Earthquake Nation

Reviewed by: Earthquake Nation: The Cultural Politics of Japanese Seismicity, 1868-1930 Gregory Smits (bio) Earthquake Nation: The Cultural Politics of Japanese Seismicity, 1868-1930. By Gregory Clancey. University of California Press, Berkeley, 2006. xiii, 331 pages. $49.95. The history of modern Japanese architecture frames Gregory Clancey's Earthquake Nation: The Cultural Politics of Japanese Seismicity, 1868–1930. The book features a close reading of the contentious social, political, [End Page 103] technical, artistic, and disciplinary discourses connected with architecture, analyzing the interplay between the material world and the realms of discourse. The organization of Earthquake Nation is reminiscent of a dramatic performance with new actors entering the stage at each chapter to complicate and enrich the multithreaded plot. In the process, Clancey breathes new life into well-worn topics such as Meiji-era adaptation of Western ideas and technology by examining them through novel lenses. Implicit in much of the discussion is an argument that contested visions of nation building during the Meiji era played out against a newly created perception of Japan as an "earthquake nation." More than advancing an explicit central argument, however, this book is a survey of new intellectual terrain that is rich in possibilities for further exploration. Although topics such as architecture, engineering, and seismology may appear outside the mainstream interests of many Japan specialists, Clancey's study has much to say about fundamental issues in modern Japan. The construction of buildings was an integral part of the Meiji project of building a nation, and architecture and threats to it therefore became an arena for the contestation of national identity. The growth of Tokyo and other urban centers during the early decades of the Meiji period required the construction of government offices, train stations, bridges, residences of the well to do, and factories. These structures needed to be functional in several respects, including portraying a desirable image of modern Japan to the outside world. For this and other reasons, the new state hired foreign experts, but these physicists, engineers, architects, geologists, and seismologists did not speak with one voice. Moreover, many of their Japanese students quickly emerged to promote their own agendas amidst a rhetorical environment full of what Clancey calls "unstable binarisms." These binarisms included fire versus earthquakes, East versus West, wood (delicate, female, Japanese) versus stone (and by extension masonry—strong, male, European), earthquake countries versus nonearthquake countries, art versus science, and others. A major cause of the instability of these dyads was the unpredictable intervention of nature. In the wake of the 1891 Nōbi (Mino-Owari) Earthquake, for example, an earlier tendency to associate wooden structures with delicate, feminine, and artistic qualities underwent a reversal such that traditional wooden construction became emblematic of strength and resistance. The instability of the rhetorical binaries in Meiji-era discourse, broad movements within Japanese society such as the turn toward nativism from the late 1880s, competition between academic disciplines, the gradual replacement of foreign experts with their Japanese students, and the instability of the earth's crust produced a complex intellectual and political environment in which interested parties competed to shape the material structure of the new Japan. One important notion to emerge from this unstable milieu was that Japan was an "earthquake nation" whose culture was uniquely [End Page 104] shaped by a physical environment that prominently featured violent shaking of the earth. This notion imparted international legitimacy to practitioners of the Anglo-Japanese discipline of seismology, contrary to the tendency among Westerners of the time to dismiss Japanese science. The seismograph, invented in Japan by three foreign experts, played a key role in constituting Japan as an earthquake nation. By 1884, these devices had become sensitive enough to detect earthquakes that human senses could not perceive. The establishment of a network of seismographs in Japan monitored by government bureaucrats provided data on thousands of unfelt earthquakes. British seismologist John Milne and his Japanese successors used these data to put Japan at the geographical center of earthquake science. Somewhat ironically, continued refinement of seismographs later de-centered Japan as it became possible in the twentieth century to measure Japanese or other earthquakes from remote parts of the globe. Indeed, as

Archaeology · Argument (complex analysis) · Civil engineering · Induced seismicity · Media studies · Meiji period · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Vision · Anthropology · Architecture · Earthquake and Disaster Impact Studies · Engineering · History · Law

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  Jonathan E Abel•Japan Forum•2014

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