Toxic Archipelago

A History of Industrial Disease in Japan

Brett L. Walker

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780295803012
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Japanese History
• Index: History

Every person on the planet is entangled in a web of ecological relationships that link farms and factories with human consumers. Our lives depend on these relationships -- and are imperiled by them as well. Nowhere is this truer than on the Japanese archipelago. During the nineteenth century, Japan saw the rise of Homo sapiens industrialis, a new breed of human transformed by an engineered, industrialized, and poisonous environment. Toxins moved freely from mines, factory sites, and rice paddies into human bodies. Toxic Archipelago explores how toxic pollution works its way into porous human bodies and brings unimaginable pain to some of them. Brett Walker examines startling case studies of industrial toxins that know no boundaries: deaths from insecticide contaminations; poisonings from copper, zinc, and lead mining; congenital deformities from methylmercury factory effluents; and lung diseases from sulfur dioxide and asbestos. This powerful, probing book demonstrates how the Japanese archipelago has become industrialized over the last two hundred years -- and how people and the environment have suffered as a consequence.

1 THE AGENCY OF INSECTS

This chapter, though not without a handful of human actors, stars four insects: a tachinid fly and the Japanese beetle it eats, silkworms, and mosquitoes. Their actions, or the actions on them by humans, demonstrate how cultural values become ecological reality in engineered landscapes. Insect behavior also exposes how Japan's nineteenth-century entrance into the international arena had immediate environmental consequences, as Japanese beetles (and other six-legged brethren) transcended the ecological boundaries of their island home to become serious agricultural pests in the United States and elsewhere. Beetles established empire far earlier than their human counterparts.

Beetle populations blossomed in the United States after they escaped their biogeographical context. U.S. entomologists learned after traveling to Japan that re-creating elements of the beetle's native habitat, namely artificially reintroducing it to natural predators and disease, could serve as a biotechnology of insect control. But knowledge of beetle predators needed to be discovered, and it was done, as we shall see, by tapping into the ancient Japanese hobby of gathering and raising insects. As for silkworms, we shall discover how cultural values specific to Japanese aesthetics and Confucian cohabitation practices drove their evolution. Eventually, the silk industry transformed Japan's caterpillars and landscapes, a process in which silkworm cultivators need to be seen as biological engineers whose activities helped morph organisms and craft a national landscape in the eighteenth century. Finally, we shall turn to the metaphysics of Buddhist cosmologies and arbovirus (arthropod-borne virus) dissemination to trace how religion and entomology intersected at different moments in Japanese history to raise havoc with human health and cause pain. Our case study is Japanese B encephalitis.

Problems with insects principally occur within hybrid spaces, where human practices and knowledge creation merged with engineered ecological conditions. Had they not merged where they did, the episodes discussed in this chapter would not have occurred. Not only is history scribed onto documents, but it is also inscribed onto the bodies of humans and insects, as well as sliced, shoveled, and excavated into landscapes around the world. One breathing canvas on which we paint our histories is insects and their habitat. As Gregg Mitman argues, the “actions of nonhuman actors such as rats, lice, or fleas are connected to, not independent of, histories of knowledge production through which such objects gain new meaning and power in the world.”¹ The lesson is that historical research is central to understanding evolution and insect-borne pestilence. Given that Earth is a gargantuan, engineered space, as suggested in the introduction, today's ecology is history, because that value-laden engineering took place over historical time.

JAPANESE INVADERS

The Japanese beetle (Popillia japonica) invaded the United States in the summer of 1916 when the hungry chafers established a beachhead at a nursery in Riverton, New Jersey. When compared to the “helmeted beetles” (Allomyrina dichotoma) that children in Japan collect and raise in small, plastic terrariums and whose shells resemble the ornate armor of medieval samurai warriors, the Japanese beetle is ordinary in everything except for its reflective golden color and voracious appetite for the same crops that humans tend to cultivate and eat. Evolution has made it an economic competitor, not an insect that contributes to human economies such as silkworms or bees. The United States deployed insecticides in earnest to kill Japanese beetles in mass numbers, chemicals that became popular in Japan in the 1950s and that will be discussed in the next chapter.

