logo for Harvard University Press
Japanese Art in Detail
John Reeve
Harvard University Press, 2005

Beginning by asking, “What is Japanese art?” this book supplies an answer so broad in its reach, so rich in detail, and so extensively illustrated as to give a reader not just a true picture, but also a fine understanding, of Japanese art. Arranged thematically, the book includes chapters on nature and pleasure, landscape and beauty, all framed by the themes of serenity and turmoil, the two poles of Japanese culture ancient and modern. Highlighting—close up and in color—outstanding examples of design and craft in prints, paintings and screens, metalwork, ceramics, wood, stone, and lacquer, Japanese Art in Detail presents each image alongside enlarged details--details that otherwise might be virtually invisible to the naked eye--thus affording intriguing comparisons between seemingly unrelated pieces. Throughout, John Reeve provides cultural context while pointing out exceptional features.

Though drawn from one extraordinary source—the British Museum—the specific objects pictured here are representative of many others in public and private collections worldwide, and offer a clear idea, both broad and particular, of what constitutes Japanese art. Most of these images, as well as many of those mentioned, are accessible electronically through the British Museum's online database, as are several tours linked to recent exhibits.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
The Japanese Automobile Industry
Technology and Management at Nissan and Toyota
Michael Cusumano
Harvard University Press, 1985

front cover of The Japanese Automotive Industry
The Japanese Automotive Industry
Model and Challenge for the Future?
Robert E. Cole, Editor
University of Michigan Press, 1981
As the University of Michigan Center for Japanese Studies reflected on the deteriorating position of the domestic auto industry in the fall of 1980, and the strong competitive threat being posed by the Japanese automakers, we were struck by the extraordinary low quality of the public discussion of these critical issues. The national importance of the issues seemed only matched by the superficiality of the analyses being offered. The tendency to think in terms of scapegoats was particularly evident. The Japanese as the basic cause of our problems has been a particularly notable theme. To be sure, cooperation with the Japanese in formulating a rational overall trade policy may be an important part of the solution. It has also been fashionable to blame it all on American auto industry management for not concentrating on the production of small cars when "everyone knew" that was the thing to do. Alternatively, government meddling was blamed for all our problems. Clearly, the complex problem we faced required more penetrating analyses. It seemed therefore, that the time was ripe for a public seminar which moved beyond the rhetoric of the moment and probed some of the deeper causes of our problems and possible directions for future policy.
In holding the January 1981 auto conference, the Center took it as their task to begin addressing the critical issues facing the industry, with particular, but not exclusive, attention to examining the role of the Japanese auto industry. They had in mind not to simply conduct a rational discussion of the trade issue but to probe the sources of Japanese competitive strength, especially those features whose study might profit them.
In these proceedings, they bring those discussions to a wider audience. Question and answer sessions at the conference were necessarily short and a few speakers delivered abbreviated remarks; this volume restores a number of omissions, and provides additional answers to some pertinent questions put by the audience. The Center hopes to encourage the serious problem-solving these complex issues demand. Far too much time has been spent trying to fix the blame. [intro]
[more]

front cover of Japanese Brazilian Saudades
Japanese Brazilian Saudades
Diasporic Identities and Cultural Production
Ignacio López-Calvo
University Press of Colorado, 2019
Japanese Brazilian Saudades explores the self-definition of Nikkei discourse in Portuguese-language cultural production by Brazilian authors of Japanese ancestry. Ignacio López-Calvo uses books and films by twentieth-century Nikkei authors as case studies to redefine the ideas of Brazilianness and Japaneseness from both a national and a transnational perspective. The result suggests an alternative model of postcoloniality, particularly as it pertains to the post–World War II experience of Nikkei people in Brazil.
 
López-Calvo addresses the complex creation of Japanese Brazilian identities and the history of immigration, showing how the community has used writing as a form of reconciliation and affirmation of their competing identities as Japanese, Brazilian, and Japanese Brazilian. Japanese in Brazil have employed a twofold strategic, rhetorical engineering: the affirmation of ethno-cultural difference on the one hand, and the collective assertion of citizenship and belonging to the Brazilian nation on the other. López-Calvo also grapples with the community’s inclusion and exclusion in Brazilian history and literature, using the concept of “epistemicide” to refer to the government’s attempt to impose a Western value system, Brazilian culture, and Portuguese language on the Nikkeijin, while at the same time trying to destroy Japanese language and culture in Brazil by prohibiting Japanese language instruction in schools, Japanese-language publications, and even speaking Japanese in public.
 
Japanese Brazilian Saudades contributes to the literature criticizing the “cognitive injustice” that fails to acknowledge the value of the global South and non-Western ways of knowing and being in the world. With important implications for both Latin American studies and Nikkei studies, it expands discourses of race, ethnicity, nationality, and communal belonging through art and narrative.
 
[more]

front cover of Japanese Cities
Japanese Cities
edited by Kuniko Fujita and Richard Child Hill
Temple University Press, 1993

Japan is the world's second most powerful economy and one of the most urbanized nations on earth. Yet English-language literature contains remarkable little about cities in Japan. This collection of original essays on Japanese urban and industrial development covers a broad spectrum of city experiences. Leading Japanese and Western urbanists analyze Japan's largest metropolitan areas (Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya); proto-typical industrial cities (Kamaishi, Kitakyushu, Toyota); high technology urban satellites (Kanagawa); and smaller, more traditionally organized industrial districts (Tsubame). This book demonstrates how Japan's flexible economic growth strategies and changing relationship to the world economy have produced a uniquely Japanese pattern of urban development in this century.

