outreach
Aug. 27, 2021: EAJS Conference: Convening a Panel with Sheldon Garon and Nadin Heé
A Frontier Problem? Placing Japan’s Modern Experience in the Age of Industrial Alienations.
Aug. 27, on Zoom @ EAJS https://nomadit.co.uk/conference/eajs2021/p/9134#
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Jonas Rüegg, Harvard University, Convenor & Panelist.
Sheldon Garon, Princeton University, Discussant & Panelist.
Nadin Heé, Osaka University, Discussant & Panelist.
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The discovery of the Anthropocene as a historical epoch has brought new dimensions to the writing of global history. Traveling species, spreading disease, and transnational ecosystems prompt us to challenge not only the nation state as a unit of analysis, but also demand new definitions of global entanglement and industrial transformation. We observe that the alienations at the origin of the “modern age” widened the distance in power and space between metropole and periphery, engineers and environment, strategists and battlefields.
Covering the century leading up to the ultimate catastrophe of World War II, this panel maps such alienations through thought, technology, and environmental change. These transformations were globally connected and had irreversible effects for global society. Jonas Rüegg finds that embedded in a global ecosystem, early modern Japan had been competing over maritime resources with distant adversaries, joining a scramble for pelagic whale grounds once the impacts of Western whaling had become evident in Japan. Nadin Heé shows how this scramble in the 20th century made the exploitation of ever-farther maritime frontiers a project central to nationalist ideology, and how the resulting migration and expansion became crucial to Japan’s imperial project. With the industrialization of fishing, the remoteness of ever-changing frontiers delayed the visibility of decline and death in maritime ecosystems. With the industrialization of war, human suffering also became less and less visible. Therefore, argues Sheldon Garon, the bombing of urban centers had become abstracted into a scientific practice of effective warfare at the hands of the allied forces.
Connecting three episodes of Japan’s modern experience with the archipelago’s inhabitants as both perpetrators and victims, this panel calls for a redefinition of global modernity based on its blind reliance on expendable frontiers and its paradoxical retreat to a discursively isolated and ostensibly safe metropole.
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