Earthquake Nation: The Cultural Politics of Japanese Seismicity, 1868-1930 (review)

Gregory Clancey has produced an imaginative and engaging book on the role played by the Great Nōbi Earthquake of 1891 in the construction of knowledge in Meiji Japan. Clancey's findings will compel readers to consider anew how the environment—in this case nature in one of its most destructive manifestations—can shape institutions, transnational relations, architectural forms, academic and professional discourse, and the creation and dissemination of knowledge. Earthquake Nation is not a political, social, or environmental history of the Great Nōbi Earthquake or earthquakes in Japan. It nevertheless tells an important and overlooked story: it explores how the Great Nōbi Earthquake not only contributed to the definition and reconceptualization of professional and academic disciplines, ideas, and institutions associated with architecture, building, and the burgeoning field of seismology, but also led many to question the primacy of foreign knowledge. The earthquake did so, Clancey suggests, at both the most basic level of material culture comprising bricks, stones, and mortar, and the advanced level of high science and intellectual and professional discourse. By plotting these developments in a convincing fashion, this interdisciplinary study will appeal to a wide cross section of academics and students interested in Japanese history, the history of science and technology, architecture, building, and the creation of knowledge.

The first four chapters of Clancey's study set the stage for the Nōbi earthquake. Chapter 1 traces the development of Japan's first College of Technology (Kōbudaigakkō), where the Meiji government employed as teachers foreign (mainly British) engineers, scientists, and, importantly for this study, architects. Clancey traces how, under the direction of Josiah Conder, the Kōbudaigakkō sought to produce British-style architects who, using the materials of advanced Western civilization, namely hard, weighty, and durable stone, would make Japan "modern." Like their foreign teachers, an increasing number of Japanese architects produced by the College of Technology came to view Japan's wooden buildings as insubstantial, combustible, and ultimately fragile. Clancey purposely complicates this story in chapter 2 by introducing the important issue of earthquakes into the architecture of Japan. Would seemingly inflexible, foreign-style buildings made of brick and mortar withstand Japan's seismicity? Most, though not all, Western architectural teachers thought yes, arguing, as Clancey illustrates, that traditional daiku (chief artisans who were responsible for designing buildings and construction) had been unable to cope with the power of Japan's earthquakes and had "thus channeled their creative energies into aesthetics, into expressing rather than resisting the sublime" (p. 43). Many Japanese and even some foreigners, however, remained skeptical. In one of the best passages of the book, Clancey draws from a star Kōbudaigakkō student's final thesis to illustrate how Japan's architects of the future, trained in European techniques, nevertheless expressed doubts about Western claims of architectural mastery over Japanese nature. Yet, as Clancey concludes, many Kōbudaigakkō graduates went "on to make careers designing dozens of masonry buildings for the Meiji state" (p. 62). Why? Though Clancey hints that these servants of the new Meiji regime were following the wishes of the state, a definitive answer remains elusive.

In chapters 3 and 4, making good use of the sometimes heated academic and popular debates that took place in journals, books, and public lectures, Clancey delves more deeply into the question of seismic resistance that captivated foreign scientists and technocrats active in Japan. At times his narrative pits Conder's pro-masonry opinions against ideas articulated by Christopher Dresser and John Milne, who suggested that traditional Japanese wooden buildings were far less fragile and much more earthquake resistant than Conder thought. What I find most exciting about these first four chapters is the challenge they pose to the notion that "technology transfer" and the creation of knowledge in Meiji Japan were neat, tidy, unidirectional processes. No institution akin to the Kōbudaigakkō, as Clancey documents, existed elsewhere to be "recreated" in Japan (p. 43). Moreover, he...