Japanese Landscape Research Articles

擬石・擬木の造園的利用の系譜からみた琴ノ浦温山荘園の造園史的位置づけについて

Kotonoura Onzanso Garden in Kainan city Wakayama, is the modern plutocrat NITTA Chojiro’s villa. A key distinguishing feature of this villa garden is that a lot of imitation stones and imitation trees are used in this garden as landscape materials. They are stepping stone, shore stone arrangement of pond, garden furniture and so on. Thus, this paper analyzed landscape historical positioning of Kotonoura Onzanso Garden from the point of view of landscape architectural use genealogy of imitation stone and imitation tree focusing on modern Japanese landscape. As the results, this paper led two points on landscape historical position of this garden. Firstly, Kotonoura Onzansou Garden is pioneering example introducing imitation stone and imitation tree. Secondary, about imitation stones and imitation trees in this garden, it is not copy of foreign technique and foreign products but original materials invented by NITTA Chojiro himself.

Hokusai, first manga master

Hokusai's constitute a comprehensive visual encyclopaedia of the Japanese civilization in the XIXth Century. This huge masterpiece is a collection of 4,000 drawings in 15 volumes for a total of 800 pages. It was published in Japan between 1814 and 1878. The word 'manga', which designates Japanese comics, is composed of two ideograms: man, which means according to the taste-liking of the author with an idea of spontaneity and profusion and ga, which means drawing. Mangas are a wealth of sketches executed randomly, freely and with no order whatsoever on a variety of subjects. This word was used for the first time for this work by Hokusai. Hokusai's had an educational aim; his students, asked him to make a compilation of sketches for inspiration. These Mangas, showing all the sides of Hokusai's styles and all the themes he approached, obtains an astonishing portrait of daily life in Japan. He also depicts the Japanese landscape: wildlife, vegetation, mountains, countryside, seaside, the changes of weather, architecture as well as religious and mythological themes.

Earthquake Nation: The Cultural Politics of Japanese Seismicity, 1868–1930 (review)

