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

On 28 October 1891 a massive earthquake shook central Japan from Osaka to Tokyo. In its wake it left the rubble of a modernizing Japan. Recently constructed, Western-style masonry buildings, iron bridges, and the ubiquitous factory chimneys collapsed while traditional Japanese wooden structures shook but remained standing. Focused on the Nobi Plain around Nagoya and later estimated to be at magnitude 8.4 on the Richter scale, what is now known as the Great Nobi Earthquake reshaped the discourse of architecture, engineering, seismicity, and East and West in an internationalizing Japan.

In this groundbreaking work, Gregory Clancey argues that earthquakes were more than natural phenomena. By unraveling the complex relationship between Japanese and Western architecture and engineering and the emerging science of seismology, he demonstrates that the culture of earthquakes redefined Western knowledge in Japan. Japanese architecture became science, rather than remaining in the realm of art; institutions such as the College of Engineering and the Seismological Society of Japan were reconceived more concretely as Japanese rather than simply being repositories of Western knowledge.

Starting in the early 1870s, Western architecture and engineering were adapted in Japan along with their symbolic values of strength and permanence. Masonry buildings, iron bridges, railroads, and telegraph wires soon became integral parts of the Japanese landscape as the Meiji government sought to import the icons of Western civilization. The government hired foreign advisors, primarily British, to train Japanese architects and engineers who would literally build the new Japan. Men like Josiah Conder, Richard Henry Brunton, and George Cawley sought to overcome the forces of Japanese nature with the mass and inflexibility of brick, stone, and iron. Facing this foreign assault on traditional technique stood the daiku, the architect-carpenter whose wooden buildings were derided as flexible, fragile, and temporary. Between the poles of modernity and tradition stood the men Clancey calls Anglo-Japanese architects: the students of Western knowledge who would nonetheless create "new archi-technical models for Meiji Japan" (p. 37). Clancey's discussion of the ways that Western knowledge was reshaped in Japan is a refreshing break from the standard narrative of technology transfer, often inaccurately described as unfettered adoption of Western technology. Clancey demonstrates that Japanese architects understood the limitations of their mentors' knowledge and were at ease to create a new architectural vernacular.

Concurrent to the development of, and informing the debate on, architecture was the emerging science of seismology. Again, it was an Englishman, John Milne, who trained a generation of Japanese scientists. Milne was originally hired to teach geology and mining at the College of Engineering, but an 1880 Yokohama earthquake induced him to more formally study what had previously been "a geological pastime" (p. 63). The lack of significant physical evidence from the earthquake frustrated Milne's efforts to use commonly accepted European methods of mapping earthquake damage to determine the quake's strength and direction of movement. This was not because the earthquake was of insufficient magnitude, but because Japanese buildings resisted the forces of nature whereas Western-style buildings had not.

Shortly thereafter, Milne and two other professors at the College of Engineering, James Ewing and Thomas Gray, built and deployed their version of a seismograph with which to document Japan's seismic movements. Although it liberated the seismologist from the constraints of civil engineering—namely, mapping damaged structures—Clancey argues that this invention did not fully divorce seismology from "the world of bricks and mortar" (p. 73). Indeed, seismologists flocked to the Nobi Plain to record the disaster. Individual observations supported by data from Milne's seismograph widened the discussion over Western and Japanese architecture and materials.

Clancey views earthquakes as the corrective to the cultural battle that ensued over the shape of Japan. The unprecedented destruction of the Great Nobi Earthquake forced architects and seismologists into their respective camps because neither Japanese nor Western structural methods escaped with its reputation fully intact. Although Nagoya Castle still...