Reeds grow thick across the Watarase Yūsuichi, a Ramsar wetland site and flood control basin located approximately 60 km from Tokyo, spanning Tochigi, Gunma, Saitama, and Ibaraki prefectures, Japan.[1]
It was early summer. The reeds stood taller than me and the air was heavy with heat. Under the buzz of a gasoline brush cutter, I knelt, set aside the hedge shears, and reached for a serrated sickle to slice through thicker willows at their base. This slow work was part of an initiative launched two years earlier by a local community conservation group to counter shrubification and dehydration.
After a morning of work, the group gathered to review this effort, joined by scientists they had been consulting the since 1990s environmental movement. While the group sought guidance, the discussion ended without any clear direction. One scientist noted that restoration of the yūsuichi has always been ambiguous, as its positioning is unclear. I picked up on this comment and suggested that the uncertainty lies in how one might “kakawari-naosu” (re-relate) to a landscape scarred by pollution and eviction.[2]
I was referring to the Ashio Copper Mine Pollution, Japan’s first major industrial pollution disaster. In the late 19th century, the modernization of Ashio Copper Mine in Tochigi Prefecture led to widespread environmental devastation across eastern Japan. The initial construction of the yūsuichi to contain floods from spreading pollutants, along with the accompanying river reengineering work, began in the 1900s–1920s, resulting in the eviction of around 450 households from Yanaka Village and the acquisition of land from surrounding villages.[3] Over the past century, some displaced villagers and their descendants used the land to support their livelihoods through farming, sericulture, fishing, hunting, and reed screen manufacturing.[4]
The Ramsar designation in 2012 marked a watershed moment that reframed the land from a flood control facility to a wetland providing habitat for endangered plants and animals. Yet, only a year before, during the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, a tailing dam in Ashio collapsed, releasing mining waste into the Watarase River. “The pollution hasn’t ended,” many interlocutors told me.
My anthropological research began in this in-betweenness: between communities’ environmental actions and what they have lost, and between the triumph of environmental regeneration and pollution without closure.
Re-relating to the yūsuichi as a wetland happens not despite histories of dispossession and state engineering, but because of and through them. The rewilding did not result from conservationist policies but instead, paradoxically, from eviction and the resulting artificial floodplain. My question is: What kinds of engagement and what kinds of writing allow us to stay with the in-between spaces of possibility and irreparability?
My thinking is shaped by anthropological, science and technology studies (STS), and environmental ethics scholarship that challenge the emphasis on measurement (Is this toxic?) and correction (Does it purify or separate the toxicity out of “us”?) when pursuing otherwise in a polluted world. Scholars including Liboiron et al, Nading, and Shotwell, among others, have discussed and reviewed environmental politics and practices from the starting point that toxicity is the condition of living, and it can be harmful to pursue a purified vision of its absence.[5] This body of work suggests researchers study politics beyond that of litigation (proving damages), mitigation (nominal separation through containment and environmental standards), and objectivity (scientific measurements).
Amid the absence of finality, how might we register the different modes of acting without reverting to the impossibility of repair? During my fieldwork, I found myself pulled in two opposing directions: the enduring environmental violence illustrated by mining residues, and the will forwards represented by environmental regeneration efforts. Murphy’s works discuss how the chemical histories of sediments continue to alter the future, while highlighting their openness to different futures.[6] To trace these possibilities, I believe we need ways of attending to sediments beyond using them to expose and critique the persistence of toxicity. Reeds in the yūsuichi, for instance, hold both the sediments buried beneath and spaces for wildlife’s flourishing. Following the acts to craft a livable present and future, I turned to what lies in between the sediments below and the water flowing above – a space I found insufficiently discussed.
In the yūsuichi, communities re-relate to the wetland by creating spaces for other species: making water-holding space for birds to hunt, disturbing soil to allow buried seeds to sprout, and maintaining the reedbed through harvesting and burning. The return or the rediscovery of wildlife does not erase loss, but opens up spaces to re-relate to it. At the same time, these spaces are also conditioned by the buried sediments and the network of chemical and hydrological infrastructure.
