is best known for Bihai jiyou (Small Sea Travelogue, 1697), one of China’s
earliest accounts of Taiwan.
317.  Nishikawa Mitsuru, Sairyū ki, 391.
318. Fujishima Takeji (1867–1943), “Yingru yishu yanzhong de Taiwan
fengwushi.” Cited by Hsin-tien Liao, “The Beauty of the Untamed,” 39.
 Notes to Pages 89–93  497

319.  Robert Tierney, Tropics of Savagery, 141. Tierney’s principal focus is

Japanese depictions of “savages,” but his book also touches on imperial portray-
als of the nonhuman.
320.  Yang Kui (1905–1985), “Shinbun haitatsufu,” 64.
321.  Yang Kui, “Songbaofu,” 154.
322.  For more on Yang Kui and environmental concerns see Huang Huizhen,
“Yang Kui xiaoshuo zhong de tudi yu shenghuo.”
323.  Wu Zhuoliu (1900–1976), Ajia no koji, 29–30.
324.  Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang, Modernism and the Nativist Resistance, 2.
325.  To date, nature-centered Taiwanese drama, poetry, and fiction is out-
numbered by travel and historical reports with an environmental focus, eco-
logical essays, and nonfiction nature writing. Needless to say, the boundaries
between nature-centered nonfiction and nature-centered creative writing are fre-
quently porous.
326.  Zheng Qingwen (1932–), “Bian,” 150.
327.  Zhu Tianxin (1958–), Gudu, 151. References to damaged environments
appear throughout Ancient Capital. This novella, which intertextualizes Kawa-
bata Yasunari’s novel of the same title, was translated into Japanese in 2000. For
more on the connections between the two Ancient Capitals see Karen Thornber,
Empire of Texts in Motion, 384–85.
328.  Yang Mu (1940–) is the pen name of Wang Jingxian.
329.  Michelle Yeh, “Introduction,” xxvi.
330.  Ibid. In addition to those discussed in the following chapters, Taiwan-
ese writers of ecopoetry include Bai Jiahua, Hong Suli, Ji Mingzong, Jiang Ping,
Jiao Lin (1943–), Lin Fengming, Lin Jianlong, Sha Bai, Wang Qijiang (1944–),
Wu Chunxian, Wu Mingyi, Zhang Fangci, Zhan Che, Zhao Tianyi, and Zhuang
Bailin. For more on Taiwanese ecopoetry see Cai Yiwan, “Taiwan shengtai
wenxue lunshu,” 91–101; Xu Longmei, “Taiwan dangdai ziran xiezuo yanjiu,”
179–80. Some important Taiwanese aboriginal writers addressing environmental
concerns in their creative work include It Ta-os (Ken A-sheng, 1957–), Salizan
Takisvilainan (1981–), Tian Zheyi (1955–), Topas Tamapima, and Walis Norgan.
331.  Taiwanese officials were concerned by the island’s dependence on Mid-
dle Eastern oil, the danger of which the Arab oil embargo made abundantly clear.
Murray A. Rubinstein, “Taiwan’s Socioeconomic Modernization,” 373–74.
332. See also Chen Mingrou, ed., Taiwan de ziran shuxie; Taiwan Ziran
Shengtai Wenxue Yantaohui, eds., Taiwan Ziran Shengtai Wenxue Yantaohui
lunwenji; Guo Wenqing, “Liu Kexiang jiqi ziran xiezuo yanjiu”; Jian Yiming,
“Taiwan ‘ziran xiezuo’ yanjiu”; Jiang Baochai et al., eds., Taiwan de wenxue yu
huanjing.
Scholarship on literature and environment in Taiwan grew substantially in
the 1990s and 2000s. This trend is likely to continue, Taiwanese having recently
inaugurated ASLE-Taiwan (est. 2008). This group already has organized several
workshops on literature and the environment. One of ASLE-Taiwan’s objectives
is to foster cooperation with scholars from neighboring Asian countries, an en-
deavor that almost certainly will lead to exciting new developments in the field
of ecocriticism and in the study of Asian literatures more generally. Taiwanese
universities are also hosting major international conferences on ecocriticism,
498  notes to pages 93–104

including Tamkang University’s symposium “Ecocriticism in Asia: Reorienting

Modernity, Reclaiming Nature?” (December 4–6, 2010), which brought together
scholars from China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, India, Canada, and the United States.
333.  Nick Kaldis, “Steward of the Ineffable,” 96.
334.  Shang Qin is the pen name of Luo Yan (1930–), Chen Huang the pen
name of Chen Huihuang (1954–), and Bai Qiu the pen name of He Jinrong
(1937–). Yu Guangzhong was born in 1928.
335.  In-Taek Hyun and Sung-Han Kim, “The Environment-Security Nexus
in Northeast Asia,” 5–6.
336.  Nicholas D. Kristof, “When Our Brains Short-Circuit.” Kristof draws
on Daniel Gilbert’s analyses of human responses to threats.
337.  Peter Hayes, “Sustainable Security in the Korean Peninsula.” Approxi-
mately one hundred peace parks can be found in conflict zones around the globe.
Peter Hayes, “Unbearable Legacies.”
338. For more on postwar intra–East Asian literary contact nebulae see
Karen Laura Thornber, Empire of Texts in Motion, 375–86; “Legitimacy and
Community”; “Traveling Texts and Titles.”
339.  John Dower, Cultures of War, xx.
340. Ibid.
341. See Peter Dale, The Myth of Japanese Uniqueness; Kosaku Yoshino,
Cultural Nationalism in Contemporary Japan; Yoshio Sugimoto, An Introduc-
tion to Japanese Society; Harumi Befu, Hegemony of Homogeneity.

chapter 2

   1. For background on Sakaki see chapter 1.

   2.  Sakaki Nanao, “Hoshi o tabeyō yo,” 60.
   3.  Genesis 1:1 first cites God as telling the animals to “Be fruitful, multiply,
and fill the waters of the seas; and let the birds multiply upon the earth,” but then
urging people to “Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth and conquer it. Be masters of
the fish of the sea, the birds of heaven and all living animals on the earth.” This
latter exhortation is often contrasted with Asian discourse on living harmoni-
ously with the natural environment.
   4.  The most famous of these is in Hokuryū (approximately ninety minutes
by bus and train from Sapporo), which holds an annual Sunflower Festival from
the middle of July to late August. The festival features more than one million
spectacularly blooming plants and attracts over 200,000 visitors, who do every-
thing from attend symposia on flowers to ride bicycles among the flowers and
participate in a road race. That “Let’s Eat Stars” is dated September 1988, the
month following the second Sunflower Festival, suggests ambivalence concerning
this gathering.
   5.  Mere months after Sakaki’s death, Nakayasu Akira of Kyushu Univer-
sity unveiled a sunflower robot, appropriately named Himawari (sunflower),
which follows the motion of people’s hands. As Sakaki’s poem predicts, this ro-
bot dances, or at least moves, because of people.
   6.  Ecoambivalence is not surprisingly also a hallmark of much literature
 Notes to Pages 104–5  499

that does not address human damage to ecosystems. For instance, the Chinese
writer Zhou Zuoren’s (1885–1967) poem “Cangying” (Flies, 1920) reads: “We
speak of love, / love of all living beings. / But I—don’t think I can love them all. / I
can love wolves and monster serpents, / and I can love pigs that live in mountain
forests. / But I cannot love flies. / I abhor them, I curse them.” Also noteworthy is
Itō Hiromi’s short story “Houseplant,” where the narrator calls attention to the
arbitrariness of the category “weed.”
7.  Distinctions between attitudes and actions are necessarily porous. When I
speak of apathy, advocacy, celebration, protest, and similar phenomena as “at-
titudes” I am referring to emotions, beliefs, and perceptions as translated into
the more private language of narrative discourse; when I speak of these same
phenomena as “actions” I am referring to such situations as characters actively
protesting, boycotting, and pursuing or rejecting particular lifestyles. Of course a
large liminal area exists here too. Even more complex is the position of literature
itself—attitudes translated into language might still be attitudes, but translating
attitudes is an action. So in some sense all attitudes expressed in literature are
themselves actions or at least the residues of actions.
8.  This is in contrast to the majority of Japanese, whom broader public opin-
ion polls reveal to have developed strong anti-nuclear sentiment. Daniel Aldrich,
“Nuclear Power’s Future.”
The people of Taiji are said to regard dolphins as no more special than other
animals. In November 2010 Taiji Municipal Assembly President Katsutoshi Mi-
hara declared, “We believe that these are natural resources, to be used effectively,”
while fishing union representatives and other officials claim the dolphin activists
hypocrites; hunting dolphins for food, they argue, is “no different than killing
cows or pigs.” Eric Johnston and Minoru Matsutani, “Taiji-activists Showdown
Staged.” For more on the Taiji controversy see chapter 1. The Japanese land min-
ister Maehara Seiji’s announcement in September 2009 that the Yanba Dam and
the Kawabe River Dam projects (both in Gunma Prefecture) were being scrapped
was met with protests by local residents; the Japanese government, calling these
people “absolute victims” of the policy change, has promised both to compensate
them financially for the dam’s cancellation and to invest in the region in other,
more cost-effective ways. Ironically, for forty years (1952–1992) local residents
had strongly opposed building the dam. Today, few admit to being dam enthusi-
asts, but most are concerned with how the town will sustain itself economically
without it. The Yanba Dam is the first of dozens of projects the Democratic Party
government wants to cancel to revitalize Japan’s economy. See Martin Fackler,
“Bridge May Rise Even if Waters Don’t”; “Leading a New Life without a Dam
Vexes Yanba Residents”; “Maehara kokukōshō.” For background on the plan-
ning of Yanba Dam and on relocation policies, see Daniel Aldrich, Site Fights, 95.
Interestingly, on May 10, 2010, Japan’s National Institute of Minamata Dis-
ease announced that even those Taiji residents with high bodily concentrations
of methyl mercury have no mercury-related health problems, indicating that it
was safe for them to continue consuming contaminated whale and dolphin meat.
These claims were quickly discredited. Human and animal rights activists have
charged the town with poisoning its people by permitting them to eat mammals
known to be contaminated with mercury. Boyd Harnell, “Experts Fear Taiji Mer-
500  notes to pages 105–7

cury Tests are Fatally Flawed”; Minoru Matsutani, “Most Taiji Residents Rest
Easy”; “Taiji Locals Test High for Mercury.”
  9.  As Harold Fromm declares in his critique of Aldo Leopold’s assertion that
whatever upholds the “integrity, stability, and beauty” of the biotic is “right”
and that whatever does not is “wrong”: “Understood to exist in the mind of the
beholder, who selects a number of qualities and data to stand for the whole while
ignoring everything else, integrity or wholeness are nowadays seen as purely con-
ventional moments of understanding . . . As for ‘stability,’ the belief that ecosys-
tems are stable is no longer generally supportable . . . [‘Beauty’] is too obviously
culturally determined and consciousness-generated to require comment.” Harold
Fromm, The Nature of Being Human, 81–82. For more on fallacies of endurance
see Daniel B. Botkin, Discordant Harmonies.
10.  Marilyn M. Cooper, “Environmental Rhetoric in the Age of Hegemonic
Politics,” 236.
11.  See Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, Break Through, for more
on material and postmaterial needs and desires.
12. Raff Cody is the protagonist of E. O. Wilson’s (1929–) novel Anthill
(2010). After much trial and error, including killing animals for sport, Raff comes
to appreciate Alabama’s threatened Nokobee tract for its own sake. The narrator
of Anthill declares, “From his passion for Nokobee’s wildness, he drew his version
of the land ethic. Where farmers love the land for what it yields to their labor,
and hunters love it for the animals they kill and take away, Raff came to love
Nokobee for its own sake. It became to him another way to look at the world”
(139). But unlike the other members of the Gaia Force, a radical environmental
group he joins while attending Harvard Law School, Raff is determined to win the
battle for the Nokobee within rather than outside the law. And after graduation,
he becomes “the legal arm of one of the most rapacious land developers in South
Alabama,” making his position “dangerously ambiguous” (311). It is one that he
uses to his advantage, convincing Sunderland Associates that limited development
of the area is best financially, as well as ecologically. The novel concludes perhaps
too optimistically: “Because the Nokobee survived, he [Raff] survived. Because it
preserved its meaning, he preserved his meaning . . . He had restored its immortal-
ity, and eternal youth, and the continuity of its deep history” (378).
13.  Deep ecologists distinguish themselves from “shallow” ecologists. Greg
Garrard explains, “Whereas ‘shallow’ approaches take an instrumental approach
to nature, arguing for preservation of natural resources only for the sake of hu-
mans, deep ecology demands recognition of intrinsic value in nature . . . The shift
from a human-centered to a nature-centered system of values is the core of the
radicalism attributed to deep ecology, bringing it into opposition with almost
the entirety of Western philosophy and religion.” Greg Garrard, Ecocriticism,
21. Another extreme position is that of radical environmentalism, which argues
that “human society, as it is now constituted, is utterly unsustainable and must
be reconstructed according to an entirely different socioeconomic logic. . . . Eco-
radicals therefore denounce anyone seeking merely to reform, and thus perpetu-
ate, a society that they regard as intrinsically destructive if not actually evil.”
Martin W. Lewis, Green Delusions, 2. See also Mick Smith, An Ethics of Place.
 Notes to Pages 107–15  501

14.  This sort of speciesism long has been sanctioned by religions and societ-
ies. See Peter Singer, Animal Liberation; Jonathan Bate, The Song of the Earth,
176–204; Linda Kalof, Looking at Animals in Human History; Donald Worster,
“Nature, Liberty, and Equality.”
15. For more on Ishimure and Minamata disease see chapter 1. For addi-
tional background on Ishimure see Iwaoka Nakamasa, ed., Ishimure Michiko no
sekai. Particularly interesting is the ecofeminist Itō Hiromi’s discussion “Ishimure
Michiko to gendai shisō.” Yūki Masami Raker compares the work of Ishimure
with that of Morisaki Kazue (1927–), a Japanese poet and essayist raised in Ko-
rea who has chronicled the lives of Japan’s minorities. See Yūki Masami Raker,
“‘Shomin no bunka’ to ekorojikaru·aidenteitei [ecological identity]”; David
Goodman, “Introduction to ‘Two Languages, Two Souls.’”
16.  Ishimure Michiko, Kugai jōdo, 218.
17.  During the colonial period Chisso built a network of factories in Korea,
China, and Taiwan.
18.  Ishimure Michiko, Kugai jōdo, 255–56.
19.  In a developmental state business leaders and national economic bureau-
crats together plan an industrial economy, but the means of production are in pri-
vate hands. See Chalmers A. Johnson, MITI and the Japanese Miracle. Scholars
generally agree that South Korea and Taiwan both became developmental states
in the 1960s, while China became a semidevelopmental state after the Cultural
Revolution, with many of China’s largest one hundred companies remaining de
facto state enterprises.
20.  Ishimure Michiko, Kugai jōdo, 233.
21.  Ibid., 8–9.
22.  Ishimure likewise notes in the afterword to her Minamata trilogy (2004)
that what she most wanted to depict in this epic was “the purity of life and
the rich atmosphere of souls in harmony with nature.” Wakamatsu Michiko,
“Ishimure Michiko’s Tetralogy,” 50.
23.  Ishimure Michiko, Kugai jōdo, 9–10.
24.  Ibid., 107.
25.  Ibid., 123.
26.  The principal exception is an article from a supplement to the January
1957 issue of the Kumamoto Igakkai zasshi (Journal of the Kumamoto Medical
Society), included in the novel’s third chapter, that discusses the symptoms of a
cat afflicted by Minamata disease (118–20). The narrator also includes several
graphic descriptions of poisoned fish.
27.  Ishimure Michiko, Kugai jōdo, 159–60.
28. Sea of Suffering likewise reveals contradictions between local people’s
attitudes and actual behaviors toward animals, most significantly between the
fishers’ deep affection for and killing of fish. For instance, the narrator remarks
that Yuki would guide her boat to areas teeming with fish and “would call out to
them: ‘Hey there, hey fish, I’m here again today.’” The narrator continues, “In-
nate fishers often talk to the fish affectionately like this. Yet being from Amakusa,
Yuki had an especially cheerful way of speaking.” Ishimure Michiko, Kugai jōdo,
112. But in light of the vast devastation wreaked on the Minamata area by the
502  notes to pages 115–19

Chisso Corporation and its collaborators, conflicts in local peoples’ attitudes are
even more revealing.
29.  Ishimure Michiko, Kugai jōdo, 167.
30.  Ibid., 112.
31.  Ibid., 159–60.
32.  Ibid., 128.
33.  Ibid., 162–63. The implication here is that the sea is bountiful and heaven
generous.
34.  Ibid., 112.
35.  Daneshvar’s short story “Sutra” features a first-person narrator halluci-
nating that she is rising above the sky: “I’m sitting in the heavenly ship, steering
toward the earth. A certain mood has come over me that I’ve never felt before.
Seems like all the world, with all its oceans and all its mermaids, belongs to me
. . . Seems like all the fish, corals, ferns, and the vastness of the sea and land
and sky belong to me” (186). Daneshvar addresses environmental concerns more
directly in her novel Savushun (1969). In the 1950s she spent two years in the
United States as a Fulbright scholar at Stanford University, where she studied
with the American writer and environmentalist Wallace Stegner (1909–1993).
Echoes of Stegner’s writing appear frequently in her own.
36.  Ishimure Michiko, Kugai jōdo, 112.
37.  Similar phenomena occur on a smaller scale in texts such as the Chinese
writer Li Hangyu’s “Zuihou yi ge yulaoer” (The Last Angler, 1982). This short
story describes pollution and overfishing as drastically depleting stock; some spe-
cies that once were plentiful now are nearly extinct. Despite everything, the fisher
protagonist Fukui “thought of a beautiful plan. Now that he was the last angler
on this river, all the fish were his. He would wait until the fish got bigger and then
would catch them. His luck would return” (53).
38.  Ishimure Michiko, Kugai jōdo, 63.
39.  Gregory M. Pflugfelder, “Preface, Confessions of a Flesh Eater,” xv.
40.  Ogata Masato (1953–) has protested environmental destruction from the
local to the global. The volume Chisso wa watashi de atta (Chisso Was I, 2001)
collects his lectures and conversations. Ogata shared his story with the anthro-
pologist, writer, and activist Ōiwa Keibō (pen name Tsuji Shin’ichi), a professor
at Meiji Gakuin University and founder of the Sloth Club, a “Slow Life” environ-
mental group. In Japan Ōiwa is best known for his books on the “Slow Life,” be-
ginning with Surō izu byūteifuru: ososa to shite no bunka (Slow is Beautiful: Slow
Culture, 2001); he has written and translated a number of books on the environ-
ment. Ōiwa has also collaborated with the Canadian science broadcaster David
Suzuki, whose The Nature of Things is Canada’s longest-running documentary
series. Ōiwa earned his Ph.D. in anthropology from Cornell University and has
written on African Americans, Native Canadians, Jews, Japanese Americans, and
Japanese Canadians as well as Japanese culture.
After extensive editing and translating of local dialects into standard Jap-
anese Ōiwa published Ogata’s narrative in 1996 as Tokoyo no fune o kogite:
Minamatabyō shishi (Rowing the Boat of the Eternal World: An Unauthorized
History of Minamata Disease). Tokoyo (lit. eternal world) is the name of Ogata’s
homemade wooden boat, a replica of crafts used in the region before Chisso’s ar-
 Notes to Pages 120–22  503

rival and the widespread use of plastics, which Ogata and Ōiwa condemn as hav-
ing polluted waters near and far (127). In 2001 Karen Colligan-Taylor adapted
Ogata and Ōiwa’s text as Rowing the Eternal Sea: The Story of a Minamata
Fisherman. The acknowledgments of the latter volume note that “Rowing the
Eternal Sea is a revision and update of Tokoyo no fune o kogite by Ogata Masato
and Tsuji Shin’ichi” (ix). Differences between the two narratives will be noted as
appropriate; translations of passages appearing in Ogata and Ōiwa’s Japanese
text are my own. In general, I speak of Rowing the Boat of the Eternal World and
Rowing the Eternal Sea as narrated by both Ogata and Ōiwa. This is because it
often is unclear whether the opinions voiced are those of Ogata, those of Ōiwa,
or both. Discourse that is clearly Ōiwa’s or Ogata’s is identified as such.
41.  Ogata Masato and Ōiwa Keibō, Tokoyo no fune o kogite, 194–95.
42.  For more on Japanese terms for “nature” see Julia Adeney Thomas, Re-
configuring Modernity, 7, 32–34.
43.  Ogata Masato and Ōiwa Keibō, Tokoyo no fune o kogite, 16, 18.
44.  Ibid., 18.
45.  The title of the third section of the first chapter in the Japanese-language
Rowing the Boat of the Eternal World is “Tamashii kurabe” (Dueling Souls) and
that of the English-language Rowing the Eternal Sea is “Competing Souls,” but
the word “dueling” captures better the battles between fish and human souls
that this segment describes. On the other hand, the word “competition” better
illustrates relations among fishers, and between fishers and farmers. The fishers
compete among themselves for the largest haul; Ogata indicates how proud he is
of his father for catching more than anyone else. Ōiwa and Ogata also explain
status differences between farmers and fishers. The former believe themselves su-
perior to the latter because they “hold property—rice paddies, cultivated fields,
even forests,” whereas fishers do not own real estate. Ogata Masato and Ōiwa
Keibō, Tokoyo no fune o kogite, 14–15. Significant here is the simultaneous be-
lief that people are one with and can legitimately possess the nonhuman world.
Elsewhere in Rowing the Boat of the Eternal World Ogata makes the case for
the impossibility of landownership: “What exactly is ownership? For me, own-
ing something necessitates the responsibility of permanently managing it. If we
understand ownership this way it’s a joke to speak of land ownership. This is be-
cause owning land would mean having to outlive it [which of course is precisely
what we don’t want]” (156).
46.  Ogata Masato and Ōiwa Keibō, Tokoyo no fune o kogite, 196. The ves-
sels that do not return to port presumably have been sunk by their overload.
Noteworthy here is how quickly attention turns from the fate of the fish to that
of the fishers. The fishers are less concerned with killing fish than with being
punished for doing so.
47.  Ibid., 196.
48.  Ogata Masato and Ōiwa Keibō, Rowing the Eternal Sea, 164.
49.  Ogata indicates that he once had thought of planting a bomb at Chisso
but is glad now that he did not “disgrace our spiritual traditions in that way.”
Ibid.
50.  Ogata declares, “When a first and then a second [child] were born with
Minamata disease, we gave birth to a third and then a fourth child, raising them
504  notes to pages 122–23

all with love and care. Each one was a takarago, a treasure child.” Ibid., 162.
Interesting is Ogata and Ōiwa’s admonition elsewhere that “We talk about a
global crisis, but at the crux of this crisis is our own lack of awareness of how we
are affecting other living creatures, how we, as individuals, live our daily lives.
Minamata disease constantly shows a new face, whether it be the human popula-
tion explosion, overuse of pesticides, or nuclear proliferation.” Cited in Karen
Colligan-Taylor, “Translator’s Introduction,” 16. Ogata and Ōiwa here reveal
the strength of their ecocosmopolitanism. Although frequently acknowledged as
a significant contributor to global environmental degradation, overpopulation is
only rarely discussed as a concern to be addressed on a national, much less local
level. In fact, as Ogata’s comments suggest, worries about global overpopulation
do not seem to preclude celebration of high birthrates closer to home.
51. Demonstrating engaged environmental cosmopolitanism, Ogata makes
the point that terms such as “settlement” and “compensation” are relevant only
to human societies, asking, “Of what meaning are those terms for the fish, the
birds, the cats that were poisoned and killed by organic mercury? You can’t com-
pensate for their suffering and death with money. What about our rich intertidal
and subtidal zones, our old-growth forests? How can you make up for their loss?
You certainly cannot force them into a ‘settlement.’ I’ve been thinking about this
for a long time.” Ogata Masato and Ōiwa Keibō, Rowing the Eternal Sea, 164.
Rowing the Eternal Sea also includes a photograph of “Neko no haka” (Grave
for Cats), a monument in the garden of Sōshisha (The Supporting Center for
Minamata Disease, Minamata) to the cats who died of the disease (131).
52.  Several pages later Ogata states: “When I’m fishing, the sea is a battlefield
[senjō]. Yet there are also times when I think the sea is just beautiful.” Ogata
Masato and Ōiwa Keibō, Tokoyo no fune o kogite, 196.
53.  Ogata Masato and Ōiwa Keibō, Rowing the Eternal Sea, 163.
54. Ibid.
55.  See Ogata Masato and Ōiwa Keibō, Tokoyo no fune o kogite, 196; Row-
ing the Eternal Sea, 166. The motif of the hunter’s ambivalence about taking life
is a common one. For further discussion of this phenomenon see Axel Goodbody,
Nature, Technology and Cultural Change, 175–76; Matt Cartmill, A View to a
Death in the Morning, 120–21, 184–85; Donna Landry, The Invention of the
Countryside; George Reiger, The Striped Bass Chronicles.
56. Ogata Masato and Ōiwa Keibō, Tokoyo no fune o kogite, 113. The
Korean writer Yu Ch’ihwan’s (1908–1967) prose poem “Sŏnhan namu” (Kind-
hearted Tree, 1958) encapsules many of the ambiguities of Ogata and Ōiwa’s
attitudes toward the natural world:“There was a pine tree remaining on the side
of the road that I sometimes passed. Even when there was no noticeable breeze
it haphazardly spread its dark limbs high in the air and cried with whimpering
sighs. I would always stop beneath the tree and carelessly join my thoughts to its
sounds, happily letting them wander to the edge of the sky. One day I came by
and found that the tree had been mercilessly hewed.
“In truth, reality pushes us to cut down the tree, rather than enjoy the shade
it gives the roadside and the sounds it makes in the wind, and yet it isn’t enough
for providing heat. If so, then how could my palms make the profound sounds of
 Notes to Pages 123–26  505

the winds blowing through the pines, even though I, grieving, stand in the tree’s
place and reach my arms up high in the air?
“And yet above my head, in those boundless skies, it’s not that there is no
divine rhythm now coming and going. It’s only the absence of the kindhearted
tree that would bear witness to it that is simply heartbreaking.”
Like Ogata and Ōiwa, the narrator of “Kindhearted Tree” articulates deep
attachments to the nonhuman, including the voices of trees, winds, and skies,
which he attempts to reconcile with his need to harm ecosystems to survive. For
more on Yu Ch’ihwan see O Seyŏng, Yu Ch’ihwan.
57.  Matt Cartmill, A View to a Death in the Morning, 31. Cartmill argues
that this is the case because hunting “takes place at the boundary between the
human domain and the wilderness” and the hunter “stands with one foot on each
side of the boundary, and swears no perpetual allegiance to either side” (31).
Boundaries between the “human domain” and the “wilderness” are far more po-
rous than Cartmill suggests and perhaps are just as ambiguous as the figure of the
hunter. Other texts exposing the paradox of the hunter include Yang Mu’s poem
“Xiaoxi” (News, 1958), which repeats the lines, “On the road [home], [still]
many dead birds / people with rifles [still] wiping sweat / Looking at the scen-
ery,” and the indigenous Inupiaq writer Herbert O. Anungazuk’s (1945–2010)
“An Unwritten Law of the Sea”: “The hunter has a profound alliance with the
mammals of the sea, an alliance that involves the spiritual beliefs of many, many
hunters . . . many hunters continue to respect animals in spirit . . . Our ancient re-
lationship with the sea is a relationship that you will not see among other groups
of people. The relationship extends to all creatures that the sea and ice harbor,
and it is this relationship that has made us into a class of hunters unmatched
among other societies” (195).
58.  Ishimure Michiko, “Shinwa no umi e,” viii.
59. Early in his narrative Ogata notes that people in his town, located at
some distance from Minamata proper, paid little attention to news of the first
outbreak of Minamata disease; they only began taking the disease seriously when
it affected them personally. Ogata Masato and Ōiwa Keibō, Tokoyo no fune o
kogite, 21.
60.  Rowing the Boat of the Eternal World and Rowing the Eternal Sea both
highlight disagreements among Minamata activists.
61.  Ōiwa Keibō, “Epilogue,” 185.
62.  Ogata Masato and Ōiwa Keibō, Rowing the Eternal Sea, 175.
63.  Ogata Masato and Ōiwa Keibō, Tokoyo no fune o kogite, 156.
64.  Ogata Masato and Ōiwa Keibō, Rowing the Eternal Sea, 132, 146.
65.  Ibid., 132.
66.  Frank Yasuda’s (1868–1958) Japanese name was Yasuda Kyōsuke. Nitta
includes a list of reference works at the end of the novel. Nitta Jirō, Arasuka
monogatari, 242.
67.  For more on the whale in Australian Aboriginal thought see Sissy Helff,
“Sea of Transformation.”
68.  Two of the former are The Tall Smokestack of a Certain Town and De-
scendants of the Mist, while an excellent example of the latter is Hakkōdasan
506  notes to pages 126–30

