In 1965 Japanese, Korean, and American physiologists organized a symposium, titled Physiology of Breath-Hold Diving and the Ama of Japan, which investigated Japanese and Korean free-diving fisherwomen who miraculously displayed “human responses at the very margin of tolerance limits.”Footnote 1 Around the same time the International Biological Program (1964–1974) was organizing research around human adaptability, with the express purpose of improving humanity’s survivability in the face of postwar urbanization, de-peasantization, and the impending climate catastrophe. In these studies, physiologists Yoshimura Hisato and Joseph Weiner centered the seawomen as one example of how traditional communities were best positioned to weather these extremes. Nearly fifty years later, Anne McDonald, an advisor to the Japanese government, presented a paper on “the resilience of [the ama’s] traditional knowledge and its applicability to help them adapt to a changing marine environment” at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2011 workshop titled “Indigenous Peoples, Marginalized Populations and Climate Change: Vulnerability, Adaptation and Traditional Knowledge.” She argues that “how the ama-san have managed to maintain their customs and distinct sense of cultural identity amidst the waves of Westernization, modernization and technological advancement that have swept through mainstream Japan may be key when considering adaptive capacity potentials not only for the ama-san, but other indigenous or marginalized communities elsewhere living with climate change.”Footnote 2
As a result of anxieties over the degrading effects of global industrialization, scientists and thinkers have continually found in seawomen and their communities a potential model for sustainable development predicated on the concept of adaptation-resilience, or tekiō in Japanese. The labor practices of “primitive” groups such as the divers were seen as a repository of the values and abilities that researchers believed would enable humans to adapt to crises and stressful environments. This primitive ability to adapt, they argued, had been lost underneath modernization, putting humanity in existential danger.
The fisherwomen, whom the studies refer to by the Japanese word ama (sea woman) but also include the Korean haenyeo, were commonly made to dive using the absolute bare minimum of technologies—for instance, with goggles, in cotton dress, or in the nude—to sustain the thin margins of important export economies in seafood industries. This austere practice resulted in the “miraculous adaptation” that allowed for the divers to bear extreme forms of cold and pressure stress. Such minimally invasive techniques appealed to scientists and policymakers who were searching for sustainable and low-cost alternatives to established development paradigms. For instance, policymakers saw indigenous adaptations at local scales as potential (in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s words) “low-cost” technologies that might be scaled up so that populations could utilize these extreme tolerances to prepare themselves for a burning world. In addition, scientists also saw these adaptations as useful for everything from the military industry and space travel to extreme work environments like deep-ocean mining.
This thinking reflects the adaptation-resilience model of development policy and its attendant discourses of “security, risk management, and resilient social systems.”Footnote 3 As Michael Watts argues, peasant communities in the global South in particular have become a “testing ground” for the adaptation-resiliency idea, which relies on “an unleashing” of a community’s “self-organizing potential by welding together indigenous capabilities and knowledge with the powers of the self-organizing market.”Footnote 4 Many scholars have chosen to analyze adaptation-resiliency through the lens of neoliberal governmentality, which views resiliency as “responsibilization,” a necessary corollary to austerity policies.Footnote 5 Resilience theory of this type “shifts responsibility onto individuals and communities” to manage threats through “reflexive self-governance.”Footnote 6 As Pat O’Malley argues, resilient subjects are not only expected to withstand shocks to the system and effectively “bounce back.” They are also expected to “thrive” in that state of “chaos” and develop a “stress hardiness.”Footnote 7
However, as Alison Howell argues, the tendency to treat resiliency as merely a propaganda tool for neoliberal austerity fails to take governance and resiliency itself seriously. Rather, she sees resiliency as “enhancement” or “bouncing forward,” a far more ambitious project than responsibilization.Footnote 8 From this perspective, resiliency becomes a positive project of the state rather than a negative consequence of austerity. To put it another way, it is a development scheme that seeks to maximize human resources at the lowest cost possible, a much more invasive form of governmentality than simply the hollowing out of government functionality.
Not seeing resilience simply as a product of neoliberal austerity enables us to see resilience in other ideological contexts. While dominantly framed as neoliberal in the literature, as Nicholas Michelsen and Pablo De Orellana show, resiliency discourse can just as easily be the product of reactionary right-wing ideologies.Footnote 9 In these cases, resilience theory views modernity and technology as aggravators of the stable localness of the self-governing community, which must in turn beat back these attacks through tradition and custom. This rejection of modernity and technology, I argue, creates a different form of absolute austerity under which maximization of human and natural resources at low-cost becomes a necessary component for the reproduction of society. In turn, this requires not only the total mobilization of these resources under the aegis of the state, but the scaling-up of those resources, which are governed self-reflexively by communities through “enhancement” in service of the state. If we think of resilience as emerging from an anxiety over unknowable threats and a generalized disbelief in the ability of the current system—seen itself as a generator of those threats—to overcome them, then we can view it as a technology of reaction emerging in times of perceived existential crisis.
Though the literature overwhelmingly frames adaptation-resilience as a postwar phenomenon with a Euro-American genealogy, adaptation-resilience as a development goal rose to prominence during Japan’s interwar era.Footnote 10 While recognizing the contingent nature of the emergence and utilization of these ideas across time and space, this essay will illustrate how adaptation discourse in Japan developed as a reactionary technology of “development without development” to counter anxieties over spiritual degradation and industrialization’s transgression of natural limits. Adaptation provided a potential solution to prewar Japan’s “insoluble” problem, which, using Barrington Moore’s language, was to “modernize without changing their social structures.”Footnote 11 In this vein, prewar thinkers sought to optimize exploitation or, to put it another way, to make the most out of less. Proponents of adaptation in labor science praised the authenticity of labor-intensive and locally rooted labor, centering the community-in-nature as both a regulating body and a site for the production of adaptive traits. The ethic of responsibilization that they drew on was not the result of a neoliberal shift but rather was rooted in communal notions of disciplined austerity and self-responsibility (jikosekinin).Footnote 12 Mapping their ideas onto a historical narrative of Japanese local diversity, they sought to harness and scale up this communal adaptive function to bolster the economic, military, and imperial objectives of the state.
Though this discourse arose from fascist concerns, it continued to have an active afterlife even after the downfall of the prewar regime. The renewed interest in adaptation-resilience as a development solution in the postwar allowed for the reintroduction and proliferation of prewar Japanese research within international scientific organizations. Indeed, not only was the Physiology symposium of 1965 held in honor of Teruoka Gitō—a prominent prewar labor scientist whom the organizers regarded as the first to investigate the ama’s physiological miracle—but the International Biological Program’s Yoshimura was also a prominent participant in social hygiene and militarized adaptation science in Japan’s colonies. Such prewar thinkers became major influences in the development of adaptation-resilience globally, informing research programs in science, economics, and demography. These ideas continue to permeate contemporary development strategies designed to help humanity cultivate the capacities necessary to survive emerging crises like climate change. By tracing studies of the seawomen’s adaptation to extreme environments and the long history of their perceived utility to medicine, labor science, and the military from Japan’s fascist period into the global postwar era, this article shows how adaptation-resilience emerged as a technology of reactionary austerity that imposed continual self-exploitation on the most vulnerable.