According to entomologists, in the first year of its invasion the beetle inhabited a modest area of about one acre; by 1941, the year Japanese Zeros strafed Pearl Harbor, beetles had made far more impressive gains than Japan's skilled pilots and inhabited some 20,000 square miles of soil in the American homeland. East Asian farmers rarely considered the Japanese beetle a serious pest; but once the beetle arrived in New Jersey—its grubs tucked clandestinely in the bundled roots and soil of a shipment of azaleas—the lack of native predators and diseases meant that it quickly went to work on crops across the country, destroying everything from soybean and clover to apple and peach trees. In the early 1920s, other “Oriental” invader species followed the gains made by the Japanese beetle, including the camphor scale (Pseudaonidia duplex) and the Asiatic garden beetle (Autoserica castanea).² The six-legged Yellow Peril invasion from the East was on. These insects, but mostly the Japanese beetle, represented a scourge on the civilized face of the planet, much as the American propaganda machine famously depicted the Japanese people to be once the Pacific War got under way. Sadly, the rhetoric deployed to justify destroying Japanese beetles and Japanese people was basically interchangeable during this period. This is because, at their most basic level, American racism and agricultural entomology were based on supposedly fixed biological principles.³

By 1945, even though the United States had subdued, though not eradicated, “Louseous Japanicas” with incendiary bombs and atomic weapons, the Japanese beetle continued to molest crops unimpeded throughout rural America. Rachel Carson, in Silent Spring (1962), featured Japanese beetle eradication campaigns in the Midwest as among the most egregious examples of the dangers of chlorinated hydrocarbons when sprayed indiscriminately over America's pastoral landscapes. As is so often the case, chlorinated hydrocarbons poisoned the very constituencies they were meant to protect (and continue to do so). In 1959, for example, specially equipped airplanes doused about 27,000 acres in southeastern Michigan with aldrin, a highly toxic and relatively inexpensive insecticide, reportedly to manage the beetle infestation in that area.⁴ Despite the fact that some local entomologists questioned the necessity of the program, the aldrin dusting continued apace, and although the beetles survived the bombing, such birds as the American robin did not. People's lawns were strewn with dead songbirds. Similarly, between 1954 and 1961, Illinois dusted some 131,000 acres with dieldrin, which, in laboratory tests, proved some fifty times more toxic than the infamous DDT (dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane). Here songbirds and household pets began dying throughout the sprayed areas as well.

What made such campaigns of “annihilation” and “extermination” so tragic is that the Japanese beetle, after about 1954, had, in most instances, ceased to be a serious agricultural pest, as populations had started to stabilize after the initial invasion, largely because of the importation of biotechnologies: predatory insects and bacterial “milky” disease from the beetle's native habitat. When those first Japanese beetles made landfall in New Jersey in the earthy roots of azaleas, they arrived in an environment free of at least ten of their mortal insect enemies. In Japan, a kind of tachinid fly (Centeter cinerea), through its own reproductive activities, tirelessly kept “golden coin insect” numbers in check through an ecological equilibrium between the two species that is centuries old and actually quite gruesome. Indeed, the fly's unwieldy Japanese name is mamekoganeyadoribae, or “the fly that lives in the Japanese beetle.” The name says it all. In their native habitat, a variety of knotweed (Polygonum reynoutria) is one of the favorite haunts of Japanese beetles. In this bushy, lush world, tachinid flies hunt for unsuspecting (and usually love-struck) beetles on the leaf tops. So terrified of tachinid flies are Japanese beetles that, if they catch a glimpse of one, they quickly drop from their leafy cover to the ground rather than risk confrontation with this ruthless predator. Sometimes the two engage in a gripping life-or-death struggle. For this reason, tachinid flies have compensated by normally preying on mating beetles, which usually prove too preoccupied to notice a stalking fly.

