Minakata Kumagusu: The first Japanese environmentalist

In this short article, I attempt to examine the environmental philosophy and activity of a Japanese intellectual giant, Minakata Kumagusu (1867–1941). In Japan, he is called by the first name, Kumagusu. Remembering and referring to an iconic figure by the first name is emblematic of reverence and continued affection toward the person. Kumagusu was the first environmental activist in Japan, and he was also the first to have introduced the English term “ecology” to Japan (Ohara & Valmalette, 2015). His activity as an environmentalist had firm roots in his philosophy that can be called cybernetic today.

This article seeks to explore four aspects regarding Kumagusu: his life, environmental activity, background, and philosophy.

Life

In the Kii Peninsula, the southern corner of Honshu Island, lies the Kumano forest. This expansive forest has been the famous seat of Shintoism. Three Kumano shrines in the forest have been the destinations of the ancient road of pilgrimage. Since the 10^th century, many pilgrims, including emperors from Kyoto, have traveled through the arduous mountain trails of the forest. The Kumano forest also has a strong association with Buddhism. The Koyasan Temple, the center of the Shingon sect of Esoteric Buddhism is located at the northern edge of the forest. Kumagusu’s life and thought were intertwined with this forest.

Kumagusu was born in 1867 in Wakayama, a northeastern coastal city in the Kumano forest. The name Kumagusu was given by a Shinto priest of Fujishiro-oji Shrine. There was a camphor tree (kusunoki) that was over 800 years old at this shrine, something that is considered to be a deity in Shintoism. The name Kumagusu literally means “a camphor tree in the Kumano region”. Kuma in Japanese also means a bear and Kumagusu himself considered the bear as his own totem. It is symbolic that his name is connected with the nature and religion of the Kumano region, while it is also emblematic of the combination of a plant and an animal. Kumagusu’s life and thought were characterized by “both and” instead of “either or”. He was both an ethnologist and a biologist. Slime mold, which he studied and collected passionately, is a creature that exhibits characteristics of both plants and animals. Moreover, he was well-versed in both Eastern and Western traditions. We will see that this feature also played an important role in his environmental activities.

As a boy, he did not like a school. He educated himself by assiduously hand copying books. For instance, from the age of 12 to 15, he copied Wakan Sansai Zue, an encyclopedia that contains considerable information (105 volumes) about “the heaven, earth, and people” of Japan and China. He had an excellent memory and memorized much of what he wrote down, but he was not a bookworm. He ventured into a forest to collect plants and sometimes did not return home for days. He possessed an extraordinary ability to get engrossed in an object.

His aversion to the school continued even after he went to Tokyo to prepare for the entrance at the Tokyo Imperial University. But he abandoned the plan before entering the university.

A unique and welcome opportunity emerged when in 1887 at the age of 20 he was allowed by his father to study in the United States. Studying abroad was extremely expensive at that time, and he was one of the lucky few who could afford it through private means. It does not directly imply that he lived as a rich young man abroad. On the contrary, the money-flow was intermittent, and he had to suffer extreme poverty. He spent the initial five years of his study abroad in America and Cuba. During this period, he dedicated himself to gathering botanical species. In 1892, he went to England and began his research at the British Museum. He adopted the same study method of hand copying books as earlier and was left with over 10,000 pages of copy. At this time, he began to submit articles to the prestigious journal, Nature. The journal at that time also encompassed articles on ethnology. His article, “The Constellations of the Far East” (1893), which discussed the constellations of China and India, was greatly appreciated. It was during this time that he met a Japanese priest of the Shingon sect, Dogi Horyu, who was going to play an important role in the evolution of his thought. Furthermore, during the same period of his life, he met a Chinese politician Sun Wen with whom he became a good friend. Later, Sun Wen would visit Kumagusu at his home in Japan.

In 1900 Kumagusu returned to Japan, and he stayed in an inn located in the southernmost part of the Kumano forest from 1901 to 1904. The place he stayed was desolate, further from any city. His inn was small, and he had only few books with him. During the day, he dedicated himself to collecting precious plants and insects, and the nights were spent in contemplation. It was at this time when he established his own philosophy.