shi no hōkō (Death March on Mount Hakkōda, 1971). Death March describes
how, preparing for a likely war against Russia (the Russo-Japanese War, 1904–5),
and deciding that their soldiers need practice marching across frigid snowy land-
scapes, the Japanese military sends several companies on treacherous marches
around Mount Hakkōda at the height of winter. The results are tragic, with 199
of the 210 participants perishing. Nitta’s publisher advertised this as the story of
“people confronting mighty nature’s violence.” (The advertisement appears on
the cover flap of the seventh volume of the Nitta Jirō zenshū [Complete Works
of Nitta Jirō], a volume devoted to texts that portray encounters with “mighty
nature.”) But Nitta’s book also highlights the human role in bringing about this
tragedy: the enlisted men for the most part blindly follow the orders of their supe-
riors, and even more prominently, their superiors, however unwittingly, use the
nonhuman to hasten human suffering and death. Other of Nitta’s novels, includ-
ing Tale of Alaska and Mikkōsen Suianmaru (Stowaway Ship Suianmaru, 1982),
describe the experiences of Japanese entrepreneurs and émigrés. Nitta’s work was
available in Chinese beginning in the 1980s: Death March, for instance, was
translated in 1982.
69.  This required a walk of 150 miles: 130 miles to the south, followed by
20 miles to the northeast.
70.  Tale of Alaska refers to the indigenous people of Alaska as Eskimo.
71.  Frank is uncomfortable with several indigenous customs, including wife
swapping before whale hunts as well as the hunts themselves. The novel’s descrip-
tion of his reaction to killing a whale exposes the brutality—albeit seemingly
inevitable—of even indigenous techniques: “The sea turned red, and the whale’s
struggle gradually subsided . . . Frank [who had thrown a harpoon at the whale]
felt that he had done something horrible . . . The gigantic body floated up, show-
ing its whitish belly. When Frank understood that the battle with the whale had
ended, he felt the world go dark. Sitting in the umiak, he struggled for breath”
(Arasuka monogatari, 67–68).
72.  The population of Beaver, Alaska remains largely Native American.
73.  Arasuka monogatari, 68.
74.  Witi Ihimaera (1944–) generally is regarded as the Māori’s most promi-
nent living writer; he was the first Māori to publish a novel.
75. In The Sacred Hoop, Paula Gunn Allen calls the theme of genocide an
“all-pervasive feature” of Native American poetry (155–56). See also Joni Adam-
son, American Indian Literature; Barbara J. Cook, ed., From the Center of Tradi-
tion; Emily Hegarty, “Genocide and Extinction in Linda Hogan’s Ecopoetry”; M.
Jimmie Killingsworth, “Ecopolitics and the Literature of the Borderlands”; Ra-
chel Stein, “Activism as Affirmation.” For alternate perspectives see Paula Gunn
Allen, “The Sacred Hoop”; Leslie Marmon Silko, “Landscape, History, and the
Pueblo Imagination.”
76.  Nitta Jirō, Arasuka monogatari, 9.
77.  Ibid., 10.
78.  Ibid., 82. The narrator elsewhere contrasts the indigenous peoples’ obey-
ing the new laws of the sea with outsiders’ blatantly flouting them (93).
79.  Ibid., 81. This comment follows the narrator’s own observation that “the
Sea Wolf left behind a bloody sea. The whales had all vanished from the sea” (81).
 Notes to Pages 130–35  507

80.  An extreme example of this phenomenon—those with deepest ties to an

animal driving it to slaughter—is the thriving cow smuggling trade from Hindu-
majority India, where cows are sacred, to Muslim-majority Bangladesh, where
cows are eaten with gusto. Mark Magnier, “Many Indian Cows Meet Unholy
End.” See also Vandana Shiva, Soil not Oil, 77–94.
81. The narrator of Wilson’s novel describes local fishers in the American
South as being held responsible for dolphins “[dying] like flies. Some blamed
deadly pesticides and speculated that the spring’s heavy rains and flooding had
washed pesticides and other contaminants into the bay. Some went even further
and nailed the pesticide Aldicarb . . . Then two biologists came to Seadrift to test
the channel . . . Due to the severity of the weather, the biologists only tested three
sites, and all for arsenic . . . Later the state sent the report back, and arsenic limits
were exceeded in two of the three sites, but their finding: overfishing. A simple
case of victim fingered as perpetrator” (205). Local fishers also are blamed for
polluting the waters. As one Formosa Plastics supporter charges: “You’re shut-
ting it down, is what you’re doin’, and that’s all your doing. It hasn’t got a thing
to do with the environment. You’re a shrimper and antiprogress. Wanting to stop
everything that doesn’t have to do with fishing. Why, your outboard motors put
more oil out there into the bay then all those industries do. It’s a fact! Look it
up!” (98).
82.  Nitta Jirō, Arasuka monogatari, 82.
83.  The Obama administration lifted the deepwater drilling moratorium in
October 2010, but many remained unsatisfied and called for additional permits
for drilling in both deep and shallow waters.
84. Topas Tamapima’s work has won numerous literary prizes and been
translated into Japanese. “Sunset Cicadas” (1987) features a retired tribesperson
who returns to his village for the first time in forty years after a successful career
working for IBM; as a young man he had abandoned his aboriginal registra-
tion but now has reclaimed this identity. This man’s dreams of reintegrating into
tribal life are shattered: his village has been transformed into a historical site that
charges an admission fee; this is a destination of wealthy Taiwanese hoping to
escape the city. Aboriginals remaining on the outskirts of this site suspect him,
like so many returnees, of having failed at city life.
85.  Other recent Taiwanese writing on the importance of hunting in aborigi-
nal cultures and the impacts of its prohibition on indigenous peoples include
Yaronglong Sakinu’s (1972–) essay “Shan yu fuqin” (The Mountains and My
Father, 1997) and Wu Junxian’s (1954–) poem “Yuanzhumin” (The Aborigines,
2002). See also Chi Chun-chieh, “From The Last Hunter to Traditional Ecologi-
cal Knowledge.”
86.  John Balcom, “Translator’s Introduction,” xvii.
87.  Topas Tamapima, “Zuihou de lieren,” 30.
88.  The Chinese of “The Last Hunter” occasionally reads somewhat awk-
wardly but is readily understood, unlike the Chinese of texts by Taiwanese ab-
original writers such as Adaw Palaf (1949–), where Mandarin structures are
significantly distorted. John Balcom, “Translator’s Introduction,” xxi. Very few
texts are written in aboriginal languages; most indigenous Taiwanese writers, like
their counterparts around the world, recognize that so doing would greatly limit
508  notes to pages 135–39

their audience. One significant exception outside Taiwan is the Navajo writer and
Princeton graduate Rex Lee Jim (1962–), who believes that writing in English,
and even translating his texts into English, would “sap them of their potency”
and “undermine efforts to encourage younger people to learn the [Navajo] lan-
guage.” Rex Lee Jim is part of the first generation of Navajo writers to write and
publish in Navajo. Mark Bernstein, “The Poet as Politician.”
  89.  In “Rewards and Perils of Fieldwork in Taiwan” Terrence Russell and
Darryl Stark note that although nonindigenous Taiwanese writers often lament
the loss of their childhood homes, frequently to urban development, indigenous
writers speak frequently of lost cultural space.
  90.  Topas Tamapima, “Zuihou de lieren,” 31–32.
  91.  Ibid., 19. Intriguingly, while the government officials characterize the
hunters as overly stubborn the hunters believe the flatlanders overly malleable.
  92.  The forest in which Biyari hunts is not bereft of animals, only of those
he is determined to catch.
  93.Topas Tamapima, “Zuihou de lieren,” 10. In fact, smoke and soot from
relatively primitive cookstoves are emerging as major sources of global climate
change. Elisabeth Rosenthal, “Soot from Third-World Stoves.”
  94.  Topas Tamapima, “Zuihou de lieren,” 17. Biyari then contrasts his wife
with the forest, claiming that, quite unlike the Garden of Eden, she resembles ma-
ples that turn red in the fall and lose their charm in winter. Intent on belittling his
wife, he appears unaware of the contradictions in his thinking: the forest that he
had just celebrated is not always green; red maple leaves in fact color the woods
for several weeks each year. Here Biyari clearly is romanticizing the nonhuman,
appreciating it not for what it is but instead for the things it alone can do for him.
  95.  Topas Tamapima, “Zuihou de lieren,” 26.
 96. Ibid., 16.
 97. Ibid., 9.
 98. Ibid., 17.
  99.  Noteworthy is Biyari’s taking issue with the Taiwanese government’s re-
strictions on how the forests are used, not with the government’s assertion that it
has the right to decide how they are used. Unlike their ancestors, Biyari and other
members of his community appear to have become inured to the government’s
claims over the island’s ecosystems. As a member of the Sejiq/Taroko nation re-
cently noted, describing an encounter his grandfather had with a Japanese police-
man soon after the handover of the island to Japan in 1895 on what he believed
were his hunting grounds, “The Treaty of Shimonoseki . . . had nothing to do
with us indigenous people . . . We were not even consulted when they decided that
our forests belong to them.” Scott Simon, “Writing Indigeneity in Taiwan,” 51.
100.  Biyari’s wife has threatened to move back to her father’s house if he does
not return with money to patch the walls of their home, money he should be able
to earn by catching and selling a mountain deer.
101.  Topas Tamapima, “Zuihou de lieren,” 24.
102.  Ibid., 27.
103.  Ibid., 28.
104.  Ibid., 32.
105.  For more on the development of national parks in Taiwan see Thomas
 Notes to Page 139  509

R. H. Havens, Parkscapes, 80–85. Cf. the South African writer Zakes Mda’s
(1929–) acclaimed novel The Heart of Redness (2000). This stirring tale of rural
life in South Africa, with a title that clearly plays on Joseph Conrad’s (1857–1924)
novel The Heart of Darkness (1902), features a struggle between two groups, the
Believers and the Unbelievers. In postapartheid South Africa the groups struggle
over whether to allow a casino and waterpark to be constructed in their village.
The Unbelievers do not deny that ecosystems will be compromised, but they sup-
port the venture, certain that “This is a lifetime opportunity . . . We cannot stop
civilization [boats, waterskiing, jet skiing, surfing, and mammoth roller coasters]
just because some sentimental old fools want to preserve birds and trees” (67). In
contrast, the Believers strongly oppose the project, arguing that something of this
magnitude “cannot be built without cutting down the forest of indigenous trees,
without disturbing the bird life, and without polluting the rivers, the sea, and its
great lagoon” (119). Camagu, a Westernized African, presents a third option,
promoting tourism that will “not destroy indigenous forests” (201). Although
they have very different visions of this region’s future, Camagu, the Believers,
and the Unbelievers all downplay potential environmental degradation. The final
pages of Heart of Redness reveal that what started as a backpackers’ hostel has
become a thriving holiday camp. It is only a matter of time before tourists out-
number trees. Cf. Astrid Feldbrügge, “The Human and the Non-Human World,”
158–59. For more on the South African context of Heart of Redness see Jennifer
Wenzel, Bulletproof, 174–87. See also Anthony Vital, “Situating Ecology. The
Māori writer Patricia Grace’s (1937–) novel Potiki (1986) describes indigenous
people (the Māori) who unlike those in Topas Tamapima’s text actively struggle
against a planned tourist resort. For an extreme instance of government conserva-
tion policies harming local peoples see the Indian writer Amitav Ghosh’s (1956–)
novel The Hungry Tide (2004), which highlights the potentially catastrophic hu-
man costs of prioritizing animals and the nonhuman more generally. For more on
these questions and the background of Ghosh’s novel see Neel Ahuja, “Postcolo-
nial Critique in a Multispecies World,” 559; Divya Anand, “Locating the Politics
of the Environment and the Exploited”; Paul Greenough, “Hunter’s Drowned
Land”; Jens Martin Gurr, “Emplotting an Ecosystem”; Graham Huggan and
Helen Tiffin, Postcolonial Ecocriticism, 185–90; Nishi Pulugurtha, “Refugees,
Settlers.” In “Don’t Fence Me Out” Elizabeth Hightower summarizes collabora-
tive efforts between conservationists and local peoples and the difficult choices
both confront. See also Caroline Alexander, “Tigerland”; “At Indian Preserves”;
Mark Dowie, “Conservation Refugees”; Caroline Ford, “Reforestation, Land-
scape Conservation”; Simon Romero, “To Protect Galápagos.”
106.  Topas Tamapima, “Zuihou de lieren,” 33. In their encounter the police-
man also lets Biyari know that he is not the only tribal hunter to have been caught
breaking the law. He exclaims: “All you hunters should be incarcerated, to teach
you a lesson . . . I’m a benevolent guy and can’t stand to have you kill animals
indiscriminately. So I have to arrest you. It doesn’t matter whether you have a
hunting rifle. You stole the products of the forest” (32). On the other hand, the
policeman appears to relish the meat he seizes from the backpacks of tribal hunt-
ers as they exit the forest. More important, the narrator reveals earlier in the
story that before the fire of uncertain origin that razed the forest, the Forestry
510  notes to pages 140–45

Bureau had felled the area’s valuable timber. “The Last Hunter” thus strongly
suggests that despite present efforts to protect mountain areas from human inter-
vention, the bureau has itself played a significant role in the region’s degradation.
107.  Lawrence Buell, Ursula Heise, and Karen Thornber summarize ecocriti-
cal treatments of indigenous literatures in “Literature and Environment.”
108. Providing an important contrast with “The Last Hunter” is Mahas-
weta Devi’s short story “The Hunt,” which features Indian tribal peoples joyfully
hunting when there is nothing to hunt. As the narrator comments, “The [women]
don’t know why they hunt. The men know. They have been playing the hunt for
a thousand million moons on this day. Once there were animals in the forest, life
was wild, the hunt game had meaning. Now the forest is empty, life wasted and
drained, the hunt game meaningless. Only the day’s joy is real” (12).
109.  Most of Huang Chunming’s stories from the late 1960s focus on indi-
viduals confronted with disintegrating agrarian communities and portray tech-
nology as threatening cherished values. Later writings demonstrate increased
sympathy for human suffering. Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang, Modernism and the
Nativist Resistance, 153–59. Other of Huang’s writings addressing ecodegrada-
tion include the short story “Nisi yizhi laomao” (The Drowning of an Old Cat,
1974), which discusses the downsides of constructing a community swimming
pool. Huang Chunming was drawn to the writings of Anton Chekov (1860–
1904) and Shen Congwen at an early age. He is also an avid reader of Ernest
Hemingway (1899–1961) and Mark Twain (1835–1910), among other American
writers.
110.  Huang Chunming, “Fangsheng,” 73.
111.  Ibid., 77–78.
112.  Ibid., 90.
113.  Ibid., 95.
114.  Ibid., 105–6.
115.  Ibid., 111.
116.  Ibid., 93.
117.  Ibid., 114–15.
118.  An intriguing corollary to the ecoambivalence depicted in “Set Free”—
anger both at ecodegradation and at the anticipated regeneration of nonhuman
species damaged by this degradation; anger both at industry for polluting the
environment at human expense and at the government for protecting the environ-
ment at human expense—is found in several selections of Nagatsu Kōzaburō’s
Genbakushi 181 ninshū (Atomic Bomb Poetry: Collection of Poems by 181 Peo-
ple, 2007). While the Zhuangs fear that regeneration of flora will increase human
suffering, a handful of poems in the Japanese anthology express fear that regen-
eration of flora obscures or even erases memories of human suffering. Atomic
Bomb Poetry depicts diverse interactions among people and their environments.
Not surprisingly, many selections expose the human devastation of Hiroshima’s
nonhuman. Also appearing in significant numbers in Atomic Bomb Poetry are
texts that depict people as at the mercy of devastated environments. More subtle
but perhaps over time just as destructive to people and the nonhuman is the
alacrity with which certain parts of environments “recover,” or at least appear to
“recover,” from nuclear testing and deployment. No selection in Atomic Bomb
 Notes to Page 147  511

Poetry advocates actively preventing regeneration of the nonhuman. At the very

least, exposure to a flourishing landscape can give hope to people in despair. But
it also can provoke anxiety. For instance, the speaker in Makabe Jin’s (1907–
1984) poem “Midori osanaku” (Young Green) comments: “You likely saw. / The
seven rivers that run so clearly / reflecting the image of every butterfly, missing
not a one, / flowing into the ebbing tide of the sea. / Where do they harbor the
afterimages of the bloody river, the valley of corpses?” Genbakushi 181 ninshū,
48. Hara Tamiki’s (1905–1951) poem “Hika” (Elegy) points to individual suf-
fering concealed by a flourishing nonhuman: “Green has already come to the
willows by the moat / smiling under the sky, wrapped in drizzly mist // Water
clearly stands still / asking for an elegy in my heart // As if all parting words were
exchanged so casually / as if all grief were wiped away so casually” (22). And
Yi Mija (1934–) concludes “Hasu no hana” (Lotus Flower), a poem lamenting
the multiple traumas experienced by Korean survivors of the atomic bomb, with
comments on an oppressively verdant nonhuman: “Suffocating green of life /
Toward a penetratingly clear summer sky / Pale pink lotus flowers are blooming,
/ Rhizomes growing fat in the mud / As though nothing had happened” (150).
See also Kurihara Sadako (1913–2005), “Hiroshima no midori” (The Green of
Hiroshima, 1960) and “Kawa” (River, 1966). As Chris Pearson notes in Scarred
Landscapes, environments can just as easily conceal as reveal atrocities: “The
natural environment is not a reliable preserver of memory. As well as being obliv-
ious to human concerns to remember the past, nature is an active force with the
ability to cover up, change or challenge sites of historical significance” (168). For
more on this phenomenon see chapter 7.
119.  Bonnie S. McDougall and Kam Louie, The Literature of China in the
Twentieth Century, 400–401. For the most part, A Cheng’s oeuvre also places
less emphasis on violence and brutality than one generally finds in “roots-seek-
ing” writers. A Cheng is most famous for Qi wang (King of Chess, 1984), a
novella on the experiences of educated youth in China’s southwest that ignited
an “A Cheng fever” in China and abroad; this text additionally inspired Chinese
interest in primitivism. McDougall and Louie, 400–401. Also noteworthy are the
novella Haizi wang (King of Children, 1985), which likewise describes life during
the Cultural Revolution, and Biandi fengliu (Romances of the Landscape, 1985),
which speaks of customs in rural China. I discuss A Cheng’s short story “Zhou-
zhuan” (Turnover, 1988) in chapter 6.
120.  Approximately 300,000 young men and women relocated in 1964. Ju-
dith Shapiro, Mao’s War against Nature, 159. The remainder of this paragraph is
based on Shapiro, 159–93.
121.  To give another example, more than 1.2 million educated youth (zhiq-
ing) were sent to the Great Northern Wilderness (Sanjiang [Three Rivers] Plain in
Heilongjiang Province), where they destroyed more than 100,000 acres of wet-
lands and much of the region’s forest cover.
122.  Yue Gang, “The Strange Landscape of the Ancient,” 68, 72. Cited by
Thomas Moran, “Lost in the Woods,” 212.
123.  For more on Zhuangzi’s parable see chapter 1. References to this par-
able appear in twentieth-century Korean literature as well. Examples include the
poet Ch’oe Sŭngho’s (1954–) “Pŏlmok” (Logging, 1983) and the poet Chŏng
512  notes to pages 148–51

Hyŏnjong’s “Sich’angjak kyosil” (Poetry Writing Classroom, 1995). “Logging”

points to the ambiguity inherent in the destruction of a mountain forest. The text
claims that the more the Zhuangzi is read—with its depiction of a tree spared
the logger’s axe—the more evil the era becomes. In contrast, “Poetry Writing
Classroom” urges individuals to be persons of “no use” and comments on the
“usefulness of the useless.” It is this, the text argues, that will rejuvenate human
and nonhuman alike.
The distinction between “useful” and “useless” trees parallels other divisions
of these plants, including that between “male” and “female” trees found in such
texts as the Indian writer Perumal Murugan’s (1968–) Tamil-language novel
Koola Madari (Seasons of the Palm, 2000), where the narrator describes a char-
acter’s vastly different behaviors toward male and female trees: “Kandamoopan
is heartless when it comes to male trees. He chops at the fronds, till the tree is
almost barren. But with female trees, he is different. He is tender, solicitous, as if
they are pregnant women given to his care. He lets their fronds grow, until they
form a huge whirl. Rarely does he take out his knife, he is happy to let it rest in
its rusty holder” (9). Seasons of the Palm deals primarily with the relationship
between landlords and dalits.
124.  Interesting in this context are the contradictions between what Knotty
Xiao feels and what he does. Hailing from rugged terrain, he is deeply attached to
the mountain’s vegetation, and he long has protested Chinese policies of rampant,
and in his mind purposeless razing of allegedly “useless” trees to plant “useful”
trees. Convinced that the King of Trees should not be touched, he persuades the
men charged with clearing the mountain slopes to focus on other trees. Knotty
Xiao is so upset with Li Li for insisting, despite his pleas, on chopping down the
King of Trees that he tells Li Li that the first blow should be directed not at the tree
but at him (Knotty Xiao). On the other hand, Knotty Xiao voluntarily teaches the
narrator, charged with sharpening the tools used to cut down trees, how to do so
more effectively. Knotty Xiao also voluntarily instructs the newly arrived students
how best to fell trees and handle wood. And by cutting the vines breaking the
fall of the King of Trees it is he who helps bring the mountain’s largest tree to the
ground. It is unclear why Knotty Xiao should assist the students in this way: he
just as easily could have focused on the vegetable patch to which he was assigned.
He does so perhaps to gain the students’ respect, so that they will listen to him
when their sights turn to the King of Trees, but he ultimately loses this gamble.
125.  A Cheng, Shu wang, 72.
126.  Ibid., 82.
127.  Ibid., 82.
128.  The team leader has the young men take a look at a nearby mountain
that has been cleared and replanted. The narrator comments that this mountain
appears to be enveloped by “thick grass and no trees.” Only after scrutinizing it
closely do the youth recognize that it in fact is covered by small trees, planted in
rows.
129.  A Cheng, Shu wang, 85.
130.  Ibid., 87.
131.  Ibid., 88.
132.  As the narrator explains, daily records are kept on the area each person
 Notes to Pages 151–54  513

has cleared. In many cases, the larger the tree, the greater the area cleared. But
if the trunk of a tree is relatively large in proportion to its crown, it is difficult
to justify the hours needed to fell it. Other loggers have made various excuses
to avoid having to chop down this tree, including arguing that it too is a spirit.
133.  A Cheng, Shu wang, 91.
134.  Ibid., 113. One of the young men responds to this comment with the
observation that “This [felling trees] is what we do every day. If it’s wasteful then
we shouldn’t do it [at all]” (113). The narrator does not respond to this remark,
instead pointing out that had the team wanted to chop down the tree, they would
have done so long ago. But the young man’s simultaneous refusing to grant spe-
cial status to the King of Trees and suggesting that if the workers are bothered
by felling this one tree they might want to think more carefully about their pres-
ence on the mountain paradoxically suggests at once demystification of all of the
mountain’s stumpage and anxiety vis-à-vis its destruction. In contrast, Knotty
Xiao declares several pages later that this tree must be spared, no matter the (non-
human) cost: “You all have so many trees to cut down. I’m not interfering with
those . . . But this tree has to stay. Even if an entire world were to be logged bare,
this tree still would have to stay” (117). Knotty Xiao’s attitudes toward flora here
are more conflicted than those of the educated youth; so enraptured is he with
a single tree that for its sake he is willing to sacrifice an entire forest, indeed an
entire planet of forests.
135.  A Cheng, Shu wang, 113–14.
136.  Jonathan D. Spence, The Search for Modern China, 575–76.
137.  On the other hand, once on the mountain, the party secretary chastises
Knotty Xiao for blocking Li Li’s access to the King of Trees. The party secretary
is the local party chief; this individual directs the committee that makes decisions
for a village.
138.  A Cheng, Shu wang, 120.
139.  Ibid., 122.
140.  Patel’s (1940–) poem concludes: “The root is to be pulled out / Out of
the anchoring earth; / It is to be roped, tied, / And pulled out–snapped out / Or
pulled out entirely, / Out from the earth-cave . . . Then the matter / Of scorching
and choking / In sun and air, / Browning, hardening, / Twisting, withering, / And
then it is done.” In contrast, W. S. Merwin’s (1927–) “The Last One” features a
vengeful shadow of a felled tree: “Where the shadow got onto them they went
out. / . . . and when it got their feet they fell down. / It got into eyes the eyes went
blind. / . . . The ones that could see and stood still / It swallowed their shadows.
/ Then it swallowed them too and they vanished” (11–12). Patel’s “On Killing a
Tree” has been included in the English-language Indian school curricula since the
1970s. Patel has denied ecological motives, but as Suman Gupta notes in “Read-
ings of Gieve Patel’s ‘On Killing a Tree,’” his poem has “retrospectively come to
be firmly associated with environmental concerns.”
141.  A Cheng, Shu wang, 124.
142.  Ibid., 126.
143.  For more on Miyazawa’s “Bears of Mount Nametoko” see chapter 4.
144.  A Cheng, Shu wang, 113.
145.  A Cheng, “Kaisetsu,” 230.
514  notes to pages 156–60

