600 Reviews of Books
vironmental thinker for “his modern vision of ‘ecocide,’
the possible extinction of a nature capable of support-
ing life and freedom” (p. 98).
The journalist Ishikawa Sanshiro៮ witnessed the Meiji
state’s destruction of levees protecting Yanaka village
in 1906 to build the flood-control reservoir and, follow-
ing in Tanaka’s footsteps, developed a theory of democ-
racy as a return to the soil based on “the life of the
people attached to the earth” (domin kurashı៮ ), a variant
on demokurashı៮ for democracy (p. 119). Rejecting so-
cialism because of its promise of subjugating nature, in
1920 Ishikawa promoted a theory of “natural democ-
racy” in which “all industry, trade, politics, and edu-
cation should be done in the service of cultivating the
earth (chi o tagayasu). This is our ideal society—an in-
dustry of agri-cultivation (ko៮ jijigyo៮ ). This is
demokurashı៮” (p. 128). Ishikawa differed from agrarian
fundamentalists (no៮ honshugisha) in seeking a return to
“mutually beneficial relations between humans and en-
vironment” (p. 140) that he believed existed in premod-
ern times, whereas in Stolz’s view fundamentalists rep-
resented “a cultural atavism or pathological
antimodernism” (p. 140) of steep hierarchy beneath a
sovereign emperor. During World War II Ishikawa re-
fused rations and continued to farm, living off the land;
after 1945 he put faith in local anarchist practices and
separated “the world of work from the world of capi-
talism,” relying “on a rather ahistorical concept of
‘life’” (p. 157).
Kurosawa Torizo៮ , by contrast, thought small-scale
dairy farming was the solution to Japan’s environmen-
tal crisis, what the author calls “an ecology of auton-
omy” (p. 162). Kurosawa regarded Danish dairy farm-
ing as superior to livestock ranching for Hokkaido and
hoped to turn Japan’s northern island into “the Den-
mark of Japan” (p. 170) as an antidote to Tanaka’s
warnings of “national death.” During national general
mobilization for war, this ecology of personal autonomy
“blurred into the ecology of national autarky” (p. 161)
as the dairy industry submitted to state controls. After
1945 Kurosawa sought to restore agricultural cooper-
atives, but American occupiers promoted entrepre-
neurial individuals as the basis of postwar capitalism.
Nonetheless, small-scale labor-intensive dairy farming
soon gave way to mechanized, capital-intensive indus-
try, what Stolz calls the “manipulation of nature by hu-
mans to produce a nature most conducive to capital ac-
cumulation” (p. 189).
Bad Water excels in analyzing the ideas of Tanaka,
Ishikawa, and Kurosawa, frequently from the vantage
of pure history of thought. As environmental history,
the book is episodic in treatment, often relying on the
insights of other scholars for its narrative thread. Stolz
undertakes frequent forays into Western critical
thought that sometimes illuminate his arguments but
just as often deflect attention from his main points. As
intellectual history, this book is a sound achievement in
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
an area of modern Japanese thought too lightly re-
garded before now.
TOM HAVENS
Northeastern University
TODD A. HENRY. Assimilating Seoul: Japanese Rule and
the Politics of Public Space in Colonial Korea, 1910–
1945. (Asia Pacific Modern, no. 12.) Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 2014. Pp. xviii,
299. $49.95.
Todd A. Henry’s Assimilating Seoul: Japanese Rule and
the Politics of Public Space in Colonial Korea, 1910–1945
analyzes ways in which the architects of the Japanese
empire worked to reorder life in Korea’s capital as it
was lived under their rule. He frames his study chron-
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ologically, dividing it into three parts: 1910–1925, 1925–
1937, and 1937–1945. Henry thematically examines
power relations between colonizer and colonized
through considerations of toponymy, religious practice,
industrial exhibition, sanitary systems, and patriotic
performance, among other things. His assessment of
Japanese peoples’ efforts and effects in Korea at the
time thus meshes well with other studies of urban ex-
istence on a regional and global scale that similarly take
up Gilles Deleuze’s fascination with such “assem-
blages” in light of modernity’s colonial, reordering
gaze. As such, Henry’s history of Japanese-occupied/
reconfigured Seoul during the first half of the twentieth
century reads best with texts ranging from David
Prochaska’s Making Algeria French: Colonialism in
Bône, 1870–1920 (1990) to Leo Ou-Fan Lee’s Shanghai
Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China,
1930–1945 (1999). It also engages well with examina-
tions of Japanese modernity in the empire’s homeland
urban areas such as Louise Young’s recent and won-
derful, Beyond the Metropolis: Second Cities and Modern
Life in Interwar Japan (2013). It is a most welcome ad-
dition to the field of Korean studies.
Henry makes use of a rich array of Korean- and Jap-
anese-language source material, much of which appears
for the first time in English, for which he is to be com-
mended. In particular, in the third chapter of Assimi-
lating Seoul, Henry lavishly describes various industrial
exhibitions held in what for centuries had been the Ko-
rean monarchy’s seat of power, Kyongbok Palace.
