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"Japan is a place where powerful earthquakes have occurred more frequently and have caused more harm in the modern era than they have in all but a handful of other locations on the planet. In the twentieth century alone, earthquake disasters took almost as many lives as they had in all of the country's recorded history up to that point. Predicting Disasters is a history of scientists' and policy makers' efforts to reduce the uncertainty around the timing and location of powerful earthquakes in modern Japan through forecasting and prediction. Kerry Smith shows how, in the twentieth century, scientists struggled to make large-scale earthquake disasters legible to the public and to policy makers as significant threats to Japan's future and as phenomena that could be anticipated and prepared for. Smith also explains why understanding those struggles matter. Disasters belong alongside more familiar topics of analysis in modern Japanese history, such as economic growth and its impacts, political crises and popular protest, and even the legacies of the war, for the work they do in helping us better understand how the past has influenced beliefs about Japan's possible futures, and how beliefs about the future shaped the present"--
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Kerry Smith is Associate Professor of History and East Asian Studies at Brown University.
