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CIAO DATE: 2/99
Ideas Toolkit: The Role of Culture in the Transboundary Air Pollution Issue in Northeast Asia 1
Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainable Development
International Studies Association
40th Annual Convention
Washington, D.C.
February 16–20, 1999
Abstract
This paper outlines a general approach for analyzing the role of culture in international environmental policymaking. It draws on work in anthropology and foreign policy analysis. As a first step in investigating the role of culture in international environmental policy, culture needs to be viewed as a “toolkit of environmental ideas.” The second step is to delimit broad definitions of culture to a more workable forms. Three forms are offered (following Hudson 1997a): culture as organization of environmental meaning, environmental shared-value preferences, and templates for environmental action. The third step is to answer three basic questions relative to the specific definition of culture employed: 1) who draws what environmentally-related ideas from the ideas toolkit, 2) how are these ideas employed in the political arena, and 3) how do these ideas, originally drawn upon for political purposes, change and ultimately end up changing the set of environmentally-related ideas in the toolkit. In the political arena the ideas are assumed to be embodied in a “discourse.” The terminology of discourse and the body of theory built up around it is then used as a vehicle for examining the role of culture and cultural change in international environmental policymaking. A rough and preliminary attempt is made to provide a concrete example of the above approach in relation to the role of culture in the transboundary air pollution issue in Northeast Asia.
1. International Relations and Anthropology
Anthropology and international relations have much to learn from each other. Anthropologists, for instance, can teach international relations scholars about the subtleties of the use of the concept of culture. Each field of scholarly inquiry has its central concepts. Central concepts in physics, for example, include “energy,” “mass,” and “acceleration;” central concepts in biology include “species,” “evolution,” and “ecosystem;” and central concepts in international relations include “sovereignty,” “balance of power,” and “regime.” The central analytical concept of anthropology is “culture.” Thus, other disciplines such as international relations may benefit from anthropology’s insights into the concept.
Although there is a history of use of the concept of culture in international relations, it is a sparse history. 2 One recent work (Hudson 1997a), however, has drawn renewed attention to the concept. Culture and Foreign Policy , edited by Valerie M. Hudson, sets about “bringing culture back into international relations.” Analytically, the book explores when and how to make “cultural explanations” in international relations. Hudson (1997b) in her introduction argues that the post-Cold War era demands a fresh look at the role of culture in international relations. In our brave new multipolar world, cultural factors can no longer be swept under the rug as they were when the international arena was dominated by the bipolar rivalry of the US and USSR. Soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Samuel Huntington (1992) caused a huge stir by essentially postulating that cultural differences between civilizations would drive inter-state conflict in the post-Cold War era. In this paper I applaud and support more precise investigation of the role of culture in international relations, and seek to expand this investigation to the field of international environmental policy.
The paper is a working paper in which I engage in a preliminary exploration of some notions about culture and international environmental relations. The paper begins with a very brief history of the definition of culture in anthropology. Illustrative definitions of culture are given which in part demonstrate the all-encompassing nature of the anthropological conceptualization of culture. Following this the relationship between culture and environment is examined, and an approach to analyzing the role of culture in international environmental policy is laid out. The approach is put into practice in relation to the transboundary air pollution problem in Northeast Asia. While this paper is prelude to a larger comparative study, only a partial and preliminary analysis is presented here. Only one aspect of the role of culture in the transboundary air pollution problem in Northeast Asia is examined, namely, Japanese citizen use of elements of culture to stir the Japanese bureaucracy to action on the “acid rain” dimension of the transboundary air pollution problem.
2. Definitions of Culture
The word culture appeared in the scholarly literature of early anthropologists in the late 1800s. Early definitions were based on the study of primitive cultures as whole systems. They generally incorporated perceptions, attitudes, behaviors, institutions, and material artifacts as components of culture. This type of definition dominated and persisted up to about the Second World War. Thus, definitions such as the ones below were common.
Culture is “that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society” (Tylor 1871).
Culture is “the sum total of knowledge, attitudes and habitual behavior patterns shared and transmitted by the members of a particular society” (Linton 1940).
Culture is “the mass of learned and transmitted motor reactions, habits, techniques, ideas, and values—and the behavior they induce” (Kroeber 1948).
Culture is “patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behavior and transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievement of human groups, including their embodiments in artifacts” (Kroeber and Kluckhohn 1952).
In the early 1950s the mainstream of anthropologists, however, began to shift away from such “material plus non-material” definitions. The collection of elements anthropologists associated with culture was split into observables (what people do and say and express in discernible patterns of activity) and non-observables (what exists in people’s conscious minds). The term culture came to be associated only with the non-observables, and hence culture came to denote something that could only be inferred. Thus, anthropologists came to see culture as something in the hearts and minds of a people; not in their material items or tangible actions. It was an ideational system. The key insight was that culture is distinct from, but related to, human action and activity. The value of this insight was that it allowed the relationship between observables and non-observables to be investigated. It was no longer assumed that a one-to-one correspondence existed between, say, values and action. Examples of definitions expressing this ‘new’ view of culture include the following.
Culture is “an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic form by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes towards life” (Geertz 1973).
Culture is “everything we know, think and feel about the world, regardless of the processes through which it is acquired” (Milton 1996:215).
