Environmental History in Transnational Networks: Climate History Described by Rangaku, Dutch Navy, and Japan's Colonial Meteorology
Speaker: Togo Tsukahara, Kobe University
Moderator: Victor Seow, Harvard University
Abstract: In our time of global warming and climate change, what can historians do? One of the answers is to focus on climate history, to show how climate has changed and is changing. We can contribute by showing how climate has changed through the reconstruction of the climate of the past. We also should pay closer attention to the historical facts where the weather has been observed by whom, and from when, and how? In this presentation, I would like to focus on Japanese case studies in the climate reconstruction of the past. First, I will discuss weather observations by Dutch agents in the so-called closed nation period of the Edo era. With the sporadic record of weather observations in the nineteenth century, we have reconstructed the West-Japan Temperature series. Recent developments are accompanied by shifts in methodology, from fixed point observation to moving points observation. With a large number of moving data, such as those recorded in ship logs, we are now building a Big Data of past climate. For that, we are now analyzing Dutch Navy ship logs, which includes meteorological records. Second, I explain the expansion of Japanese weather observation networks in the former Japanese Empire. Through this case, I try to demonstrate how climate history is an example of transnational history involving interactions among multiple different cultural and political entities.
About the speaker: Born in Tokyo in 1961, Togo Tsukahara first studied chemistry before turning to the history of science. He earned his Ph.D. in Leiden University, held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Needham Research Institute at Cambridge University, and is currently Professor of the History of Science and STS at the Graduate School of Kobe University. Togo’s main fields are chemistry in cultural exchange, Dutch Studies in Japan, climate reconstruction, and the history of meteorology. He is currently the president of the International Society for the History of East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine.