Environmental archaeology and eco-nativist discourse in modern Japan

Mark Hudson^1*Claudia Zancan²

• ¹Max Planck Institute for Geoanthropology, Jena, Germany
• ²Universita Ca' Foscari, Venice, Italy

Claims that Japanese society has lived in ‘harmony’ with Nature and can therefore provide lessons for global sustainability have a long history. While such ‘eco-nativist’ ideas have been the subject of an extensive critical literature, here we consider three topics that have so far escaped in-depth attention. First, we trace how environmental archaeology became integrated into this approach from the 1980s, examining how palynologist Yoshinori Yasuda combined traditional environmental archaeology with the comparative civilisation theory begun by ethnologist Tadao Umesao in the 1950s. Second, we ask whether Japanese eco-nativism can be said to represent an Indigenous approach to environmentalism and sustainability. This section also explores how Yasuda’s concept of a ‘Pan-Pacific Civilisation’ attempted to link Japan with other Indigenous or non-Western ecologies. Third, we analyse the uneven representation of the Japanese past in eco-nativist writings. Noting that most attention has been paid to the hunter-gatherer Jōmon, early agricultural Yayoi and early modern Tokugawa periods, we argue that the near total absence of discussion of the Kofun era of early state formation reflects a reluctance to consider issues of social inequality within the utopian eco-nativist approach. We conclude that this selective use of the past is inconsistent with an Indigenous or native environmentalism.