1,720,974 research outputs found
Technical knowledge in early modern Japan
No full textDrawing on the papers presented at CEEJA’s* first international conference addressing the long-neglected field relating to the generation, dissemination and application of technical knowledge in Japan from the Edo to the Meiji periods, this volume provides a valuable selection of new research on the subject, from Hashimoto Takehiko’s detailed examination of Tanaka Hisashige’s ‘Myriad Year Clock’, Regine Mathias’s paper on mining and smelting, and Erich Pauer’s overview of Japanese technical books in the pre-modern era, to Suzuki Jun’s detailed account of boiler-making in late nineteenth-century Japan
Translating COVID-19 and Japan: a historical reflection on the social standing of scientists
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The scientist and the South Seas: Micronesians in the Japanese Imperial gaze
No full textIn 1914, shortly after the outbreak of World War I, Japan seized Germany’s territories in the North Pacific, having invoked its formal alliance with the British to combat what it deemed “German piratical activity” in the region. When hostilities ended, Japan was granted a class C mandate over these territories. Micronesia, comprising the Mariana, Caroline, and Marshall Islands, then remained part of the Japanese Empire until the end of World War II in 1945. These north Pacific atolls had long attracted the attention of outsiders. The northernmost islands, the Marianas, had been declared a possession of the Spanish crown in 1565. However, following its defeat in the Spanish-American war of 1898, Spain sold these islands (except for Guam) to Germany, which added them to its Pacific territories of the Caroline Islands and the Marshall Islands that Germany had acquired a few years earlier.
Japanese interest in Micronesia—referred to as Nan’yō (the South Seas)—predated its formal occupation. Private Japanese traders had been operating from these islands since the 1880s, with government-led anthropological surveys carried out in the 1890s. By the late Meiji period journalists and public figures were clamoring for Japan to take these islands to gain a foothold in the Pacific—one that could be used a steppingstone to even more lucrative territories in Southeast Asia and the Pacific
Evolutionary theory and the limits of humanity at the southern reaches of Japan’s empire: Reading Earth’s Belly by Nishimura Makoto
Full text linkMorris Low (2020) Visualizing nuclear power in Japan: a trip to the reactor [Book Review]
Full text linkThe translation of technical manuals from western languages in nineteenth-century Japan: a visual tour
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Translation of a discipline the fate of rankine's engineering science in early meiji-era Japan
No full textThis paper examines the translation of the academic discipline of engineering from Britain to Japan in the early Meiji era (1868-1880). It argues that engineering, like other disciplines, is a discursive field shaped by the context in which it develops. British academic engineering was greatly influenced by W.J.M. Rankine, professor of engineering at the University of Glasgow, who delineated a discursive identity for the field by meeting the demands of both practising engineers and the academy. The resulting character of this discipline was but one of multiple possibilities, but it gained legitimacy, and ultimately orthodoxy. In Japan, there were a number of competing visions but Rankinian engineering eventually prevailed as it was granted privileged status by the Ministry of Public Works through the selection of Rankine's protégé, Henry Dyer, as head of the Imperial College of Engineering, and later by the Ministry of Education through its selection of Rankine's works for translation into Japanese. This paper demonstrates that the Rankinian vision was but one of multiple choices available in the early Meiji era. It also examines how Rankine's engineering science became entrenched as orthodoxy in Japan and how translation reflects this process. © St Jerome Publishing Manchester
Popular science and personal endeavor in early-Meiji Japan: The case of Hatsumei Kiji
Full text linkDuring the late 1860s and early 1870s, many science books were translated into vernacular Japanese from Chinese and European languages. These works rendered science accessible to non-scholarly audiences, thereby opening up scientific knowledge for appropriation in various ways. This paper focuses on one work that drew together material from such translations to promote a particular message. The book in question, Hatsumei Kiji (Accounts of Invention), was created by an Osaka-based merchant who adapted, supplemented and vernacularized scholarly translations to produce a work which aimed to persuade tradesmen that science promised a means of securing their future in the unsettled social and economic landscape of the early Meiji period. This paper examines the methods used by the boo
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