Jordan Sand
Biographic Data
| ID | 247850 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jordan Sand |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jordan |
| FAMILY NAME | Sand |
| SIGNATURE | SAND J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Georgetown University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6531-9720 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 11 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 23 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1991 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2022 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Land, Lumber, Labor, and Excrement
The expansion of Tokyo’s periphery in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was led by builder-managers who built simple wooden tenements on former farmland. These tenements provided no more than minimal shelter. In the early years of industrialization, migrants from the countryside joining the new urban proletariat established their foothold in the city in these dwellings. Although the tenement builders were responsible for the major…
Building Tokyo
This essay introduces contributions by six scholars of modern Japanese history writing about Japanese cities. The essays cover key issues in the history of Tokyo from the late-nineteenth century to the years immediately after World War II. Despite Tokyo’s status as a world city, historical literature in English on the city is still limited. This special feature seeks to address that lack. It includes work by several of the leading figures in urba…
People, animals, and island encounters
This essay traces the diffusion of pigs and the introduction of new practices of pig husbandry in East Asia and the Pacific, with particular attention to the cases of Hawaii, Okinawa, and Japan. Countering the trend in animal history to emphasize environmental and genetic factors, it demonstrates that discourses of property, sovereignty, freedom, and slavery, brought to the region with modern imperialism, played a decisive role in shaping relatio…
Introduction
This essay introduces six studies based on oral history and ethnography in spontaneous urban settlements in East and Southeast Asia. It proposes that asking residents to tell the history of their settlements provides an important tool for understanding them in the context of their cities. Rather than focusing on the theoretical issues around 'informality,' we seek to understand the settlement process itself, in both material and discursive terms
Kasumigaoka Apartments
This essay introduces the stories of four former residents of a municipal housing complex built in the late 1950s in central Tokyo. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, the interviewees and their families had found shelter in and around an abandoned Imperial Japanese Army base. After moving them into concrete housing blocks in order to hide their settlement prior to Tokyo's hosting of the Olympics in 1964, the city moved them again in prep…
Tokyo Bay as a productive landscape
In the large body of research on the relationship between cities and their hinterlands, the role of bodies of water as productive resources has often been overlooked. Tokyo presents the case of a city whose bay has played an indispensable role in the growth of the city, in perceptions of the cityscape and, most importantly, in provisioning the urban population. This essay examines the management of bay fisheries from the seventeenth through the n…
A Year of Memory Politics in East Asia
Portions of this essay were previously published in Japanese as 「アジア太平洋戦争の ポリティックスと教育-アメリカ合衆国で日本 史を教えて」『歴史学研究』942号、2016年3月 (by Jordan Sand and Franziska Seraphim)In spring 2015, I participated in the drafting and distribution of the statement on the "comfort women" and Japanese war responsibility issued under the title "Open Letter in Support of Historians in Japan." That letter took inspiration from a statement issued in Japan by the Historical …
Imperial Tokyo as a Contact Zone
Overlooked by most scholars of Taiwanese history and almost entirely forgotten in the history of Tokyo, sightseeing tours organized by the Japanese colonial government brought groups of Taiwanese aborigines to the imperial capital twenty-one times between 1897 and 1941. The aim of these tours was to show the aborigines the "light of civilization" and impress upon them Japanese superiority. The aboriginal tourists, however, did not always learn th…
Tokyo Vernacular
Tokyo Vernacular examines how the megacity Tokyo acquired a historical identity in the late twentieth century. Through political activism in public squares, community movements, local history, urban exploration, found art, and museum exhibits of commonplace objects and scenes, Tokyo Vernacular traces a trajectory of citizen involvement in the reimagining of the capital city from the monumental embodiment of national subjectivity to the site of ev…
Tropical Furniture and Bodily Comportment in Colonial Asia
This essay examines graphic, textual, and material evidence concerning the use of chairs by European colonists in South and Southeast Asia and by Japanese colonists in Taiwan. It focuses particularly on informal furniture made from lightweight tropical fibers such as rattan. The significance of chair sitting and the ways that chairs were used in these different contexts reveal contrasting colonial sensibilities — that is, bodily awarenesses and e…
Guest Editor's Introduction
The four essays presented in this special section emerged from a conference originally conceived by Miriam Silverberg and organized at the University of California, Los Angeles in collaboration with Mariko Tamanoi in 2007. Each essay takes up some aspect of life in the Japanese colonial empire, exploring the politics of colonial relations beyond the realm of the formal and explicit. They consider issues of bodily habitus, emotional experience bot…