“Cultures...comprise systems of shared ideas, systems of concepts and rules and meanings that underlie and are expressed in the ways that humans live. Culture, so defined, refers to what humans learn, not what they do and make. As Goodenough (1961:522) expressed it, this knowledge provides ‘standards for deciding what is, ... for deciding what can be, ... for deciding how one feels about it, ... for deciding what to do about it, and ... for deciding how to go about doing it’” (Keesing and Strathern 1998:16; emphasis in original).
In sum, culture is an ideational system which is the sum total of feelings, perceptions, assumptions, values, norms, theories, and any mechanisms through which people order their experiences. 3 The split between observables and non-observables makes choice and change available for analysis. As Milton (1996:20) states: “The dialectical relationship between culture (meaning what people hold in their minds) and what people do...consists of two complementary processes: that whereby culture generates actions, and that whereby culture is sustained, reinforced or modified through actions.”
To complicate the problem of definition, there is again today a movement to redefine the concept of culture. However, no new consensus definition has yet emerged in anthropology. Some have moved away from the culture/action (ideas/behavior) dichotomy to a process view where action and ideas are seen as part of a single process called culture. Not all anthropologists agree with this shift. Related to this, some anthropologists see culture as “contingent,” and not existing as such until created moment-by-moment by individuals in concrete behavior which anthropologists then describe and interpret. Others see culture as not existing until created by anthropological writing. Thus, the picture painted of other people is influenced by “who one is” and “how one writes.” (There are similar trends in international relations, as in some the “reflectivist” writings.) The difficulty with some of the newer approaches to culture in anthropology is that they make it almost impossible to generalize in any meaningful way.
While acknowledging many of the points of the “reflectivist” writers, my own approach to culture follows the “non-observable, non-contingent” approach. I assume people in society have an historically-derived and shared collection of perceptions, values, beliefs, and knowledge that they use to interpret events, to decide proper courses of action, and to create material objects, and that this “ideas bundle” is called culture. I also believe culture possesses at least a modicum of inner logic amenable to analysis. But the ideas of culture exist in flux and one can only infer their existence and logical connections from observations of people’s behaviors and expressions. Thus, I, like many anthropologists and other scholars, choose to use culture as a heuristic tool to help in my interpretations of social phenomena rather than a real entity that exists outside people’s minds.
Assuming culture consists not of things and events that can be observed, counted and measured, but consists of shared ideas that exist in people’s minds, we still have the problem of the gulf between anthropologists’ use of culture and international relations scholars’ use. The gulf in part lies in the fact that, generally, international relations scholars tend to view politics, economics, and culture as distinct spheres; whereas anthropologists view politics and economics, at least in part, as elements of culture. In anthropology the central analytic distinction is between culture itself and the phenomena with which culture is assumed to interact such as forms of social organization and social processes. The key distinction is not between the different internal components of culture such as economics and politics. Thus, anthropologists usage tends to be more all-encompassing than the (implicitly) more narrow, restricted use of the term in international relations. The tension between the all-encompassing definition and a restricted definition is, it seems to me, one source of international relations scholar’s aversion to the use of culture in their analyses. International relations scholars often treat culture as a residual category used to explain what can’t be explained by other ‘political’ factors—“the explanation of last resort” (Pye 1991:504). In other words, culture in international relations is a catch-all for leftover factors used to explain events in the international arena.
International relations scholars, therefore, are left craving a crisp definition of culture that can be easily wielded as a tool in theoretical analysis. In Culture and Foreign Policy Hudson acknowledges in that there is no single best way of conceptualizing culture. When confronting the all-encompassing definitions of anthropology and other social sciences, the problem is “not so much centered on what to include in...a definition [of culture], but rather what to exclude” (Hudson 1997b:2; emphasis in original). She offers three ‘limiting’ definitions—culture as 1) organization of meaning, 2) shared-value preferences, and 3) templates for action. These are by no means the only limiting definitions that can be constructed. What is important, though, is that to pursue a meaningful research agenda, one must be clear on the (sub-)definition being employed.
While I agree with Hudson’s general approach to analyzing the role of culture in international relations, I begin with the general orientation that culture is a resource. It is an “ideas toolkit” which has consciously and unconsciously been built up over time. It is a toolkit which people draw upon to make decisions. In other words, there is a huge collection of knowledge/feelings “in the collective mind and heart” of a society which can be drawn upon relative to any situation; and, the collection is always changing. Many possible actions/behaviors can stem from the same knowledge/feeling item within the ideas toolkit. The three central questions to ask relative to the use of culture in international relations analysis are: 1) who draws what ideas from the ideas toolkit, 2) how are the ideas employed in the political arena, and 3) how do the ideas, originally drawn upon for political purposes, change and ultimately end up changing the set of ideas in the toolkit. What these three questions make clear is that culture in and of itself is not a cause of anything in international relations or any other area of human activity. It is in the “who draws what ideas” and the “how the ideas are employed in the political arena” aspects that causes of events can be found.
Given this general orientation, we can then proceed in the direction that Hudson outlines. We can proceed to whittle down the all-encompassing definitions of culture to workable but limited definitions applicable to a selected research topic. To capture the full impact of culture, though, we want to be specific in answering the three questions stated above.