Reviewed by: Earthquake Nation: The Cultural Politics of Japanese Seismicity, 1868–1930 David G. Wittner (bio) Earthquake Nation: The Cultural Politics of Japanese Seismicity, 1868–1930. By Gregory Clancey . Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. Pp. xiii+331. $49.95. On 28 October 1891 a massive earthquake shook central Japan from Osaka to Tokyo. In its wake it left the rubble of a modernizing Japan. Recently constructed, Western-style masonry buildings, iron bridges, and the ubiquitous factory chimneys collapsed while traditional Japanese wooden structures shook but remained standing. Focused on the Nobi Plain around Nagoya and later estimated to be at magnitude 8.4 on the Richter scale, what is now known as the Great Nobi Earthquake reshaped the discourse of architecture, engineering, seismicity, and East and West in an internationalizing Japan. In this groundbreaking work, Gregory Clancey argues that earthquakes were more than natural phenomena. By unraveling the complex relationship between Japanese and Western architecture and engineering and the emerging science of seismology, he demonstrates that the culture of earthquakes redefined Western knowledge in Japan. Japanese architecture became [End Page 462] science, rather than remaining in the realm of art; institutions such as the College of Engineering and the Seismological Society of Japan were reconceived more concretely as Japanese rather than simply being repositories of Western knowledge. Starting in the early 1870s, Western architecture and engineering were adapted in Japan along with their symbolic values of strength and permanence. Masonry buildings, iron bridges, railroads, and telegraph wires soon became integral parts of the Japanese landscape as the Meiji government sought to import the icons of Western civilization. The government hired foreign advisors, primarily British, to train Japanese architects and engineers who would literally build the new Japan. Men like Josiah Conder, Richard Henry Brunton, and George Cawley sought to overcome the forces of Japanese nature with the mass and inflexibility of brick, stone, and iron. Facing this foreign assault on traditional technique stood the daiku, the architect-carpenter whose wooden buildings were derided as flexible, fragile, and temporary. Between the poles of modernity and tradition stood the men Clancey calls Anglo-Japanese architects: the students of Western knowledge who would nonetheless create "new archi-technical models for Meiji Japan" (p. 37). Clancey's discussion of the ways that Western knowledge was reshaped in Japan is a refreshing break from the standard narrative of technology transfer, often inaccurately described as unfettered adoption of Western technology. Clancey demonstrates that Japanese architects understood the limitations of their mentors' knowledge and were at ease to create a new architectural vernacular. Concurrent to the development of, and informing the debate on, architecture was the emerging science of seismology. Again, it was an Englishman, John Milne, who trained a generation of Japanese scientists. Milne was originally hired to teach geology and mining at the College of Engineering, but an 1880 Yokohama earthquake induced him to more formally study what had previously been "a geological pastime" (p. 63). The lack of significant physical evidence from the earthquake frustrated Milne's efforts to use commonly accepted European methods of mapping earthquake damage to determine the quake's strength and direction of movement. This was not because the earthquake was of insufficient magnitude, but because Japanese buildings resisted the forces of nature whereas Western-style buildings had not. Shortly thereafter, Milne and two other professors at the College of Engineering, James Ewing and Thomas Gray, built and deployed their version of a seismograph with which to document Japan's seismic movements. Although it liberated the seismologist from the constraints of civil engineering—namely, mapping damaged structures—Clancey argues that this invention did not fully divorce seismology from "the world of bricks and mortar" (p. 73). Indeed, seismologists flocked to the Nobi Plain to record the disaster. Individual observations supported by data from Milne's seismograph [End Page 463] widened the discussion over Western and Japanese architecture and materials. Clancey views earthquakes as the corrective to the cultural battle that ensued over the shape of Japan. The unprecedented destruction of the Great Nobi Earthquake forced architects and seismologists into their respective camps because neither Japanese nor Western structural methods escaped with its reputation fully intact. Although Nagoya Castle still...

Scottish views of Japanese landscape and plants described until 1900

Scottish views of Japanese landscape and plants described until 1900

Seasonal food habits of the raccoon dog at a western suburb of Tokyo

ABSTRACT Food habits of the raccoon dog (Nyctereutes orocyonoides) at a western suburb of Tokyo were analyzed by the point-frame method by use of 344 fecal samples for a year. The food habits were omnivorous, but plants, particularly plant leaves and seeds, were predominant. The seasonal foods were characterized by leaves and flowers in spring, insects in summer, seeds in autumn, and birds/mammals and artificial foods in winter. Dependency on artificial foods was not strong. The raccoon dogs fed on various fruits and nuts, among which those of planted fruit trees like ginkgo and persimmon were particularly important. The raccoon dog seems to have adapted themselves to “satoyama”, a traditional Japanese landscape.

Ruining and Restoring Rivers: The State and Civil Society in Japan

R ivers in Japan and Currents in Civil Society The postwar history of Japan can be seen in terms of the inexorable march of development through construction (generally in concrete).1 Much of the resulting conflict has focussed on struggles over water, in its various forms and attributes. It has also played itself out against the backdrop of an immense transformation in the human and physical landscape of postwar Japan. Large-scale migration to cities has been accompanied by almost total urbanization and industrialization of coastal areas. At the same time, rivers and their banks, as well as over half the country’s coast, has been cast in concrete, with consequences that are only now being acknowledged. Dams were built across nearly all of Japan’s rivers to provide power for industry, as well as water for the cities and irrigation for farmers. The combination of steep and thickly wooded mountain slopes and packed but productive plains, consisting largely of paddy fields, combined to form a potent protection force against flooding, but with urbanization in the flood plains and widespread reforestation to conifers in the mountains, the land lost its absorptive capacity. Japan’s rivers flood easily; they are generally quite short, rushing down narrow valleys before wandering sluggishly through alluvial flood plains, where in the summer months, swollen by seasonal rains, they are liable to burst their banks. All told, the presence of water is as remarkable a feature of the Japanese landscape as is the presence of mountains. Equally remarkable, however, is the aesthetic impoverishment of the landscape resulting from the encasement of rivers. The dramatically manipulated landscape of rivers, their beds, banks and flood plains serves as a setting to the issues that are examined in this paper. These concern civil society, especially in the context of a rise in volunteer activity in recent years, a growth that both coincided with and was spurred