Flammable Cities
Flammable Cities
Introduction: Flammable Cities Part 1: Cities as Fire Regimes 1 Jan van der Heyden and the Origins of Modern Firefighting Art and Technology in Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam Susan Donahue Kuretsky 2 Governance, Arson, and Firefighting in Edo, 1600-1868 Jordan Sand and Steve Wills 3 Taming Fire in Valpara\u00edso, Chile, 1840s-1870s Samuel J. Martland 4 The Burning of a Modern City? Istanbul as Perceived by the Agents of the Sun Fire Office, 1865-…
Living with Uncertainty after March 11, 2011
One year has passed since the earthquake and tsunami in Tōhoku. How should we as scholars approach, think about, and teach about the disaster? In generations hence, will 2011 be treated as a historical turning point on a par with 1945? Will it appear more significant than the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923, despite the far greater loss of life in that event? We have a long process of analysis and contextualization ahead before the traumatic event…
Landscape of Contradictions
Tokyo's suburban landscape has been treated in two distinct fields of research to date: urban history and literary studies. Urban historians have traced the effects of suburban population growth along the rail lines extending into the Musashi Plain to the west of the city from the beginning of the twentieth century. At the same time, literary scholars have identified the Musashi Plain as a special site or topos of modern nature writing since the …
Gentlemen's Agreement, 1908
This experimental essay takes the form of a series of episodes related to immigration, race, empire, radical politics, family norms, disease and health, expositions, houses, furnishings, dress, hairstyle, and bodily comportment among Japanese, Koreans, Australians, and North Americans in the year 1908. I have eschewed conventional methods of historical argumentation so that the connections between seemingly disparate events and utterances may eme…
Isami's House
Reviewed by: Isami's House: Three Centuries of a Japanese Family Jordan Sand (bio) Isami's House: Three Centuries of a Japanese Family. By Gail Lee Bernstein. University of California Press, Berkeley, 2005. xxviii, 283 pages. $50.00, cloth; $19.95, paper. A secret history of American research in Japan could be written around relationships between American academics and what might be called—somewhat contentiously—"native intellectuals." In a highl…
The spaces of the modern city
By United Nations estimates, 60 percent of the world's population will be urban by 2030. With the increasing speed of urbanization, especially in the developing world, scholars are now rethinking standard concepts and histories of modern cities. "The Spaces of the Modern City" historicizes the contemporary discussion of urbanism, highlighting the local and global breadth of the city landscape. This interdisciplinary collection examines how the ci…
House and Home in Modern Japan
Monumentalizing the Everyday
The Edo-Tokyo Museum is both the crowning achievement of the populist historiography of Edo-Tokyo studies and the monumental embodiment of an era of cultural nationalism in Japan. It embodies the perennial tension between the city as home to a unique local culture and the city as a site of state power. The historians who oversaw the design of the exhibits envisioned a celebration of local everyday life, and focused their efforts on narrating the …
Was Meiji Taste in Interiors “Orientalist”
positions: east asia cultures critique - Volume 8, Number 3, Winter 2000
Historians and Public Memory in Japan
An intellectual battle divides public life in Japan today. Since 1995, writers calling themselves advocates of a "liberalist view of history" (jiyūshu gi shikan) have attacked academic historiography and the contents of public-school textbooks. Coming from the political right, these critics question the dark narrative of Japanese imperialism and wartime fascism. Historians have responded with a variety of arguments and recently unearthed document…
At Hom e in the Meiji Period
The Way of the Japanese Carpenter
People, animals, and island encounters
This essay traces the diffusion of pigs and the introduction of new practices of pig husbandry in East Asia and the Pacific, with particular attention to the cases of Hawaii, Okinawa, and Japan. Countering the trend in animal history to emphasize environmental and genetic factors, it demonstrates that discourses of property, sovereignty, freedom, and slavery, brought to the region with modern imperialism, played a decisive role in shaping relatio…
Tropical Furniture and Bodily Comportment in Colonial Asia
This essay examines graphic, textual, and material evidence concerning the use of chairs by European colonists in South and Southeast Asia and by Japanese colonists in Taiwan. It focuses particularly on informal furniture made from lightweight tropical fibers such as rattan. The significance of chair sitting and the ways that chairs were used in these different contexts reveal contrasting colonial sensibilities — that is, bodily awarenesses and e…
Living with Uncertainty after March 11, 2011
One year has passed since the earthquake and tsunami in Tōhoku. How should we as scholars approach, think about, and teach about the disaster? In generations hence, will 2011 be treated as a historical turning point on a par with 1945? Will it appear more significant than the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923, despite the far greater loss of life in that event? We have a long process of analysis and contextualization ahead before the traumatic event…
Introduction