From the Factory Girl Problem to the Diving Woman Problem
Adaptation-resilience gained traction in Japan as a reaction to what thinkers perceived as imported social ills caused by the sudden introduction of modern industry into a largely peasant society. In response, a dichotomy was introduced between “modern” laborers and the laborer-in-nature, represented by the ama and haenyeo, to highlight the unnaturalness of modern labor. The rural fishing village was viewed as a repository of traditional labor practices and values adapted over centuries that could provide the antidote to the deteriorating effects of capitalist industry. For its economic growth and independence from foreign powers, Japan was reliant on the textile industries and the young rural women and children who worked them.Footnote 13 The terrible working conditions inspired a steady stream of criticism from health professionals, contemporary journalists, and social activists. Ishihara Osamu’s famous medical studies on the workers exposed the “slow and indirect” murder of the girls through their overwork in an unsanitary environment under “slave-like” conditions.Footnote 14 Based on Ishihara’s studies, Kawakami Hajime’s Bimbō monogatari (A Tale of Poverty), published as a series of articles in the Osaka Asahi newspaper from September to December 1916, inspired public outcry that forced the government’s hand in enacting the Factory Acts in 1916.Footnote 15
Though these acts contained important reforms, the government recognized that most small and medium sized companies did not have the resources nor the desire to implement such improvements, leading to legislative loopholes. For instance, though the acts encouraged companies to restrict their workers’ daily labor to twelve hours, some companies made their laborers work as many as eighteen. Protest also came from the large companies: Shimotsuke Spinning’s Masahiro Tamura argued that, since Japan’s global economic power was smaller than the “second and third ranks of Europe,” workers should make “much sacrifice” even if that meant continuing to work the night shift.Footnote 16
Nevertheless, companies like Kurashiki Cotton Spinning (Kurabō) voluntarily implemented internal reforms to help improve working conditions. The owner of Kurabō, Ōhara Magosaburō, adopted the paternalist welfare program created by the Belgian industrialist Ernest Solvay with the aim of repairing the social contradictions that plagued Japan.Footnote 17 Ōhara sought to dampen the specter of social revolution by turning the company into a corporate-being, in which management and workers would each contribute to each other’s well-being.Footnote 18 In 1920 he created the Ōhara Institute for the Science of Labor to research the women’s labor issue, enlisting the physiologist Teruoka Gitō to direct the institute.Footnote 19 United with Ōhara by their reformism, Teruoka actively barred researchers who advocated for revolutionary means from joining the institute. While Teruoka himself was influenced by Marx’s critique of value, as a dedicated Buddhist he criticized Marx’s purely “materialist” worldview for not rooting its critique of capitalism in spiritualism. To reconcile this, Teruoka turned toward Christian socialist thought, which put forth a reading of Marx’s theory of value that “would not contradict religious morals.”Footnote 20 Indeed, it was the Ōhara Institute’s house journal, the Journal of the Ōhara Institute for Social Research, in which debates on Marx’s theory of value took place among economists like Kawakami and Kushida Tamizō, whom Teruoka credits with introducing him to a religious-friendly Marxism that he incorporated into the development of his own ideas on industrial science.Footnote 21 This Christian socialism regarded the worker’s situation under capitalism as one of pure victimhood, interpreting Marx’s theory of alienation through a moralist lens. Teruoka’s rejection of the material Marx meant that he also rejected the ultimate sublation of the capitalist-proletariat relation into communism, leading him to embrace an oppositional view of labor that sought to rescue “natural” human labor-in-nature from the “artificial” conditions of mechanized industry.
Teruoka thought society would destroy itself by putting the well-being of working women aside for profit: “the society which countenances it is guilty of a moral crime the consequences of which cannot fail ultimately to destroy it.”Footnote 22 Japan’s problems—low wages, poor working and living conditions, the rampant spread of diseases, the decline in fertility, and an increase in the infant mortality rate—could all be blamed on the “dominance of the utilitarian worldview that accompanied the global conquest of capitalist industry.”Footnote 23 Teruoka’s Kushida-derived “corruption narrative,” centered on moral failings, was in stark opposition to Kushida’s Marxist opponents, the Kōza-ha, or Lecture Faction. For them, it was the preservation of semi-feudal remnants in the countryside underneath an authoritarian military state that was the origin of Japan’s developmental issues.Footnote 24 To counter these problems, the Kōza-ha proposed structural economic reform centered on democratization and nation-wide land reform. Teruoka and his colleagues valued a personal internal revolution over a generalized social revolution and emphasized reformism and maintaining stability above all. Therefore, Teruoka was skeptical about infusing politics into matters of economic development; he stated that, “It is not the place of science to question the purpose of the development of industry thus far,” because “these questions are beyond the knowledge of humans.”Footnote 25 His moralism led him to believe that the roles of science and business were merely to regulate the degree of corruption through an apolitical program of scientific rationalism attuned to human spirit.Footnote 26
In order to compete globally, he opined, Japanese workers had been “forced” into working in industrial and military production against their will, their health and well-being an afterthought to making Japan into a competitive capitalist country.Footnote 27 In exploiting the “natural” industriousness of the labor-intensive workforce, supplemented by the artificial labor from imported machinery, he said, industrialists pushed the pace and intensity of this labor to its breaking point, wearing out the bodies and minds of the workers in the process. Of even greater concern was the rapidly changing composition of the labor force. Teruoka writes: “In 1920, 52% of the population was engaged in agriculture but in 1930 the number decreased to 48%. The characteristic trend of our working population is that, despite rapid commercialization and industrialization, agriculture exists just as before. Indeed, the peasant disposition of our nation’s population holds important significance in national life.”Footnote 28
While this may seem on its face like a simple statement of demographic fact, it encapsulated Teruoka’s unease with industrial capitalism as it was developing into its newest stage, one that would accelerate the decline of Japan’s peasant backbone and bring about the total industrialization of national life. The value of labor, Teruoka argued, was degraded by machinery, which effaced its “humanness” and turned the workers into mere slaves. In contrast, rural communities played an important function in insulating people from the equilibrium-destroying changes of industrial capitalism. By preserving the rural community, capitalism could enter society in a more gradual and less destructive manner, allowing people to keep their local customs and health (products of local adaptations) intact, and defraying the need for the state to intervene through welfare policy. Should Japan cease to attune itself to the rural—as it always had—would its population be adequately prepared to meet the needs of industrial production and lifestyles? From this position, Teruoka advocated in 1927 for a move away from industrial and social policies informed by economics or sociology to a “biology-based social and industrial policy” rooted in social hygiene.Footnote 29
Within this broader context, the seawomen as an object of research emerged as a useful contrast to the factory girl problem. While the Physiology symposium had credited Teruoka as the first to study the seawomen, others, driven by similar concerns, had already done so. In 1917 Itami Banri, a Kyoto University student, went to Mie prefecture and Jeju Island to conduct the first consolidated study of female divers, though he restricted his study to only Japanese women. From 1920 to 1922, Mie Prefecture’s police department hygiene division conducted a series of detailed health surveys of the women and their communities in Shima. In both of these works, concern over the factory girl problem blinded the authors to the ama’s unique distress.
In the introduction to the 1917 study, Itami stated that the study was designed as a response to the women’s labor problem, which had become a major social issue, and that Shima was chosen precisely because it was, at the time, a rare case where the majority of skin divers were female.Footnote 30 Itami took issue with the discourse’s tendency to reduce the women’s labor problem to an economic issue. Rather, he argued the issue was both an economic problem and a social one and insisted that researchers were wrongly attempting to apply Western opinions and approaches to labor issues that were particularly Japanese. However, Itami’s study merely set up his subjects as contrastive nostalgia for what was and could have been—a Japanese alternative of women’s labor unsullied by the forces of the West.
