I have always been fascinated by natural history and dreamed of becoming a paleontologist—until I took my first Japanese language class in college and got “hooked” on that. Eventually, I wound up with a doctorate in Japanese history and spent 30 years teaching at a university in Tokyo. At first, most of my research was on Japanese foreign relations. But I retained a strong interest in science and the environment. After a while, I realized that I could combine that with my love of history and that the result could be relevant to contemporary environmental problems. Serendipity at work! Currently, I’m editing a second book on Japanese environmental history, this one focusing on historical climate change.
There are many other books about the Japanese “triple disaster” (earthquake, tsunami, nuclear meltdown) of 2011, but none that engages so closely and with such resonance on the human element.
The author’s interviews with survivors allowed him to reconstruct events up to and beyond the devastation of Ishimaki City. Most poignant was the fate of students and teachers at Ogawa Elementary School, who drowned following mistaken advice to stay put in the face of the oncoming tsunami.
In places, the account was so painful it left me with tears in my eyes. Read it to learn from the tragedy and to honor those whose lives were lost as well as those who survived against all odds.
'The definitive book on the quake which killed more than 15,000 people.' Mail Online 'You will not read a finer work of narrative non-fiction this year.' Economist 'A breathtaking, extraordinary work of non-fiction.' Times Literary Supplement 'A future classic of disaster journalism.' Observer
On 11 March 2011, a massive earthquake sent a 120-foot-high tsunami smashing into the coast of north-east Japan. By the time the sea retreated, more than 18,500 people had been crushed, burned to death, or drowned.
It was Japan's greatest single loss of life since the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. It…
It tells the story of one of Japan’s worst manmade environmental disasters. The author documents the suffering of victims of mercury poisoning caused by consuming seafood tainted by industrial waste. The lyrical descriptions of people and place contrast starkly with the sheer horror of the events being depicted.
There are other books on Minamata disease, but this one—part oral history and part “new journalism”—hits closest to home. I couldn’t stop reading it.
In the early 1950s, numerous cases of organic mercury poisoning were discovered in the fishing villages around Minamata, Japan. Yet for decades after, victims of what is now known as Minamata disease suffered neglect, discrimination, and ostracism by Minamata residents, local government, labor unions, Minamata disease certification committees, and fishers' cooperatives. Fifty years later, renewed efforts began to conserve the environment and reconcile with victims of poisoning, including a flurry of museum-building, citizen waste recycling campaigns, and conferences, symposia, and exhibitions. But this rapprochement in the 1990s took place slowly and with difficulty, as the pain of previous decades was…
Of the 918 Americans who died in the shocking murder-suicides of November 18, 1978, in the tiny South American country of Guyana, a third were under eighteen. More than half were in their twenties or younger.
The authors taught in a small high school in San Francisco where Reverend Jim…
This is not just one of my favorite books on Japanese history; it is one of my favorite books, period.
Written by a team of Japanese and American historians and geologists, it solves a three-hundred-year-old mystery: What caused the tsunami that struck northeast Japan, sans earthquake, in January 1700? (Spoiler alert: The culprit was an M9 temblor along the Pacific coast of North America, which left clues in the geological record and the historical memory of Native Americans.)
The book is profusely illustrated and extremely easy to understand, even for those without a background in the geology of Cascadia or the history of Japan. I can’t recommend it highly enough; I was completely blown away.
A puzzling tsunami entered Japanese history in January 1700. Samurai, merchants, and villagers wrote of minor flooding and damage. Some noted having felt no earthquake; they wondered what had set off the waves but had no way of knowing that the tsunami was spawned during an earthquake along the coast of northwestern North America. This orphan tsunami would not be linked to its parent earthquake until the mid-twentieth century, through an extraordinary series of discoveries in both North America and Japan. The Orphan Tsunami of 1700, now in its second edition, tells this scientific detective story through its North American…
I grew up in the beautiful Pacific Northwest and developed a love of nature at an early age.
I always found it sad that timber wolves had been hunted to extinction in the region. (Thankfully, they have made a comeback in recent years.) Later, as a historian, I was fascinated to learn that wolves had similarly been driven extinct in the Japanese islands.
This book is the definitive account of how that happened. Yes, it’s an academic work written by a professor, but it is also extremely well written and tells a clear story that anyone interested in human impact on the natural world should take to heart. Unlike wolves in the Pacific Northwest, those in Japan are never coming back (unless they are cloned).
Many Japanese once revered the wolf as Oguchi no Magami, or Large-Mouthed Pure God, but as Japan began its modern transformation wolves lost their otherworldly status and became noxious animals that needed to be killed. By 1905 they had disappeared from the country. In this spirited and absorbing narrative, Brett Walker takes a deep look at the scientific, cultural, and environmental dimensions of wolf extinction in Japan and tracks changing attitudes toward nature through Japan's long history.
Grain farmers once worshiped wolves at shrines and left food offerings near their dens, beseeching the elusive canine to protect their crops from…
With Franklin Roosevelt’s death in April 1945, Vice President Harry Truman and Senator Arthur Vandenberg, the Republican leader on foreign policy, inherited a world in turmoil. With Europe flattened and the Soviets emerging as America’s new adversary, Truman and Vandenberg built a tight, bipartisan partnership at a bitterly partisan time…
This book was utterly sui generis when it was published in 1989; with it, Totman singlehandedly created the field of Japanese environmental history.
It also had a huge impact on me personally, showing me how I could combine my interest in environmental issues with my research as a historian. The book’s basic argument is that with such a dense population, Japan today should be an environmental wasteland, but it is instead a beautiful, verdant country thanks to sustainable resource use over many centuries.
Totman focuses specifically on silviculture (forest management) during the Edo period (1600–1867). Viewed in retrospect, his argument is a little oversimplified, but the book remains a must-read for anyone interested in Japan’s environmental history.
This inaugural volume in the Ohio University Press Series in Ecology and History is the paperback edition of Conrad Totman's widely acclaimed study of Japan's environmental policies over the centuries. Professor Totman raises the critical question of how Japan's steeply mountainous woodland has remained biologically healthy despite centuries of intensive exploitation by a dense human population that has always been dependent on wood and other forest products. Mindful that in global terms this has been a rare outcome, and one that bears directly on Japan's recent experience as an affluent, industrial society, Totman examines the causes, forms, and effects of…
This collection of essays on Japanese environmental history grew out of an international conference held in Honolulu just after Japan’s “triple disaster” of 2011. The book’s aim is to examine human-nature relationships over the course of Japanese history.
Contributions by leading Japanese and Western historians, geographers, archaeologists, and climatologists show how Japan’s natural environment has both sustained human life and posed threats in the form of earthquakes, tsunamis, typhoons, floods, and volcanic eruptions. The essays also explore how human activity has reshaped nature through landscape modification, resource depletion, and industrial pollution. Unified by the themes of resilience and risk mitigation, the volume places Japanese environmental history in a global context and illuminates the historical roots of contemporary environmental challenges.
Ancient Evenings is a study of consciousness presented as a series of fictional philosophical dialogues set at the height of the Roman Empire. These dialogues—on good and evil, truth and falsehood, life and death—are historical re-enactments of what persons representing the major Hellenistic schools of philosophy might actually have said…
A memoir of homecoming by bicycle and how opening our hearts to others enables us to open our hearts to ourselves.
When the 2008 recession hit, 33-year-old Heidi Beierle was single, underemployed, and looking for a way out of her darkness. She returned to school, but her gloom deepened. All…
