5/30/2023 0 Comments Brett walker montana stateHis 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. The quiet they experience reminds us of the profound silence that awaits all humanity when, as the Japanese priest Kenko taught almost seven centuries ago, we "look on fellow sentient creatures without feeling compassion.Brett L. Certain wolf scientists still camp out in Japan to listen for any trace of the elusive canines. The story of wolf extinction exposes the underside of Japan's modernization. Through poisoning, hired hunters, and a bounty system, one of the archipelago's largest carnivores was systematically erased. By the nineteenth century, however, the destruction of wolves had become decidedly unceremonious, as seen on the island of Hokkaido. Highly ritualized wolf hunts were instigated to cleanse the landscape of what many considered as demons. In the eighteenth century, wolves were seen as rabid man-killers in many parts of Japan. ![]() ![]() The Ainu people believed that they were born from the union of a wolflike creature and a goddess. Talismans and charms adorned with images of wolves protected against fire, disease, and other calamities and brought fertility to agrarian communities and to couples hoping to have children. Grain farmers once worshiped wolves at shrines and left food offerings near their dens, beseeching the elusive canine to protect their crops from the sharp hooves and voracious appetites of wild boars and deer. In this spirited and absorbing narrative, Brett Walker takes a deep look at the scientific, cultural, and environmental dimensions of wolf extinction in Japan and tracks changing attitudes toward nature through Japan's long history. By 1905 they had disappeared from the country. Many Japanese once revered the wolf as Oguchi no Magami, or Large-Mouthed Pure God, but as Japan began its modern transformation wolves lost their otherworldly status and became noxious animals that needed to be killed.
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