Public Dystopias and Private Illnesses in Japan during the Seventies. Ui Jun and the Global Environmental Activism

Japanese public intellectuals played a crucial role in forcing questions of environmental injustice onto the public agenda throughout the Sixties and the Seventies. In such a context, ever-growing movements of citizen activists and cases of frontline scientists ready to denounce questionable political measures and environmental disasters not adequately covered by the media, came to play a significant role. Chemical engineer Ui Jun (1932-2006) could be arguably considered as the most important figure in transnational environmental activism in postwar Japan. This contribution proposal is based on these premises and aims at highlighting the crucial role played by Ui within the public and scientific debate in Japan and internationally. Moreover, this essay analyzes in parallel the contribution offered by both citizens and intellectuals, in an interrelationship that was simultaneously fueled by the dissenting voices coming from totally different fields but that had the same goal. I argue that this form of environmentalism was based on a strong correlation between the local dimension of protest and science, between people’s sensitivity and scientific activism.