URI_Research_Magazine_Momentum_Winter_2015_Melissa-McCarthy

Bangladesh: District water officer testing well water for arsenic; water samples collected for testing by the Asia Arsenic Network; old mine entrance. | Timothy S. George

aggressive colonizer itself, until its disastrous invasions in Asia and the Pacific ended in its defeat in 1945. “Japan then transformed itself into a vibrant and very pacifist democracy, and expanded its economy spectacularly,” George says. “In the process it polluted itself terribly. In 1968, its economy became the third largest in the world, and virtually all of that production was condensed into the small part of its area—less than 20 percent of Japan, a country that in total is about the size of California—that is not steep mountains.” George points out that Japan also is exceptionally safe, and has a literacy rate and life expectancy among the highest in the world. “After having been the country that showed many other developed countries the sorts of problems they might also face with urban crowding and with pollution,” says George, “it has, in recent decades, been showing us the sorts of challenges we might face with an aging population and a stagnant economy.”

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Timothy S. George , professor and chair of history

says he, “often simply spent a great deal of time walking the land, ‘getting to know it with my feet,’ according to a saying in Japanese.” Most of the individuals affected by the Toroku arsenic poisoning have since passed away, making interviews of residents conducted in the early 1970s, oral histories, and other documents key primary sources for his research. In 2008, George published a chapter titled, “Toroku: Mountain Dreams, Chemical Nightmares,” in a collection of essays, Japan at Nature’s Edge: The Environmental Context of a Global Power . He was awarded a second Fulbright grant in 2012 to continue his research on the arsenic incident in Toroku and its aftermath, and is currently working on a book based on his research in Japan and Bangladesh. Explaining why he is drawn to Japan, George says he sees larger lessons to be learned in Japan’s history. The first non-Western country to industrialize, and the first to have a constitution and a modern governmental system, Japan successfully avoided colonization and then became an

Irrigation ditch dug in the mid-19th century to supply water for rice paddies in Toroku; the water was polluted after arsenic mining began in 1920. | Timothy S. George

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