Climate and environment in historycovers the environmental history of the entire world, not just Japan. Next is the six- volume
Shirīzu Nihon rettō no sanman gosen nen (Series: Thirty- Five Thousand Years of the Japanese Archi-
pelago), published in 2011 by Bun’ichi Sōgō.^65 This has an ecological focus and emphasizes “wise
use” and “multilayered governance” of resources in premodern times. Finally, there is the five-
volume Kankyō no Nihonshi (Environmental Japanese History), published by Yoshikawa
Kōbunkan in 2012–2013.^66 This chronologically and thematically comprehensive project was
the brainchild of Hirakawa Minami and other prominent historians. Its publication represents a
validation of environmental history by the Japanese historical community.
In closing, possibly the biggest challenge in Japanese environmental history is to bring the
field into the mainstream of research on world environmental history. This will require greater
collaboration between Japanese and foreign historians. The former are prone to tightly focused
empirical research, much of it conducted without reference to scholarly discourse outside Japan.
The latter are prone to broader, more conceptual work drawing on questions or approaches in
the English- language literature on world environmental history. One hopes that in coming years,
the two can combine their respective strengths to shed light on some of the important questions
that emerge from the Japanese experience. To what extent is it accurate to consider premodern
Japan a sustainable society that respected its ecological limits? How was a “soft landing” to zero
population growth achieved during the seventeenth century? Was Japan uniquely successful in
weathering (so to speak) the Little Ice Age, and if so, how? These questions are important not just
for Japan but for the world as a whole as we struggle with contemporary problems such as popu-
lation growth and climate change. Focused, collaborative research between Japanese scholars and
their foreign counterparts can provide some of the needed answers.
Notes
1 Carl Haub, “How Many People Have Ever Lived on Earth?” Haub assumes that Homo sapiens is only
50,000 years old, so his estimate may be a bit on the low side—but not by much, since earlier popula-
tions would have been minuscule.
2 On which, see J. Donald Hughes, What Is Environmental History?
3 For good English- language descriptions of Japan’s physical geography, see Conrad Totman, A History of
Japan, 2nd ed., 11–19, or Gina L. Barnes, “Japan’s Natural Setting.” In Japanese, see Kokuritsu Kagaku
Hakubutsukan, Nihon rettō no shizenshi.
4 Gina L. Barnes, “Origins of the Japanese Islands: The New ‘Big Picture,’ ” 30.
5 For an overview, see Umitsu Masatomo, “Nihon rettō no fukugen.”
6 On climate- induced floral change, see Matsuo Tsukada, “Vegetation in Prehistoric Japan: The Last
20,000 Years”; Junko Habu, Ancient Jomon of Japan, 42–46; and Hikaru Takahara and Ryoma Hayashi,
“Paleovegetation during Marine Isotope Stage 3 in East Asia.”
7 For a much more detailed account of the material in the next few paragraphs, see Bruce L. Batten,
“Climate Change in Japanese History and Prehistory: A Comparative Overview.”
8 See Haruo Shirane, Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons: Nature, Literature, and the Arts.
9 Yasuyuki Aono and Keiko Kazui, “Phenological Data Series of Cherry Tree Flowering in Kyoto, Japan,
and Its Application to Reconstruction of Springtime Temperatures since the 9th Century”; Y. Aono
and S. Saito, “Clarifying Springtime Temperature Reconstructions of the Medieval Period by Gap-
Filling the Cherry Blossom Phenological Data Series at Kyoto, Japan.”
10 Mikami Takehiko and Ishiguro Naoko, “Suwako keppyō kiroku kara mita kako 550 nenkan no kikō
hendō”; Takehiko Mikami, Masumi Zaiki, and Junpei Hirano, “A History of Climatic Change in Japan:
A Reconstruction of Meteorological Trends from Documentary Evidence,” 197–199.
11 Yutaka Sakaguchi, “Warm and Cold Stages in the Past 7600 Years in Japan and Their Global Correlation—
Especially on Climatic Impacts to the Global Sea Level Changes and the Ancient Japanese History—”;
Sakaguchi Yutaka, “Kako 8000 nen no kikō henka to ningen no rekishi.”
12 Tatsuo Sweda and Shinichi Takeda, “Construction of an 800-Year- Long Chamaecyparis Dendrochronol-
ogy for Central Japan.”