In Tokugawa Edo, men with baskets on their backs walked the streets calling “kamikuzu-kai!” — paper-scrap buyer. They bought used letters, broken umbrellas, worn-out lanterns, and resold them to mills that re-pulped the fibres into fresh sheets. They were one tile in a mosaic of specialist trades — ash-buyers for fertiliser, metal-casters who patched leaking pots, umbrella-strippers who recovered bamboo and oil-paper separately — that kept one of the largest pre-industrial cities on earth running almost without waste. Edo wasn’t sustainable because it wanted to be. It was sustainable because nothing was cheap enough to throw away.
I open with the paper-buyer because Edo is the world my dissertation lives in. My research traces political violence in the late Tokugawa and early Meiji periods — the shishi lineage from Bakumatsu assassins through the killing of Ōkubo Toshimichi in 1878 to the founding of the Gen’yōsha. A placement at the University of Tokyo means inheriting, briefly, the sensibility that made mottainai — the small ache of waste — a working principle rather than a slogan. It would feel dishonest to study this society and move through it as a high-impact consumer.
The flight is the one cost I can’t redesign: roughly two tonnes of CO₂ to reach Tokyo and back. Everything else I can.
I’m choosing one long placement over multiple short trips — the lower-carbon shape that serious archival work rewards anyway (SDG 13). Inter-city research, including Kyoto and the Satsuma archives in Kagoshima, will be by Shinkansen, never domestic flight (SDG 11). I’m front-loading what the National Diet Library’s digital collections allow before I travel, cutting both time on the ground and photocopying once I’m there. Day-to-day: a refillable bottle in a country whose tap water is among the world’s cleanest, a furoshiki in my bag instead of plastic ones, family-run minshuku and neighbourhood shokudō rather than international chains — choices that move my yen toward small operators rather than aggregators (SDGs 8 and 12).
These aren’t new practices. On previous visits I’ve used IC cards rather than disposable tickets, sorted moeru / moenai / shigen recycling carefully (Japan’s system shames a London recycler), and eaten shun produce because seasonal cooking is built into menus rather than offered as an upcharge.
What the application asks me to think harder about is how to share this. I plan to write a piece for the LSE History Society on Edo’s circular economy and what a generation that has rediscovered the word “sustainability” can learn from a city that lived the practice. Among my table tennis teammates and coursemates planning placements of their own, I’ll make the unfashionable case for one long stay over many short ones — the slow, reciprocal exchange SDG 17 actually calls for. Sustainability spreads among peers less through preaching than through visible choices that look easy enough to copy.
The paper-buyer’s call was that nothing was beyond use. It’s a wonderful principle to travel by.