Nicely explaining the summary effect of the Japanese
colonial rulers’ use of this significant spot as a “de-
sacraliz[ing]” process (p. 92), Henry’s examination of
modernity’s display wares in 1907, 1915, and 1929—me-
diated through their Japanese producers—introduces
readers to small but significant features of daily life his-
tories such as rooftop beer-garden spots and times and
locations of dancing-girl revues as well as which tooth-
brushes and cigarettes were most popular. Henry is
careful, furthermore, to chronicle the economics and
demographics of these details, including understanding
how these displays drew visitors from throughout Ko-
rea, not just the capital city. He notes, for example, that
at the 1915 exhibition, “during the first forty-eight days
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 Asia
of this fifty-one-day event, almost 70 percent of 790,000
total admissions were made by individuals residing out-
side the capital city. Newspaper reports [in Korean and
Japanese] referred to most participants of group visits
as local notables” (p. 106). Thus, while it remains es-
sential today to recognize antagonistic and violent
workings of the era of Japanese colonial rule in Ko-
rea—something Henry’s study in no way devalues—it
remains equally significant to understand, as Henry’s
analysis does, how the lived life of this period took
place: simply put, how power functioned. Throughout,
Henry’s textured discussion of multiple features of ex-
istence brings such realities into tactile relief.
Arguably of most analytic importance is Henry’s
treatment of the place and practice of Japanese Shinto៮
in colonized Seoul (chaps. 2 and 5). Though Japanese
colonizers were hard-pressed to define Koreans as with-
out organized religious practice—a justification that
Christian missionaries throughout the world at the time
used to prove other colonizers’ superiority over the col-
onized—Henry’s study reveals ways in which Japanese
colonizers nonetheless worked to define their pre-
sumed ethnic supremacy through the introduction of
state Shinto៮ . This took time, however, and was only par-
tially accomplished. In the early phase of colonial con-
trol, Henry explains, “[t]he colonial state would have
preferred to represent Japanese settlers as a unified na-
tional community of reverent subjects, especially to
newly colonized Koreans” (p. 67). This was not to be
achieved so simply, though. “Boisterous” Japanese, for
example, liked things such as sumo wrestling and pa-
rades of pretty women in the mix of faith, making all in
all for what Henry describes as at best “[u]neven man-
ifestations of national identity among settlers” during
the initial stages of colonized Korea (p. 71) (here the
University of California Press is to be thanked for al-
lowing Henry to include such excellent photographs).
As the Japanese state expanded throughout Eurasia
and the Pacific and headed into its period of total war,
however, what Henry describes as “imperial subjecti-
fication” went into high gear, Japan increasingly po-
liced compliance with its “‘Shinto៮ ization’ of [Korean]
households” (p. 169). Despite efforts, for example, by
Korean Confucian scholars among others to oppose
things such as the requirement of a miniature shrine in
the household, Henry notes that the reach of the Jap-
anese state even included rewriting Confucian bowing
practices into “emperor worship,” making “locating
and analyzing resistance . . . that much more difficult”
and that much more difficult to assess historically. For
example, Japanese officials documented the success of
Shinto៮ ’s spread—whether actual or not—through “sta-
tistical increases” that they measured by Koreans’ bow-
ing at shrines, a measure that leaves a “far messier and
less comforting reality of imperial subjectification” (p.
170) on the one hand, yet, on the other hand, makes it
almost impossible to demonstrate the substance of re-
sistance. One is left to wonder what Koreans thought
about while being forced to bow at a shrine as the Jap-
anese official counted his presence there as belief.
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
601
Henry smartly leaves such questions unanswered be-
cause they are unanswerable. He shows that countless
aspects of urban daily life became newly configured un-
der Japanese control over Seoul—streets, shops, light-
ing systems, and transportation—yet he shows, too, that
many Seoulites assimilated these features of modernity
to their lives without losing themselves.
ALEXIS DUDDEN
University of Connecticut
ROBERT CRIBB, HELEN GILBERT, and HELEN TIFFIN. Wild
Man from Borneo: A Cultural History of the Orangutan.
Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2014. Pp. xii,
318. $54.00.
This joint-authored, multidisciplinary study offers a
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wonderful introduction to the promise and challenge of
investigating human-animal histories. This particular
work provides nothing less than a history of the hyphen
within the “human-animal” formulation, by examining
“the changing pattern of ways human beings . . . have
grappled with the specific and unsettling similarities
and differences between orangutans and humans” (p.
249).
The authors tread carefully through the range of
source material that this history of grappling has
yielded, which includes scientific inquiry across four
centuries and virtually every possible form of cultural
production—including philosophy, novels, theater, cin-
ema, exhibitions, painting, and travel writing—a range
that clearly establishes the enduring importance of the
orangutan and its discontents to the history of creative
reflection and artistic expression. The finest line the au-
thors draw (and blur) through this literature is that be-
tween scientific and non-scientific discourse. As they
carefully explain, the book “interwine[s]” the “history
of developing scientific knowledge of the orangutan . . .
with the history of the representation of orangutans in
key areas of human culture” (p. 7). They further note:
“The ‘truth’ of a cultural history . . . lies not in biological
or behavioral ‘facts’ alone, but in recording the various
ways in which orangutans have been perceived and rep-
resented in a number of disciplines, discourses, and do-
mains of practice” (p. 8). Such distinctions, made and
unmade in successive close readings, work to carve out
distinctive arenas of discourse, through which the book
unfolds, without explicitly granting any one of them
greater truth-value than the others.
The book is thus organized largely, if not exclusively,
by disciplinary focus, but also chronologically, and it
leads the reader toward the present through three chap-
ters on the history of scientific classification, two on rep-
resentations of the orangutan in literature, and one on
representations “on stage and screen.” Three non-dis-
ciplinary chapters then follow, addressing zoos, conser-
vation, and recent and contemporary reprisals of en-
during themes in human-orangutan history.
The story begins with a history of the question “What
is an orangutan?” and the fascinating attempts to an-
swer it, which alternately asserted and denied the an-
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