chapter 3

1. Ann Blair, “Information Overload, Then and Now.”

2.  Ann Blair, “Information Overload: The Early Years.”
3.  Kim Kwanggyu, “Saenggak ŭi sai,” 34–35.
4.  After receiving his doctorate in German literature from Seoul National Uni-
versity, Kim Kwanggyu spent several years writing about and translating works
by the German writers Peter Bichsel (1935–), Heinrich Böll (1917–1985), Günter
Eich (1907–1972), Heinrich Heine (1797–1856), and Franz Kafka (1883–1924).
He started publishing poetry in the mid-1970s in Korea’s leading journals. Be-
ginning with Uri rŭl chŏksinŭn majimak kkum: Kim Kwanggyu sijip (The Final
Dream that Drenches Us: Collection of Kim Kwanggyu’s Poetry, 1979) he has
put out a number of poetry collections. His verse, which has won several prizes,
covers a variety of topics but often addresses social injustice and human damage
to ecosystems. As “Relationship of Thoughts” suggests, Kim Kwanggyu’s writing
generally avoids esotericism and strives for simplicity; he has said that he pur-
posely eschews “abstract or theoretical guises.” Hanguk Munhak Pŏnyŏkwŏn,
Hanguk ŭi chakkadŭl—siin. Even so—like “Hometown” (discussed in chapter 1)
and the poems analyzed in this and following chapters—the ramifications of his
verse are often broad and complex.
5.  Texts such as the American writer George R. Stewart’s (1895–1980) novel
Earth Abides (1949) go one step further and depict apocalypse as the destiny of
such a world.
6.  The first stanza of the Korean poem reads literally: “Poets think solely of
poems and / politicians think solely of politics and / . . . if scholars think only of
scholarship.” Although “if” appears in the second stanza of the English transla-
tion, the structure of Korean is such that “if” (myŏn) concludes the first stanza of
the Korean-language “Relationship of Thoughts.”
7.  Also noteworthy is how the third stanza ends by asking people to consider
the relationship between government office and scholarship, not that between
scholarship and poetry, which would link the stanza’s final line back to its first.
The poem thus leaves space for additional fields. Asking people to reconsider
the relationship between scholarship and poetry would have underlined the im-
portance of the connections among the fields enumerated in “Relationship of
Thoughts,” poetry being the first mentioned. But had the poem tied together the
third stanza’s first and last lines, it would have closed the stanza in on itself. Of
course with more fields come not only more relationships but also more blights
to be forestalled. “Relationship of Thoughts” sets the stage for an interminable
struggle: the larger the mass to be confronted, the greater the possibility of failure
and the more severe the consequences. Despite its protests to the contrary, by set-
ting the stage for this struggle the poem ironically makes its original predictions
appear edenic.
8.  In general, when I refer to information on ecodegradation I mean not sim-
ply references to and actual data on damaged environments but also the recon-
figuration/translation of these data into narratives or stories that take the form
of everything from straightforward description to rigorous analysis and creative
manipulation, appearing in everything from popular novels to peer-reviewed sci-
 Notes to Pages 161–64  515

ence journals. As noted in the introduction, our sense of reality, that is to say our
understandings of who we are and of our relationships with our surroundings,
generally is constructed around narratives or stories, not around raw data. Al-
though ecodegradation is a conceptually important part of nearly all narratives in
which it is spatially significant (i.e., narratives in which ecodegradation is referred
to frequently), as in Kim Kwanggyu’s “Relationship of Thoughts,” ecodegrada-
tion need not be spatially significant in a text (i.e., referred to frequently) for it to
be a conceptually important part of that text. For instance, a fiction or nonfiction
narrative on the experiences of a family dislocated by a newly constructed dam
might speak only briefly of the damage the dam has inflicted on surrounding
ecosystems, but because this damage undergirds so much of the narrative it easily
could be a conceptually important part of the text. For diverse perspectives on
the circulation and reconfiguration of facts, see Peter Howlett and Mary S. Mor-
gan, eds., How Well Do Facts Travel?
 9. Mahasweta Devi, Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha, 192.
10.  Swimming in a polluted river or eating polluted fish does not necessar-
ily harm a person, but when a creative work features a character unaffected by
such environmental damage it raises questions about the actual extent to which
ecosystems have been transformed.
11. Passive intertextuality stems from similarities in circumstances and/or
predecessors, from apparent coincidence and from what often has been referred
to as “influence,” while dynamic intertextuality involves more active engagement
with narrative forebears. For discussion of passive and dynamic, as well as im-
plicit and explicit intertextuality, see Karen Laura Thornber, Empire of Texts in
Motion, 215–38.
12.  Robert Sattelmeyer, “Depopulation, Deforestation,” 236. Although Tho-
reau claims that “during the winter ‘no wanderer ventured near my house for a
week or a fortnight for a time,’ reinforcing the portrait of his self-sufficient isola-
tion, the fact that [in truth] more than a hundred men with heavy equipment were
at work every day in front of his house suggests a somewhat different reality . . .
the completion of the railroad to Concord in 1844 . . . [meant that living in Tho-
reau’s cabin in the 1840s] must have been rather like living near a just-completed
freeway today, only with more intermittent noise.” Sattelmeyer, 240. In Walden
Thoreau comments on the whistle of the locomotives but likens these sounds to
those of a screaming hawk. Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 112. Thoreau’s text
is also often intratextually inconsistent, particularly about the condition of the
woodlands surrounding the waters. Thoreau, 168–93.
13.  To some extent all narratives, creative or otherwise, are characterized by
lacunae in information, since no narrative can definitively answer all the ques-
tions it asks or inspires. But for the most part the literary texts examined here
take notable advantage of these ambiguities.
14.  Kim Ch’unsu (1922–2004) studied art at Nihon University in Tokyo dur-
ing the colonial period and was arrested by the Japanese for being a “subversive
Korean.” He began publishing poetry in 1946; his first collection—Kurŭm kwa
changmi (Cloud and Rose)—came out two years later and was followed by many
more. A prolific writer, Kim Ch’unsu also published a number of volumes of lit-
erary criticism. His enthrallment with plants, flowers in particular, pervades his
516  notes to pages 165–67

work. Poems such as “Kkot” (Flowers, 1947), “Kkot” (Flowers, 1952), “Kkot
pat’ e tŭn kŏbuk” (Turtle in the Flower Garden, 1954), “Kkot” (Flowers, 1955),
“Namok” (Bare Tree, 1955), “Kkot ŭi somyo” (Sketches of a Flower, 1956) and
the collection of the same name (1959), and “Namok kwa si” (Bare Tree and
Poetry, 1957) laid the foundation for a lifetime of writing on the nonhuman and
on human relationships with it. While the parts of the nonhuman discussed in
these poems are metaphors for people, and seem relatively healthy, or at least
are experiencing their “natural” cycles, some of Kim Ch’unsu’s texts allude to
or even speak directly of ecodegradation. Notable in this regard, in addition to
“Landscape,” is his “Kyŏul pam ŭi kkum” (Dream of a Winter Night, 1964).
This verse describes a typical winter evening in Seoul. It claims that while people
are eating dinner, reading the newspaper, and listening to the radio their “coal
gas stealthily descends to the Jurassic stratum.” It then states that the residents
of this city will dream that night about the Archaeopteryx, a bird from the Late
Jurassic Period (150–145 million years ago), flying in “Seoul blackened by coal
gas” (129). The gas pervades everything in the city—its houses and other human
cultural products, as well as human and nonhuman bodies. Noteworthy is the
poem’s claim that the coal gas floats not forward but backward in time, to an era
predating people by millions of years. “Dream of a Winter Night” suggests that
human degradation of environments is far more spatially and temporally perva-
sive than is generally realized.
15.  Kim Ch’unsu, “P’unggyŏng,” 13.
16.  Xin Yu (the pen name of Mi Shisen) was born in Hangzhou in 1933 and
moved to Taiwan in 1950; he began writing poetry soon thereafter and joined the
Modernist School in 1956. Not only publishing volumes of poetry, he also has
written fiction, essays, and television scripts. In the mid-1990s he became editor
of the Chuang shiji (Epoch Poetry Quarterly). Xin Yu also has devoted consider-
able effort to promoting science education, publishing the journal Kexue yuekan
(Science Monthly). Michelle Yeh and N. G. D. Malmqvist, Frontier Taiwan, 211.
Many of Xin Yu’s poems center on nonhuman beings. Key texts, in addition to
“Leopard,” include “Turang de ge” (Song of the Soil, 1966) and “Sangjiba shizi”
(Zanzibar Lion, 1971). In “Song of the Soil” a field claims that it is allowing
itself to be used by people however they want so that they can “create an even
more glorious future” and that it one day hopes to “provide a sleeping place for
all living things” (20–21). On the other hand, it also indicates the pain it is likely
to suffer in the name of human progress. Personifying the soil, this poem justi-
fies human manipulation of the environment. “Zanzibar Lion” is narrated by a
lion confined to a national park that is “playing the game” by eating the food
provided it by its keepers. The lion wonders whether people will now be satis-
fied. The poem concludes with a reference to a “mass of black cloud,” suggesting
that people are still commandeering landscapes. The lion’s life inside the park is
comfortable and relatively safe, but the poem indicates that much has been lost
and little gained.
17.  Xin Yu, “Bao,” 43–44.
18.  When read by themselves, the poem’s opening two stanzas suggest that
the leopard witnesses the disappearance of the grassland’s vegetation. But the
third stanza speaks of “this leopard” as unfamiliar with fragrant flowers and
 Notes to Pages 168–72  517

verdant trees, indicating that it did not in fact observe these species disappearing
from this or other ecosystems.
19.  More often this desire is experienced and articulated as yearning for more
comfort or more prestige, rather than as craving simply to occupy more space or
to use more resources, although the former desires often manifest themselves as
the latter.
20.  Daria Menicanti (1914–1995), “Felini,” 14.
21.  On the other hand, although it is “natural” for leaves to fall in autumn,
human behaviors can impact precisely when and how they do so.
22.  Karen Tei Yamashita, Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, 99–101.
23.  Chŏng Hyŏnjong received a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Yonsei
University, then worked as a journalist and a teacher of Korean literature. He
began publishing poetry in the mid-1960s and put out the first of many collec-
tions in 1972. His oeuvre can be divided into two principal categories. Drawing
on his studies of philosophy and Western literature (Chŏng Hyŏnjong partici-
pated in the University of Iowa’s International Writers’ Program in 1974), early
work in the anthologies Samul ŭi kkum (Dreams of Things, 1972), Kot’ong ŭi
ch’ukche (Festival of Suffering, 1974), and Na nŭn pyŏl ajŏssi (I Am Uncle Star,
1978) tends to be abstract and experimental. Particularly noteworthy is the use
of opaque diction and European syntactic structures. Later collections, beginning
with Ttŏrŏjyŏdo t’wi nŭn kong ch’ŏrŏm (Like a Ball that Bounces When It Falls,
1984), Saranghal sigan i manch’i ant’a (There Isn’t Much Time for Love, 1989),
and Han kkot song i (A Single Flower, 1992), tend to employ simpler language
and adopt an engaged ecocosmopolitan perspective; many of his poems speak of
the relationships among and the value of all beings. For instance, “Namu yŏ”
(Oh, Tree, 1992) features an individual who, on seeing a fallen tree, also tumbles,
so intertwined does he perceive himself to be with this plant. Sesang ŭi namudŭl
(Trees of the World, 1995), Chŏng Hyŏnjong’s sixth collection, likewise includes
poems such as “Isŭl” (Dew), which begins by likening rivers to “our blood,” wind
to “our breath,” and soil to “our flesh” and later states that “trees give birth to
clouds, clouds / give birth to rivers, rivers / give birth to birds / birds give birth
to wind, wind / gives birth to trees . . .” (121). Wolhee Choe and Peter Fusco,
“Introduction”; Hanguk Munhak Pŏnyŏkwŏn, Hanguk ŭi chakkadŭl—sosŏlga;
Hayama Gakuto, “Tei Genshū [Chŏng Hyŏnjong] ni okeru shigaku”; Korean
Culture and Arts Foundation, Who’s Who in Korean Literature, 83–85; Peter H.
Lee, “Late Twentieth-Century Poetry by Men,” 436–39. Chŏng Hyŏnjong has
also translated several volumes of world poetry.
24.  Chŏng Hyŏnjong, “P’um,” 267.
25. For instance, “Musŭn sŭlp’ŭm i” (Certain Sorrow, 1992) reads: “At
dawn / at the point of waking up / a certain sorrow spreads / it spreads out then
spreads out some more . . . I want to see grasshoppers.” But unlike “The Field
is Desolate,” which highlights longing for grasshoppers stemming from their ab-
sence on the fields where one might expect them, “Certain Sorrow” speaks only
of an individual’s longing for these animals. It is entirely possible that grasshop-
pers have not disappeared, that on waking the speaker will see them outside his
window.
26.  Chŏng Hyŏnjong, “Tŭlp’an i chŏngmak hada,” 25.
518  notes to pages 173–75

27.  Song Sugwŏn earned a degree in creative writing from Sŏrabol Arts Col-
lege and began publishing poetry in 1975; awarded the New Poet Prize from the
journal Munhak sasang (Literature and Thought), he won immediate recognition
for his work. Song Sugwŏn’s first collection came out in 1980. Much of his oeu-
vre has its roots in Korean folk culture and focuses on rural Korea’s human and
nonhuman inhabitants. Song Sugwŏn’s interest in Korean history manifests itself
in his poetry and other writings, most notably Saeya saeya p’aran saeya (Bird,
Bird, Blue Bird, 1986).
28.  Song Sugwŏn, “Chirisan ppŏkkusae,” 14.
29. Ibid.
30.  Ibid., 14–15.
31.  Ibid., 15.
32. Luo Qing, “Sanduan lunfa,” 147. “Pop Songs” is the second part of
the poem “Sanduan lunfa” (Syllogisms). Luo Qing (pen name of Luo Qingzhe,
1948–) was born in China but with the exception of two years in the United
States in the early 1970s for graduate school has lived in Taiwan nearly all his
life; his family was part of the 1949 KMT exodus to the island. He began writing
creatively while in college and has published prolifically. A painter before he was
a poet, Luo Qing is known abroad primarily for his artwork. The visuality of his
concrete poetry is particularly impressive.
33.  Other excellent examples of this phenomenon in East Asian literatures
include the Sinophone writer Wang Runhua’s (1941–) poem “Shanshui zhexue”
(Landscape Philosophy, 1974), which by juxtaposing the lack of rocks, branches,
and waves with missing eyes suggests that something in this landscape is amiss.
But the text quickly changes focus and speaks of phenomena associated with
“healthy” environments. Likewise, Hoshi Shin’ichi’s science fiction short story
“Spiteful Planet” depicts the earth as overpopulated and rapidly reaching its lim-
its. A new planet is discovered, leading to much excitement. But ecological condi-
tions here are unclear. Visitors to the planet immediately comment on its beauti-
ful flowers, verdant forests and mountains, and lack of people. But they are said
to imagine seeing delicious food; their visions are so powerful that they have to
return home. The second group of visitors is subjected to even stronger visions,
this time of alluring women; these individuals are so distracted that they too must
return to earth. Multiple missions are sent to the newly discovered planet, each
more elaborate than the previous one, in an effort to withstand the inevitable hal-
lucinations. When the final group arrives with so many possessions from home
that they believe themselves able to withstand any vision, they discover that all
the previous hallucinations of food, women, and jewels have disappeared. More
significantly, “Together with [these illusions] a larger illusion had also disap-
peared. The oceans and rivers and mountains, the forests and fields also had
disappeared. Not the slightest bit of water flowed, not a single flower bloomed.
Just a monotonous landscape of gray stones spread out before them” (970). It is
unclear whether people have turned this planet from green to gray, as they did
the planet earth, or whether it was already gray when they arrived. What seemed
“real” at the beginning of the story is presented as an illusion at the end. Cf. the
American writer Ursula K. Le Guin’s (1929–) novel The Word for World is For-
 Notes to Pages 176–78  519

est (1972), where people destroy the tree-covered imagined planet of Athshe; the
violence against the nonhuman here is all too real.
Also noteworthy is the Taiwanese writer Shang Qin’s poem “Pizibao” (Pitts-
burgh), which claims that in truth there is no city but a grove, in truth no grove
but a tree, in truth no tree but some leaves, in truth no leaves but some birds, and
in truth no birds but some sad songs. For its part, Kim Kwanggyu’s prose poem
“Yŏngsan” (Spirit Mountain, 1991) features a young man who returns to his
childhood village searching for Spirit Mountain; elusive in the past, it now seems
to have disappeared. It is unclear whether this mountain ever existed, much less
whether it has been altered by human behaviors.
In contrast with the texts examined in this section, which feature landscapes
with symptoms associated with but not necessarily indicating environmental dis-
tress, the Taiwanese writer Liu Kexiang’s prose poem “Meili xiao shijie” (Beauti-
ful Small World, 1984) ambiguously features a landscape with known sources of
environmental damage that nevertheless are not depicted as causing degradation.
“Beautiful Small World” describes in some detail the various birds that congre-
gate around Dadu Brook in west-central Taiwan. Midway through the text, the
poem reveals several causes of environmental damage: “This is the lower stream
of the Dadu Brook, cities and factories flock the banks, railways and highways
run over the riverbed. The stream runs quietly, bends into the city, takes out sew-
age, and flows to the mouth of the river where the waterfowl gather.” But para-
doxically, although the river is portrayed as transporting sewage, nowhere does
the poem indicate that the water’s ecosystems are suffering. Instead, it continues
with a lyrical description of the diverse species that flourish in the region. See Liu
Kexiang, “Meili xiao shijie,” 101. Liu Kexiang takes his title from the economist
Ernst Friedrich Schumacher’s (1911–1977) famed Small is Beautiful: A Study of
Economics as if People Mattered (1973), which critiques the modern economy
and calls for sustainable development; natural resources, Schumacher argues, are
finite and will not be able to withstand current patterns of use, putting people
at substantial risk. Liu Kexiang replaces Schumacher’s anthropocentrism with a
more engaged ecocosmopolitanism.
34.  See also Scott Slovic, ed., Getting over the Color Green.
35. Rongzi was born in China, raised as a Christian there, and moved to
Taiwan in 1949. Publishing her debut poetry collection in 1953, she was one of
the first women to make her name in poetry in postwar Taiwan and became a
member of the Lanxing Shihui (Blue Star Poetry Society). Established in 1954,
this group initially defined itself as reacting against the modernist practices of Ji
Xian (1913–); it instead promoted the “perfection of lyric poetry” and published
several journals. Dominic Cheung, “Introduction,” 10–11. See also Marián Gá-
lik, “The Contemporary Taiwanese Woman Poet Rongzi.”
36.  Rongzi, “Chong de shijie,” 61.
37. Like Rongzi, Shang Qin was born and raised in China and moved to
Taiwan after the founding of the PRC. He served with the Nationalist Army in
Chengdu in 1945 and while imprisoned there was introduced to works by Lu
Xun and Bing Xin (1900–1999). He began publishing poetry in the mid-1950s
and became one of Taiwan’s most prominent modernist poets. Shang Qin was
520  notes to pages 178–80

also the first poet in Taiwan to engage seriously with surrealism. Michelle Yeh
and N. G. D. Malmqvist, Frontier Taiwan, 170. Like several other East Asian
creative artists discussed in this book, he participated in the University of Iowa’s
International Writers’ Program. Another of his achievements was promoting the
genre of the prose poem in Taiwan. Shang Qin’s poems frequently talk about ani-
mals; texts addressing ecodegradation in addition to “Chicken” include “Pitts-
burgh,” “Wenzi” (Mosquitoes, 1982), “Feixing laji” (Flying Garbage, 1998),
and “Feixing yanlei” (Flying Tears). Featuring a flying plastic garbage bag that
contains people, domestic livestock, and cockroaches, “Flying Garbage”—ironi-
cally written on “Earth Day 1998”—suggests that environmental movements
have done little to prevent society’s literal and figurative trashing of both people
and animals. “Flying Tears” describes logging as “Time, one hundred years, three
hundred years, one thousand years turns into sawdust that dances in the air,
time, one thousand years, two thousand years, tumbles with a boom. The past
tumbles, the future tumbles” (114). “Mosquitoes” features an individual who
finds these insects beautiful and fascinating yet nevertheless kills one, only to feel
great remorse; he worries that he has infected the mosquito with the hatred, and
the sorrow, that course through his body.
38.  Shang Qin, “Ji,” 92.
39.  “The Bird Song-Box”; Peter S. Sakas, “Basic Avian Anatomy.” The syr-
inx is impossible to remove; short of killing them, chickens cannot be quieted by
taking out this or any other part of their bodies. Jacquie Jacob and Tony Pesca-
tore, “Chicken Anatomy and Physiology.”
40.  Yang Mu began writing poetry as a teenager and in the 1960s became a
leading figure of Taiwan’s avant-garde poetry movement. He earned an M.F.A. in
Creative Writing from the University of Iowa in 1966 and a Ph.D. in Compara-
tive Literature from the University of California, Berkeley in 1970; he then taught
Chinese and Comparative Literature at the University of Washington, Seattle,
University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and Princeton University. Despite his resi-
dence in the United States, Yang Mu has retained an active presence in the Tai-
wanese literary world, winning every major prize, managing a publishing house,
and editing countless collections of Chinese literature of all eras and genres. A
passionate reader of foreign texts, he publishes in both English and Chinese, and
his work draws on both Western culture and literature (particularly the writings
of John Keats [1795–1821] and William Butler Yeats [1865–1939]) and classical
Chinese poetry and prose. Yang’s celebration of nature worship among Taiwan’s
aboriginal peoples has been said to originate in Keats’s desire to return to a ro-
manticized Middle Ages. Michelle Yeh, “Introduction”; Li-hua Ying, Historical
Dictionary. One of his most interesting poems on ecodegradation not discussed
above is “You ren wen wo gongli he zhengyi de wenti” (Someone Asked Me
about Truth and Justice, 1984), which interweaves several problematic allusions
to damaged landscapes. Some of Yang Mu’s poetry has been translated into Japa-
nese.
41.  Yang Mu, “Zuotian de xue de ge,” 383.
42.  Ibid., 384.
43.  Ibid., 385, 386.
44.  Ibid., 387.
 Notes to Pages 181–85  521

45.  “Song of Yesterday’s Snow” refers more to the destruction of “conifer

forests” than to that of individual trees.
46.  Yang Mu, “Zuotian de xue de ge,” 384.
47.  Ibid., 383, 387.
48.  Yang Mu, “Xiatian,” 101–2.
49. Yamanoguchi Baku’s (1903–1963) poem “Scenery in Mourning” pro-
vides an interesting corollary to “Summer”: “When you turn back / there are
your parents / behind your parents are their parents / again behind their parents
are the parents of their parents / a parade of the parents of the parents of the
parents / continuing deep into the past. / When you look forward / your children
are in front / in front of your children are their children / and in front of their
children are their children’s children / a parade of the children of the children of
the children of the children of the children / continues to the shore of the future /
as if fading beyond the sky. / Into such scenery / God’s baton drops / The blood-
dyed earth falls.” The bulk of the poem implies a seamless progression from
parent to child over the generations. But the final two lines shatter this peaceful
vision: God’s baton drops, and soon thereafter the planet falls as well. Adding
to the confusion, the planet is said to be “blood-dyed.” Nothing in the previous
lines suggested the presence of blood, much less enough of this substance to color
the earth. The poem implies that in reproducing themselves into oblivion people
have disfigured the planet; the higher human fertility the lower that of the nonhu-
man. Yamanoguchi began writing poetry while in middle school in Okinawa but
did not publish his first collection until 1938. Although he spent most of his adult
life in Tokyo he was deeply disturbed by and often wrote about the American
presence in Okinawa and the troubled relationship between Japan and its south-
ernmost prefecture, as well as Okinawan cultural identity.
50. Another important subset of narratives on human-on-human violence
contrasts the suffering of people with a flourishing nonhuman. Ambiguities in
these contrasts are examined below.
51.  Zheng Chouyu (1933–), “Canbao,” 59. Zheng Chouyu is the pen name
of Zheng Wentao, a native of China who lived briefly in Taiwan and then taught
at Yale for three decades. For more on Du Fu’s “Spring View” see chapter 1.
52.  In this line the speaker notes simply “Taking advantage of the moonlight
[chen yuese], I issued the mournful ‘General’s Order.’”
53.  Vietnamese literature also contains numerous texts on wartime destruc-
tion of environments. Particularly noteworthy is fiction by Anh Ðức, Nguyễn
Ngọc (1932–), and Minh Chuyên. Anh Ðức’s short story “Giấc mo ȏng lão vuờn
chim” (The Dream of the Bird Garden Guardian; Mr. Fourth’s Dream, 1965) fea-
tures a mangrove forest that for decades has been a haven for birds but during the
war is damaged by American bombing attacks; the story highlights joint human
and nonhuman suffering. For its part, Nguyễn Ngọc’s (pen name Nguyễn Trung
Thành) short story “Rừng xà nu” (Xanu Forest, 1965) depicts a forest devastated
by American artillery: “The village is in the cannon’s trajectory. Nearly all of the
bullets fall into the xanu forest on the hill. Tens of thousands of xanu are injured;
no xanu tree is left untouched. Some trees are cut in half. The resin bursts out
from the wound, dries and becomes as thick as blood. If the trees are young and
deeply wounded, they die.” Translation by Tran Phuong Hoa. Also significant is
522  notes to pages 185–88

the poetry of Nguyễn Duy (1948–), which eloquently exposes damage suffered by
Vietnamese landscapes during the war.
Huy Lien (pen name of Nguyen Lien, English and American literature, Hanoi
University of Social Sciences and Humanities) and Charles Waugh (English, Utah
State University) have launched a project on the implications of Agent Orange
that includes a collection of short stories on effects of this herbicide on the Viet-
namese people and Vietnam’s environments. See, for instance, their Family of
Fallen Leaves. Many Vietnamese writers active in environmental groups have
spoken eloquently on ecodegradation but have not made ecological concerns a
focus of their creative work.
Agent Orange remains the most contentious environmental legacy of the Viet-
nam War; more than 80 percent of Vietnamese surveyed believe the United States
should be doing more to help people affected by this chemical. Ben Stocking,
“Vietnam, US.” American defoliation policy in Vietnam has been likened to
frontier destruction of North American wilderness and Native Americans. Thi
Phuong-Lan Bui, “1969, November 12.”
Some of Leo Tolstoy’s fiction, including the short story “The Cutting of the
Forest” (1855) and the novella Hadji Murad (1904), deal with the Tsarist policy
of deforesting the Caucusus to thwart hostile peoples; these texts provide im-
portant points of comparison with their Vietnamese and Chinese counterparts.
Thank you to Bill Todd for reminding me of this aspect of Tolstoy’s work.
54.  There are countless exceptions to this phenomenon, including the Ameri-
can comic-book writer Brian K. Vaughan’s (1976–) graphic novel Pride of Bagh-
dad (2006) on the fate of lions that escaped from the Baghdad Zoo during the
2003 bombing of Iraq.
55.  Chŏng Hyŏnjong, “Kwisin ch’ŏrŏm,” 309.
56.  Ibid., 310.
57.  Ibid., 311.
58.  Ibid., 310.
59.  In “Like a Ghost” the proximate cause of avian destruction is clear: birds
were an unintended casualty of people treating one another violently. The un-
derlying reasons behind their displacement are closely related to the underlying
causes of the human-on-human violence the poem addresses.
60.  The Korean writer Pak Namsu’s (1918–1994) “Sae ŭi amjang—3” (Se-
cret Burial of the Birds—3, 1970) likewise speaks of people’s deafness to suffer-
ing, both human and nonhuman. This poem features a “single wing” displayed
in a specimen room that is the fossilization of “the screams preceding countless
deaths,” including those of birds and a young soldier. Like many texts that ad-
dress both human and nonhuman suffering, “Secret Burial of the Birds” deeply
intertwines references to the former with those to the latter, highlighting both.
Pak Namsu began publishing poetry shortly before his graduation from Chūō
University (Japan). Birds appear frequently in his work, often as metaphors of
the speaker’s own experiences. Pak moved to the United States in the 1980s and
continued writing poetry in Korean.
61.  Kim Kwanggyu, “Yuryŏng,” 32.
62. Ibid.
63.  Ibid., 33.
 Notes to Pages 189–90  523

