Turbulent Streams: An Environmental History of Japan’s Rivers, 1600–1930(68 Brill's Japanese Studies Library)

In Turbulent Streams: An Environmental History of Japan’s Rivers, 1600–1930, Roderick I. Wilson describes how the rivers of Japan are both hydrologically and historically dynamic. Today, these waterways are slowed, channeled, diverted, and dammed by a myriad of levees, multiton concrete tetrapods, and massive multipurpose dams. In part, this intensive engineering arises from the waterways falling great elevations over short distances, flowing over unstable rock and soil, and receiving large quantities of precipitation during monsoons and typhoons. But this modern river regime is also the product of a history that narrowed both these waterways and people’s diverse interactions with them in the name of flood control. Neither a story of technological progress nor environmental decline, this history introduces the concept of environmental relations as a category of historical analysis both to explore these fluvial interactions and reveal underappreciated dimensions of Japanese history.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments List of Figures and Tables Note to Readers Introduction  1 A Riparian History of Ogura Lake  2 Crossing the River between Nature and Society  3 Riparian Relations: An Expanded Understanding of Rivers  4 Chapter Organization Part 1: Regional River Regimes in the Tokugawa Period 1 Riparian Relations in the Kantō Region  1 Producing the Kantō Region and Its Riverscapes during the Seventeenth Century  2 Water Worlds of Farmers, Fishers, and Boat Pilots  3 Conclusion 2 Regional River Regime under the Tokugawa Government  1 Establishing Tokugawa Governance over the Waters of the Kantō Region, 1590–1700  2 Maintaining Riparian Governance in the Kantō Region, 1700–1783  3 Losing Ground against Continued Flooding, 1783–1868  4 Conclusion Part 2: Techno-Politics of River Engineering in Imperial Japan 3 Engineering and River Engineers in the Age of Imperialism  1 The Home Ministry’s Early Riparian Policies  2 The Fudō River Worksite  3 Dutch Engineers in Japan  4 Educating Japanese Engineers: The French Connection  5 Conclusion 4 Confluence along the Yodo River  1 The Yodo River  2 Home Ministry Engineers  3 Local Communities  4 Conclusion 5 Constructing the Modern River Regime in Japan  1 Making Modern River Regimes  2 Techno-Politics of Flood Control  3 The 1910 Flooding of Tokyo and Paris  4 The Effects of Building Japan’s Modern River Regime  5 Conclusion Epilogue Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Roderick I. Wilson, Ph.D., Stanford University, is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he teaches and writes about topics in Japanese and environmental history.

Review :
"Wilson’s careful attention to the literature in Japanese and English and to questions of method and approach are present throughout. Altogether this is an important new contribution to the fast-developing fi eld of Japanese environmental history and has major implications for the urban history of Edo/Tokyo especially." – Mark Metzler, in The Journal of Japanese Studies 49.1, pp. 162-167 (2023) "Roderick Wilson’s Turbulent Streams makes another fine contribution to this growing body of literature on Japanese environmental history, exploring the early modern Tokugawa era to well into the twentieth century. The book draws on a considerable volume of Japanese-language secondary sources that focus exclusively on Japan and also takes inspiration from well-known theoreticians and practitioners who make up the core of English-language environmental historical studies." – Philip C. Brown, in Monumenta Nipponica 77.1, pp. 140-145 (2022)