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The rivers of Japan are both hydrologically and historically dynamic. Overshadowed in the popular imagination and academic studies by the seismic activity of earthquakes and volcanos, the country’s rivers exhibit a deep fluvial history of people’s interactions with these waters for fishing, shipping, and irrigation as well as efforts to prevent flooding. In this talk, I focus on a dramatic shift in the approach to river management at the turn of the twentieth century to argue that the environmental relations that helped constitute the country’s rivers during the preceding Tokugawa period (1660–1868) were fundamentally reimagined in ways that continue to shape riparian policies and people’s interactions with those rivers today.
