B.L. Batten
emergence of animistic, polytheistic religions and of civilizations more in tune with nature than
their monotheistic pastoral or desert equivalents.^21 Such sweeping assertions find little support
among historians today.
Other claims have been made about the influence of environmental conditions on Japanese
culture and society. For example, it is said that living in a beautiful environment amidst changing
seasons has fostered a love of nature, or that overfamiliarity with natural disasters has bred a tend-
ency toward fatalism.^22 These assertions are perhaps not completely wrong, but from a historian’s
point of view they are problematic. For one thing, the objective reality of these alleged cultural
traits is open to question. Are or were Japanese truly more fond of nature or more fatalistic than
other people?^23 For another, even granted the traits’ existence or importance, ascribing them
confidently to environmental factors requires a leap of faith.
The same criticisms apply to other generalizations. For example, some authors state that
because Japan is an island country relatively safe from invasion, society was able to develop in its
own way at its own pace.^24 Isolation is also said to have contributed to a trend toward decentrali-
zation over much of Japanese history.^25 Or we read that Japan’s mountainous topography was a
force for political fragmentation and regional diversity.^26 All of these claims seem plausible, but
it is difficult to say that they have been, or could be, “proved” in any meaningful sense.
That said, it is certainly true that natural events and conditions have influenced people’s lives,
and hence the course of history, in Japan: the most obvious example is provided by natural dis-
asters. Historical accounts of disasters are legion. One of the most famous is Hōjōki (An Account
of a Ten- Foot-Square Hut), an early Kamakura period work by Kamo no Chōmei, whose experi-
ences with (among other things) whirlwinds, earthquakes, droughts, typhoons, floods, pesti-
lences, and the deaths and misery they caused persuaded him to retreat from the world and
become a hermit.^27 About the only things missing from Hōjōki are volcanic eruptions and tsunami,
but these, like other categories of disaster, appear frequently in surviving records from all periods
of Japanese history.^28 Clearly bad things happened and people suffered greatly (although I hasten
to add that in most cases the extent of suffering depended on human as well as environmental
factors).
Information on disasters and their effects is also to be found in the archaeological record. Vol-
canic ash from the eruption of the Kikai caldera south of Kyushu around 5500 bce rendered huge
swaths of western Japan uninhabitable for a period of years or more. Ash- covered fields and resi-
dences at the Hashimuregawa site in Kagoshima prefecture, southern Kyushu, dramatically cor-
roborate historical records of an eruption in 874 ce.^29 Excavations in the Kantō Plain have
uncovered fields and villages destroyed by the eruptions of Mt. Fuji in 1707 and Mt. Asama in
- (Recall that the latter event was also responsible for cold weather and famine.) Archae-
ology has also revealed evidence of structural damage and liquefaction caused by the 1596 Keichō
Fushimi earthquake, as well as of destruction of fields and villages by flooding in the Kofun and
medieval eras.^30
In addition to such one- time events, Japanese society was also influenced by long- standing
environmental conditions. People tend to settle where it is easy (or at least possible) to do so in
terms of accessibility and availability of resources. So it is no surprise that from ancient times
Japanese people settled in valleys, basins, and alluvial plains, which were accessible and generally
suitable for human life and livelihood (not least, that involving agriculture). Local conditions also
influenced settlement and construction at each specific site. A study by the late Kawasumi Tatsu-
nori made use of GIS (geographic information systems) methodology to show that in eighth-
century Heijō-kyō (Nara), nobles lived in close proximity to water sources, while large
government buildings and temples were built atop Pleistocene terraces, where the ground was
sufficiently firm to support them.^31