Even in a section of the study dedicated to the health consequences of diving work, Itami was more interested in valorizing their labor to prove the unnaturalness of factory work. Here he asked a series of questions: “Is it not dangerous work? Is it not extreme? Does it not influence their reproductive health?”Footnote 31 While he recounted uncomfortable details about their labor—for instance, that the ama dive throughout pregnancy and even give birth during work, returning to dive right after—he excused these by claiming that the women did not show or express discomfort. Unlike the factory girls—whose reproduction was dependent on company care and whose work environment could only improve through state and corporate regulation—the “self-sufficient diving women,” embedded as they were in both their natural community and the natural environment, had their reproduction regulated to correspond to healthy limits. The customs of the village and her “hereditary industriousness,” reminiscent of Darwin’s claim that a habit of self-restraint could be transmitted from generation to generation, meant that, while ama labor was grueling, because their work is volitional, “autonomous,” and therefore natural, it could not be harmful. In his conclusion, Itami asserted that skin diving is “appropriate female labor” and encouraged its promotion in other fishing villages.Footnote 32
Likewise, the Mie police department survey reflects a concern with the natural environment of the community, pointing out that although ama sometimes consume as few as 1,400 calories a day—far less than the average agricultural villager—they were able to maintain their health despite strenuous labor.Footnote 33 Their mental stress was also kept in check, the department explained, due to the protective insularity of the village. Thanks to the lack of transportation infrastructure and the fact that its members’ consumption needs could be met through the village’s subsistence activities, modern life, which they referred to as “the menace of lifestyle maintenance,” was kept at bay.Footnote 34
For both Itami and the Mie police, the absence of state and consumer services that would corrode self-responsibility was key to the women’s thriving.Footnote 35 Because skin diving is conducted within nature and the traditional community, and the workers have their needs met outside of the market, it became a model for reformers looking to find a “third way” to resolve the factory girl problem. As we will see, the idea of the seawomen being at once inside of capitalism but not subject to its tendency toward dissolution within primitive accumulation was what made them most appealing to researchers in both the pre- and postwar periods. But how exactly was ama labor supposed to remedy the problem? For that, we need to understand Teruoka’s concept of the “will to work” as a theory of adaptation-resilience.
Resilience as the “Will to Work”
What made capitalism so destructive in Teruoka’s telling was its imposition on a society at odds with and unprepared to handle it:
The world now looks on with amazement at the great advances our people have made in development … the transformation from the former peasant way of life to a new industrial way of living, the transition from the civilization the people have come to be accustomed to over a long period of time to a different species of civilization—these have not been accomplished easily. In the course of such radical transformation in the ways of life of a people, great difficulties must usually be overcome and the ability of the people to adapt to the new situation must be developed.Footnote 36
The “different species of civilization” was embodied by the machine and the urban factory environment, imported as they were from foreign countries, and unsuitable to local conditions. Teruoka’s criticism of machine production was based on the technology itself and its alienating effect on the physiology and psychology of the worker, which forced the worker to “mimic” an unnatural way of working. His view was that, in these factories, the laborer was forced to adjust their movement to fit the pace and function of the machine, reducing the laborer to a mere appendage of the machine.Footnote 37 In the process, humans become ill, weak, quick to tire, and were robbed of the chance to develop their human capacities. “Thus,” Teruoka believed, “human machines are created, the development of their creative capacity is blocked, and the opportunity to inspire a positive will to work is abandoned as the era of an extreme mechanization of human work progresses.”Footnote 38 Along with the machine, the “unnatural and artificial environment” of the factories, Teruoka thought, had a polluting effect on the “lovely, pure and innocent, and fresh-skinned” young female migrants from the mountain villages who disguise their poor health “under the guise of thick makeup.”Footnote 39 Not only did Teruoka see the individual metabolisms of the bodies of these workers as becoming “horribly unbalanced” after being exposed to the factory, these “unhealthy metabolisms” corrupted the health of the nation and the Japanese race: “Healthy things are replaced by unhealthy things…. Thus, society’s health, the health of the race, continues its degradation…. This is precisely what the world knows is industrialism’s evil.”Footnote 40
The solution to this was not in a regressive plan to destroy the machine and return Japan to preindustrial times, but to harmonize industrial development to traditional industry through the development of the “positive will to work.” That Teruoka’s solution did not seek to return to an agrarian past but to instead utilize the characteristics of the agrarian village for new purposes made it distinct from agrarianism. It was an attempt to transpose the essence of the past onto the future to overcome, through adaptation, the destabilizing effects of mechanization and Westernization. Teruoka’s idea of adaptation—translated as tekiō in Japanese from the German Anpassungsfähigkeit, meaning adaptation, flexibility, or resilience—was an outgrowth of his adherence to the gradualism of the German Historical School and his sense of historical time as an ebb-and-flow from equilibrium to external shock back to an equilibrium again. Teruoka’s conceptualization was in line with Thomas Malthus’s naturalist-Christian perspective, which saw virtue in adapting to given circumstances limited by God’s design rather than transforming them.Footnote 41 This justified inequality and distress under the imperative to accept one’s circumstances, no matter how miserable, as a “uniform course of prosperity” would degrade human character. Accordingly, Malthus rejected the very possibility of “improvement in adaptation.”Footnote 42 In contrast, Teruoka coupled this conception with an idea of the nation as an organic body, with each citizen acting as a “cell.” For this, he borrowed the organicism and holism of political Romanticism, where biological metaphor and cultural politics combined to explain the role of the people as an organ within the national body, with the diverse characteristics of individuals and communities constituting the organic whole. Teruoka saw these “cells” as giving the Japanese national character its “internal original essence” which provided a relatively stable mechanism for setting the nation back on its course to equilibrium.Footnote 43
To explain this mechanism, Teruoka tied the ideal of the Japanese village as an autonomous self-sufficient entity to the concept of fūdo, a premodern idea that saw the particular characteristics of each village’s natural environment as determining their culture. The concept of fūdo was expanded in the Meiji period by Mori Ōgai, who married the idea to Darwinian thought and German ideas of social hygiene, becoming the first thinker in Japan to link hygiene to environmental issues such as heat stroke, sunstroke, and acclimatization.Footnote 44 Teruoka believed that the ability of the country to maintain its eternal national essence was dependent on the capacity of its subjects to adapt to external shocks to their particular fūdo. These adaptations, which he said are like the ability of bodies to fight off illness, or the adaptations specialized workers have to their particular working environments, occur at different levels all over Japan in response to diverse local environments, maintaining the health of the nation in the aggregate.Footnote 45 “Thus,” Teruoka wrote, “the physical strength of our people must be understood as the totality of the transformations brought about through the necessary adaptations made by each in response to the demands of their particular environments.”Footnote 46
If these naturally occurring adaptations exist at the individual level, Teruoka imagined that these could be scaled up to serve as the basis for the development of a scientific national physical education curriculum that would strengthen the adaptive capacity of citizens. This would create a flexible national subject that had the “ability to respond to and fulfill various labor demands of different types, lengths of time, and intensity, and to keep up with their constant transformations.”Footnote 47 Teruoka believed this would increase resilience against existential shocks at the national level, such as war or dramatic changes in climate. Resiliency goals were, of course, decided by the state and the requirements of its military and industrial production. Especially in wartime, Japanese people—ill-adapted as they were to the requirements of work in heavy industry and the productive demands of a militarizing nation—had to speed up the slow process of adaptation so their “natural abilities” could transcend the confines of their fūdo and be employed to meet these demands.
But it was not enough for workers to possess the ability to work to the extremes demanded by militarized industry and labor-intensive agriculture, they had to like it: “Even if the ability to adapt exists and can be judged and measured, it is still imperative that it manifests as a vibrant productive action. In other words, it cannot simply be the ability to work, but must be sublimated as a productive action for the nation. It is here that the will to work and the joy of working are an essential part of working capacity.”Footnote 48 For Teruoka the will to work manifested in the subconscious of the worker and was controlled by the rhythm of work, which was in turn governed by the physical and spiritual condition of the worker. This is where discomfort and pain can emerge, and it is here where Teruoka’s idea of adaptation reveals itself as a theory of resilience. Just as mental and spiritual processes affected the determination, perseverance, and therefore the ability of athletes in sport, Teruoka thought that spiritual arousal could play the same role in laborers, giving them the capacity to work through bodily fatigue and mental stress.