3. Culture and the Environment
There are two basic views on the relationship between culture and ecology. One is that culture is the medium through which people interact with the environment (i.e., culture is essential to survival), and two, culture is the medium through which people adapt to, rather than interact with, their environment. Both ideas are compatible with my orientation to culture. As Milton states (Milton 1996:23): “A culture may be seen as a whole way of life, as a way of thinking about and understanding the world, or as the process through which that understanding is generated, and still be a mechanism through which the people whose culture it is, interact with or adapt to their environment.” In either case, culture is something which humans interpose between themselves and their environment in order to ensure security and survival.
We can distinguish two major dimensions to the study of the relationship between culture and the environment: 1) traditional human ecology, or an understanding how early humans or those living in simpler, “primitive” societies interact with the environment, and 2) modern human ecology, or an understanding of how our modern industrial and post-industrial societies interact with the environment. The later dimension is associated with the quest to develop sustainable societies—societies that value long-term, cross-generational environmental stewardship.
Anthropology’s prime interest has been in the study of non-industrial and “traditional” non-Western societies; the study of which was initially fostered by colonial expansion. “[A]nthropologists could once be distinguished from sociologists and political scientists because it was their special role in the academic division of labor to study ‘primitive’ peoples” (Keesing and Strathern 1998:5). This, however, is changing. Anthropologists now study, for example, peasants and urbanites in both Western and non-Western societies. The distinctive methodologies of anthropology can generally be characterized by their detailed observation of small-scale communities often based on intimate participation in people’s daily lives. From its methods, anthropology has distilled highly valuable insights into the relationship between culture and the environment that it would do well for scholars studying international environmental policy to keep in mind.
Anthropology has shown (Milton 1996:222–224) first of all that human beings have no ‘natural’ propensity for living sustainably with their environment. Primitive ecological wisdom is a myth. Second, all human cultures and actions are part of Nature, and thus are “natural.” At a fundamental level there is no difference between a beaver dam and a human dam. Third, there are no cultures that are more “natural” than others; however, cultures can differ radically. The fundamental character of cultural variation and the barriers to cross-cultural communication must be acknowledged. The concept of species extinction, for instance, is interpreted differently by cultures for whom cross-species reincarnation is fact. And fourth, culture is a complex of components which are not necessarily interchangeable. This serves as warning that cultural change in an era of globalization may be a painful process.
The field of international (environmental) relations may also have much to offer to anthropology. In particular, anthropology has failed to develop models of large-scale cultural change. Processes of large-scale change are familiar topics of inquiry for international relations scholars, and an active area of inquiry in the new field of international environmental relations. Anthropology has generally focused on the minutiae of cultural ecology but ignored the big picture of cultural change. In our present day and age an essential question (which can and should jointly occupy the attention of both anthropologists and international relations scholars) is: What happens to culture in a globalized and seemingly unsustainable world? While this paper does not address this macro-question, it seeks to lay one small brick in the foundation for answering it.
One recent piece of terminology that can profitably be used by both anthropologists and international relations scholars relative to the question of global environmental-cultural change is the concept of “discourse.” (Here I am following Milton’s game plan for defining how anthropologists can aid the environmentalist cause, and I am adding international environmental scholars as players in the game.) A discourse is defined as a field of communication identified by its subject matter. A discourse is not tied to a territory or a group of people. A discourse, therefore, as it crosses boundaries can generate understandings which are transcultural. If we assume transcultural discourses are formulated, sustained and changed primarily through social activity, then in order to study these processes we need to know who does and says what to whom. This is a reasonable task in the scope of traditional anthropological inquiry where an anthropologist lived within a community and recorded the who and what. However, at a global level the task becomes overwhelming. International relations scholars may be somewhat more practiced at trying to dissect transnational/transcultural “discourse dynamics” than anthropologists.
Analysis of international/transcultural environmental discourses is a very recent topic on inquiry in international relations. One of the first to tackle the subject was Karen Litfin (1994). While the use of discourse analysis in international environmental policy will not be reviewed here, suffice it to say that such analysis has not yet be intimately linked to analysis of the role of culture and cultural change in international environmental policy. I argue that such a linkage needs to be made.
To show how such a linkage may be made let’s return to the use of culture in international relations analysis. Following the direction pointed out by Hudson and tying it to the environment (which is not done in her edited volume), anthropologist’s all-encompassing definition of culture must first be narrowed. She offers three narrowing schemes. Extending her schemes to the environmental domain we can say that in relation to the environment culture can be defined as organization of environmental meanings, environmentally related shared-value preferences, and templates for environmental strategy. Let’s say we choose one of these schemes (or some other) for investigating the relationship between culture and international environmental policy. Then we need to ask the three central questions relative to the use of culture in international (environmental) relations analysis: 1) who draws what environmentally-related ideas from the ideas toolkit that is culture, 2) how are these ideas employed in the political arena, and 3) how do these ideas, originally drawn upon for political purposes, change and ultimately end up changing the set of environmentally-related ideas in the toolkit. The “ideas” (feelings, perceptions, assumptions, values, norms, theories, or mechanisms through which people order their experiences) selected for tracking in a given study will relate to the particular definition of culture used. The ideas are also assumed to be embodied in a discourse. Thus, my suggestion is to use the terminology of discourse and the body of analysis built up around it as the vehicle for examining the role of culture and cultural change in international environmental policy.
