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In September 1923, a magnitude 7.9 earthquake devastated eastern Japan, killing more than 120,000 people and leaving two million homeless. Using a rich array of source material, J. Charles Schencking tells for the first time the graphic tale of Tokyo's destruction and rebirth. In emotive prose, he documents how the citizens of Tokyo experienced this unprecedented calamity and explores the ways in which it rattled people's deep-seated anxieties about modernity. While explaining how and why the disaster compelled people to reflect on Japanese society, he also examines how reconstruction encouraged the capital's inhabitants to entertain new types of urbanism as they rebuilt their world.Some residents hoped that a grandiose metropolis, reflecting new values, would rise from the ashes of disaster-ravaged Tokyo. Many, however, desired a quick return of the city they once called home. Opportunistic elites advocated innovative state infrastructure to better manage the daily lives of Tokyo residents. Others focused on rejuvenating society-morally, economically, and spiritually-to combat the perceived degeneration of Japan. Schencking explores the inspiration behind these dreams and the extent to which they were realized. He investigates why Japanese citizens from all walks of life responded to overtures for renewal with varying degrees of acceptance, ambivalence, and resistance. His research not only sheds light on Japan's experience with and interpretation of the earthquake but challenges widespread assumptions that disasters unite stricken societies, creating a "blank slate" for radical transformation. National reconstruction in the wake of the Great Kanto Earthquake, Schencking demonstrates, proved to be illusive.

City planning - Social aspects - Japan - Tokyo - History - 20th century. --- Disaster relief - Government policy - Japan - History - 20th century. --- Kanto Earthquake, Japan, 1923. --- Tokyo (Japan) - History - 20th century. --- Kanto Earthquake, Japan, 1923 --- Disaster relief --- City planning --- Government policy --- History --- Social aspects --- History --- Tokyo (Japan) --- History

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It is widely known that such Western institutions as the museum, the university, and the penitentiary shaped Japan's emergence as a modern nation-state. Less commonly recognized is the role played by the distinctly hybrid institution-at once museum, laboratory, and prison-of the zoological garden. In this eye-opening study of Japan's first modern zoo, Tokyo's Ueno Imperial Zoological Gardens, opened in 1882, Ian Jared Miller offers a refreshingly unconventional narrative of Japan's rapid modernization and changing relationship with the natural world. As the first zoological garden in the world not built under the sway of a Western imperial regime, the Ueno Zoo served not only as a staple attraction in the nation's capital-an institutional marker of national accomplishment-but also as a site for the propagation of a new "natural" order that was scientifically verifiable and evolutionarily foreordained. As the Japanese empire grew, Ueno became one of the primary sites of imperialist spectacle, a microcosm of the empire that could be traveled in the course of a single day. The meaning of the zoo would change over the course of Imperial Japan's unraveling and subsequent Allied occupation. Today it remains one of Japan's most frequently visited places. But instead of empire in its classic political sense, it now bespeaks the ambivalent dominion of the human species over the natural environment, harkening back to its imperial roots even as it asks us to question our exploitation of the planet's resources.

Nature and civilization --- Philosophy of nature --- Zoos --- Civilization and nature --- Civilization --- Nature --- Nature, Philosophy of --- Natural theology --- Gardens, Zoological --- Zoological gardens --- Zoological parks --- Parks --- History. --- Social aspects --- Philosophy --- Ueno Dōbutsuen (Tokyo, Japan) --- Tokyo (Japan). --- Tōkyō-to Onshi Ueno Dōbutsuen (Tokyo, Japan) --- Onshi Ueno Dōbutsuen (Tokyo, Japan) --- Ueno Zoo (Tokyo, Japan) --- Ueno Zoological Gardens (Tokyo, Japan) --- Ueno Dobutsuen (Tokyo, Japan) -- History.. --- Zoos -- Social aspects -- Japan -- History.. --- Philosophy of nature -- Japan -- History.. --- Nature and civilization -- Japan -- History. --- books about the environment. --- books for history lovers. --- books for reluctant readers. --- east asian history. --- easy to read. --- engaging. --- gifts for friends. --- global history. --- historical novels. --- history and politics. --- humans and natural environment. --- imperial zoological gardens. --- japanese culture. --- japanese empire. --- japanese history. --- japanese politics. --- japanese zoos. --- japans emergence into the world. --- leisure reads. --- modernization of japan. --- natural environment. --- rapid modernization. --- shaping japan. --- vacation books. --- zoology.