Consuming Nature: Early Modernity, Popular Culture and the Natural World in Japan, 1600-1900

The central hypothesis of Consuming Nature is that a new mode of interacting with the natural world developed among non-elites during the social and economic upheavals of Japan’s Tokugawa period (1600–1868), with consequences for our understanding of “early modernity” in the Japanese case and beyond. Previous studies, both of Japan and of other regions, have examined early modern nature from the perspective of environmental degradation and resource management or elite philosophy and natural science. In contrast, the focus of this cultural historical study will be on a largely untapped corpus of objects and texts from 17th to 19th century Japan attesting to a new kind of (purchasing) power over nature, one which saw the commercialized enjoyment of plants, animals, and natural phenomena as consumer products and leisure activities among commoners. The project will collate this corpus and analyse it in light of the characteristics associated with Japanese early modernity: rapid urbanization, increasing literacy, a commercial print industry, and a consumer culture concentrated in large urban centres connected to rural areas by improved communication and transport networks. How was the commercialization of nature as a leisure product linked to these so-called “early modern” developments? Did it also draw upon older traditions and institutions? How did this consumption of nature vary by urban versus rural locations, by social status or sex? Did it vary over time or by type of product? The final stage will connect the project’s findings to the history of global early modernity/ies, and to research on nature and Japanese modernity, which usually takes the Meiji Period (1868–1912) as its starting point. It will interrogate the supposed rupture between the early modern Tokugawa period and the modern Meiji period when it comes to the consumption and commodification of nature, and will provide a scholarly framework for challenging Eurocentric teleologies of nature and modernity.