Japan is infamously known around the globe for episodes of environmental pollution and the ways in which the bodies of citizens have, often in horrific ways, exhibited the violence of unchecked industrial capitalism embodied in streams of cadmium, methylmercury, and other toxic chemicals. While in popular global imaginings Japan has produced plenty of victims of environmental pollution, the country has not produced many environmental activists. In Transnational Japan in the Global Environmental Movement, Simon Avenell argues against such imaginaries, suggesting that encounters with industrial pollution by people in Japan gave rise to what he labels an “environmental injustice paradigm” (p. 4) that has been a source of motivation for environmental activism both within and beyond the archipelago.
Covering the period from the 1960s to the 1990s, Avenell analyzes the productivity of local spaces and experiences for environmental activism, but then goes on to highlight Japanese environmental activists’ encounters in...