In 1904 Kumagusu moved to Tanabe, a city located at the western border of the Kumano forest, and there he got married and had children. However, his quiet life soon met the end with Kumagusu plunging himself into the protest against shrine consolidation that led to the destruction of thousands of shrines in Japan.

In the rest of his life, he gradually received recognition among ethnologists and biologists, although he remained outside of established academic realm. The most momentous occasion of his life was when he was asked to deliver a private lecture to Emperor Hirohito about slime mold in 1929. Kumagusu died in 1941.

Environmental activities

Kumagusu’s environmental activities were centered around the protests against shrine consolidation. The shrine consolidation started in 1906 with the motto “one shrine for a village”. Its basis was the intention of the central government to create a modern nation under the Emperor. Before this period, Shintoism was a quite lax system that allowed numerous local deities. Hence, at that time, the government aimed to centralize and establish a hierarchical order among the variety of deities (Nakazawa, 1992). Amaterasu Omikami, the Sun Goddess who was considered the ancestor of the imperial family, was at the apex of the hierarchical order. Consequently, this led to the destruction of numerous local shrines. By1915, 70,000 out of 200,000 shrines in Japan had disappeared. The shrine consolidation law had significant ecological consequences because Japanese shrines, unlike Western churches, encompassed forests. Shintoism is a nature religion in which a forest plays the central role. The destruction of shrines paved the way for the commercial exploitation of forests. Old trees were cut down and sold, and rare species suffered extinction.

Kumagusu’s involvement against the shrine consolidation was occasioned by the decision of a local government to cut down the shrine forest, Itoda Sarugamishi in his neighborhood. It was in this forest where he had found a new species of slime mold. Kumagusu started the protest in 1911 by writing two long letters, in which he accused the shrine consolidation for the destruction of the ecology. These letters, known as the Two Letters of Minakata (Minakata, 1992) were addressed to Matsumura Jinzo, a professor of botany at the Tokyo Imperial University. Fifty copies of these letters were distributed to other experts. The protest led by Kumagusu continued, and he wrote a letter of protest to a local newspaper and sent his opinion to many journals and influential people. In addition, he appealed to foreign scholars on this matter. He thought that the matter was not merely a local incident but of the international concern. This was a turbulent period in his life, which included his imprisonment. His protest provided significant impetus to the eventual repealing of the shrine consolidation law in 1918.

In a letter known as An Opinion Concerning Shrine Consolidation (written in 1912 to Shirai Kotaro, one of the founders of plant pathology in Japan) Kumagusu expressed his view in eight slogans (Minakata, 1992; Haga, 2011), which I briefly enumerate and comment on in the following paragraphs. For the sake of convenience, I divide the sixth slogan into two parts, and they can be subsumed in under nine keywords.

1. “Shrine consolidation weakens the respect of gods.” The reduction of the number of shrines led to the disappearance of neighboring shrines, and this weakened the reverence toward gods. Here Kumagusu stands against the modern centralized religion promoted by the Meiji government. His understanding of religion is polytheistic without centralization and hierarchy. Keyword: Religion

2. “It hinders the unity among people.” Kumagusu reported the incidents of the revolts by fishermen who felt deprived of their own shrine. A shrine served as a place of security and identification for the local people. Keyword: Community

3. “It weakens local economy.” Economy that thrived in and around local shrines suffered from shrine consolidation. Keyword: Economy

4. “It deprives people of leisure, weakens humane feeling, and harms customs.” A shrine that comprises of vast forests dedicated to a deity was a place of leisure for local people. The nature there also had moral influence upon people. Keyword: Morality

5. “It weakens the love of one’s country and patriotism.” People who are deprived of their own shrine loses the love for their own country. Keyword: The love of country

6. 6a) “It harms security and people’s interests.” A local shrine was the place of refuge in case of natural disasters and a playground for children. The children deprived of their playground destroyed rice fields and caused quarrels among adults. The disappearance of a forest led to the lack of water and the extinction of birds, which in turn caused the increase of harmful insects. Keyword: Security

7. 6b) “Each day, many insects eat glass and trees that amount to the double of their own weight. The only way to prevent this is to protect and increase the number of birds. Birds also play an important role for fishery by eating insects and crabs that are harmful to fish (as Mr. Backland of England says).” Here, Kumagusu underscores the ecological insight regarding the interconnection of life. He learned the concept of ecology during his stay in England. Keyword: Ecology

