Inner Mongolia’s Magnetic Mountain: Mining Histories of the Prius

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

Abstract

In December 1997, the Toyota Motor Corporation released the Prius, the world’s first mass-produced gasoline-electric hybrid car. The Prius brought the promise of green technology for the automobile industry, making it possible to imagine an eventual future without fossil fuel dependency. Central to Toyota’s move towards clean energy were the neodymium magnets that propelled the electric motors of the Prius. Because of the environmental effects of mining neodymium, however, Toyota has already accrued significant, but indirect ecological costs, in spite of promoting a vision of clean energy. In short, the Prius has shifted the environmental burden from first-world consumers inhaling the smog of their gas-powered cars to third-world producers absorbing the radiation of mining effluent.

This paper troubles the recent history of green technology by tracing its products to their sites of extraction, namely the Bayan Obo Rare Earth Mine in Inner Mongolia. This essay locates the origin of this uneven relationship between Japanese industry and Chinese resources within the Japanese occupation of Inner Mongolia (1937–1945). This resource frontier re-opened in the postwar decades, serving as the foundation of the technological enterprises by former zaibatsu that were so crucial to their country’s economic recovery. As this case study of the Prius shows, the “Japanese miracle” relied as much on these domestic companies, as it did on foreign extraction, with profound effects to lives and livelihoods beyond its borders.

Author

• Sakura Christmas, Bowdoin College