「風景」と「景観」の理論的区別の検討

「風景」と「景観」の理論的区別の検討

Predicting Invasions of North American Basses in Japan Using Native Range Data and a Genetic Algorithm

AbstractLargemouth bass Micropterus salmoides and smallmouth bass M. dolomieu have been introduced into freshwater habitats in Japan, with potentially serious consequences for native fish populations. In this paper we apply the technique of ecological niche modeling using the genetic algorithm for rule‐set prediction (GARP) to predict the potential distributions of these two species in Japan. This algorithm constructs a niche model based on point occurrence records and ecological coverages. The model can be visualized in geographic space, yielding a prediction of potential geographic range. The model can then be tested by determining how well independent point occurrence data are predicted according to the criteria of sensitivity and specificity provided by receiver–operator curve analysis. We ground‐truthed GARP's ability to forecast the geographic occurrence of each species in its native range. The predictions were statistically significant for both species (P < 0.001). We projected the niche models onto the Japanese landscape to visualize the potential geographic ranges of both species in Japan. We tested these predictions using known occurrences from introduced populations of largemouth bass, both in the aggregate and by habitat type. All analyses robustly predicted known Japanese occurrences (P < 0.001). The number of smallmouth bass in Japan was too small for statistical tests, but the 10 known occurrences were predicted by the majority of models.

'Japanese landscape photograph' in Tokushima Mainichi Shimbun

'Japanese landscape photograph' in Tokushima Mainichi Shimbun

Kawase Hasui: the complete woodblock prints

Kawase Hasui (1883-1957) is considered the foremost Japanese landscape print artist of the 20th century. His work is characterized by a fascination with light, climatic conditions and tranquility. His oeuvre consists of over 700 designs of which the largest proportion was produced for the initiator of the Shin hanga ('new print') movement, Watanabe Shozaburo. Originally published in 2003, this groundbreaking publication on the life and work of Kawase Hasui is now available with a DVD, which includes a 1950s film on the artist and the production of one of his designs, a process book displaying all stages in the creation of a Japanese woodblock print, and designs which have been discovered since 2003.

Spatial Cognition of Japanese-Brazilians in Japanese Urban Space

In this paper, the author examines the spatial cognition of and navigation in a Japanese city by different ethnic groups. The purpose of this study was to identify any uneasiness that the subjects Japanese-Brazilians living in Japan, feel in finding their way in a city in Japan by studying the clues they use for navigation and their cognitive maps in comparison to those of a Japanese group. This study consists of two approaches. First, the author used the Sense of Direction Questionnaire Simple Version (SDQ-S) developed by Takeuchi (1992) to study how one's consciousness perceives navigation and space. The author obtained responses to the questionnaire from 41 Japanese-Brazilians and 252 Japanese college students and compared the scores of the responses to the questionnaire by item and conducted a factor analysis. As a result, it was found that Japanese-Brazilians had a poor sense of directions and that it was important for them to use and remember landmarks for navigation. Next, the author focused on the fact that landmarks play a significant role in their navigation and conducted two types of sketch map survey. In the first type, the subjects were asked to draw a sketch map of a route to identify the features of the landmarks they used as clues. In the second type, they drew a sketch map around their own homes to examine the differences in the space areas and forms perceived. Analysis of their sketch maps of a route found that stores and traffic lights with signs written in the Roman alphabet or Japanese kana characters that they could read were important landmarks used in their navigation. Regarding the sketch maps around their homes, the author conducted quantitative analysis of the area drawn on the map, number of factors drawn, forms of drawing, and direction. The sketch maps by Japanese-Brazilians covered a much smaller area and had fewer factors than those drawn by Japanese. They all drew route-type maps regardless of the number of years that they had resided there. Transition from route-type maps to survey-type maps was not seen based on the number of years they had been there. This means that the cognitive maps of Japanese-Brazilians do not undergo the typical development process to survey-type maps even if they live in Japan longer. Based on these results, the author considered the factors hindering the development of cognitive maps of Japanese-Brazilians from route-type maps to survey-type maps. Japanese-Brazilians may be affected by their limited Japanese language proficiency, the fact that the streets and house numbers are marked in different ways in Japan, different cultural backgrounds, and unfamiliarity with the Japanese landscape and urban structure, The author assumes that they have route-type cognitive maps and their navigation in Japanese cities is limited to the use of certain landmarks for these reasons.

