scholarly journals Underwater Cultural Heritage in the Pacific: Themes and Future Directions

2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 135-168
Author(s):  
Bill Jeffery ◽  
Jennifer F. McKinnon ◽  
Hans Van Tilburg
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Fuel Oil ◽  
Asia Pacific ◽  
Underwater Cultural Heritage ◽  
Atlantic Trade ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Galleon Trade

This article focuses on the underwater cultural heritage (UCH) located across the Pacific Ocean by sampling three temporal themes: living heritage and traditional indigenous cultural heritage, the global connections of the Manila Galleon trade, and the modern warfare of World War II (WWII). Many of the traditional cultural practices (living heritage) and tangible cultural heritage related to indigenous people of the Pacific are coastal and sea related. Their world encompasses the sea, which was not seen as a barrier as but a much-used connection to people occupying the thousands of islands. The Pacific contains an extensive maritime cultural heritage, including UCH, which reflects the cultural identity of people living in the region. From the 16th to 18th centuries, the Spanish Empire prospered through an elaborate Asia-Pacific trade network. The Manila Galleon trade between Manila, Philippines, and Acapulco, Mexico, connected into the existing Atlantic trade transporting commodities such as porcelain, silver, spices and textiles from Asia to the Americas and Spain. Of the 400 known voyages between 1565 and 1815, approximately 59 shipwrecks occurred, of which only a handful of galleons have been investigated. The scale of WWII heritage in the Pacific region reflects the intensity and impacts of global conflicts fought across the world’s largest ocean. Associated UCH includes near shore defensive infrastructure, landing and amphibious assault craft, submerged aircraft, and a wide range of ships and submarines, auxiliary, combatant and non-military casualties alike. Twentieth century warfare involved massive losses of material. The legacy of submerged battlefields in the Pacific is complex. Interest is high in the discovery of naval UCH, but critical aspects are often intertwined. Archaeology, history, reuse, memorialisation (gravesites), tourism, unexploded ordnance, environmental threat (fuel oil), ownership and salvage all shape what we can learn from this resource.

The Trade Networks of Japanese Porcelain in the Asia-Pacific Region

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Takenori Nogami
Keyword(s):  
New World ◽  
Ceramic Industry ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Asia Pacific ◽  
Spanish Colonial ◽  
Trade Networks ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
The Pacific Ocean ◽  
Trade Route ◽  
Galleon Trade

The Manila-Acapulco galleon trade route was established after the Spanish founded Manila City in 1571. Many Asian goods, such as silks and spices, were exported by the Spanish galleons. Many New World goods, including Mexican silver, crossed the Pacific Ocean and were brought to Asia. For instance, the cargoes sent to Acapulco from Manila included East Asian porcelain. On the other hand, in the early modern period, Japanese porcelains were exported from Nagasaki and carried throughout the world. Although, under the rule of the Tokugawa shogunate, Spanish galleons could not enter Nagasaki until the mid-nineteenth century, the Spanish could still get Japanese porcelains if they were brought by Chinese ships. Because Manila was one of the most important port cities of the trade network in Asia, Chinese ships imported many Chinese and Japanese porcelains to Manila. The Spanish in Manila used Japanese porcelains and exported some of them to Acapulco. These were distributed among Spanish colonial cities in the Americas. The majority of them were underglazed blue Kraak-type dishes, underglazed blue items, and overglazed enamel chocolate cups. They reflect Spanish colonial life and culture in America. Moreover, Chinese and Japanese porcelain had an influence on the ceramic industry in America.

The pacific Ocean Basin to 1850

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rainer F. Buschmann
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Pacific Ocean ◽  
World History ◽  
Ocean Basin ◽  
World War ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Military Campaigns ◽  
The Pacific Ocean ◽  
Galleon Trade ◽  
Geographical Feature

The Pacific Ocean is the world's largest and deepest ocean, spanning about one-third of the earth's surface. Despite its size, the Pacific has received only scant global historical attention when compared to the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans. However, the Pacific has played a prominent role intermittently in world history, highlighted by Austronesian expansion, Manila Galleon trade, eighteenth-century European exploration, and the intense island-hopping military campaigns of World War II. At the same time, such historical interest did not translate into a familiar timeline integrating this watery geographical feature into a larger world historical framework. This article argues that there is more discontinuity than continuity to this ocean, and its history is best broken down by three distinct periods of exploration and settlement.

scholarly journals China’s Growing Influence in the Pacific Islands and Its Implications on Climate Change

2021 ◽  
Vol 04 (02) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dr. Kankana Debnath ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Pacific Islands ◽  
Asia Pacific ◽  
World War ◽  
Regional Powers ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Paris Climate Agreement ◽  
Pacific Island Nations ◽  
First Time

