One of our weblog’s authors, Roderick Wilson, is giving a talk this Friday in Tokyo at the Modern Japanese History Workshop. Since Rod is one of us, I just want to put in an extra plug for his talk here and wish him the best of luck. Below is the blurb found in the H-Japan posting about his upcoming event:
For many years now, Tokyo has been much maligned for its lack of greenery and waterside spaces. Typically, blame is cast on the influence of industry and a succession of Kafkaesque bureaucrats and city planners during the city s rapid industrialization from the 1890s onward. But, while the city indeed industrialized, society changed, and the environment suffered, Tokyo also remained a city of canals and rivers through the 1950s. And, these waterways teemed with barges, lighters, and rafts–more than twenty thousand of them in 1920–hauling the fuel and food that fed the city s factories and people. Thus, it was because of, rather than in spite of, the interests of industry and commerce that successive generations of city planners both retained and maintained the city s vast network of waterways.
At November’s Modern Japanese History Workshop, I will present my ongoing research about how Tokyo s city planners sought to harness and control the city’s waterways for economic growth. This work is part of a chapter in my larger dissertation project entitled Riverwork: A Social and Environmental History of Tokyo’s Sumida River, 1850s-1950s, where I show how industrialization produced new social and environmental relations along the city s waterways. Moreover, by showing how Tokyo has always been both more and less than the capital city of Japan–a metonymical place for all things national, I use the history of Tokyo and its rivers to show how the city worked as a nexus amidst several layers of cultural, social, and economic networks–local, regional, national, imperial and international. Specifically, in November s presentation, I will use this approach to show how transnational ideas and technologies about urban planning and civil engineering were institutionalized at a national level and applied locally with dramatic consequences for the entire Kanto region.
I hope we can hear more about Rod’s research in the future. You can find directions to the talk in the original announcement.
