The Development of Power Sources and Nationalism in the Postwar Japan

This article tries to explicate changes of anti-dam movements in between the prewar and postwar Japan from the standpoint of 'nationalization' and nationalism. Japan has poor natural resources, so its economic development had fairly depended on hydroelectric power in the prewar period. As a dam has to be built at the cost of mountain village communities, its building usually brings about strong opposition movement as a matter of course. Especially in the prewar period, dam-building plans were sometimes forced to be stopped because of the importance of rivers for the village people. In the postwar period, as the scale of dams became larger, their negative impacts on village communities became deeper. However, there have been built as many as 2700 dams in Japan in spite of strong anti-dam movements. In this article we discuss the importance of the standpoint of 'nationalization' and nationalism to explain the above changes. Nationalization refers to processes in which circulation of commodities, capitals and so on become nationwide with the development of regional (domestic) division of labour. We review the history of forestry in mountain villages and demonstrate that the exhaustive nationalization under the total war regime changed economic roles of village communities and rivers and also attitudes of village people, and that new types of nationalism, for example, economic nationalism, promoted the dam-construction by suppressing movements ideologically in the postwar period. 本稿は，戦前・戦後日本におけるダム建設に対する反対運動の変化を「ナショナリゼーション」とナショナリズムの観点から説明することを目的とする。天然資源の乏しい日本において，戦前の経済発展は水力発電に大きく依存し，河川を利用した電源開発が盛んに行われた。しかし，それらは山村社会を犠牲にするものであり，激しい反対運動が展開された。そして，戦前におけるダム建設計画は河川が山村に対してもつ多様な重要性ゆえに時には中止を余儀なくされたこともあった。ところが，戦後ダムの規模が大きくなり山村に与えるその影響も拡大し，強い反対運動が展開されたにもかかわらず，さらに数多くのダムが建設され，その数は2700にも上っている。こうした過程を説明する概念として本稿ではナショナリゼーションとナショナリズムを重視する。ナショナリゼーションとは，国内地域分業を伴う商品と資本の流通やヒトの移動の全国規模化の過程を指す概念である。本稿では，山村における林業の盛衰史を概観し，戦中の総力戦体制による徹底したナショナリゼーションの過程が山村や河川の経済的役割と人々の態度を変化させ，さらには戦後に生まれた経済成長ナショナリズムといった新しいナショナリズムが反対運動をイデオロギー的に抑圧することによってダム建設を促進したことを論じた