SEMINAR: Asian Studies Seminar Series

During the last twenty years, over one hundred citizen’s voluntary organisations have travelled back and forth from Japan to desertifying areas in Northern China to plant trees. The arrival of these groups in Northern China in the 1990s coincided with increased international engagement by Japanese citizens’ organisations, and by the proliferation of organizations specifically dedicated to addressing global environmental problems. Japanese observers have claimed that environmental good-works such as ryokuka katsudo (literally, ‘greenification activities’) by Japanese citizens in China can have a softening influence on Japan-China relations, in addition to their positive environmental impact. To better understand the above claim, between April and June 2013 I participated in ryokuka katsudo with three Japanese non-profit groups (in Shanxi province and Inner Mongolia) and interviewed leaders and participants from Japanese environmental (mostly ryokuka) citizens organisations responding to China’s desertification, Sino-Japanese civil society experts in Tokyo, and officials from the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) based in Beijing. In this presentation I will draw on material from these interviews as well as my book- and internet-based research to distinguish ‘transnational’ and ‘national’ aspects of Japanese environmental outreach in China (outlining the problems and achievements of Japanese citizen’s environmental groups there in terms of these two general categories), in order to help to both explain and question its potential role in Japan-China relations.