Imaging Disaster

Imaging Disaster is a rich social history of Japan’s Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923. Drawing on a kaleidoscopic range of images from the fine arts, magazines, cartoons, and other popular sources, Gennifer Weisenfeld has produced an original study of this catastrophic event from an art historical perspective. —Jonathan Reynolds, Barnard College Imaging Disaster is an exhaustive and illuminating study of the visual culture generated by Japan’s most devastating natural disaster. Comprehensive in scope—covering photography, cinema, painting, postcards, sketches, urban planning, and even scientific models—Weisenfeld makes a compelling point that the massive profusion of visual representations that followed the quake must itself be considered an integral part of this tragic historical event.—Seiji Lippit, UCLA

Focusing on one landmark catastrophic event in the history of an emerging modern nation—the Great Kanto Earthquake that devastated Tokyo and surrounding areas in 1923—this fascinating volume examines the history of the visual production of the disaster. The Kanto earthquake triggered cultural responses that ran the gamut from voyeuristic and macabre thrill to the romantic sublime, media spectacle to sacred space, mournful commemoration to emancipatory euphoria, and national solidarity to racist vigilantism and sociopolitical critique. Looking at photography, cinema, painting, postcards, sketching, urban planning, and even scientific visualizations, Weisenfeld demonstrates how visual culture has powerfully mediated the evolving historical understanding of this major national disaster, ultimately enfolding mourning and memory into modernization.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th Computational Color Imaging Workshop, CCIW 2019, held in Chiba, Japan, in March 2019. The 22 full papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 34 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections named: computational color imaging; multispectral imaging; perceptual model and application; color image evaluation; colot image filtering; color image applications; and color imaging for material appearance. In addition, the book contains 3 invited talks in full paper length.

This new guide describes the application of spatial technology to improve disaster risk management (DRM) within the aquaculture sector. DRM requires interrelated actions and activities to ensure early warning, prevention, preparedness, response and recovery for a wide range of natural, technological and complex disasters that can impact aquaculture operations and livelihoods. Spatial technology refers to systems and tools that acquire, manage and analyse data that have geographic context. Some of the technologies include satellite remote sensing, aerial surveys, global positioning systems, geographic information systems, information and communication technology and other data gathering sensors used, for instance, in meteorology. Spatial technology supports activities across all phases of the DRM cycle and its rapid development provides enhanced opportunities to support DRM within the aquaculture sector. This guide is organized in two parts. Part one is the “guidance”; it is the main body of the document and describes the processes and steps for the use of spatial technology within DRM for aquaculture. Part two includes selected country case studies from Bangladesh, the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean, and Indonesia to illustrate the application of spatial technology in DRM for aquaculture at the national level within local contexts. Best practices at the farm and area management levels, supported by spatial technology, reduce volatility and risks and thus facilitate investment. Countries that would like aquaculture to grow sustainably and reliably are encouraged to use this guide in order to support spatial planning approaches and protect responsible investors. A separate summary version accompanies this publication.

This new edition is a comprehensive source of imaging informatics fundamentals and how those fundamentals are applied in everyday practice. Imaging Informatics Professionals (IIPs) play a critical role in healthcare, and the scope of the profession has grown far beyond the boundaries of the PACS. A successful IIP must understand the PACS itself and all the software systems networked together in the medical environment. Additionally, an IIP must know the workflows of all the imaging team members, have a base in several medical specialties and be fully capable in the realm of information technology. Practical Imaging Informatics has been reorganized to follow a logical progression from basic background information on IT and clinical image management, through daily operations and troubleshooting, to long-term planning. The book has been fully updated to include the latest technologies and procedures, including artificial intelligence and machine learning. Written by a team of renowned international authors from the Society for Imaging Informatics in Medicine and the European Society of Medical Imaging Informatics, this book is an indispensable reference for the practicing IIP. In addition, it is an ideal guide for those studying for a certification exam, biomedical informaticians, trainees with an interest in informatics, and any professional who needs quick access to the nuts and bolts of imaging informatics.

In Selling the Future, Ryan Moran explains how the life insurance industry in Japan exploited its association with mutuality and community to commodify and govern lives. Covering the years from the start of the industry in 1881 through the end of World War II, Moran describes insurance companies and government officials working together to create a picture of the future as precarious and dangerous. Since it was impossible for individual consumers to deal with every contingency on their own, insurance industry administrators argued that their usage of statistical data enabled them to chart the predictable future for the aggregate. Through insurance, companies and the state thus offered consumers a means to a perfectible future in an era filled with repeated crises. Life insurance functioned as an important modernist technology within Japan and its colonies to instantiate expectations for responsibility, to reconfigure meanings of mutuality, and to normalize new social formations (such as the nuclear family) as essential to life. Life insurance thus offers an important vehicle for examining the confluence of modes of mobilizing and organizing bodies, the expropriation of financial resources, and the action of disciplining workers into a capitalist system.

The Great East Japan Disaster – a compound catastrophe of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown that began on March 11, 2011 – has ushered in a new era of cultural production dominated by discussions on safety and security, risk and vulnerability, and recovery and refortification. Gender, Culture, and Disaster in Post-3.11 Japan re-frames post-disaster national reconstruction as a social project imbued with dynamics of gender, race, and empire and in doing so Mire Koikari offers an innovative approach to resilience building in contemporary Japan. From juvenile literature to civic manuals to policy statements, Koikari examines a vast array of primary sources to demonstrate how femininity and masculinity, readiness and preparedness, militarism and humanitarianism, and nationalism and transnationalism inform cultural formation and transformation triggered by the unprecedented crisis. Interdisciplinary in its orientation, the book reveals how militarism, neoliberalism, and neoconservatism drive Japan's resilience building while calling attention to historical precedents and transnational connections that animate the ongoing mobilization toward safety and security. An important contribution to studies of gender and Japan, the book is essential reading for all those wishing to understand local and global politics of precarity and its proposed solutions amid the rising tide of pandemics, ecological hazards, industrial disasters, and humanitarian crises.