Throughout the essays that describe individual cities, contributors provide commentary on each city's twentieth-century history and functional relations with other cities and focus on the dynamic linkage between global relations and local activities. They examine the role of government—central, prefectural, and local—in the restructuring of Japanese industrial and urban life. One essay is devoted to the urbanization process in pre-World War II Japan; another considers urban planning on the western Pacific Rim. This is the first book that analyzes how the economic transformation of Japan has restructured Japanese cities and how urban and regional development policies have kept pace with (and in some ways effected) changes in the economy.

This comprehensive study of Japanese cities provides interdisciplinary coverage of urban development issues of interest to the fields of economics, business, sociology, political science, history, Asian and Japanese studies, and urban planning.

[more]

front cover of Japanese Civilization
Japanese Civilization
A Comparative View
S. N. Eisenstadt
University of Chicago Press, 1996
S. N. Eisenstadt, one of the world's leading social theorists, provides a monumental synthesis of Japanese history, religion, culture, and social organization. Equipped with a thorough command of the literature, Eisenstadt explores the Japanese historical legacy and its impact on the Japanese experience of modernity. Eschewing the polemicism of structuralist or culturalist approaches, he expands his investigative framework to include a keenly systematic, broadly comparative analysis. What emerges is an innovative new construction, focusing on the nonideological character of Japanese civilization as well as its infinite capacity to recreate community through an ongoing past.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Japanese Colonial Education in Taiwan, 1895–1945
E. Patricia Tsurumi
Harvard University Press, 1977

Japan was the only non-Western colonial power in the pre–World War II world. Yet studies of Japanese colonialism are, for the most part, still in an embryonic stage. For too long critical investigation of the broad problem of the Japanese colonial empire—its development and character—has been neglected by both scholars of East Asian history and those of comparative colonial systems. How much was the Japanese administration of Taiwan like French, Dutch, British, or American rule in other parts of Asia? How closely did the actions taken by the colonial governments resemble the patterns of governmental initiative in the home islands established by the Meiji politicians and their successors? What is the effect of colonization on the mental and physical condition of people who are colonized?

This study of Japanese colonialism in Japan’s first overseas acquisition, Taiwan, approaches these questions through an analysis of a central pillar of Japanese rule there—education—which performed key functions in keeping order, exploiting economic resources, securing the cooperation of the natives, and attempting to assimilate them. Using a vast amount of material meticulously and judiciously, the author gives us provocative, convincing, and significant answers to these questions and makes an important contribution to the study of modern East Asian history and comparative colonialism.

[more]

logo for Southern Illinois University Press
Japanese Corrections
Managing Convicted Offenders in an Orderly Society
Elmer H. Johnson
Southern Illinois University Press

In his analysis of the current Japanese corrections system, internationally respected criminologist Elmer H. Johnson focuses on three basic questions: What are the characteristics of the major programmatic elements? How do various personnel carry out their programmatic responsibilities? Why are the various duties and activities carried out in a particular way?

Johnson points out that compared with the United States, where prison populations are huge and often violent, Japan incarcerates relatively few criminals. In 1989, for example, Japan locked up only 34 out of every 100,000 citizens while the United States imprisoned people at a rate of 271 per 100,000. Examining the cultural differences leading to this disparity, Johnson notes that in Japan prosecutors are reluctant to refer defendants for trial and the courts often suspend sentences for convicted felons.

In Japan, two bureaus—the Correction Bureau and the Rehabilitation Bureau—administer all Japanese correctional activities. Placing these bureaus in the organizational scheme of the Ministry of Justice, Johnson traces the history, describes the organizational ideologies, and outlines the special features of each.

A central feature of the Japanese penal system is the industrial prison, a concept that met such fierce opposition in the United States that it lost almost all access to the free market by the 1940s. Johnson traces the history of the industrial prison, noting particularly that the industrial operations in adult institutions explain in part why there is almost no violence and why few try to escape. Juvenile institutions enjoy similar success; even though they produce no industrial products, the juvenile training schools emphasize education, vocational training, and counseling.

Japanese correctional officers rely heavily on the community and on unsalaried volunteer probation officers for supervision of probationers and parolees. Although Japanese courts regard probationary supervision as too punitive for most convicted defendants and return many to the community without supervision, the probation caseload is weighty. Johnson describes the responsibilities and operations of the Regional Parole Boards. He also discusses the aid hostels (halfway houses) that are primarily operated by private organizations and that serve released or paroled prisoners.

Johnson sums up by noting that both the Correction Bureau and the Rehabilitation Bureau depend on the overall operations of police, prosecutors, and judges. More broadly, he asserts, both bureaus are creatures of Japanese society and culture. The assets and disadvantages of the bureaus reflect society’s reluctance to sentence defendants to prison and, to a lesser extent, the reluctance to place them on probationary supervision.

 

[more]

front cover of Japanese Counterculture
Japanese Counterculture
The Antiestablishment Art of Terayama Shuji
Steven C. Ridgely
University of Minnesota Press, 2010
Terayama Shuji (1935-1983) was an avant-garde Japanese poet, dramatist, film director, and photographer known for his highly provocative work. In this inventive and revealing work, Steven Ridgely examines Terayama's life and art to show that a conventional notion of him does not do full justice to the meaning and importance of his wide-ranging, often playful body of work.

Ridgely places Terayama at the center of Japanese and global counterculture and finds in his work a larger story about the history of postwar Japanese art and culture. He sees Terayama as reflecting the most significant events of his day: young poets seizing control of haiku and tanka in the 1950s, radio drama experimenting with form and content after the cultural shift to television around 1960, young assistant directors given free rein in the New Wave as cinema combated television, underground theatre in the politicized late 1960s, and experimental short film through the 1970s after both the studio system and art house cinema had collapsed.