Teruoka believed that the “will to work” arose naturally out of the village community. As the labor within rural communities had been adapted, through the process of history and biological change, to its natural environment over time, it became equipped with the appropriate technology needed to adjust to changing circumstances. For this reason, Teruoka was interested in local examples of work within nature as ways to actualize these characteristics in the context of the factory. Like the earlier studies on the divers, Teruoka selected the ama of Shima as “one example of natural and primitive forms of traditional women’s labor that have existed since ancient times and are particular to Japan.”Footnote 49 While historian Jaehwan Hyun’s work accepts Teruoka’s claim to gradualist scientific neutrality, and therefore sees civilized/primitive binaries as emerging only in postwar American studies, it is clear that Teruoka’s work, building on past physiological studies of the ama, was already rooted in an ideological opposition between primitive/traditional rural labor and the civilized/urban labor of the factory girl.Footnote 50
Indeed, Teruoka’s work on the ama, which he started in 1927, was included as one part of his study on Japan’s “traditional domestic labor methods” that were “gradually being eradicated.” In this way, the traditional ama diver was established as a foil for his female factory worker, a fact he readily admits to in the piece: “One of the reasons we are taking measurements of the ama, with their natural, free, yet skilled bodies which evoke a sense of discipline, is to compare them to those of the forced and unnatural women laborers.”Footnote 51 He spends much of the work describing the unsullied scenery of the environment in which they work. Looking through a telescope toward “the land of the ama,” or the area where the ama were actively working in their white cotton uniforms, Teruoka likens the experience to that of scientists approaching a group of penguins or the resting place of eagles, objectifying them as if they were part of a pristine natural environment. Alighting from his boat and entering Shima, Teruoka describes his feeling of “ecstasy”: “The fields on the mountains are cultivated, but the smell of civilization has still not reached the mountain villages around here. Somewhere within the grass, trees, and forests swaying in the Pacific Ocean’s winds is the hazy smell of the primitive,” he wrote.Footnote 52 This vivid and emotional introduction of place was not just romantic flourish but highlights his view that the quality of a worker’s fūdo and its distance from the unnatural urban environment had a determinative effect on the worker’s performance and well-being.
Place, tradition, and the hereditary adaptations of the women all contributed to the ama’s “will to work,” or their resilience, but another contributing factor was the regulating function of nature on labor and community well-being. It was in this natural environment where Teruoka discovered the actualization of his idea of the “will to work.” In the factory setting, labor is coerced by bosses who dictate tasks, by machines that ask workers to mimic its movements, by the wage contract, and by the schedule set by the company’s production quotas. The ama village, as an example of truly “free labor” within a cooperative natural society, Teruoka said, was the opposite: “Here, under the ama’s absolutism, a cooperative society was established … the ama divers are free people under the vastness of nature.”Footnote 53 This “freedom” became all the more apparent to Teruoka when the women divers took their obligatory break time. Here, Teruoka mirrored Itami in stressing the regulating function of nature that helped the divers to maintain their industrious spirit while also protecting their health. A day with poor weather or rough seas could force the divers to take a break from work, and the limits of the human body to cold exposure and oxygen deprivation, he suggested, meant that women did not overwork themselves to the point of illness. In between dives, the divers took periods of rest from working to sit in front of a fire in their hut to warm their frozen bodies up and regain energy by eating sweet potatoes, abalone, and sazae, heated over the open flame with a side of rice, cucumbers, and fruits. While the ama took their hour and a half break to warm up and gain strength, the men stood by and waited on the boat—at a distance from the women-only firepit—letting the women comfortably rest and chat with each other “to their heart’s content,” until the divers spontaneously found “the will to work” and to developed it into action." Around the fire, Teruoka wrote, these “free people” could “escape from all social constraints.”Footnote 54 The process that transforms human desire into labor is encouraged by this natural regulation and inspires a labor that is embedded in community relationships and voluntarily executed rather than coerced. “This is the comfort of the natural and primitive line of business,” Teruoka explained, that “There is no coercion in their work. It does not smell like capitalism. It’s not that it doesn’t exist, but at least in their life on the sea they have subjugated it and driven it away. In their present condition they cannot be considered financially unstable women’s labor. With their skills they can easily become economically independent people.”Footnote 55 What Teruoka meant by “economically independent” was not that the ama could support herself independently of her community; he meant that her artisanal labor was not entangled in a degrading wage-relationship.
Nature and community were a dual-regulating force that protected the ama from capitalism, making them appealing to researchers. In the immediate postwar period, the sociologist Makino Yoshirō undertook a long-term study of an ama village in Kuzaki, Mie.Footnote 56 Believing that the Kuzaki community structure acted as a breakwater against the penetration of the commodity economy into their village, he argued ama could “adapt” to the capitalist economy while being protected from potential destruction. In other words, the preservation of the traditional community provided the means through which the ama and their goods could enter the market economy without being subjected to its transformations. However, Makino admitted that maintaining the “breakwater” function of the community kept the ama in a marginalized position, largely excluded from decision making over community endeavors, even when those endeavors were the direct result of their labor.
Teruoka shared the idea of the community as a protective shield against capitalism but, unlike Makino, he could not recognize exploitation within the village because of the absence of a capital-wage labor relation among its members. Indeed, returning to the ama text, Teruoka wrote that, “there is no discrimination between young and old, rich or poor. All ama are equal here.”Footnote 57 Similarly, in 1929 Teruoka’s student and colleague at Ōhara, Ogawa Korehiro, continued his mentors’ comparative work on the “primitive and free” labor of the ama against the “modern and forced labor” of the factory girls.Footnote 58 Ogawa’s concern was also focused on the issues of adaptation and historical time: Japan’s indigenous industries required “laborers who until now continued to labor under a natural, unconfined, and free system” to now work under a system of “coercive, severe, and unified organization and control.”Footnote 59 In this way, Teruoka and Ogawa considered the community to consist of voluntary, “natural,” and embedded social relationships and hierarchies which precluded the possibility of coercion. Despite Teruoka’s naturalist framing of the text, in reality it was the all-male fishing cooperative that helped facilitate Teruoka and Ogawa’s research every step of the way, from helping to administer the physical tests, to speaking on the women’s behalf and entering their information into forms. This is a stark contrast to how Teruoka deliberately chose to survey factory girls only during times when supervisors were absent. That Teruoka or Ogawa did not feel the need to extend this same caution to the village betrays their faith in the perceived innocence of village relations and imbues the ama with a degree of agency they did not have. The tendency of studies rooted in adaptation-resilience to glorify austerity as autonomy made the authors complicit in undermining the agency of their subjects.
It is not that Teruoka did not recognize that the ama’s labor was physically difficult. On the contrary, this is one of the reasons he chose them as a comparison. Ama labor necessitated that the women undergo extreme pressure from water, to persist for periods of time without breathing, to build resiliency against cold temperatures, and to develop the mental fortitude to continue despite the pain. Living under duress made them an example of strength and the habituation of the divers to their pain gave them an authenticity that urban labor lacked. The distress the factory girls experienced only weakened the women, while the distress of labor-intensive work built the divers’ physical and mental resilience. It is from this labor-intensive work and their propensity for self-exploitation that the ama developed the adaptational hardiness which made them useful to state and industry. Their pain could only be seen as a positive attribute to exploit for the nation. For example, the ama, with their ability to withstand extreme temperature and pressure changes without breaking down, Teruoka wrote, served as a prime example for understanding how humans could survive under extraordinary environmental change.Footnote 60 This value made them particularly useful subjects of study for military and colonial exploration. Exposure to extreme environments could only heighten the natural strength of individuals and their ability to maintain resilience. Denying them such experiences would only work to weaken individuals and thereby, borrowing Teruoka’s eugenicist language, bring about the decline of the race.