Japanese beetles have good reason to fear these small flies. Tachinid flies do not immediately kill and eat beetles. (Remember, this is the fly that lives in the Japanese beetle.) Instead, after observing the mating beetles for some time, a female tachinid identifies the female beetle and, in a lightning-fast diagonal run, quickly maneuvers herself to lay several eggs on the thorax of the female beetle. In the early 1920s, U.S. researchers from the Bureau of Entomology who were visiting Japan noticed that in certain parts of northern Japan nearly all of the Japanese beetles inspected had such eggs around their thoraxes. Having attached her eggs to the beetle's thorax—or “provisioned her eggs,” as entomologists say—the female fly's work is basically done; but now the beetle has been served with a nine-day death sentence. The larvae within the eggs develop in about two days, and rather than hatch externally, the larvae employ rasplike teeth to bore through the shell of the egg and directly into the thorax of the beetle. Eggs mistakenly deposited on more armored and, therefore, better-protected parts of the beetle's exoskeleton often prove unable to penetrate the body cavity and quickly perish. Once in the thoracic cavity, the larvae molt and then move into the main body cavity, attaching themselves with a perforated hook to air sacks in order to breathe. The beetle, being eaten alive from the inside, usually buries itself in the ground. In the body cavity of the beetle and underground, the larvae then move back into the thorax, mercifully killing the beetle-host in the process; later, still living inside the beetle, the larvae eat the entire content of the body cavity. Four days after the beetle has died and nine days after the female fly originally attached her eggs, the larvae morph into pupae and survive in the buried cavity until they emerge in the early morning hours some ten months later. Once mature, the female flies then search for other love-struck female beetles on which to lay their eggs and procreate.

The engineers at chemical giant American Cyanamid (responsible for the development of the pesticide parathion in the United States, featured in the next chapter) could never have even dreamed of such an effective insect-killing machine, particularly one with so little collateral damage. Because of the tachinid fly and other predatory insects, Japanese beetles never posed much of a threat to Japanese farmers, unless, of course, these farmers unwittingly used chemicals that killed tachinids, which they often did. The increase in Japanese beetle populations as a result of the killing of tachinid flies with pesticides is an example of a trophic cascade in the agrarian food web perpetrated by humans.

Starting in 1921, the team from the Bureau of Entomology paid over two hundred Japanese children to collect parasitized specimens of the Japanese beetle to be released at ground zero in Riverton, New Jersey. The Japanese children must have enjoyed making money while engaged in their age-old hobby of netting insects. As far back as the early eleventh century, Japanese courtiers wrote nostalgically of the ringing songs of the bell cricket (Homoeogryllus japonicus), which they described poetically and, in typical Japanese fashion, onomatopoeically. Courtiers sometimes collected these emotionally evocative insects and then set them free in their gardens. In the thirteenth century, Tachibana Narisue, in his Kokon chomonjū (Notable Tales Old and New; 1254), described an excursion in 1095 to the fields of Saga near Kyoto to catch insects. Everybody from the head priest downward gathered horses from official pavilions and departed the capital carrying stylized bamboo cages with dangling decorative cords. The party dismounted at Toyomachi and proceeded on foot. They caught insects until evening and then returned to the capital, where they fed the crickets and other creeping creatures leaves from bush clover and other perennial plants (Patrinia scabiosaefolia). Once back in the palace, the courtiers raised their saké cups and composed poetry to celebrate the occasion.⁵ The fictional Prince Genji had autumn insects (perhaps caught on an expedition similar to the one described by Tachibana) released into his garden in order to create a lonely mood that evoked, as Heian courtiers often wanted to do, a Buddhist sense of impermanence and transcendence.⁶

Later, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the admirers of insect songs learned how to cultivate crickets from how-to books. Raising the eggs of the pine cricket (Xenogryllus marmorata) proved relatively simple and something that any enthusiast could do.⁷ The ability to cultivate insects led to the business of insect vendors (mushi uri) in some towns and cities. In the nineteenth century, Kitagawa Morisada (b. 1810) described the practice of selling insects as one of the “modern customs” of Tokugawa Japan. On city streets, decorative bamboo cages dangling from colorful insect-vendor kiosks contained singing bell crickets (Homoeogryllus japonicus), giant katydids (Mecopoda elongata), pine crickets (Xenogryllus marmorata), buprestid beetles (Chrysochroa fulgidissima), and others.⁸ These insects served early modern Japanese as pets.

