The “botanical imagination” names artistic expression that incorporates natural elements at the level of content, form, and context. In his latest publication, Botanical Imagination: Rethinking Plants in Modern Japan, Jon L. Pitt introduces and theorizes the concept in the tradition of Critical Plant Studies (CPS). The Japanese literary works and films he analyzes span the Imperial Period of Japanese colonization, World War II, and the postwar democratic transition. Engaging with fiction, poetry, and film, Pitt suggests that the “botanical imagination” allows artists not only to rethink environmental concerns such as the human-nature relationship, but also to exercise artistic resilience and resistance against imperial ideologies and state power.
Literature about large-scale environmental disaster has been central to the interdisciplinary fields of environmental humanities and media studies in modern and contemporary Japan. While literature about the Atomic Bomb, Minamata disease, and the 2011 tsunami and earthquake remains urgent, Pitt positions the less commonly discussed effects of forestry as one of the country’s most significant environmental transformations. What stands out to me as especially innovative in Pitt’s approach in The Botanical Imagination is his emphasis on the regenerative role that destruction, including deforestation, plays in natural ecosystems. Referencing Anna Tsing, he explains that “disturbance ecology” is an ecological theory in which destruction is recognized as necessary for regrowth, and he demonstrates how artists have explored this theory through his analysis of Yanagimachi Mitsuo’s Fire Festival (1985) and Kawase Naomi’s Vision (2018).
Yanagimachi’s Fire Festival provides the strongest example of Pitt’s analysis of disturbance ecology as an aesthetic strategy. The film depicts regional development in a rural village in the Kumano region of the Kii Peninsula. The title Fire Festival references a traditional ritual of purification to welcome spring in the region. The festival enacts the cycle of the seasons and fire symbolizes the ecosystem’s rhythm of endings and new beginnings. The village is facing depopulation and the film’s protagonist Tatsuo, a somabito or traditional forest manager, faces pressure to concede to tourism development, a common predicament during Japan’s period of economic growth in the 1970s and ‘80s.
When his family solidifies plans to sell their land for development, Tatsuo murders them. Because Tatsuo’s participation in the fire festival intensifies his motivation, Pitt interprets the murders as an act of ritualistic disturbance. As one season ends to make way for a new one and the festival burns away the past to welcome a fresh start, Tatsuo sets fire to his land in hopes of creating an alternative future there. Pitt interprets Tatsuo’s actions as a form of “botanical subjectivity,” in which Tatsuo acts on behalf of the forest. In Yanagimachi’s depiction, this kind of disturbance is powerful and authentic because it emerges from an indigenous and ecological mindset rather than from superficial environmentalism aimed at human-centered gains. In this sense, Tatsuo’s destructive act represents liberation from harmful development and a call for renewal.
It is important to emphasize that disturbance ecology is grounded in the idea of a cyclical ecosystem, in which ecological destruction is followed by renewal and is not motivated by profit. As Pitt points out, some corners of the environmental movement have appropriated and distorted the concept for economic gain. The Kizukai Movement, for example, was launched by the Japanese Forestry Agency, and typifies neoliberal environmentalism because it shifts the burden of forest sustainability onto consumers. Rather than regulating environmental protection directly, the movement ends up serving market interests, leaving the same structures of environmental exploitation in place. In contrast, grassroots disturbance ecology has the potential to confront and challenge this kind of false environmentalism.
Pitt is writing in the tradition of CPS, an interdisciplinary field that offers flexible ways to understand the human-nonhuman relationship. Building on key concepts like “becoming” and “plasticity,”1 Pitt introduces the term “botanical subjectivity” to explore a malleable epistemology of the human that challenges long-held, fixed ideas about humanity’s central role in environmental networks.
Plasticity is especially central to Pitt’s engagement with the subjectivity of character Machiko in Osaki Midori’s novella Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense. Inspired by moss, which spreads without fixed boundaries, Pitt argues that Osaki uses moss metaphorically to explore a fluid, multiple, and extrasensory subjectivity that is a non-fixed, ever-transforming, and difficult to pin down. Pitt focuses on how Osaki pushes back not only against Japanese imperialism and patriarchy, but also against colonial science. Social Darwinism was used to justify Imperial Japan’s colonial expansion, and Pitt explains that Osaki’s rejection of hierarchical evolution through a moss-like subjectivity as one way the author “resist[s] the exclusionary impulses of social Darwinism” (31).
In more recent literary works, such as Hiromi Itō’s Wild Grass on the Riverbank (2004), we find a similar challenge to fixed national, racial, and species boundaries. Itō Hiromi is a poet who immigrated to the U.S. and draws on that experience in her long narrative poem about a mother and daughter moving between Kumamoto and Southern California. In the epic, she reimagines plants as migratory beings that challenge species boundaries. The “botanical imagination” elucidates Itō’s exploration of the parallels between migrating plants and her own transnational experience. Like Osaki, Itō critiques the biopolitical control of migratory bodies through the concept of “botanical empathy.” Pitt’s concept of “botanical subjectivity” emerges as a new CPS tool for revealing artistic expressions of fluid and migratory subjectivity inspired by plants.
Pitt is also interested in how the botanical imagination allows writers and artists to confront the complicated legacy of imperialism. In the postwar period, while colonial memory was believed to be fading, Abe Kōbō re-engages the processes of memorialization of his childhood and his country’s colonial past through a different lens. His short story Dendrocacalia narrates the metamorphosis of the protagonist Common into the plant Dendrocacalia. Pitt argues that the plant’s contagious nature, endemic to Common’s body, serves as an allegory for colonial expansion and influence. The blurring of boundaries between human and plant represents the absorption of colonial ideology. Abe critiques Japan’s lingering postwar ideological divide—between gaichi (external colonies) and naichi (mainland)—through the metaphor of the plant invading Common’s body. With this metaphor, Abe expresses “botanical subjectivity” and reveals how colonial ideologies continue to persist even after the war.
Pitt’s concept of the “botanical imagination” offers an innovative critical framework for engaging with artistic expressions involving plants and trees. Pitt gives us a way to rethink the boundary between humans and nature and imagine the relationship as something more fluid. The blurred and seamless connectivity between humans and nature has the potential to defy our usual understanding of subjectivity, which is shaped by ideas of modernity, nation, race, ethnicity, science, and species. In this sense, the “botanical imagination” can be a powerful critical lens not only for environmental studies but also for broadening the scope of Critical Plant Studies. The “botanical imagination” might help us question rigid separations and exclusions across various fields of thought because it challenges dominant anthropocentric frameworks and invites more relational modes of thinking.
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Endnotes
- The idea of “becoming” originates in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), 342. “Plasticity” originates in Catherine Malabou’s Ontology of the Accident: An Essay on Deconstructive Plasticity, trans. Carolyn Shread (Malden: Polity, 2012), 3.
Mei Fujie