Prescribing the Pill in Japan? Foreword to the Hostile M&A Conference Issue

Contrary to popular belief, corporate Japan is changing–incrementally, to be sure, but changing nonetheless. One of the areas of greatest potential change is the legal and business environment for mergers and acquisitions (“M&A”), including hostile M&A. Recent amendments to Japan’s Commercial Code in the areas of stock swaps and divestitures are helping to facilitate M&A transactions. At the same time, the constellation of shareholders in Japanese firms is changing as cross-shareholding declines and foreign investment increases. M&A activity in Japan has increased significantly in recent years. While virtually all of the recent deals have been friendly, there have been several prominent examples of unsolicited bids, by both foreign and Japanese bidders. In the space of a few years, hostile takeovers of Japanese firms have gone from the unthinkable to the distinctly possible. It is possible that over the next few years, such transactions will become a small but meaningful feature of the Japanese corporate governance landscape. The symposium was designed to achieve a deeper understanding of the current legal and business environments for hostile M&A and defensive measures in Japan, and to glean possible lessons from the U.S. experience with hostile takeovers.

The Cambridge Companion to Kafka by Julian PreeceA Companion to the Works of Franz Kafka by James Rolleston

AUSTRIAN STUDIES, 12, 2OO4 295 including one with a more topical theme interwoven: war. By the end of his life Altenberg claimed to have collected some 10,000 postcards; and 'postcard texts' by him, prose poems fromNeues Altes (1911), had been at the centre of the Vienna School's notorious 'Skandalkonzert' of 31March 1913,when Alban Berg's 'F?nf Orchesterlieder nach Ansichtskarten-Texten von Peter Altenberg' (op. 4) was disrupted by audience outrage and fisticuffsbetween protesters and supporters. Influenced by the Secession's fascination with Japanese landscape motifs, Altenberg's collector's eye had initiallybeen caught by the decorative potential of the snapshot. The aesthete thus proselytized photography as a medium of popular access to natural beauty ? which, in the Semmer?ng igi2 album, as in his texts, is to be found equally in feminine grace and inmountain landscapes and flora. The album's incorporation of contemporary popular culture and mass-produced imagery both provides objective correlatives for an autobiographical confessional narrative, of the ageing poet hopelessly love-sick for pubescent girls, and system atizes the emblematic practices familiar from his correspondence (see Peter Altenberg, Rezept dieWelt zu sehen [1995], edited by Barker and Lensing). Character istic of the album as a form is that the image is both self-contained and part of a whole, in loose non-linear sequence that is allusively open-ended. It is also a bold statement of personal recollection, which allows the lyricvoice much less scope than Altenberg's prose poems, but gives prominence to the author's ego, at least partly as an assertion of his new-found personal health at this spa away from the decadence ofVienna. His verbal devotions, especially towards the hotelier's daughter, are visu ally accompanied by various concretizations: of the locusamoenus,of the beatification of his 'saint' in religious icons, or of a beloved either isolated in a nature idyll or singled out in group snapshots that threaten to reinstate her socially. Though more information about manufacturers' colour techniques around 1914might have been provided, Lensing's reading of the album as a multi-media text is particularly successful. As meticulous and innovative as the editors' previous research into Altenberg, the present volume does justice ? in a way that the original could not attempt to embody ? toAltenberg's varied emblematic synthesis of photographic image, textual caption and loose sequence, as thework of an inter-media pioneer. Trinity College Dublin Gilbert J. Carr The CambridgeCompanion toKafka. Ed. by Julian Preece. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2002. xix + 254 pp. ?40.00 (hardback), isbn 0-521-66314-8; ?14.95 (paperback), isbn 0-521-6639i-i. A Companion to the Works ofFranz Kafka. Ed. by James Rolleston. Rochester, NY: Camden House. 2002. xvi + 372 pp. $75.00; ?65.00. isbn 1-57113-180-9. 'We are now in a very productive era ofKafka scholarship, benefiting from linguis tic theory and cultural studies', James Rolleston declares in his introduction to the Camden House Companion tothe Works of Franz Kafka. The appearance in 2002 of two 'Companions' toKafka, both aimed at the English-speaking market and designed to perform a very different function from Hartmut Binder's two-volume Kqfka Handbuch (1979), is itselfevidence of the buoyant state ofKafka studies. Both reflect in varying degrees the current tendency to situateKafka firmly in his historical and social context while bringing to bear on his writings a diverse range of currendy 296 Reviews expanding methodological approaches. Of the two, theCambridgeCompanion isbetter designed tomeet the needs of non-specialist readers requiring further information about contextual factors vital to an understanding ofKafka's works and wanting some sense of the major critical debates surrounding them. Unlike the more intensely work-oriented collection of essays published by Camden House, the CambridgeCompanion contains a number of general chapters: on 'Kafka's Europe' (Julian Preece), on how and how not to read Kafka (David Constantine), on Kafka and gender (Dagmar C. G. Lorenz), and Kafka and Jewish folklore (IrisBruce), as well as a 'political reading' ofKafka (BillDodd) and a piece on 'Myths and realities inKafka biography' (AnthonyNorthey). The volume also documents Kafka's recep tion at the hands of editors and translators (Osman Durrani), filmmakers (Martin Brady and Helen...

明治後期の画家高島北海にみる山岳景へのまなざしの特質

The paper considers characteristics of gaze at mountains reflected in a painter, Hokkai Takashima, who depicted the Alps and the Rocky Mountains and so on, in his landscape paintings, in the Late Meiji Era, and it evaluates Hokkai Takashima from a viewpoint of a landscape theory. These analyses are done by showing the backgrounds and actual conditions of his gaze at mountains, the characteristics of his landscape paintings, and the meaning of mountain landscape drawn in his book of paintings and his theory of paintings. Hokkai Takashima acquired the knowledge of natural science, investigated typical modern mountain landscape, and observed new mountain landscape from modern landscape view around the same time as The Theory of Japanese Landscape written by Shigetaka Shiga. He aimed at Shinkeizu (a new type of Japanese traditional landscape paintings), but he exceeded Shinkeizu of the Edo Era and produced things similar to European landscape paintings. The footprint of Hokkai Takashima can be esteemed from a viewpoint of a landscape theory about spread and fixing of a modernistic landscape view.

Noise in the Intensive Care Nursery

THE PARABLE OF THE GARDENThe problem of juxtaposing noise and premature babies brings to mind the paradoxical situation of my neighhbor’s garden. This garden is an oasis of visual calm, with evergreen bushes sculpted into flowing waves in the traditional Japanese landscape style which alternate serenely with the perfect miniature green seas of the lawn. However, the great paradox here is the noise made by the tools needed to create this tiny paradise. The gas lawn mower is a familiar evil, but the latest laborsaving invention—the leaf blower— makes life as a neighbor hardly worth living while it’s being used. It is the coexistence and contradiction of these opposites that provides the theme for this article on noise in the intensive care nursery.