Adapting to Extremes: Learning to Work through Pain
Teruoka’s interest in adaptation was not isolated from broader trends in the scientific community, nor was he alone in seeing the utility of subjecting workers to extreme conditions. German and French scientists, like the physiologist Claude Bernard, the geographer Paul Vidal de La Blache, and the biologist Jakob Johann von Uexküll, researched the inextricable relationship between ecology, bioclimatic zones, and community “modes of living” in the late nineteen and early twentieth centuries. Franz Boas’s famous 1912 study on the plasticity in European migrants to the United States was pivotal in developing environmental and cultural adaptation as a topic for scientific investigation.Footnote 61 In the 1930s, anthropologist Julian Stewart’s concept of “culture core” linked community behavior, culture, and subsistence practices to ecological adaptation.Footnote 62 Moreover, ideas about cultural or ethnic adaptability to hot and cold climates were pervasive in Japan long before they became the topic of scientific research. These ideas were mapped onto regional differences within the country that, as previously mentioned, were contained within Japan’s racial nationalism, constituting a diversity of local adaptations that themselves made up the national “whole.”
The science of adaptation, including Teruoka’s work, was based around a historical narrative of Japan that claimed an early population derived from diverse origins. This included Southeast Asian fishers using the Kuroshio current to enter southern Japan, migrants from Manchuria and Korea, and the Ainu.Footnote 63 One prevailing view held that these diverse groups intermarried and mixed cultures, preventing the formation of a unified ethnic character until the Edo period (1603–1868), when the country closed its borders to foreign trade, initiating the slow development of a coherent “Japanese” culture that culminated in the Meiji period. This allowed scientists to argue that the Japanese population possessed both the heat resistance of Southeast Asians and the cold resistance of “mongoloid” populations from the continent. Bodily adaptations mingled within diverse fūdo customs and ways of knowing, producing a population uniquely suited to their environment. In the mid-1930s, thinkers such as Heidegger’s student Watsuji Tetsurō and the philosopher Terada Torahiko released works that used fūdo as a theory of national spirit that would encompass nature and climate. These works included anxieties about the harm that modernization and Westernization would bring to one’s spiritual fūdo, and some, such as Misawa Katsue’s Fūdo Sangyō (1941), argued that the solution to these problems were in conforming industry to regional climate.
Developing human bodies that could sustain themselves in environments of extreme heat, cold, or high-pressure settings had long been of relevance not just to labor science, but to militarists as well. Perhaps one of the first medical studies on cold adaptation in Japan took place with the Mount Hakkōda incident of 1902, where the imperial army, preparing for war with Russia, sought to both test the resiliency of soldiers to cold and snowy weather and study the effects of frostbite.Footnote 64 A 1922 study of the susceptibility of soldiers to frostbite during the Siberian expedition, which found that the rate of death from frostbite was significantly less among soldiers from northern Japan than those from Shikoku and Kyushu in the south, set off a wave of scientific studies on heat and cold adaptation in the mid-to-late 1920s and into the 1930s.Footnote 65
These ideas mingled with Japan’s expansionist goals and evolving conceptions of the racial differences and similarities between Japan and the people of Asia, whom they intended to colonize under the guise of reuniting peoples with a common origin and governing those who were culturally and developmentally inferior, coalescing in the idea of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. The studies also had the purpose of preparing Japanese citizens and soldiers to inhabit territories with extreme climates with minimal material support. But these works also emphasized the diversity in the physiology of the natives they were studying. In the early 1920s, Kuno Yas and his student Hou studied human sweating in Manchuria by looking at seasonal perspiration rates among ethnic groups, developing their theories of human heat acclimation based on these studies—and their comparisons to Japanese subjects—into the 1930s.Footnote 66 Kuno’s disciples Kosuge and Kawahata turned their attention to studying the active sweat glands of the indigenous inhabitants of the South Sea islands. Many of these studies relied on using invasive methods on human and animal subjects.
Equally important to military concerns was the need to find adaptations among working people, as Teruoka had pioneered. One famous study in this vein was made by Kuno of textile workers in Yūzen in northern Kyoto that found a local example of Thomas Lewis’ “hunting reaction” where the body would alternate between vasoconstriction and vasodilation to rewarm the body and maintain its tissue.Footnote 67 Because the workers in Kuno’s study had to stand for long periods of time in Kyoto’s freezing Kamo River to wash their dyed textiles, they developed a strong habituation to cold.Footnote 68 Kyoto University scientists also began studying the ama as an example of “superhuman” adaptation, enlisting village headmen from Mie’s Shima peninsula to organize groups of seawomen to visit their medical school and undergo examinations. Research on climate adaptation was also centered around the Institute of the Science of Labor where Teruoka was affiliated. During World War II, Ishikawa Tomoyoshi, the physiologist spearheading these studies at the institute, built a climatic chamber to conduct studies on the metabolic adaptation to heat and cold along with his student Shirai, who conducted experiments to find seasonal variations in basal metabolism. In the case of Kuno’s Philippines study, Japanese and Filipino subjects were submerged in scalding hot water to gauge the rate and time it took them to sweat.Footnote 69 Building tolerance to cold or heat, based as it was in creating a resilience to pain and fear, came at the discomfort of the subject.
The brutality of these studies only increased as the Japanese military entered Manchuria and, afterwards, the Pacific War, making the institute a major center for studies on cold adaptation. Teruoka led some of these initiatives through the South Manchuria Railway Company Colonial Science Research Institute, where he conducted studies to ascertain the cold acclimation of Manchurian indigenous, Russian, Chinese, and Japanese people in Manchuria—and in the case of one Dr. Shoji the body of the experimenter himself.Footnote 70 During the war, adaptation studies, which became entangled with Japan’s infamous Unit 731, subjected their human research subjects to torture-like experiments involving extreme cold. One of the legacies of these experiments was the start of IBP physiologist Yoshimura Hisato’s career. Yoshimura and Iida Toshiyuki’s experiment on the cold tolerance among different ethnic groups in Northern Manchuria added to Lewis’ findings on the “hunting reaction” by discovering a way to calculate resistance to extreme cold and frostbite through what they called the “resistance index.”Footnote 71 Yoshimura and Iida subjected one hundred research subjects of different ethnic and regional backgrounds, including Chinese coolies, school children, and the native population—which included Manchurian Mongols and the nomadic tribe of the Khin-gan Mountain region, the Orochons—and divided them into two groups based on regional climates (warm versus cold). These groups, which included women and children as young as seven and, in one case, a newborn baby, were made to withstand immersion into ice water. In experimenting on these groups to see if cold tolerance existed within the experiment populations or, if not, whether it could be developed, they found that cold adaptation could indeed be developed through training. But in finding the result they hoped for, the researchers admitted to causing extreme pain to their subjects, with some suffering loss of body parts, cerebral anemia, and other ailments.Footnote 72
These discourses of adaptation had real-life consequences on workers as their violent hypotheses were put into practice. Just as studies of the ama had proposed that the gender division in ama villages emerged from the natural fact that diving labor is more “suitable” to the physiology of female bodies, local adaptation began to explain the suitability of the Korean haenyeo divers for harsh conditions over the ama, reflecting colonial divisions of labor. Although the ama regularly dove in the cold waters off Hokkaido and the Sanriku coast in Northern Japan, and both groups of women dove in the nude or in cotton dress, when it became convenient for merchants to exploit Korean labor for diving tasks, the special cold resiliency of the haenyeo became the explanatory engine that propelled this development. It also became an explanation—offered by the haenyeo themselves—for why they should dive even in the wintertime. Biology and science became endowed with a cruel explanatory power that, despite Teruoka’s insistence that diving was not coercive, constituted a coercion of its own.
