Events

CHAIRPERSON

Dr Stefan Huebner, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

PROGRAMME

ABSTRACT

Japan’s oceans demand our attention. Violent, prolific, and changeful, they define life and death on the archipelago: pushing the shore under the rush of tsunami, charging typhoon circulation, feeding millions, and seeding conflicts over territory and resources. And yet, Japan studies remain largely beholden to a terrestrial view of the world that is at odds with the importance of the sea. This “terrestrial bias” also means that on those occasions when oceans are recognized they are most often presented as dividers or connectors—spaces in between rather than rich ecologies and meaningful sites. Oceanic Japan is meant to help readers re-envision Japanese history in order to show how the seas created the country that we know today.

The book convenes a diverse, multinational, multidisciplinary group of scholars to expand the scope of Japan studies and the field of environmental humanities. The chapters draw from the broader turn to the sea—characterized by new oceanic and terraqueous perspectives—developing within these fields and in areas such as Pacific history and Indian Ocean studies. The volume editors’ vision is bifocal. On one hand, they aim to reorient East Asian studies and Japan studies to the sea, underlining how oceans have shaped dynamics from the Tokugawa Era forward into the age of empire and the crisis of the Anthropocene. On the other hand, they argue for a more nuanced environmental approach within the burgeoning field of Oceanic studies. Seeing oceanic spaces as more than entrepots or political spheres requires thinking in new, often vertical, volumetric ways. The chapters follow human and non-human actors to recognize the variegation of watery ecologies through winds, tides, coasts, seabeds, and currents such as the Kuroshio and Oyashio, which have always shaped life on the archipelago.

More information on the book can be found here: https://uhpress.hawaii.edu/title/oceanic-japan-the-archipelago-in-pacific-and-global-history/

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Stefan Huebner is a historian interested in environmental and oceanic topics whose work centers on modern Japan and its connections to other parts of Asia and the West. He is also Senior Research Fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, and the President of the Society of Floating Solutions, Singapore. His second book project is a history of the industrialization and urbanization of the ocean in the Anthropocene. His recent articles focused on Asia’s oceanic anthropocene (Journal of Global History), Earth’s amphibious transformation (Modern Asian Studies), and tackling climate change, air pollution, and ecosystem destruction (Environmental History). He is also the lead editor of Oceanic Japan: The Archipelago in Pacific and Global History.

Nadin Heé is Professor at Osaka University’s Graduate School of Humanities. Previously, she was Junior Professor for Global History of Knowledge at the Free University Berlin and at the Max-Planck Institute for the History of Science after a visiting professorship at Humboldt University of Berlin and teaching at Zurich University. Nadin has a background in Empire Studies and a focus on East Asia, and her critical engagement with postcolonial theory and theories of violence and trans-imperial aspects of colonial history has been published as Imperiales Wissen und koloniale Gewalt. Japans Herrschaft in Taiwan 1895–1945, (Campus Verlag, 2012), which was awarded the JaDe-Prize.

Ian J. Miller is Professor of History at Harvard University, where he teaches courses focused on Japan and its former empire, with special attention to questions of environment, science, and technology. He is the author of The Nature of the Beasts: Empire and Environment at the Tokyo Zoo (2013), and the co-editor of Japan at Nature’s Edge: The Environmental Context of a Global Power (2013). Funded in part via a Mellon Foundation New Directions Fellowship focused on “carbon and its discontents”, his current book, Fueling Tokyo: Japan in the Age of Global Energy, recasts the history of the world’s largest city as a history of energy. He is also Director of Undergraduate Studies in History and Faculty Dean of Cabot House at Harvard College.

Bill Tsutsui has served as Chancellor and Professor of History at Ottawa University since 2021, after more than 30 years teaching modern Japanese history and holding a variety of administrative positions at the University of Kansas, Southern Methodist University, Hendrix College, and Harvard University. Among the nine books he has written, edited or co-edited are Manufacturing Ideology: Scientific Management in Twentieth-Century Japan (which was awarded the John Whitney Hall Prize of the Association for Asian Studies) and Godzilla on My Mind: Fifty Years of the King of Monsters (which was called a “cult classic” by the New York Times). He continues to speak, write, and teach on the Godzilla movies, monster culture in Japan, and the environmental history of Japan and the Pacific Ocean.

Helen M. Rozwadowski is Professor of History and founder of the University of Connecticut’s Maritime Studies program. Her book, Vast Expanses: A History of the Oceans (2018), aims to promote ocean histories, as does her work co-editing the University of Chicago Press book series, Oceans in Depth. Her Fathoming the Ocean: The Discovery and Exploration of the Deep Sea (2005) was awarded the History of Science Society’s Davis Prize for best book for a wide public audience. She also wrote The Sea Knows No Boundaries, and co-edited three volumes on history of oceanography, including Soundings and Crossings (2016). She is part of the University of Oslo’s Maritime Modernities project, held a fellowship at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich, Germany, and been awarded the William E. and Mary B. Ritter Fellowship from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

Lijing Jiang is Assistant Professor at the Department of History of Science and Technology at Johns Hopkins University. She is a historian of the modern life sciences. Her first monograph in progress is titled The Entangled Model Fish: Nations, Environments, and Ornamental Fish as Experimental Animals. It examines how ornamental fish became crucial experimental animals for the life sciences and with deep relations to aquacultural industry and changing global politics, especially in China and Japan, before the rise of the zebra fish in the twentieth century. She is also working on a second monograph that traces the aquaculture transformation in East and Southeast Asia.

Gene Kim is a PhD candidate in History and East Asian Languages at Harvard University, focusing on modern Japanese and Korean history. He is writing his dissertation on an oceanic history of Korea-Japan relations from the late colonial period to 1965, centering on fisheries disputes and maritime transformations. He holds a BA in history from Yale University, an MA from Yonsei University, and an AM from Harvard University. He was a fellow at the Kyujanggak Institute for Korean Studies at Seoul National University, and his work has been published in Yŏksa pip’yŏng. He is currently a visiting fellow at Waseda University with support from the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad program.