Peter Wynn Kirby

Responses to TROUBLED NATURES: WASTE, ENVIRONMENT, JAPAN:

"Welcome to post-Bubble Tokyo. A miasma emanating from a waste transfer station hidden under a city park sickens local homeowners and tears a neighborhood apart. Smart, malevolent jungle crows menace passersby and lay waste to garbage bags. Fears of incinerator fumes and tainted spinach paralyze residents of a middle-class neighborhood. And all the while Tokyoites question who among them belongs and who does not. Peter Kirby's sensitive ethnography brings the new field of environmental anthropology to Japan. He grounds universal questions of waste and renewal in the specific context of a city and nation afflicted by economic malaise and social uncertainty."

--David L. Howell, Professor of Japanese History, Harvard University

"Kirby's long-term ethnographic study takes the unlikely-sounding subject of waste (in all its forms) to a fascinating depth, demonstrating the sociocultural complexity of environmental issues, and the crucial contribution that an anthropological study such as this can make to the broader field. Here is a novel way to understand the changing nature of contemporary Japan, through insights into the lives of residents of its enormous capital city and their struggle to eliminate environmental pollution and maintain the purity on which Japan has long prided itself."

--Joy Hendry, Professor of Social Anthropology, Oxford Brookes University

"Kirby makes a large original contribution both in content and approach in this work. The scholarship is sound and the writing style is exceptionally good, even eloquent. Policy makers, urban and environmental anthropologists, environmentalists, and those interested in Japan will all find useful insights in this book. It is important for understanding the Japanese case in hand, but equally important for pointing to the necessity of considering multilevel factors unique to each society in dealing with global approaches to environmental degradation."

--Pamela Asquith, Professor of Anthropology, University of Alberta

"This book provides a fascinating insider's view of Japan's 'wastescape' based on more than three years of immersive ethnography in Western Tokyo of actual waste flows alongside notions of purity. Garbage casts a broad ecological shadow over the nation's environment, damaging local health and also redefining social boundaries for outcastes and victims of pollution. Through richly detailed case studies of protests against Azuma Disease caused by toxic emissions from waste facilities, the ubiquitous and aggressive scavenging black crows, "social pollution," purity, and prejudice, this book opens our eyes to the consequences of rapid industrialization and the meaning of waste to consumers, residents, and scholars alike."

--Political scientist Daniel P. Aldrich, author of Site Fights: Divisive Facilities

and Civil Society in Japan and the West