64. Ko Ŭn has more than 130 volumes to his name; he began publishing
poetry in the 1950s, during his decade as a Buddhist monk, and has also written
a number of novels and volumes of essays. He has won numerous prizes, and
his oeuvre has been translated into more than a dozen languages, including, es-
pecially since the late 1980s, Chinese and Japanese. Nihilism colors much of Ko
Ŭn’s early verse, including poems in the collection Munŭi maŭl e kasŏ (Going to
Munŭi Village, 1974), but since his activist turn in the 1970s he has used poetry
in part to protest social injustice. Ko Ŭn’s harsh critiques of Korea’s military dic-
tatorships and his active involvement in Korea’s democracy movement led to his
imprisonment and torture during the late 1970s and early 1980s; accused of trea-
son in 1980, he was sentenced to twenty years in prison but was released in 1982.
Poems written at this time, read at prodemocracy demonstrations, express his
determination to “offer himself to a new era.” These experiences also prompted
him to write the series Maninbo (Ten Thousand Lives, 1986–2010), a significant
twist on the Japanese Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves (see chapter 1), which
contains poetic portraits of thousands of people, most of whom he has met per-
sonally, with the ultimate goal of creating “an encyclopedic representation of
Koreans.” In the preface to Ten Thousand Lives Ko Ŭn declares that with this
text, “I have freed myself from foreign literary influence.” Emphasis throughout
is on conveying “the chain of life’s joy and the joy of living on this earth that no
amount of poverty or persecution can break.” Ko Ŭn’s other major poetry series
is Paektusan (Mount Paektu, 1987–1994). “Mount Paektu” takes place between
1900 and 1940 and describes the experiences of a woman who escapes Japanese
assassins hired by her father, who disapproves of her husband. She becomes an
anti-Japanese fighter and “the embodiment of the Korean people’s struggles, reso-
lution, solidarity, peace, forgiveness, and sharing—indeed she is a symbol of the
ideal Korean woman.” Ko Ŭn is best known for his political and protest poetry,
but these genres comprise only a fraction of his work; his interests and range of
subjects are remarkable. For instance, he currently is directing an international
team that is compiling a complete dictionary of the Korean language, includ-
ing vocabulary used not only in North and South Korea but also in the Korean
diaspora. Brother Anthony of Taizé, “The Art and Life of Korean Poet Ko Un”;
Brother Anthony of Taizé and Gary Gach, “Transcribing the Wind”; Hanguk
Munhak Pŏnyŏkwŏn, Hanguk ŭi chakkadŭl—siin; Peter Lee, “Late Twentieth-
Century Poetry by Men,” 451–54.
65.  Ko Ŭn, “Ch’ŏt nun,” 38–40.
66.  Pak Inhwan, “Kŏmŭn kang,” 104. Pak Inhwan (1926–1956) attended
Pyongyang Medical College but abandoned his studies for a literary career; he
published his first poems in 1946. He attracted the attention of the Korean liter-
ary world and established himself as a modernist poet in 1949, when together
with Kim Kyŏngnin (1918–) and Kim Suyŏng (1921–1968) he published Saeroun
tosi wa simindŭl ŭi hapch’ang: sin siron sijip (The New City and the Chorus of
Citizens: New Poetics Collection of Poetry, 1949). This collection is character-
ized by its engagement with Western literatures and anxiety vis-à-vis modern war
and civilization. Peter Lee, “Late Twentieth-Century Poetry by Men,” 427–28.
Pak Inhwan was also a translator, including works by the American writer John
Steinbeck (1902–1968).
524  notes to pages 190–94

67.  Pak Inhwan, “Kŏmŭn kang,” 104.

68.  Ibid., 105.
69.  Mun Tŏksu, “Saebyŏk pada,” 111. Born during the colonial period, Mun
Tŏksu (1928–) received part of his education in Japan. He began publishing po-
etry in 1955, and his first collection came out in 1956; since then he has produced
more than a dozen volumes of poetry. Mun Tŏksu also has a Ph.D. in Korean
literature from Hongik University and has written volumes on Korean and other
literatures. He has served on the boards of numerous literary organizations and
journals and received multiple prizes for his work. Some of his oeuvre has been
translated into Japanese. Other of his texts dealing with ecodegradation include
“Myoji” (Cemetery, 2002), which contrasts garbage’s portability with its perma-
nence: “While a piece of black plastic sweeps over the street / while an empty,
crumpled aluminum can rolls and tumbles along / . . . Some entangled in car
wheels / Some carried on the river / moving somewhere / but unable to leave the
earth” (973).
70.  Among the best-known East Asian texts contrasting nonhuman resilience
with human ephemerality is the Tang poet Du Fu’s “Spring View,” discussed in
chapter 1. Other examples from premodern East Asia include the Korean writer
Kwŏn Taeun’s (1612–1699) poem “Passing the Old Capital,” which claims, “The
mountains are blue as of old, / but how many brave men have come and gone.”
One of the many twentieth-century East Asian creative works highlighting
nonhuman revivability in the face of human suffering is the Chinese writer Yip
Wai-lim’s (Ye Weilian, 1937–) poem “Yehua de gushi” (Story of Wildflowers,
1974), which begins, “Wildflowers / after the raging artillery fire subsides / en-
thusiastically come into bloom” and continues by juxtaposing society in mourn-
ing with thriving flowers and crops (82). Also from the 1970s but contradicting
the paradigm of resilient nonhuman and ephemeral human in twentieth-century
East Asian literatures are texts such as the Korean writer Yi Sŏngbu’s (1942–)
poem “Chayŏn” (Nature, 1974), which claims that the earth “gives off the smell
of being unable to begin again,” that “although the world’s valiant people keep
coming / the earth lags behind, far, far too late.” Yip Wai-lim was born in China
but moved with his family to Hong Kong in the early 1950s; he attended college
in Taiwan, earned a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Princeton University in
1967, and is professor emeritus at the University of California, San Diego. He has
been publishing poetry since the 1950s and is also known for promoting modern-
ist European and American poetry to Chinese audiences (especially the work of
T. S. Eliot [1888–1965]) as well as translations of Chinese poetry into English.
Yi Sŏngbu began publishing poetry in 1961 and produced his first collection in
1969. His poetry speaks often of Paekche, Cholla Province, and Kwangju.
71.  Mun Tŏksu, “Yangsim,” 971.
72.  On the other hand, as recent research has suggested, typhoons are not
solely “natural” disasters; global warming, for which human behaviors are at
least partly responsible, has been blamed for increasing the intensity of these and
other storms.
73.  Ko Ŭn, “I ttang e ajikdo saemi itta,” 49.
74. Ibid.
75.  Ibid., 50.
 Notes to Pages 195–99  525

76. Ibid.
77.  Ibid., 51.
78.  Ibid., 51.
79.  The final line can also be translated “like other nations is a new world,”
indicating a different form of cosmopolitanism. Providing an important con-
trast with “In This Land There Still are Springs” is Ko Ŭn’s famed poem “Owŏli
kamyŏn” (When May is Gone, 1986), which describes the May 1980 protests
in Kwangju against Korea’s military dictatorship in which hundreds of Korean
civilians were killed. This poem features a human population that suffers among
thriving ecosystems; it juxtaposes bloodied and murdered fighters with overflow-
ing spring greenery, coughing people with crying cuckoos: “Feverishly living, we
will continue to fight / We live in this way, suffering / May! / May! / Glittering
fresh green, dazzling days—May! / What will we do when May is gone? / Days
heavy with tear gas / Tears flowing in trickles / Hacking coughs / The cuckoo is
crying, in the night sadly crying.” The cuckoo is upset, but at least it can breathe.
See Ko Ŭn, “Owŏli kamyŏn,” 73–74.
80.  Yu Guangzhong was born in Nanjing and moved to Taiwan in 1950. He
received his B.A. in 1952 from National Taiwan University and in 1959 earned
an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa. He has taught at universities in Taiwan,
Hong Kong, and the United States. Having begun publishing poetry collections in
the 1950s, he remains a prolific writer of both poetry and prose, including essays
and literary criticism, and he has won numerous awards. He also has translated
poetry, both his own and texts from around the world. Yu Guangzhong’s oeu-
vre covers a variety of topics, but he is best known for his poignant evocations
of Taiwanese nostalgia for China, crystallized in such poems as “Xiangchou”
(Nostalgia, 1972), which concludes, “And now, / nostalgia is a shallow strait, /
I’m on this side / the mainland is on that side” (36–37). He has published poetry
in China since the 1980s, and his lectures on nostalgia for the mainland find ap-
preciative audiences. Yu Guangzhong also has translated the work of a number
of English and American writers, including Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) and Ernest
Hemingway.
81.  Yu Guangzhong, “Xishuai he jiguanqiang,” 414–15.
82.  For background on Ishimure see chapters 1 and 2.
83.  Bruce Allen, “Ishimure Michiko and East Asia.” For more on the Arase
Dam see Hoyano Hatsuko, “The Struggle over the Arase Dam.”
84.  Ishimure Michiko, Tenko, 278. Early Japanese believed that words har-
bored great powers, powers that could be released by recital. In the Record of
Ancient Matters (712) words are described as having the power to do harm, but
by the time of The Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves words were idealistically
believed to have only the power to do good. Earl Miner et al., eds., The Princeton
Companion, 285.
85.  However, as Bruce Allen rightly observes, like the writing of the Indian
author and social activist Arundhati Roy (1961–), Ishimure’s Lake of Heaven
addresses “the effects of modernization and globalization upon culture and en-
vironment worldwide.” See Bruce Allen “Facing the True Costs of Living,” 161.
86.  Ishimure Michiko, Tenko, 27.
87.  Ibid., 164.
526  notes to pages 200–204

  88.  Ibid., 307–8, 310.

  89.  Ibid., 114. During the drought, when the lake’s water level decreases,
this monument becomes visible. Tenko, 309. Near the conclusion of Lake of
Heaven the narrator further discusses the changes to the landscape made by the
region’s first farmers. Tenko, 312–13.
 90. Ibid., 24.
 91. Ibid., 78.
 92. Ibid., 29.
 93. Ibid., 78.
 94. Ibid., 260.
 95. Ibid., 75.
 96. Ishimure Michiko, Kugai jōdo, 218.
 97. Ishimure Michiko, Tenko, 79.
 98. Ibid., 276.
 99. Ch’oe Sŭngho is one of Korea’s most renowned ecopoets. He began
publishing individual poems in the 1970s and collections in the 1980s. His early
volumes established his reputation as a writer highly critical of the corruption
pervading contemporary industrial society. Much of his oeuvre focuses on ur-
ban blight, describing everything from individual human and nonhuman bodies
to entire landscapes damaged severely by rapid industrialization and “modern”
civilization. Images of gruesome death are a staple of his work. His poetry also
often overflows with references to waste of all kinds. For instance, his collection
Chinhŭk so rŭl t’ago (Riding a Mud Ox, 1987) includes verse likening people to
toilets and gluttonous rats. Particularly noteworthy are Ch’oe Sŭngho’s gruesome
images of women harmed by environmental pollution. On the other hand, his
output is not wholly fatalistic; often his poems point to the possibility of renewal
or transcendence. This tendency became stronger in the 1990s, verse written in
this decade containing references to Buddhist and Daoist thought. See Chang
Chŏngnyŏl, Saengt’aejuŭi sihak; Morita Keitarō, “Kankoku kankyō shijin”; Yi
Hyewŏn, “Saengt’ae—hwangyŏng sosŏl.” Morita likens Ch’oe Sŭngho’s depic-
tions of women to those of the Japanese poet Itō Hiromi, discussed in chapter 4.
Also noteworthy is Ch’oe Sŭngho’s writing on the Gobi desert, particularly in the
collection Kobi.
John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939) and other texts present a
very different picture from “Bulldozer Wrapped in Ivy Vines.” As the narrator
comments, “Behind the tractor rolled the shining disks, cutting the earth with
blades—not plowing but surgery, pushing the cut earth to the right where the
second row of disks cut it and pushed it to the left; slicing blades shining, polished
by the cut earth . . . Men ate what they had not raised, had no connection with
the bread. The land bore under iron, and under iron gradually died; for it was
not loved or hated, it had no prayers or curses” (36). See also 115, 151. Cf. Gary
Snyder, “Covers the Ground.”
100.  Ibuse Masuji (1898–1993), Kuroi ame, 97.
101. Ibid., 188. Cf. Ibuse’s short story “Kakitsubata” (Crazy Iris, 1951),
where the narrator notes that ten months after the bombing of Hiroshima only
the palms are putting forth new buds. See also the Ukranian American writer
 Notes to Pages 204–6  527

Irene Zabytko’s (1954–) novel The Sky Unwashed (2000), which describes the
slow regeneration of plants in spaces close to Chernobyl.
102.  McCarthy’s (1933–) The Road is the frightening story of the journey
of a father and son through postapocalyptic America. At the same time that it
highlights the absolute horrors people are capable of inflicting on themselves
and their environments, it also draws attention to the endurance of human love,
featuring a father and son who are “each the other’s world entire” (6). Cf. “Life
after People” (2008).
103.  Wang Ping was born and raised in China; she attended Peking Univer-
sity despite having only a few years of primary education. In 1985 she emigrated
to the United States and in 1999 earned a Ph.D. in comparative literature from
New York University. Currently she teaches environmental writing and environ-
mental justice at Macalester College. Wang Ping began publishing fiction in the
mid-1990s and poetry in the late 1990s; she also has written a monograph on
footbinding based on her dissertation and translated Chinese poetry into English.
The Last Communist Virgin is her second short-story collection. It won the 2007
Book Award from the Association for Asian American Studies as well as the 2008
Minnesota Book Award. Although her creative work focuses on China, Wang
Ping writes in English. She explains: “Mother tongue is the tightest fit ever . . .
It tells us where to look, what to look at, and how to think.” Elizabeth Larsen,
“Cultural Shape-Shifter.” One of Wang Ping’s greatest concerns is China’s envi-
ronmental future. In addition to writing stories such as “Maverick,” she has put
on several exhibits of her own photographs, including Beyond the Gate: China in
Flux after the Three Gorges Dam (2007) and All Roads to Lhasa (2008).
104. Another key example, discussed in chapter 4, is the Chinese émigré
writer Gao Xingjian’s Soul Mountain.
105. The cofferdam, located approximately one hundred yards upstream
from the Three Gorges Dam, was 1,900 feet long and 460 feet high. Andrew R.
Bridgman, “China Unleashes Yangtze River on Dam.”
106.  Jonathan D. Spence, The Search for Modern China, 416–17, 574. Wu
Pan was born in 1954.
107.  “Mountain Spirit” is one of the “Jiuge” (Nine Songs) in the early part
of the Chuci (Lyrics of Chu), songs in which Qu Yuan (ca. 340–278 B.C.E.) “al-
legorically laments his misfortunes, declares his virtue, attacks those who have
defamed him, and goes on a cosmic quest for a worthy lord.” Stephen Owen, ed.,
An Anthology of Chinese Literature, 155. The “Nine Songs”—which actually
numbered eleven—were performed at shamanistic rituals; the state of Chu was
known for its shamanism. Fusheng Wu, “Sao Poetry,” 37–38. Scholars continue
to debate whether Qu Yuan really authored the texts in the Lyrics of Chu that
have been attributed to him.
108.  E. N. Anderson, “Flowering Apricot.”
109.  Wang Ping, “Maverick,” 171.
110.  Ibid., 177.
111.  Ibid., 203.
112.  Ibid., 204. For an analogous countdown see the atomic bomb writer
Kurihara Sadako’s “Mō hitotsu no tokei” (Another Clock, 1983). This poem
528  notes to pages 206–10

pleads that the planet’s fields, forests, and insects be preserved for the world’s
children, then turns the focus to the women of Japan, concluding: “Three min-
utes remaining to 0 hour / The women of Japan, what should they do?” (416).
Zero hour refers to the end brought about by nuclear war. Kurihara was Japan’s
first published poet of the atomic bomb as well as the most prolific. In both her
writing and her political activities she was an outspoken critic not only of Ameri-
can and Japanese policies during World War Two but also of Japanese treatment
of Koreans, of the continued proliferation of nuclear weapons, and of the apathy
of individuals everywhere.
113. Wang Ping, “Maverick,” 204. The narrator of the Native American
writer Linda Hogan’s novel Solar Storms (1995) likewise predicts, “And in time
it would be angry land. It would try to put an end to the plans for dams and
drowned rivers. An ice jam at the Riel River would break loose and rage over the
ground, tearing out dams and bridges, the construction all broken by the blue,
cold roaring of ice no one was able to control. Then would come a flood of un-
planned proportions that would suddenly rise up as high as the steering wheels
of their machines. The Indian people would be happy with the damage, with the
fact that water would do what it wanted and in its own way. What water didn’t
accomplish they [the Indians] would.” Linda Hogan, Solar Storms, 224. As the
last sentence suggests, Solar Storms, a novel that fictionalizes the Cree and Inuit
resistance to hydroelectric projects in James Bay, gives more agency to displaced
native peoples than “Maverick” does to Chinese.
114.  Wang Ping, “Maverick,” 177.
115.  Ibid., 203–4.
116.  Ibid., 181–82.
117.  Ibid., 201.
118.  Ibid., 190.
119.  For background on Sakaki see chapters 1 and 2.
120.  The phrase “nuclear power plant Ginza” denotes the Mecca of nuclear
power plants.
121.  Sakaki Nanao, “Itsuka,” 45.
122. Most notable in the context of “Someday” is the December 8, 1995
massive sodium leak and fire at Monju, an incident that forced the suspension of
the fast-breeder reactor and led to the suicide of Nishimura Shigeo, a manager
at the Power Reactor and Nuclear Fuel Development Corporation, the govern-
ment entity that controls Monju. Although “Someday” is time-stamped January
1995, the poem was published in a volume released in 1999; Sakaki’s reference
to Monju might simply have been fortuitous, but he also had ample time to alter
references for greater effect. Monju was restarted on May 6, 2010, and reached
criticality on May 8, 2010. It has since been temporarily stopped several times.
123.  Many deaths occurred in houses built on landfills.
124.  For more on the Tōhoku earthquake see chapter 1. Japan’s Niigata-
Chūetsu Oki Earthquake (July 16, 2007) was a reminder that the nation most
profoundly affected by nuclear fallout not only houses the world’s largest nuclear
generating station but also operates it on an active earthquake fault. The epi-
center of this earthquake was only nineteen kilometers from the Kashiwazaki-
 Notes to Pages 210–14  529

Kariwa nuclear power plant. One of the plant’s units restarted operation in May
2009 and another in August 2009. Resuming operations is seen as a key part of
reducing Japan’s emissions of greenhouse gases. Ajima Shinya, “Restart Raising
Questions.” Cf. Gavan McCormack, “August Nuclear Thoughts.”
125.  Some 2,300 soldiers are buried at the United Nations Memorial Cem-
etery in Pusan, the only local cemetery supported by the United Nations. The
reach of Sakaki’s “Declaration” is even greater than that of “In the 21st Cen-
tury.” To be sure, the text is time-stamped September 1986 and place-stamped
Ishikarigawa, Hokkaido’s longest river and the site of significant damming, and
its first part features “Hokkaido becomes independent” (Hokkaido wa doku-
ritsu suru) as its refrain. But near its end “Declaration” calls for the creation
of a “Federation of the Pacific Basin” (Taiheiyō renpō e) and then in a monu-
mental leap demands a “Federation of the Universe” (Uchū renpō e), a group
that will connect not only the poem’s envisioned Pacific Basin Federation (Hok-
kaido, Alaska, Tierra del Fuego, New Guinea, Yunnan, and Siberia) but also the
Andromeda nebula, Orion constellation, and Magellanic clouds. For more on
flood-control projects along the Ishikari River, see Taguchi Tetsuaki and Kagaya
Seiichi, “History of Flood Control Projects.” “Declaration” is dedicated to the
explorer Matsuura Takeshirō (1818–1888), a “sympathetic observer of the Ai-
nu’s plight” who was deeply troubled by the fact that “relations between Ainu
elders and Japanese fishery officials were so cozy . . . that they colluded to exploit
the ordinary Ainu workers under their control.” David Howell, Geographies of
Identity, 124. Sakaki’s text does not focus on damage to Hokkaido’s ecosystems.
Instead it depicts the island as a paradise for human and nonhuman alike, a
space where people, animals, and plants all thrive, one without nuclear power
plants, agrochemicals, large corporations, or weapons. “Declaration” articulates
a dream even more impossible to realize than the conditions of “In the 21st Cen-
tury” are to avoid.
126.  Sakaki Nanao, “21 seiki ni wa,” 64.
127.  Ibid., 65.
128. Urashima Tarō is the central character of Japan’s popular Urashima
Tarō legend. After rescuing a turtle being tormented by a group of children,
Urashima is informed that the turtle is actually Otohime, the daughter of the
Emperor of the Sea, and he is taken to the undersea Palace of the Dragon God,
where he stays with Otohime and her father. Concerned about his aging mother,
he returns to his village before long, only to discover that in fact many years
have passed. Despite her warnings against so doing, Urashima then opens the
box Otohime had given him as a gift at their departure. A cloud of white smoke
emerges, and he suddenly is transformed into an old man. This is one of the more
common of the many versions of the Urashima legend.

chapter 4

   1. Daniel Goleman, Ecological Intelligence, 2. Goleman advocates radical

transparency, making clear “the hidden impacts of what we buy, sell or make.”
530  notes to pages 215–18

He optimistically claims that “once we know the true impacts of our shopping
choices, we can use that information to accelerate incremental changes for the
better . . . with the right, targeted data, a continuous cascade of consumer-driven
shifts would ripple through the world of commerce, from the most distant fac-
tory to the neighborhood power grid, opening a new front in the battle for mar-
ket share” (5–6). This ideal is attractive but would be exceptionally difficult to
implement.
2.  Ch’oe Sŭngho’s “Saeu ŭi nun,” 52.
3.  See Alison Hawthorne Deming’s remarks on ecotourism in “The Edges of
the Civilized World.”
4.  The Korean writer Chŏng Hyŏnjong’s poem “What’s That?” provides an
excellent contrast with Ch’oe Sŭngho’s “Shrimp Eyes.” While the latter alludes
to the hazards of celebrating beautiful eyes, the former points to the dangers of
not probing the stories behind seemingly “normal” eyes. “What’s That?” features
a young woman with amaurosis who was blinded by the Union Carbide disaster
in Bhopal, India (1984). The poem highlights the gap between the appearance
of her eyes (completely normal) and their inability to see. It also reveals that the
more her eyes are examined, the more disturbing they become. The poem con-
cludes: “Your eyes give us the third degree / Your eyes faint / Your eyes vomit
/ What are you looking at / that what / your eyes!” Chŏng Hyŏnjong, “Kŭge
mwŏni,” 268. The Bhopal disaster is featured in texts of many languages, includ-
ing Mahasweta Devi’s Bengali Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha; the British
writer Indra Sinha’s (1950–) English novel Animal’s People (2007); the Indian
writer Ke Aravindākşan’s Malayalam novel, Bhōpāl (2009); the Indian Canadian
playwright Rahul Varma’s (1952–) English drama Bhopal (2001); and the Indian
writer Kaśmīrī Lāla Zākira’s Hindi novel Laśakara kā ākhirī sipāhī: Bhopāla
gaisa trāsadī para ādhārita (The Army’s Last Soldier: Based on the Bhopal Gas
Tragedy, 1993). In the Air (1991), a novel by the American writer Robert Nichols
(1919–), has bodies from Bhopal appearing on a Maine beach. Bhopal remains
an environmental catastrophe to this day. See Somini Sengupta, “Decades Later.”
5.  For more on the writings of Dai Sijie (1954–) and François Cheng (Cheng
Baoyi, 1929–) see Karen Thornber, “French Discourse in Chinese, in Chinese
Discourse in French.”
6.  Also noteworthy from an ecological perspective is Gao Xingjian’s “Gei wo
laoye mai yugan” (Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather, 1986). The narra-
tor of this short story remarks that a river near his town dried up after a dam was
built, and a pond near his house was filled in after it went foul, presumably from
pollution. Now all that remain are asphalt roads and concrete bridges.
7.  Thomas Moran, “Lost in the Woods,” 209.
8.  Gao Xingjian was misdiagnosed with lung cancer in 1983. After his prog-
nosis was reversed, he left Beijing and traveled through the provinces of the
Yangzi River watershed. Gao Xingjian’s trip largely overlaps with that of his
protagonist in Soul Mountain. Thomas Moran, “Lost in the Woods,” 209.
9.  Ibid., 208. Moran lists some of the many plants and animals named in
Soul Mountain (214–15). He reads Soul Mountain as “nature-oriented,” even
“environmental” literature but does not connect it to the huanjing wenxue or
 Notes to Pages 218–23  531

shengtai wenxue that developed in China in the 1990s. Many discussions of Gao
Xingjian’s novel comment on the relationship between this text and the writings
of Thoreau. See, for instance, J. Gerard Dollar, “In Wildness is the Preservation
of China.”
10.  Gao Xingjian, Lingshan, 1.
11.  Ibid., 4–5.
12.  Ibid., 7.
13.  Ibid., 45.
14. Ibid.
15.  Ibid., 46–47.
16. Discussing the Wusong River in Shanghai, the narrator comments on
human resistance to chemicals that kill other animals and deduces that people
“have greater endurance than fish and prawns” (451). This contrasts with his
earlier description—while gazing out on ruins overgrown with weeds and other
foliage—of nonhuman species outliving their human counterparts.
17.  Gao Xingjian, Lingshan, 349.
18. Ibid.
19.  The narrator comments that this space was logged for two years allegedly
for national defense materials.
20. James Pusey, China and Charles Darwin, 439. Cited by Jonathan D.
Spence, The Search for Modern China, 292. Huxley lived from 1825 to 1895 and
Yan Fu from 1854 to 1921.
21. The narrator of Soul Mountain disputes the validity of Thomas Hux-
ley’s theory of evolution, but he likely would have approved of the environmen-
talism of Huxley’s grandsons Julian Huxley (1887–1975) and Aldous Huxley
(1894–1963). In addition to pioneering conservation efforts in colonial Africa,
Julian Huxley helped found the International Union for Conservation of Nature
(IUCN) and World Wildlife Federation (WWF), while Aldous Huxley developed
ideas of transcendence. Richard Samuel Deese, “Agnostic Gospels.”
22. It could be argued that their imminent burial is even more reason to
search for remains of the Daqi.
23.  Gao Xingjian, Lingshan, 295.
24.  The song “Yellow Pearl” explains the trio’s name: Asians are but “a tiny
grain of sand” trapped in the “belly” of the racist United States. But in protest-
ing, they construct an identity as beautiful as a yellow pearl, which replaces for-
ever the “yellow peril” (discussed in chapter 7); these yellow pearls “are half the
world.” Daryl J. Maeda, Chains of Babylon, 142.
25.  William Blake’s (1757–1827) “Auguries of Innocence” begins with “To
see a world in a grain of sand, / And a heaven in a wild flower, / Hold infinity
in the palm of your hand, / And eternity in an hour.” In this poem, Blake argues
for moral accountability toward nature, including such lines as “He who shall
hurt the little Wren / Shall never be beloved by Men” and “Kill not the Moth
nor Butterfly / For the Last Judgment draweth nigh.” Lawrence Buell, The En-
vironmental Imagination, 185. The opening lines of Blake’s poem in some ways
echo parts of Ch’an (Zen) Buddhist thought, which declares the Buddha nature
inherent in all human beings. As Wm. Theodore de Bary et al. explain, “By Bud-
532  notes to pages 223–25

dha-nature is meant the Buddha-mind in its highest attributes and true essence,
which transcends all distinctions of object and subject or duality of any kind”
(Sources of Chinese Tradition, 347). Blake’s verse likewise advocates “blurring .
. . traditional hierarchicalizing boundaries” (Buell, 186), also a key Daoist teach-
ing. But, as de Bary continues, Buddhism advocates freeing the mind “from the
influence of the external world” and “eliminating all defilements and attachments
. . . ‘letting the mind take its course’ unhindered among phenomena, the latter
being, after all, manifestations of the Buddha-mind” (347). Blake’s verse thus
simplifies and distorts Buddhist philosophy as articulated by the Zen masters. Cf.
Mark S. Ferrara, “Ch’an Buddhism,” 68–69. For more on the Buddhist concept
of all-pervasive interdependence see Rita M. Gross, “Buddhist Resources” and
Paul O. Ingram, “The Jeweled Net.” Blake’s lines appear throughout popular cul-
ture, including in Bob Dylan’s (1941–) “Every Grain of Sand” (1981) and Sting’s
(1951–) “Send Your Love” (2004).
26.  Gao Xingjian, Lingshan, 295–96.
27.  Ibid., 346–47. Cf. Gao Xingjian’s comments in “Kankyō to bungaku”
(Environment and Literature), his speech at the September 2010 International
PEN Congress in Tokyo.
28.  Ibid., 452.
29.  Ibid. With a slightly different pronunciation (dàren as opposed to dàrén),
the characters daren (大人) can also mean simply “adult.”
30.  The narrator here reveals conflicts between information and behaviors:
he describes people as continuing to degrade environments despite plentiful evi-
dence and even their awareness that their behaviors threaten the very resources
on which they depend. For more on these phenomena see the following chapters.
31.  Although little known during his lifetime, Miyazawa Kenji (1896–1933)
has enjoyed great posthumous success. Prolific in multiple genres and known par-
ticularly for his fantastical children’s stories, Miyazawa also wrote extensively on
Japan’s environments. A trained agronomist and geologist, he saw himself as “na-
ture’s faithful recordist.” Most of his stories and poetry focus on the landscapes
of Iwate prefecture, but they also exhibit environmental cosmopolitanism: Iwate
is “a microcosm in whose tiny details the history of the entire universe is con-
tained.” Gregory Golley, When Our Eyes No Longer See, 165. Miyazawa was all
too aware of the dangers Japan’s rapid industrialization posed for people and the
nonhuman alike, but at the same time he did not argue for a “return to nature.”
Instead, many of his texts emphasize the importance of living in harmony with
environments. An excellent example is his short story “Kenjū kōenrin” (Kenjū’s
Wood). In this short story Heiji demands that his neighbor Kenjū fell the crypto-
meria he has planted on the uncultivated land that borders both of their proper-
ties. A farmer, Heiji is concerned that the cryptomeria are depriving his field of
light. Kenjū refuses, and both men die soon thereafter. The railroad and then
factories and mills come to the town, and farms are replaced by city streets.
Kenjū’s forest, on the other hand, continues to grow unscathed and becomes the
children’s favorite gathering place. In time, these youngsters grow up and disperse
around the globe, but they all remember the forest and send letters and dona-
tions to keep it intact. The reader can imagine them voicing sentiments similar to
the speaker of George Pope Morris’s (1902–1964) poem “Woodman, Spare that
 Notes to Pages 225–26  533