Featuring close readings of Terayama's art, Ridgely demonstrates how across his oeuvre there are patterns that sidestep existing power structures, never offering direct opposition but nevertheless making the opposition plain. And, he claims, there is always in Terayama's work a broad call for seeking out or creating pockets of fiction-where we are made aware that things are not what they seem-and to use otherness in those spaces to take a clearer view of reality.
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Japanese Cultural Policy toward China, 1918–1931
A Comparative Perspective
See Heng Teow
Harvard University Press, 1999
Most existing scholarship on Japan’s cultural policy toward modern China reflects the paradigm of cultural imperialism. In contrast, this study demonstrates that Japan—while motivated by pragmatic interests, international cultural rivalries, ethnocentrism, moralism, and idealism—was mindful of Chinese opinion and sought the cooperation of the Chinese government. Japanese policy stressed cultural communication and inclusiveness rather than cultural domination and exclusiveness and was part of Japan’s search for an East Asian cultural order led by Japan. China, however, was not a passive recipient and actively sought to redirect this policy to serve its national interests and aspirations. The author argues that it is time to move away from the framework of cultural imperialism toward one that recognizes the importance of cultural autonomy, internationalism, and transculturation.
[more]

front cover of Japanese Demon Lore
Japanese Demon Lore
Oni from Ancient Times to the Present
Noriko Reider
Utah State University Press, 2010

Oni, ubiquitous supernatural figures in Japanese literature, lore, art, and religion, usually appear as demons or ogres. Characteristically threatening, monstrous creatures with ugly features and fearful habits, including cannibalism, they also can be harbingers of prosperity, beautiful and sexual, and especially in modern contexts, even cute and lovable. There has been much ambiguity in their character and identity over their long history. Usually male, their female manifestations convey distinctivly gendered social and cultural meanings.

Oni appear frequently in various arts and media, from Noh theater and picture scrolls to modern fiction and political propaganda, They remain common figures in popular Japanese anime, manga, and film and are becoming embedded in American and international popular culture through such media. Noriko Reiderýs book is the first in English devoted to oni. Reider fully examines their cultural history, multifaceted roles, and complex significance as "others" to the Japanese.

[more]

logo for Ohio University Press
Japanese Empire in the Tropics
Selected Documents and Reports of the Japanese Period in Sarawak, Northwest Borneo, 1941–1945
Ooi Keat Gin
Ohio University Press, 1997

Although the Japanese interregnum was brief, its dramatic commencement and equally dramatic conclusion represented a watershed in the history of the young state of Sarawak.

In recent years, there has been a groundswell of interest in the war years, culminating in an attempt at reassessment of the Japanese occupation in Southeast Asia by Western and Japanese scholars as well as by those from Southeast Asia.

Presented here in a two-volume edition is a history of the Japanese occupation of Sarawak narrated through the compelling testimonies of the actual participants based on their recollections, memoirs, and correspondence.

[more]

front cover of Japanese Filmmakers in the Wake of Fukushima
Japanese Filmmakers in the Wake of Fukushima
Perspectives on Nuclear Disasters
Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano
Amsterdam University Press, 2023
In the ongoing aftermath of the nuclear accident in 2011, filmmakers have continued to issue warnings about the state of Japanese society and politics, which remain mired in refusal to change. Nearly a decade in the making, Japanese Filmmakers in the Wake of Fukushima is based on in-person interviews with countless filmmakers, as well as continuous dialogue with them and their work. Author Wada-Marciano has expanded these dialogues to include students, audiences at screenings, critics, and researchers, and her observations are based on down-to-earth-exchange of ideas engaged in over a long period of time. Filmmakers and artists are in the vanguard of those who grapple with what should be done regarding the struggle against fear of the invisible blight—radiation exposure. Rather than blindly following the mass media and public opinion, they have chosen to think and act independently. While repeatedly viewing and reviewing the film works from the post-Fukushima period, Wada-Marciano felt the unwavering message that emanates from them: “There must be no more nuclear weapons.” “There must be no more nuclear power generation.” The book is dedicated to convincing readers of the clarity of their message.
[more]

front cover of Japanese Foodways, Past and Present
Japanese Foodways, Past and Present
Edited by Eric C. Rath and Stephanie Assmann
University of Illinois Press, 2010
Spanning nearly six hundred years of Japanese food culture, Japanese Foodways, Past and Present considers the production, consumption, and circulation of Japanese foods from the mid-fifteenth century to the present day in contexts that are political, economic, cultural, social, and religious. Diverse contributors--including anthropologists, historians, sociologists, a tea master, and a chef--address a range of issues such as medieval banquet cuisine, the tea ceremony, table manners, cookbooks in modern times, food during the U.S. occupation period, eating and dining out during wartimes, the role of heirloom vegetables in the revitalization of rural areas, children's lunches, and the gentrification of blue-collar foods.
 
Framed by two reoccurring themes--food in relation to place and food in relation to status--the collection considers the complicated relationships between the globalization of foodways and the integrity of national identity through eating habits. Focusing on the consumption of Western foods, heirloom foods, once-taboo foods, and contemporary Japanese cuisines, Japanese Foodways, Past and Present shows how Japanese concerns for and consumption of food has relevance and resonance with other foodways around the world.
 
