Background
Tanaka Shōzō was bom on 15 December 1841 in Aso District of the province of Shimotsuke in present-day Tochigi Prefecture, the son of a nanushi (village head).
田中 正造
Tanaka Shōzō was bom on 15 December 1841 in Aso District of the province of Shimotsuke in present-day Tochigi Prefecture, the son of a nanushi (village head).
At the age of sixteen he succeeded his father as village head and continued in that post for the following twelve years. But he and his father joined in censuring the lord of the domain for the harshness of his rule and as a result were imprisoned and later expelled from the domain. In 1870 Tanaka became a minor official in the government of Esashi Prefecture, later a part of Iwate Prefecture. When one of his superior officials was assassinated, he was suspected of having a hand in the affair and was imprisoned for over three years.
In 1884 he was put in prison for opposing an engineering project ordered by Mishima Michitsune, the prefectural governor, which he felt would be too much of a burden on the people of the prefecture.
In the first general election, held in 1890, he was elected to the Lower House of the Diet. In 1891, at the second session of the Diet, he appealed to the government to take measures to combat the pollution caused by the Ashio Mine and thereafter devoted his full energies to this problem. The Ashio Mine, situated in Tochigi Prefecture, was owned and operated by Furukawa Ichibei, the founder of the Furukawa zaibatsu. Poisonous wastes from the mine were dumped into the Watarase River, killing the fish in the river and rendering the farmland in the area unfit for use.
In 1878 he determined to devote all his efforts to governmental reform and in 1879 founded a newspaper called the Tochigi Shimbun, in which he discussed the issues of the times. He participated in the democratic rights movement, in 1880 became a member of the prefectural assembly, and in 1886 became president of the assembly. During this period he also took part in the movement to establish a national Diet.
In 1900, a number of the farmers who were victims of the pollution went in a group to Tokyo to appeal their case and in the process clashed with the police. The following year, Tanaka resigned his seat in the Diet, and, when Emperor Meiji was returning from the opening ceremony of the Diet session, he presented a direct appeal to the emperor, the text of which had been written at his request by Kotoku Shusui. To solve the problem, the government proposed to buy up the farmland of the village of Yanaka and convert the area into an artificial lake, but Tanaka opposed this plan, took up residence in the village, and joined the farmers who were resisting it. The farmers, however, were split in their reaction to the government’s proposal, and in the end the resistance movement failed and the plan was put into effect. Though ill at the time, Tanaka set about conducting an investigation of the river, but collapsed on his way home to Yanaka and died a month later.
