The Two Yawatas: The Modern Afterlives of Japan’s Early Modern Iron Industry

Beginning in the late nineteenth century, Japan burst onto the world stage as the first society outside the West to undergo a modern industrial revolution. What role did earlier developments play in this striking take-off? This talk delves into this enduring question of Japanese history through the lens of iron: a material as fundamental to modern trains and artillery as it was to earlier farming tools and samurai swords. Before the Meiji Restoration of 1868, distinctive methods of ironmaking flourished in the mountains of Japan’s southwestern region of Chūgoku, with distinctive forms of labor, technology, and environmental effects. After the Meiji Restoration, Japan’s ironmakers struggled to find a place in a world dominated by European and American ironmakers who relied on different materials, different geographies, and different forms of technology. Yet, surprisingly, local pathways of ironmaking maintained significance deep into the twentieth century. This talk explores two places, both called “Yawata,” to examine how and why homegrown modes of ironmaking persisted alongside modern mass production, and what this can tell us about continuity and discontinuity in the history of Japan. (Image: Governmental Yawata Iron & Steel Works from the book "Showa History of 100 million people Vol.14" published by Mainichi Newspapers Company.)

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About the speaker:

Joanna Linzer is an Assistant Professor in history at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. An environmental historian with a focus on Japan, she received her Ph.D. in history from Yale University in 2021 and was a 2021-2023 Environmental Fellow at the Harvard University Center for the Environment. Her book manuscript, Iron Archipelago: Environment and Industry in Early Modern and Modern Japan, places industrial activity at the heart of Japan’s early modern economy, arguing that political negotiations over industry's environmental impacts have a deeper and more global history than commonly acknowledged. In 17th-19th-century Japan, conflicts and compromises over the dramatic environmental effects of iron mining were part and parcel of a society that has been prominently cast as a sustainable exception in an increasingly destructive early modern world. The unequal social burden of pollution from Japan’s iron mines during this period featured in an article in Environmental History. Linzer’s other research interests include Japan's pivotal role in the silver trade that linked the world during the early modern "first global age" and the modern history of renewable energy in Japan.