On another summer day two years ago, when I volunteered to help clear overgrown stems at the evicted Yanaka Village, one descendant from another affected village said to me, “If one is to think about it, the reedbed was once farmland.” That scene was what I pictured when I spoke about the uncertainty of restoration back in the meeting. Relating with the land as wetland sometimes also means the loss of relating with the land as it was. It is now predominantly a reed wetland, not a farmland nor a human settlement. The aspiration to re-create past landscapes or expand water-holding spaces also is not envisioned on former swamps, as these were filled up by the toxic sediments from Ashio.[7]
Meanwhile, although the environmental movement had first begun with an anti-dam focus, water-retarding capacity expansion now sits in uneasy coexistence with restoration. At the city’s facility where the meeting was held, the front doors displayed photos of the yūsuichi containing floodwaters during Typhoon Hagibis in 2019, with waters reaching 95% of the basin’s capacity. The history of soil erosion due to forest loss in Ashio, combined with decades of river engineering, continues to concentrate risks in the neighborhoods.
Outside of conversations at the yūsuichi, I met many of my interlocutors in the reforestation of barren mountains in Ashio. On the bare slopes damaged by the sulfurous gases, we cut grass beside tailing dams holding back mining waste and erosion control dams. In the landscape, one particular dam in the neighboring city stood out: the Kusaki Dam that was built in 1976 and displaced 230 households. The dam is designed to trap toxic sediments from flowing down beyond the mountains. I gradually saw this dam as a boundary redesignating the zone of sacrifice from the downstream to the post-mining town that now holds the pollution mitigation facilities.
Walking along the redirected flows of water and sediments reveals that the separation of toxicity from life is untenable. This is not only because toxicity endures but also because zones of sacrifice enable life sustained elsewhere. As Povinelli observes about late liberal toxicity, efforts to “remove, replace, and restore” polluted areas often obscure the fact that restoring one place depends on abandoning another.[8] Here, at the yūsuichi, the land further embodies the duality of wasteland and wetland as it is both once the land to be let go of and now rewilded, despite still being a flood control basin. It invites us to think about how conditions of violence are re-related into conditions of life, while also refusing and resisting such re-relating.
Reflecting on why cutting grass and walking constitute most of my fieldwork, I think it is because these are the ways to dwell in-between: between the endurance of pollution and environmental regeneration, between evictions and rewilding, and between the yūsuichi as a mitigation facility and as a protected habitat. Cutting grass guides me towards the aspect of in-betweenness as a generative space and walking keeps my feet close to its fragility. If an earthquake strikes, will the tailing dams and erosion control dams in Ashio break? If another typhoon arrives, will the Kusaki dam and the yūsuichi hold? Inhabiting the aftermath means inhabiting this in-betweenness – its leakiness, its inseparability, and the ever-present possibility that life and toxicity may collapse into one another again.[9]
Between walking and cutting grass lies the unresolved chasm between loss and return. Alongside the changing traces of Yanaka village’s heritage on the landscape – mizuka (dwelling mounds for flood protection) and dried boatways – the wetland ecosystem will continue to shift. I understand why scientists refrain from providing directives, as shrubification is arguably a natural process of vegetation succession, but I also share the community’s anxiety surrounding what an ideal wetland should look like. The riddle is not about saving or eradicating a particular species, as it is what the group deliberately resists. It is a matter of relational ethics on how to weave ourselves in the post-mining landscape that transforms with or without us walking or cutting grass, and how to sit with the refusals from those being left out of our hands that cut grass, including the buried sediments, the villages’ remnants, the lost and remaining farmlands, the flood control infrastructure, as well as the tailing dams upward in Ashio.
[1] The basin is around 3,300 hectares, out of which 2,861 hectares are registered under the Ramsar convention. Part of the non-designated area was developed into leisure facilities, such as golf courses.
