...David Wittner Nicely punctuated with historic illustrations and Walker's own photographs of the industrial sites visited during the course of researching this book, Toxic Archipelago is an outstanding history of industrial disease and environmental degradation in Japan. It is a welcome...

...Martha Chaiklin Technology and the Culture of Progress in Meiji Japan . By David G. Wittner . New York : Routledge , 2008 . xix , 199 pp. $150.00 (cloth). Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 2009 2009 The relationship between modernization, Westernization...

... Depression led to state control over the economy. Rather than seeking governmental aid, the cotton-spinning industry relied on self-governance in responding to dramatic changes in the international economy. Like Wittner's chapter, Martha Chaiklin's study of Japan's efforts to develop sheet glass...

... development and political transformation of Japan puzzled contemporaries as much as it would later vex historians (Auslin 2004 ; Wittner 2008 ). No event signaled Japan's new status on the world stage more than the defeat of imperial Russia in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5. From Istanbul to Tehran, from...