The engineering of Japan's modern river regime, 1600-1920
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- This dissertation is a history of the formation of Japan's modern river regime under the Home Ministry during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Until that time, Japan's rivers had been integral to regional irrigation systems and the transportation networks by which much of goods, people, and information moved about the country. Widespread upstream logging and downstream reclamation also caused rivers to frequently flood, leading to widespread suffering for nearby communities and over time an erosion of the fiscal and moral foundations of the ruling Tokugawa shogunate. Following the 1868 Meiji Restoration, the new government's powerful Home Ministry initially pursued what its engineers later called a "low-water" policy that sought to balance flood control with the need for navigable rivers in the "promotion of production and encouragement of industry." However, as flooding continued and railways began to stretch across the countryside in the 1890s, ministry engineers jettisoned concerns about river navigation to create a new national "high water" policy that emphasized the reengineering of the country's largest rivers to handle the highest predicted water flow during summertime floods. In formulating this modern "high-water" river regime, the Home Ministry drew in part from the late nineteenth-century transnational flow in engineering knowledge and expertise, but in administering and carrying out its riparian work, the ministry participated in the creation and strengthening of a new national framework for infrastructural development. Because Japan's rivers are ultimately regional entities, the ministry's administering and reengineering of the nation's waterways had profoundly local effects on nearby fisheries, farms, and factories.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2011 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Wilson, Roderick |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of History. |
| Primary advisor | Duus, Peter, 1933- |
| Primary advisor | Wigen, Kären, 1958- |
| Thesis advisor | Duus, Peter, 1933- |
| Thesis advisor | Wigen, Kären, 1958- |
| Thesis advisor | White, Richard |
| Advisor | White, Richard |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Roderick Ike Wilson. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of History. |
| Thesis | Ph.D. Stanford University 2011 |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2011 by Roderick Wilson
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
Also listed in
Loading usage metrics...