Although the seismicity of Japan as a natural phenomenon belongs to the realm of tectonics, perspectives from the history of culture, architecture, and science and technology can problematize the ways in which socio-cultural contexts have formed and transformed the knowledge and technology of earthquakes. In Earthquake Nation, Clancey carefully analyzes discourses about Japan's representation as an “earthquake nation” from the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth, investigating how European architecture, Japanese seismicity, knowledge and technology of earthquakes, Japanese carpentry, and cultural politics co-produced one another. His main finding is that the media through which the lithosphere's movements propagated were not monolithic, in that they were situated in geopolitical contexts such as the imperialism and nationalism of the time. I should confess that my own research has been much indebted to his work.
One of the main points of this book concerns the portability of knowledge, from “the West” outward to “the East.” As Clancey points out, by the last decades of the nineteenth century, the European knowledge system did not possess a toolbox with which it could aptly handle the endemic problems of earthquakes on Japanese soil. European experts employed by the Japanese government, in this situation, could not provide univocal instructions for the Japanese natives on how to construct buildings strong enough to withstand earthquakes. On the shaking “Asiatic” field, without established answers, the invited representatives of “Western” knowledge and technology exchanged polemical discussions between the proponents of masonry and those of more flexible wooden structures.
According to Clancey, the choice between the “Western” architecture and the “Japanese” variety was something more than a technological decision. Buildings of brick and stone, during the earliest decades of the Meiji period, were represented as “strong,”“eternal,” and “male” in nature, representing the European civilization, while traditional Japanese wooden buildings were discussed as their “weak,” “temporary,” and “female” counterparts. Even though sometimes the latter was hailed in terms of the beauty and the skill that the traditional artisans rendered, within the gendered hierarchy of the civilizations it was difficult for the latter to match the foreign system of architecture. Buildings of brick and stone became diplomatic symbols of the “civilizing” Japan.
