This is an updated edition of Conrad Totman's authoritative history of Japan from c.8000 BC to the present day. The first edition was widely praised for combining sophistication and accessibility. Covers a wide range of subjects, including geology, climate, agriculture, government and politics, culture, literature, media, foreign relations, imperialism, and industrialism. Updated to include an epilogue on Japan today and tomorrow. Now includes more on women in history and more on international relations. Bibliographical listings have been updated and enlarged. Part of The Blackwell History of the World Series The goal of this ambitious series is to provide an accessible source of knowledge about the entire human past, for every curious person in every part of the world. It will comprise some two dozen volumes, of which some provide synoptic views of the history of particular regions while others consider the world as a whole during a particular period of time. The volumes are narrative in form, giving balanced attention to social and cultural history (in the broadest sense) as well as to institutional development and political change. Each provides a systematic account of a very large subject, but they are also both imaginative and interpretative. The Series is intended to be accessible to the widest possible readership, and the accessibility of its volumes is matched by the style of presentation and production.
A survey of Japan's early modern period (1568-1868) that blends political, economic, intellectual, literary, and cultural history. It also introduces a fresh ecological perspective, covering natural disasters, resource use, demographics, and river control.
The lush green mountainous archipelago of today supports a population of over 127 million people and one of the most advanced economies in the world. How has this come about? At what environmental cost? Conrad Totman, one of the world's foremost scholars on Japan, here provides a comprehensive and detailed account of the country's environmental history, from its beginnings to the present day. What makes the Japanese story particularly instructive is that the country's boundaries are uncommonly clear and the nature, timing, and extent of external influences on its history are unusually identifiable. The Japanese experience, therefore, not only yields important insights into the processes of environmental history, it offers important lessons for the wider environmental history of the planet.
By 1853 Japan had been transformed from a sparsely populated land of nonliterate tribal peoples into an elaborately structured commercial society sustaining massive cities and a varied array of sophisticated cultural production. In this authoritative survey, Conrad Totman examines the origins of Japanese civilization and explores in detail the classical, medieval, and early-modern epochs, weaving interpretations of the major themes in Japan's cultural and political development into a rich historical narrative.
Taking the history of Japan and Korea and their environmental interactions from late Pleistocene down to about 1870 AD, this work aims to make a convincing case for viewing the two countries together, looking at their pre-industrial experiences.
This concise volume surveys three hundred years in the history of the lumber industry in early modern (Tokugawa) Japan. In earlier works, Conrad Totman examined environmental aspects of Japan's early modern forest history; here he guides readers through the inner workings of lumber provision for urban construction, providing a wealth of detail on commercial and technological systems of provision while focusing on the convoluted commercial arrangements that moved timber from forest to city despite exceptionally severe environmental and financial obstacles. Based on scrupulous scholarship in the vast Japanese secondary literature on forest history, The Lumber Industry in Early Modern Japan brings to light materials previously unavailable in English and synthesizes these within a thoughtful ecological framework. Its penetrating examination of the patterns of cooperation and conflict throughout the industry adds significantly to the scholarly corpus that challenges the stock image of Tokugawa rulers and merchants as social enemies. Instead it supports the view of those who have noted the interdependent character of political and economic elites and the long-term strengthening of rural sectors of society vis-a-vis urban sectors.
Every foreign traveler in Japan is delighted by the verdant forest-shrouded mountains that thrust skyward from one end of the island chain to the other. The Japanese themselves are conscious of the lush green of their homeland, which they sometimes refer to as "the green archipelago." Yet, based on its fragile geography and centuries of extremely dense human occupation, Japan today should be an impoverished, slum-ridden, peasant society subsisting on a barren, eroded moonscape characterized by bald mountains and debris-strewn lowlands. In fact, as Conrad Totman argues in this pathbreaking work based on prodigious research, this lush verdue is not a monument to nature's benevolence and Japanese aesthetic sensibilities, but the hard-earned result of generations of human toil that have converted the archipelago into one great forest preserve. Indeed, the author shows that until the late 1600s Japan was well on her way to ecological disaster due to exploitative forestry. During the Tokugawa period, however, an extraordinary change took place resulting in a system of "regenerative forestry" that averted the devastation of Japan's forests. The Green Archipelago is the only major Western-language work on this subject and a landmark not only in Japanese history, but in the history of the environment.
By 1853 Japan had been transformed from a sparsely populated land of nonliterate tribal peoples into an elaborately structured commercial society sustaining massive cities and a varied array of sophisticated cultural production. In this authoritative survey, Conrad Totman examines the origins of Japanese civilization and explores in detail the classical, medieval, and early-modern epochs, weaving interpretations of the major themes in Japan's cultural and political development into a rich historical narrative.
This is the first study of its kind to trace the history of what was to become one of Japan’s major resources and a model of conservation and forestry management. Central to the planning of the Meiji reformers was securing the long-term financial stability of the Imperial household that would not leave it exposed to future political and economic change.
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