During World War II, the United States, the United Kingdom, and other countries recruited teams of researchers to investigate adaptation to cold, heat, and extreme environments for the purpose of developing the efficiency, comfort, and crisis capabilities of their military personnel.Footnote 73 But none of these programs matched the gruesomeness of the Japanese experiments except for Nazi Germany. The German studies exposed human subjects, mainly prisoners and victims of concentration camps, to extreme environments to find examples of natural resilience to environmental ailments such as hypothermia, hypoxia, frostbite, and heat stroke. As in Japan, they relied on sadistic experimental methods such as using Roma women prisoners to test if sexual intercourse could help relieve men suffering from hypothermia. Japanese research into adaptability, including Teruoka’s work on the ama, was translated into German in 1932 and served as a reference point for this research.Footnote 74 Despite all the pain the subjects were put through, the irrationality of the premises meant that the studies themselves amounted to very little. Yet the ideas had staying power, as scientists continued to conceive of localized bodies, adapted to their fūdo, as constituting low-cost technologies for exploitation.
Postwar Adaptation-Resilience Discourse and the Seawomen
With the conclusion of World War II, the grotesque and exploitative research of the Germans and Japanese faced scrutiny in war crime tribunals. The Nazi research, outlined in a report by Andrew Ivy as evidence for the prosecution of Nazi war criminals, became the subject of fierce ethics debates over whether the potential usefulness of the research justified its embrace by the scientific community in light of its disturbing use of human subjects.Footnote 75 It was ultimately judged that the findings were not worth the ethical dilemma they caused, and the circumstances in which the studies were conducted meant the results were ultimately deemed suspect.
Japanese wartime scientists, on the other hand, were not subject to the same level of scrutiny. Yoshimura is a noteworthy example of how Japan’s prewar discourse was absorbed into the burgeoning discourse on adaptation and work in the postwar era, which was preoccupied with the unpredictable consequences of global transformation wrought by the rapid spread of industrial capitalism. Yoshimura’s wartime studies were released in the immediate aftermath of the war and received international acclaim despite their macabre details.Footnote 76 This breathed new life into his group’s research, allowing them and their ideas to take a central place in collaborative internationally and nationally funded projects.
In the early 1960s the International Council of Scientific Unions began formulating a plan to establish the IBP as the successor to its International Geophysical Year (IGY) program. Among the several large-scale multidisciplinary research programs established by the IBP was the Human Adaptability Project (HAP). Yoshimura was chosen to head and promote the Japanese division of the HAP project, which along with the USSR and USA divisions, was one of the largest. The Japanese representatives for the “simpler communities” included the indigenous Ainu—described by IBP contributor Itoh Shinju as in the process of inevitably being “absorbed into the Japanese race”—who were thought to represent the extreme of Japanese cold adaptation alongside peasants and isolated mountain dwellers and the ama and other sea-based laborers.Footnote 77 Work on “the primitive professional diving work” of the ama was a matter of “high priority” as the postwar modernization of their working equipment, the researchers predicted, would eventually lessen their adaptability, and therefore their usefulness as a case study of primitive adaptation for developing the capacity for deep sea exploration.Footnote 78 The HAP program’s mission allowed Yoshimura not only to continue his research on adaptation, but to integrate the prewar reactionary social Darwinian historical vision into the science.
Yoshimura’s work influenced and reflected the broader intellectual currents of the IBP program. One of Yoshimura’s close collaborators, the South African anthropologist and physiologist Joseph S. Weiner, acted as convener of the program. Weiner’s interest in adaptation began in 1936 when he was recruited to study the physiological and pathological impact of brutally hot and humid temperatures on Bantu diamond miners employed by the Rand Mine Corporation in South Africa.Footnote 79 These studies shaped the direction of his life’s work on human evolutionary processes, the adaptation of workers to hot and arid environments, and his involvement in a wartime research program for the UK on environmental stresses.
The IBP mission was propelled by anxieties about ecological limits and climate transformation. IBP scientists were deeply concerned that the very trends prewar adaptation researchers had been concerned with—industrialization, Westernization, urbanization, and population growth—were only accelerating in the postwar period. Global development initiatives and the attendant “domination” of the human species over nature were spreading these ills, driving widespread migration, depeasantization, and transformative changes in the ways of life of even the most remote populations.Footnote 80 The identification of these phenomena as threats to ecological balance led Weiner and his colleagues to study the “changes in peoples of non-European culture who have recently adopted the Western way of life.”Footnote 81 Some took an explicitly racist direction. Referencing Canada’s indigenous population, Roy Shephard, the director of the IBP Expert Group on the Measurement of Work Capacity, describes IBP subjects as “communit[ies] undergoing rapid deterioration not only in its physical condition but also in its nutrition, health, morale, sobriety, and racial purity.”Footnote 82
Populations of interest to the IBP were split between two categories: “undisturbed or ‘natural’ ecosystems” and “those subject to man’s intervention.”Footnote 83 “[B]oth in their size and level of economy,” “[s]imple communities” which the IBP described as inevitably disappearing, were seen as “the closest approximation … to the conditions under which mankind has lived for the greater part of his existence.”Footnote 84 But the main thrust of this research was not to lament the inevitable loss of adaptations due to economic growth, but to understand how industrialized people became deacclimated after exiting natural communities and to use examples of past adaptations to learn how humans could regain the ability to live and work under nature’s constraints. As Weiner himself wrote, the IBP was not just an “exercise in ‘pure’ ecological investigation” but strongly identified with the practical goal of “gaining new ecological knowledge in the interests of ‘productivity and human welfare.’”Footnote 85 Weiner and Yoshimura’s early work in labor physiology, which compared “thermal comfort for different occupations in different parts of the world” in diverse settings, echoed the discourse of fūdo as a repository of adaptation-resilience.Footnote 86 Through such studies, scientists aimed to uncover how to create resilient subjects just as well-weathered as pre-industrial humans had evolved to be.
Weiner’s conception of adaptation, which was shared by many of his IBP collaborators, was based on the idea of human communities as “dynamic functional entities displaying adaptive responses to the demands and stresses of the environment, as well as of day-to-day events.”Footnote 87 He believed that communities and their natural environments were in a reciprocal and dependent relationship for the management and maintenance of their “organic productivity.”Footnote 88 Individuals within communities could display physiological adaptations to environmental stresses, but cultural and behavioral adaptations could also take place within the social structure of the communities to “meet crises.” In William Laughlin and F. A. Milan’s studies on Eskimo communities, for instance, they use the example of a man offering half of his clothing to a comrade who fell in cold water as an example of social adaptation: the two will be “cold but alive.”Footnote 89 Thus in the IBP’s understanding of adaptation, human relationships within communities, as much as human relationships to nature, are thought to be organic outcomes of natural processes. But these adaptations can only exist when the relationship between human communities and nature retains its place in an organic and traditional environment. Urbanization, industrialization, and Westernization reduce human’s “resilience to change,” and this impacts the productivity level of individuals, the IBP maintained. Adaptation to the demands of work and the metabolic efficiency of workers continued, for this reason, to be of significant interest. The correlation between cardiovascular disease, the intensity of work, and the level of fitness, IBP studies found, was a particular “disease of civilization” that occurred due to modernization, lessening the ability of workers to adapt to environmental stress.Footnote 90 In his study of the process of urbanization of circumpolar communities, including Igloolik in the Northwest Territories of Canada, Shephard proposed that traditional communities were more physically fit and productive than urban ones.Footnote 91 He maintained that sedentary, urban lifestyles, and their reliance on artificial technologies to maintain human equilibrium with the environment, reduced the responsiveness and survivability of even healthy, genetically gifted individuals to environmental stresses: “prospects for adaptation could be further reduced through the emergence of individuals who are fertile, attractive to the opposite sex, and yet have a very limited capacity to respond to environmental challenge. This variety of Homo sapiens, the ultimate form of Homo sedentarius, would survive only while modern technology could maintain the constancy of his external environment. Such a luxury may no longer be practicable when nonrenewable energy reserves have been exhausted.”Footnote 92 Workers who labored in extreme conditions—high altitudes, with low calorie intake, or in extreme heat or cold—were especially interesting to IBP scientists for illustrating that humans were, in fact, capable of surviving in situations of extreme deprivation.
