Jakobina K. Arch is assistant professor of history at Whitman College.
"What is the real history of whaling in Japan? Is it first and
foremost a story about the continuation of a centuries old cultural
tradition? And how likely is it that the whaling Japan continues to
do in the name of scientific research under IWC rules will validate
a long-standing dedication to the sustainable use of whales for
food? . . . Jakobina Arch . . . provide[s] for the first time
convincing answers to these and other questions in Bringing Whales
Ashore."
*Environment, Law, and History*
"Bringing Whales Ashore is not only an important volume but also a
provocative one. Jakobina Arch has produced (in her first book, no
less) one of those rare and wonderful pieces of research that
recasts the historical landscape (or, in this case, seascape) while
stimulating debate and raising challenging new questions."
*Monumenta Nipponica*
"Arch’s fascinating study is more than an interdisciplinary
maritime history. . . . Whales and whaling, here, wed the
historical to the contemporary, enhancing knowledge of Japanese
history while historizing contemporary controversies, including the
invented tradition of Japanese as nature-loving people spiritually
connected to their natural world."
*Japan Studies Review*
"Lucid, thoughtful, and thought provoking . . . a richly textured
work that not only fills an important gap for scholars of Japanese
history but also provides engaging material that should stimulate
discussion—as well as debate—in the classroom."
*Journal of Japanese Studies*
"Rarely do books on the early modern period engage so directly with
the present as does Bringing Whales Ashore. . . . As the Japanese
pro-whaling lobby has constructed a certain narrative of the past
to claim a right to whaling rooted in tradition and an ethos of
sustainability, Arch provides a powerful counterweight with her
in-depth investigation into all aspects of Japanese whaling history
predating the rise of the modern factory ship in the twentieth
century."
*American Historical Review*
"With Bringing Whales Ashore, Jakobina Arch almost singlehandedly
places the emerging field regarding whales and whaling in Japanese
history on solid ground."
*Journal of Japanese Studies*
"A superb book. . . . It represents the growing field of marine
environmental history at its best."
*Environmental History*
"A breath-taking and emotional read... Jakobina Arch’s work
challenges readers to travel from oceanscapes of cetacean
migration, to visceral death on the coast, value extraction by
dismemberment, and disintegration to places of hybrid-memory and
lives long in the memory."
*New Books Asia*
"Jakobina K. Arch's Bringing Whales Ashore: Oceans and the
Environment of Early Modern Japan is an important contribution to
the rapidly expanding field of marine environmental history.
Shedding the long-engrained terrestrial predisposition of history,
Arch offers fresh understanding of the economic, cultural, and
social links whaling forged between Japan and the Pacific Ocean in
the premodern era."
*H-Environment*
"Bringing Whales Ashore is a breath-taking and emotional read for
those concerned to fill in the watery, liminal spaces of
environmental history in general or specifically of Japan."
*New Books Asia*
"[A] model of an interdisciplinary approach to environmental
history...distill[s] complex histories into an eminently readable
volume without compromising the scholarship therein."
*H-Environment*
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