Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Seismic Japan
What are we to make of contemporary newspapers in Japan speculating about the possible connection between aquatic creatures and earthquakes? Of a city council deciding to issue evacuation advice based on observed animal behavior? Why, between 1977 and 1993, did Japan’s government spend taxpayer money to observe catfish in aquariums as part of its mandate to fund earthquake prediction research? All of these actions are direct legacies of the 1855 Ansei Edo earthquake, one of the major natural disasters of the period. In his investigation of the science, politics, and lore of seismic events in Japan, Gregory Smits examines this earthquake in a broad historical context. The Ansei Edo earthqua...
The Green Archipelago
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 Japane...
Handbook of Japanese Dialects
This volume is the first comprehensive English handbook on Japanese dialects. The study of Japanese dialects has a rich tradition, contributing to fields like geolinguistics, sociolinguistics, and phonology. While influenced by Western linguistics, Japanese dialectology has also made significant original contributions through extensive fieldwork and compilation of dialect dictionaries and atlases. Most studies have been published in Japanese, allowing only a handful of foreign specialists to take full advantage of the achievements in Japanese dialectology. This handbook addresses that gap, making dialect data and analyses available to a broader audience and informing specialists about Japanese dialectology's methods and achievements. It focuses on mainland dialects, including the Hachijō language, while a separate handbook covers the Ryukyuan languages, now regarded as sister languages of Japanese.
Mathematics Across Cultures
Mathematics Across Cultures: A History of Non-Western Mathematics consists of essays dealing with the mathematical knowledge and beliefs of cultures outside the United States and Europe. In addition to articles surveying Islamic, Chinese, Native American, Aboriginal Australian, Inca, Egyptian, and African mathematics, among others, the book includes essays on Rationality, Logic and Mathematics, and the transfer of knowledge from East to West. The essays address the connections between science and culture and relate the mathematical practices to the cultures which produced them. Each essay is well illustrated and contains an extensive bibliography. Because the geographic range is global, the book fills a gap in both the history of science and in cultural studies. It should find a place on the bookshelves of advanced undergraduate students, graduate students, and scholars, as well as in libraries serving those groups.
Xavier's Legacies
Japan has had three Catholic prime ministers, and its current empress was raised and educated in the faith. How did a non-Christian nation come to foster more Catholic leaders than the United States, particularly when Protestantism is said to define Christianity in Japan and Catholicism is believed to be but a fleeting element of Japan’s so-called Christian century? Far from being a relic of the past – something brought to Japan by sixteenth-century missionaries such as Francis Xavier and then forgotten – Catholicism offered, and continues to provide, an authentic way for Japanese believers to shape their cultural identities. This volume documents the appeal of Catholicism, not only among farmers and fishers but also among scientists, diplomats, novelists, and members of the imperial household who have found in Catholicism an alternative way to keep “tradition” and negotiate modernity since the late nineteenth century.
The Lumber Industry in Early Modern Japan
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 bri...
The Modern Epidemic
Through a historical and comparative analysis of modern Japan’s epidemic of tuberculosis, William Johnston illuminates a major but relatively unexamined facet of Japanese social and cultural history. He utilizes a broad range of sources, including medical journals and monographs, archaeological evidence, literary works, ethnographic data, and legal and government documents to reveal how this and similar epidemics have been the result of social changes that accompanied the process of modernization. Johnston also shows the ways in which modern states, private organizations, and individual citizens have responded to epidemics, and in the process reexamines the concept of the epidemic itself, showing that epidemics must be thought of not only in medical and biological terms but in political, social and cultural terms as well.