Around the same time that the IBP Japanese committee was turning to the ama as a research subject for adaptation, the Korean physiologists Hong Suk-Ki and his American colleague Hermann Rahn were planning their studies on the environmental adaptation of the ama and the Korean haenyeo divers. Hong had begun research on the haenyeo at Yonsei University in the 1950s as part of a broader research program informed by prewar Japanese studies on the ama. He met Rahn during his time at the University of Buffalo and introduced Rahn, who was familiar with the German translation of Teruoka’s work, to the prospect of traveling to Asia to study the women. The seawomen’s adaptation to hypoxia was of particular interest to the US military anticipating a war between the high altitude borders of China and India.Footnote 93 Because Rahn’s specialty was in pulmonary mechanics and blood-gas exchange, he had originally only been interested in studying the mechanics of the ama and haenyeo as free divers and the adaptation of their respiratory system. But as he entered into partnership with Hong and began studying the women, his interest shifted to how they survived diving in cold water with little protection.Footnote 94 Their research project drew together researchers from Japan and Korea, most notably for the Physiology symposium, which was held in honor of Teruoka in 1964. They received a grant from the U.S. government, which itself was keen to develop knowledge for exploring new extractive frontiers in deep ocean mining, or developing soldiers’ “arctic response capability for conflicts, emergencies, safety, and environmental concerns.”Footnote 95 The military source of funding and interest in adaptation had, as it did in the prewar period, fueled the production of adaptation research, even as the philosophical position of some researchers remained opposed to state development projects and government intervention into the realms of communities and individuals.Footnote 96 Contradictions, as ever, abounded.
The explanatory foundation of the prewar theory of adaptation found new power in the postwar period in an effort to efface its revolutionary changes. Yoshimura’s ideas found common ground with modernization theorists, who in turn used the language of adaptation to explain the gradual process of historical change and cultural acclimation to capitalism in Japan.Footnote 97 In his 1982 article, “Human Adaptability with Special Reference to Acclimatization of Japanese,” Yoshimura quotes the foreword to John Hall’s Japan, from Prehistory to Modern Times, which sought to find the historical precedent for Japanese industrial success. The chosen passage—which he attributes to Hall, but instead seems to be the foreword to the Japanese version of the text—states that the reason the Japanese were able to overcome the cultural shocks produced in its interaction with the West, while the indigenous “mongoloid race” in North America collapsed in their own encounter, is due to the spiritual-cultural adaptability of the Japanese.Footnote 98 Japan’s success in becoming a “first-class” developed nation was due to the pairing of the spiritual strength provided by their traditions of Buddhism and Confucianism with the values of self-denial, sacrifice for the nation, and industriousness that were nurtured from the Meiji period onward.Footnote 99 He reminds us, however, that these were the values of the prewar. Japanese youth in the postwar, having lost the spiritual culture of the Meiji period, now lacked the adaptability to withstand such cultural shocks. Paraphrasing from the rightwing rabbi Tokayer’s 1975 essay, The Japanese are Finished, he warned that, amidst postwar reform, the Japanese people should not “throw the baby out with the bath water.”Footnote 100 Although Yoshimura does not give us the context of Tokayer’s statement, it was referring to the moral and spiritual values of prewar militarism.Footnote 101 Similarly, economist Hayami Akira’s theory of the industrious revolution speaks of “industriousness” as a value handed down through families over generations, similar to how adaptation theorists used the concept of hereditary industriousness. The “400-yearlong historical mission” of Japanese industriousness, Hayami lamented, has ended, foreshadowing the decline of the nation. Japan’s defeat in World War II opened the door for criticism of the government and, in time, “criticisms were mounted against long working hours and being workaholics”; this brought about “a change in direction toward a welfare state” that gradually extinguished Japan’s “claim to industriousness.”Footnote 102 Another proponent, economist Sugihara Kaoru, argued that the industrious peasant spirit, managed by family-units able to “respond flexibly to extra or emergency needs … and anticipate and prevent potential problems,” allowed for a more ecologically sustainable and humane development than the West’s capital intensive path.Footnote 103
Teruoka also found a place for himself in this discourse. In the early 1950s, Teruoka founded the Asian Association of Occupational Health to promote Asian cooperation on the management of the physiological health of workers through non-governmental initiatives.Footnote 104 He believed that, since Japan had industrialized while keeping their traditional handicraft and cottage industry intact, the Meiji model of development could be instructive for Asian countries anxious about managing the gap between advanced industry and traditional work methods.Footnote 105 In his address at the organization’s first conference in Tokyo, he continued to stress the alienation of work in modern industry, the attendant moral and physical disorders brought by Westernization and modern technology, and argued for Asians to embrace a “technology based on humanitarianism” as they developed their industries.Footnote 106
Anti-technology and anti-modernist sentiment remained part of the discourse. For instance, Yoshimura’s student Hori Seiki’s work emphasized the deterioration of Japanese people’s heat and cold adaptation due to the use of air conditioners and heaters in the postwar. In addition to weakening one’s ability to regulate temperature naturally, exposure to these technologies also generated various illnesses.Footnote 107 In the late 1970s, Yoshimura and his colleagues feared that another ice age was imminent and that natural resources such as coal and oil were on the verge of collapse. They were concerned that humans, who had developed artificial “cultural adaptations” to technologies reliant on those fuel sources, had weakened their natural ability to adapt and were therefore heading for disaster.Footnote 108
The seawomen’s labor, which was regarded as a low-impact technology of coastal extraction embedded in the self-regulating structure of an autonomous community, became a site where postwar researchers looked for sustainable alternatives. For this, it was necessary to set up the seawomen as existing on the borders of capitalism, not immune to its entrepreneurial possibilities but not polluted by it either. Scholars involved in the Physiology symposium continued to stress that the ama were “independent, self-employed laborers” as opposed to the “employed laborer of a factory.”Footnote 109 What they meant by this is clear from the text of another participant, Hiromasa Kita, who described the difference between pearl diving ama—diving for cultured pearls in aquaculture farms—and other ama, explaining that the former were “not real ama in the sense they are not self-employed” and more like an “agricultural or factory laborer.”Footnote 110 What differentiated the pearl divers was the denaturalization of their labor through the wage relationship and the technological environment in which that labor was performed. In contrast, the seawomen’s aversion to technology (or that which would protect their bodies) positions them as a sustainable alternative to capitalism. In 2010, Anne McDonald celebrated ama communities on Hegura island for “questioning how lifestyles could potentially be changed by indiscriminate adoption of technologies all in the name of progress.”Footnote 111 The rejection of diving technologies—first goggles, and then diving suits or apparatuses—was a collective decision based both on the idea that these might potentially harm their community ecology and that “technological innovations can potentially alter natural abilities,” like their ability to withstand cold.Footnote 112 To quote one haenyeo researcher, rejecting technology was a necessary noble sacrifice to preserve the seawomen’s “benign human cohabitation with nature.”Footnote 113 The framing of technology against nature created a false choice between metabolic violences, between the metabolism of the body and that of the ecology. The community’s choice was to subject the seawomen to bodily violence in the name of protecting the environment.
