URI_Research_Magazine_Momentum_Winter_2015_Melissa-McCarthy

He later studied U.S. history at Stanford University and fulfilled his language requirement by taking Japanese. “I decided to take Japanese to see how much I could remember from when I had lived in Japan from second through fifth grade of elementary school,” he says. “I had forgotten many vocabulary words, but retained my pronunciation and a sense for Japanese grammar.” George’s pursuit of the language prompted him to find his way back to Japan. He eventually worked with Volunteers in Asia, spending six months during his junior year of college teaching English in Japan. That service learning experience led George to enroll in courses in Japanese history, a move that would shape his travels and future studies. As a Ph.D. student at Harvard University, George received a Fulbright grant and spent two years in Japan researching Minamata disease. The neurological syndrome was first reported in 1956 and the name stems from a mercury poisoning incident in Minamata city, Japan. In Minamata George met the photographer Akutagawa Jin, who has published books of photographs of both Minamata and Toroku, and was active in the citizens group supporting the Toroku victims.

Toroku, Japan | Timothy S. George

“The pattern was similar to that in other pollution cases in Japan, including Minamata,” notes George. “Because the period of activism, mostly in the 1970s, is so similar to what I and others have written about in the well-known pollution incidents, I focus in my Toroku study on what came before and after.”

However, George says he did not learn much about Toroku until he was seeking a new subject to research for a 2008 conference in Montana, the first large academic conference in North America on Japan’s environmental history. He received grants from the Association for Asian Studies, URI’s Council for Research, URI’s Center for the Humanities, and the URI Foundation, and went to Toroku and other sites in Japan to study the history.

Environment Weaves Common Thread

George says he first attempts a longue durée, or long-term, environmental history of Toroku, from Neolithic times to the 20th century. Then, he looks at how the support group, instead of fading away after the 1990 settlement, morphed into the Asia Arsenic Network, applying its knowledge and expertise to the arsenic poisoning mainly in Bangladesh. “The points I make include, first, the idea that because human bodies are part of the environment, by poisoning the environment we are poisoning ourselves; and second, the idea that there is no such thing as a history of just one little place because the environment ties every place to the broader world in many surprising ways,” explains George. To reconstruct Toroku’s story, George traveled to the region, conducted interviews and took photographs. He

Map of Toroku, Japan mining operations at their peak before World War II, drawn from memory by a resident.

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