Contributors are Stephanie Assmann, Gary Soka Cadwallader, Katarzyna Cwiertka, Satomi Fukutomi, Shoko Higashiyotsuyanagi, Joseph R. Justice, Michael Kinski, Barak Kushner, Bridget Love, Joji Nozawa, Tomoko Onabe, Eric C. Rath, Akira Shimizu, George Solt, David E. Wells, and Miho Yasuhara.
[more]

logo for Georgetown University Press
Japanese Foreign Intelligence and Grand Strategy
From the Cold War to the Abe Era
Brad Williams
Georgetown University Press, 2023

Incisive insights into the distinctive nature of Japanese foreign intelligence and grand strategy, its underlying norms, and how they have changed over time

Japanese foreign intelligence is an outlier in many ways. Unlike many states, Japan does not possess a centralized foreign intelligence agency that dispatches agents abroad to engage in espionage. Japan is also notable for civilian control over key capabilities in human and signals intelligence. Japanese Foreign Intelligence and Grand Strategy probes the unique makeup of Japan's foreign intelligence institutions, practices, and capabilities across the economic, political, and military domains and shows how they have changed over time.

Brad Williams begins by exploring how Japan’s experiences of the Second World War and its new role as a major US ally influenced its adoption of bilateralism, developmentalism, technonationalism, and antimilitarism as key norms. As a result, Japanese intelligence-gathering resources centered primarily around improving its position in the global economy throughout the Cold War. Williams then brings his analysis up to the Abe Era, examining how shifts in the international, regional, and domestic policy environments in the twenty-first century have caused a gradual reassessment of national security strategy under former prime minister Shinzo Abe. As Japan reevaluates its old norms in light of regional security challenges, the book concludes by detailing how the country is beginning to rethink the size, shape, and purpose of its intelligence community.

Anyone interested in Japanese intelligence, security, or international relations will welcome this important contribution to our understanding of the country's intelligence capabilities and strategy.

[more]

front cover of The Japanese in Latin America
The Japanese in Latin America
Daniel M. Masterson with Sayaka Funada-Classen
University of Illinois Press, 2003

Latin America is home to 1.5 million persons of Japanese descent. Combining detailed scholarship with rich personal histories, Daniel M. Masterson, with the assistance of Sayaka Funada-Classen, presents the first comprehensive study of the patterns of Japanese migration on the continent as a whole. 

When the United States and Canada tightened their immigration restrictions in 1907, Japanese contract laborers began to arrive at mines and plantations in Latin America. The authors examine Japanese agricultural colonies in Latin America, as well as the subsequent cultural networks that sprang up within and among them, and the changes that occurred as the Japanese moved from wage labor to ownership of farms and small businesses. They also explore recent economic crises in Brazil, Argentina, and Peru, which, combined with a strong Japanese economy, caused at least a quarter million Latin American Japanese to migrate back to Japan. 

Illuminating authoritative research with extensive interviews with migrants and their families, The Japanese in Latin America tells the story of immigrants who maintained strong allegiances to their Japanese roots, even while they struggled to build lives in their new countries.

[more]

front cover of Japanese Law
Japanese Law
An Economic Approach
J. Mark Ramseyer and Minoru Nakazato
University of Chicago Press, 1998
In this introduction to Japanese law, J. Mark Ramseyer and Minoru Nakazato combine an economic approach with a clear and often amusing account of the law itself to challenge commonly held ideas about the law. Arguing against such things as the assumption that Japanese law differs from law in the United States and the idea that law plays only a trivial role in Japan or is culturally determined, this book will be recognized as a major contribution to the understanding of Japanese law.

"A compelling economic analysis. . . . This book remains one of the few concerning Japanese law that successfully brings to life the legal culture of Japan." —Bonnie L. Dixon, New York Law Journal
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Japanese Law in Context
Readings in Society, the Economy, and Politics
Curtis J. Milhaupt
Harvard University Press, 2001
This is a wide-ranging selection of 130 readings in Japanese law. The essays, extracted from previously published books and articles, cover subjects including historical context, the civil law tradition, the legal services industry, dispute resolution, constitutional law, contracts, torts, criminal law, family law, employment law, corporate law, and economic regulation. This unique collection of readings is accompanied by the texts of the Japanese constitution and other basic laws.
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Japanese Marxist
A Portrait of Kawakami Hajime, 1879–1946
Gail Lee Bernstein
Harvard University Press, 1976

It is the merit of Bernstein's portrait of Kawakami Hajime that he emerges as a recognizable human being, a truly modern figure reflecting in his own life a personal and hard-won balance between traditional Japanese values and the demands of modernization. The heir of a samurai family, an acknowledged authority on economics, a professor at one of Japan's leading universities, an early popularizer of Marxism in Japan, a Japanese Communist on his own unique terms, and, finally, the author of an autobiography that is a classic of modern Japanese literature, Kawakami Hajime is an important figure in the history of modern Japan.

At each stage of Kawakami's winding path to Marxism—from patriotic nationalist to academic Marxist to revolutionary Communist—his concern for the ethical and economic problems that emerged in the course of Japan's astonishingly rapid industrialization dominated his consciousness. Bernstein provides a portrait of Kawakami's complex personality as well as an elegantly shaped narrative of the context and content of Japanese left-wing politics in the 1920s, and she makes plain the kinds of cultural conflict that modernization, in its several varieties, bequeathed to Japanese intellectuals.

[more]

front cover of Japanese Monetary Policy
Japanese Monetary Policy
Edited by Kenneth J. Singleton
University of Chicago Press, 1993
How has the Bank of Japan (BOJ) helped shape Japan's economic growth during the past two decades? This book comprehensively explores the relations between financial market liberalization and BOJ policies and examines the ways in which these policies promoted economic growth in the 1980s. The authors argue that the structure of Japan's financial markets, particularly restrictions on money-market transactions and the key role of commercial banks in financing corporate investments, allowed the BOJ to influence Japan's economic success.

