Timothy George will discuss the two parts of his current research project on Toroku, a hamlet in the mountains of Miyazaki Prefecture on Japan’s southernmost main island of Kyūshū devastated by arsenic poisoning that was Japan’s fourth officially recognized postwar pollution disease. He will first describe five key moments in the longue durée environmental history of Toroku, from neolithic times up to the early years of the arsenic mining that began there in 1920 and ended in 1962. Next he will trace events since 1990, when the Supreme Court imposed a settlement compensating the Toroku arsenic victims. Instead of disappearing, the citizens’ group that had formed to support the victims transformed itself into an international NGO, the Asia Arsenic Network, working mostly in Bangladesh. The Toroku story reinforces one of the fundamental truths of environmental history: there is no such thing as a history of just one small place.