Tree”: “Woodman, spare that tree! / Touch not a single bough! / In youth it shel-
tered me, / And I’ll protect it now // . . . My heart-strings round thee cling, / Close
as they bark, old friend!/ Here shall the wild-bird sing, / And still thy branches
bend. / Old tree! the storm still brave! / And, woodman, leave the spot; / While
I’ve a hand to save, / Thy axe shall hurt it not.” As the narrator declares in the
concluding lines of Miyazawa’s story, “It’s impossible to count the thousands of
people who learned what true happiness was from the dark splendid green of the
cryptomeria in Kenjū’s wood, their refreshing scent, their cool shade in summer,
and the lawn the color of moonlight beneath them” (57). For more on “nature”
in Miyazawa’s work see Itaya Eiki, Kenji gensōkyoku; Komori Yōichi, Saishin:
Miyazawa Kenji kōgi; Hoyt Long, “On Uneven Ground,” 354–76; Matsumura
Tomomi, “Hito wa buta ni nareruka”; Miyagi Kazuo, Miyazawa Kenji to shizen;
Roger Pulvers, “In Harmony with All Creation.”
32.  Lying on the ground after being attacked, Kojūrō believes he hears the
bear saying, “Oh, Kojūrō, I didn’t mean to kill you.” This bear echoes what
Kojūrō says to the bears he kills. Miyazawa Kenji, “Nametoko yama no kuma,”
175. The Vietnamese writer Nguyễn Huy Thiệp’s (1950–) short story “Muối cúa
rừng” (The Salt of the Jungle) provides an important corollary to Miyazawa’s
tale. In the Vietnamese narrative a hunter who kills a monkey is awakened by
the monkey’s family to the fact that there is no place for violence against the
nonhuman; people need to live in harmony with their surroundings. Likewise,
one part of Nguyễn Huy Thiệp’s story “Con thú lớn nhất” (The Winds of Hua
Tat) features a hunter in a ravaged jungle who mistakes his wife for prey and
ultimately commits suicide. Like “The Salt of the Jungle,” this text highlights the
deep intertwining of people with the nonhuman and emphasizes the importance
of the former respecting the latter.
33. For more on boreal peoples and the Circumpolar Bear Cult see Juha
Janhunen, “Tracing the Bear Myth.” Janhunen observes that the most elaborate
manifestation of the Bear Festival (part of the Bear Cult), where the spirit of a
killed bear is placated at an elaborate funeral, was the habit of holding hostage a
bear slated to be killed for the festival. For more on the Ainu ritual see Michael
Ashkenazi, Handbook of Japanese Mythology, 64.
34.  Miyazawa Kenji, “Nametoko yama no kuma,” 166. Later in the story
the narrator echoes this sentiment: “This being the way things were, even though
Kojūrō killed bears, he never did so out of hatred” (172). The Japanese writer
Shiga Naoya’s short story “At Kinosaki” provides an important corollary with
“Bears of Mount Nametoko.” Shiga’s text features a young man convalescing
at Kinosaki who is fascinated by the bees, ants, and rats he watches both scurry
around and die. He feels great sympathy toward a rat being tortured by a boister-
ous crowd and then, spotting a water lizard, decides that he no longer dislikes
these animals. Even so, he wants to startle it, so throws a stone that accidentally
kills it. The narrator remarks that although this is not the first lizard he has killed,
he is repulsed that he has brought about its death without intending to. Unlike
Shiga’s narrator, Miyazawa’s Kojūrō purposely kills animals, but both stories
highlight people’s contradictory feelings toward both animals and the roles they
play in the life and death of these creatures. Cf. the Japanese writer Asakura
Kikuo’s (pen name Shimaki Kensaku, 1903–1945) short story “Akagaeru” (Red
534  notes to pages 226–32

Frog, January 1946), which depicts a narrator haunted by a frog’s struggles

against the water, and his short story “Mukade” (Centipede, March 1946), which
takes place two years later and finds the narrator watching a centipede fight for
its life in the sink. He claims that there is no comparison between the frog’s and
the centipede’s struggles. Even so, he has his wife kill the insect.
35.  Miyazawa Kenji, “Nametoko yama no kuma,” 175.
36.  The narrator depicts Kojūrō both as hearing conversations among bears
and as having conversations with them.
37.  Although the narrator does not say so explicitly, Kojūrō likely spares the
mother and her cubs not only because he is moved by what he imagines to be
their conversation but also because he is well aware that were he to shoot them
now he would lose the opportunity for future hauls.
38.  Miyazawa Kenji, “Nametoko yama no kuma,” 172.
39.  Before begging for its life, the bear acts strangely; having just scrambled
up a tree, it releases its hold and comes crashing to the ground. Kojūrō finds this
disconcerting and raises his rifle, but once the bear engages him in conversation
he no longer desires to pull the trigger.
40.  Miyazawa Kenji, “Nametoko yama no kuma,” 166.
41.  Ibid., 169.
42.  Ibid., 171.
43. Born and raised in Taiwan, Bai Ling (pen name of Zhuang Zuhuang,
1951–) received his undergraduate training at the Taipei Institute of Technology
and a master’s degree in chemical engineering from Stevens Institute of Tech-
nology. He is on the faculty of the Taipei Institute of Technology. Although an
engineer by profession, Bai Ling has had an active presence in Taiwan’s poetry
scene since the 1970s. He was an early member of the Grass Roots Poetry Soci-
ety, a group that aspired to balance the popularization and professionalization
of poetry. Not surprising considering his engineering background, Bai Ling also
cofounded Poetry’s Sound and Light Workshop, which emphasized multimedia
presentations of poetry. He cofounded and edits Taiwan Poetics Quarterly. Mi-
chelle Yeh and N. G. D. Malmqvist, Frontier Taiwan, 40, 321; http://poetry.
culture.gov.tw/eng/Elpoet.html.
44.  “Calls for Official Relief.”
45.  East Asian citizens and governments continue to grapple with this issue.
For instance, in 2007, Chinese opened in Shanghai the first museum devoted to
comfort women; in October 2008 the South Korean government passed a reso-
lution calling for Japan to accept responsibility and apologize to Asian women
subjected to its military slavery system, while in November 2008 the Taiwan-
ese parliament approved a similar measure. “Taiwan and South Korea Call for
‘Comfort Women’ Apology.”
46.  C. Sarah Soh, The Comfort Women, xvi.
47.  Ibid., xviii.
48.  According to Taiwanese folklore, a giant cow lives inside the earth and
causes earthquakes when she moves.
49.  Bai Ling, “Wen weianfu ziyuan shuo,” 67.
50.  The principal ambiguities of these three texts lie in the role of human
behaviors in damaging ecosystems. Disjunctions between behaviors and condi-
 Notes to Pages 232–36  535

tions and between behaviors and attitudes are examined in chapters 5 and 7,
respectively.
51.  Ch’oe Sŭngho, “Ch’amsaedŭl ŭn ŏdisŏ chungnŭn ga,” 84.
52.  The irony of agrochemicals is that they allow certain plants to prosper
by harming a much greater variety of nonhuman entities. In general, those plants
that thrive thanks to agrochemicals in turn nourish far greater numbers of people
than would otherwise have been possible. But agrochemicals also can poison the
same plants they nourish.
53.  Ch’oe Sŭngho, “Ch’amsaedŭl ŭn ŏdisŏ chungnŭn ga,” 84.
54.  Itō Hiromi is one of contemporary Japan’s most prominent and prolific
poets; she also has translated medieval Buddhist stories into modern Japanese,
reconfigured the oral text of an early twentieth-century shaman, and written fic-
tion and numerous essays, including collaborative work with Ishimure Michiko.
See, for instance, their Shi o omou: warera mo owari ni wa hotoke nari (Thinking
of Death: In the End We Too Will Become Buddha, 2007). Itō has been referred
to as a “shaman” and “goddess” of poetry. She established herself as a literary
force in the 1970s, quickly becoming the foremost voice of a new generation of
female poets who spoke explicitly of women’s sexuality and erotic desires and
graphically of pregnancy, childbirth, nursing, and other bodily functions. Her
style is strikingly original and experimental; she typically uses a range of diction,
including registers that generally are excluded from poetic expression. Unhappy
with her marriage and eager to learn more about Native American cultures and
writings, in the late 1980s she took several extended trips to the United States and
in 1997 settled in California with her partner, the British artist Harold Cohen.
Her productivity has only increased since moving to the United States. Jeffrey
Angles, “Translator’s Introduction.” Itō’s writing on childbirth and motherhood
resembles that of the early twentieth-century Japanese poet Yosano Akiko (1878–
1942), particularly the latter’s prose pieces “Ubuya monogatari” (Delivery Room
Story, 1909) and “Sanjoku bekki” (Additional Note on My Confinement, 1911).
Both feature women in childbirth, a taboo subject for Meiji literature. Leith Mor-
ton, The Alien Within, 72–96.
55.  Itō Hiromi, “Haha ni tsurerarete arechi no sumitsuku,” 18.
56.  Ibid., 18–19.
57.  Ibid., 22.
58.  Ibid., 22–23.
59.  Ibid., 23.
60.  Lawrence Buell defines an “environmentally oriented” creative work as
one where “the nonhuman environment is present not merely as a framing device
but as a presence that begins to suggest that human history is implicated in natu-
ral history; the human interest is not understood to be the only legitimate interest;
human accountability to the environment is part of the text’s ethical orientation;
some sense of the environment as a process rather than as a constant or a given
is at least implicit in the text.” As Buell notes, “by these criteria, few works fail
to qualify at least marginally, but few qualify unequivocally and consistently.”
Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination, 7–8.
61.  Sakaki Nanao, “Kōdo 10,700m,” 30.
62.  Ibid., 31.
536  notes to pages 236–40

63.  The poem’s speaker claims this prediction a “Neanderthal prophecy.” Cf.
Sakaki, “In the 21st Century,” discussed in chapter 3.
64.  Masuda Mizuko, “Dokushinbyō,” 105. Masuda has a degree in plant
immunology and in the 1970s worked in the Department of Biochemistry at
the Nihon Institute of Medical Science. She began writing while working at the
laboratory and quickly gained literary prominence. “Single Sickness” features a
cancer researcher in her thirties who herself is diagnosed with breast cancer and
wonders what life will be like without her breasts.
65.  Jia Fuxiang was born in Shandong (east China) but moved with his fam-
ily to Taiwan. He studied biology at National Taiwan Normal University, earned
his Ph.D. from the University of Washington, Seattle, and has taught at a number
of institutions in the United States, Canada, and Hong Kong. He has published
hundreds of articles on marine biology but also is an enthusiastic reader of lit-
erature. He begins “People and the Sea” by comparing Ernest Hemingway’s The
Old Man and the Sea (1952) and the poetry of the Chinese writer Bing Xin
(1900–1999).
66.  Cf. Wang Wenxing, Beihai de ren (Backed Against the Sea, 1981). In the
opening pages of this novel the narrator goes to the northern Taiwan seacoast to
examine the “grand sights of nature” but instead finds a “mindless orgy of trash,
trash, and still more trash.” He wonders why the ocean just does not scoop up
everything and take it out to sea (18–19).
67.  Zhuang Jia (Jia Fuxiang), Kan hai de ren, 50.
68.  Ibid., 52.
69.  Ibid., 55.
70.  Ibid., 51.
71. As Alan Weisman points out in The World without Us, family size is
often the elephant in the room, even among the most fervid environmentalists
(271–74). See, for instance, Wangari Maathai’s (1940–2011) comments in The
Green Belt Movement. The recipient of the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize, Maathai is
a Kenyan environmental and political activist; “Green Belt Movement” refers
to grassroots tree-planting activities taking place in Kenya. Maathai remarks,
“rapid population growth creates much pressure on land . . . the only way to
impede the process is to encourage people to participate in conservation efforts”
(23). Nothing is said about reducing family size. Also noteworthy is Colin Bea-
van’s No Impact Man (2009), both the book and the film. Beavan, his wife Mi-
chelle, and young daughter, residents of New York City, spent a year attempting
to have as little effect as possible on the environment; they forewent everything
from toilet paper to electricity to motorized transportation. In the film, Beavan’s
wife expresses her desire for a second child; she believes the “perfect end” to
their environmental experiment would be announcing her pregnancy. In the book
Beavan explains, “In our ongoing negotiations about a possible second child, she
didn’t want to hear anything about whether or not it would be bad for the envi-
ronment. She was in [on the no-impact project], but only on the condition that it
would not be a factor in our decision whether or not to have more children” (31).
72.  My Year of Meats exposes the inhumanity of the American meat indus-
try. One of the characters in this novel exclaims, “Thinkin’ about all the billions
of people on the earth multiplying, having more and more babies—I swear it used
 Notes to Pages 240–41  537

to keep me awake at night. It still does. It’s the single most underdiscussed issue
in the world . . . I mean, we talk about the environment, the economy, human
rights, but no one ever talks about population . . . It’s the heart of all the other
problems . . . It can’t go on like this. The math just doesn’t work out” (70–71).
This statement stands out in a novel featuring women desperate to become preg-
nant.
Other fiction, including the Canadian writer Margaret Atwood’s (1939–) dys-
topian novel The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), parodies forced birthing particularly
in light of intensifying ecodegradation. The narrator asks, “The sea fisheries were
defunct several years ago . . . The news says the coastal areas are being ‘rested.’
Sole, I remember, and haddock, swordfish, scallops, tuna; lobsters, stuffed and
baked, salmon, pink and fat, grilled in steaks. Could they all be extinct, like
the whales?” (173). Even so, in the society described in The Handmaid’s Tale,
women are prisoners of their uteruses. Also noteworthy is the Korean writer
Yi Yŏnju’s (1953–1992) poem “Muŏt i chalmot” (What’s Wrong), which de-
picts a woman’s mixed reactions to having a tubal ligation. Cf. the American
writers Whitley Strieber (1945–) and James Kunetka’s (1944–) futuristic novel
Nature’s End (1986), which features drastic attempts at depopulating the planet
circa 2025.
73. See, for instance, the Iranian writer and social critic Jalāl Āl Ahmad’s
(1923–1969) novella Sangī bar gūrī (A Stone on a Grave, 1964) on the social
stigmas of childlessness. Ironically, although Iran experienced a population boom
between 1976 and 1986, beginning in the early 1990s the state dropped mater-
nity benefits for families with more than three children and requires engaged
couples to attend contraception classes. These and other measures, including free
contraceptives, have allowed Iran to stabilize its population growth. Jim Muir,
“Condoms Help Check Iran Birth Rate.”
For discussion of changing attitudes toward childless/childfree women see
Madelyn Cain, The Childless Revolution; Ingrid Arnet Connidis, Family Ties and
Aging; Robert Engelman, More: Population, Nature, and What Women Want;
Michelle Goldberg, The Means of Reproduction; Sara Hayden and D. Lynn
O’Brien Hallstein, eds., Contemplating Maternity; Mardy S. Ireland, Reconceiv-
ing Women; Corinne Maier, No Kids; Molly Peacock, Paradise. Rochelle Rat-
ner’s Bearing Life and Lynne Van Luven’s Nobody’s Mother anthologize stories
of women who have questioned or rebelled against equating womanhood with
motherhood.
74.  Ursula K. Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet, 76. Heise provides
a comprehensive list of English-language creative titles on overpopulation (71).
John Brunner was born in 1934 and died in 1995.
75.  Ibid., 90.
76.  Kim Kwanggyu, “Inwangsan,” 38.
77.  A German literature major in college, Ch’oe Sŭngja (1952–) made her
mark as a poet in the aftermath of the Kwangju uprising (1980). Incorporating
vulgarisms and other rough language, her verse departs from the typical “female
poetry” of the 1960s. Its depictions of powerful women “stranded in dignity”
provided the foundation for a new Korean feminism. On the other hand, much
of her verse brims with despair, featuring individuals who compare themselves to
538  notes to pages 242–47

mold, urine stains, maggot-infested bodies, and syphilis germs. Like that of many
of her male counterparts, Kim Hyesun’s work is highly critical of the status quo,
particularly the “colonization” of women. Noteworthy is her Tallyŏk kongjang
kongjangjangnim poseyo (Please Look, Mr. Manager of the Calendar Factory,
1997). Kim Hyesun’s technique sets her apart; she is known for her parody and
black humor. Also attracting attention are her graphic yet sensitive depictions of
the female body in such collections as Pulssanghan sarang kigye (A Poor Love
Machine, 1997). Hanguk Munhak Pŏnyŏkwŏn, Hanguk ŭi chakkadŭl—siin;
Kim Chŏngnan, “Late Twentieth-Century Poetry by Women,” 461–63. For more
on the ambiguous position of women in ecodegradation see Karen L. Thornber,
“Degendering Ecodegradation and Rethinking Ecofeminisms.”
78.  Kim Hyesun, “Kkŏpchil ŭi norae,” 116.
79.  The Chinese writer Yan Li’s (1954–) poem “Xingyun de zhuanli” (Patent
on Fortune, 2002) declares: “People can’t but be fortunate / After sucking flat the
breast of the earth / We now enjoy the nectar of technology.” Likewise, the sec-
ond half of the American poet Richard Wilbur’s (1921–) poem “Epistemology”
reads simply: “We milk the cow of the world, and as we do / We whisper in her
ear, ‘You are not true.’”
80.  The poetic voice could be interpreted as that of the planet, which begins
by likening itself to a nursing woman.
81.  Ch’oe Sŭngja, “Kyŏul e pada e kassŏtta,” 50.
82.  Ch’oe Sŭngho’s poem “Kongjang chidae” (Industrial Zone, 2005) pro-
vides a more graphic instance of a violated (polluted) woman polluting her chil-
dren: “After giving birth to a brainless child, the woman / felt as though an
industrial zone had entered her body / When she squeezed her breasts, foamy
wastewater ran down / and plastic cords swung down from the child’s navel / It’s
clear I committed adultery with smokestacks! / As if in her uterus she reared a
rubber doll / the woman who gave birth to a brainless child / spent all day picking
hair from her head / to see whether in her head she had a brain” (57).
83.  Ch’oe Sŭngja, “Kyŏul e pada e kassŏtta,” 50–51.
84.  Cf. Itō Hiromi, “Hikkoshi” (Moving, 1986).
85.  Masuda Mizuko, “Tsuno,” 100.
86.  Ibid., 78.
87.  Ibid., 94–95. More explicit about the shaping of plants are texts such as
Daria Menicanti’s poem “Camaleonte” (Chameleon, 1962), which states, “the
hedge cut off / by expert hand in painful blood / atrocious amputations.”
88.  For more on the policies and politics of Japan’s city parks, see Thomas
R. H. Havens, Parkscapes. The flowers in the park’s flowerbeds have all been
planted by people, so in some sense are human cultural products, but for consis-
tency I retain the sometimes arbitrary distinctions among the nonhuman, human
beings, and human cultural products.
89.  On the other hand, as an earlier incident revealed, the plants often suffer
even after having been moved to private homes, sometimes only after many years.
The narrator describes an elderly gentleman visiting her office and pleading with
her to purchase the many plants and shrubs in his garden that are the products
of cuttings his wife has taken from the municipal park. (The park distributes free
cuttings to interested parties several times each year.) The man is afraid he will be
 Notes to Pages 247–51  539

unable to care for these plants on his own and claims he is making this request of
the park because he feels empathy for the plants that he knows will simply die un-
der his watch. Noteworthy here is the contrast between the man’s concern for the
plants and the narrator’s refusal, in line with park regulations, to buy them. The
park is not in the business of rescuing plants, only of showcasing those deemed
most desirable. Parks also obtain their new flowers from municipal nurseries free
of charge, so have no need to purchase them from the public.
  90.  In most Japanese parks trees are carefully pruned and are often wrapped
in burlap during the winter.
  91.  Masuda Mizuko, “Tsuno,” 80–81.
 92. Ibid., 82.
 93. Ibid., 83.
 94. Hwang Sunwŏn (1915–2000) received a degree in English from To-
kyo’s Waseda University in 1939; his adviser was the Japanese novelist Tani-
zaki Jun’ichirō’s (1886–1965) brother Seiji (1890–1971), whom he described as
a “major influence” on him. Hwang made his first mark as a short story writer
in the 1940s and early 1950s, but beginning with K’ain ŭi huye (Descendants
of Cain, 1954) established himself as a novelist. Particularly noteworthy are his
writings on Korea’s colonial experiences and on the Korean War. For instance,
Descendants of Cain—which explores the human capacity for cruelty within the
triadic relationship of the landlord, the landlord’s agent, and the tenant farmer—
discusses the division of Korea following the nation’s liberation from Japan and
the ensuing communist takeover. Important from an ecofeminist perspective is
Hwang’s short story “Chayŏn” (Nature, 1966). This narrative is largely about
people’s relationships with other people. At one point the narrator’s friend tells
him that he will have to “tame” his new girlfriend, since “men are large like na-
ture and women are nothing more than charming animals that live there . . . Do
you think it’s nature that has to adapt to animals, or animals that have to adapt
to nature?” (98). Significantly, nothing is said about people adapting to nature.
For more on ecological consciousness in the writings of Hwang Sunwŏn see Yi
Sŭngjun, Hanguk hyŏndae sosŏl.
  95.  Hwang Sunwŏn, “Hak,” 317.
 96. Ibid.
 97. Ibid., 318.
  98.  Sŏngsam does offer his former friend a brief reprieve; after remembering
their childhood experience with the crane he suggests that the two interrupt their
journey to hunt these birds. But this expedition only forestalls Tŏkjae’s inevitable
imprisonment and possible execution.
  99.  Hwang Sunwŏn, “Hak,” 317.
100.  The fact that the boys hid their trap and did not care whether they were
discovered and scolded indicates that their behavior would not be condoned by
their parents and neighbors.
101.  These texts are related closely to those where attitudes contradict be-
haviors or effects of behaviors, as examined in chapter 7.
102.  Liu Kexiang began writing poetry in the 1970s, focusing largely on po-
litical concerns. But since the 1980s his oeuvre has centered on Taiwan’s physi-
cal environments. In his essay “Taiwan no shizenha sakka” (Taiwan’s Nature
540  notes to pages 251–56

Writers) he discusses early inspirations, texts as varied as Gary Snyder’s verse,

