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power to the natural features of the landscape (Eisenstadt 1995:190). To this was
added the fertile legacy of Buddhism, with its idea—central in Japanese traditions—
of the immanence of the transcendental in the mundane world, a vision of
Buddhahood within the objects of everyday surroundings. Confucianism was a later
but still distinctive influence on Japanese social consciousness, with its emphasis on
personal improvement and the amelioration of the environment through respectful
exploitation and careful stewardship. As a result of Western intervention after the
fall of the shogunal regime in 1868, however, it has been argued that a new, more
damaging, less respectful approach to development was introduced in Japan. While
there is a certain inevitability to this interpretational construct, it presents several
dangers, of which the most obvious is a tendency to ascribe all manifestations of
environmental degradation to the modern wave of Western influence, neglecting
thereby the radical transformations of the environment effected at various stages of
Japan's history (Totman 1989).
The contours of the Japanese relationship with nature and the environment bear
a number of features that distinguish it from Western traditions of thought. First
among these is a lack of abstract ideals. Without abstract ideals, the Japanese
ontological world is free of the opposed dualities of moral absolutes. This is not to
say that it lacks all dualities. Japanese life is infused with a basic hemispheric duality
of purity and impurity, expressed in terms of harmony and chaos, of ritual
cleanliness and defilement, of beauty and deformity, to which can be added other
and cognate dualities, of inside and outside, of inner feelings and outer posture.
This dual conceptual landscape is reflected in the natural world (Kalland 1995:95).
On the one hand, we find a tamed and idealised nature, seen in the carefully
cosseted symbolic landscapes of gardens and the minutely crafted and regulated
landscape of the paddy fields of narrow valley floors and the densely populated flood
plains. On the other hand, there is a wild and original nature, found not only in the
forested mountain slopes whose crenellated contours line the valleys and ring the
plains but also in symbolised miniature in the thick growth of trees around country
shrines to the gods. But these are opposite ends of a spectrum within which we live,
not dichotomous dualities between abstract ideal and physical substance.
A second feature of the Japanese (and indeed the broader Asian) ontological
landscape is the overriding importance of context, what Eisenstadt (1995:190) refers
to as 'an emphasis on relational and indexical criteria (as against abstract, linear ones
rooted in principles transcending existing reality)'. 'This contextualism', write
Bruun and Kalland (1995:11),
frequently applies to the concept of morality. Nature and morality are closely
linked in many Asian cultures, man [sic] and environment forming a moral
unity. Yet, as there is no absolute good or evil, there is no absolute morality,
at least not for commoners. Thus, people's moral obligations towards nature
are contextual.
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