[2] I wrote for the group’s community newsletter earlier this year on my journey of building a relationship with the yūsuichi. I shared how I first traced the history of evictions and developments on the land, while gradually coming to learn about the names of other living things. I described making humus from harvested reeds as a way of connecting with gardens and fields outside the yūsuichi, and making rice cakes with yomogi (Japanese mugwort) as an experience through which my body was nourished by the land. Weeding willows cultivated a sense of participating in shaping the landscape. Visiting the common cemetery of Yanaka Village also reminded me that this work of conservation has deeper roots in the social movements of the 1970s, when people resisted a planned reservoir that would have submerged the now-protected cemetery, as well as grassroots oppositions against mining since the Meiji period.
[3] The reported population varies across different second-hand historical accounts. Shōji and Sugai noted that there were around 2,700 villagers. In this essay, I did not differentiate the populations inside and outside the embankment, as I counted the whole population affected by both the construction and river reengineering together. See Kichirō Shōji (東海林吉郎) and Masurō Sugai (菅井益郎),【新版】通史・足尾鉱毒事件 1877–1984 (A Concise History of the Ashio Mine Poisoning Incident, 1877-1984 [New Edition]) (世織書房 (Seori-shobō), 2014), 172.
[4] Hunting is forbidden now and reed screen manufacturing has also declined; the swamps used for fishing had also been filled up by sediments.
[5] For instance, Liboiron et al use the term “a permanently polluted world” and Nading develops the concept of “toxic worlding.” Max Liboiron, Manuel Tironi, and Nerea Calvillo, “Toxic Politics: Acting in a Permanently Polluted World,” Social Studies of Science 48, no. 3 (2018): 332–33. Alex Nading, “Living in a Toxic World,” Annual Review of Anthropology 49 (2020): 219. On the heterosexist and ableist roots of purified thinking in environmentalist discourses, see Alexis Shotwell, Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times (University of Minnesota Press 2016), 77–106.
[6] Michelle Murphy, “Chemical infrastructures of the St Clair River,” in Toxicants, Health and Regulation Since 1945, edited by Nathalie Jas and Soraya Boudia (Routledge 2013), 103–115. On the account of how the PCBs remained at the lake bottom extended racism in time and the concept of “alterlife,” see Michelle Murphy, “Alterlife and Decolonial Chemical Relations,” Cultural Anthropology 32, no. 4 (2017): 498–500.
[7] Satoru Fukawa, a respected local historian, saw the disappearance of swamps together with the lack of actions to revive them as a violation of the promised right to use the land by enkomin (evicted villagers affiliated to the land). See Satoru Fukawa (布川了), “第二貯水池はやめて赤麻沼の復活を！” (Stop the Second Reservoir Construction and Revive the Akama Swamp!), in わたらせ川 第二号 (Wa-ta-ra-se River: Issue 2), edited by わたらせ川協会 (Watarase River Association) (随想舎 (Zuisōsha) 1996), 72–77.
[8] Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Between Gaia and Ground: Four Axioms of Existence and the Ancestral Catastrophe of Late Liberalism (Duke University Press, 2021), 28. I also resonated deeply with this line that it reflected the post-mining landscape I have walked across: “Rather than a common and differentiated present, the liberal response to its distributed toxicity is symptomatic and diagnostic of its blocked and disavowed networks, namely, that some regions are built up and sustained by ripping and disemboweling other regions while leaving behind the chemicals needed to separate metals and ores, the fungi that thrive in machine-friendly fields, and the winds and waters that flow differently when the trees have been uprooted” (28).
[9] To clarify, “life” and “toxicity” here do not strictly refer to the exposure of biological bodies to chemicals. For instance, while no health or economic damage was reported in 2011, lead levels briefly reached nearly twice the tap water standard. Instead, I am referring to the categorization of safety and pollution based on the management and mitigation of pollution through separation.
*Cover Image: A view of the Watarase Yūsuichi, taken from an observation tower in February 2022. Photograph by the author.
[Cover Image Description: Two reed-covered areas are divided by a concrete water conduit and surrounded by roads. On the left, the reeds stand upright and appear straw-yellow, with one corner harvested. On the right, the reeds are bent, tangled, and greyer in hue.]
Edited by Amelia Diehl; reviewed by Evelyn Ramiel.