Thoreau’s narratives, Tang and Song poetic descriptions of animals, and poetry
and prose by Matsuo Bashō. But he also criticizes Chinese writers’ relative disen-
gagement from environmental concerns, including that of his immediate prede-
cessors. He argues that with ecodegradation only accelerating, writers no longer
can remain isolated and need to become more proactive. Liu Kexiang met this
challenge himself by publishing volumes of ecologically sensitive reportage and
creative work. For more on Liu Kexiang see chapters 1 and 3. See also Nick Kal-
dis, “Steward of the Ineffable”; Li Jinghua, Ziran xiezuo yu huanjing yishi yanjiu,
115–42; Xu Jiankun, “Xunzhao X dian.”
103.  Liu Kexiang, “Xiwang”; “Danshui River Pollution.”
104.  Recent efforts to clean the river have been relatively successful: fish and
other marine populations have increased, biodiversity has improved, and trees
and bicycle paths now line its banks.
105. Jia Pingwa, “Linqu,” 63. Jia Pingwa began publishing creative work
while in college and received his first editorship in his early twenties. Fiction
released in the mid-1980s established him as one of China’s leading writers of
root-seeking literature. Creative work such as Jiwowa de renjia (Families of Ji-
wowa Village, 1984), Tiangou (The Heavenly Hound, 1986), and Shangzhou
(1987) chronicle the customs and history of Shangzhou, a rural district outside
Xi’an where he was raised. Much of Jia Pingwa’s writing draws on the narrative
conventions of early Chinese vernacular fiction. Some of his work, most notably
the 1993 novel Feidu (Defunct Capital) has been censored, but it remains readily
available outside China. Defunct Capital exposes Chinese decadence. Bonnie S.
McDougall and Kam Louie, The Literature of China in the Twentieth Century,
407–8; Yiyan Wang, Narrating China, vii. Although human damage to environ-
ments is not a principal focus of Jia Pingwa’s oeuvre, many of his texts refer to it.
106.  Jia Pingwa, “Linqu,” 63.
107.  Ibid., 100.
108. Chen Huang has written extensively on Taiwan’s nonhuman species,
particularly the island’s birds. Noteworthy in addition to Pigeon Tuoli are Ren-
niao zhi jian (Of Birds and Men, 1988) and Zhoujiu dizhi (Accounts of a Chirp-
ing Place, 1989).
109.  Chen Huang, “Gezi Tuoli shi weiyi de xiwang (daixu),” 3.
110.  Ibid., 1.
111.  Ibid., 3.
112.  In the introduction to his volume Chen Huang notes that the first essay
was awarded a prize from the China Times in 1990.
113.  Chen Huang, “Gezi Tuoli zhi yi,” 13.
114.  Ibid., 15.
115.  In the opening paragraphs of “Pigeon Tuoli” the narrator claims that
Tuoli and its companions “were very free, even though they had lost the wild
nature of their race a billion years ago” (8). He exaggerates, but his comments
do make us reconsider what it means to be “free.” It is unclear whether Tuoli
himself was born in captivity. The ambiguities of “freedom” are explored in later
sections of Pigeon Tuoli, as well as in such texts as the Spanish-born Canadian
writer Yann Martel’s (1963–) novel Life of Pi (2001), where the narrator, whose
 Notes to Pages 256–72  541

father worked in a zoo, claims “Well-meaning but misinformed people think ani-
mals in the wild are ‘happy’ because they are ‘free.’ . . . [In a zoo an animal’s]
‘happiness’ is dashed. It yearns mightily for ‘freedom’ and does all it can to es-
cape. Being denied its ‘freedom’ for too long, the animal becomes a shadow of
itself, its spirit broken. So some people imagine. This is not the way it is. Animals
in the wild lead lives of compulsion and necessity within an unforgiving social
hierarchy in an environment where the supply of fear is high and the supply of
food low . . . Animals in the wild are, in practice, free neither in space nor in time,
nor in their personal relations” (15–16).
116.  The narrator does not indicate precisely what portion of Tuoli’s days are
spent practicing avian acrobatics, but he suggests that practice is onerous because
of its tedium, not its duration.
117.  Chen Huang, “Gezi Tuoli zhi yi,” 9.
118.  Ibid., 16.
119. Ibid.
120.  Ibid., 18–19.
121.  Ibid., 17.
122.  Ko Ŭn, “Nunmul han pangul,” 39–40.
123.  At the same time, by toppling large trees, avalanches facilitate growth of
smaller plants, including the berry bushes that help sustain animal populations.
124.  These texts are related closely to those where attitudes contradict be-
haviors or impacts of behaviors, as examined in chapter 7.
125.  Masuda Mizuko, “Kemuri,” 13.
126.  Ibid., 14–15.
127.  Ibid., 25.
128. Yu Hyŏnjong burst onto the Korean literary scene in 1961 with his
prize-winning “Ttŭt issŭl su ŏmnŭn i tolmengi” (Insignificant Stone). This short
story also takes place in the DMZ and features a moving interaction between a
South Korean and a North Korean soldier. Yu Hyŏnjong is best known for his
historical fiction, beginning with Tŭlpul (Wild Fire, 1975), which describes the
Tonghak peasant uprisings of 1894.
129.  Yu Hyŏnjong, “Pimujang chidae,” 210. Since the South Korean soldiers
had dressed Pilgu in adult clothing, the only garments they had on hand, the
North Korean soldiers did not realize that he was only a boy; they assumed they
were shooting a South Korean soldier attempting to cross over to their side.
130.  Yu Hyŏnjong, “Pimujang chidae,” 180.
131.  Ibid., 186.
132.  Ibid., 187.
133.  The narrator notes that Pilgu barely avoids stepping on a mine as he
crosses over the southern border of the DMZ. Interestingly, the narrator com-
ments only on the mines in the vicinity of the northern and southern borders of
the DMZ, remaining silent on the countless mines buried throughout the zone
beginning with the Korean War.
134.  Kim Kwanggyu, “Sawŏl ŭi karosu,” 50.
135.  Bai Qiu’s first language is Japanese; he studied Chinese only after Tai-
wan was liberated from Japanese rule in 1945. He began publishing poetry in
1952 and in the 1950s and 1960s participated in all of Taiwan’s major poetry
542  notes to pages 272–83

groups. Bai Qiu also was a founder of the Bamboo Hat group and journal of the
same name (Li, est. 1964). The Bamboo Hat poetry society defended the legiti-
macy of modern poetry, promoted experimental poetry, encouraged rigorous lit-
erary criticism, and introduced and translated American, European, and Japanese
poetry. In the 1980s this group replaced its modernist orientation with “Taiwan
consciousness.” Still published today, Bamboo Hat is Taiwan’s longest running
poetry journal. Michelle Yeh, “Modern Poetry of Taiwan,” 566.
136.  Bai Qiu, “Shu,” 119–20.
137.  Ch’oe Sŭngho, “Sŭlp’ŭn twaeji,” 70.
138. Ibid.
139.  As noted in chapter 1, Hoshi Shin’ichi was mid-twentieth-century Ja-
pan’s most prolific short-short story writer and one of its premier authors of
science fiction; he is said to have introduced the short-short story form into this
genre. His family background proved fortuitous: his grandfather Koganei Yo-
shikiyo (1858–1944) was an anthropologist and physician at the University of
Tokyo who published widely on anatomy; his grandmother was a respected poet
and translator and the younger sister of the famed writer Mori Ōgai (1862–
1922); his father Hoshi Hajime (1873–1951) went to the United States in 1894
and earned an undergraduate degree at Columbia University, before founding the
Hoshi Pharmaceutical Company in 1901. Trained as a scientist, Hoshi himself
received undergraduate and graduate degrees in chemistry from the University
of Tokyo. After graduation he worked for his father’s company and after his
father’s death became its president but could not rescue it from financial ruin.
Unemployed, he read science fiction and became engrossed in the work of the
American science fiction writer Ray Bradbury (1920–). Hoshi published his first
fiction in 1957. Karen Colligan-Taylor, The Emergence of Environmental Litera-
ture in Japan, 216–23. Stories contemporaneous with “The Present” that grapple
with environmental destruction include “Spiteful Planet,” discussed in chapter
3, “O-i, dete ko-i” (He-y, Come on Out-t!, 1971), discussed in chapter 6, and
“Tōgenkyō” (Peach Blossom Spring, 1972), “Ame” (Rain, 1972), and “Hotaru”
(Fireflies, 1972).
140.  Hoshi Shin’ichi, “Genzai,” 1615–16.
141.  Thank you to Heather Blair for this comparison.
142.  Hoshi Shin’ichi, “Genzai,” 1616. Like many texts that discuss the end
of the known world, the Algerian writer Mohammed Moulessehoul’s (pen name
Yasmina Khadra, 1955–) novel Morituri (1997) predicts apocalypse reminiscent
of that in “The Present,” with one crucial difference. Rather than return to soil,
or a beginning, “the earth will become full of gangrene and tentacular sects” (64).
143.  Hoshi Shin’ichi, “Genzai,” 1616.

chapter 5

   1. Masuda Mizuko, “Kagami,” 176.

  2. Ibid., 175.
   3.  Tanikawa has published more than fifty volumes of poetry, as well as
essay collections, books on poetics, children’s books, and translations of ev-
 Notes to Pages 283–90  543

erything from the plays of T. S. Eliot and the poetry of Robert Bly (1926–) to
Mother Goose and Peanuts. Tanikawa’s first collection—Nijūoku kōnen no ko-
doku (Alone in Two Billion Light Years, 1952)—marked a notable departure
from the anguish and disillusionment of the early postwar Arechi (Wasteland)
movement. It was greeted with high acclaim and established Tanikawa’s position
as a towering figure of Japanese poetry. As the esteemed poet and critic Murano
Shirō (1901–1975) gushed in 1968, “Right from his first volume Alone in Two
Billion Light Years, no books of poetry in post World War Two Japan have been
so spectacular as Tanikawa’s . . . In terms of superb intelligence and sharp wit no
modern [Japanese] poets could surpass him. One can see his work as the arche-
type of a new modern [Japanese] poetry.” Tanikawa’s style varies considerably
from volume to volume, and his verse appears in a variety of genres, everything
from analytical prose to epic, experimental, lyrical, narrative, and satirical po-
ems. Takako U. Lento, Poems of Shuntaro Tanikawa, i–v.
  4.  “Small Birds” has inspired multimedia performances around the world.
For instance, on March 15, 2009, the New Classic Singers, the resident choral
ensemble of the College of DuPage (Glen Ellyn, IL), included the Japanese classi-
cal composer Takekuni Hirayoshi’s (1936–1998) musical rendition of Tanikawa’s
poem as part of its program Circles of Peace.
 5. Other texts parodying such a focus include the Korean writer Mun
Tŏksu’s poem “Tosi 3” (Metropolis 3, 1988), which is set in an unidentified city
and depicts both disappearing animals and unrelenting construction as going un-
noticed; the sixth and twelfth (the final) lines of “Metropolis 3” repeat the sen-
tence “Residents of the city cannot see this” (simindŭl ŭn kŭgŏsŭl poji mot’anda).
Mun Tŏksu, “Tosi 3,” 504.
  6.  Tanikawa Shuntarō, “Sora ni kotori ga inakunatta hi,” 116–17.
  7.  Because the fourth stanza speaks both of people as losing their individu-
ality and as continuing to believe in the future, all four lines begin with the word
hito (ヒト).
  8.  Ch’oe Sŭngho, “Mul wi e mul arae,” 33.
 9. These include the Korean writer Yi Ch’angdong’s (1954–) short story
“Kkumkku nŭn chimsŭng” (Dreaming Beast, 1983). Early in the text the narra-
tor remarks: “Once again, the city’s deep darkness was swallowing everything.
The smoke rising quickly from the factory smokestacks was spreading like ink in
water, staining the glowing sky . . . Factory wastewater moved sluggishly in the
open sewer. It got water from the dying factory upstream. Sometimes it flowed
a dazzling yellow, sometimes as red as a virgin’s period. Now it was jet black,
moving like slime. Last summer a six-year-old kid drowned in it. The people in
the projects looked for him the entire night, but in the end he never rose to the
surface.” Yi Ch’angdong, “Kkumkku nŭn chimsŭng,” 217–18. People here are
overwhelmed by environmental devastation of their own making.
10.  Just as Ch’oe Sŭngho’s poem equates a pile of garbage with a tomb, so
does the American poet Archie Randolph Ammons’s (1926–2001) lengthy poem
Garbage (1993) liken heaps of garbage to ziggurats. A. R. Ammons, Garbage,
18, 35. For more on garbage poetry in the United States see Christopher Todd
Anderson, “Sacred Waste.”
11.  The poem remains notably silent on the backgrounds of the tourists—
544  notes to pages 291–93

they could be locals enjoying a brief respite, they could have arrived from afar,
or some combination of the two and everything in-between. But their fascination
with both the hotels and the mountains suggests that these are not familiar sights.
12. An excellent example occurs in the Japanese writer Ogura Toyofumi’s
(1899–1966) memoir Zetsugo no kiroku (Record from the End of the World,
1948). Looking out over the ruins of Hiroshima, Ogura comments: “[On the
ground] things looked exactly the same as from the top of the hill. There was no
difference between the distant and close-up views. This is what shocked me” (68).
13. Willa Cather (1873–1947), William Faulkner (1897–1962), F. Scott
Fitzgerald (1896–1940), Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961).
14.  Louise H. Westling, The Green Breast of the New World, 4–5. Westling
additionally remarks that “attention to gender can do much to explain the puz-
zle of ambivalence in American literary responses to landscape and nature” (5).
See also Westling’s chapter 3, “Pastoral Ambivalence in Emerson and Thoreau,”
39–53.
15. Ian McEwan’s (1948–) novel Solar (2010) likewise features a scientist
who does not doubt that the planet is in peril but is paralyzed by the crumbling
of his personal life and thus does not use his talents to help ameliorate conditions.
16. Chen Jingrong was born in Leshan (Sichuan Province). The poet Cao
Baohua (1906–1978) convinced her to go with him to Beijing when she was
thirteen. The two were apprehended shortly after their departure, but at age sev-
enteen, after several years of publishing poetry, she at last was able to escape
to the city. Chen Jingrong did not have the funds to study at a university, so
she listened to lectures surreptitiously and spent hours reading modern and clas-
sical Chinese, Western, and Indian literatures on her own, as well as studying
English and French with a tutor. She moved frequently during the war, and after
Japan’s defeat she relocated to Shanghai. There she established herself as a poet
and translator, publishing in her first two years away from home two volumes
of poetry, one of prose, and seven of translation. The following decades were
characterized by periods of creative outburst and of personal struggle. As editor
of Yiwen (Translation) in the mid-1950s, she was exposed to writing from Asia,
Africa, and Latin America. Chen Jingrong’s poetry thus echoes work from many
periods and places. Shiu-Pang E. Almberg, The Poetry of Chen Jingrong, 4–30.
Another of Chen Jingrong’s poems addressing ecodegradation is “Guocheng”
(Process, 1946), which declares, “The great earth is rotten: / Maggots creep forth
/ Sucking the vapor from garbage heaps; / . . . Decay — / A painful process. / The
times are panting, waiting — / Waiting for the great earth to rot through.” Trans-
lated by Shiu-Pang E. Almberg, The Poetry of Chen Jingrong, 120. I was unable
to find the original Chinese-language text of this poem.
17.  Ibid., 113.
18.  The poem’s second stanza reveals war exhaustion, “Wars? Let wars go
to hell! / Ay, you people, you half-witted citizens.” No sooner had World War
Two come to an end than the Chinese Civil War (1927–1949) resumed; full-scale
war between the KMT and the CCP broke out in June 1946, three months before
“City of Dusk” was written.
19.  Meng Yue, Shanghai, vii.
20.  Leo Ou-fan Lee, Shanghai Modern, xi–xii, 4. See also David Strand, “A
 Notes to Pages 293–301  545

High Place.” Mao Dun is the pen name of Shen Dehong (Shen Yanbing, 1896–
1981).
21.  Leo Ou-fan Lee, Shanghai Modern, 323.
22.  Ibid., xii, 4.
23.  As in many creative works examined in this chapter, references to dam-
age done to the nonhuman are more circumspect than those to harm inflicted on
people, but the former can be readily inferred from the latter.
24.  Rongzi, “Women de cheng bu zai fei hua,” 84–85.
25.  The poem does not specify what is meant by “urban tigers,” but the fact
that they “roar” and move in “packs” suggests they are motor vehicles.
26.  Ko Ŭn, “Yŏngil man–1,” 107–8.
27.  Although the notion of grains of sand as “mother of every person and
beast” does not come from Buddhism or Daoism, the blurring of hierarchies,
implied by the creation of this common mother, is an ideal embraced by both
traditions.
28.  Han Shaogong began writing in the mid-1970s, and much of his early
work (1978–1985) criticizes the policies of the Gang of Four, who controlled the
CCP during the latter part of the Cultural Revolution. In the early 1980s he also
wrote his first narratives on the mentally and physically handicapped, the most
notable of which is “Ba ba ba,” a story that draws parallels between the adversi-
ties faced by a severely handicapped child and the deterioration of a village. The
same year he published “Ba ba ba” Han Shaogong also wrote an essay on the
roots of Chinese civilization, which helped establish his position as a leader of the
new roots-seeking school. Bonnie S. McDougall and Kam Louie, The Literature
of China in the Twentieth Century, 405–7. Unlike most roots-seeking writers,
Han Shaogong’s work is less realistic than avant-garde, a result of his readings
of Latin American magical realism. Li-hua Ying, Historical Dictionary of Mod-
ern Chinese Literature, 58. One of Han Shaogong’s most prominent works is
Maqiao cidian (Dictionary of Maqiao, 1996), a novel structured as a dictionary
that provides keen insights into the language and lives of the people of Maqiao,
a village in southern China where Han Shaogong was sent during the Cultural
Revolution. In 1999 Han Shaogong participated in the Nanshan Seminar, a con-
ference on ecology and literature, and was one of the signatories of “Why Must
We Talk about the Environment?” This summary of the seminar urges balance
between environmental health and economic growth. It advocates taking a global
perspective over that of any single nation, as well as a farsighted historical view.
29.  Han Shaogong, “Nü nü nü,” 161.
30. Ibid.
31.  Ibid., 188–89.
32.  Ibid., 188.
33.  Ibid., 189.
34. Yi Hyŏnggi began publishing poetry as a teenager. Much of his early
work sensitively meditates on harmonious relationships between people and the
nonhuman world. A staple of these texts is the lonely wanderer who sees in the
nonhuman both happiness and sorrow, both life and death. Romantic nihilism
becomes philosophical nihilism in Yi Hyŏnggi’s later work, many of his poems
depicting a world suffused with death and madness. Nonhuman bodies—particu-
546  notes to pages 301–7

larly water—generally are used to symbolize or accentuate human experiences,

but at times they become the text’s focus. Korean Culture and Arts Foundation,
Who’s Who in Korean Literature, 312–14. Much of Yi Hyŏnggi’s oeuvre has
been translated into Spanish.
35.  Yi Hyŏnggi, “Eksŭrei sajin,” 88–89.
36. Chŏng Hyŏnjong, “Munmyŏng ŭi sasin,” 343. For more on “civiliza-
tion” and environmental degradation see chapter 6.
37.  Cho Sehŭi published his first story, “Tottae ŏmnŭn changsŏn” (Funeral
Boat without a Mast) in 1965. Then, after a ten-year hiatus, between 1975 and
1978 he produced the twelve stories that form Little Ball Launched by a Dwarf
(1978). This linked-story novel has been heralded as one of twentieth-century
Korea’s most important works of fiction, second only to Yi Kwangsu’s (1892–
1950) Mujŏng (Heartless, 1917). It describes the traumas the Park Chung Hee re-
gime inflicted on people and environments as it industrialized Korea. Cho Sehŭi’s
use of subtle irony helped him evade Park’s National Security Law, and his simple
syntax ensured a large audience; the book has enjoyed nearly 200 printings in
Korea and remains a best-seller. Readers easily identified with the dwarf who
appears in many of the novel’s stories; this individual is mistreated at every turn
and eventually believes he has no choice but to commit suicide. Bruce Fulton
and Kwŏn Yŏngmin, eds., Modern Korean Fiction, 215–16; Hanguk Munhak
Pŏnyŏkwŏn, Hanguk ŭi chakkadŭl—sosŏlga. Little Ball Launched by a Dwarf
has also been translated into Chinese (1995), Japanese (1980), and a number of
Western languages. Also noteworthy is Cho Sehŭi’s story “Chugŏ kanŭn kang”
(A Dying River, 1983), which discusses the exploitation of human and nonhuman
beings.
38. Cho Sehŭi, “Kigye tosi,” 144. Nearly 60 percent cite poverty as their
motive for employment; about the same number declare themselves always ex-
hausted (hangsang p’irohada).
39.  Ibid., 145.
40.  Ibid., 142.
41. Ibid.
42.  The narrator of “City of Machines,” unlike his counterpart in such texts
as Ishimure’s novel Sea of Suffering, does not depict industrialists as denying their
fundamental role in the destruction of ecosystems.
43.  Cho Sehŭi, “Kigye tosi,” 142. Not surprisingly, those who live in Ŭngang
think it ridiculous to forage for seafood in such obviously polluted waters.
44.  The narrator speaks frequently of the “people of Ŭngang,” by which he
generally means those who reside there but are not factory laborers, even though
many of the laborers appear to live in the city.
45.  Cho Sehŭi, “Kigye tosi,” 138–39. The words “poverty,” “population,”
and “pollution” are given in English in the Korean-language version of the story.
46.  Ibid., 149.
47.  In the final pages of the story, before Yunho’s transformation, the nar-
rator repeats the reference to a silent air conditioner found on the story’s open-
ing page and then comments that “Yunho knows so little” (147). The narrator
here accentuates Yunho’s initial physical and mental separation from the factory
workers.
 Notes to Pages 307–10  547

48.  “City of Machines” does not itself describe the dwarf’s death, speaking
only of Yunho’s obsession with it.
49.  Cho Sehŭi, “Kigye tosi,” 146. The leaders of the current union are min-
ions of the employers, making the union completely ineffective. “City of Ma-
chines” does not provide the names of the dwarf’s children; his oldest son instead
is referred to throughout to as “the dwarf’s eldest son.”
50.  “Kigye tosi,” 149.
51.  Yunho’s principal focus is ameliorating the working conditions of fac-
tory laborers, not remediating the ecosystems surrounding the factory. However,
improving work conditions would almost certainly have the indirect result of
improving environmental conditions.
52.  Cho Sehŭi, “Kigye tosi,” 147.
53.  Ibid., 141.
54.  Ibid., 143.
55. Ibid.
56. Ibid.
57.  Ibid., 144.
58.  Jiang Rong is a political scientist by training; he reportedly worked on
Wolf Totem, his first novel, for twenty years. His parents became government of-
ficials after the communist takeover in 1949, allowing him a relatively privileged
upbringing and early exposure to foreign cultures. Until the mid-1960s he had
nearly unfettered access to films from England, India, the Soviet Union, and the
United States, as well as foreign news reports and creative writing. Jiang Rong
volunteered to work in Inner Mongolia during the Cultural Revolution in part,
he claims, to be able to continue reading: “Everywhere I looked people were
confiscating books, and I was collecting them . . . I brought two big cases of hun-
dreds of books with me: Balzac, Tolstoy, Jack London, and Jane Austen. If I had
gone to Heilongjiang [cold, but by far the more popular volunteer destination],
I would have been living with the army, and they would have been confiscated.”
Howard W. French, “A Novel, by Someone, Takes China by Storm.” Jiang Rong
was jailed for participating in the antigovernment protests at Tiananmen Square
in June 1989; afraid for his safety and knowing that the novel could not be pub-
lished under his real name, he wrote Wolf Totem under a pseudonym and did not
reveal himself to the public until 2007. Although Wolf Totem is highly critical of
China, the novel has not been banned there. On the other hand, Jiang Rong was
stripped of his passport after Tiananmen Square and cannot leave the country.
Francois Bougon, “Chinese Ex-Prisoner Now Global Literary Star.”
59. Within a year of its publication Wolf Totem had sold one million of-
ficial copies in China and an estimated six million pirated copies. By 2008 it
had sold more than 2.6 million official copies and more than 17 million pirated
copies. Howard W. French, “A Novel, by Someone, Takes China by Storm”;
Francois Bougon, “Chinese Ex-Prisoner Now Global Literary Star.” Wolf To-
tem already has been or is under contract to be translated into Catalan, Dutch,
English, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean,
Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Spanish, Slovene, Turkish, and
Vietnamese. Manga rights have been sold to a Japanese publisher. Jiang Rong
also has adapted the novel into a children’s book. In addition, a number of se-
548  notes to pages 310–12

quels have been published. For a summary of negative reviews of the novel,
see Timothy Weston, “In Defense of Jiang Rong’s Wolf Totem.” See also Jerry
Varsava, “Jiang Rong’s Wolf Totem,” 296.
60.  As noted in chapter 1, Wolf Totem was preceded in China by such texts
as Jia Pingwa’s Remembering Wolves. Jiang Rong has also spoken of his admi-
ration for the American writer Jack London (1876–1916), particularly his Call
of the Wild (1903) and White Fang (1906). The former features a domesticated
dog transforming into a wild animal and the latter the domestication of a wild
animal. Jiang Rong’s environmentalism also draws on Thoreau’s writings. See
J. Gerard Dollar, “In Wildness Is the Preservation of China.” For comparative
perspectives on wolves in literature, and in particular on the ambivalence to-
ward wolves in American culture, see S. K. Robisch, Wolves and the Wolf Myth.
Other creative writings on wolves that provide interesting grounds of comparison
include Nicholas Evans (1950–), The Loop (1998); Seth Kantner (1965–), Ordi-
nary Wolves (2005); Joseph Smith, The Wolf (2008).
61.  Cited in Tang Yaming (Tan Yamin; Tō Amei), “Hon’yaku kōki,” 513.
Elsewhere Jiang Rong has stated that “The spirit of Wolf Totem can be summed
up in five ideas: freedom, independence, competition, tenacity, and team spirit.”
Francois Bougon, “Chinese Ex-Prisoner Now Global Literary Star.”
62.  The Olonbulag is southwest of the Xing’an mountain range and directly
north of Beijing; it shares a border with Outer Mongolia and historically was the
southern passage between Manchuria and Mongolia.
63.  Han Chinese constitute more than 90 percent of China’s population.
64.  Luis Ramiro Sepúlveda (1949–), Un Viejo que leía novellas de amor, 54.
65.  Jiang Rong was hardly the first Chinese writer to lament the degreening
and desertification of Beijing. See, for instance, the second part of Chen Jing­
rong’s “Beijing cheng” (Beijing City, 1981), which graphically depicts winds and
sands attacking the city and declares sandstorms an “obstinate characteristic” of
Beijing. Unlike Wolf Totem, the poem concludes on a hopeful note, with garden-
ers, residents, and students entering the city with “armfuls of green” prepared to
reinvigorate the Chinese capital.
66.  Although Mongols treat wolves more humanely than do Han Chinese,
Wolf Totem also suggests that had there been no wolves, or had Mongols not
been so intent on emulating wolves, millions of human lives would have been
saved. Reverence for animals here has deadly consequences. The narrator’s, Chen
Zhen’s, and the Mongols’ celebration of the Mongol admiration of animals, of
their willingness and indeed eagerness to emulate them—in sharp contrast with
Chinese attitudes—paradoxically leads to celebration of human annihilation on
a vast scale. Although the novel condemns Chinese incursion into Mongolia and
destruction of its landscapes, in truth the Mongols are depicted as historically
having killed more people and taken over more territory than the Chinese. Wolf
Totem is a clear indictment of twentieth-century Chinese abuse not only of Mon-
gols and Mongolian grasslands but also of their own people in the Great Leap
Forward and Cultural Revolution. Yet the novel also demonstrates just how easy
it is to be seduced by narratives of human respect for the nonhuman. The novel
reveals how such narratives can camouflage destruction far greater than the ac-
tual destruction being condemned.
 Notes to Pages 312–14  549