This essay introduces six studies based on oral history and ethnography in spontaneous urban settlements in East and Southeast Asia. It proposes that asking residents to tell the history of their settlements provides an important tool for understanding them in the context of their cities. Rather than focusing on the theoretical issues around 'informality,' we seek to understand the settlement process itself, in both material and discursive terms
Kasumigaoka Apartments
This essay introduces the stories of four former residents of a municipal housing complex built in the late 1950s in central Tokyo. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, the interviewees and their families had found shelter in and around an abandoned Imperial Japanese Army base. After moving them into concrete housing blocks in order to hide their settlement prior to Tokyo's hosting of the Olympics in 1964, the city moved them again in prep…
Landscape of Contradictions
Tokyo's suburban landscape has been treated in two distinct fields of research to date: urban history and literary studies. Urban historians have traced the effects of suburban population growth along the rail lines extending into the Musashi Plain to the west of the city from the beginning of the twentieth century. At the same time, literary scholars have identified the Musashi Plain as a special site or topos of modern nature writing since the …
Gentlemen's Agreement, 1908
This experimental essay takes the form of a series of episodes related to immigration, race, empire, radical politics, family norms, disease and health, expositions, houses, furnishings, dress, hairstyle, and bodily comportment among Japanese, Koreans, Australians, and North Americans in the year 1908. I have eschewed conventional methods of historical argumentation so that the connections between seemingly disparate events and utterances may eme…
Was Meiji Taste in Interiors “Orientalist”
positions: east asia cultures critique - Volume 8, Number 3, Winter 2000
The Way of the Japanese Carpenter
At Hom e in the Meiji Period
Historians and Public Memory in Japan
An intellectual battle divides public life in Japan today. Since 1995, writers calling themselves advocates of a "liberalist view of history" (jiyūshu gi shikan) have attacked academic historiography and the contents of public-school textbooks. Coming from the political right, these critics question the dark narrative of Japanese imperialism and wartime fascism. Historians have responded with a variety of arguments and recently unearthed document…
Was Meiji Taste in Interiors “Orientalist”
positions: east asia cultures critique - Volume 8, Number 3, Winter 2000
Monumentalizing the Everyday
The Edo-Tokyo Museum is both the crowning achievement of the populist historiography of Edo-Tokyo studies and the monumental embodiment of an era of cultural nationalism in Japan. It embodies the perennial tension between the city as home to a unique local culture and the city as a site of state power. The historians who oversaw the design of the exhibits envisioned a celebration of local everyday life, and focused their efforts on narrating the …
House and Home in Modern Japan
Isami's House
Reviewed by: Isami's House: Three Centuries of a Japanese Family Jordan Sand (bio) Isami's House: Three Centuries of a Japanese Family. By Gail Lee Bernstein. University of California Press, Berkeley, 2005. xxviii, 283 pages. $50.00, cloth; $19.95, paper. A secret history of American research in Japan could be written around relationships between American academics and what might be called—somewhat contentiously—"native intellectuals." In a highl…
The spaces of the modern city
By United Nations estimates, 60 percent of the world's population will be urban by 2030. With the increasing speed of urbanization, especially in the developing world, scholars are now rethinking standard concepts and histories of modern cities. "The Spaces of the Modern City" historicizes the contemporary discussion of urbanism, highlighting the local and global breadth of the city landscape. This interdisciplinary collection examines how the ci…
Landscape of Contradictions
Tokyo's suburban landscape has been treated in two distinct fields of research to date: urban history and literary studies. Urban historians have traced the effects of suburban population growth along the rail lines extending into the Musashi Plain to the west of the city from the beginning of the twentieth century. At the same time, literary scholars have identified the Musashi Plain as a special site or topos of modern nature writing since the …
Gentlemen's Agreement, 1908
This experimental essay takes the form of a series of episodes related to immigration, race, empire, radical politics, family norms, disease and health, expositions, houses, furnishings, dress, hairstyle, and bodily comportment among Japanese, Koreans, Australians, and North Americans in the year 1908. I have eschewed conventional methods of historical argumentation so that the connections between seemingly disparate events and utterances may eme…
Flammable Cities
Flammable Cities
Introduction: Flammable Cities Part 1: Cities as Fire Regimes 1 Jan van der Heyden and the Origins of Modern Firefighting Art and Technology in Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam Susan Donahue Kuretsky 2 Governance, Arson, and Firefighting in Edo, 1600-1868 Jordan Sand and Steve Wills 3 Taming Fire in Valpara\u00edso, Chile, 1840s-1870s Samuel J. Martland 4 The Burning of a Modern City? Istanbul as Perceived by the Agents of the Sun Fire Office, 1865-…
Living with Uncertainty after March 11, 2011
