Few people think of the Ogasawara Islands as a place of historical interest. When I first said I was going to the islands to do research, one person assumed I was making the 25-hour ferry ride to study dolphins; another told me there was no history on the islands to study.

The islands are about 1,000 km south of Tokyo, roughly along the same line of latitude as Okinawa. The first settlers were non-human. Plants and animals from Polynesia, Southeast Asia and Northeast Asia rode trans-Pacific air and ocean currents to the Ogasawaras for millenniums. While there is evidence of human settlement some 5,000 years ago — in the form of a couple of stone tools at the University of Tokyo — the islands were left undisturbed until the early 19th century.

Their out-there-ness lends itself to the idea that they are wild, far away from transformative processes like industrialization or commercial agriculture. But it wasn't that long ago that the Ogasawaras were where it was at commercially and militarily.

From the late 1820s, the islands' ecologies were worked into the global market economy: Whaling interests from America and Europe saw the islands as an ideal location to replenish provisions, repair their vessels and even jump ship.

Japanese settlers dominated the ecology of the islands from the 1880s, and for nearly four decades they logged trees, blasted rocks, harvested coral, and built towns and military bases.

While we think of the islands as one of the last remaining wild places in Japan, a glance over even the most pedestrian of histories of the Ogasawaras reveals they have been a place where people walked, shoveled and bulldozed for nearly 200 years.

In fact, it was only after the majority of the islands were designated as a national park in 1971 that human beings began to approach the nature of the islands in a less destructive way, producing what has been called "environmental culture (kankyo bunka)." The term is meant to suggest people have found a meaningful, and less intense and invasive way of living with the "nature" of the Ogasawara Islands.

While I think that the promotion of "environmental culture" is worthwhile, it has limits in helping us understand the ways in which people have lived and continue to live in the Ogasawara Islands. In particular, the term doesn't give other kinds of labor their due. The islands were produced by intense and often unpleasant kinds of labor, much more unpleasant that going for a hike or a kayak trip on an ecotour.

Addressing the ways in which people worked the islands disrupts the idea that there was one "environmental culture." Rather, there were likely as many "environmental cultures"as there were kinds of labor. Whatever kind of labor was performed, knowledge-producing practices about nature were tied to people's particular form of livelihood there.

Since most of the settlers came to the Ogasawaras for the expressed purpose of making a life there, it is important to think of the ways in which people marked that landscape culturally and materially. These marks are so deep that separating what is "wild" or "natural" from what is cultivated or man-made is impossible.

While it has been fashionable to think of the ways in which industrialized societies like Japan have worked to erode their reliance on nature, it might be more fruitful to look at how the structures and technologies of industrialized Japan refashioned an inseparable relationship between humans and nature. Certainly, the labor of agrarian capitalism and modern science that unfolded in the Ogasawara Islands was sometimes exploitive, but ignoring it isn't going to help people reconcile with the "natures" that have been produced on the islands.

The writer lives in Japan and is completing his Ph.D. in history.