The Critical Heritage of Japanese Geography: Its Tortured Trajectory for Eight Decades

Abstract

In Japan, critical geography has been practised for eight decades: since the 1920s when poverty and the miserable condition of labour and peasants instigated Japanese social scientists to adopt Marxism. The critical heritage began with importing works by German Marxist and soviet scholars, followed by criticism of the geopolitical ideologies that supported the militarist regime and the war of aggression. Besides them, the general orientation of critical geography before World War 2 remained mainly exceptionalist. Critical geographers gained momentum in the course of the democratisation process after World War 2, and they consolidated themselves by forming one of the earliest alternative organisations of geography, the Japan Association of Economic Geographers. Although the trend of exceptionalism persisted, some attempts to theorise critical geography emerged in the late 1960s to early 1970s. Noboru Ueno's work Chishigaku no Genten (The ultimate origin of chorography) (1972, Taimeido, Tokyo), for example, integrated the tenets of Marxism and phenomenology into a theoretical body of Marxist chorography that dealt with alienation of the indigenous fishers from the neighbouring sea, which was polluted with mercury from industrial waste. Yet, the advent of Toshifumi Yada's chiiki kozo ron (theory of regional structure) in 1973 (see Yada, 1990 Chiiki Kozo no Riron [The theory of regional structure] Mineruba Shobo, Kyoto) and its subsequent domination in the circle of once-critical geographers of a younger generation shattered further development of the critical heritage. The general orientation of geographers in Japan has become much more conservative and lost the intellectual power to come to terms with the growing critical trend among international geographers. At the same time, Japanese social scientists outside geography started to adopt the conceptions of critical geography developed abroad, bypassing the Japanese geographers' circle. It was not until the early 1990s that a group of critically minded geographers set out their endeavour to revitalise the critical heritage of geography afresh, to create their own conceptions of critical geography in close association with an international group of critical geographers.

History and philosophy of geography 2004-2005: biographies, practices, sites

“…In a survey of the 'critical heritage' of Japanese human geography since the 1920s, Mizuoka et al (2005) note that while 'critical geography' has been practised in Japan since the 1920s and 1930s when Japanese social scientists engaged with Marxist thought and, for some anyway, criticized right-wing elements of European geopolitics, the history of Japanese human geography since 1945 has been marked by an avowedly utilitarian economic focus, by the turn of some to Stalinist perspectives and, latterly, by explicitly theoretical work in a period when the future of the subject is by no means certain: 'In terms of disciplinary politics, geography in Japan is now exposed on the one hand to neoliberalism and on the other to the crisis of liquidation through university reform' (Mizuoka et al, 2005: 468).…”

“…Summary national accounts review the 'absent' place of cultural geography in contemporary Italy (Minca, 2005), Dame Evelyn Stokes' contribution to postcolonial work in New Zealand geography (D'Hauteserre, 2005), and, in longer essays, geography's place in Australia where Anderson in particular offers a broad consideration of contemporary geographical issues around the fraught notions of 'nature' and 'native' with reference to a partial reading of Enlightenment conceptions and the lingering legacy of Griffith Taylor's strident environmentalism (Anderson, 2005: Dowling, 2005. In a survey of the 'critical heritage' of Japanese human geography since the 1920s, Mizuoka et al (2005) note that while 'critical geography' has been practised in Japan since the 1920s and 1930s when Japanese social scientists engaged with Marxist thought and, for some anyway, criticized right-wing elements of European geopolitics, the history of Japanese human geography since 1945 has been marked by an avowedly utilitarian economic focus, by the turn of some to Stalinist perspectives and, latterly, by explicitly theoretical work in a period when the future of the subject is by no means certain: 'In terms of disciplinary politics, geography in Japan is now exposed on the one hand to neoliberalism and on the other to the crisis of liquidation through university reform' (Mizuoka et al, 2005: 468).…”

“…Tracing the 'tortured trajectory' of geography at that time in France -or anywhere else -(to borrow a phrase from the account above of Japanese geography: Mizuoka et al, 2005), will always require sensitivity to the institutional sites of its making and reception (see also Naylor, 2005). This is as true of the private practices of geographical fieldwork revealed in Lorimer's account of familial geography in upland Scotland (Lorimer and Spedding, 2005), as it is of the public civic spaces given over to the institutionalized display of natural knowledge (Finnegan, 2005).…”

The spaces of critical geography

“…Zusman (2004) argues that Latin American critical geography, which dates back at least twenty years, is less pluralistic than the critical geography of the Anglo-American world, reflecting the need to respond to the harsh effects on neoliberalism (particularly within Latin America). Other observers have noted the relatively undeveloped character of critical geography in many countries (Timar, 2003), and the challenges that some critical and radical scholars have faced (Mizuoka et al, 2005, on Japan), while others note the existence of vibrant critical scholarship in certain regions such as Austria (Essletzbichler and Rammer, 1999) and Scandinavia (Simonsen, 2004).…”

History and philosophy of geography: life and death 2005—2007

“…In China it was the Qing dynasty that tethered historical geography to the study of a particular governance structure of 'national territories and administrative divisions', yange dili (Chiang, 2005: 149). Japanese geography, according to Mizuoka et al (2005), has been engaged since the 1920s in a titanic Faustian battle between conservative and progressive forces for the discipline's very soul (and see also Murata, 2005: 261, on the shockingly neglected treatment of gender and women in Japanese geography -only 8% of Japanese geographical society members are female). In Sweden's long history of geography, according to Buttimer and Mels (2006: 6-8), there has been not only Faust, but also Phoenix and Narcissus, pioneering, emancipating and refl ecting the national geographical project.…”