In the evening of the last full day of the 2005 ASLE-US biennial conference in Eugene, Oregon, a panel session entitled “Modernization and Literary Environmentalism: Asian Perspectives” offered the first real focus in English on East Asian ecocriticisms. It was another three years before the first analytical retrospective appeared in English on East Asian ecocriticisms. Far from being in what some perceived as the rather marginal position of the tail-end of a conference, a November 2008 plenary speech (jointly delivered by three scholars—one Japanese, one an American expat living in Japan, and one Korean¹) took center stage at the International Conference on Literature and Environment at the Central China Normal University in Wuhan, China. In between these two events was an ASLE-Japan/Korea Joint Symposium held in Kanazawa, an important event that was to become the first in a series—the second being at Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul in 2010, and the third at the National Taiwan University in Taipei, Taiwan, in December 2012. A growing consensus from these meetings has to do less with a rejection of Western environmental theory, ethics, and approaches than with addressing the one-sidedness of information flows, a one-sidedness that predictably and dangerously reiterates colonialist dynamics and structures. Central, then, to much of the concern within the East Asian environmental humanities is the question of carryings-across, translations. With so few people in Western scholarship able to understand Mandarin or Hangul or Japanese or Taiwanese, the onus has often been on the Asian scholar to translate for the Western scholar. This book performs precisely such a carrying-across. We proceed on the assumption that the work in East Asia is important and that we here in East Asia are in the best position to articulate the importance of our work for the larger ecocritical community.

It would be reductive and mistaken, though, to suggest that translation is the core concern of East Asian ecocriticisms. East Asian ecocriticisms address urgent problems (some unique to the region, others less so) regardless of whether the West listens or wants to listen. The rapid postwar industrialization currently progressing in the region poses perhaps the most immediate social and environmental challenges, but there are other matters very specific to parts of the region: the division of the Koreas, the continuing tensions between indigenous and nonindigenous land use in Taiwan, legacies of poison in Japan, the sheer size of China, the growing conflict within East Asia between community needs, on the one hand, and the relative position and value of the individual on the other. The field is enormous. It is impossible to see it all. Partial visions are bound to characterize any view of East Asian ecocriticism. Because we each see from our own biased eyes, there are also the important matters of distortion and of how we see.

I saw something I initially thought very disturbing where I live in Seoul, but, as I pushed the issue, it turned out that I really didn’t see what was going on at all. I live beside a stream (on the twentieth floor of a condo) in Seoul, and I run along the stream every morning before sunrise. On several occasions, I have planted indigenous maple saplings illegally on public grounds along that stream. On a run once with Scott Slovic, who was in town for a talk, we planted a tree together. Not all have lived, but some are now 20 feet tall. Before dawn one morning in July 2007, I was running beside the stream and nodding to all of the other early runners in this dense city (it has a metro population of over 25 million). There was a man with a saw cutting down Acacia trees. I was astounded. There was a line of ten that he had already cut down along a hundred-meter stretch beside the stream. No one said anything. People tend to mind their own business in Seoul. Not me. I asked him angrily in Korean what he was doing. He responded in fluent English that Japan had stripped the land of vegetation and seeded Acacia in many places as part of the colonizing process. Acacia, an invasive species, now dominates many mountains in Korea. It was early, and my brain wasn’t working well enough for me to formulate a response, and I ran on, doubting that anyone would have seen his actions as wrong—indeed, doubting that it was wrong, doubting the applicability of the very notions of right and wrong. His actions were wound up with questions about history, national identity, ecological preservation, pride, fear, resistance, and many other things.

I have always considered the cutting of a tree as an act of violence, and violence is violence. A saw is a saw, and a tree is a tree. When Jane Bennett, discussing our bodily enmeshments with the material world, asks, “[W]ould we continue to produce and consume in the same violently reckless ways” if we took these enmeshments seriously,² we are forced to question with her the very meaning of the term “violence.” In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Barack Obama commented that “[a] non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies.” Nor will smiling at pretty Acacias stop their spread. We all know what violence can result from indifference. One doesn’t want to compare Acacia to Hitler, but there are obvious similarities.