The first two chapters provide the most in-depth English-language discussion of the BOJ's operating procedures and policymaker's views about how BOJ actions affect the Japanese business cycle. Chapter three explores the impact of the BOJ's distinctive window guidance policy on corporate investment, while chapter four looks at how monetary policy affects the term structure of interest rates in Japan. The final two chapters examine the overall effect of monetary policy on real aggregate economic activity.

This volume will prove invaluable not only to economists interested in the technical operating procedures of the BOJ, but also to those interested in the Japanese economy and in the operation and outcome of monetary reform in general.
[more]

front cover of The Japanese 'New Woman'
The Japanese 'New Woman'
Images of Gender and Modernity
Lowy, Dina
Rutgers University Press, 2007

The dawn of the twentieth century in Japan witnessed the rise of a peculiar problem: the “Woman Problem.” This, at least, was the term used in an ongoing debate among the government and various intellectuals over how to define gender roles. While the government worked hard to promote the “good wife, wise mother” paradigm, certain female members of society had other notions about how to engage with their world.

In The Japanese “New Woman,” Dina Lowy focuses on this new female image as it was revealed, discussed, and debated in popular newspapers and magazines in the 1910s, as well as on the lives of a specific group of women—members of the feminist literary organization known as the Seitosha. These women drew on a variety of sources, including Zen training, Western writings and ideas, and Japanese morals and arts as they tried to open up new spaces for female activity beyond the confines of the home. Lowy shows how the Seitosha set a precedent that would be emulated in the decades to follow as Japanese women continued to question the patriarchal order, experiment with alternative visions, and pursue their rights in a variety of forms.  This work also provides a context for comparative studies of New Women, gender debates, and the modernizing process.

[more]

front cover of The Japanese On Trial
The Japanese On Trial
Allied War Crimes Operations in the East, 1945–1951
By Philip R. Piccigallo
University of Texas Press, 1979

This comprehensive treatment of post–World War II Allied war crimes trials in the Far East is a significant contribution to a neglected subject. While the Nuremberg and, to a lesser degree, Tokyo tribunals have received considerable attention, this is the first full-length assessment of the entire Far East operation, which involved some 5,700 accused and 2,200 trials.

After discussing the Tokyo trial, Piccigallo systematically examines the operations of each Allied nation, documenting procedure and machinery as well as the details of actual trials (including hitherto unpublished photographs) and ending with a statistical summary of cases.

This study allows a completely new assessment of the Far East proceedings: with a few exceptions, the trials were carefully and fairly conducted, the efforts of defense counsel and the elaborate review procedures being especially noteworthy. Piccigallo’s approach to this emotion-filled subject is straightforward and evenhanded throughout. He concludes with a discussion of the broader implications of such war crimes trials, a matter of interest to the general reader as well as to specialists in history, law, and international affairs.

[more]

front cover of Japanese Prefectures and Policymaking
Japanese Prefectures and Policymaking
Steven R. Reed
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1986
In this book, Steven R. Reed argues that studying only central administrations and national-level politics yields a picture of greater rigidity than actually exists in modern governments. There is not a simple dichotomy between centralization and local autonomy: many different relationships between levels of government are possible. Reed illustrates his point in nine detailed case studies in which he analyzes the governments of three of Japan's forty-seven prefectures. Reed interviews over one-hundred officials to reveal the innovative policymaking that exists at the local level.

Reed compares how each prefecture addresses pollution control, public housing, and access to the best high school education, and concludes that despite some inefficiency in the system, the results are usually very good. Japan's prefectures are important sources of governmental flexibility and responsiveness.
[more]

front cover of The Japanese Prime Minister and Public Policy
The Japanese Prime Minister and Public Policy
Kenji Hayao
University of Pittsburgh Press

Despite the undeniable importance of Japan in world affairs, both politically and economically, the office of the Japanese prime minister has recieved far less attention from scholars than have the top political offices in other advanced industrialized democracies.  This book is the first major systemic analysis of the Japanese prime minister’s role and influence in the policy process.

Kenji Hayao argues that the Japanese prime minister can play a major if not critical role in bringing about a change in policy.  In Japan the prime minister’s style is different from what is considered usual for parliamentary leaders: rather than being strong and assertive, he tends to be reactive.  How did the role develop in this way?  If he is not a major initiator of policy change, how and under what conditions can the prime minister make his impact felt?  Finally, what are the consequences of this rather weak leadership?

In answering these questions, Professor Hayao presents two case studies (educational reform and reform of the tax system) involving Nakasone Yasuhiro to see how he be became involved in the policy issues and how he affected the process.  Hayao then examines a number of broad forces that seem important in explaining the prime minister’s role in the policy process: how a leader is chosen; his relationships with other important actors in the political system - the  political parties and the subgovernments; and the structure of his “inner” staff and advisors.