A rough and preliminary attempt is made to provide a concrete example of the above roadmap for culture-environment analysis in international relations by examining the role of culture in the transboundary air pollution issue in Northeast Asia.
4. Transboundary Air Pollution in Northeast Asia
Since 1990 Northeast Asia has emerged as the world’s third regional-scale transboundary air pollution hot spot behind northern Europe and eastern North America. The aspect of transboundary air pollution that drew first attention in each of the three areas was the problem known as “acid rain.” However, acidic substances are only one category of air pollutants which are transported long distance and cross national boundaries. Other pollutants include photochemical species, aerosols, and persistent organic pollutants (POPs) such as DDT. Northeast Asia consists of Japan, China, North and South Korea, Taiwan, Far Eastern Russia, and Mongolia. What binds most of this area environmentally is a shared temperate monsoon climate, and what binds most of it culturally is a shared culture derived from ancient China. The dominant nation-states in the transboundary air pollution issue are Japan, China, and South Korea, and the dominant actors are bureaucrats, scientists, and industrialists.
This paper focuses on one aspect of the transboundary air pollution problem (acid rain), one country involved in the problem (Japan), and one minor actor (the Japanese public). We will use discourse terminology to examine the role of culture in the Japanese public’s participation in and influence on Japanese foreign policy related to the acid rain, or more formally, acid deposition issue in Northeast Asia. Japan is the scientific and political leader on the issue in Northeast Asia.
Japanese scientists discovered the first evidence of long-range transport of acidic pollutants from mainland Asia in the mid-1980s. China was quickly fingered as the biggest emitter of pollutants involved in long-range transport. The problem, it turned out, was a “side-effect” of the 1979 market-oriented economic reforms in China. The two bureaucracies in Japan that dominate international policy on the acid rain issue are the Environment Agency (EA) and the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI). Many actors influence Japanese foreign policy on the issue. One “minor” political actor is the Japanese public. The Japanese citizenry’s role, and the role that culture plays in its role in Japan’s international environmental policymaking on the transnational acid rain issue, is investigated in the rest of the paper.
5. Acid Rain & the Japanese Public
There is a very high level of awareness of, and interest in, the acid deposition issue among the Japanese public. One indication is the citizen “acid rain monitoring boom.” Literally tens of thousands of citizens and school children have taken part in acid rain monitoring events. These events have received widespread media coverage and have resulted in a public that is highly educated about the acid deposition problem. Even though some promote environmental monitoring as a citizen science “weapon,” the vast majority of the monitoring events are more benignly oriented to environmental education. Beginning about 1990 there was a sudden burst of citizen acid rain monitoring activities (Tamaki 1993), with samples collected in everything from kitchenware to a sophisticated, citizen-oriented sequential collector, and analyzed with everything from simple color indicator kits to sophisticated hand-held pH meters. A few of the more prominent activities are described below. Suffice it to say that the scope and the number of participants has resulted in a citizenry that is highly informed on the nature of the acid deposition problem in Japan and Asia. This is in sharp contrast to the general public of other countries in Asia where citizens are relatively less educated about the problem.
One of the first citizen monitoring efforts in Japan was the so-called Morning Glory Acid Rain Survey. Uemura Shinsaka of Osaka wanted to bring the new generation of “invisible” air pollution problems (i.e., those whose effects were indirect, long-term, low-level, slowly accumulating and widespread) home to the ordinary citizen. Therefore, in 1987 he began experimenting with the use of morning glories as a means of observing acid rain at home. He was interested in morning glories 1) because the very first reports of acid rain damage in Japan were reports of bleaching and spotting on morning glory petals, 2) because morning glory seeds were easily obtainable and easy to grow, 3) because morning glories had long been a familiar theme in tradition summer nature poetry of Japan, and 4) because the petals are relatively sensitive to acid. With experimentation he found that fading and spotting was readily detectable at pHs of 4.5 and below. He found that sky-blue morning glories were the most sensitive indicator species of pH but since they were difficult to obtain he chose to work with the more readily obtainable purple variety. He also found that because of generations of cross-breeding for petal design that even smooth purple color varieties would develop natural spotting and stripping, thus making it difficult to distinguish acid-induced spotting. However, after settling on a suitable sub-variety, and after testing his morning glory method at a few locations in Osaka, in 1989 he began a “Morning Glory Acid Rain Survey” campaign. He used the slogan “Plant on 5/5 (children’s day in Japan) and Observe!” He distributed 350 morning glory sets. Out of 189 people who reported results, 163 observed spots. The campaign caught on and in 1990 the Morning Glory Acid Rain Survey was touted on TV, radio and in newspapers, and 500 sets were distributed, not only in Osaka but also nationwide. In 1991 1300 sets were distributed. Because of the demand for the sets, Uemura published a 32–page pamphlet entitled “Morning Glories are Crying: An Introduction to the Acid Rain Problem” in 1990. The survey sparked great interest, and inspired similar uses of morning glories in environmental fairs, school classrooms, and citizen environmental education programs.
In 1992 a “Simple Acid Rain Test Kit” (using simple chemistry not morning glories) was perfected by Uemura and distributed to interested citizens. Between May of 1992 and May of 1993 more than 8000 pH measurement were taken by some 500 people from around the country and were send to Uemura. The results, described in Uemura (1993), showed a national average pH of 4.9, with the lowest reading of 2.3 coming from Osaka. In general, the results showed that low pH values occurred in large urban areas and along the Sea of Japan coast.
