Description:
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 remains 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.Brief description: Nadin Heé is professor of global history at Osaka University.
Review Quotes: Huebner, Heé, Miller, and Tsutsui have managed to curate a collection of works that range widely in temporal and geographic scope but still come together around a common theme of oceanic engagement that shines through in each section. The whole is greater than the parts, and the editors pull off the tricky feat of creating an edited volume that stays coherent and consistent without feeling too narrow or specialized. . . . Oceanic Japan succeeds overall in both collecting work from a wide array of maritime and Japan studies scholars into a single readable volume and in provoking a conversation between these scholars on why the view from the ocean matters to historians.--David J. McCaskey, SUNY Old Westbury "H-Oceans"