A01=Greg Clancey
architecture
Author_Greg Clancey
building codes
building materials
building project
Category=NHF
earthquake safety
earthquake science
earthquakes
ecology
environment
environmental history
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
great kant earthquake
great nobi earthquake
infrastructure
japan
meiji
meiji restoration
modern japan
modernity
nation
natural disasters
nonfiction
osaka
science
seismic activity
seismic waves
self fashioning
structural integrity
tokyo
traditional architecture
western architecture
wooden building
wooden structures
Product details
- ISBN 9780520246072
- Weight: 635g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 01 May 2006
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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Accelerating seismic activity in late Meiji Japan climaxed in the legendary Great Nobi Earthquake of 1891, which rocked the main island from Tokyo to Osaka, killing thousands. Ironically, the earthquake brought down many 'modern' structures built on the advice of foreign architects and engineers, while leaving certain traditional, wooden ones standing. This book, the first English-language history of modern Japanese earthquakes and earthquake science, considers the cultural and political ramifications of this and other catastrophic events on Japan's relationship with the West, with modern science, and with itself. Gregory Clancey argues that seismicity was both the Achilles' heel of Japan's nation-building project - revealing the state's western-style infrastructure to be surprisingly fragile - and a new focus for nativizing discourses which credited traditional Japanese architecture with unique abilities to ride out seismic waves.
Tracing his subject from the Meiji Restoration to the Great Kant Earthquake of 1923 (which destroyed Tokyo), Clancey shows earthquakes to have been a continual though mercurial agent in Japan's self-fashioning; a catastrophic undercurrent to Japanese modernity. This innovative and absorbing study not only moves earthquakes nearer the center of modern Japan change - both materially and symbolically - but shows how fundamentally Japan shaped the global art, science, and culture of natural disaster.
Gregory Clancey, Assistant Professor of History at the National University of Singapore, is editor, with Alan Chan and Loy Hui-chieh, of Historical Perspectives on East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine (2002) and editor, with M.R. Smith, of Major Problems in the History of American Technology (1998).