In 1990 the Citizen Bank Eco established its Citizen Bank Eco Research Laboratory dedicated to citizen activism through citizen science. With the start of the research lab an appeal was launched to develop a nationwide, and worldwide, citizen acid rain monitoring network. This effort has been described in Masuyama (1993). By the end of 1993, after four years, the network consisted of some 1500 individuals taking measurements at some 150 locations throughout Japan with over 13,500 data points. The network members are of all ages, from middle school student to retiree. The collected data is published every three months. Also, with the cooperation of a manufacturer of analytical chemistry equipment they are now analyzing rain samples. By 1996 they had analyzed some 6000 samples. They also publish “Acid Rain Measurement Notes” containing member’s ideas and problems related to measurement.
Citizen Bank Eco’s philosophy is to make people more aware of the environmental condition of the Earth through direct participation. In his well-known book, The Earth in Balance, Al Gore proposed a global Environmental Marshall Plan. Citizen Bank Eco sees mobilization of world citizens and children to measure the state of the environment as a vital prelude to such a plan. To encourage this mobilization they have sent acid rain measurement kits to NGOs in over 30 countries. Many have sent back results, and some even send rain samples for analysis. In addition, Citizen Bank Eco also conducts an “environmental teacher” training program for members so as to develop their skills as environmental lay-educators in their respective communities.
Multinational corporations are also involved in the citizen monitoring movement. Horiba Ltd. is a multinational corporation based in Kyoto which specializes in the manufacture of analytical instruments. In 1950 it was the first company in Japan to manufacture a pH meter. At present it holds about 60% share of the Japanese pH meter market and an 80% share of the world’s automotive emission analyzer market. In 1987 the company developed and began selling a small, inexpensive pH meter. Interest in the device was modest, but then around 1990 with the sudden boom in citizen-level acid rain monitoring, Horiba realized there was demand for a range of acid rain measurement equipment by citizens and educators. In discussions with various educational groups the company found that there was great interest in a cheap, easy-to-use sampler which could automatically sample sequential volumes of rainwater. One of the reasons for this interest was that such a sampler could distinguish “rainout” from “washout,” and thus local acid rain from regional acid rain. 4 This resulted in development of the Rain-go-Round (Nagai 1994). Horiba’s Rain-go-Round is a small, lightweight sequential sampler that operates automatically with no outside energy inputs and which collects each millimeter of rainfall separately in a series of little cups attached to a Ferris wheel-like device, hence the name “Rain-go-Round.” The idea for the Rain-go-Round came from a Kyoto teacher who made a similar device from empty 35 millimeter film containers. Horiba expanded this idea into a commercial device. The first samplers manufactured had to be manually opened and closed. However, since
there was demand for a device with an automatic lid, a contest for a simple, non-technically-complicated lid design was held. The winning contraption was one which used toilet paper. The lid automatically springs open after the first few drops of rain wet and dissolve toilet paper held taut with a rubber band. The company tested over 100 varieties of toilet paper before finding one with the right tensile strength. The automatic opening contraption is called “Open Sesame,” after the famous phrase in the Arabian A Tale of a Thousand and One Nights.
Increased interest in student and citizen level monitoring of acid rain led Horiba to also develop the HONEST ( Horiba New Ecology Station) personal computer-based acid rain monitoring network (Ohishi 1993). HONEST is an internet-based communications network and database for storage and analysis of monitoring data collected by network members, who are mostly students and teachers. HONEST was brought on-line on the exact opening date and time of the Rio Conference on Environment and Development (6/6 at 6 a.m., 1992). By the end of 1992 there were 700 subscribers to the network, and today there are several thousand. There is no subscriber fee. The HONEST program contains information on acid rain analysis techniques, acid rain monitoring data, acid rain literature, and a bulletin board. Data comes from a variety of sources, but to assure the integrity of the data it must meet the following requirements: 1) both pH and electric conductivity must have been measured, 2) pH must be determined by the glass electrode method, 3) rain must be sampled from initial rainfall, and 4) the rainfall volume must also be reported. The HONEST program can analyze data by day, month, or region, and can make comparisons. Horiba is seeking to make HONEST a worldwide network. In 1993 10 sites in Shanghai were established which will feed data into the network.
By the mid-1990s Horiba was producing a wide range of acid rain measurement products aimed primarily at the environmental education market. Besides the Rain-go-Round (cost approximately $185), it manufactures compact, hand-held pH and electrical conductivity meters (cost approximately $250 each). A kit of all these items plus a few extra frills can be purchased for about $750. According to Ohishi Masayuki about 80% of the market for these items is middle school and high school teachers.
The largest citizen acid rain monitoring network in Japan is that of the Japanese Consumers’ Co-operative Union, or as it is known in Japanese Nihon Seikatsu Kyôdô Kumiai Rengôkai, or Seikyô for short. 5 Beginning in the late 1980s a few scattered members of a few local Seikyô groups began to monitor acid rain on their own and publish the results in their local Seikyô newsletters. In addition, monitoring of air quality and water quality were conducted by various individual groups. Very rapidly the idea of member monitoring of the environment took root and flowered. In 1991 the central Seikyô headquarters in Tokyo established its Environment 21 Project to promote and coordinate these “citizen science” activities. As a result several nationwide, centrally coordinated, Seikyô member-based, volunteer environmental monitoring programs were initiated. One such program was the three-year “Seikyô Nationwide Acid Rain Survey” which was started in 1993.
