Shōzō Tanaka (田中 正造, Tanaka Shōzō; 15 December 1841 – 4 September 1913) was a Japanese politician and social activist, and is considered to be Japan's first conservationist. Tanaka was politically active in the Meiji Restoration and leader in the Freedom and Popular Rights Movement. In Japan's first general election of 1890, he was elected to the House of Representatives as a member of the Rikken Kaishintō, a liberal political party. He is most well known for his advocacy of rural residents around the Watarase River whose health and livelihoods were negatively affected by pollution from the Ashio Copper Mine in the 1880s. Tanaka also contributed to philosophical thought on nature in the early Meiji era.
Early life Tanaka was born in the Watarase River Basin. He was raised by his father, the headman of Konaka Village and principal of the Jōrenji Temple school in present-day Sano, Tochigi. Tanaka struggled with reading and writing in school, however, he excelled in aural memorization. For example he had the Confucian Analects and Mencius committed to memory. He was an apt farmer and engaged in some entrepreneurial farming projects during his youth. His community came to know Tanaka for his steadfast sense of judgement and responsibility. In 1857, Tanaka's father was promoted to superintendent of the eight villages that made up the domain. Even at the age of 17, Tanaka's village was happy to elect him as headman in his father's place, where he served for twelve years.
Political activism Tanaka participated in the Freedom and Popular Rights Movement through his position as headman in the village of Kanaka. The end of the Tokugawa era saw major changes r extensions in Japanese economic system, a national market, domestic trade, and the commercialization of agriculture. Such changes created a more stratified lower class, with village elites (Gono). As a headman, Tanaka rose up and challenged the system made up of shogun government controlling the domain which encompassed his village. One of the only ways of doing this was through petition, which, Tanaka dedicated himself to at the risk of his own life. In 1890, Gono took over local prefectural assemblies. These assemblies pushed against the oligarchical government and made demands on behalf of the peasant class they represented. The government halfway relented to these demands; however, it came at the expense of the Freedom and Popular Rights Movement. Although it took 10 years, successes of the prefectural assemblies eventually included a constitution from the emperor and an elected body. In May 1868, Tanaka was imprisoned for challenging a higher-ranking official. Tanaka submitted a petition which called for the official’s arrest for the embezzlement of government money. In prison, Tanaka was tortured. He was forced to maintain to stress positions for extensive periods of time and survived for 30 days by licking a stick of dried bonito. Tanaka was convicted of, "...disturbing the peace of the Fief, betraying the trust of his position (as Headman of Kanaka), plotting in a nefarious manner and submitting presumptuous petitions...". He was released from prison in 1869. After being released from prison, Tanaka taught in a small shrine. He studied with Oda Takizaburō in Tokyo before leaving for Iwate Prefecture. In 1870, Tanaka was arrested in relation to the murder of a man named Kimura. A biography about Tanaka Shozo, Ox Against the Storm by Kenneth Strong, contends that the blame shifted upon Tanaka was wrongful and likely due to his isolated position as an "...ex-peasant, with no samurai connections to protect him..." Kimura's son was eventually cross-examined and asserted that he had seen the killer before he left and that it could not have been Tanaka. He was placed in Iwate prison where he studied Jean Jacques Rousseau’s (1712–78) Du Contrat Social (1762) and Samuel Smiles’s (1812–1904) Self-Help (1859). He was released in April 1874. In 1879, he founded the Tochigi Shimbun (or Tochigi News), a periodical in which he discussed human rights and contemporary issues. Tanaka became a member of the Tochigi Prefectural Assembly in 1880, and served as its Chairman in 1886. In the General Election of 1890, the first ever held in Japan, Tanaka was elected to the House of Representatives as a member of the Rikken Kaishintō, a liberal political party. In 1902, Tanaka engaged in a political battle against the second Pollution Prevention Committee, which was an attempt to shift the blame of contamination from the Ashio Copper Mine incident to the movement of the river, "...they had concluded that only amounts of soluble copper were still reaching the rivers from the mine, committee held that the cause of current suffering was not mining, but flooding that agitated the polluted mud, allowing the embedded insoluble copper to escape and cause damage." The second Pollution Prevention Committee adopted a zero tolerance policy on flooding, asserting that the Watarase and Tone Valleys, historically Japan's most fertile agriculture zones, were ill suited to agriculture and required massive reengineering to make the river system flood-proof. This schema nationalized rivers and required a village called Yanaka to be demolished to make way for a flood control reservoir. Tanaka moved to Yanaka and protested these measures. He did so through a philosophical discourse portending the ineffectuality and hostility of such measures. See philosophy section for more. This was Tanaka's final political campaign before death.
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