A Non-Recent Approach to Japan’s Environmental Humanities

It is said that the environmental humanities (EH) scholar Toyosato Mayumi’s 2014 and 2015 essays are the progenitors that kicked off the EH in Japan. While true, it is also natural and reasonable to look at works prior to those years to see whether there were any scholars who could have been considered environmental humanists, even if they were not hailed as such—an analytical method which I would call a non-recent approach to the EH. One such scholar is the late comparative sociologist and environmental thinker Tsurumi Kazuko (1918-2006). Tsurumi was epoch-making in that she made extensive attempts to develop her endogenous development theory (EDT) regarding humans and nonhumans existing in harmony—a state referred to as multispecies—in an endogenously, not exogenously, developing community. This paper takes such a non-recent approach to Japan’s EH so as to identify an environmental humanist before the birth of the space there and focus accordingly on Tsurumi Kazuko and her EDT. More specifically, the paper presents a case that Tsurumi’s EDT qualifies as an EH theory and that Tsurumi herself can be considered an environmental humanist. My hope is that this paper will serve as an opportunity to further disseminate Tsurumi’s EDT as a decolonial, glocal, and multispecies EH theory, especially outside Japan, thus providing an antithesis to the linear, anthropocentric Western oriented exogenous development.