The predecessor to the formal, scientific Seikyô survey was a summer “educational” acid rain monitoring event in 1992. During the rainy season of this year members and their families from all over the nation tested the pH of rainfall with a simple colorimetric (color comparison) test kit and sent the results to co-op headquarters. Most of these tests were done as part of festivals, school programs, or summer cultural activities. The results were compiled, published and distributed to the local Seikyô groups. Over 22,000 data points were collected, of which 85% indicated acid rain (defined as pH < 5.6) and over 4% recorded a pH of less than 4.0. The aim of this type of program was educational but its success prompted the more serious, scientific and politically motivated formal survey in 1993.
Before discussing this formal nationwide survey, it might be instructive to briefly relate the story of one of the earliest “spontaneous” local groups whose acid rain monitoring experience predates, and formed the foundation for, the nationwide survey. This is the story of a few housewives in Osaka (Fukushima 1993). In the fall of 1990 a group of about 10 housewives associated with the North Osaka branch of Seikyô, who were taking an environmental class offered by Seikyô, decided they wanted to know more about the acid rain problem. At this time, according to the group’s account, “... seemingly day after day the mass media was shouting messages about the global environmental crisis, of which acid rain was one aspect. But what did it mean to say ‘the rain is acid’? Wanting to know more, we began to study, and formed our own ‘acid rain group’” (Fukushima 1993:690; author’s translation). Being rank beginners the group gathered information and educated themselves. One of the easiest to understand documents was the “Morning Glories are Crying” pamphlet mentioned earlier. Then finding out about Citizen Bank Eco’s acid rain survey, they joined a study group to learn acid rain measurement techniques. Using two pH meters which had been purchased by the North Osaka Seikyô and the acid rain test kit put out by Citizen Bank Eco, they began their own rain measurements. By the fall of 1991 they had organized a local monitoring network in the North Osaka area. They found pH values as low as 3.5. Their reasons for pursuing this activity were all local in character—to know more about their local environment, to inform neighbors of what they discovered, and to give impetus to changing their own lifestyle. The North Osaka group was not the first to monitor acid rain, but was typical of the first local efforts that simultaneously emerged at several branches within Seikyô, and which soon precipitated the national effort.
In addition to the experience of the local Seikyô groups, the Seikyô Nationwide Acid Rain Survey benefited from a similar effort begun in the United States in 1987 by the National Audubon Society. A report on the “Audubon Society Citizen’s Acid Rain Monitoring Network” (Bolze and Beyea 1989), along with other material on the program obtained from Audubon by a university professor, was translated into Japanese and eventually reached Seikyô’s ear via the professor. Other scientists in Japan aided Seikyô in working out methods and techniques, and in writing a manual for the survey. For instance, retired scientists from the Meteorology Agency helped in establishing the sample collection procedure. The nationwide Seikyô effort was completely funded by Seikyô itself at a total cost of about $100,000 per year, or $300,000 total for the three years. 6 There were no outside funds.
The Seikyô Nationwide Acid Rain Survey monitored in over 100 locations from Hokkaidô to Okinawa uniformly distributed throughout the country. There were at least two monitoring sites per prefecture. Precipitation from the first rainfall event for each month was collected. (Thus, all rainfall events in a month are not sampled, only the first.) When the sample was collected a quick check of pH was made on the spot, and then the sample was mailed to Seikyô’s Consumer Testing Center in Saitama Prefecture where a analysis was made for pH, electric conductivity, and SO4 2-, NO3 -, Cl-, NH4 +, Ca2+, and Na+ ion concentrations.
The first year’s results (July 1993 through June 1994) were published in 1995 in a Seikyô booklet entitled “ Ashita no Ame wa Donna Ame? (Tommorrow’s Rain, What Kind of Rain?).” They indicated an annual average pH of 4.6 and a pH range of 4.15 - 5.98 for the 100 locations. This agreed well with the Environment Agency’s Acid Deposition Survey results of 4.7 and range of 4.5 - 5.8 (EA 1995). The annual average concentrations and deposition values of ionic species also basically agreed with those of the Environment Agency, as did the high winter acid depositions on the Sea of Japan coast. One interesting Seikyô finding which was out-of-synch with the Environment Agency’s findings was the fact of very low pH values in the Inland Sea region (containing cities such as Osaka, Okayama, Hiroshima, etc.) where the Environment Agency had only four monitoring stations. Thus, while the Seikyô Nationwide Acid Rain Survey’s first year results confirmed the high winter deposition on the Sea of Japan coast, highlighting transboundary pollution from the mainland, it also convincingly demonstrated that Pacific Coast acid deposition (i.e., in-country acidic pollution) can’t be ignored. The Seikyô results were reported by the mass media. The 15 April 1995 issue of Asahi Shimbun, for instance, ran an article Zenkoku Tsunagi Sanseiu Chôsa (Citizen's Nationwide Acid Rain Survey), and the 19 April 1995 issue of Yomiuri Shimbun ran an article Medatsu Taiheiyôgawa (Pacific Coast Stands Out).
