Creating Safety, Courting Disaster on the Lower Shinano River, Japan

Authors

  • Philip C. Brown Ohio State University, USA

Abstract

Engineering the Lower Shinano River in northeastern Japan to prevent floods such as those of 1896 ironically contributed to increased loss of property and expanded risk of other flood and tsunami damage as the region developed over the next century.

Author Biography

Philip C. Brown, Ohio State University, USA

Philip C. Brown is a professor of history at the Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, USA, where he teaches a variety of courses on pre‐modern and modern Japanese and East Asian History. His most recent book, Cultivating Commons: Joint Ownership of Arable Land in Early Modern Japan, explores a distinctive approach to managing micro‐climatic, micro‐topographical, and flood/landslide hazard risk in about a third of Japanese villages. One of his current projects focuses on Japanese efforts to ameliorate flood risk over three political regimes, ca. 1750–2010.

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Published

2017-09-21

Issue

2017

Section

Autumn

License

Copyright (c) 2017 CC BY 4.0 Philip C. Brown

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.