Japan at Nature's Edge

Japan at Nature's Edge
Author: Ian Jared Miller
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Total Pages: 338
Release: 2013-07-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0824838777

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.

Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons

Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons
Author: Haruo Shirane
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 316
Release: 2012-03-20
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0231526520

Elegant representations of nature and the four seasons populate a wide range of Japanese genres and media—from poetry and screen painting to tea ceremonies, flower arrangements, and annual observances. In Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons, Haruo Shirane shows how, when, and why this practice developed and explicates the richly encoded social, religious, and political meanings of this imagery. Refuting the belief that this tradition reflects Japan's agrarian origins and supposedly mild climate, Shirane traces the establishment of seasonal topics to the poetry composed by the urban nobility in the eighth century. After becoming highly codified and influencing visual arts in the tenth and eleventh centuries, the seasonal topics and their cultural associations evolved and spread to other genres, eventually settling in the popular culture of the early modern period. Contrasted with the elegant images of nature derived from court poetry was the agrarian view of nature based on rural life. The two landscapes began to intersect in the medieval period, creating a complex, layered web of competing associations. Shirane discusses a wide array of representations of nature and the four seasons in many genres, originating in both the urban and rural perspective: textual (poetry, chronicles, tales), cultivated (gardens, flower arrangement), material (kimonos, screens), performative (noh, festivals), and gastronomic (tea ceremony, food rituals). He reveals how this kind of "secondary nature," which flourished in Japan's urban architecture and gardens, fostered and idealized a sense of harmony with the natural world just at the moment it was disappearing. Illuminating the deeper meaning behind Japanese aesthetics and artifacts, Shirane clarifies the use of natural images and seasonal topics and the changes in their cultural associations and function across history, genre, and community over more than a millennium. In this fascinating book, the four seasons are revealed to be as much a cultural construction as a reflection of the physical world.

Learning from Megadisasters

Learning from Megadisasters
Author: Federica Ranghieri
Publisher: World Bank Publications
Total Pages: 391
Release: 2014-06-26
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1464801541

While not all natural disasters can be avoided, their impact on a population can be mitigated through effective planning and preparedness. These are the lessons to be learned from Japan's own megadisaster: the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011, the fi rst disaster ever recorded that included an earthquake, a tsunami, a nuclear power plant accident, a power supply failure, and a large-scale disruption of supply chains. It is a sad fact that poor communities are often hardest hit and take the longest to recover from disaster. Disaster risk management (DRM) should therefore be taken into account as a major development challenge, and countries must shift from a tradition of response to a culture of prevention and resilience. Learning from Megadisasters: Lessons from the Great East Japan Earthquake consolidates a set of 36 Knowledge Notes, research results of a joint study undertaken by the Government of Japan and the World Bank. These notes highlight key lessons learned in seven DRM thematic clusters—structural measures; nonstructural measures; emergency response; reconstruction planning; hazard and risk information and decision making; the economics of disaster risk, risk management, and risk fi nancing; and recovery and relocation. Aimed at sharing Japanese cutting-edge knowledge with practitioners and decision makers, this book provides valuable guidance to other disaster-prone countries for mainstreaming DRM in their development policies and weathering their own natural disasters.

Environment, Modernization and Development in East Asia

Environment, Modernization and Development in East Asia
Author: Ts'ui-jung Liu
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 313
Release: 2016-04-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 1137572310

Environment, Modernization and Development in East Asia critically examines modernization's long-term environmental history. It suggests new frameworks for understanding as inter-related processes environmental, social, and economic change across China and Japan.

The Economic and Business History of Occupied Japan

The Economic and Business History of Occupied Japan
Author: Thomas French
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2017-08-07
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1317270088

The Occupation era (1945-1952) witnessed major change in Japan and the beginnings of its growth from of the ashes of defeat towards its status as a developmental model for much of the world. The period arguably saw the sowing of the seeds of the post-war flowering of what some term the ‘postwar Japanese economic miracle’. However, some scholars dispute this position and argue that the Occupation's policies and impacts actually hindered Japan's recovery. This volume addresses this question and others surrounding the business and economic history of this crucial period. The chapters presented in The Economic and Business History of Occupied Japan are authored by major scholars of the Occupation from the U.S., Japan, and Europe. The chapters are divided into three sections: 'Planning, reform and recovery', 'Industries under the Occupation', and 'Legacies of the Occupation era'. Following an introduction focusing on the historiographical background, the first section examines zaibatsu dissolution and its significance, the role of Japanese businessmen within the Occupation's reforms, the crucial impact of Japan's postwar Materials Crisis, and the impact of reform at the local level in Hokkaidō. Part two looks at a number of individual industries and their development during the era, including the fishing, automotive, and cotton spinning industries. The final section looks at the human impact of the changes of the initial postwar years, including the reintegration of repatriates into the Japanese labour force and the impact of changing working patterns on society and family life. This book covers a key period of the economic and business history of Japan and presents numerous new approaches and original contributions to the scholarship of the Occupation era. It will be of interest to scholars of modern Japan, economic history, business history, development studies and postwar U.S.-Japan relations.

Oceanic Japan

Oceanic Japan
Author: Stefan Huebner
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Total Pages: 433
Release: 2024-11-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 082489927X

Japan’s oceans demand our attention. Violent, prolific, and changeful, they define life and death on the archipelago: pushing the shore under the rush of tsunami, charging typhoon circulation, feeding millions, and seeding conflicts over territory and resources. And yet, Japan studies remains largely beholden to a terrestrial view of the world that is at odds with the importance of the sea. This “terrestrial bias” also means that on those occasions when oceans are recognized they are most often presented as dividers or connectors—spaces in between rather than rich ecologies and meaningful sites. Oceanic Japan is meant to help readers re-envision Japanese history in order to show how the seas created the country that we know today. The book convenes a diverse, multinational, multidisciplinary group of scholars to expand the scope of Japan studies and the field of environmental humanities. The chapters draw from the broader turn to the sea—characterized by new oceanic and terraqueous perspectives—developing within these fields and in areas such as Pacific history and Indian Ocean studies. The volume editors' vision is bifocal. On one hand, they aim to reorient East Asian studies and Japan studies to the sea, underlining how oceans have shaped dynamics from the Tokugawa Era forward into the age of empire and the crisis of the Anthropocene. On the other hand, they argue for a more nuanced environmental approach within the burgeoning field of Oceanic studies. Seeing oceanic spaces as more than entrepots or political spheres requires thinking in new, often vertical, volumetric ways. The chapters follow human and non-human actors to recognize the variegation of watery ecologies through winds, tides, coasts, seabeds, and currents such as the Kuroshio and Oyashio, which have always shaped life on the archipelago.

Blind in Early Modern Japan

Blind in Early Modern Japan
Author: Wei Yu Wayne Tan
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 267
Release: 2022-09-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 0472055488

A history of the blind in Japan that challenges contemporary notions of disability

Reopening the Opening of Japan

Reopening the Opening of Japan
Author: Lewis Bremner
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 444
Release: 2023-10-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004685200

The 'Opening of Japan' has been central to the retelling of Japan's modern history. Reopening the Opening of Japan fundamentally reconsiders what that historical moment entailed. What did intensified connections between Japan and the world mean both inside and outside of the country, and what does this tell us about Japan's historical significance on a global scale? The chapters excavate a rich array of surprising cross-border connections, from the global trade in mummified mermaids to the Japanese-Russian intellectual links underpinning the work of Akira Kurosawa. Re-thinking connectivity through non-state transnational perspectives, the book guides readers to new ways of doing and writing history. Contributors are: Lewis Bremner, Natalia Doan, Manimporok Dotulong, Maki Fukuoka, Eiko Honda, Sho Konishi, Mateja Kovacic, Joel Littler, Chinami Oka, Yu Sakai, Olga Solovieva, and Warren Stanislaus.

Environmental Histories of the First World War

Environmental Histories of the First World War
Author: Richard P. Tucker
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 325
Release: 2018-08-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108429165

Surveys the ecological impacts of World War I, showing how the war had a global impact on the environment.

Routledge Handbook of Modern Japanese History

Routledge Handbook of Modern Japanese History
Author: Sven Saaler
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 700
Release: 2017-10-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 1317599039

The Routledge Handbook of Modern Japanese History is a concise overview of modern Japanese history from the middle of the nineteenth century until the end of the twentieth century. Written by a group of international historians, each an authority in his or her field, the book covers modern Japanese history in an accessible yet comprehensive manner. The subjects featured in the book range from the development of the political system and matters of international relations, to social and economic history and gender issues, to post-war discussions about modern Japan’s historical trajectory and its wartime past. Divided into thematic parts, the sections include: Nation, empire and borders Ideologies and the political system Economy and society Historical legacies and memory Each chapter outlines important historiographical debates and controversies, summarizes the latest developments in the field, and identifies research topics that have not yet received sufficient scholarly attention. As such, the book will be useful to students and scholars of Japanese history, Asian history and Asian Studies.