Abstract Among the first French Jesuits to undertake missionary work in the Qing Empire, Jean-François Gerbillon embarked upon eight expeditions between 1688 and 1698 to the empire’s borderlands beyond the Great Wall. His travel journal, Voyages en Tartarie , presents eyewitness accounts of these journeys, including observations on the region’s natural history, which is often overlooked in favour of his better-known cartographic contributions. This article examines Gerbillon’s natural history writings and the contexts in which they were produced. Operating within the courtly politics of service and patronage, he accompanied Qing dignitaries and, at times, the Kangxi Emperor himself, on diplomatic, military, hunting, and surveying expeditions that brought him into the borderlands’ natural environments and into the orbit of the court’s intellectual life. His writings – their production being contingent on such patronage – were neither merely empirical notes of a European traveller nor offshoots of local oral traditions or the Chinese literary corpus. They should instead be understood as part of the broader Qing knowledge regime concerning the empire’s natural environments – rooted in Chinese classical traditions and, under Manchu rule, reconfigured into new forms of imperial knowledge and imbued with renewed political significance.
Abstract Although imperial Japan had mobilized medicine for overseas expansion in Asia, the postwar Japanese state developed sustained international health programs only gradually. This article argues that the early history of Japan’s postwar international health cooperation cannot be written as a simple story of state-led diplomacy. Adopting trans-Asian and transwar perspectives, it situates this work amid Cold War politics, postwar diplomatic reconstruction, and the political legacies of empire. Focusing on the Japan Overseas Christian Medical Cooperative Service (JOCS), the Japan Leprosy Mission for Asia (JALMA), and the International Nursing Foundation of Japan (INFJ), it shows that NGOs became central actors in sustained, personnel-based medical cooperation in Asia from the 1960s. Their activities expanded by mobilizing support across Christian communities, industrial philanthropy, and, in some cases, government agencies. The article also challenges male-centered histories of international cooperation by showing that female medical professionals, especially nurses, were central to sustaining the everyday medical work on the ground.
Abstract This article examines the thought of Takahashi Minoru 高橋実 (1916–1999), an influential postwar Japanese energy thinker, whose career spanned the aftermath of defeat and the nation’s subsequent embrace of commercial nuclear power. During the Allied Occupation, Takahashi developed a theory of civilization based on the idea that the increasing mobilization of energy resources would drive civilizational progress. In an influential 1952 work, he went on to quantify and compare national development using a set of metrics derived from this theory, envisioning the construction of a system of energy production that could underpin Japan’s material recovery and secure its place in a global community of advanced nations. He emerged as a fierce advocate for nuclear power in the years that followed, portraying atomic energy as a means of transcending the constraints of the era of high economic growth. By the early 1970s, he had developed his theory into a grand vision of a global nuclear future characterized by the ubiquity of topography-free fast breeder reactors, but not before theorizing humanity’s potential regression into a state of barbarity. Using his writings—ranging from theoretical texts through technical treatises to works of popular science—, this article reconstructs the foundations of his energy theory and situates them within the broader intellectual and economic contexts of mid-twentieth-century Japan. In so doing, it challenges a historiography that has disproportionately tied Japan’s nuclear program to American Cold War policy, and instead highlights domestic visions of technological modernity, civilizational renewal, and nuclear utopia. Takahashi’s thought is central to understanding both the origins and trajectory of Japan’s atomic world.
Abstract This paper investigates the comprehensiveness of the fenye 分野 (“field allocation”) system created by Chen Zhuo 陳卓 (ca. 230–ca. 320). Fenye was an omenological heuristic used in pre-modern China to correlate events in astral and terrestrial regions by artificially assigning precise astronomical measures of lodge-entry du ( ruxiu du 入宿度) to the latter. The schemes and measures of fenye underwent numerous adjustments and evolved into various models over history. There was a clear trend in imperial times to reconcile and fuse together earlier independent models, and previous research has regarded Chen Zhuo’s fenye as a synthesis and as the pinnacle of this evolution. This paper argues, however, that Chen Zhuo’s fenye achieved only formal reconciliation, failing to ensure the perfect alignment between astronomical measures and terrestrial regions. The imperfections evident in Chen Zhuo’s fenye were only truly resolved by Li Chunfeng 李淳風 (602–670), whose more refined Tang-era “guiding framework” ( jigang 紀綱) had a significant influence on expert literature. Given the impact of the intensifying bans on omenology, however, Li Chunfeng’s expert writings were less well known than his Jinshu 晉書 “Tianwen zhi” 天文志, which instead ensured the widespread circulation and authority of Chen Zhuo’s fenye , even into late-imperial times.
Abstract This article examines how Ming and Qing local gazetteers rendered environmental difference intelligible through the rubric qihou and its pairing with fenye (field allocation). Drawing on LoGaRT to trace qihou headings across over 4,000 gazetteers, I show that the rubric first consolidated in the Ming South before diffusing northward, eventually absorbing Republican-era meteorological data. I argue that compilers used the fenye–qihou pairing as an authorizing format: fenye supplied a political-cosmological coordinate, while qihou offered a flexible interface for recording seasonal rhythms, bodily concerns, and local ecological variation. Reframing cosmology as constituted through compilation practices as well as articulated in them, the article shows how gazetteers made local difference portable through headings, textual adjacency, and documentary form. This operative logic proved durable, persisting across the Republican epistemological shift even as qihou itself transitioned toward the modern concept of climate.
