Japan: Nation Building Nature

Japan: Nation Building Nature PDF Author: Joachim Nijs
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789462086135
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
A new history of modern Japanese architecture, from an environmental perspective Joachim Nijs' Japan: Nation Building Natureis the first book to map out the views of nature that have shaped the widely acclaimed but often misunderstood modern architecture of Japan. By connecting the dots between philosophy, design, geopolitics and an earnest quest for a greener tomorrow, this book explains how Japanese culture can shed new light on our understanding of ecology, and vice versa. Using a distinctive blend of academic research and personal experience, Nijs draws on architectural history to navigate Japan's complex and unique ecological ethic through the lens of four typological phenomena: earthquakes, monsoon climates, nuclear erasure of life and insularity. This imaginative and refreshing book offers key insights and references for anyone wishing to deepen their knowledge of Japan and its architecture.

Japan: Nation Building Nature

Japan: Nation Building Nature PDF Author: Joachim Nijs
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789462086135
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Get Book

Book Description
A new history of modern Japanese architecture, from an environmental perspective Joachim Nijs' Japan: Nation Building Natureis the first book to map out the views of nature that have shaped the widely acclaimed but often misunderstood modern architecture of Japan. By connecting the dots between philosophy, design, geopolitics and an earnest quest for a greener tomorrow, this book explains how Japanese culture can shed new light on our understanding of ecology, and vice versa. Using a distinctive blend of academic research and personal experience, Nijs draws on architectural history to navigate Japan's complex and unique ecological ethic through the lens of four typological phenomena: earthquakes, monsoon climates, nuclear erasure of life and insularity. This imaginative and refreshing book offers key insights and references for anyone wishing to deepen their knowledge of Japan and its architecture.

Painting Nature for the Nation

Painting Nature for the Nation PDF Author: Rosina Buckland
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004249419
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
In Painting Nature for the Nation: Taki Katei and the Challenges to Sinophile Culture in Meiji Japan, Rosina Buckland offers an account of the career of the painter Taki Katei (1830–1901). Drawing on a large body of previously unpublished paintings, collaborative works and book illustrations by this highly successful, yet neglected, figure, Buckland traces how Katei transformed his art and practice based in modes derived from China in order to fulfil the needs of the modern nation-state at large-scale exhibitions and at the imperial court.

Japan at Nature's Edge

Japan at Nature's Edge PDF Author: Ian Jared Miller
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 9780824838768
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
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’s Environmental Politics and Governance

Japan’s Environmental Politics and Governance PDF Author: Yasuo Takao
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1317517784
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
Environmental issues stretch across scales of geographic space and require action at multiple levels of jurisdiction, including the individual level, community level, national level, and global level. Much of the scholarly work surrounding new approaches to environmental governance tends to overlook the role of sub-national governments, but this study examines the potential of sub-national participation to make policy choices which are congruent with global strategies and national mandates. This book investigates the emerging actors and new channels of Japan’s environmental governance which has been taking shape within an increasingly globalized international system. By analysing this important new phenomenon, it sheds light on the changing nature of Japan’s environmental policy and politics, and shows how the links between global strategies, national mandates and local action serve as an influential factor in Japan’s changing structures of environmental governance. Further, it demonstrates that decision-making competencies are shared between actors operating at different levels and in new spheres of authority, resulting from collaboration between state and non-state actors. It highlights a number of the problems, challenges, and critiques of the actors in environmental governance, as well as raising new empirical and theoretical puzzles for the future study of governance over environmental and global issues. Finally, it concludes that changes in the tiers and new spheres of authority are leading the nation towards an environmentally stable future positioned within socio-economic and political constraints. Demonstrating that bridging policy gaps between local action, national policy and global strategies is potentially a way of reinventing environmental policy, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of Environmental Studies, Environmental Politics and Japanese Politics.

Shinto, Nature and Ideology in Contemporary Japan

Shinto, Nature and Ideology in Contemporary Japan PDF Author: Aike P. Rots
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474289959
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Shinto, Nature and Ideology in Contemporary Japan is the first systematic study of Shinto's environmental turn. The book traces the development in recent decades of the idea of Shinto as an 'ancient nature religion,' and a resource for overcoming environmental problems. The volume shows how these ideas gradually achieved popularity among scientists, priests, Shinto-related new religious movements and, eventually, the conservative shrine establishment. Aike P. Rots argues that central to this development is the notion of chinju no mori: the sacred groves surrounding many Shinto shrines. Although initially used to refer to remaining areas of primary or secondary forest, today the term has come to be extended to any sort of shrine land, signifying not only historical and ecological continuity but also abstract values such as community spirit, patriotism and traditional culture. The book shows how Shinto's environmental turn has also provided legitimacy internationally: influenced by the global discourse on religion and ecology, in recent years the Shinto establishment has actively engaged with international organizations devoted to the conservation of sacred sites. Shinto sacred forests thus carry significance locally as well as nationally and internationally, and figure prominently in attempts to reposition Shinto in the centre of public space.

