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Japan at Nature's Edge

Japan at Nature's Edge PDF Author: Ian Jared Miller
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824838777
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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 at Nature's Edge

Japan at Nature's Edge PDF Author: Ian Jared Miller
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824838777
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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 and the Culture of the Four Seasons

Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons PDF Author: Haruo Shirane
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231152817
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 346

Book Description
"Elegant representations of nature and the four seasons populate a wide range of Japanese genres and media. In Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons, Haruo Shirane shows how, when, and why this practice developed and explicates the richly encoded social, religious, and political meanings of this imagery. Shirane discusses textual, cultivated, material, performative, and gastronomic representations of nature. He reveals how this kind of 'secondary nature, ' which flourished in Japan's urban environment, fostered and idealized a sense of harmony with the natural world just at the moment when it began to recede from view. Illuminating the deeper meaning behind Japanese aesthetics and artifacts, Shirane also clarifies the use of natural and seasonal topics as well as the changes in their cultural associations and functions across history, genre, and community over more than a millennium. In this book, the four seasons are revealed to be as much a cultural construction as a reflection of the physical world."--Back cover.

Forest Bathing

Forest Bathing PDF Author: Dr. Qing Li
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 052555985X
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 322

Book Description
The definitive--and by far the most popular--guide to the therapeutic Japanese practice of shinrin-yoku, or the art and science of how trees can promote health and happiness Notice how a tree sways in the wind. Run your hands over its bark. Take in its citrusy scent. As a society we suffer from nature deficit disorder, but studies have shown that spending mindful, intentional time around trees--what the Japanese call shinrin-yoku, or forest bathing--can promote health and happiness. In this beautiful book--featuring more than 100 color photographs from forests around the world, including the forest therapy trails that criss-cross Japan--Dr. Qing Li, the world's foremost expert in forest medicine, shows how forest bathing can reduce your stress levels and blood pressure, strengthen your immune and cardiovascular systems, boost your energy, mood, creativity, and concentration, and even help you lose weight and live longer. Once you've discovered the healing power of trees, you can lose yourself in the beauty of your surroundings, leave everyday stress behind, and reach a place of greater calm and wellness.

Environment and Society in the Japanese Islands

Environment and Society in the Japanese Islands PDF Author: Bruce Loyd Batten
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780870718014
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Over the long course of Japan's history, its people profited from their rich natural environment while simultaneously facing significant environmental challenges. Over time, they have altered their natural environment in numerous ways, from landscape modification to industrial pollution. How has the human-nature relationship changed over time in Japan? How does Japan's environmental history compare with that of other countries, or that of the world as a whole? Environment and Society in the Japanese Islands attempts to answer these questions through a series of case studies by leading Japanese and Western historians, geographers, archaeologists, and climatologists. These essays, on diverse topics from all periods of Japanese history and prehistory, are unified by their focus on the key concepts of "resilience" and "risk mitigation." Taken as a whole, they place Japan's experience in global context and call into question the commonly presumed division between pre-modern and modern environmental history. Primarily intended for scholars and students in fields related to Japan or environmental history, these accessibly-written essays will be valuable to anyone wishing to learn about the historical roots of today's environmental issues or the complex relationship between human society and the natural environment.

Just Enough

Just Enough PDF Author: Azby Brown
Publisher: Stone Bridge Press, Inc.
ISBN: 1611729572
Category : House & Home
Languages : en
Pages : 236

Book Description
How the mindset of traditional Japanese society can guide our own efforts to lead a green lifestyle today. If we want to live sustainably, how should we feel about nature? About waste? About our forests and rivers? About food? Just Enough is a book of stories and sketches that give valuable insight into what it is like to live in a sustainable society by describing life in Japan some two hundred years ago, during the late Edo period, when cities and villages faced many of the same environmental challenges we do today and met them beautifully and inventively.

