The Micropolitics of Extraction in the Iron Mining Villages of Early Modern Japan

• In Event: “Asiatic Modes” of Extraction: Mining Pasts in China and Japan

Abstract

In global accounts of early modern environmental history, Japan often stands as something of an exception. At a time when other advanced organic societies were accelerating global trade and plundering new resource frontiers, the Tokugawa shogunate (1603-1868) tightly regulated foreign exchange. Japan’s inhabitants had to rely chiefly on domestic resources.

Iron was no exception. During this period of economic growth, the iron for farming implements, tools, and samurai swords came from the archipelago's richest source of iron: not the clumps of ore typically mined elsewhere, but fine particles of iron sand distributed within granite slopes.

This paper explores the small communities that mined these small particles of ore as they intensified their efforts at extraction. Seventeenth-century miners developed increasingly effective methods of extracting iron sand using the power of water. As they adopted the new methods, mountain villagers had to devise new ways of owning and operating mines to accommodate their increasing scale and significance in community life and land use. With their intense and ever-shifting demands on local water supplies, hydraulic mines sparked tension among neighbors, forcing villagers to resolve conflicts and to balance mining and agriculture.

These local dynamics mattered far beyond the mountain hamlets that supplied Japan’s iron. In their pursuit of tiny grains of ore, miners remade mountains and sent so many tons of tailings into the waterways they used for mining that they set off ongoing conflicts with downstream plains regions. And mining, finally, shaped the way mountain communities related to ruling authorities.

Early modern Japanese society was sustained mostly through domestic resources, rather than foreign trade or imperial expansion. But this was not simply a time of stability or "stasis." The extraction of iron sand reveals the local politics—and their far-reaching effects—behind supplying the archipelago with an essential commodity.

Author

• Joanna Linzer, College of the Holy Cross