In large part because of the citizen acid rain monitoring craze, there is a huge environmental education-related literature on acid rain, particularly directed at schools. Also, there are, by the author’s estimate, at least 15–20 books directed toward the general public devoted wholly to the subject of acid rain. One of the earlier was The Dread of Acid Rain (Taniyama 1989). Others were mentioned above.
One sign of the high level of public awareness on the acid rain issue is acid rain-related haiku poems that appear in newspapers and magazines. Haiku is the world’s shortest form of poetry, composed of only three lines of five, seven and five syllables. Writing poetry is a popular pursuit in Japan unmatched by any other country. 7 It is so popular that some poets have become superstars and are as celebrated as top actors or athletes. One young haiku superstar, Mayuzumi Madoka, even has her own highly rated weekly TV and radio programs. Poetry has a long tradition in Japan extending at least back to the Manyô-shû of the Nara period (710–794). However, the greater leisure afforded by the postwar economic miracle has caused a surge in popularity in the past two decades, to levels unfathomable in the West. By some estimates 5–10% of the population regularly writes poetry. There are some 2000 poetry magazines and newsletters along with thousands of poetry books. All national newspapers carry daily poetry columns. One of the reasons for the popularity of haiku is because it is so short. Almost anyone can write it. Companies hold contests that draw tens of thousands of entries. A biannual contest held by Japan Air Lines solicits some 70,000 entries; another by Itoen, a tea company, drew 400,000 entries in 1995, mostly from children. Thus, if a certain topic area, such as acid rain, regularly shows up in haiku poems this is a sure indication that the topic is one of high public interest. The following are some examples of acid rain haiku.
(These poems are courtesy of Hara Hiroshi of the National Institute for Public Health who is collecting acid rain haiku to be published in a volume of acid rain poetry. After each poem to the right is the poet and date of first publication. The English version below is the author’s translation of the original.)
(In the early 1990s reports of acid rain damage to the two huge bronze Big Buddhas in Nara and Kamakura abounded.)
(Shrikes often do not immediately eat their prey, such as grasshoppers, but skewer them on a thorn or other sharp protrudance to be eaten later. The last Chinese character — nie — refers to a sacrifice, offering or gift to the Shintô gods.)
(The last three Chinese characters — baku shin chi — refer to ground zero of the Hiroshima atomic bomb.)
6. The Role of Culture in the Japanese Public’s Acid Rain Politics
The Japanese public’s deep interest in the acid rain issue can partly be explained as the result of the Japanese people’s millennial old association with rain. This fact makes acid rain an issue “intimate” to the Japanese people, more intimate than, say, global climate change or stratospheric ozone depletion.
A ‘delimited’ definition of culture appropriate for a comparative study of the role of culture in public expressions and behavior related to the acid rain issue in the several countries of Northeast Asia is the definition of culture as shared environmental symbols and shared environmental values. Using this definition, a comparative study can be conducted of the shared symbols and values relative to rain of the peoples of China, the Koreas, and Japan. The impact of these symbols and values as manifest in the general publics’ literacy and behavior relative to domestic and/or international environmental policy on the acid rain issue could then be assessed. The final object of the study would be the general publics’ respective influence on international policymaking on the acid rain issue. In such a study one of the three central questions relative to the use of culture in international environmental relations analysis—Who draws what environmentally-related ideas from the ideas toolkit that is culture?—would already be implicitly answered. The “who” is the general public, the ordinary citizen, that is drawing on shared ideas related to rain.
This paper addresses only the relation of the Japanese public to “rain ideas” within Japanese culture. We first need to look at some of the observable expressions of “rain ideas” within Japanese culture. Rain is to Japanese culture what the sun is to the Native American Hopi culture and snow is to the Arctic Inuit culture. Japan's wet rice agriculture is fundamentally dependent on abundant rainfall. Elements of clothing (for instance, geta sandals), housing (for instance, tile roofs), and gardens (for instance, the ubiquitous pond) reflect the prevalence of rain. In Japan the umbrella was elevated to a work of art. Japanese poetry and literature breathe rain, and Japanese artforms exude mist. There are hundreds of words for rain in the Japanese language. If the environment in which Japanese culture was borne were likened to a watercolor painting, a broad brush dipped in sky-blue air would lay on the wash, and smaller, finer brushes dipped in the endless forms of moisture (typhoon downpours, rainy season drizzles, hot spring steams, summer humidity, winter wet “peony” snowflakes) would stroke in the detail. The author was repeated told in interviews with Japanese scientists, bureaucrats, business people, and ordinary citizens that rain is special to the Japanese people.
The above observables lead us to hypothesize on the non-observables that make up Japanese culture. Such non-observables might include a shared perception that rain is an essential ingredient of Japanese life, a shared idea that rain is deeply affiliated with the long and honorable history of the Japanese nation, a shared feeling that contamination of rain is contamination of the Japanese spirit, and a shared value that the purity of rain must be preserved.