67.  Wolf Totem highlights how much the Mongols have learned from wolves
not only about obtaining food and surviving on the often brutal bodyscape of
Inner Mongolia but also about offensive warfare. The wolves are depicted as
ultimately responsible for the Mongols’ military prowess as well as their ability
to conquer vast swaths of land, ultimately creating an empire that, linking most
of Asia, was the largest in history. Chen Zhen wonders: “How on earth could
Chinggis Khan (ca. 1162–1227) and his progeny have swept across Eurasia us-
ing fewer than a hundred thousand soldiers? They exterminated hundreds of
thousands of the Western Xia’s armored cavalry, a million of the Great Jin’s
troops, millions of the Southern Song’s maritime and mounted forces, the Russian
Kipchaks, and the Teutons of Rome. They attacked and occupied Central Asia,
Hungary, Poland, and all of Russia, and they attacked large civilized nations like
Persia, Iran, China, and India . . . It was the Mongols who created the largest em-
pire in human history. How could a small primitive, backward, nomadic people,
a people without even their own writing system and steel-tipped arrows, a people
who used bone-tipped arrows, have such amazing military capability and mili-
tary wisdom? That was one of world history’s great unanswered questions . . .
Chen Zhen believed more and more strongly that the answer to Chinggis Khan’s
military marvels lay with the wolves . . . Chen Zhen felt as though he were stand-
ing at the entrance to the tunnel of the history of five thousand years of Chinese
civilization.” Jiang Rong, Lang tuteng, 97–98.
Scholars take a different view, generally attributing the Mongols’ military suc-
cess—surprising considering their small population—to superior military tactics,
weapons, and horses and to extreme endurance, adaptability, and organization.
Patricia Ebrey et al., East Asia: A Cultural, Social, and Political History, 226–34.
The Mongols, formerly just one of many tribes on the Asian grasslands, owed
their rise to the brilliant and brutal Chinggis Khan, who after uniting the tribes
of Mongolia, attacked the Jin, swept across north China (1212–13), captured
Beijing (1215), and then turned to Central Asia, pushing the Khwarazm shah
of Persia to an island in the Caspian Sea, where the shah died. Chinggis Khan
died of illness while attacking the Xia State in northwest China, but his legacy
continued. In the 1230s and 1240s Mongols took over Moscow and Kievan Rus-
sia and plundered cities in Poland and Hungary. They then looked to Persia and
the Middle East, taking Baghdad in 1258. Chinggis Khan’s grandson Khubilai (r.
1260–1294) completed the Mongol conquest of Korea and China several decades
later. See also Stephen G. Haw, The Mongol Unification of China; the Japanese
writer Inoue Yasushi’s (1907–1991) novel Aoki ōkami (The Blue Wolf, 1960).
68.  Jiang Rong, Lang tuteng, 104.
69.  Ibid., 275.
70.  Ibid., 475.
71.  Ibid., 467.
72. Ibid.
73. Ibid.
74. Ibid.
75.  Ibid. In Inner Mongolia a banner (qi) is an administrative unit equivalent
to a county.
76. Far less ambivalent about “progress” are individuals like those in the
550  notes to pages 314–17

isolated Sangre de Cristo mountain community (in the American Southwest) de-
scribed in Waters’s (1902–1995) People of the Valley. Foreshadowing the prom-
ises the Han Chinese make to the Mongols, a judge attempts to convince Maria
del Valle, the protagonist of the novel and a strong opponent of the planned
Orme Dam, “The dam cannot be stopped . . . It is not a dam alone. It is new
roads, new food and clothing, new customs to add to the old, education for all; it
is the progress of the world which sweeps all nations, all valleys of men. No man
can stop it, for it is of man himself” (164–65). But the persistence of the dam’s
challengers proves him wrong. Also noteworthy is Grace’s novel Potiki, which
depicts a range of local responses to outside calls to transform New Zealand
ancestral lands into resorts. One of the individuals protesting development of
the area declares: “None of us wants to see any of the things you have outlined
. . . None of these things [first-class accommodations, top restaurants, night
clubs, recreation centers, golf courses, covered parking facilities] would be of any
advantage to our people here” (90).
77. Christa Wolf (1929–), Störfall: Nachrichten eines Tages, 73. The pro-
tagonist of Accident is an East German writer who learns about Chernobyl
while waiting for a phone call from the hospital where her brother is undergoing
brain surgery. This double plot allows Wolf to portray “different perceptions
of advanced technology, different experiences of risk, and different perspectives
on the role of science.” Lawrence Buell, Ursula K. Heise, and Karen Thornber,
“Literature and Environment.” Other German writing on Chernobyl includes
Olaf Klein’s Nachzeit (Aftertime, 1999); Gabriele Wohmann’s (1932–) novel Der
Flötenton (Sound of the Flute, 1987) and her short story collection Ein russischer
Sommer (A Russian Summer, 1988).
78. Also countering Han Chinese claims that turning the grasslands into
farmland will help fortify the region against natural disasters is the Mongol asser-
tion that the grass is precisely what staves off further destruction of the region’s
people and animals during natural disasters. During blizzards, which in Wolf
Totem are labeled “natural disasters,” the Mongols are able to keep their animals
alive by feeding them harvested grass. Moreover, the grass prevents land erosion
and keeps wells from drying up, providing both people and animals with water
even during drought.
79.  According to both Mongols and Han Chinese, hatred of canines (wolves
and dogs) runs deep in Han Chinese thinking. The Mongol elder Bilige describes
how in ancient times Han armies came to the grasslands and killed and ate dogs
belonging to the herders, infuriating them and inciting resistance. Jiang Rong,
Lang tuteng, 195.
80.  Ibid., 102.
81.  In general, the term “class enemy” (jieji diren) referred to a “former land-
lord or rich peasant, a former member of the [Guomindang], a bookworm, a
bureaucrat, or an egoist.” Douwe Fokkema, “Creativity and Politics,” 606.
82.  Jiang Rong, Lang tuteng, 499. The term “jackal” often is used to refer to
counterrevolutionaries, or more generally to individuals who are deemed fools or
inimical to the cause being promoted.
83. In Adios to the Brushlands, Arturo Longoria discusses similar processes
of desertification in south Texas during the 1980s.
 Notes to Pages 317–21  551

84.  Jiang Rong, Lang tuteng, 394.

85.  Ibid., 234.
86.  For background on Ishimure, Sea of Suffering, and Minamata disease, see
chapters 1 and 2.
87. Doing so even more seamlessly is Christa Wolf’s Accident. Lawrence
Buell, Ursula K. Heise, and Karen Thornber, “Literature and Environment.” Cf.
Cho Sehŭi, “City of Machines.”
88.  Sea of Suffering not only features extensive attitudinal ambivalence vis-
à-vis environments (exhibited by the narrator and many residents of Minamata)
but also behavioral conflict vis-à-vis Minamata disease and Minamata patients
(exhibited between and within groups including the Japanese government, the
Chisso Corporation, the Japanese medical community, and residents of Mina-
mata and surrounding towns). These conflicts are discussed as appropriate, but
the principal focus in this chapter is on the more serious disjuncture between
disavowals and incontrovertible physical conditions.
89.  Ishimure Michiko, Kugai jōdo, 57.
90.  As the narrator describes, in July 1959 the Minamata Disease Compre-
hensive Research Group published an essay declaring that mercury in the fish and
shellfish of Minamata Bay was the most likely cause of the disease; this report is
said to “point out” Chisso’s practice of discharging poisonous wastewater into
the bay. Chisso immediately denied any connection between its wastewater and
the disease. The response of the corporation is understandable only insofar as
Chisso is not the only polluter of waters around Minamata. Sea of Suffering
transcribes an article published in the January 1, 1957 issue of the Journal of
the Kumamoto Medical Society that indicates a number of possible pollutants:
“the Minamata factory of a fertilizer company, the Minamata municipal slaugh-
terhouse near Tsukinoura, the underwater springs in the Yudō area, and in the
Modō area the former naval ammunition storehouse and antiaircraft encamp-
ment” (37).
91.  Ishimure Michiko, Kugai jōdo, 69. Hosokawa is the noblest lineage in
Kumamoto; during the Tokugawa period, the Hosokawa clan was one of the
most powerful daimyo families in Japan. Throughout Sea of Suffering the narra-
tor alternates references to Chisso’s heartlessness with those to the dedication of
medical researchers. It often is difficult for Minamata doctors to understand their
patients, since Minamata disease makes speech difficult, but the novel portrays
physicians as doing whatever they can to assist those suffering from this disease.
The narrator calls attention to the bonds that form between doctors and their
patients and the trust the latter have in their physicians, except when they believe
they are being used solely to further a doctor’s career.
92. Ishimure Michiko, Kugai jōdo, 179. The narrator cites remarks by
Tanaka Minoru, head of the local Public Health Department, downplaying the
seriousness of Minamata disease. Tanaka claims that his office is working dili-
gently to discover the cause of this disease, but he also stresses to members of the
Minamata City Assembly that it is not always fatal. He neglects to mention that
for those with severe cases, life might not always be preferable to death.
93.  Chisso, as the “second-largest chemical complex in the world,” was vital
not only to the economies of towns on the Shiranui Sea but also to the national
552  notes to pages 321–27

economy. Bruce Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun, 168. Cumings discusses
Chisso’s involvement in Korea, arguing that the company “provided the starting
point for North Korea’s postwar chemicals industry (which was integral to its
self-reliant industrial policy).”
 94. Ishimure Michiko, Kugai jōdo, 79.
 95. Ibid., 76.
 96. Ibid., 77.
  97.  For more on the Ashio copper mine incident see chapter 1.
 98. Ishimure Michiko, Kugai jōdo, 234.
 99. Ibid., 97–98.
100.  This is not to say that if Minamata disease only affected animals, that
if people remained healthy even after eating poisoned fish but the waters around
Minamata were polluted and the fish and shellfish living in these waters were
afflicted, the residents of Minamata would not insist on measures to protect non-
human health. In fact, if they did not have to agonize to such a degree over their
own health, they likely would have more energy to devote to that of their sur-
roundings.
101.  Ishimure Michiko, Kugai jōdo, 258.
102.  Tsutsui Yasutaka is famous for his satires of Japanese society and his
metafictional/hyperfictional style. He has won literary awards in Japan and
abroad. One of his best-known novels is Toki o kakeru shōjo (The Girl Who
Dashes through Time, 1966), an intriguing exploration of time travel; this text
has been adapted into a television series and several films, including an anime.
103.  Tsutsui Yasutaka, “Tatazumu hito,” 184.
104.  Ibid., 185.
105.  Ibid., 187. The narrator invents a new character for “cat-tree,” replac-
ing the radical of 猫 (cat) with 木 (tree).
106.  Ibid., 193. The Diet Building in Nagatachō, Tokyo is a popular place for
citizens’ protests, but only one individual has been killed there, Kanba Michiko,
a twenty-two-year-old senior at the University of Tokyo who in 1960 was one
of several million people protesting the revised U.S.-Japan Security Treaty. Pro-
testors were only occasionally detained and were imprisoned only if they threw
rocks or committed other violent acts. In fact, before boarding the last trains of
the evening to their homes in the suburbs the 1960 protestors would frequently
line up and bow to the police, who would bow back in return, despite wearing
riot gear. See George Packard, Protest in Tokyo.
107.  Tsutsui Yasutaka, “Tatazumu hito,” 188. The narrator creates a new
character for nin, combining 木 (tree) and人 (person). This character is followed
by no ki (の木; lit. tree of).
108.  Tsutsui Yasutaka, “Tatazumu hito,” 193.
109.  Ibid., 188.
110.  Also noteworthy in this context is Han Kang’s story “The Vegetarian,”
which depicts a woman who wastes away after becoming a vegetarian; this story
was translated into Japanese in May 2011 by Kim Huna (Kimu Funa).
111.  Tsutsui Yasutaka, “Tatazumu hito,” 189–90.
112.  Ibid., 193.
113.  For more on literature and the artificial greening of environments see
 Notes to Pages 328–36  553

chapters 6 and 7. Also featuring people being turned into trees is the Japanese
writer Abé Kōbō’s short story “Dendorokakariya” (Dendrocacalia, 1952).

chapter 6

  1. Bai Xianyong (Kenneth Pai) was born in China in 1937 but moved to
Taiwan in 1952. His father was the noted Guomindang general Bai Chongxi
(1893–1966) and his brother a famous calligrapher. He began writing while in
college and then in 1960, together with several classmates at National Taiwan
University, launched the journal Xiandai wenxue (Modern Literature), which
introduced Western literary modernism to Taiwanese and eventually Chinese au-
diences. In 1963 Bai Xianyong moved to the United States and after earning his
M.A. in creative writing from the University of Iowa became a professor at the
University of California, Santa Barbara, where he taught until his retirement in
1994. Born a Muslim, he attended Catholic missionary schools in Hong Kong
but turned to Buddhism in the United States. He is most famous for Taibeiren
(Taipei People, 1971), a collection of short stories written in the 1960s and note-
worthy for its modernist and experimental style; these narratives describe the
experiences of Chinese who moved from China to Taiwan in the 1950s. Many
of these people reminisce nostalgically about their lives in China. Bai Xianyong
also wrote on the experiences of Taiwanese in the short story “Zhijiage [Chicago]
zhi si” (Chicago Death, 1964) and in the collection Niuyue ke (New Yorkers,
1974). “Chicago Death” features a despondent Taiwanese exchange student (Wu
Hanhun) who envisions himself drowning in Lake Michigan the day after earn-
ing his Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Chicago. Highlighting
American chauvinism, this story depicts a woman Wu Hanhun meets at a bar
declaring she will call him “Tokyo,” even though he is Chinese. This is because
“It doesn’t matter. You Easterners all look about the same. Hard to distinguish.”
Bai Xianyong, “Zhijiage zhi si,” 264.
 2. The narrator comments that the houses in Pleasantville all have large
windows that because of air conditioning are closed throughout the year. See Bai
Xianyong, “Anlexiang de yi ri,” 284.
  3.  Bai Xianyong, “Anlexiang de yi ri, 290–91.
 4. Ibid., 291.
 5. Ibid., 285–86.
 6. Ibid., 282.
 7. Ibid., 283.
 8. Ibid.
 9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11.  Chapter 5 discusses more active acquiescence to environmental degrada-
tion.
12.  Nakaoka Jun’ichi was born in 1937.
13.  For more on Kim Kwanggyu and his work, see chapters 1, 3, and 4.
14.  Kim Kwanggyu, “Hwae namu,” 76.
15. Ibid.
554  notes to pages 336–42

16. Ibid.
17.  Ibid., 76–77.
18.  Kim Kwanggyu elaborates on the trope of the unchanging tree in such
poems as “Nŭlgŭn sonamu” (Old Pine Tree, 1986), discussed in the following
chapter.
19.  For more on Ch’oe Sŭngho and his literary production see chapters 3, 4,
and 5.
20.  Ch’oe Sŭngho, “Naenggak doen tosi e sŏ,” 60.
21.  Korea outlawed whaling in 1986–five years before the publication of “In
the Refrigerated City”–in compliance with the International Whaling Commis-
sion’s global moratorium. But the government continued to allow sales of meat
from whales caught “accidentally” by Koreans, and whale meat remains readily
available to the present day. Some whale meat sold in Korea is imported from
Japan.
22.  Ch’oe Sŭngho, “Naenggak doen tosi e sŏ,” 61.
23.  Isakawa Masomi, “Kosumosu no hana,” 72.
24.  By 1960 Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been rebuilt so successfully that
they looked like ordinary Japanese cities. Aside from their memorials, the only
obvious sign that they had been subjected to atomic bombings was their lack of
large trees.
25.  Nakaoka Jun’ichi, “Midori ga shitatari,” 227.
26.  “Green Trickles” is included in a collection published in 2007 so might
have been written after Abé’s (1954–) speech. Abé’s goal was creating a “beauti-
ful country, Japan” (utsukushii kuni, Nihon). In the opening of his general policy
speech to the 165th session of the Diet, he declared, “First, ‘a beautiful country,
Japan’ is a country that values culture, tradition, history, and nature”; at the
conclusion of the speech he asserted, “Our country Japan is a country blessed
with beautiful nature, a country with a long history, culture, and tradition, a
country of which we can be proud in the world.” Comments like Abé’s promote
inflated self-confidence, which can preclude attaining the very objectives that are
advocated. Abé Shinzō, “Dai 165 kai kokkai ni okeru Abé naikaku sōri daijin.”
Fukuda Yasuo (1936–), the next prime minister, quietly abolished the office Abé
established to invite citizens’ ideas as to what makes Japan beautiful.
27.  The anthology Collection of Atomic Bomb Poems–August is divided into
three parts: children’s poems on the atomic bombings, writings by adults on the
nuclear attacks, and verses calling for peace; the three parts are separated by
several pages of background on the bombing of Hiroshima, that of Nagasaki,
and subsequent nuclear testing and the antinuclear movement. Interestingly, most
of the poems are accompanied by color photographs, almost all of which depict
thriving ecosystems. In contrast, the collection contains only six photos of atomic
ruin, all in black and white; these photographs are separated from the poems
and appear in three sets of facing pages: a burnt watch, a schoolgirl’s summer
dress, human bone buried in melted tile, a student’s jacket, a second watch, and
a cluster of half-melted bottles. Sakai Izumi, ed., Genbaku shishū, 13–14, 42–43,
88–89.
28. Stephen Vincent Benét’s (1898–1943) “Metropolitan Nightmare” de-
scribes gradual global warming that goes largely undetected. People are depicted
 Notes to Pages 342–47  555

as for the most part simply adapting to changing conditions; those who do notice
there is something wrong keep quiet.
29.  Sakaki Nanao, “Nabete yo wa koto mo nashi,” 63. Browning’s (1812–
1889) poem reads “The lark’s on the wing; / The snail’s on the thorn; / God’s in
his heaven— / All’s right with the world.” Robert Browning, Pippa Passes, 133.
Sakaki subtly changes Browning’s verse. For more on Sakaki and his writings see
chapters 1–4.
30.  Sakaki Nanao, “Nabete yo wa koto mo nashi,” 63.
31.  Ibid., 65.
32.  Charles Inouye, Evanescence and Form, 191.
33.  One of the most striking texts on the deadly consequences of this attitude
is W. S. Merwin’s “The Last One,” which begins: “Well they’d made up their
minds to be everywhere because why not. / Everywhere was theirs because they
thought so. / . . . They started to cut. // Well they cut everything because why not.
/ Everything was theirs because they thought so / . . . Well in the morning they
cut the last one. / Like the others the last one fell into its shadow. / It fell into its
shadow on the water. / They took it away its shadow stayed on the water. // Well
they shrugged they started trying to get the shadow away.” The remainder of the
poem describes the desperate means employed to remove the shadow and the lat-
ter’s successful resistance against human encroachment.
34.  Sakaki Nanao, “Ee ja nai ka ee ja nai ka,” 49.
35.  Sakaki participated in poetry readings in both the United States and Ja-
pan aimed at increasing awareness of this airport’s potential impact on ecosys-
tems. In “Nanao,” the environmental activist Noike Motoki describes an “eco-
poetry-roundup” that Sakaki organized in San Francisco on June 3, 1988, to
benefit the Shiraho coral reef. More than 1,000 people attended this event, which
featured the American poets Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Joanne Kyger,
and Gary Snyder. Sakaki’s English-language poem “Save Shiraho’s Coral Reef”
(1986) urges people to order Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro to “stop this
Kamikaze project! And to find a better solution for the future of Japan and the
world.” Controversy over the New Ishigaki Airport (Shin Ishigaki Kūkō) dates
to 1972. Construction began in 2006, and the airport is expected to open in
2013. For more on the movement against this airport see Unryu Suganuma, “The
Protection of the Shiraho Sea.” Daniel Aldrich discusses airport controversies in
Japan in Site Fights.
A friend of Sakaki’s, Noike has written on the dangers facing coral reefs in
“Sango no umi o kowashi, nōka o kurushimeru ‘tochi kairyō’ jigyō” (“Land Im-
provement” Works That Destroy the Coral Sea and Strangle Agriculture, 1994)
and “Tochi kairyō jigyō ga sangoshō o odokasu” (Land Improvement Works
Threaten the Coral Reef, 1996).
36.  Sakaki Nanao, “Ee ja nai ka, ee ja nai ka,” 51.
37.  George Orwell, “Preface to ‘Kolghosp Tvaryn,’” For more on Miyazawa
Kenji and his writings, see chapters 1, 2, and 4.
38. Both Animal Farm and “The Frandon Agricultural School Pig” feature
articulate pigs, but there is little chance Orwell (1903–1950) was aware of Mi-
yazawa’s story since there is no record of Miyazawa being translated into Western
languages before the 1950s. Animal Farm, a scathing attack against the Soviet
556  notes to pages 348–51

Union, depicts pigs liberating themselves from their oppressive human masters
but ultimately turning on one another and on other animals; the novel portrays
both animals and people as viciously calculating and pigs as even taking on the
physical characteristics of their former masters. The novel concludes: “The crea-
tures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man
again; but already it was impossible to say which was which” (95). In contrast,
Miyazawa’s story centers around a pig who is abused and killed by people and
never enjoys such power.
39.  Because the first page of Miyazawa’s manuscript was never found, it is
unclear whether he actually intended the story to be called “The Frandon Agri-
cultural School Pig.” Some believe that Miyazawa wished the title to be “Fanta-
sies in the Faries Agricultural School,” this being written in English in the mar-
gins of the first existing page. Miyazawa Tajirō, “Kōki,” 315.
40.  Miyazawa Kenji, “Frandon Nōgakkō no buta,” 253. The narrator also
indicates that pigs have been abused by a number of societies when early in the
story he comments, “To understand fully the thoughts and feelings of a pig you
have to become a pig . . . The most difficult thing to imagine is what a pig is feel-
ing when its flat back is being hit with a stick. Is it Japanese? Italian? German?
English? How should it express itself? Yet in the end only cries are understood. As
Kant said, it’s completely mysterious.” Miyazawa Kenji, “Frandon Nōgakkō no
buta,” 251–52. It is undoubtedly true that although speculation is always part of
transcribing unvocalized emotions, in many cases those best able to comprehend
the thoughts and feelings of an individual (human or nonhuman) are of the same
species as that individual. On the other hand, this particular pig’s facility with
“human language” allows the narrator to provide a credible transcription of the
animal’s inner and inaudible monologues.
41.  According to an editor’s note, the first page of Miyazawa’s manuscript of
“Frandon Agricultural School” is missing. Miyazawa Kenji, “Frandon Nōgakkō
no buta,” 250.
42.  The narrator comments that the king recently proclaimed the Livestock
Consent to Death by Clubbing Law (Kachiku Bokusatsu Dōi Chōinhō), which
requires that those wishing to kill livestock must first have the animals sign a
Certificate of Consent to Death. This law embodies the ambiguous ways people
treat their nonhuman counterparts. On the one hand, it acknowledges animal
consciousness and desire. On the other hand, it forces animals to be complicit in
their own deaths.
43.  Miyazawa Kenji, “Frandon Nōgakkō no buta,” 253.
44.  Ibid., 269.
45.  Ibid., 258.
46.  Ibid., 264.
47.  At the beginning of the story the animal weighs 75 kilograms, but by its
death it has swollen to well over 100.
48.  Miyazawa Kenji, “Frandon Nōgakkō no buta,” 258–59.
49.  Ibid., 259.
50.  Ibid., 261–62.
51.  Ibid., 267. Ironically, the pig here refers to its body as that of a person.
This scene also provides an important contrast with the pig’s joyous calculation,
 Notes to Pages 351–60  557

early in the story, that his body, valued at the current price of platinum, is worth
600,000 yen. The major difference is that in this case it is the pig itself, not agri-
culture students, determining its value.
52.  For more on A Cheng and his writings see chapters 1 and 2.
53.  A Cheng, “Zhouzhuan,” 175.
54. Ibid.
55. Ibid.
56.  Ibid., 177.
57.  Ibid., 179–80.
58.  For more on Hoshi Shin’ichi and his writings see chapters 1, 3, and 4.
59.  Hoshi Shin’ichi, “O—i dete ko—i,” 22.
60.  Ibid., 23.
61. Ibid.
62.  Yuyin residents who generate trash but do not travel to the landfill to
salvage trash would not themselves witness the garbage level rising. It is unclear
how much they know, but nothing in the text indicates that they have been ac-
tively prevented from learning about the precarious state of this pit: 100 tons of
trash per day into a facility that holds only 10,000 tons. Hoshi’s short story con-
trasts significantly with such texts as the American writer Don DeLillo’s (1936–)
postmodern novel Underworld (1997), which highlights the continual resurfac-
ing of various forms of waste.
63.  Hoshi Shin’ichi, “O—i dete ko—i,” 23.
64. Ibid.
65.  Olive Senior (1941–), “Seeing the Light,” 93.
66.  For background on Yu Guangzhong see chapter 3.
67.  Yu Guangzhong, “Shatian shanju,” 4, 6.
68.  Ibid., 7.
69.  Ibid., 7.
70.  Yamazato Katsunori’s observations concerning Gary Snyder are true of
many writers who address environmental degradation. Snyder did not simply
“love nature.” Instead, he indicted “a civilization devoid of sensibility of and
respect for other life forms, mindlessly engulfed in its own destructiveness.”
Yamazato Katsunori, “Seeking a Fulcrum,” 134, 136.
71.  Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, 95.
72.  As the speaker of South African writer Douglas Livingstone’s poem “A
Death of Green” queries after colorfully describing trees being felled: “Part of it
all, hands unclean / as the rest, I wondered if the matches, / news-sheets, planks
and plastics, / pitprops, sleepers, telephone- / uprights for country party-lines /
were worth half a hillside/ of twenty-five summers / nodding peacefully in the
sun; / and if the trees would ever learn to run; / every night tried to remember,
/ just before sleeping, things / would be quieter when we had gone” (444–45).
73.  For more on Ko Ŭn’s writing see chapters 1, 3, 4, and 5.
74.  Ko Ŭn, “Pŏpsŏngp’o e sŏ,” 44.
75.  In contrast, some texts feature people who actively relish destruction of
ecosystems. The bulk of the Korean writer Pŏm Taesun’s (1930–) poem “Pul-
dooja” (Bulldozer, 1965) painfully describes how this machine shreds the land-
scape; the poem’s speaker could hardly be more pleased by what he observes,
558  notes to pages 360–68

claiming in the final lines: “BULLDOZER / . . . I stand forever, cherishing your

sight / dreaming of the exuberance of prickly joyous roses / with you in the bril-
liant flower garden of some splendid village.” Such texts are counterbalanced
by those including the Korean writer Yi Sŏngbu’s (1942–) poem of similar title
“Puldojŏ” (Bulldozer, 1976). The bulk of this text describes hills being brutally
torn apart as though they were people having their shoulder blades dislocated
and masses of their flesh ripped away, and people being torn apart as though
they were hills. Unlike Pŏm Taesun’s text, Yi Sŏngbu’s “Bulldozer” concludes not
with words of admiration but instead with comments on the endurance of love
that emerges from death. More subdued is the Native American writer Allison
Adelle Hedge Coke’s (1958–) poem “Tractor” (2006), narrated by a machine that
declares, “It is my duty to plow, my work / to turn the earth to something / my
master thinks precious / . . . Let it not be said I / judged this domain / anything
but worthy of / my own steely blades” (53).
76.  Ch’oe Sŭngho, “Mulso kajuk kabang,” 66.
77.  Ibid., 67.
78.  For more on Chŏng Hyŏnjong see chapters 3, 4, and 5.
79.  Chŏng Hyŏnjong, “Kip’ŭn hŭlk,” 77.
80.  As Roy Sidle notes, in some mountainous regions roads cause more dam-
age than deforesting, damming, and farming unsustainably. Roads fragment for-
ests, harm bird habitats, increase insect populations, and prevent ground animals
from ranging freely. Sediment loss is particularly severe and can lead to sub-
stantial erosion. Yet the impact of roads tends to be ignored by environmental-
ists, NGOs, and government agencies alike. See Roy Sidle, “Dark Clouds over
Shangri-La.”
81.  Sakaki Nanao, “Nihonjin no senzo,” 42.
82.  Ibid., 42–43. The mamushi is a poisonous Asian viper.
83.  For more on Japanese logging outside Japan see chapter 1.
84.  Japan now imports its Matsutake mushrooms primarily from China.
85.  Most Japanese buy at least a few Matsutake mushrooms annually, but
the poem exaggerates when it claims that vipers are part of the lives of 100 mil-
lion middle-class Japanese; Japan’s population in 1986 was 121.5 million. http://
datafinder.worldbank/org/population-total.
86.  For an extreme example of this phenomenon, see the Korean writer Kim
Tongin’s (1900–1951) short story “Kwangyŏm sonat’a” (Mad Flame Sonata,
1929). Karen Laura Thornber, Empire of Texts in Motion, 278–79.
87.  For background on Ch’oe Sŭngja see chapter 4.
88.  Latife Tekin (1957–) is a best-selling writer in Turkey.
89.  Ch’oe Sŭngja, “Yŏŭido kwangsigok,” 54.
90.  Ibid., 24.
91.  Ibid., 60.
92.  Ibid., 56.
93. Wang Lixiong began his career as an engineer for First Automotive
Works, China’s first car and truck manufacturer, but in 1980 became a freelance
writer. He published his debut story in 1978 and his debut novel in 1984, Tian-
tang zhi men (Heaven’s Gates). Fear of reprisal led him in 1991 to publish Yel-
low Peril anonymously, under the pseudonym Bao Mi (lit. keep secret). Pirated
 Notes to Pages 368–72  559

editions were readily available in China, but for many years the identity of the
novel’s author was an enigma.
Also well known are Wang Lixiong’s writings on Tibet; he is married to the
Tibetan poet and influential blogger Tsering Woeser (1966–). Wang Lixiong’s
experiences in Tibet beginning in the 1980s and meetings with the Dalai Lama
led to deep compassion for the Tibetan people and inspired personal memoirs
such as Piaoliu (Drifting, 1988) and Yu Dalai Lama duihua (Conversations with
the Dalai Lama, 2002) and reportage such as Tianzang: Xizang de mingyun (Sky
Burial: The Fate of Tibet, 1998). In the 2000s Wang Lixiong wrote similarly on
Urumqi, most notably in Xinjiang zhuiji (Memories of Xinjiang, 2001). He also
has published widely on political theory, including such texts as Rongjie quanli:
zhucengdi xuanzhi (Dissolving Power: A Multistaged Electoral System, 1998)
and Dijin minzhu: Zhongguo de disantiao daolu (Democracy Moving Forward:
China’s Third Road, 2004).
Wang Lixiong’s involvement in environmental movements dates to the mid-
1990s; in 1994 he and several others formed the NGO Ziran zhi You (Friends of
Nature). He was forced to resign from this organization in February 2003; the
Chinese government threatened that if he did not do so it would withdraw the
group’s right to operate. See Rémi Quesnel, “Wang Lixiong.” In the past Wang
Lixiong has been imprisoned and placed under house arrest for his activism.
  94.  Deng Xiaoping (1904–1997) served as political leader of China from
1978 to 1992.
  95.  Susan J. Napier, From Impressionism to Anime, 3. See also William F.
Wu, The Yellow Peril, 30. Fear of Asians, particularly Chinese, led to the Chinese
Exclusion Act of 1882 and the Scott Act of 1888.
 96. Jack London (1876–1916), who visited Japan, Korea, and Manchu-
ria and covered the Russo-Japanese War (1904–5) as a reporter, often has been
accused of propagating the term. His short story “The Unparalleled Invasion”
(1910) features China attempting to take over the globe but being annihilated by
a plague released by Western powers. For different perspectives on Jack London
and the Yellow Peril see Daniel A. Métraux, “Jack London, Asian Wars and the
‘Yellow Peril.’” Yorimitsu Hashimoto’s seven-volume Primary Sources on Yellow
Peril is the most comprehensive collection of fiction on this phenomenon. Mat-
thew Phipps Shiel lived from 1865 to 1947 and Rudyard Kipling from 1865 to
1936.
  97.  William F. Wu, Yellow Peril, 30.
 98. Wang Lixiong, Huang huo, 3:244.
 99. Ibid., 3:249.
100.  Wang Lixiong, “Preface to the English Edition,” v.
101. Ibid.
102.  Like those who insist that Frederick Cook and Robert Peary reached
the North Pole, these people use reverse logic or “motivated reasoning,” some
ignoring or rejecting counterevidence, some counterarguing, and some resorting
to inferred justification. See John Tierney, “A Clash of Polar Frauds and Those
Who Believe.”
103.  Wang Lixiong, Huang huo 1:68.
104.  Ibid., 1:69–70.
560  notes to pages 372–87

