He argues that because our bodies are embedded in environments, as those environments are engineered and polluted our bodies become relics of our industrial age, basically historical artifacts.īrett skis regularly in Montana and sails in the San Juan Islands with friends and family. His third book, Toxic Archipelago (Washington, 2010), winner of the George Perkins Marsh Prize for best book in environmental history from the American Society for Environmental History, investigates pollution episodes in Japan’s modern history and how they evidence the way in which our bodies are integrated into environments, particularly industrialized ones. The book pushes the boundaries of nonhuman agency in historical analysis. For this project, he spent as much time researching with wolf biologists in Yellowstone National Park as he did in archives in Japan, trying, through ethological and ecological sciences, to give wolves a voice. Four years later he published The Lost Wolves of Japan (Washington, 2005), which focuses on the two subspecies of wolf in Japan that hunters pursued to extinction at the end of the nineteenth century. He explores how environmental change and epidemic diseases engendered dependency among native Ainu groups, enabling the Japanese subjugation of Hokkaido and beyond. His analysis demonstrates that the conquest of Hokkaido fueled early modern Japanese economies and bodies much as European expansion to the New World brought silver and sugar to European ones. His first book, The Conquest of Ainu Lands (California, 2001), investigates the conquest of Japan’s northernmost island in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. His nonacademic writing has appeared in Sail magazine. Currently, he is writing Cambridge’s Concise History of Japan. He has written three books in addition to two coedited volumes, the most recent of which is Japan at Nature’s Edge: The Environmental Context of a Global Power (Hawaii, 2013). He teaches courses on environmental history, Japanese history, and world history. from the University of Oregon and was assistant professor of history at Yale University prior to returning home to Big Sky Country. Walker is Regents Professor of History at Montana State University, Bozeman. Walker is Assistant Professor of History at Montana State University, Bozeman.Brett L. The book is highly informative and consistently interesting, and will be read with pleasure by all students of Japanese history."-"Monumenta NipponicaĪbout the Author Brett L. The writing is a model of clarity and logical exposition, and the text is further enhanced by a large number of maps and illustrations showing different aspects of Ainu life. "One of the book's great strengths is the author's attention to detail, grounded in a mastery of the relevant primary sources, some of them published, but many available only in manuscript form. Using new and little-known material from archives as well as Ainu oral traditions and archaeology, Walker poses an exciting new set of questions and issues that have yet to be approached in so innovative and thorough a fashion. Rather than presenting a mere juxtaposition of oppression and resistance, he offers a subtle analysis of how material and ecological changes induced by trade with Japan set in motion a reorientation of the whole northern culture and landscape. Walker takes a fresh and original approach. By framing his study between the cultural and ecological worlds of the Ainu before and after two centuries of sustained contact with the Japanese, the author demonstrates with great clarity just how far the Ainu were incorporated into the Japanese political economy and just how much their ceremonial and material life-not to mention disease ecology, medical culture, and their physical environment-had been infiltrated by Japanese cultural artifacts, practices, and epidemiology by the early nineteenth century. Inspired by "new Western" historians of the United States, Walker positions Ezo not as Japan's northern "frontier" but as a borderland or middle ground. It shows the ecological and cultural processes by which this people's political, economic, and cultural autonomy eroded as they became an ethnic minority in the modern Japanese state.īook Synopsis This model monograph is the first scholarly study to put the Ainu-the native people living in Ezo, the northernmost island of the Japanese archipelago-at the center of an exploration of Japanese expansion during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the height of the Tokugawa shogunal era. About the Book This is the story of the Ainu people who live in what is today far Northern Japan.
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