New Books on Japan: "Predicting Disasters: Earthquakes, Scientists, and Uncertainty in Modern Japan"

Thursday, December 12, 2024 | 7:00-8:30 PM ET | REGISTER FOR ZOOM

Predicting Disasters: Earthquakes, Scientists, and Uncertainty in Modern Japan (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024)

Author: Kerry Smith, Associate Professor of History, Brown University

Discussant: Eiko Maruko Siniawer, Class of 1955 Memorial Professor of History, Williams College

The Modern Japan History Association invites the wider community to a conversation with Kerry Smith (Brown University). Professor Smith will be speaking about his new book Predicting Disasters: Earthquakes, Scientists, and Uncertainty in Modern Japan (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024). Predicting Disasters is the first English-language book to explore how scientists convinced policy makers and the public in postwar Japan that catastrophic earthquakes were coming, and the first to show why earthquake prediction has played such a central role in Japan’s efforts to prepare for a dangerous future ever since. Professor Smith shows how, in the twentieth century, scientists struggled to make large-scale earthquake disasters legible to the public and to policy makers as significant threats to Japan’s future and as phenomena that could be anticipated and prepared for. Smith also explains why understanding those struggles matters. Disasters, Smith contends, belong alongside more familiar topics of analysis in modern Japanese history—such as economic growth and its impacts, political crises and popular protest, and even the legacies of the war—for the work they do in helping us better understand how the past has influenced beliefs about Japan’s possible futures, and how beliefs about the future shape the present. Eiko Maruko Siniawer (Williams) will serve as interlocutor.