Results by title

How Japanese coastal residents and transnational conservationists collaborated to foster relationships between humans and sea life

 

Drawing the Sea Near opens a new window to our understanding of transnational conservation by investigating projects in Okinawa shaped by a “conservation-near” approach—which draws on the senses, the body, and memory to collapse the distance between people and their surroundings and to foster collaboration and equity between coastal residents and transnational conservation organizations. This approach contrasts with the traditional Western “conservation-far” model premised on the separation of humans from the environment.

Based on twenty months of participant observation and interviews, this richly detailed, engagingly written ethnography focuses on Okinawa’s coral reefs to explore an unusually inclusive, experiential, and socially just approach to conservation. In doing so, C. Anne Claus challenges orthodox assumptions about nature, wilderness, and the future of environmentalism within transnational organizations. She provides a compelling look at how transnational conservation organizations—in this case a field office of the World Wide Fund for Nature in Okinawa—negotiate institutional expectations for conservation with localized approaches to caring for ocean life. 

In pursuing how particular projects off the coast of Japan unfolded, Drawing the Sea Near illuminates the real challenges and possibilities of work within the multifaceted transnational structures of global conservation organizations. Uniquely, it focuses on the conservationists themselves: why and how has their approach to project work changed, and how have they themselves been transformed in the process?

How Pop artists confronted the legacies of modern Empire of Japan and post-1945 American imperialism from the 1960s to the present.

Looking at a pivotal period spanning the 1960s to the present, Hiroko Ikegami explores how artists in Japan, Okinawa, and the United States have adopted Pop strategies to critique legacies of imperialism. 

Ikegami focuses on locales—Tokyo, Okinawa, Minidoka, and New York—that were deeply impacted by the complex relationship between the Japanese and American empires and considers artists across different situations and generations. The book begins with Tokyo Pop artists and graphic designers, including Shinohara Ushio and Tanaami Keiichi, who critically parodied American Pop during the long 1960s. It then turns to Okinawa, where Tom Max probed Okinawans’ convoluted reality regarding the American Occupation and the Vietnam War. Artists in the second half of the volume confronted legacies of the Asia-Pacific War as a historical condition of the present. Roger Shimomura, the third-generation Japanese American who had been incarcerated in the Minidoka camp as a child, dealt with the subject by appropriating motifs of ukiyo-e woodblock prints. Takashi Murakami, now a global art star, created otaku-inspired art and capitalized on his country’s experience of the atomic bombs in promoting his “Superflat” enterprise. The book concludes with a new generation of artists protesting repercussions of empire in the twenty-first century. This is the first study to treat artists of post-1945 Japan, Okinawa, and the US diaspora in a single volume as mutually independent yet interrelated, using Pop’s criticality as a connecting thread.