University of Hawai'i Press
Japan at Nature's Edge
-
Edited by:
About this book
Japan at Nature’s Edge is a timely collection of essays that explores the relationship between Japan’s history, culture, and physical environment. It greatly expands the focus of previous work on Japanese modernization by examining Japan’s role in global environmental transformation and how Japanese ideas have shaped bodies and landscapes over the centuries. The immediacy of Earth’s environmental crisis, a predicament highlighted by Japan’s March 2011 disaster, brings a sense of urgency to the study of Japan and its global connections.
The work is an environmental history in the broadest sense of the term because it contains writing by environmental anthropologists, a legendary Japanese economist, and scholars of Japanese literature and culture. The editors have brought together an unparalleled assemblage of some of the finest scholars in the field who, rather than treat it in isolation or as a unique cultural community, seek to connect Japan to global environmental currents such as whaling, world fisheries, mountaineering and science, mining and industrial pollution, and relations with nonhuman animals.
The contributors assert the importance of the environment in understanding Japan’s history and propose a new balance between nature and culture, one weighted much more heavily on the side of natural legacies. This approach does not discount culture. Instead, it suggests that the Japanese experience of nature, like that of all human beings, is a complex and intimate negotiation between the physical and cultural worlds.
Contributors: Daniel P. Aldrich, Jakobina Arch, Andrew Bernstein, Philip C. Brown, Timothy S. George, Jeffrey E. Hanes, David L. Howell, Federico Marcon, Christine L. Marran, Ian Jared Miller, Micah Muscolino, Ken’ichi Miyamoto, Sara B. Pritchard, Julia Adeney Thomas, Karen Thornber, William M. Tsutsui, Brett L. Walker, Takehiro Watanabe.
Author / Editor information
Topics
-
Download PDFPublicly Available
Frontmatter
i -
Download PDFPublicly Available
Contents
ix -
Download PDFPublicly Available
Preface
xi -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
Writing Japan at Nature’s Edge: The Promises and Perils of Environmental History
1 - Part I: Oceans and Empires
-
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
1. The Pelagic Empire: Reconsidering Japanese Expansion
21 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
From Meat to Machine Oil: The Nineteenth-Century Development of Whaling in Wakayama
39 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
Fisheries Build Up the Nation: Maritime Environmental Encounters Between Japan and China
56 - Part II: Changing Landscapes
-
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
Talking Sulfur Dioxide: Air Pollution and the Politics of Science in Late Meiji Japan
73 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
Constructing Nature
90 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
Toroku: Mountain Dreams, Chemical Nightmares
115 - Part III: Between Bodies
-
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
Fecal Matters: Prolegomenon to a History of Shit in Japan
137 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
Weathering Fuji: Marriage, Meteorology, and the Meiji Bodyscape
152 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
Animal Histories: Stranger in a Tokyo Canal
175 - Part IV: Vistas and Vantage Points
-
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
Inventorying Nature: Tokugawa Yoshimune and the Sponsorship of Honzōgaku in Eighteenth-Century Japan
189 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
Japanese Literature and Environmental Crises
207 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
Japanese Environmental Policy: Lessons from Experience and Remaining Problems
222 - Part V: The Triple Disaster of 3/11
-
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
An Envirotechnical Disaster: Negotiating Nature, Technology, and Politics at Fukushima
255 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
Postcrisis Japanese Nuclear Policy: From Topdown Directives to Bottom-Up Activism
280 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
Using Japan to Think Globally: The Natural Subject of History and Its Hopes
293 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
List of Contributors
311 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
Index
315
