Ox Against the Storm

Tanaka Shozo was a leader in demands for protection of the Japanese environment at the turn of the twentieth century. The author argues that he was, in fact, the world's first conservationist pioneer. The self-educated son of a peasant, pigheaded, emotional, impetuous and politically naive, he was elected to the Diet and established his place in history by waging an extended and costly campaign against the gross pollution of his constituents' food, water, and land by an enormous and important copper mine. This biography - the first on Tanaka Shozo in English - is also the first detailed study of how the letter and spirit of the Japanese constitution of 1889 took root outside the capital. Called in his own time an unrealistic madman for fighting a battle we and the Japanese now take far more seriously, Tanaka Shozo is likened by Kenneth Strong not to the fanatics of history but to such great humanitarians as Mahatma Gandi and Danilo Dolci.