BOOK CHAPTER IN PRODUCTION
“Japanese History in Hydrological Dimensions.” In Histories and Society of the Hydrosphere. Duara, Prasenjit, and Wescoat, James (eds.). Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, Prospectively 2026.
Human history is embedded in hydrological cycles that interlink terrestrial, atmospheric and oceanic ecologies. In the twenty-first century, change in climatic patterns is no longer perceived as a question of centuries or millennia but of decades, compressing geological time into scales otherwise used to measure individual lives. Water plays an exemplary role in this process both as a metabolic linkage between disparate spheres of social ecology, and as a source of historically changing paradigms. Water circulates across human society in the disparate rhythms of seasonal precipitation, decadal oscillations and interdecadal climatic patterns. Its fluidity serves as a palpable model for dynamics that otherwise exceed the temporal scope of immediate observation.
This chapter outlines questions and tensions that may come to the fore if the history of terraqueous Northeast Asia were framed not primarily by language and archival tectonics as conditioned by the nation state, but by the hydrological cycles that structure the region at a macroscopic level. I begin by outlining how geophysical processes that transcend shores and national borders, such as the Kuroshio and Oyashio currents, the East Asian Monsoon, or the El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) could offer the transregional frameworks needed to read climatic events in historical conjunction. Affirmed or overhauled, aquatic ontologies have time and again expressed geopolitical fears and promises. Yet oceans defy the centuries-old project of subjecting them to land-borne rationalism. Embedding Japanese history in the hydrosphere offers an opportunity to consider novel frameworks such as currents, winds and seismic waves to understand diachronic and tele-connected ramifications of anthropogenic Climate Change. I conclude this chapter with a reflection on how inverting the classical terrestrial bias and subjecting land-borne history to hydrological cycles instead can serve as an exercise in critically reexamining the epistemic hierarchies that inform how humans use the past to forecast the future.