Japan Living

Japan Living PDF Author: Marcia Iwatate
Publisher: Tuttle Publishing
ISBN: 1462906435
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Book Description
Gain insight into both modern and Japanese styles with this stunning Japanese interior design book. Japan Living presents thirty exceptional houses that transcend function and resonate with spirit. Chosen for their inspiring and innovative designs, these new Japanese homes are special places to dream in. The owners and architects, working as collaborative teams, have created homes that are quintessentially Japanese. Crisp, sharp, transparent and light—these new designs represent a new burst in creativity over the past decade. Many reflect changes in the dynamics of Japanese society, while others represent self-expression and individuality. All of them are marked by a return to traditional Japanese materials and design elements married with such present-day requirements as flexibility, modern kitchens and bathrooms, energy efficiency and electronic gadgetry.

World on the Edge

World on the Edge PDF Author: Lester Brown
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113654075X
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 258

Book Description
In this urgent time, World on the Edge calls out the pivotal environmental issues and how to solve them now. We are in a race between political and natural tipping points. Can we close coal-fired power plants fast enough to save the Greenland ice sheet and avoid catastrophic sea level rise? Can we raise water productivity fast enough to halt the depletion of aquifers and avoid water-driven food shortages? Can we cope with peak water and peak oil at the same time? These are some of the issues Lester R. Brown skilfully distils in World on the Edge. Bringing decades of research and analysis into play, he provides the responses needed to reclaim our future.

Environment, Modernization and Development in East Asia

Environment, Modernization and Development in East Asia PDF Author: Ts'ui-jung Liu
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137572310
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 301

Book Description
Environment, Modernization and Development in East Asia critically examines modernization's long-term environmental history. It suggests new frameworks for understanding as inter-related processes environmental, social, and economic change across China and Japan.

Japan's Ocean Borderlands

Japan's Ocean Borderlands PDF Author: Paul Kreitman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108807976
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289

Book Description
Desert islands are the focus of intense geopolitical tensions in East Asia today, but they are also sites of nature conservation. In this global environmental history, Paul Kreitman shows how the politics of conservation have entangled with the politics of sovereignty since the emergence of the modern Japanese state in the mid-nineteenth century. Using case studies ranging from Hawai'i to the Bonin Islands to the Senkaku (Ch: Diaoyu) Isles to the South China Sea, he explores how bird islands on the distant margins of the Japanese archipelago and beyond transformed from sites of resource extraction to outposts of empire and from wartime battlegrounds to nature reserves. This study examines how interactions between birds, bird products, bureaucrats, speculators, sailors, soldiers, scientists and conservationists shaped ongoing claims to sovereignty over oceanic spaces. It considers what the history of desert islands shows us about imperial and post-imperial power, the web of political, economic and ecological connections between islands and oceans, and about the relationship between sovereignty, territory and environment in the modern world.

To Stand with the Nations of the World

To Stand with the Nations of the World PDF Author: Mark Ravina
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190656093
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 312

Book Description
The samurai radicals who overthrew the last shogun in 1868 promised to restore ancient and pure Japanese ways. Foreign observers were terrified that Japan would lapse into violent xenophobia. But the new Meiji government took an opposite course. It copied best practices from around the world, building a powerful and modern Japanese nation with the help of European and American advisors. While revering the Japanese past, the Meiji government boldly embraced the foreign and the new. What explains this paradox? How could Japan's 1868 revolution be both modern and traditional, both xenophobic and cosmopolitan? To Stand with the Nations of the World explains the paradox of the Restoration through the forces of globalization. The Meiji Restoration was part of the global "long nineteenth century" during which ambitious nation states like Japan, Britain, Germany, and the United States challenged the world's great multi-ethnic empires--Ottoman, Qing, Romanov, and Hapsburg. Japan's leaders wanted to celebrate Japanese uniqueness, but they also sought international recognition. Rather than simply mimic world powers like Britain, they sought to make Japan distinctly Japanese in the same way that Britain was distinctly British. Rather than sing "God Save the King," they created a Japanese national anthem with lyrics from ancient poetry, but Western-style music. The Restoration also resonated with Japan's ancient past. In the 600s and 700s, Japan was threatened by the Tang dynasty, a dynasty as powerful as the Roman empire. In order to resist the Tang, Japanese leaders borrowed Tang methods, building a centralized Japanese state on Tang models, and learning continental science and technology. As in the 1800s, Japan co-opted international norms while insisting on Japanese distinctiveness. When confronting globalization in 1800s, Japan looked back to that "ancient globalization" of the 600s and 700s. The ancient past was therefore not remote or distant, but immediate and vital.