Japan and the Ocean: A transnational history of Hyakushō and the making of the Arafura zone

Thesis

This dissertation chronicles the lives of a group of people thus far unknown to History – people for whom the challenges posed by nature formed the principal driver of historical change and whose seaborne ways of life, in turn, challenged the agents of industrial modernity in Japan and the colonies of European empires in the Western Pacific in the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century. These people were ‘hyakushō’, ordinary seafolk who used their rich local knowledge of the sea to...

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Authors: Dotulong, MRG

• Alternative title: Japan and the Ocean
• DOI: 10.5287/ora-jnbagkx4g
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: Everyday death; Care and mutual aid; Nature/ecology; Competing modernities; Hyakusho; Disasters; Japan; Local knowledge; Transnationalism; Psychogeography
• Subjects: Intellectual history; Historiography; Transnational history; Environmental History; Modern Japanese History; Asian History; Oceanic History