Interdisciplinary Edo

Interdisciplinary Edo brings together scholars from across the methodological spectrum to explore new approaches to innovative humanistic research on early modern Japan (1603–1868). It makes an intervention in the field by thinking across conventional disciplinary boundaries toward a holistic and cohesive approach to Japan’s early modern period. By taking historical, religious, literary, and art historical analyses into account, the contributors hope to begin a new, transdisciplinary conversation on political formation, social interaction, and cultural proliferation under the “Great Peace” of the Tokugawa regime. This book comprises 14 essays by specialists of history, literature, religious studies, and art history. Major topics include Edo-period Japan’s cultural, intellectual, and economic connections to the early modern world; environmental humanities and material culture; popular culture and aesthetics; and the question of how contemporary academic demarcation lines impact the current study of Tokugawa Japan. Individual essays range in scale from individual paintings and works of prose fiction to the tectonic plates underlying the Yamashiro basin and span topics from overseas medicinal exchange and premodern cartography to the history of intoxication. Interdisciplinary Edo will be of immediate interest to all scholars focusing on the early modern period, as well as to researchers studying other periods of Japanese studies. As part of an ongoing and inclusive process of pluralizing and deprovincializing global conceptions of early modernity, this book will contribute to historiographical interventions outside Japan studies as well.

This collection of essays suggests the great extent to which exploration, settlement, agricultural growth, colonization, urbanization, and even human stature were influenced by environmental and epidemiological realities, as well as by political and economic responses to those realities.

Designed around a practical "practice-what-you-teach" approach to methods instruction, Your Science Classroom: Becoming an Elementary / Middle School Science Teacher is based on current constructivist philosophy, organized around 5E inquiry, and guided by the National Science Education Teaching Standards. Written in a reader-friendly style, the book prepares instructors to teach science in ways that foster positive attitudes, engagement, and meaningful science learning for themselves and their students.

Tokyo: destroyed by the earthquake of 1923 and again by the firebombing of World War II. Does anything remain of the old city? The internationally known Japanese architectural historian Jinnai Hidenobu set out on foot to rediscover the city of Tokyo. Armed with old maps, he wandered through back alleys and lanes, trying to experience the city's space as it had been lived by earlier residents. He found that, despite an almost completely new cityscape, present-day inhabitants divide Tokyo's space in much the same way that their ancestors did two hundred years before. Jinnai's holistic perspective is enhanced by his detailing of how natural, topographical features were incorporated into the layout of the city. A variety of visual documents (maps from the Tokugawa and Meiji periods, building floorplans, woodblock prints, photographs) supplement his observations. While an important work for architects and historians, this unusual book will also attract armchair travelers and anyone interested in the symbolic uses of space. (A translation of Tokyo no kûkan jinruigaku.)

The multiple and diverse forces of globalization have, indeed, affected Japan significantly over the past decades. But so, it must be said, has Japan influenced a variety of critical global developments - globalization is not a one-way street, particularly for a nation as economically influential and technologically advanced as Japan. The chapters in this collection examine the impact of globalization on Japan and the impact of Japan on the forces of globalization from the various disciplinary perspectives of business, the economy, politics, technology, culture and society. They also explain the manner in which the nation has responded to the economic and cultural liberalization that has been such a profound force for change around the globe. This comprehensive collected works brings the latest research to bear on this important subject and provides evidence of the long history of global influences on Japan – and Japanese impacts on the rest of the world. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of globalization, Japanese Studies, and Asian Studies.