The change of a satoyama landscape and its causality in Kamiseya, Kyoto Prefecture, Japan between 1970 and 1995

We focused on patterns of land use in a particular satoyama landscape (Japanese traditional rural landscape, comprised of an integral social and ecological network of a village and its surroundings, such as agricultural lands, open forestlands and forests), and the effects of human activities upon them during Japan’s economic growth of the last few decades. Changes of landscape patterns and their probable causes were traced since the beginning of the 1900s to the present, and clarified. Societal, economic and technological changes, especially those that occurred after 1970, were considered the focal points from which major landscape changes developed. We compared the spatial features, patterns of land use and landscape diversities of each land unit, defined in terms of both their natural and man-made conditions for the year 1970, to those of 1995. We found land-use diversity to be strongly related to changes in the patterns of land use, with a decrease in diversity for all land units after 1970. Diversity of forest-age distribution on the other hand, increased. These changes, with the complex, changing patterns of each land unit, could be explained by differences in accessibility from the village and variations in the topography, as well as land ownership of the land units. We selected those land units found to have responded to these factors between 1970 and 1995, and classified them into four types of pattern changes, determined mainly by accessibility and topography.

Cezanne and "Japonisme"

After summarising the comments of other art historians on possible links between Cezanne's paintings and Japanese landscape prints, the author assesses the circumstantial evidence for Cezanne's knowledge of Japanese art, noting that several of Cezanne's friends were in the forefront of the Japonisant movement. Cezanne is famous for his denial of the value of outline, one of the techniques which lends Japanese prints much of their character, and advocacy of the representation of nature by the cylinder, the sphere and the cone, an idea which can also be found in the writings of Hokusai. This denial of outline may reflect the artist's awareness of Japanese ink paintings, as opposed to prints, and it is also clear that he understood some of the fundamental teachings of Buddhism, which were in harmony with his own notion of the worship of nature. The article concludes by suggesting that Cezanne may have painted exactly thirty-six oil paintings of Mont Sainte-Victoire in conscious rivalry with the title of Hokusai's series of 'thirty-six' (actually forty-six) views of Mount Fuji.

The Landscape of Japanese Tobacco Policy: Law, Smoking and Social Change

Japanese landscape painters use three perspectives-hei-en evokes the feeling of standing on the top of a mountain and gazing at other peaks; shin-en emphasizes the side of a scene that is hidden from view; and ko-en refers to the view from a valley up toward the heights. With these three points-of-view, painters working in the sansui (literally, hills and water) tradition are able to portray Japan's rich physical environment. The same perspectives help shed light on the current landscape of tobacco policy and smoking in Japan. Each of this paper's sections is based on one of the sansui approaches. First, observing other mountains from the top of one, the hei-en perspective, suggests the importance of understanding Japanese tobacco policy in its historical and comparative contexts. It illustrates Japan's long history of tobacco cultivation and regulation, as well as continuities in the regime of tobacco control. Taken together, hei-en's historical and comparative aspects emphasize the similarity of Japanese legal, political, and social practices with those of other nations. The shin-en perspective on that part of the mountain hidden from view illuminates the political economy of tobacco in Japan. Like the roots and branches that keep a hill from eroding, tobacco farmers, government bureaucrats, politicians, and big business constitute the not easily visible, interconnected elements of tobacco's political economy. More specifically, the key institutions include the Ministry of Finance (MoF), the majority owner of Japan Tobacco Inc. (JT); the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which dominates domestic politics; the tobacco grower's union; and tobacco retailers. Unified, they con-

Reading Zen in the rocks: the Japanese dry landscape garden

Reading Zen in the rocks: the Japanese dry landscape garden

A phytosociological study on Mediterranean laurel forest area of Tenerife, Canary Islands in comparison with Japanese laurel forest landscape area of Izu, Central Japan

A phytosociological study on Mediterranean laurel forest area of Tenerife, Canary Islands in comparison with Japanese laurel forest landscape area of Izu, Central Japan