Japan at nature's edge : the environmental context of a global power

Writing Japan at nature's edge : the promises and perils of environmental history / Ian Jared Miller
The pelagic empire : reconsidering Japanese expansion / William M. Tsutsui
From meat to machine oil : the nineteenth-century development of whaling in Wakayama / Jakobina Arch
Fisheries build up the nation : maritime environmental encounters between Japan and China / Micah Muscolino
Talking sulfur dioxide : air pollution and the politics of science in late Meiji Japan / Takehiro Watanabe
Constructing nature / Philip C. Brown
Toroku : mountain dreams, chemical nightmares / Timothy S. George
Fecal matters : prolegomenon to a history of shit in Japan / David L. Howell
Weathering Fuji : marriage, meteorology, and the Meiji bodyscape / Andrew Bernstein
Animal histories : stranger in a Tokyo canal / Christine L. Marran
Inventorying nature : Tokugawa Yoshimune and the sponsorship of honzōgaku in eighteenth-century Japan / Federico Marcon
Japanese literature and environmental crises / Karen Thornber
Japanese environmental policy : lessons from experience and remaining problems / Ken'ichi Miyamoto
An envirotechnical disaster : negotiating nature, technology, and politics at Fukushima / Sara B. Pritchard
Postcrisis Japanese nuclear policy : from top-down directives to bottom-up activism / Daniel P. Aldrich
Using Japan to think globally : the natural subject of history and its hopes / Julia Adeney Thomas

This book 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. -- Publisher's website