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This article provides historical context for Singapore’s fabled preoccupation with cleanliness. Beyond the legacy of British colonialism and post-colonial concerns with international branding, the city-state was globally unique in shifting nearly all its citizens into a new urban infrastructure in one sustained campaign. Public health bureaucracies came to play an important supporting role in the creation of this ‘landlord state’, in which health became imbricated with cleanliness and habitation, all three becoming realms of state responsibility. The ban on the importation of chewing gum in the early 1990s can also be set within this context, that substance having emerged for infrastructure builders as not just a nuisance, but a tool of low-level sabotage.

ArgumentHijōji(emergency) was an important keyword in the militarist Japan of the 1930s. Previous scholarship has assumed that such language sprung from the global financial crisis of 1929, and subsequent diplomatic events. Our article demonstrates, however, that a full-bodied language of emergency was crafted well before the collapse of the global economy, and against the backdrop of the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, which destroyed the Japanese capital. While previous “great earthquakes” had been opportunities to strengthen Japanese participation in the global project of science, this one led more dramatically to a crisis of reason, and indirectly contributed to the spiritual, anti-western, and anti-rational rhetoric of what became the “Showa Restoration.” This and other post-disaster landscapes, we argue, should be examined as compelling sites for the crafting of political language – sites of opportunity and meaning as well as trial. While the phrase “state of emergency” was coined under very different circumstances in post-war Britain, it gained power and charisma in Japan, and likely other places around the world, by its association with natural catastrophe. Thus did modern politics establish a new connection with the traditional realm of the sublime, and in the case of Japan, the supernatural. Emergency's ability to associate politics with nature would never disappear, and has perhaps even strengthened in the early twenty-first century.

��� IntheaftermathoftherecentJapanesetsunamiIwasaskedforinterviewsbyanumber of Southeast Asian broadcast journalists because I had written a book on Japanese earthquakes. Most of them politely gave me their questions in advance. This was not just politeness, of course, because writing out all one’s questions in advance predetermines the course of the interview, constructing a narrative ahead of the conversation. One narrative that I was continually invited to contribute to could be called “the admirable stoicism of the Japanese in the face of natural disaster.” My role as a historian, I was signaled, was to help viewers or listeners understand how the long historyofearthquakes,disaster,andsimplyhardshiphadinuredtheJapanesepeopleto sublime misfortune. One interviewer (who had an undergraduate degree in history) actually asked me to begin in the Tokugawa period and tell viewers how each successive period and its crises had made the Japanese more stoical. Another wanted me to explicitly contrast the behavior of the Japanese with that of other peoples who had faced similar crises and (supposedly) had not behaved so admirably (he mentioned Haitians and the citizens of New Orleans). I did my best in every interview to complicate the narrative of a unitary Japanese people inured to crisis, but to no avail. I mentioned, for instance, that the mayor of a northern town had complained of the slow response of the central government, whom he claimed was leaving elderly residents of the town to die. I reminded reporters that therehadbeenastringofnuclearaccidentsinJapanandthatthereweremanyactivists (and just regular people) who deeply mistrusted the nuclear industry even before the disaster.IsuggestedthatthesameJapanesewhoappearedstoicalontelevisionscreens today would punish the ruling party at the polls tomorrow if it did not perform well in thiscrisis.Thefishingvillages mostaffectedbythedisaster,Imentioned,were indeed used to hardship, and could weather the crisis as fishing and farming villages around theworldhaveweatheredcrises forcenturies.ButtheywereonlyoneofmanyJapans. In any case, any comment that I made which could be construed as complicating the narrative of a unified stoical people was edited out of my eventual appearances on

There is clearly much work to be done on science in the Japanese colonial empire and on colonialism as a category in the Japanese sciences. Political considerations are partly to blame for delaying...

On October 28, 1891, one of the most powerful earthquakes in modern Japanese history rocked the main island of Honshu from Tokyo to Osaka. Centered on the populous Nōbi Plain north of Nagoya, this was the first daishinsai (‘great earthquake disaster’) of the Meiji era, and the strongest to visit central Japan in 37 years. The Great Nōbi Earthquake killed only 7–8,000 people (compared to the over 100,000 destined to die in the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923), mostly inhabitants of towns and villages in Nagoya's hinterland. But its breadth and power were unprecedented in the memories of most Japanese, and the event became the subject of many dozens of books, newspaper and journal articles, paintings and woodblock prints, and even images on fans, plates, and lampshades. This was Japan's first truly national natural catastrophe. It was national in the sense that it was deemed by many of its narrators to have affected the new nation-state directly, and a nationalizing discourse of alarm, regret, recrimination, sympathy, and even patriotism was generated around it by a newly-consolidating modern print media.

