Bad Water: The Political Ecology of Snow Brand Dairy

Abstract
With the outbreak of industrial pollution in the 1890s, Japanese thinkers and activists came face to face with the reality of modern nature: namely, that for the first time in history, human practice had the capacity to transform nature itself into something antithetical to human health and freedom. The quest was on to build a new relationship to nature. One attempt was the founding of what would become Snow Brand Dairy--until a recent merger Japan's largest. Snow Brand was designed to be a form of social organization meant to build healthful personal and national ecologies. Ranging from agrarian communalism to complicity with the wartime state in Manchuria and spanning the pre- and postwar periods, Snow Brand's story has much to tell us about politics, commerce, and our own environmental concerns.

About the Speaker
Robert Stolz is Assistant Professor of Modern Japan at the University of Virginia. He is coeditor of Tosaka Jun: A Critical Reader (forthcoming, Cornell East Asia Series) and the author of Bad Water: Nature, Pollution, and Politics in Japan 1870-1950 (Forthcoming, Duke University Press). His current research is on the relationship between ecology, capitalism, and politics.