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| 1 |
ID:
135950
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| Summary/Abstract |
This essay shows how a new understanding of the animal – and thus the human – developed in Japan over the course of the nineteenth century. Inspired by Linnaean nomenclature, the delineation of a new ‘animal kingdom’ (dōbutsukai) in Japan led to a radical rethinking of the human place in the natural world. Given early form by the natural historian Udagawa Yōan (1798–1846) in his 1822 Botany Sutra (Botanika kyō), that vision – in which people became ‘animals who can reason’ – carried ramifications for the emergence of the modern sciences in Japan, most notably biology and zoology (dōbutsugaku). By the close of the century, the once-foreign kingdoms of Animalia and Plantae were fully naturalized, and they were quickly put to political use. Fueled by the emerging debate over social evolution, the new natural history gathered a diverse assemblage of living creatures together into a single classificatory kingdom, elevating nomenclature to the level of a natural order that seemed to transcend concerns of individual people even as it gave structure and meaning to their lives. The imagination of the modern ‘civilized’ human being, then, was impossible without the definition of a new animal world.
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| 2 |
ID:
135952
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article examines popular representations of Japan and China before and during the war, assesses the ideas of key figures from the press, and considers the ways in which media and policy interacted through the influence of opinion leaders. These prepared the way for the ‘soft’ peace relying on Japanese cooperation that would become the basis for a new alliance between America and Japan.
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| 3 |
ID:
135948
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| Summary/Abstract |
Kenneth Pomeranz’s Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy took the scholarly world by storm over ten years ago and still energizes debates in global history today.1 Pomeranz’s broad vision, clarity of analysis, careful research, and generous citations provincialized Europe on material grounds just as Dipesh Chakrabarty had provincialized Europe on intellectual grounds.2 The Great Divergence proposed that the economic productivity of northwestern Europe and core parts of China (especially the Yangzi Delta) had been roughly equivalent as late as 1800, followed by China’s swift economic decline in both relative and absolute terms. This argument weaned many adherents, though not all, from the older view of the West’s long-term, deep-rooted superiority.3 In subsequent discussions however, ‘China’ was often read as ‘Asia’, leaving Japan scholars relegated to the shadows, haunting the debate like hungry ghosts with no ground to stand on. Not only intellectually but also institutionally, The Great Divergence unintentionally helped obscure Japan from view because it appeared in 2001 just as the juggernaut of Chinese economic dominance rose above the horizon. University administrators, history departments, and global historians writing, as most do, from that perspective of Europe seemed to have found an ‘Asia’ sufficient to their wants, and many desired no other. Even though Japan remained the second and then the third largest economy in the world during the first decade of the twenty-first century, its historical and theoretical importance ebbed. In considering the rise of modern prosperity, it no longer seemed essential to think about Japan. At times Japan even appeared to be written out of world history and global consciousness.
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| 4 |
ID:
135949
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| Summary/Abstract |
After the economic crises of the 1790s and 1830s, various domains of Tokugawa Japan initiated a series of reforms of their administrative and productive systems. Among these, the reform plan carried on by the Shimazu lords of the Satsuma domain, in the southern island of Kyushu, is particularly revealing. Under the lead of Zusho Hirosato and inspired by the writings of scholar Satō Nobuhiro, Satsuma became one of the wealthiest regions of nineteenth-century Japan. The plan consisted of assuring direct samurai control over productive and marketing activities, the development of monoculture in cash-crops like sugarcane in the southern islands of Amami and Okinawa (under the proto-colonial administration of Satsuma) and food self-sufficiency on the mainland. The philosophical foundations of this reform plan rested on a conceptualization of a systematic human domination over nature that coincided with similar notions developed in Europe and that unfolded in an analogous framework of exploitation of natural resources, labor reorganization, complete monetization of economic life, and market-oriented productive activities. Nobuhiro invented a Japanese form of ‘political economy’ (keizai) which exercised, directly and indirectly, a considerable influence among Meiji political oligarchs, economists, and intellectuals throughout the nation’s modernizing years. It also contributed to redefining both the human relationship with the material environment and knowledge as an instrument in economic growth
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| 5 |
ID:
135951
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| Summary/Abstract |
Given the clear convergence of practices of nature across the traditional East-West divide examined in these essays, it is not surprising to learn that the consequences of the particular practice of nature characteristic of industrial capitalism also converged around similar problems such as deforestation, smog, and water pollution, all with their attendant ill effects on health and prosperity. If we look at the key period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the West and in Japan we also find a vast, shared reaction to and critique of the destructive aspect of the great convergence. Here I will focus on a particular instance of this global critical movement found in anarchism, specifically the thought and practice of Ishikawa Sanshirō (1876–1956). Influenced by Edward Carpenter and the Reclus brothers, Elisée and Paul, Ishikawa did not privilege the newly emerging industrial proletariat as the revolutionary subject as did fellow anarchists Ōsugi Sakae and Kōtoku Shūsui. Instead he stayed in the countryside to focus on the separation of humans from nature as the greatest problem of modern societies, eventually developing a theory of ‘dynamic social aesthetics’ (dōtai shakai bigaku) critical of both the ‘cornucopianism’ of infinite exploitation and later the Japanization of nature during the war. In many ways Ishikawa anticipated the recent neo-Lamarckian ‘epigenetics revolution’ and the current call to consider humanity’s unprecedented ability to intervene in its environment a geological force that defines our age.
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