[more]

front cover of Japanese Reflections on World War II and the American Occupation
Japanese Reflections on World War II and the American Occupation
Edgar A. Porter and Ran Ying Porter
Amsterdam University Press, 2018
This book presents an unforgettable up-close account of the effects of World War II and the subsequent American occupation on Oita prefecture, through firsthand accounts from more than forty Japanese men and women who lived there. The interviewees include students, housewives, nurses, midwives, teachers, journalists, soldiers, sailors, Kamikaze pilots, and munitions factory workers. Their stories range from early, spirited support for the war through the devastating losses of friends and family members to air raids and into periods of hunger and fear of the American occupiers. The personal accounts are buttressed by archival materials; the result is an unprecedented picture of the war as experienced in a single region of Japan.
[more]

front cover of Japanese Studies in Britain
Japanese Studies in Britain
A Survey and History
Hugh Cortazzi
Amsterdam University Press, 2016
This book takes an in-depth look at the study of Japan in contemporary Britain, highlighting the many strengths but also pointing out some weaknesses, while at the same time offering a valuable historical record of the origins and development of Japanese Studies in British universities and other institutions. It comprises essays written by scholars from universities all over Britain – from Edinburgh and Newcastle to Cardiff, SOAS and Oxbridge+, as well as contributions from various supporting foundations and organizations – from the British Association of Japanese Studies (BAJS) to the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures (SISJAC). It opens with an historical overview by Peter Kornicki, followed by chapters on the important role of missionaries in advancing Japanese language studies in pre-war Japan by Hamish Ion and the contribution of the British consular and military officers before 1941 by Jim Hoare. Japanese Studies in Britain gives a snapshot of the present state of Japanese Studies in Britain. It also provides an important new benchmark and point of reference regarding the present options for studying Japan at British universities. It offers in addition a wider perspective on the role, relevance and future direction of Japanese Studies for academia, business and government, students planning their future careers and more generally the world of education, as well as readers interested in the developing relationship between Britain and Japan.
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Japanese Studies of Modern China
A Bibliographical Guide to Historical and Social-Science Research on the 19th and 20th Centuries
John King Fairbank, Masataka Banno, and Sumiko Yamamoto
Harvard University Press, 1971
The present volume is a supplement, equal in size and scope, to the volume published in 1955, Japanese Studies of Modern China, by John K. Fairbank, Masataka Banno, and Sumiko Yamamoto. Summaries and critical evaluations of more than one thousand books and articles are arranged by topics. There is a comprehensive general index and a special character index to establish the correct readings of the names of Japanese authors.
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Japanese Studies of Modern China since 1953
A Bibliographical Guide to Historical and Social-Science Research on the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
Noriko Kamachi, John King Fairbank, and Chūzō Ichiko
Harvard University Press
The present volume is a supplement, equal in size and scope, to the volume published in 1955, Japanese Studies of Modern China, by John K. Fairbank, Masataka Banno, and Sumiko Yamamoto. Summaries and critical evaluations of more than one thousand books and articles are arranged by topics. There is a comprehensive general index and a special character index to establish the correct readings of the names of Japanese authors.
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
The Japanese Today
Change and Continuity
Edwin O. Reischauer
Harvard University Press, 1988

With the two-thousand-year history of the Japanese experience as his foundation, Edwin O. Reischauer brings us an incomparable description of Japan today in all its complexity and uniqueness, both material and spiritual. His description and analysis present us with the paradox that is present-day Japan: thoroughly international, depending for its livelihood almost entirely on foreign trade, its products coveted everywhere—yet not entirely liked or trusted, still feared for its past military adventurism and for its current economic aggressiveness.

Reischauer begins with the rich heritage of the island nation, identifying incidents and trends that have significantly affected Japan’s modern development. Much of the geographic and historical material on Japan’s earlier years is drawn from his renowned study The Japanese, but the present book deepens and broadens that earlier interpretation: our knowledge of Japan has increased enormously in the intervening decade and our attitudes have become more ambivalent, while Japan too has changed, often not so subtly.

Moving to contemporary Japanese society, Reischauer explores both the constants in Japanese life and the aspects that are rapidly changing. In the section on government and politics he gives pithy descriptions of the formal workings of the various organs of government and the decision-making process, as well as the most contentious issues in Japanese life—pollution, nuclear power, organized labor—and the elusive matter of political style.

In what will become classic statements on business management and organization, Reischauer sketches the early background of trade and commerce in Japan, contrasts the struggling prewar economy with today’s assertive manufacturing, and brilliantly characterizes the remarkable postwar economic miracle of Japanese heavy industry, consumer product development, and money management. In a final section, “Japan and the World,” he attempts to explain to skeptical Westerners that country’s growing and painful dilemma between neutrality and alignment, between trade imbalance and “fair” practices, and the ever-vexing issue of that embodiment of Japanese specialness, a unique and difficult language that affects personal and national behavior.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
The Japanese Today
Change and Continuity, Enlarged Edition
Edwin O. Reischauer and Marius B. Jansen
Harvard University Press, 1995

Japan, like the rest of the world, has undergone enormous changes in the last few years. The impact of the end of the Cold War has combined with a worldwide recession to create a fluid situation in which long-held assumptions about politics and policies no longer hold. A classic, short history of Japan, this book has been brought up-to-date by Marius Jansen, now our most distinguished interpreter of Japanese history. Jansen gives a lucid account and analysis of the events that have rocked Japan since 1990, taking the story through the election of Murayama as prime minister.

About the previous edition:

With the two-thousand-year history of the Japanese experience as his foundation, Edwin O. Reischauer brings us an incomparable description of Japan today in all its complexity and uniqueness, both material and spiritual. His description and analysis present us with the paradox that is present-day Japan: thoroughly international, depending for its livelihood almost entirely on foreign trade, its products coveted everywhere—yet not entirely liked or trusted, still feared for its past military adventurism and for its current economic aggressiveness.

Reischauer begins with the rich heritage of the island nation, identifying incidents and trends that have significantly affected Japan’s modern development. Much of the geographic and historical material on Japan’s earlier years is drawn from his renowned study The Japanese, but the present book deepens and broadens that earlier interpretation: our knowledge of Japan has increased enormously in the intervening decade and our attitudes have become more ambivalent, while Japan too has changed, often not so subtly.

