Alumni Interview with David Fedman (Stanford History PhD, 2015)

History alum Prof. David Fedman (Stanford Ph.D. 2015) spoke to the Eurasian Empires Reading Group on May 12, presenting a paper titled "Shadows in the Forest: The Ōji Paper Company and Japan's Pulp Pipeline in Asia." He is Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of the award-winning book Seeds of Control: Japan’s Empire of Forestry in Colonial Korea (University of Washington Press, 2020) and co-editor of Forces of Nature: New Approaches to Korean Environments (Cornell University Press, 2023). A specialist in the environmental history and historical geography of Japanese imperialism, his latest project explores Japan's vibrant print culture through the lens of the Ōji Paper Company, historically one of largest corporate managers of forests across the Asia-Pacific.

How did you get interested in the field of East Asian History?

My interest in history came first, and I attribute it mainly to my father. Growing up in Virginia I was surrounded by history. My dad made sure I understood that fact. He took me to Civil War battlefields at every opportunity and even brought me as a teenager to the Library of Congress to look at documents on a few occasions.

My fascination with East Asia came later, when I had a chance to go on a tour of Japan with my highschool orchestra. If not for that trip, there’s no way I’d be doing what I’m doing now. I returned from that tour totally enamored with Japan, and set out to study the language. It was only in college that I realized I could fuse these two interests, and that’s just what I did.

Your award-winning book, Seeds of Control: Japan’s Empire of Forestry in Colonial Korea (University of Washington Press, 2020), is based on your Stanford History dissertation. Tell us about how you decide to focus on this topic and the book’s main arguments.

Another love of mine is mountaineering. I try to get into the mountains whenever and wherever I can. It wasn’t long after traveling to Japan in highschool that I started exploring its incredible mountain ranges. After college I had a chance as a Fulbright Fellow to spend a year researching Japan’s mountaineering history, and it was in that context that I encountered a steady stream of commentary from Japanese friends and colleagues about their country’s unique traditions of forest conservation. This struck me as being fundamentally at odds with what I was then reading about corporate Japan’s role in the deforestation of Southeast Asia. Entering graduate school, I knew I wanted to write something about Japanese environmental history. I knew further that there was probably an interesting story to be told about forestry in Japan’s empire. My advisors in the department – Jun Uchida, Karen Wigen, Yumi Moon, and Richard White – pushed me to dig into this intersection of interests, which led me naturally to the Korean peninsula. That became the main site of my research into the environmental history and legacies of Japan’s imperial expansion – a project I continue to pursue into the present day.

You presented your current project, “Dai-Ōji: The Ōji Paper Company and the Politics of Pulp in Asia,” at Eurasian Empires Workshop. Could you share with us the main focus of the project?

This project is a spin-off from my first book. Over the course of that research I became fascinated with a corporation I saw everywhere in the archive: the Ōji Paper Company, historically one of the largest corporate consumers of Asia’s forests. This new project examines the growth of Ōji as a lens into the tangled histories of green imperialism and green capitalism in Asia. It maps the evolution of this corporation and its forest politics to call greater attention to the material underpinnings of Japan’s vibrant print and paper culture.

You have a very prolific academic, writing at the intersection of history, environmental studies, and area studies. You also contributed to many public forums, co-produced a documentary about fire-bombing of Tokyo, and co-led a bilingual digital archive with geographer Cary Karacas. What are some key advantages or challenges of such research across academic disciplines and forms for such audiences? What would you advise those who are interested in building such a diverse portfolio? Where should they start from? What should they engage with?

I love collaborative research. For one thing, it forces you to write for a broader audience of scholars. This means you often have to keep jargon in check and convey your ideas in an accessible way. It also presents all sorts of opportunities for cross-pollinating ideas. Most of my work with Cary Karacas, for example, is geared toward taking theories about urban resilience and construction long developed by geographers and grounding them deeply in the archive of urban Japan’s wartime destruction. We’ve very purposefully blended methods here, and I think the end-result is something unique.

I suppose my main word of advice is to not hesitate to sow seeds of opportunity and collaboration. This work on the destruction of urban Japan – now yielding a book, a digital archive, and a documentary film – all started because I sent Cary Karacas an email with a question about a map I found at Stanford. That email exchange became an essay, and that essay a collaboration that continues fifteen years later. If you have a question and there’s a scholar out there who can probably answer it, why not reach out?

Do you have a favorite archive or library?

I’ll one up you. Not only do I have a favorite archive, I have a favorite record group: RG331, the “Records of Allied Operational and Occupation Headquarters, World War II,” the archive generated by the US Occupation of postwar Japan. I’ve spent weeks combing through it at the National Archives in College, Park, MD, and I’d happily spend many more.

What texts inspired you the most in your career?

The works-in-progress of my fellow travelers through Stanford’s history PhD program. I learned so much from other students during my time workshopping drafts at Stanford – not just how to write, but also how to give and take constructive criticism. The faculty were of course great, but there was something truly inspirational about working through these issues in real time with my peers. They modeled for me what it means to be an intellectually generous and academically rigorous colleague – a career lesson, for sure.

What are some key things you remember from your time at Stanford?

I remember the unflagging support of my mentors. I remember bonding tightly with my cohort in Keith Baker’s year-one Approaches to History course. I remember spending lots of time poking around the map collection at the Branner Earth Sciences Library, turning up all sorts of cartographic goodies that ended up being quite central to the questions I explored during my time there.

What advice do you have for undergraduate students who may be contemplating taking classes or majoring in History?

Find an archive (broadly defined) that excites you and immerse yourself in it. Primary sources are so much fun to work with, and I make a point of putting them front and center in my own teaching. My sense is that once students get a true taste of the joy that comes from finding cool stuff in the archive, there’s no turning back.