105.  Ibid., 1:70.

106. Ibid., 2:263.
107.  Ibid., 2:264, 266.
108.  Ibid., 1:71.
109.  Wawa can mean either “baby” or “doll.”
110.  Wang Lixiong, Huang huo, 3:275–76.
111.  Sakaki Nanao, “Midori eien nari,” 60.
112.  Franklin R. Rogers, Painting and Poetry, 66. Sen no Rikyū lived from
1522 to 1591.
113.  Sakaki Nanao, “Midori eien nari,” 60.
114.  Ibid., 61.
115.  C. V. Krementetski et al., “Late-Quaternary Dynamics of Pines,” 95–
106.
116.  The color white overtakes the color green in the fourth stanza, with its
references to the Japanese white pine and White Mountain.
117.  Nobiagaru also means “stand on tiptoe.”
118.  Sakaki Nanao, “Midori eien nari,” 61.

chapter 7

   1. Mireya Navarro, “Navajos Hope to Shift from Coal to Wind and Sun,”
A12.
   2.  Lucille Lang Day, “Letter to Send in a Space Capsule,” 606. The timber
merchant Zhang likewise declares in Gao Xingjian’s environmental drama Yeren
(Wild Man, 1985), “I love these trees dearly. My heart cries for them.” Zhang an-
thropomorphizes these plants, declaring that if his colleagues go into the woods,
“You will hear, the trees all can speak.” Yet still he spends his days felling them.
Gao Xingjian, Yeren, 150. For more on this drama see Monica Basting, Yeren.
   3.  Lucille Lang Day, “Letter to Send in a Space Capsule,” 605–6.
  4. Jiang Rong, Lang tuteng, 9.
  5. Ibid., 160.
  6. Ibid., 164.
  7. Ibid., 167.
  8. Ibid.
  9. Ibid., 168.
 10. Ibid., 169.
 11. Ibid., 174.
 12. Ibid., 350.
 13. Ibid., 463.
 14. Ibid., 500.
 15. Ibid., 501.
 16. Ibid., 506.
 17. Ibid., 541.
 18. Ibid., 548.
 19. Ibid., 126.
 Notes to Pages 387–93  561

20.  Ibid., 169.

21.  Ibid., 169–70.
22.  The South African-born Australian writer J. M. Coetzee’s (1940–) novel
Disgrace (1999), a haunting tale of postapartheid South Africa, features one of
the logical extremes of this phenomenon. The protagonist David Lurie, a former
professor, works at an animal welfare clinic that every week kills “superfluous”
dogs; his job is to dispose of their remains. He takes this task seriously, out of re-
spect for the dogs that have been killed. Unwilling to see their corpses mutilated,
he carries them to the incinerator himself: “The dogs are brought to the clinic
because they are unwanted . . . That is where he enters their lives. He may not be
their savior, the one for whom they are not too many, but he is prepared to take
care of them once they are unable, utterly unable, to take care of themselves . . .
There must be other, more productive ways of giving oneself to the world . . . He
saves the honor of corpses because there is no one else stupid enough to do it”
(146). David himself does not directly hurt dogs, but the deep respect he has for
the dogs’ corpses does not extend to their living bodies. Of course, even if it did,
there is likely nothing he could do to offer the animals a better life.
23.  In some creative texts, the only significant disjuncture expressed is be-
tween attitudes and behaviors. In others the gap between attitudes and behaviors
coexists with the attitudinal conflicts examined in chapter 2: individuals deeply
respect the environment yet believe it is theirs for the taking. Many of the creative
works examined in chapter 2 also include gaps between beliefs and behaviors,
and many of the creative works discussed in this chapter also incorporate gaps
between attitudes. But while chapter 2 focuses on these attitudinal conflicts, the
present chapter centers on disjunctures between attitudes and actions.
24.  It is unclear whether Awei is aware that the bird recently ingested pesti-
cide.
25.  Huang Chunming, “Fangsheng,” 78–79.
26.  Ibid., 79.
27.  Keeping birds in cages to fulfill emotional desires is of course not unique
to Awai. For example, in the first half of 2010, nearly one hundred elderly Tokyo
residents were charged with keeping birds illegally. One widower claimed that
“having the bird there in a cage soothed his heart.” See “Committing Crime for
Company.”
28.  Hwang Chunming, “Fangsheng,” 103–4.
29.  Ibid., 123.
30.  Ibid., 115.
31.  Murakami is known the world over for his powerful narratives on ev-
erything from young love to Japanese atrocities in World War Two, including in
such works as the three-volume Nejimakidori kuronikuru (The Wind-Up Bird
Chronicle, 1995). Murakami’s novels, short stories, and nonfiction have been
translated into more than forty languages, and they are best-sellers in China,
Korea, Taiwan, and numerous other countries. His fiction is translated into
Chinese and Korean almost immediately after it appears in Japan. Scholarship
on the Murakami boom in Asia and around the world is vast. For summaries
of this phenomenon see Fujii Shōzō, “Higashi Ajia to Murakami Haruki” and
562  notes to pages 393–99

“Murakami Haruki to Chūgoku”; Margaret Hillenbrand, “Murakami Haruki in

Greater China”; Shibata Motoyuki et al., Sekai wa Murakami Haruki o dō yomu
ka; Karen L. Thornber, “Cultures and Texts in Motion,” 756–61.
Murakami did not begin writing until he was nearly thirty, and he was never
awarded the Akutagawa Prize, the conventional entrée into the Japanese liter-
ary elite. But despite this initial lack of recognition and the literary establish-
ment’s often harsh dismissals of his work, such early texts as “Chūgoku yuki
no surō bōto” (Slow Boat to China, 1980), Hitsuji o meguru bōken (A Wild
Sheep Chase, 1982), Sekai no owari to hādoboirudo wandārando (Hard-Boiled
Wonderland and the End of the World, 1985), and Noruei no mori (Norwegian
Wood, 1987) established him as a formidable talent, and his popularity quickly
soared. His recent trilogy 1Q84 (2009-10), a publishing sensation and translated
into Korean and Chinese just months after its release in Japanese, features agri-
cultural communes that have attracted the attention of Japanese scholars of lit-
erature and the environment. “Environmental Literature.” Murakami is a prolific
translator of English-language literature, including the American writers F. Scott
Fitzgerald, Raymond Carver (1938–1988), John Irving (1942–), Truman Capote
(1924–1984), Ursula K. Le Guin, and Chris Van Allsburg (1949–). Murakami’s
nonfiction is also distinguished: he wrote about the 1995 Aum Shinrikyō sarin
gas attack in the Tokyo subways in Andāguraundo (Underground, 1997), a col-
lection of interviews with victims of the incident supplemented by his own com-
mentary, and Yakusoku sareta basho de: Andāguraundo 2 (The Place that Was
Promised: Underground 2, 1998), a collection of interviews with members of the
Aum Shinrikyō cult. Jay Rubin, “Murakami Haruki.”
32.  Murakami Haruki, “Always on the Side of the Egg.”
33.  For examples see Jim Dwyer, Where the Wild Books Are, 99–100.
34.  Murakami Haruki, “Zō no shōmetsu,” 412.
35. Ibid.
36.  Ibid., 426.
37.  Ibid., 408–9.
38.  Ibid., 411.
39.  Ibid., 414.
40.  Ibid., 408.
41.  Ibid., 405. The mayor uses the elephant’s age to justify its adoption by
the town (407).
42.  Ibid., 410.
43.  Ibid., 421.
44.  Ibid., 414.
45.  Elephants are known for their great intelligence and uncommonly strong
bonds with the land, one another, and at times the people who nurture them. See
Charles Siebert, “An Elephant Crackup?”
46.  David G. Goodman, “Introduction: Oguma Hideo.” Oguma was born
in Hokkaido and moved with his family to Japan’s colony in Sakhalin in 1911;
he relocated to Tokyo in 1928. During his life he published only two books of
poetry but deeply impressed his contemporaries and later writers, including such
leading poets as Nakano Shigeharu (1902–1979), Kijima Hajime (1928–), Iwata
Hiroshi (1932–), and Odagiri Hideo (1916–2000), who together published a six-
 Notes to Pages 399–407  563

volume collection of his work in 1980, four decades after his death. Oguma was
active in Japanese proletarian literary circles in the late 1920s and early 1930s.
In the mid- and late 1930s he founded and edited a number of literary journals
and continued writing in earnest. His post-tenkō (renunciation of communism)
writing emphasized the need to separate literature and politics but also promoted
progressive ideals. Most impressive are his long narrative poems published in
1935, including “Flying Sled.” Unlike most wartime Japanese writers, Oguma
did not support Japan’s conflict with China and instead attempted to understand
the experiences of Japan’s victims—Chinese, Koreans, and the Ainu.
47.  Sakhalin Island, Russia’s largest, is located just north of Hokkaido. The
southern part of Sakhalin Island was administered by Japan as Karafuto between
Russia’s defeat by Japan in 1905 and Japan’s own defeat in 1945.
48.  David G. Goodman, “Introduction: Oguma Hideo,” 17.
49.  In his 1980 essay on “The Flying Sled,” Wada Jun comments on Oguma’s
environmental consciousness, “I hardly need to reiterate that struggling with the
human costs of the destruction of the natural environment is a major challenge
for mankind today and an essential part of every poet’s mission.” Wada Jun,
“Tobu sori,” 342. Cited by David G. Goodman, “Introduction: Oguma Hideo,”
16.
50.  Oguma Hideo, “Tobu sori,” 122.
51.  Ibid., 99.
52.  Ibid., 124.
53.  Ibid., 127.
54. Ibid.
55.  Gontarō depicts his techniques as perfectly ordinary, at least among the
Ainu.
56.  Kim Kwanggyu, “Nŭlgŭn sonamu,” 96.
57. Ibid.
58. Ibid.
59.  Ibid., 97.
60.  Oodgeroo Noonuccal (1920-1993) was born Kathleen Jean Mary Ruska
and also was known as Kath Walker. She was a member of the Noonuccal tribe
(Australia) and was a leader of aboriginal activist movements beginning in the
1960s. Her popular anthology We are Going was the first volume of poetry pub-
lished by an Australian aboriginal writer.
61.  Other Korean creative writing on environmental ambiguities associated
with the 1988 Seoul Olympics includes Han Sŭngwŏn’s (1939–) novel Abŏji wa
adŭl (Father and Son, 1989), which addresses the campaign against eating dog
meat launched to appease the United States and other Western nations.
62.  Ko Ŭn, “Kkot,” 470.
63.  Ibid., 471.
64.  Removing the foliage that heretofore camouflaged the countryside’s many
televisions (a much milder version of what Sakaki’s Black Angels do to Japan, dis-
cussed later in this chapter) also makes the countryside look more like the city.
65.  Ko Ŭn, “Kkot,” 471.
66.  Ibid., 470–71.
67.  The cult of Dazai is larger and more passionate than most. Like many
564  notes to pages 407–11

Japanese writers, Dazai used literature as a way of probing and exposing the self,
whether “authentic” or constructed. But what makes his work stand out is its
seeming honesty and intimacy. Also inviting is his inventive prose style and lively,
linguistic colorings. Much of Dazai’s oeuvre concerns the chasm between the few
people who strive for integrity, and society at large; Dazai speaks frequently of
society as wallowing in deceit. His first volume, Bannen (Final Years, 1936), is a
collection of diverse stories, covering everything from his childhood to the history
of the Edo period. Dazai is best known for the novels Shayō (The Setting Sun,
1947) and Ningen shikkaku (No Longer Human, 1948), both of which highlight
the bleakness of postwar Japan. Joel Cohn, “Dazai Osamu.” Roy Starrs discusses
Dazai’s lifelong ambivalence toward his childhood home and its impact on his
work in “Nation and Region in the Work of Dazai Osamu.” For discussions of
the nonhuman in Dazai’s oeuvre, see Ōmori Ikunosuke, “Dazai Osamu to shi-
zen.” See also Sin Hyŏnsŏn (Shin Hyun-seon), “Dajai Osamu [Dazai Osamu]
munhak.”
68.  Phyllis I. Lyons, The Saga of Dazai Osamu, 140–48. Tsugaru was com-
missioned by the publisher Koyama Shoten for its series of regional studies by
prominent writers. For more on Tsugaru, see Nanyan Guo et al., eds., Tsugaru,
particularly Hidemichi Kawanishi, “The Transformation of Modern Tsugaru
Identity.”
69.  Dazai Osamu, Tsugaru, 259–60.
70.  Dikes frequently control the water in such places.
71.  Dazai Osamu, Tsugaru, 286–87.
72.  Ibid., 288.
73.  Ibid., 302. Dazai uses the term fūkei (landscape) differently from Shiga
Shigetaka, discussed in chapter 1, who employs fūkei rather than the conven-
tional, humanistic keikan so as to be more tangible/concrete regarding Japan’s
geophysical setting. Shiga was a geologist, but still romanticized Japan as not
merely different but as superior to other countries.
74.  Goncharov (1812–1891) is best known for his novel Oblomov (1858).
75.  Dazai Osamu, Tsugaru, 274.
76.  Ibid., 274–75.
77.  Ibid., 275.
78. Ibid.
79. Ibid.
80.  Abé Kōbō played a principal role in Japan’s postwar literary avant-garde
and remained a dominant figure in Japanese letters for the rest of his life; his
oeuvre has been translated into many languages and been celebrated abroad.
Abé spent most of his youth in Manchuria, where his father was a physician. He
relocated permanently to Japan in 1946 and began publishing in 1948 while in
medical school. His debut fiction, Owarishi michi no shirube ni (On the Sign at
the End of the Road, 1948) is set in Manchuria at the end of the war and dis-
cusses questions of home and homeland. Although these issues remained focal
points of his oeuvre, Abé quickly moved away from autobiographical writing. He
published volumes of avant-garde fiction that aptly blend the experimental and
surreal with science, math, and logic. His best-known works are Woman in the
Dunes (1962), Tanin no kao (Face of Another, 1964) and Moetsukita chizu (Ru-
 Notes to Pages 411–13  565

ined Map, 1967); Face of Another features a chemist with a severely scarred face
who believes he can restore his identity via a mask, while Ruined Map depicts
a detective searching for a missing man while identifying closely with his need
to escape society. Christopher Bolton, “Abé Kōbō.” Abé’s oeuvre is not obvi-
ously environmental, but its futuristic scenarios point to possible consequences
of continued human manipulation of ecosystems. As noted in chapter 1, Abé’s
novel Inter-Ice Age Four features a world utterly transformed by rising sea levels.
Also important from an ecological perspective is his short story “Dendrocaca-
lia,” which portrays a man transformed into a plant and highlights similarities
between man and plant.
81.  Susan Rubin Suleiman, Subversive Intent, 12. See also Karen L. Thorn-
ber, “Ecocriticism and Japanese Literature of the Avant Garde.”
82.  Abé Kōbō, Suna no onna,10. The narrator is purposely vague concerning
the location of the village. He indicates only that the journey from Niki’s home
to the dunes takes barely half a day via rail (to “S Station”), bus, and foot. It is
likely that Niki’s travels take him to the Tottori sand dunes on Japan’s western
seashore, which Abé’s literary predecessor Arishima Takeo (1878–1923) made
famous and which Abé visited before writing Woman in the Dunes; “S station”
could refer to Suetsune Station, located only one stop from Tottori University
(where Abé did some of his research) and three stops from Tottori Station. But
Tottori Station’s greater proximity to the dunes than Suetsune Station compli-
cates this interpretation. It is also possible that the narrator is evoking sand dunes
in Manchuria (northeastern China), where Abé spent much of his childhood.
Abé lived in the city of Shenyang, so the “S” could suggest Shenyang Station;
in addition, Liaoning Province’s long coastline, not far from Shenyang, includes
numerous sand dunes. Or perhaps the novel is alluding to China’s and Mongo-
lia’s Gobi Desert, whose windborne sands regularly invade Japan. At the same
time, the narrator strongly implies that the story takes place in Japan. To give an
example, the village elders provide Niki with a newspaper with headlines that,
with one exception (the deaths of 280 people in Africa), either do not specify
location or are explicitly about events in Japan; Niki not coincidentally is drawn
to an article, cited in the narrative, on a fatal construction accident in Yokokawa
(Gunma Prefecture) involving sand and the Tō-A Construction Company (Tō-A
Kensetsu Kōgyō, est. 1908). The bureaucracy and social structure depicted in the
novel also mirror those of 1950s Japan.
83.  Abé Kōbō, Suna no onna, 144.
84.  The avant-garde filmmaker Teshigahara Hiroshi (1927–2001) worked on
several films with Abé.
85.  David Pollack, Reading against Culture, 128.
86.  Sasaki Kiichi, “Gūwa teki ni shika kokuji dekinai,” 3.
87.  Susan J. Napier, Escape from the Wasteland, 13.
88.  J. Thomas Rimer, A Reader’s Guide to Japanese Literature, 179.
89. Abé Kōbō, Suna no onna, 7–8. Much scholarship on Woman in the
Dunes addresses Niki’s interest in insects but for the most part reads this con-
nection symbolically (as indicating, for instance, an obsession with detail), rather
than as pointing to human/nonhuman interactions.
90.  Abé Kōbō, Suna no onna, 61–62.
566  notes to pages 414–22

 91. Ibid., 9.
  92.  Roy Rosenstein discusses other meanings of Niki’s quest for insects in
“The End of Insect Imagery.”
 93. Abé Kōbō, Suna no onna, 11.
 94. Ibid., 72.
 95. Ibid., 76.
 96. Ibid., 65.
 97. Ibid., 13.
 98. Ibid., 15.
 99. Ibid., 29.
100.  Ibid., 13.
101.  Ibid., 25–26.
102.  Ibid., 134.
103.  Ibid., 92–93.
104.  Ibid., 93.
105.  Norimitsu Onishi, “In the Shrinking Dunes.”
106.  Sakaki Nanao, “Kono hana tanensō,” 51.
107.  Ibid., 50.
108.  See chapter 1; Kada Yukiko et al., “From Kogai to Kankyo Mondai,”
159–70.
109.  Sakaki Nanao, “Kono hana tanensō,” 51.
110. Ibid.
111.  “This Flower” is date-stamped October 1995. As in “Someday,” dis-
cussed in chapter 3, Sakaki’s reference to Monju in “This Flower” might have
been fortuitous, but he also could have changed the poem in light of the Decem-
ber 1995 sodium leak and fire at the plant. Likewise, although “This Flower”
was written several years before the Nagano Olympics, the environmental conse-
quences of this sporting event were already becoming apparent despite the latter’s
billing as the “Environmental Olympics” and slogan “coexistence with beautiful
and abundant nature.”
112.  Sakaki Nanao, “Kono hana tanensō,” 51.
113. Pollution and other environmental problems have increased dramati-
cally on Everest in recent decades, largely because of the greater numbers at-
tempting to climb the mountain. For more on this phenomenon see “Environ-
mental Problems and Efforts to Save Mount Everest.”
114.  Sakaki Nanao, “Kono hana tanensō,” 51.
115.  Sakaki Nanao, “Yuki no umi koide iku,” 9.
116.  Halley’s Comet will next be visible from Earth in 2061.
117.  Sakaki Nanao, “Yuki no umi koide iku,” 11.
118.  Ibid., 10. Daisetsuzan is Japan’s largest national park.
119. Although not as fantastical, also complicating dichotomies are such
texts as the German writer Günter Seuren’s (1932–) novel Die Krötenküsser (The
Toad Kisser, 2000), which depicts a group of environmental activists who aim
to revitalize a 10,000-square-meter urban space. Led by a local biology student
(Staudinger) and hoping to save the European green toad population, the envi-
ronmentalists advocate returning this space to a “pristine” state off-limits to peo-
ple. Not surprisingly, they are taunted by the city’s adults and children alike, who
 Notes to Pages 422–27  567

call them “toad kissers,” “green weirdos,” “eco-shits,” and “eco-arseholes.” Yet
Staudinger himself is quickly revealed as a tyrant; obsessed with controlling every
aspect of the reserve, he brings in an excavator to dig basins that will accelerate
the lifecycle of the toads, he lines the basins with plastic, and he sterilizes the
soil with a gas burner to prevent weeds from consuming the wildflower seeds he
has planted; he also has the narrator cut off the limbs of hibernating toads. The
narrator goes so far as to compare the toad-breeding project to the Nazis’ Leb-
ensborn. Staudinger’s scheme ultimately fails: toads die by the thousands likely
because of poisons that were injected into the soil years ago during construc-
tion of the subway. Axel Goodbody, Nature, Technology, and Cultural Change,
238–45. Seuren’s The Toad Kisser does not depict environmentalists as bearing
principal responsibility for the devastation of ecosystems, but it does complicate
dichotomies between people devoted to “preserving” and people seemingly intent
on “destroying” the natural world.
120.  Other creative works feature plants and animals, as opposed to semihu-
man creatures, striking back. See the German writer Frank Schätzing’s (1957–)
best-selling novel Der Schwarm (The Swarm, 2004), where a new species of
worms collapses the continental shelf, previously innocuous marine life attacks
people en masse, and lobsters trigger an epidemic. Schätzing’s The Swarm is
reminiscent of the American writer Arthur Herzog’s (1927–2010) The Swarm
(1974), which features killer bees that migrate from Africa to South America
and then to the United States. Related films include Godzilla (1954); The Day of
the Triffids (1962); Frogs (1972), which has the tagline “It’s the day that Nature
strikes back!”; The Day after Tomorrow (2004); The Ruins (2008); and The
Happening (2008). Also noteworthy is creative work where nature actively de-
fends itself, preventing degradation, such as the tales “Curupira: Guardian Spirit
of the Forest” and “Mapinguari: One-Eyed Ogre” on nonhuman protectors of
the Amazon. See also Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow, “Sued by the Forest.”
121.  Sakaki Nanao, “Haru wa akebono,” 40.
122.  Ibid., 41.
123.  Ibid., 42.
124.  For more on gender in Sakaki’s verse and his attacks on conventional
ecofeminist thought see Karen L. Thornber, “Degendering Ecodegradation.”
125.  Sei Shōnagon lived from 966 to 1017.
126.  Sakaki Nanao, “Haru wa akebono,” 39.
127. The narrator of Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats likewise credits Sei
Shōnagon for being her inspiration. She begins each chapter with a quotation
from the Pillow Book. But far from setting the tone of the chapter, these quota-
tions highlight the incommensurability of Sei Shōnagon’s depictions of environ-
ments with current conditions.
128.  Kyoto became Japan’s imperial capital in 794.
129.  Sakaki Nanao, “Haru wa akebono,” 39–42.
130.  Ibid., 44.
131.  Wang Lixiong, Huang huo, 2:269.
132.  Ibid., 1:24–25.
133.  Ouyang and the Green Rescue Association also are said to have worked
to negotiate peace between the People’s Front and the Democracy Front. Both
568  notes to pages 428–35

the People’s Front and the Democracy Front want to reform China, but while the
former is supported primarily by workers and the urban population, the latter
is supported by intellectuals with strong international connections. Most of the
leaders of the People’s Front were imprisoned after Tiananmen, while the lead-
ers of the Democracy Front found refuge in the United States and other nations.
134.  Wang Lixiong, Huang huo, 1:79.
135.  Ibid., 1:80.
136. Ibid.
137.  Ibid., 1:81.
138.  Ibid., 1:82–83.
139.  Ibid., 1:86.
140.  See ibid., 1:272. The complaint appears in his new book Nirvana.
141.  Ibid., 1:273.
142. Ibid.
143. Ouyang envisions people who already are spiritual as developing a
more fear-based consciousness, but this transformation is less significant than
that from material to spiritual.
144.  The bases admit only those who have mastered a particular specialty,
and they reject the infirm, the disabled, children, and anyone over age fifty-five.
145.  Wang Lixiong, Huang huo, 3:215.
146.  Ibid., 3:238.
147. The narrator vividly describes the planet as it becomes enveloped by
nuclear winter: “It was the hottest season, yet the hills were covered in white
snow. The sky was black, the ground was white, and the entire world appeared
as though it were in reverse. Looking closely, the snow wasn’t pure white, it was
dark blue or green, and if you looked at it a little longer, it even appeared black.
Radioactive dust, melted rubber, smoke and dust from burnt cities, and no doubt
also the scorched molecules of corpses were congealed together to form each
snowflake. The temperature continued to fall” (3:213).
148.  Ibid., 3:268.
149.  For more on this phenomenon outside literature see Paul Wapner, Liv-
ing through the End of Nature.
150.  Significantly, writing on ecodegradation is often less place specific than
writing on the allure of the natural world.
151.  See, for instance, Paul De Man, Blindness and Insight, 3–19; Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline; René Wellek, “The Crisis of Com-
parative Literature.”
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