The geostrategic value of the Pacific region has started to gain momentum for the first time since the end of World War II. The region is consisting of Melanesia, Micronesia, Polynesia, and Australasia. The center of global geostrategic fulcrum has moved to the Asia-Pacific with China’s growing strategic and economic interest in the region. Pacific Island nations that consider themselves on the front lines of climate change had hoped the U.S. and other regional powers like Australia would stay committed to the global deal to cut emissions and help populations confront the rising seas around them. But they didn’t and as a result the island nations turned towards China, as Beijing has vowed to stay in the Paris Climate Agreement. The paper has dealt with the change in power play in the region on the perspective of climate change and has focused on the future of the regional equation with China.

scholarly journals A retrospective on the Asia-Pacific Regional Conference on Underwater Cultural Heritage

2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 169-192
Author(s):  
Michelle M. Damian
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
Asia Pacific ◽  
Government Agencies ◽  
Underwater Cultural Heritage ◽  
Pacific Region ◽  
Asia Pacific Region ◽  
Regional Network ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
Future Success ◽  
Regional Conference

November 8th to 12th, 2011, marked the first targeted gathering of people involved in researching, managing, and developing underwater cultural heritage (UCH) in the Asia-Pacific region. Since then, the Asia-Pacific Regional Conference on Underwater Cultural Heritage (APCONF) has been convened every three years, providing a unique opportunity to bring together members of government agencies, universities, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), intergovernmental organisations (IGOs), museums, the private sector, and the wider community. Participants from over 35 countries have attended the conference, making it a truly international endeavour. The APCONF was created in part to promote awareness of UCH on a wider scale. As such, one of the primary directives of the inaugural conference was to ensure that all papers presented would be recorded in full in the official conference proceedings, so as to establish an ongoing archive of the critical work being done in this region. This article will examine the wider benefits of creating this regional network through the APCONF, arguing that it provides an important venue for face-to-face networking that can lead to additional collaborations, and contributes to the understanding of how the conference may evolve in the future. The fact that the APCONF is not tied to a specific membership base provides not only unusual flexibility but also financial and infrastructural unsurety. The conference is organised by a group of dedicated volunteers and funded almost entirely by donations. As we stop to consider the first decade of the APCONF’s achievements, we also need to determine the best ways to ensure its sustainable future success.

scholarly journals "Hiroshima Sublime": Trauma, Japan, and the US Asia/Pacific Imaginary

2021 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 46-61
Author(s):  
Rob Wilson
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Persian Gulf War ◽  
Asia Pacific ◽  
World War ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Pacific Ocean ◽  
The Persian Gulf ◽  
The Cold War

As an ethical and aesthetic mandate for the new millenium, the Cold War repression of Hiroshima within the American political imaginaryneeds to be symbolically confronted and undoneat national as well as global levels.As Americans and as Japanese citizens of the liberal global order, we must mutually move beyond the Cold War situation of historical repression that had obtained in 1965, when novelist Kenzaburo Ōelamented, “To put the matter plainly and bluntly, people everywhere on this earth are trying to forget Hiroshima and the unspeakable tragedy perpetrated there.” However traumatic, Americans and their allies must try to remember this Hiroshima sublimeas a trauma of geopolitical dominationand racialized hegemony across the Pacific Ocean. By thinking through and re-imagining the techno-euphoric grandeur of this Hiroshima sublime, as well as representing the ideological complicity of ordinary Americans in their own sublime (rapturedby these technological forces of sublimity as manifesting and globally installingPatriot missilesas signs of theirglobal supremacy) and ordinary Japanese (citizens of the Empire of the Sun fascinatedby self-sublation into zeros of solar force) in the production of this nuclear sublime, we can begin to mutually recognize that a ‘post-nuclear’era offers new possibilities and symbolic ties between America and Japan as Pacific powers. This post-nuclear era emerges out of World War II freighted with terror and wonder as a double possibility:at once urging the globe towards annihilation andyet also towards transactional and dialogical unityat the transnational border of national self-imagining. The phobic masochism of the sublime can no longer operate in a transnational world of global/local linkages, although the technological sublimity of the Persian Gulf War had suggested otherwise, withits “sublime Patriot”missiles and quasi-nuclear landscapes lingering in the world deserts from Iraq and Afganistan to Nevada and North Korea.

Legal Pluralism in the Pacific: Solomon Island's World War II Heritage

2013 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Craig Forrest ◽  
Jennifer Corrin
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
Solomon Islands ◽  
Legal Pluralism ◽  
Customary Law ◽  
World War ◽  
High Court ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
The Common ◽  
Pacific Island Nations

AbstractThe country of Solomon Islands, like most Pacific island nations, has a legally pluralistic regime. That is, customary law operates in parallel with the common law, a legacy of Solomon Islands' colonial past. Legal pluralism raises significant difficulties, including in the way cultural heritage is protected and managed. To date, the courts have rarely been called on to deal with such issues, but in 2010 the High Court had to examine legislation designed to regulate the recovery and export of World War II relics. This seemingly innocuous case raised a number of issues concerning the rights of different stakeholders to this material. Moreover, it raised a foundational question as to whether these relics might be considered cultural heritage, and if so, just whose heritage it was. A consideration of this case and the legislation that applies to this heritage serves to illustrate some of the difficulties that arise in protecting cultural heritage within pluralistic legal systems.

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