A War Against Garbage in Postwar Japan

Eiko Maruko Siniawer

When Minobe Ryōkichi declared war against garbage in September 1971, he thrust waste into the public’s attention and rendered it visible. The governor of Tokyo was not just encouraging the construction of incinerators and landfills to deal with the rapid proliferation of rubbish then facing the metropolis, but was also provoking discussions about the inescapable costs of high economic growth and mass consumption. The Garbage War (gomi sensō), described below in an excerpt from Waste, ultimately proved to be pivotal in changing conceptions of waste in postwar Japan. Coupled with the Oil Shock of 1973, it revealed how deeply waste had insinuated itself into the values and practices of everyday life, and how a society of mass production and mass consumption was also one of mass waste. Shaped too by ideas of environmental protection, the waste of things, resources, and energy came to be seen as tightly interwoven problems that threatened the security and longevity of middle-class lifestyles.

At this moment in the early 1970s, garbage was not just a material reality that demanded the attention of urban infrastructure development, but also a symbol of the many desires of middle-class life: the convenience of disposable goods, the comforts fueled by energy consumption, the purchase of electric appliances, the preservation of natural resources, and more. In subsequent years, people’s production of rubbish continued to pose problems, as it does today with plastic polluting the world’s oceans and trash accumulating after China’s refusal to continue serving as the world’s dump. But what has changed over the postwar decades in Japan are the views of rubbish and the larger sociocultural issues that it has been seen to reflect. It is this more capacious understanding of garbage that best captures the central concerns of Waste, which is less about rubbish and much more about the idea of waste—about what was considered to be waste and to be wasteful in Japan from the mid-1940s to the present day.

A fundamental quality of garbage—that it has been rejected as valueless—can be applied to waste of all sorts, material or otherwise. To deem anything a waste, be it energy or food or money or time, is to make a determination of value. By tracing shifts in conceptions of waste and wastefulness, the book illustrates how people gave meaning to and found value in their daily lives. And it tells a story of the concerns, aspirations, disappointments, and hopes that have marked people’s experiences in the long postwar.

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A New Governor and a New Era for Okinawa Reflections of an All-Okinawa Activist Urashima Etsuko Translated and Edited by Gavan McCormack

December 1, 2018 Volume 16 | Issue 23 | Number 2

Cries of “Shitaihya” and “Yushittai” (Okinawan words meaning “Well Done [People of Okinawa!]” and “Take That [Abe government!]” rang out across Okinawa. The 30 September 2018 gubernatorial election occasioned by the sudden death of Governor Onaga Takeshi was literally an all-out war between the Okinawan people doggedly opposing the construction of a new military base at Henoko and the Abe government trying by all means to crush the will of the people. As Onaga’s second son, Takehiro, kept insisting during the election period, “this is not an election to be won, or an election we want to win, it is an election we simply must win at all costs.” Needless to say, this election was not just a struggle against candidate Sakima Atsushi but against the Abe government that backed him, to decide whether or not former Governor Onaga Takeshi would be able to pass the baton of our struggle to the candidate (Tamaki Denny) who inherited his mission of no new base.   All-Out Struggle between the Abe Government and Okinawa No sooner had the ballot boxes been closed at 8 pm on 30 September than the word spread that “Tamaki has won!” But having tasted the bitterness of defeat at the hands of the Abe government’s dirty campaign in the February Nago City mayoral election, in which the ruling LDP and Komeito mobilised money and authority, we could not immediately believe that we had really won. “Impossible, counting has only just started,” some said. At Nago the combination of “avoid discussion of the key issue” [i.e., the base problem] and abundant resources produced the desired result, so the government applied the same means, themselves referring to it as its “Nago-formula” or “victory formula,” to the gubernatorial election. Furthermore, this time more than 70,000 “Ishin” (Japan Innovation Party) voters who had voted for Shimoji Mikio in the last election could be added to the Sakima support base, so, counting Komeito votes that last time had been left up to individuals, the government felt confident that Sakima would be able to make up the 100,000 margin of former Governor Onaga’s victory in 2014, and therefore to win. Gov. Tamaki Denny during the campaign Full article