Toxic Archipelago

The Earth's environment is interlaced with complex, constructed ecological pathways that link industrial facilities and human consumers. Nowhere is this truer than on the Japanese archipelago. During the nineteenth century, Japan saw the rise of Homo sapiens industrialis, a new breed of human who was transformed by an engineered, industrialized, and poisonous environment. Toxins moved freely through mines, factory sites, and rice paddies and more directly into human bodies. Toxic Archipelago explores the relationship between the causes of colossal toxic pollution and the manner in which pain caused by pollution insults porous human bodies. Brett Walker examines startling case studies of industrial toxins that know no boundaries: a killer pollution from insecticide saturations; poisonings from copper, zinc, and lead mining; congenital deformities from methylmercury factory effluents; and lung diseases from sulfur dioxide and asbestos. This powerful and thoughtful book demonstrates a deep understanding of how the Japanese archipelago has become industrialized over the last two hundred years and the human and environmental consequences of that transformation. Brett L. Walker is Regents' Professor and department chair of history and philosophy at Montana State University, Bozeman. He is author of The Conquest of Ainu Lands: Ecology and Culture in Japanese Expansion, 1590-1800 and The Lost Wolves of Japan.