8. “It destroys historical heritage.” Destroying a local shrine also destroys precious documents that pertain to history, folklore, and rituals. This is an interesting remark. We should remember that Kumagusu was an eminent scholar of ethnology who collected and memorized innumerable folklores from around the world. For him, ethnology and biology are closely related. Keyword: History and Ethnology

9. “It destroys precious species.” A shrine with its vast forest protected many precious plants and animals. Keyword: Protection of natural species

As we observe from the list, Kumagusu approached the problem from different perspectives. This may partly be due to the special standing of a Japanese shrine that served as a node where different threads intersected. In a shrine, gods, men, animals, and plants found their own place, and they could co-exist there. The destruction of a shrine was detrimental to religious feeling, the sense of community, the local economy, morality, the love for one’s own country, security, cultural heritage, and natural species. Additionally, he launched ecological arguments and cited a British scholar to support his arguments. In fact, Kumagusu was the first Japanese who used the term “ecology”. For him, ecology was not only the matter of nature, but was connected with the various aspects of life (Tsurumi, 1981; Karasawa, 2015). The awareness of this connection is an important lesson we can learn from him.

Background

I will attempt to examine the fundamental backgrounds of Kumagusu’s environmental activities.

The first background aspect is Shintoism. Shintoism is a nature religion. It was developed out of reverence and awe toward nature, such as a forest, a huge rock, and an old tree. Originally, a shrine was an encirclement in a forest without a building, and a forest was the dwelling of god. It also served as a market for adults and a playground for children, and it was a place of conviviality. The Kumano forest was one of the oldest and most venerable places for Shintoism.

The second aspect is Buddhism. Kumagusu regarded Buddhism not only as a religion but also as a comprehensive science that can match its Western counterpart. Since childhood, he had written down and memorized Buddhist scriptures. This knowledge helped him significantly in his interaction with Western scientists and ethnologists in London. His friendship with Dogi Horyu, an erudite of the Esoteric Buddhism who later became the head of the Koyasan temple, helped him immensely to establish his own philosophy.

The third fundamental background is Western academism. During his stay in America, he had exchanged letters related to botany with American scholars. As he was not satisfied with American universities, he spent most of his time on the field. In England, the British Museum enabled Kumagusu to access numerous precious books and facilitated the writing of the articles on ethnology. In the absence of the England experience, Kumagusu would have remained an eccentric amateur scholar. The number of articles he published in Nature amounted to 51. He also contributed numerous notes, queries and replies in the Notes and Queries, another prestigious journal encompassing diverse fields. England at that time already suffered from environmental pollution, and environmental consciousness was markedly nurtured by this crisis. Kumagusu’s ecological consciousness owed immensely to his British experience. At the time when Kumagusu’s environmental activity was criticized even by his friends in Japan, Western scholars supported him warmly.

Philosophy

Scholars are unanimous about discovering the essence of Kumagusu’s philosophy in the Minakata mandala. This term is not his own, but he referred to his view “my own mandala”. Kumagusu expressed his ideas in correspondence with Dogi Horyu, and their correspondence spanned over 30 years. The fundamental feature of his thought was already expressed in a letter written in 1893 without a reference to the mandala. The crucial letters concerning the mandala were written from 1901 to 1904 during his secluded sojourn in the Kumano forest. In these letters, he expressed his thought using divergent mandalas as illustrations. (You can easily look them up by using google.) Here, I limit myself to examining two letters: the one of 1893 and the other of 1903.

A letter from the London period (December 24, 1893) merits an attention. In it he expressed one of his fundamental ideas: the science of koto uniting the physical and psychological sciences. Kumagusu wrote:

Contemporary scholars (scientists and most of philosophers) only investigate specifically and separately the mind (kokoro) or physical things (mono). My exploration focuses on the koto (which can be considered as the phenomena of the human world) yielded by the interaction between the mind and physical things. I want to know how the world of the mind and the world of physical things differ from each other and how they have the same feature (Minakata, 1991, p. 63).