One year has passed since the earthquake and tsunami in Tōhoku. How should we as scholars approach, think about, and teach about the disaster? In generations hence, will 2011 be treated as a historical turning point on a par with 1945? Will it appear more significant than the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923, despite the far greater loss of life in that event? We have a long process of analysis and contextualization ahead before the traumatic event…
Tokyo Vernacular
Tokyo Vernacular examines how the megacity Tokyo acquired a historical identity in the late twentieth century. Through political activism in public squares, community movements, local history, urban exploration, found art, and museum exhibits of commonplace objects and scenes, Tokyo Vernacular traces a trajectory of citizen involvement in the reimagining of the capital city from the monumental embodiment of national subjectivity to the site of ev…
Tropical Furniture and Bodily Comportment in Colonial Asia
This essay examines graphic, textual, and material evidence concerning the use of chairs by European colonists in South and Southeast Asia and by Japanese colonists in Taiwan. It focuses particularly on informal furniture made from lightweight tropical fibers such as rattan. The significance of chair sitting and the ways that chairs were used in these different contexts reveal contrasting colonial sensibilities — that is, bodily awarenesses and e…
Guest Editor's Introduction
The four essays presented in this special section emerged from a conference originally conceived by Miriam Silverberg and organized at the University of California, Los Angeles in collaboration with Mariko Tamanoi in 2007. Each essay takes up some aspect of life in the Japanese colonial empire, exploring the politics of colonial relations beyond the realm of the formal and explicit. They consider issues of bodily habitus, emotional experience bot…
Imperial Tokyo as a Contact Zone
Overlooked by most scholars of Taiwanese history and almost entirely forgotten in the history of Tokyo, sightseeing tours organized by the Japanese colonial government brought groups of Taiwanese aborigines to the imperial capital twenty-one times between 1897 and 1941. The aim of these tours was to show the aborigines the "light of civilization" and impress upon them Japanese superiority. The aboriginal tourists, however, did not always learn th…
Tokyo Bay as a productive landscape
In the large body of research on the relationship between cities and their hinterlands, the role of bodies of water as productive resources has often been overlooked. Tokyo presents the case of a city whose bay has played an indispensable role in the growth of the city, in perceptions of the cityscape and, most importantly, in provisioning the urban population. This essay examines the management of bay fisheries from the seventeenth through the n…
A Year of Memory Politics in East Asia
Portions of this essay were previously published in Japanese as 「アジア太平洋戦争の ポリティックスと教育-アメリカ合衆国で日本 史を教えて」『歴史学研究』942号、2016年3月 (by Jordan Sand and Franziska Seraphim)In spring 2015, I participated in the drafting and distribution of the statement on the "comfort women" and Japanese war responsibility issued under the title "Open Letter in Support of Historians in Japan." That letter took inspiration from a statement issued in Japan by the Historical …
Introduction
This essay introduces six studies based on oral history and ethnography in spontaneous urban settlements in East and Southeast Asia. It proposes that asking residents to tell the history of their settlements provides an important tool for understanding them in the context of their cities. Rather than focusing on the theoretical issues around 'informality,' we seek to understand the settlement process itself, in both material and discursive terms
Kasumigaoka Apartments
This essay introduces the stories of four former residents of a municipal housing complex built in the late 1950s in central Tokyo. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, the interviewees and their families had found shelter in and around an abandoned Imperial Japanese Army base. After moving them into concrete housing blocks in order to hide their settlement prior to Tokyo's hosting of the Olympics in 1964, the city moved them again in prep…
People, animals, and island encounters
This essay traces the diffusion of pigs and the introduction of new practices of pig husbandry in East Asia and the Pacific, with particular attention to the cases of Hawaii, Okinawa, and Japan. Countering the trend in animal history to emphasize environmental and genetic factors, it demonstrates that discourses of property, sovereignty, freedom, and slavery, brought to the region with modern imperialism, played a decisive role in shaping relatio…
Land, Lumber, Labor, and Excrement
The expansion of Tokyo’s periphery in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was led by builder-managers who built simple wooden tenements on former farmland. These tenements provided no more than minimal shelter. In the early years of industrialization, migrants from the countryside joining the new urban proletariat established their foothold in the city in these dwellings. Although the tenement builders were responsible for the major…
Building Tokyo
This essay introduces contributions by six scholars of modern Japanese history writing about Japanese cities. The essays cover key issues in the history of Tokyo from the late-nineteenth century to the years immediately after World War II. Despite Tokyo’s status as a world city, historical literature in English on the city is still limited. This special feature seeks to address that lack. It includes work by several of the leading figures in urba…
History (19 works) · Japanese History and Culture (16 works) · Political science (15 works) · Law (13 works) · Politics (13 works) · Sociology (12 works) · Archaeology (11 works) · Art (11 works) · History (8 works) · Geography (7 works)