Moving to contemporary Japanese society, Reischauer explores both the constants in Japanese life and the aspects that are rapidly changing. In the section on government and politics he gives pithy descriptions of the formal workings of the various organs of government and the decision-making process, as well as the most contentious issues in Japanese life—pollution, nuclear power, organized labor—and the elusive matter of political style.

In what will become classic statements on business management and organization, Reischauer sketches the early background of trade and commerce in Japan, contrasts the struggling prewar economy with today’s assertive manufacturing, and brilliantly characterizes the remarkable postwar economic miracle of Japanese heavy industry, consumer product development, and money management. In a final section, “Japan and the World,” he attempts to explain to skeptical Westerners that country’s growing and painful dilemma between neutrality and alignment, between trade imbalance and “fair” practices, and the ever-vexing issue of that embodiment of Japanese specialness, a unique and difficult language that affects personal and national behavior.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Japanese Tradition and Western Law
Emperor, State, and Law in the Thought of Hozumi Yatsuka
Richard H. Minear
Harvard University Press

front cover of Japanese Women and the Transnational Feminist Movement before World War II
Japanese Women and the Transnational Feminist Movement before World War II
Taeko Shibahara
Temple University Press, 2014

This book traces the development of feminist consciousness in Japan from 1871 to 1941. Taeko Shibahara uncovers some fascinating histories as she examines how middle-class women navigated between domestic and international influences to form ideologies and strategies for reform. They negotiated a humanitarian space as Japan expanded its nationalist, militarist, imperialist, and patriarchal power. 

 

Focusing on these women's political awakening and activism, Shibahara shows how Japanese feminists channeled and adapted ideas selected from international movements and from interactions with mainly American social activists. 

 

Japanese Women and the Transnational Feminist Movement before World War II also connects the development of international contacts with the particular contributions of Ichikawa Fusae to the suffrage movement, Ishimoto Shidzue to the birth control movement, and Gauntlett Tsune to the peace movement by touching on issues of poverty, prostitution, and temperance. The result provides a window through which to view the Japanese women's rights movement with a broader perspective.

[more]

front cover of Japanese/Korean Linguistics, Volume 1
Japanese/Korean Linguistics, Volume 1
Edited by Hajime Hoji
CSLI, 1990
Japanese and Korean are typographically quite similiar, so a linguistic phenomenon in one language often has a counterpart in the other. The papers in this volume are intended to further collective and collaborative research into both languages. The contributors discuss aspects of language acquisition, sociolinguistics, pragmatics, phonology, syntax, morphologyu, and semantics. Most of the papers were presented at the Southern Californai Japanese/Korean Linguistics Conference in 1989. Hajime Hoji is a professor of linguistics at the University of Southern California. Distributed for the Center for the Study of Language and Inforamtion
[more]

front cover of Japanese/Korean Linguistics, Volume 13
Japanese/Korean Linguistics, Volume 13
M. Endo Hudson, Peter Sells, and Sun-Ah Jun
CSLI, 2008

Japanese and Korean are typologically quite similar languages, and the linguistic phenomena of the former often hve counterparts in the latter. These collections from the annual Japanese/Korean linguistics conference include essays on the phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, historical linguistics, discourse analysis, prosody, and psycholinguistics of both languages. Such comparative studies deepen our understanding of both languages and will be a useful reference to students and scholars in either field.

[more]

front cover of Japanese/Korean Linguistics, Volume 14
Japanese/Korean Linguistics, Volume 14
Edited by Timothy J. Vance and Kimberly Jones
CSLI, 2006

Japanese and Korean are typologically quite similar languages, and the linguistic phenomena of the former often hve counterparts in the latter. These collections from the annual Japanese/Korean linguistics conference include essays on the phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, historical linguistics, discourse analysis, prosody, and psycholinguistics of both languages. Such comparative studies deepen our understanding of both languages and will be a useful reference to students and scholars in either field.

[more]

front cover of Japanese/Korean Linguistics, Volume 15
Japanese/Korean Linguistics, Volume 15
Edited by Naomi McGloin and Junki Mori
CSLI, 2007

Japanese and Korean are typologically quite similar languages, and the linguistic phenomena of the former often hve counterparts in the latter. These collections from the annual Japanese/Korean linguistics conference include essays on the phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, historical linguistics, discourse analysis, prosody, and psycholinguistics of both languages. Such comparative studies deepen our understanding of both languages and will be a useful reference to students and scholars in either field.

[more]

front cover of Japanese/Korean Linguistics, Volume 16
Japanese/Korean Linguistics, Volume 16
Edited by Yukinori Takubo, Tomohide Kinuhata, Szymon Grzelak, and Kayo Nagai
CSLI, 2009

The annual Japanese/Korean Linguistics Conference provides a forum for presenting research that will broaden the understanding of these two languages, especially through comparative study. The sixteenth Japanese/Korean Linguistics Conference, held in October of 2006 at Kyoto University, was the first in the history of the conference to be held outside of the United States. The thirty-six papers in this volume encompass a variety of areas, such as phonetics; phonology; morphology; syntax; semantics; pragmatics; discourse analysis; and the geographical and historical factors that influence the development of languages, sociolinguistics, and psycholinguistics.

[more]

front cover of Japanese/Korean Linguistics, Volume 17
Japanese/Korean Linguistics, Volume 17
Edited by Shoishi Iwasaki, Haejime Hoji, Patricia M. Clancy, and Sung-Ock Sohn
CSLI, 2009

The papers in this volume are from the seventeenth Japanese/Korean Linguistics Conference, which was held at the University of California, Los Angeles in November of 2007. The articles cover a broad range of topics in Japanese and Korean linguistics, including phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, historical linguistics, discourse analysis, prosody, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, acquisition, and grammaticalization.

