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- Convenor:
-
Jonas Ruegg
(Harvard University)
Send message to Convenor
- Chair:
-
Sheldon Garon
(Princeton University)
- Section:
- History
- Sessions:
- Friday 27 August, -
Time zone: Europe/Brussels
Short Abstract:
This panel seeks out three instances of Japan's experience with modern alienations. It connects the reliance on ever-expanding resource frontiers to scientific abstraction of warfare, thus calling for approaches to empire that encompass both the material and intellectual spheres.
Long Abstract:
The discovery of the Anthropocene as a historical epoch has brought new dimensions to the writing of global history. Traveling species, spreading disease, and transnational ecosystems not only prompt us to challenge the nation state as a unit of analysis, but also demand new definitions of global entanglement and industrial transformation. We argue that the alienations at the origin of the modern age widened the distance in power and space between metropole and periphery, engineers and environment, strategists and battlefields.
Covering the century leading up to the ultimate catastrophe of World War II, this panel maps such alienations through thought, technology, and environmental change. These transformations were mutually connected and had irreversible effects for global society. The first presenter finds that embedded in a global ecosystem, early modern Japan had been competing over maritime resources with distant adversaries, joining a scramble for pelagic whale grounds once the impacts of Western whaling had become evident in Japan. The second presenter shows how this scramble in the 20th century made the exploitation of ever-farther maritime frontiers a project central to nationalist ideology, and how the resulting migration and expansion became crucial to Japan's imperial project. With the industrialization of fishing, the remoteness of ever-changing frontiers delayed the visibility of decline and death in maritime ecosystems. With the industrialization of war, human suffering also became less and less visible. Therefore, argues the third presenter, the bombing of urban centers had become abstracted into a scientific practice of effective warfare at the hands of the allied forces.
Connecting three episodes of Japan's modern experience with the archipelago's inhabitants as both perpetrators and victims, this panel calls for a redefinition of global modernity based on its blind reliance on expendable frontiers and its paradoxical retreat to a discursively isolated and ostensibly safe metropole.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 27 August, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the potentials and limitations of writing a history of early modern knowledge, technology, and environmental transformation through 19th century Japan's experience with the globally connected expansion of whaling frontiers.
Paper long abstract:
1858 had started out as an exciting year for Nakahama Manjirō. The Tokugawa government of Japan had finally responded to his petitions and dispatched the former fisherman to the Oyashio current off Hokkaido. There, he was to catch whales with methods only foreigners had practiced off the shores of Japan. Equipped with a Russian-style schooner, the latest spoils of Japanese espionage, the former castaway who once served on an American vessel, was to open a new, Oceanic frontier for Japanese whaling, in order to counteract the steady decline in domestic catch. The mission of tapping into a new, and, for the Japanese sailors, completely unfamiliar environment, however, ended with a near-havoc in the Philippine Sea.
This attempt at technological modernization stood in a longer perspective of an expanding maritime resource base. Since the 18th century, magistrates of Izu Province had invited expert whalers to attempt the introduction of whaling in the region, both to accommodate growing demand in whale products and in response to signs of depletion in older whaling grounds. Just like Atlantic whaling shifted to ever-new frontiers, growing whale catches in the Pacific necessitated improved technologies and new concepts for maritime knowledge, long before the scramble on the open sea.
This paper explores the potentials and limitations of writing a history of early modern knowledge, technology, and environmental transformation through the globally connected experience of whales. While historical ecosystems are hard to reconstruct, the reduced activity of whales as nutrient transporters from the deep sea to shallow layers has affected the abundance of other species. Accordingly, this study locates the origins of the Anthropocene far beyond the discovery of fossil fuels, as technological progress and frontier expansion appear as inevitable responses to commercialization and resource depletion. Thus, historicizing pelagic ecosystems can shed new light on the causations of political change in allegedly 'secluded' Tokugawa Japan, and raise new questions regarding Japan's imperial departure to the Pacific.
Paper short abstract:
Scholars commonly assume that the bombing of Japanese cities resulted primarily from racism and even genocidal motivations. This paper situates the bombing of Japan in a decades-long process of transnational learning that involved a re-imagining of the place of the modern city in warfare.
Paper long abstract:
How had it become "normal" to destroy the built environment of urban centers by the Second World War? Scholars commonly assume that the US firebombing and atomic-bombing of 66 Japanese cities resulted primarily from racism and even genocidal motivations. This paper, however, situates the bombing of Japan in a decades-long process of transnational learning among nations in Europe, North America, and East Asia that involved a re-imagining of the place of the modern city in warfare. Beginning in the First World War, belligerents vigorously studied each other's strategies to "disrupt" economic and social organization in the enemy's cities, while investigating efforts to maintain the vitality of one's own urban environments by means of "civilian defense" against bombardment. They increasingly envisioned the city as both a built environment and a social organism—which functioned as the "nerve center" of the national body. Bombing would sever the "sinews" in this organism, they prophesied, culminating in breakdowns in communications, diminished economic activity, and panic and chaos among the civilian defenders and producers. Belligerents rarely aimed at the long-term degradation of the "natural" environment (a "Carthaginian peace"). Rather they sought to eviscerate the interconnections between human beings that sustained urban environments and the urban-based mechanisms of Total War (factories and neighborhood civil-defense and food-rationing organizations).
This paper focuses on the aerial bombardment of China, Germany, Britain, and Japan in 1937-45. The inclusion of Japan, as bomber and bombed, contributes to a more global, connected history of the Second World War. Why Japanese cities were bombed, and how they were bombed, was not an exceptional story, but was intimately connected to what the Allies had learned from bombing European urban environments.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores how environmental change and Japanese fisheries labor migration in the Indo-Pacific in the first half of the 20th Century were reinforcing each other embedded in a transimperal race for fish.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores how environmental change and Japanese fisheries labor migration in the Indo-Pacific in the first half of the 20th Century were reinforcing each other well before the "great acceleration" attributed to the post-WWII years or and the phenomenon of environmental refugees of the post-Cold War era. By focusing on tuna fishermen, it highlights how Japanese transpacific fisheries labor migration throughout this period was driven to a significant degree by man-made environmental transformation which saw the dramatic depletion of fish stocks in the coastal waters of Japan, and the changing migration patterns of tuna.
New technologies and fishing techniques enabled fishermen within the Japanese Empire to access tuna on the open sea. A new frontier of tuna fisheries was pushed into new fishing grounds in ecological strata that had previously been untouched. The expanding Japanese Empire played a crucial role in accelerating this process. While the new techniques allowed for migration, they also reinforced environmental change and the inevitable crash of newly discovered fishing grounds in the foreseeable future. This lead to increasing concern as to how best to deal with the tuna commons among fisheries migrants in Micronesia and its surrounding waters and islands. They aimed to regulate human interaction with tuna in order to stabilize fluctuating tuna stocks. However, Indo-Pacific waters more and more became a theater of transimperial competition not only in military terms, but a locale of an increasingly aggressive race for fish. This lead to conflicting ideas regarding fisheries management and the question of how to deal with tuna commons remained unsolved in the face of increased overfishing due to a lack of temporal and geographical goalposts, which were not in the interests of the expanding Japanese empire.