Kumagusu criticized modern sciences that are specialized in a limited field of reality, such as physical things or the mind. He also emphasized the necessity of finding the point of interaction, which he named koto. This Japanese word normally means a non-physical thing, in contrast to mono, which means a physical thing. Nonetheless, Kumagusu used this word in a different sense. He defined it as a kind of mediator between the mind and physical things. Thus, the entire artificial and cultural world that surrounds us is the world of koto. The world of koto is the world of “work,” in the sense used by Hannah Arendt (Arendt, 1958). Borrowing terms from Greek philosophy, koto can be also called the product of techne or nomos. It is different from the product of nature, phusis.

Kumagusu said that koto is yielded out of the interaction between the mind and nature (physical things). This does not mean that it is the third element that comes after them. Rather, by binding together the mind and nature, it lets them be as they are. For instance, without a microscope (a favorite tool of Kumagusu) as a koto, the miraculous world of microbes would have been non-existent for the human mind. Without appropriate tools, the mind would remain inactive, closed within itself. Kumagusu may have arrived at this idea thanks to his lifelong interest in natural philosophy and ethnology. In the world of natural philosophy (such as that of Pliny the elder) and ethnology, there is no clear distinction between imagination and science. For Kumagusu, there is no natural science that is completely free from the interaction with the mind mediated by a koto.

Another letter to Dogi, written 10 years later (June 18, 1903) from the deep forest of Kumano, explains his mature thought with the help of a mandala. The mandala is only a rough sketch, and it looks like graffiti or an abstract painting. Like a loosened thread ball, numerous grumpy lines intersect one another. The mandala expresses the five wonders (or miracles) (Minakata, 1991, pp. 295–299). They are the following:

1. Wonder of koto: it binds together physical things and the mind.

2. Wonder of the mind: it remains largely unknown because psychology is excessively preoccupied with the physical aspects such as the brain and the sensory organs.

3. Wonder of physical things: it can be known through sciences such as physics.

4. Wonder of reason: it can be known with great difficulty through intuition (reasoning, foresight and the sixth sense). In the mandala, it is expressed by a line that is drawn above the other lines that are interlaced.

5. Great wonder of Dainichi Nyorai (Vairocana in Sanskrit), the greatest God of Esoteric Buddhism: it is not depicted in the mandala. It is the Source of Life: Nothing that comprises Everything.

In this mandala, “it is possible to reach everywhere and do everything starting from any point if you make a complete pursuit of it.” However, there are some points (suiten) where different lines intersect. These points are heuristically important. Once you find them you can easily move from one point to another. Here, we can understand the importance of intersection and connection. The universe itself comprises the intersection of distinct levels of reality. Although Kumagusu introduced here the concept of Great God, the structure of the universe is not hierarchical. It looks more like a deep forest where different creatures live together (Nakazawa, 1992). Here, the Minakata mandala approaches the thought of cybernetics, and even surpasses it in its ontological complexity.

Final remarks

Kumagusu was a man who traversed freely between different worlds. He was a botanist, an ethnologist, a religious philosopher, and an ecological activist. He was at home with the Eastern and the Western traditions. His ecological thought teaches us to go beyond a limited field of specialization and find connections among divergent disciplines. Ecology should not be limited to the protection of a rare species or wilderness, nor should it be the matter of economical calculation or a leisure industry. We must understand that all things, religion, morality, community, nature, culture, and economy undergo damage by ecological destruction.

In many respects, Kumagusu reminds us of another great ecological thinker of the last century, Gregory Bateson (1904–1980). Bateson was also well-versed in different disciplines, such as biology, anthropology, and psychology. He was a Western thinker who was fascinated by the Eastern thought, and similar to Kumagusu, Bateson conceived nature as a cybernetically connected system. Kumagusu was almost 40 years older than Bateson, and they never met each other. If they had, they probably would have started a stimulating conversation, which never happened. However, we can continue this imaginary conversation among ourselves.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Morimichi Kato

Morimichi Kato is a emeritus professor of Tohoku University, Japan and a former professor of Sophia University, Japan. For the past 10 years his research activity is centered on the comparative studies of the Western and Far Eastern philosophy of education and environmental philosophy.