A Leaky Terrain: Latency and Vertical Territoriality in Post-Mining Japan

Abstract (English)

In the 2011 East Japan Earthquake, a tailing dam in Ashio collapsed, dislodging mining waste into the Watarase River. This event reaffirmed many community members’ worries: the mining pollution, dating back to the Meiji period, has not ended and likely never will. This paper addresses the slow violence in late industrialism and rethinks the role of leaky infrastructure and latency in shaping territorial relations. At the center is a dam constructed in the 1970s, which trapped upstream pollutants and marked a turning point in the spatial and temporal sensing of toxicity. The dam bracketed residue leaking from Ashio’s closed mines and containment facilities as latent rather than active. While communities never assumed absolute safety, their attunement to danger points toward Ashio as a persistent threat, while questions surrounding river water and sediments remain suspended in everyday use. Downstream infrastructures, once part of pollution control, were also recast as ordinary irrigation systems.

These dynamics reconfigured territorial imaginations from an upstream/downstream division to vertical entanglements: life regenerates above, while contamination persists below. Though leaky, this sedimented terrain creates conditions for partial reconciliation. A 1982 environmental map depicted Ashio and downstream villages as co-affected zones rather than opposing sides, aligning with grassroots solidarity expressed in the slogan “Green to Ashio, Clean River to Watarase.” These shifts animated collaborative reforestation efforts to repair mountain-river connectivity. This mid-way encounter, where post-mining revitalization in Ashio meets downstream concerns about flooding and water quality, does not resolve toxicity or corporate impunity. Yet tree planting marks a moment when leakiness and latency is controlled, opening space for partial engagement across the kagai/higai divide, or the split between zones of responsibility and exposure. Actions become possible through imagining environmental futures with the flowing water above sedimented toxicity.