By Nikki Babri
What if humans could learn to think and act more like plants? While this might sound like science fiction, UC Irvine Associate Professor of East Asian Studies Jon Pitt argues that Japanese writers and filmmakers have been grappling with this question for a century.
His new open-access book, Botanical Imagination: Rethinking Plants in Modern Japan (Cornell University Press, 2025), explores how artists turned to the botanical realm as a model for adaptation and resistance during moments of crisis.
Unearthing hidden histories
The book grew out of Pitt’s time as a graduate student at UC Berkeley, where he noticed something curious. While plants appeared everywhere in the novels and short stories he was reading, they remained invisible in scholarly conversations.
During a field work research trip to Japan with Berkeley’s Architecture Department, the group had a brief opportunity to interview renowned architect Kuma Kengo about Sunny Hills, a fully wooden building in Tokyo. When Pitt asked whether Kuma felt a spiritual connection to the wood despite the building’s commercial purpose, the architect responded without hesitation: “Yes, of course. Wood is a kind of god.”
“It was then that I realized that the intersections of science, spirituality, art and commerce could all meet through plant life,” Pitt explains. His work is situated within Critical Plant Studies (CPS), an emerging interdisciplinary field that takes plants seriously as subjects of humanities research.
While animal studies have long examined human-animal relationships – we can see reflections of ourselves in their pain, care and communication, after all – plants have been overlooked, largely because they fundamentally challenge human understanding of what it means to be alive.
Plants are the most abundant living organisms on the planet, but humans rarely think deeply about their dependence on botanical life for essential resources like oxygen and food. And despite acknowledging that plants are living organisms, most people still consider them less “alive” than animals or humans.
Where science meets storytelling
CPS pushes back against this hierarchy and calls for moving plants from background to foreground. “Once we accept that plants, too, have histories, our experiences with texts become enriched with a new layer of meaning and context,” Pitt explains. “When you start really thinking about how much of your life depends on plants, you are bound to encounter the world differently.”
This shift in perspective proved particularly productive when applied to Japanese literature and cinema, where plants have always been present but rarely examined critically. For Pitt, deeper engagement meant looking beyond traditional aesthetics to discover how Japanese artists integrated botanical science into their creative work.
“I became fascinated by the ways in which writers and filmmakers either engaged directly with science or brought scientific concepts into their art,” he reflects. “When you look at plants, at least in the modern era, you see how blurry the line between science and art becomes.”
Much of Pitt’s research required reading scientific texts, but he was surprised to discover how influential the pseudoscientific 1973 bestseller The Secret Life of Plants was on writers considered “serious authors.” The book’s claims about direct communication with plants fascinated artists even after scientists debunked them.
“From an environmental humanities perspective, the fact that the science has been debunked does not mean it is any less interesting or worthy of study,” Pitt argues. “It’s an important cultural touchstone that inspired a generation to look for plasticity in the botanical realm.”
Taking root in times of crisis
The central concept Pitt introduces is “becoming botanical,” the idea that humans might adopt plant-like qualities to navigate periods of crisis. For nearly a century, from around 1930 to the present day, Japanese artists have turned to plants as models for survival during turbulent times.
Plants excel at adaptation because they cannot simply flee from danger; they must transform themselves to survive changing conditions. This quality, which scientists call “plasticity,” became a template for human resilience. The artists Pitt studies found themselves similarly immobilized during Japan’s periods of crisis, from war and colonial violence in the 1930s-40s and postwar trauma to economic depression and the 2011 Fukushima disaster. Like rooted plants responding to threat, they sought transformation – plasticity – as survival.
This search for botanical plasticity took distinctive forms in Japan, where plants like cherry blossoms and bonsai trees have long held cultural prominence. But Pitt discovered something more radical in modern Japanese works. Drawing on the Japanese concept of shokubutsusei (roughly “plant-ness” or “botanicality”), developed by scholar Fujihara Tatsushi, he identifies how artists created “botanical forms” – works that weren’t simply about plants but attempted to write and create like plants, incorporating botanical logic into the very structure of their art.
In the moss-filled writings of modernist author Osaki Midori from the 1930s, Pitt suggests the prose mimics moss itself: “indistinct and repetitive at first glance but, like moss, carefully constructed and full of minute details on closer examination.” Haniya Yutaka’s long, sprawling postwar novel Dead Spirits captures the expansive, haunting qualities of forests in its philosophical prose. Filmmaker Kawase Naomi’s cinematography moves at the cyclical pace of trees experiencing time. Contemporary poet Hiromi Ito’s unruly verse embodies the wild qualities of weeds and vines.
“Anyone who has kept a garden and has tried to keep weeds out of a given area knows the tenacity of plants and their ability to sprout up where you least expect them,” Pitt explains. In becoming botanical, these artists found ways to become “untamable, unruly and potentially nongovernable.”
While Botanical Imagination examines Japanese cultural history, Pitt believes its insights remain vital for our current moment. “It was fascinating to me that writers in the 1930s were circling many of the same ideas about plants that contemporary artists are still engaging with,” he shares. The botanical approach, he adds, allows for discussions across national boundaries and academic disciplines. Scholars are doing similar work in Critical Plant Studies with German, American, Korean, Chinese, Taiwanese and Indian literature, among others.
He sees particular relevance in how botanical modes of being might offer resilience in the age of AI and mass surveillance. “AI is very much about simplification and prediction, while plants defy human predictability and favor complexity and excess,” he explains. “As AI continues to be pushed into our lives and classrooms, and as it continues to support surveillance efforts at an alarming scale, I hope my work helps inspire readers to become botanically complex and explore underground.”
Branching into the present
As the new director of UCI’s Environmental Humanities Research Center, Pitt is bringing this botanical perspective to his programming. This fall’s lecture featured guest speaker Dr. Alyssa Paredes from the University of Michigan, whose environmental-anthropological work examines banana plantations in the Philippines. Pitt’s scholarship also informs the center’s programming, with upcoming film screenings and in-person Q&As with Chinese documentary filmmakers Zhao Liang and Jiang Nengjie.
Along with teaching students about botanical representation in Studio Ghibli films in Humanities Core this quarter, Pitt is working on two new book projects. The first examines DIY subcultures of fermentation and composting in Japan; the other draws from his own family history to explore artistic and scientific collaboration between Japan and New Mexico following the Manhattan Project. Additionally, he’s translating poetry for an upcoming exhibit at the UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum of Art centered on artist Tokio Ueyama, who founded an art collective in Los Angeles before World War II.
“I hope readers take away a sense that thinking about plants can be more than a conservative retreat from more pressing matters,” Pitt says. “Plants are political, and how we think about them and engage with them, and potentially even try to model our behaviors on their behaviors, has radical possibilities.”
At the same time, he notes, we can see how those in power use botanical logic to control and “weed out” certain marginalized populations. Botanical Imagination speaks to our current moment as much as it reveals moments of modern Japanese history and offers, Pitt hopes, a framework for rethinking what it means to be human, what it means to resist and what it means to adapt and grow.
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