'Difficult Heritage' in Nation Building

'Difficult Heritage' in Nation Building PDF Author: Hyun Kyung Lee
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319663380
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
This book explores South Korean responses to the architecture of the Japanese colonial occupation of Korea and the ways that architecture illustrates the relationship between difficult heritage and the formation of national identity. Detailing the specific case of Seoul, Hyun Kyung Lee investigates how buildings are selectively destroyed, preserved, or reconstructed in order to either establish or challenge the cultural identity of places as new political orders are developed. In addition, she illuminates the Korean traditional concept of feng shui as a core indigenous framework for understanding the relationship between space and power, as it is associated with nation-building processes and heritagization. By providing a detailed study of a case little known outside of East Asia, ‘Difficult Heritage’ in Nation Building will expand the framework of Western-centered heritage research by introducing novel Asian perspectives.

The Making of Japanese Settler Colonialism

The Making of Japanese Settler Colonialism PDF Author: Sidney Xu Lu
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108482422
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 331

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Book Description
Shows how Japanese anxiety about overpopulation was used to justify expansion, blurring lines between migration and settler colonialism. This title is also available as Open Access.

The Making of Modern Japan

The Making of Modern Japan PDF Author: Marius B. Jansen
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674039106
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 933

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Book Description
Magisterial in vision, sweeping in scope, this monumental work presents a seamless account of Japanese society during the modern era, from 1600 to the present. A distillation of more than fifty years’ engagement with Japan and its history, it is the crowning work of our leading interpreter of the modern Japanese experience. Since 1600 Japan has undergone three periods of wrenching social and institutional change, following the imposition of hegemonic order on feudal society by the Tokugawa shogun; the opening of Japan’s ports by Commodore Perry; and defeat in World War II. The Making of Modern Japan charts these changes: the social engineering begun with the founding of the shogunate in 1600, the emergence of village and castle towns with consumer populations, and the diffusion of samurai values in the culture. Marius Jansen covers the making of the modern state, the adaptation of Western models, growing international trade, the broadening opportunity in Japanese society with industrialization, and the postwar occupation reforms imposed by General MacArthur. Throughout, the book gives voice to the individuals and views that have shaped the actions and beliefs of the Japanese, with writers, artists, and thinkers, as well as political leaders given their due. The story this book tells, though marked by profound changes, is also one of remarkable consistency, in which continuities outweigh upheavals in the development of society, and successive waves of outside influence have only served to strengthen a sense of what is unique and native to Japanese experience. The Making of Modern Japan takes us to the core of this experience as it illuminates one of the contemporary world’s most compelling transformations.

Moral Nation

Moral Nation PDF Author: Miriam Kingsberg
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520276736
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
This trailblazing study examines the history of narcotics in Japan to explain the development of global criteria for political legitimacy in nations and empires in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Japan underwent three distinct crises of sovereignty in its modern history: in the 1890s, during the interwar period, and in the 1950s. Each crisis provoked successively escalating crusades against opium and other drugs, in which moral entrepreneurs--bureaucrats, cultural producers, merchants, law enforcement, scientists, and doctors, among others--focused on drug use as a means of distinguishing between populations fit and unfit for self-rule. Moral Nation traces the instrumental role of ideologies about narcotics in the country's efforts to reestablish its legitimacy as a nation and empire. As Kingsberg demonstrates, Japan's growing status as an Asian power and a "moral nation" expanded the notion of "civilization" from an exclusively Western value to a universal one. Scholars and students of Japanese history, Asian studies, world history, and global studies will gain an in-depth understanding of how Japan's experience with narcotics influenced global standards for sovereignty and shifted the aim of nation building, making it no longer a strictly political activity but also a moral obligation to society.

Japan's World Heritage Sites

Japan's World Heritage Sites PDF Author: John Dougill
Publisher: Tuttle Publishing
ISBN: 146291408X
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 443

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Book Description
"It's a nice tome for armchair travel, whisking you off around the country from where you sit--or time travel, taking you back to that life-changing decade-lost holiday and old friends."--The Japan Times Visit the most compelling cultural and nature sites in all of Japan with this beautifully photographed travel guide. In Japan's World Heritage Sites, readers are introduced to the temples, gardens, castles and natural wonders for which Japan is so justly renowned--all of those now declared to be Unesco World Heritage Sites. Author John Dougill describes each site in detail, stating why they were singled out by Unesco, the current number and types of sites, the application process, how the sites have been selected, and how difficult it is to be given the special status of a World Heritage Site. Dougill traveled to all of the sites in Japan to research this book. Because the Japanese archipelago extends from Siberia all the way down to Taiwan, Dougill describes how his journey led him from the sub-Arctic to the sub-tropical zones. These are without a doubt the most interesting sites that Japan has to offer, including the following: Mount Fuji, Japan's tallest and most sacred volcano. Located on Honshu Island near Tokyo, Mt. Fuji is considered the sacred symbol of Japan Himeji Castle, a monument from Japan's long feudal history. Also known as Egret Castle, because it looks like a bird taking off in flight. Horyu-ji Temple, the world's oldest surviving wooden structure--a center of Buddhist learning that still serves as a seminary and monastery Hiroshima Peace Memorial or Atomic-Bomb Dome--one of the few structures to partially survive the atomic blast in 1945 The Ogasawara Islands, a remote archipelago of over 30 islands--including Iwo Jima--that is home to rare wildlife and spectacular scenery Readers will learn how Japan first became involved with the World Heritage Sites program back in 1993, the importance of these designations, and their popularity in Japan, where they are visited by millions of people annually, both Japanese and foreigners.