Culturally speaking, Japanese children and their parents knew about collecting, keeping, and appreciating the habits of bugs because it was part of Japan's history, and U.S. entomologists tapped into this history to collect and deploy Japanese biotechnologies for scientific reasons. By 1924, after releasing beetles with eggs around their thoraxes, entomologists spotted parasitized Japanese beetles within a twelve-mile radius of Riverton.⁹ The fate of the Japanese beetle in the United States was sealed, but chemical companies and their political allies, as we shall learn, still pushed hard for the use of chemical insecticides, both in the United States and abroad in the 1950s and afterward.

When U.S. entomologists released Japanese beetles parasitized with tachinid fly larvae in Riverton, they deployed insects as a kind of biotechnology: they tweaked, if ever so subtly, the insect predator-prey landscape in North America. Indeed, the cultural knowledge of agricultural entomology, insect behavior, and insect gathering gained over centuries in Japan was utilized by U.S. entomologists and exported across the Pacific in this ecologically driven reengineering scheme, where it was used to control Japanese beetles in orchards and other crops. For entomologists, using tachinid flies as a biotechnology required learning about local Japanese ecologies (and trying to reproduce them elsewhere), tapping into ancient Japanese cultural practices, recruiting eager children to net parasitized insects, and strategically transcending global biogeographies, just as the Japanese beetle had originally done on its own. As the story of the Japanese beetle also demonstrates, what necessitated this reengineering project in the first place was Japan's nineteenth-century entrance into the international arena, after centuries of relative seclusion.¹⁰ “Opening Japan” to the United States had immediate ecological consequences. But Japanese did not just observe, catch, raise, and adore evocative bugs; they manipulated their evolution through selective breeding to serve their aesthetic and market needs. Here is where our story of the silkworm begins.

SILKWORMS

One point of topical congruency between this chapter and chapter 3 is the environmental impact of the Ashio copper mine, specifically the deleterious effect it had on silkworm nurseries downstream and downwind in the Shimotsuke Plain. In this instance, silkworms served as unwitting biological sentinels, or highly sensitive alarms in hybrid spaces. Think of their untimely deaths as flashing red lights on an environmental dashboard. In the carefully tended working lands of Shimotsuke, spring's unnatural silence portended environmental havoc as early as the 1880s. What makes the relationship between the mine refineries and silkworm nurseries of interest is that silkworms died because of an “ecosystem accident,” wherein the complex, tightly coupled relationships among extracting ore, smelting, photochemical processes in the atmosphere, acid rain (or acidic deposition), the location of mulberry plantations, and the monophagous habits of silkworms killed the insects and thereby caused economic hardships among farmers downstream from the mine. This is an example of the hybrid causation discussed in the introduction. But, in the case of Japanese villages, traditional economic and social systems that had evolved over centuries and that interfaced with the ecosystem also shaped the nature of environmental crisis in the Shimotsuke Plain. To be sure, all these systemic couplings, from rural lending practices and kinship patterns to mining interests and local ecologies, were mostly unanticipated by mine operators, farmers, and, of course, the unsuspecting silkworms themselves while they munched on mulberry leaves. Silkworms are the key to our story.

Silkworms (Bombyx mori) not only serve as biological sentinels downstream and downwind from mines but survive as organisms that humans have, over centuries, transformed into purely industrial technologies: they are utterly dependent on human beings. That is, as historian Edmund Russell, a major proponent of “evolutionary history,” has argued, organisms such as silkworms have “changed in historical time” due to intentional and unintentional human meddling with three keystone Darwinian factors: variation, inheritance, and selection. Russell contends that investigating the manner in which human histories have shaped the evolution of other organisms allows us to “historicize organisms themselves,” which, refreshingly, carves out a new place for historians in generating knowledge about the current state of evolution and the natural world.¹¹

Today, tucked away in “stock centers” at a handful of major East Asian universities are hundreds of Mendelian mutations of the silkworm, most of them spontaneous and discovered by cultivators and then preserved; other mutations have been induced by scientists through irradiation techniques and chemical mutagenesis. Many of these mutations represent “improved strains,” or silkworms that exhibit economically desirable characteristics such ...