Jonas Rüegg, AM '16, is the Modern Japan History Association 2024 Dissertation Winner for his work The Kuroshio Frontier: Business, State and Environment in the Making of Japan’s Pacific (Harvard University, History and East Asian Languages, 2022). Congratulations, Jonas!

 

The Kuroshio Frontier adopts an oceanic perspective to shed new light on nineteenth-century Japan's geopolitical, material, and intellectual engagements with the broader Pacific world. Drawing upon extensive, original archival research, Jonas Rüegg chronicles the efforts of a diverse group of historical actors—including whalers, sailors, farmers, laborers, guano miners, castaways and urban intellectuals—to, each in their own way, help expand the reach of Japan’s economic, people, and ideas beyond the bounds of the Japan Current (Kuroshio) that had greatly inhibited oceanic travel prior to the modern era. Rüegg’s fascinating and wide-ranging study adroitly surfs the currents of recent trends of environmental, maritime, and oceanic history to uncover important trajectories, continuities, and discontinuities as Japan traversed the transition from the early modern to the modern period.