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This article expands and complicates the literature on “craft” by examining the seeming anomaly of a craft community dominating a significant production sector within an advanced industrial economy, and despite the existence of cheaper high-tech and labor-saving alternatives. Japanese house-carpenters, organized into very small firms with very local markets, and producing “traditional” house-frames in small batches, have long held prefabrication and other alternatives at bay through a process of conservative innovation. The primary goal of their innovative process has been the protection and continuance of house-carpentry as a relevant and marketable skill, and of its practitioners as a self-sustaining community. This craft is not an exemplar of sustainability in other ways, however, despite its association with the traditional and organic. Its house-products have unnaturally short lives given Japanese methods of accounting for property value, and its raw material, foreign-sourced old-growth forests, are increasingly subject to global conservation efforts.

‘Thermal governance’ has been discussed elsewhere as the regulation of temperature through infrastructure, technology and social and political organisation. We extend it here to include a subtle and heretofore under-recognised element of public health: the governance of recent urban epidemics by the Chinese state. The SARS epidemic of 2002–2003 in Guangzhou and more markedly the COVID-19 epidemic in Wuhan triggered massive emergency responses by public health authorities which differed from previous strategies in more fully activating the state health sector known in China as Chinese Medicine ( zhongyi) and outside China as Traditional Chinese Medicine. With this enlistment comes a body of theory and practice which makes meteorology central to diagnostic and prescriptive processes, and reinforces as part of state discourse the long-standing Chinese cultural understanding of ‘heat’ as an internal micro-climatic element transcending temperature.

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.

Japan is periodically wracked by “Great Earthquakes” (daijishin) – seismic events so destructive that they leave massive amounts of textual and graphic evidence, much of it produced by people who did not experience the events directly. Using this cache of information, it is possible to see how the idea of the “disaster victim” has changed over time and circumstance. My paper traces this role across five Great Earthquakes that spanned roughly 150 years (1855–2011), a period convergent with modern Japan. I will argue that the sense of who and what has been victimized by the shaking of the earth – who has suffered, what weight to attach to their loss, what actions to take and emotions to feel regarding their situation – has changed regularly, and surprisingly, over this rather short period. There is, in other words, no common Japanese experience of victimhood, even in the context of one disaster type over a relatively short historical period. The article is one contribution to an as-yet unexamined hi...

This essay considers how the dead are being memorialised and geographically sited (‘brought home’) on the Internet through the use of online databases that allow collaborative construction of conte...

The Human Liver Proteome Project (HLPP) is the largest international scientific research project ever headquartered in China. At the same time, the HLPP is one component of the global Human Proteome Project (HPP), which in 2001–2002 began dividing the organs and systems of the human body between different national laboratories and institutes. Research on the kidney was assigned to Japan, brain research to Germany, liver research to China, etc. Only in China, however, did the project take on the character of ‘big science’, successfully competing with other scientific initiatives for funding and prestige at the highest level, and developing ‘national’ characteristics similar to that of genomics research in the United States. Our article considers this flagship Chinese bioscience project from two complementary angles: as ‘big science’ at the cutting edge of biomedical research, and as a discursive and practice-oriented meeting ground between modern and ‘traditional’ Chinese medicine. We also discuss how these strands are politically and philosophically convergent.

Our title, “Asian Biopoleis: Practice, Place, and Life,” is also the name of a research initiative under way at the National University of Singapore (NUS) since 2010, and is the theme of this issue...

Psychosocial stress is generally associated with adverse health behaviors and has been linked to the development of cardiovascular diseases (CVD). Recently, an individual's sense of coherence (SOC), which is a concept that reflects the ability to cope with psychosocial stress, has been recognized as an essential component of long-term health and stress management. The association between SOC and traditional and alternative atherosclerotic markers in a community sample, however, has not been thoroughly investigated. In the present study, we evaluated stress management capability and psychological conditions using the Japanese version of the Sense of Coherence-13 (SOC-13) Scale, supplemented by the General Health Questionnaire-12 (GHQ-12) that screens for minor psychiatric disorders. The study subjects were 511 adults, median age 64 years (range 48-70), who participated in a regular medical screening program in Nagasaki Prefecture, Japan. We then correlated our findings with atherosclerotic risk factors in the same community sample, such as body mass index (BMI) and proper and regular sleeping habits. We found that close association between good stress management capability and lower BMI and/or regular sleeping habits in elderly Japanese. This provides strong evidence that BMI and sleep management are contributory to SOC. If the ability to cope with psychosocial stress is important to the prevention of CVD, then weight control and proper sleep habits must be emphasized from a psychosocial stress-management perspective as well as a physical one.

