This project explores how technical and social responses to widespread flooding and landslides in Japan changed during its transition to a modern society. Highly decentralized in 1800, by 1900 the Japanese state had become a strong, capable state. The responsibility for addressing hazards moved largely from districts and villages to the national government. The new government (1868-1912) transformed local administration and taxation, re-defining the resources available to villages to address flood/landslide amelioration just as new engineering techniques entered Japan from the West. Throughout the 19th and well into the 20th centuries, both the world and Japan saw significant innovations in engineering technology and materials that transformed both the opportunities for, and costs of, public works designed to ameliorate these hazards. New cost/benefit balances provoked widespread re-evaluation of such efforts in Japan as elsewhere. An in-depth case study of Niigata prefecture is used to explore how local, prefecture and national political and administrative organizations adapted to the challenges of natural hazards and addressed changing opportunities and problems associated with the new practices in civil engineering. The project is grounded in the traditional tools of the historian--careful reading of archival sources and qualitative analysis. Primary emphasis is on exploration of records of multiple levels of government, engineering societies, public interest groups, and newspaper reports. Excellent records exist on flood frequency and extent that permits us to assess the effectiveness of flood control projects, zoning, etc. in reducing flooding and its impact on loss of life and property in the 19th and 20th centuries. Precipitation data for the past century along with soil maps, digital elevation models, etc. will be used to supplement traditional historical sources in order to consider the impact of natural conditions when making comparisons over time and space. Comparison of Niigata with other regions of Japan helps to assess the applicability of conclusions drawn from Niigata to Japan as a whole and generally to modernizing societies.
Intellectual merits. 1) The project illuminates the interaction of technological change and the modernizing state, an under-studied topic in Japanese history and the history of technology in non-Western contexts. 2) It explores the degree to which new civil engineering technologies not only spread to Japan, but beyond its major metropolitan intellectual centers to the provinces. 3) It assesses the relative effectiveness of traditional techniques of river management (which largely dominated local practice through World War II) and modern practices, evaluating the impacts of both sets of technologies. 4) It explores public re-evaluation of the benefits and costs of government- supported riparian works and new technologies in the period before contemporary environmental consciousness as well as today.
Broader impacts. Study of technological development and transfer outside of Western contexts is limited, and typical examples are those of central governments (colonial or post-colonial) capable of promoting large-scale projects. Such studies stress "states" as the unit of study. This study instead explores voluntary importation of civil engineering technology and its diffusion into more "ordinary" spheres of use. It addresses broader social impacts and challenges to adoption than those associated with prestigious large-scale projects of strong states. This context is especially appropriate to understand issues faced by modernizing societies today, particularly since Japan developed outside relationships of extreme dependence and subservience that contemporary societies seek to avoid. The problems of technological diffusion and integration faced by Japan, along with the fate of her attempted solutions, hold significant implications for understanding what has transpired in other societies in the past (e.g., links between traditional and modern practices) and what issues to address in planning natural hazard amelioration in the developing world today (e.g., adaptation of solutions to the circumstances of a given society).