But the point of climate adaptation studies was never to ameliorate the seawoman’s burdens or to release her from pain— it was to make her pain more bearable. The IBP, after all, defined physiological adaptability as the “capacity to withstand or come to terms with extreme cold, heat, aridity, or oxygen lack,” not the inability to feel their effects.Footnote 114 What becomes clear from the scientific literature on the seawomen’s adaptation is that tolerating the cold is not natural but developed through a repeated exposure to extreme stress. It is a process of habituation to distress. As one author in the Physiology symposium states, “the most important attribute of the best ama is not necessarily good health. It is the perseverance to continue diving exercises for many years, the mental power to continue patiently breath holding and to increase the skillfulness of their respiratory control.”Footnote 115 In one of the earliest postwar studies, Shibuya and Sukegawa criticized the prewar ama literature for its misleading presentation of data. In their study they found that, while young ama may be physically fit, the impact of the ama’s hard labor gradually takes its toll on the body, becoming more visible with age.Footnote 116 While most prewar studies focused on the short-term activities of the divers, their study followed the ama over the entire duration of the diving season and discovered that, as they worked regularly over the diving season, every single ama showed signs of serious fatigue and weight loss. This data, coupled with their findings on the health of the women during and after pregnancy, showed the true costs of diving. Furthermore, despite the continued romanticization of the seawomen’s capacity for adaptation in the literature, postwar studies on climate acclimatization phenomena like the hunting reaction began to show that the suppression of the bodily response to pain and cold does not actually create an adaptation that protects the person from that cold. On the contrary, they find that “cold acclimation could potentially put someone at greater risk of cold injury.”Footnote 117 Far from creating resiliency, “adaptation” only led to desensitization, heightening vulnerability and threatening the life of the laborer.
Criticisms of adaptation science, including and especially the studies conducted during the IBP, centered on these scholars’ omissions of the socio-economic, political, and historical factors creating these adaptations.Footnote 118 Poor, marginal, and indigenous populations had developed bodily “adaptations” to the extreme environments in which they lived and worked, to be sure, but were these “adaptations” not also the product of poor living conditions, resource scarcity, and state neglect? Was their pain and psychosocial stress necessary? Weiner’s own prewar work on Bantu miners showed that, far from developing a superhuman tolerance to heat, these miners learned to live with the distress that the mining companies expected them to bear out of financial necessity.Footnote 119 In Japan and South Korea too, postwar development and political change coincided with an improvement in research methods and a greater frequency of studies on the adaptation of the divers. Though, as stated, a prewar ideological orientation continued to hold relevance, it was clear now that the divers’ struggle was deeply connected to the political circumstances they existed within, and that these circumstances in turn could change the fate of the divers.
Fishery reform formed an important part of the American-led reforms during the postwar period in Japan. Although these reforms had mixed results, they did largely serve to ameliorate conditions within fishing villages, including ama villages. Over time, technological restrictions were gradually lifted so that Japanese female divers could use technologies such as diving suits, which greatly improved the comfort of their dives.Footnote 120 This fact is reflected in the adaptation literature, which admits that the introduction of wetsuits has reduced the Japanese ama’s adaptation to cold. Tourist facilities and local development projects meant that ama were also no longer limited to diving and subsistence work and, for the first time, they received direct wages for their work. Health and reproductive outcomes improved in lockstep in these villages. As did the phenomenon of women leaving the profession for less arduous and better paid work.
In Korea, on the other hand, the postwar fascist regime largely kept in place the colonial fisheries cooperatives, themselves based almost exactly on those implemented in Japanese coastal villages. The lack of democratic recourse within villages and their low economic position meant that the adoption of wetsuits was delayed, and the Korean haenyeo were still subject to a level of cold stress that NASA described as “greater than any other group of human subjects studied.”Footnote 121 Stuck in the vortex of underdevelopment while their nation developed, the haenyeo continued to dive throughout the winter with little protection between their bodies and the cold water, putting up with appalling working conditions for low wages. Out of necessity, their metabolic reproduction was made a secondary concern to economic production, but their economic well-being was also harmed by this work. As one Udo Island diver, interviewed by a researcher about her postwar experience in the lead up to the haenyeo’s UNESCO intangible cultural heritage designation in 2016, said, “The living standards for us were lower than countries like Ghana. In the winter, we did not have socks, even in the cold weather we did not have enough clothes.”Footnote 122 Comparisons of the Korean haenyeo and the Japanese ama pointed to the greater adaptation ability of the former, while ignoring the circumstances around why that extreme tolerance remained necessary. S. K. Hong’s study found that most haenyeo would cease to dive if it were not for economic necessity and also discouraged their daughters from inheriting the profession.Footnote 123 The increase in capital-intensive fisheries in Jeju over the postwar period, including those that utilized diving equipment which haenyeo had no means of procuring, furthered their economic marginalization. It was the fact of their financial desperation—and the romanticization of their pain—which made them convenient studies for military research.
Conclusion
The backlash against postwar state-led development projects led to a communitarian turn in development policy that sought to put responsibility for environmental maintenance and the fallout of climate change onto local communities.Footnote 124 Within this revisionist policy, a space was opened for the concept of adaptation-resilience and its promise of a low-cost and sustainable ecological management. The United Nation Development Programme’s 2008 report, titled Roots of Resilience, explicitly addressing the rural poor, outlines this vision: “Resilience is the capacity to adapt and to thrive in the face of challenge. This report contends that when the poor successfully (and sustainably) scale-up ecosystem-based enterprises, their resilience can increase in three dimensions. They can become more economically resilient—better able to face economic risks. They—and their communities—can become more socially resilient—better able to work together for mutual benefit. And the ecosystems they live in can become more biologically resilient—more productive and stable.”Footnote 125
Promoting decentralization, “rooted” community development, and the continuance of labor-intensive “nature-based livelihoods,” the UN’s plan tasks communities to “absorb environmental stresses and remain productive.”Footnote 126 For marginal rural populations, the UN takes the view that “large-scale interventions” to mitigate climate disaster “are not practical or likely.”Footnote 127 The plan also dissuades migration to wealthier countries, leaving poorer communities no option but to devise a plan to fortify themselves against the impending climate crisis. Instead, they tell rural communities that these policies will allow them to “be better able to confront the new environmental conditions brought on by climate change so as to maintain and perhaps [italics added] improve their own circumstances.”Footnote 128 The “perhaps” in that sentence betrays the cynicism behind these projects: much like Teruoka’s defense of labor-intensive development in prewar Japan, resilience-focused development is a quantitative rather than qualitative change, scaling up existing systems of dependency and scarcity instead of offering structural change, and asking people to “maintain” lives perpetually at the edge of destruction.
Resilience is a model of development without development that emerges from anxieties about declining resources and the ability of states to continually provide resources and technologies in times of anticipated crisis. In answering the question it poses—how can we continue to improve productivity from dwindling resources under scarcity?—it proposes spiritualism, psychological hardiness, harnessing the adaptive power of the human body, and community paternalism, all rooted in the double-regulated sphere of natural extraction, so as to not exceed the limitations it perceives are imminent. Because its program relies on resources that are scarce or becoming scarce, technologies that could potentially weaken the capacity of unmediated natural adaptation are deemed suspect. But the paradox of resilience is that, rather than protecting communities from shocks, these policies serve to deepen their vulnerability.
In their study of the cold tolerance of ama divers, Glickman and Caine-Bish explain that without the economic incentives of a labor system that constantly asked divers to push their bodies to the physical extreme, humans would never voluntarily expose themselves to the levels of hypothermia necessary to build such an adaptation that the seawomen did through their labor.Footnote 129 The seawomen became models of resilience because they embodied its values of self-sacrifice, labor-intensiveness, and methods of extraction with low environmental impact. These aspects were useful to the prewar state and its military, but they did nothing but condemn the women themselves to learn how to suffer in glorified extremes.
Acknowledgments
I am immensely grateful to the mentors, friends, and colleagues who helped to bring this essay to its current state. Joshua Linkous agonized with me over multiple years and numerous drafts to bring clarity to a once opaque argument. I would also like to thank Lorenzo Bondioli, Patrick Chimenti, John D’Amico, Deren Ertas, Andrew Gordon, David Howell, Saito Kohei, Simon Angseop Lee, and Jeremy Woolsey for their comments on various versions of this essay. I am thankful to Ian J. Miller and the students in his Energy History seminar for their comments on a very early version of this research and for encouraging this social historian to continue to pursue a history of labor science. The editors and the anonymous CSSH reviewers offered valuable feedback and editorial assistance that further strengthened this piece.
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