Like many twentieth-century states, late imperial Japan launched a housing campaign as it marched to war. Conducted under the banner of “rationalisation” and “total defence”, Japan's housing progra...

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has a distinctive mandate to “accelerate and enlarge the contribution of atomic energy to peace, health, and prosperity throughout the world.” The Division of Human Health (NAHU) of the IAEA recognizes education and research as key components of “readiness, response, and recovery” with respect to a major nuclear accident. In this chapter, we address ongoing efforts of NAHU to foster a more comprehensive Science and Technology Studies (STS) approach to creating and mobilizing new knowledge of radiation medicine. This includes promoting collaborative education and research programs and policies based on lessons from the Fukushima accident. NAHU is playing an instrumental role in this process. We discuss results from a consultancy meeting on “Global Radiation Medicine: Educational Challenges for Academia,” which used a focus group methodology. Two STS-oriented projects are being implemented as an outcome of this meeting. The first aims to enhance global radiation medicine education by building capacity among physicians, health professionals, and medical students. The second project aims to strengthen research cooperation in radiation disaster medicine, including the psychosocial consequences of disasters. NAHU mobilizes both international and Japanese STS and disaster studies experts as a way to integrate outsider and insider perspectives on the Fukushima recovery process and draw on the contributions of health professionals, medical students, and specialists from relevant fields such as sociology, anthropology, history, and psychology.

1. Cities as Targets Ryan Bishop, Gregory Clancey, and John Phillips 2. 'But with Malice Aforethought': Cities and the Natural History of Hatred Nigel Thrift 3. Targeting the Imaginist City John Armitage 4. The Refugee War Eyal Weizman 5. Theme Park Archipelago: Convergences of War, Simulation and Entertainment in Urban Targeting Steve Graham 6. Empire or Imperialism: Implications for a "New" Politics of Resistance Pal Ahluwalia 7 . The City-as-Target: Targeting the City Verena Andermatt Conley 8. Tokyo: Water, Earthquake, and Island Universe Suzuki Hiroyuki 9. Vast Clearings: Emergency, Technology, and American De-Urbanization, 1930-1945 Gregory Clancey 10. Concealment and Exposure: Imagining London after the Great Fire Li Shiqiao 11. Moscow: Fortress City Irina Aristarkhova 12. Ars Memoria and Unbombing Tjebbe van Tijen 13. London: The Imperial Target Rajeev Patke 14. : Keizu to Nendaiki: Making and Erasing History in Tsukuba Science City at the Edge of Empire Sharon Traweek 15. The City and the Economy of "Losing": Targeting Competitive Bodies in an Era of Global Competition Robbie Goh 16. The Absorptive Assemblage Jordan Crandall 17. "The Target is the People": Representations of the Village in Modernization and National Security Doctrine Nick Cullather

Carpenters are liminal figures in the history of technology, and in studies of architecture, labor, masculinity, and any other commonly recognized disciplinary cluster which might claim their story. The Anglo-American word “technology” and its Japanese translation gijutsu, both coined in the mid-nineteenth century to describe a new regime of continually reengineered devices and systems, were set more or less above (if not against) the existing world of wood and hand-tools.1 Few figures seemed more outside this new rubric than carpenters, who by definition were tied to an age-old organic material, and assigned by necessity to small, widely dispersed work-groups difficult to subject to industrial management or discipline. In both Japan and the West, the image of the carpenter surrounded by shavings still immediately evokes for most people the world of the pre-“technology” past, even if he (and it is still typically a “he”) now carries a union card, the hand-tool is electrified, and the lumber was ripped out of a rain forest by giant skidders.2

I want to trace a relationship, as yet little examined, between architecture and the condition of emergency. I’ll do so mainly from Singapore, where the nexus seems particularly compelling. It does not occur here uniquely, however, nor did it arise here originally. This essay will thus work its way back toward the city-state from distant but related places. My concerns are chiefly historical, because emergency bespeaks an event, and events are the peculiar province of history. Emergency cuts across process and design – or the design process – and shifts readily between the “natural” and the “man-made”, the political and the personal, conditions subject to description and those which approach the sublime. It suggests the possibility of deception through the manipulation of speed. In these and other senses it seems very much a keyword for the modern condition.

One of the country's largest postwar architectural projects, the United States Air Force Academy opened in 1958. Its stunning Modernist design has been hailed as a national landmark and attracts over a million visitors each year. The contributors to this volume (Jory Johnson, Robert Nauman, Sheri Olson, James Russell, and Kristen Schaffer) and editor Robert Bruegmann chronicle the complex history of the planning, design, and construction of the Air Force Academy. As the most conspicuous commission of the American military at the height of the Cold War, the design of the Academy generated intense popular interest and was a lightning rod for conflicting values in postwar society. The design, by architects Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, has been seen by many as the final triumph of the International Style and as a monument to military bureaucracy.