Kerry Smith: Predicting Disasters: Earthquakes, Scientists, and Uncertainty in Modern Japan

Kerry Smith is an Associate Professor of History and East Asian Studies. Professor Smith teaches courses on the history of modern Japan, the global atomic age, and Tokyo.

\"Predicting Disasters: Earthquakes, Scientists, and Uncertainty in Modern Japan,\" is the first English-language monograph to focus on disaster as an ongoing condition in modern Japan, and the first to consider the role of scientists as mediators of the public’s understanding of the hazards and risks the nation faced. Built on extensive archival work conducted in Japan and the U.S., the book draws on an unusual variety of sources in the popular press, broadcasting, film, scientific journals, scientists’ memoirs and personal papers, and conversations with key figures in the post-1970s debates over earthquake prediction in Japan. Predicting Disasters argues that catastrophes - and earthquake disasters in particular - shaped the trajectory of modern Japanese history in ways that we are only just beginning to recognize.

Read more about \"Predicting Disasters: Earthquakes, Scientists, and Uncertainty in Modern Japan.\"
https://www.pennpress.org/9781512825374/predicting-disasters/

Learn more about Kerry Smith:
https://vivo.brown.edu/display/ksmith1