Turning to the second of the three central questions relative to the use of culture in international environmental relations analysis—How are rain ideas employed in the political arena?—we can see first of all that these ideas motivated the citizen acid rain monitoring boom and high degree of acid rain literacy among the general public. In other words, they have shaped an “acid rain discourse” among the citizenry. This discourse has primarily been linked to environmental education, but it has also served political functions. Through such activities as citizen monitoring and writing acid rain poetry, this discourse is carried by citizen groups and public opinion to the central government. The major vehicle of citizen input into acid rain policymaking is the mass media. A second vehicle is scientists. Scientists sometimes work with citizen groups, and often act as a sounding board for citizen opinions. Some of these scientists have access to central government bureaucrats and pass on the citizen messages. Even though the citizen’s voice is muffled because there are few other avenues for direct input into bureaucratic policymaking in Japan, it nonetheless provides a constant reminder to the central government to maintain a pro-active stance toward the domestic and international dimensions of the acid rain problem. If it wavers there are tens of thousands of citizens who will notice, and the bureaucracies, especially the EA and MITI, risk public censure. In interviews with the author, bureaucrats often stated that they felt citizens were watching their every move on the acid rain issue.
The third of the three central questions relative to the use of culture in international environmental relations analysis—How do rain ideas, originally drawn upon for political purposes, change and ultimately end up changing the set of environmentally-related ideas in the toolkit?—is a complicated question. One effect of the acid rain discourse in Japan is to renew people’s feeling of the importance of rain as a shaping influence on the culture. Another is to demonstrate how the nature of pollution problems have changed. From the Meiji Restoration of 1868 up until about 1990, environmental problems in Japan were viewed primarily in terms of their health effects. The acid rain discourse is showing people that ecosystem impacts may be just as important as or more important than direct health consequences. A third effect of the acid rain discourse is to demonstrate the interdependence of the peoples, economies, and environments of Northeast Asia. It was mentioned several times above that Japanese citizen groups have made efforts to expand their activities to the rest of Northeast Asia. This expansion of citizen acid rain discourse may, for instance, help build momentum for the signing of a transboundary air pollution treaty such as already exist in Europe and North America. Such a move would have major implications for altering Northeast Asia’s traditional non-legalistic worldview, and hence the ideas housed within Japanese and other Northeast Asian nations’ cultures.
In sum, one role of culture in the transboundary air pollution issue in Northeast Asia is, through the Japanese culture’s deep association with rain, to motivate the Japanese citizenry to engage in various acid rain related activities such as monitoring events and haiku poetry writing. These activities in turn are often picked up by the press and on occasion expressed directly to bureaucrats. This in turn motivates the two most prominent bureaucracies, the EA and MITI, to be more pro-active in their pursuit of international environmental cooperation on the transboundary air pollution issue. Even though the Japanese public’s attention is focused on acid rain, which is only one form of transboundary air pollution, this attention translates fairly smoothly to interest in the wider range of air pollutants involved in the problem.
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Endnotes
Note 1: The author wishes to thank Clark Sorensen of the University of Washington for the insights he shared on the concept of culture. It was Clark’s critique of my “old-fashioned” use of culture that started me on this paper. Back.
Note 2: A few examples of early works which treat culture and international relations include F.S.C. Northrop (1960), Adda Boseman (1960), Jongsuk Chay (1990), and the extensive review in Valerie Hudson (1997b). Back.
Note 3: It should be noted that the observables/non-observables dichotomy is where the anthropologists’ definitions of culture part company with the lay person’s popular notion of culture. In the popular literature culture is given to include material and non-material things. It would be very difficult to explain to the ordinary citizen that sushi, sumo wrestling, and Zen temples are not part of Japanese “culture.” Be this as it may, for analytic reasons the scholarly interpretation has taken a different turn from the popular interpretation. Back.
Note 4: “Rainout” refers to the phenomenon whereby primary air pollutants, such as SO2, are captured in rain droplets within clouds. Generally, the pH of such rain does not change significantly from the start of the rainfall to the end, and indicates that the pollutants have been transported over a distance and have mixed into the cloud moisture. “Washout” refers to the phenomenon whereby primary air pollutants, such as SO2, are captured by rain droplets as they fall. Generally, the pH of the initial rainfall is low, but as below-cloud air pollutants are depleted, the pH rises. This indicates that the pollutants are of local origin and have not mixed into the cloud moisture. Back.
Note 5: Seikyô is the largest consumer movement in Japan. It revolves primarily around cooperative food-buying. The central Seikyô headquarters in Tokyo serves as an umbrella organization for hundreds of local “seikyô’s.” The predecessor to the present organization was founded just after the war in 1945. The movement was fairly small until the 1960s when membership soared. Today there are over 15,000,000 member households. The distinguishing feature of Seikyô is its joint household purchase and home-delivery system for food and other products. In addition, it operates some 2500 retail outlets throughout the nation. Besides its core food-related services, Seikyô performs a wide variety of other services such as care for the elderly. The basic structural unit of Seikyô is the “ han,” which is a group of households from the same neighborhood who jointly order food. However, the han is more than a mere buying club. It is a social unit that serves numerous other educational, political and cultural functions. One such recent function is citizen-based environmental monitoring. Seikyô’s first environmental activity dates to the promotion of phosphate-free detergents in the 1960s. Back.
Note 6: The budget was 10 million yen per year, or 30 million yen for the three years. The above dollar figure is calculated at $1 = ¥100. (Source: interview with Futamura Chikako of Japan Seikyô’s Environmental Program Promotion Section, 2 June 1995.) Back.
Note 7: Much of the information on Japan’s recent haiku revolution was drawn from (Kristof 1996). Back.
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