As a longtime resident of South Korea, I have often wondered about the violence of indifference and about, by extension, the potential effects of Western indifference toward Korea—at least in terms of culture and scholarship. American culture and scholarship spread like Acacia. As a Canadian, it was hard for me not to notice while growing up what seemed a very different culture south of the 49th parallel, one that often seemed to me north of the 49th to lack the sense of humility that I was accustomed to seeing in Canada.

It was with questions about indifference and arrogance in mind that I attended a conference in Brussels in 2008 and spoke about similarities between Canada and Korea as each country looks in the enormous face of cultural power the United States presents. I asked, “What shall we do about the lack of humility, toward both human and nonhuman nature, when we see it? What shall we do? How can we make them interested in us? How can we make them want to listen to us?” These questions grew, both in me and in the communities where I worked and visited, and it was with these questions in mind that I suggested a book project to Won-Chung Kim. This volume is the result. With this volume, we will make it easier for them to listen.

While the field of ecocriticism began as an American academic pursuit, it is now a multinational, multivocal, multicultural area of scholarship. Within this context, East Asian Ecocriticisms: A Critical Reader presents 12 original essays from Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and China that define and characterize trends in East Asian ecocriticism. Drawing on diverse theoretical perspectives and traditions of East Asian environmental thought, as well as on less theoretically oriented close readings of East Asian texts (especially those not commonly studied or even heard of in mainstream ecocriticism), the essays in this volume present a valuable and original contribution to an ongoing and increasingly global conversation within the environmental humanities. This work is needed, for mainstream ecocriticism has not been able to give a lot of attention to voices beyond the ken of Anglo-European intonations. It is far better for a community to speak for itself (even if in a different language than its own) than to let others subsume this voice either by speaking on behalf or in partial or complete ignorance of that community. This book modestly hopes to contribute enormously to the developing area of ecocritical studies by offering situated responses (that are neither singular nor unmediated) to environmental problems and crises that, in some senses, affect all people and defy boundaries of nation, creed, race, ideology, gender, sexuality, class, and so on, responses from East Asia targeted for a Western constituency, offering voices that need to be heard.

While the dimensions of the “environmental crisis” are clearly global, responses grow out of local systems with varying cultural valencies. What this means is that an American ecocriticism will differ significantly in its material implications from, say, a Korean or a Taiwanese ecocriticism. All of the essays in this book work within an understanding that the history of ecocriticism is a history of relatively one-way flows. Aware of the fact that American geographies tend to become matters of global interest, every essay in this book has nation front and center in its ecocritical discussion.

There are four sections that constitute the core of the book. Rather than dividing the contents thematically (which would effectively perform a kind of universalizing that this book is implicitly against), we organized the book according to the national contexts out of which the contributors wrote: one each for Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and China.

Chapter 2 begins this book of carrying-across and is, in fact, literally a translation. It is the only previously published material in the book, a translation into English of an essay originally written and published only in Japanese and included in Masami Yuki’s book Mizu no oto no kioku (Remembering the Sound of Water: Essays in Ecocriticism, 2010). Yuki seeks in the essay to show the logic that she sees as characterizing Japanese writings and, to a certain extent, Japanese ecocriticism, and she carefully rejects the Western essay model in this chapter. Yuki explains that unlike written English, Japanese requires neither a demonstration of a thesis nor a deductive or inductive examination of a thesis: she proceeds on this basis to examine the literary contributions of poet and writer Kazue Morisaki (1927–) to Japan’s growing ecological discourse.

This chapter demonstrates more than argues that Morisaki’s work is keenly interested in radically questioning modern values of dualistic separations between life and death as well as between self and others. Yuki shows that Morisaki employs the idea of ecological identity as a theoretical framework and examines Morisaki’s diasporic exploration of language and identity, delineating how Morisaki’s (self-) critical reflection on identity and language highlights the significance of cultural and social factors in developing ecological identity.

