Keitai mizu 133millions of Japanese lives as a way to provide a sense of constant connectedness
with physically separated but electronically co-present family and friends. As we
discuss in the next section, the agency of mobile media practices to rearticulate the
role of place and the environment have their history in Japanese environmentalism.
Locating the environment: Japan and environmentalism
The significant role mobile media have played in restructuring narratives in and
around the environment and their relationship to grassroots movements in Japan
cannot be underestimated (Gill, Steger, and Slater 2013). In order to understand
these shifts, one needs to understand Japanese environmentalism—a phenomenon
that has a history beginning within the Meiji Period (a period marked by great
industrialism) and marked by two key stages after 1960s urbanization (Ministry of
Foreign Affairs in Japan 2010). The first Japanese environmental movement emerged
in the 1970s exemplified by the Minamata and the Love Canal incidents. Together
with rapid motorization, air pollution via photochemical smog became one of the
major environmental issues. People soon came to recognize that wrongdoers were
not only companies but also played a role. The second stage of environmentalism—
as represented by anti-development and ecological movements in the 1980s and
1990s—focused upon the relationship between ecology and lifestyle.
In the 1990s, pushing back against the rapid industrialization and urbanization
of the 1970s and 1980s, local grassroots and community-based environmental
movements dubbed the Jyumin-Undo (local residents campaign) emerged
(Mitsuda 1996). Writing a few years after the landmark United Nations Conference
on Environment and Development or Rio Earth Summit of 1992, Jonathan
Taylor argues that from the early 1990s, “Japan has attempted to position itself
rhetorically as a global environmental leader”. However, for Taylor, this position
was underscored by the reality of the “Japanese model of development” as “linked
to Asia’s continuing environmental crises” (1999, p. 535). And yet the traditional
notion of mottainai (“what a waste”)—while repressed up until the 1980s economic
bubble burst—has continued to play a key role in everyday Japanese life (Masters
2008). In 2000, The Basic Law for Establishing the Recycling-based Society came
into effect—establishing Japan as a “recycling-based society”. Given Japanese
tendencies toward mass production, consumption, and disposal, the Law aims to
shift the cultural emphasis toward a reduction of environmental loading.
While grassroots, community-driven environmental groups have grown
over the past three decades, it is in the wake of 3/11 that we see new forms of
environmentalism that involve new forms of protest and engagement entangled
with the digital (Gill, Steger, and Slater 2013). As David H. Slater (2011) observes
in his analysis of post-3/11, prior
... the threat of nuclear radiation and critiques of the nuclear industry have been
skillfully politicized in ways that have led to the largest set of demonstrations
in Japan (with the exception of Okinawa) since the US-Japan security treaty
protests of the 1960s and 1970s. These protests have been based in Tokyo,