This article is the transcript of a round-table talk delivered at the 2011 annual meeting of the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) in Cleveland, Ohio. It considers the paradox that the close identification of “Asia” with “technology,” globally as well as within Asia, has not been paralleled by a strong research program in the humanities and social sciences to understand this relationship, particularly its cultural ramifications. It outlines reasons for this, particularly in regard to teaching and research in the history of technology, and suggests that the recent rise of interest in STS in Asia represents a path forward.

Almost every destructive earthquake opens social and political fault lines as well as natural ones, and those of the Great East Japan Earthquake of March 2011 are notable only for their local depth and global circulation. Seismicity is a geographically selective concern, but because radiation is involved in the present instance, the stake-holders in debates surrounding the earthquake are much more numerous and spread over a far wider map. In fact seismicity, as opposed to radiation, has receded in most contemporary discussions of the earthquake's aftermath, just as “Sanriku,” the area most damaged by the tsunami, has been displaced by “Fukushima” as shorthand for the event as a whole.

This essay tells a cultural and political history of biomedicine in Singapore. It takes as its starting point the ‘Intelligent Island’ discourse of the 1990s. It argues not for continuity but dissonance between the two projects, while embedding them in local as well as global cultural politics. Singapore’s adaptation of biomedicine was more than an economic decision, and has had more than economic consequences.

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

At a time when the residential college model seems under threat in other parts of the world, it is experiencing a second birth in 21st century Asia. A few traditional colleges have long existed in the region, particularly in former British colonies like Hong Kong, Malaysia, India, and Pakistan, but the new wave of college building here represents less a continuity with the past than a conscious attempt to make something new. In Singapore, the model of the residential college is being rethought from the ground up.

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.

This article is one step toward an urban history of the United States that foregrounds “emergency” as a clearing device. American cities were strategically targeted during the sustained mid-twentieth century depression and war by a complex of groups – the Federal government, corporations, professional organizations, and universities – who coordinated survival largely at the expense of existing urban fabric. Together they invented “the house” as a new type of space – at once national, masculine, and high-tech – whose connection to urban densities was casual if not inherently confrontational. “The house” was only the beginning of an emergency response that would eventually declare cities “blighted,” and hence susceptible to large-scale winnowing.

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...

This paper describes the uncharted terrain of the 'remote city', an ubiquitous modern urban space. Concentrating on four cities to the north-east of Tokyo and New York, it argues that worldliness is hardly a monoply of 'world cities'; that historical narratives of connection not only construct the 'locality' of many places, but establish imperatives for regular re-engagement. The remote, local, historical and small are revealed as aspects of globality, rather than alternatives. The worldly narratives of Bangor and Lewiston, Maine (US), and Hakodate, Japan, are contrasted not only with each other, but with the studied non-worldliness of the larger but still remote Japanese city of Niigata. The essay ends with a possible explanation for why 'heroic' or local worldliness actually flourishes in an era of the global mundane.

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

Generalist descriptions of Japan often begin with two seemingly contradictory statements. One is that “Japan is a heavily forested country,” an observation that is by any measure indisputable. The second is that “Japan is a country largely lacking in natural resources,” a lesson taught not only by geographers and economic historians, but by virtually all narrative histories of World War II, in which Japan conquers large areas of the rest of Asia because of its need for “strategic (natural) resources.” Working both formulaic statements into a single introductory paragraph, a common device of Japanese and foreign writers alike, presupposes that Japan’s forests are not a “natural resource,” or at least not one suitable to the sustenance of a modern, industrial economy. The singularity of this formula is apparent only when one compares it to generalist descriptions of other forested places. A discussion of, say, Indonesia, could not possibly separate the “heavily forested” observation from a “natural resource” statement so blithely.

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.

This paper reports three aspects of an ongoing building archeology project at the MacPheadris-Warner House (ca. 1716–23) in Portsmouth, N.H., U.S.A. One is the use of a portable moisture meter to map rising damp levels and areas of water infiltration through brickwork. The second is the mapping of crack patterns and other defects on exterior elevations. We will also refer to a second site, the Juliette Gordon Low House in Savannah, Georgia, in discussing the problem of crack mapping. The third project is an ongoing attempt to replicate a shell lime mortar.