The chapter concludes by showing that Morisaki’s work demonstrates that what we call “ecological identity” does not simply concern human relationships with the natural world but should include more comprehensive issues of self and others.

In chapter 3, Bruce Allen discusses Michiko Ishimure’s critique of modernity and her vision for creating a society that can foster reconciliation between humans and the nonhuman world. It outlines the central features of Ishimure’s writing and social activism by examining their exposition in three of her major works: Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow (1969), Story of the Sea of Camellias (1976), and Lake of Heaven (1996). Focusing particularly on Ishimure’s distinctive narrative methods, rooted in local traditions of storytelling, the chapter shows how her stories connect with her work to revitalize local culture, community, and environment. It touches on the trajectory that extends from Ishimure’s activism and writing about the environmental pollution incident in Minamata to the more recent events of the Fukushima nuclear incident. Finally, it suggests some implications of Ishimure’s writing for Japanese and global ecocritical thought.

Chapter 4, by Keitaro Morita, offers a radically different perspective and gives one of the only examples of queer green theorizing yet to come out of East Asian ecocriticism. Morita begins carefully in this chapter, contextualizing his position and arguing that Greta Gaard’s 1997 paper “Toward a Queer Ecofeminism” was long-awaited by ecofeminists who were interested in queer theories and queer theorists who were interested in ecofeminist theories, and that Gaard’s simultaneous focus on the emancipation of women, nature and the nonhuman, and queers signals a significant theoretical link that has only recently been much expanded.

This chapter continues the conversation Gaard began and notes that ecocriticism requires the queer ecofeminist perspective of Gaard (and of other more recent scholarship). Morita confirms Gaard’s observation that straight ecofeminism has often lacked the variable of sexuality and that there is a continuing need to dismantle dualisms.

Morita then examines Hiromi Ito’s 1991 poem “Matsuri [Festival]” based on “queerings of the green” and shows the possibility of a utopia/ecotopia where women, the nonhuman, and queers are mutually liberated. This chapter shows that an ecocriticism committed to an activist stance connects powerfully with very important social theories.

Won-Chung Kim begins the Korean section with chapter 5. This essay provocatively observes that there are important matters of globalization within the environmental humanities that strongly warrant attention. Kim maintains that one of the most widely discussed issues in the field of ecocriticism today is how to get over the limitations of an ecocriticism that is gripped by a cultural cringing toward America and to thereby make it a more viable multicultural and transnational discourse.

This chapter shows that while countries have become more closely interconnected economically and culturally under the banner of “globalization,” ecocriticism has been voicing predominantly Western viewpoints on literature and environment and thus limiting its scope. In order to truly globalize ecocriticism, Kim maintains, it is necessary to broaden its academic sphere to encompass literatures of non-English-speaking countries.

This chapter then goes on to argue that ecological literature of Korea obviously deserves more attention and that this attention can help to truly globalize ecocriticism by introducing fresh perspectives. Kim argues that many works of Korean literature carry poignant insights about rapid industrialization and a consumption-oriented society. Kim distinguishes two prominent characteristics of Korean environmental literature: the first trait is its investigation of the close relationship between the division of the Korean peninsula and environmental degradation. The second feature is Korean ecoliterature’s emphasis on life, not only that of humans but also of nature. This chapter compellingly demonstrates a central position of the entire collection—namely, that twenty-first-century ecocriticism should transcend national and geographical boundaries and be enlarged to a multicultural and transnational discourse, which considers not only Western viewpoints but also elements about the politics, economies, and cultural subtleties of the non-Western world.

Dooho Shin’s chapter is a logical follow-up to many of the issues raised in chapter 5. Shin looks at the intersection between development and conservation in South Korea, using the Cheongyecheon Restoration project of central Seoul as a point of entry into these discussions.

Shin argues that it is vital to understand the economic, social, and political circumstances of modern Korea that have produced environmental discourses as a kind of a dialectical struggle between preservation and development. Development is uneven globally, happening at different rat...