[more]

front cover of Japanese/Korean Linguistics, Volume 18
Japanese/Korean Linguistics, Volume 18
Edited by William McClure and Marcel den Dikken
CSLI, 2011

Because Japanese and Korean are typologically quite similar, a linguistic phenomenon in one language often has a counterpart in the other. The annual Japanese/Korean Linguistics Conference provides a forum for presenting research that will deepen our understanding of these two languages, especially through comparative study. The papers in this volume are from the eighteenth Japanese/Korean Linguistics Conference, which was held at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in 2008. The papers cover a broad range of topics in Japanese/Korean linguistics, including phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, historical linguistics, discourse analysis, prosody, and psycholinguistics.

[more]

front cover of Japanese/Korean Linguistics, Volume 19
Japanese/Korean Linguistics, Volume 19
Edited by Ho-Min Sohn, Haruko Minegishi Cook, William O'Grady, Leon A. Serafim, and Sang Yee Cheon
CSLI, 2011
Japanese and Korean are typologically similar languages, and a linguistic phenomenon in the former often has a counterpart in the latter. The papers in this volume are from the nineteenth Japanese/Korean Linguistics Conference, which was held at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa. The collections in this volume include essays on the phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, historical linguistics, discourse analysis, prosody, and psycholinguistics of both languages. Such comparative studies deepen our understanding of both languages and will be a useful reference for students and scholars in either field.
[more]

front cover of Japanese/Korean Linguistics, Volume 2
Japanese/Korean Linguistics, Volume 2
Edited by Patricia Clancy
CSLI, 1993
Japanese and Korean are typologically quite similar, so a linguitic phenomenon in one language often has a counterpart in the other. The papers in this voulme are intended to further collective and collaborative research in both languages. The contributors discuss aspects of language acquisition, discourse, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, phonology, morphology, typology, sociolinguistics, and psycholinguistics. The papers were presented at the Southern California Japanese/Korean Linguistics Conference in September 1991. Contributors to this volume are Patricia M. Clancy, SeikoYamaguchi Fujii, Shoichi Iwasaki, Kyu-hyun Kim, Yoshiko Matsumoto, Shigeko Okamoto, Sung-Ock S. Sohn, Kyung- Hee Suh, Eunjoo Han, Jongho Jun, Ongmi Kang, David James Silva, Noriko Akasuka, Shoji Azuma, Sooja Choi, Bruce L. Derwing, Yeo Bom Yoon, Sook Whan Cho, Tsuyoshi Ono, Hiroko Yamashita, Laurie Stowe, Mineharu Nakayama, Ruriko Kawashima, Masanori Nakamaura, Shin Watanbe, Dong-In Cho, Stanley Dubinsky, Hiroto Hoshi, Yasua Ishii, Hisatsugu Kitahara, Masatoshi Koizumi, Jae Hong Lee, Sookhee Lee, Young-Suk Lee, and Shigeo Tonoike. Patricia Clancy is associate profressor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California at Santa Barbara. She is the author of The Acquisition of Japanese.
[more]

front cover of Japanese/Korean Linguistics, Volume 20
Japanese/Korean Linguistics, Volume 20
Peter Sells
CSLI, 2013
Japanese and Korean are typologically similar, with linguistic phenomena in one often having counterparts in the other. The Japanese/Korean Linguistics Conference provides a forum for research, particularly through comparative study, of both languages. This volume includes essays on the phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, historical linguistics, discourse analysis, prosody, and psycholinguistics of both languages. This volume will be a useful tool for any researcher or student in either field.
[more]

front cover of Japanese/Korean Linguistics, Volume 21
Japanese/Korean Linguistics, Volume 21
Seungho Nam, Heejeong Ko, and Jongho Jun
CSLI
Japanese and Korean are typologically similar languages, and a linguistic phenomenon in the former often has a counterpart in the latter. The papers in this volume are from the twenty-first Japanese/Korean Linguistics Conference, which was held at the Seoul National University in October 2011. The collections in this volume include essays on the phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, historical linguistics, discourse analysis, prosody, and psycholinguistics of both languages. Such comparative studies deepen our understanding of both languages and will be a useful reference for students and scholars in either field.
[more]

front cover of Japanese/Korean Linguistics, Volume 22
Japanese/Korean Linguistics, Volume 22
Edited by Mikio Griko, Naonori Nagaya, Akiko Takemura, and Timothy J. Vance
CSLI, 2014
Japanese and Korean are typologically similar, with linguistic phenomena in one often having counterparts in the other. The Japanese/Korean Linguistics Conference provides a forum for research, particularly through comparative study, of both languages. The papers in this volume are from the twenty-second conference, which was held at the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics. They include essays on the phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, historical linguistics, discourse analysis, prosody, and psycholinguistics of both languages. Such comparative studies deepen our understanding of both languages and will be a useful reference for students and scholars in either field.
[more]

front cover of Japanese/Korean Linguistics, Volume 23
Japanese/Korean Linguistics, Volume 23
Edited by Theodore Levin, Ryo Masuda, and Michael Kenstowicz
CSLI, 2014
Japanese and Korean are typologically similar, with linguistic phenomena in one often having counterparts in the other. The Japanese/Korean Linguistics Conference provides a forum for research, particularly through comparative study, of both languages. The papers in this volume are from the twenty-third conference, which was held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They include essays on the phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, historical linguistics, discourse analysis, prosody, and psycholinguistics of both languages. Such comparative studies deepen our understanding of both languages and will be a useful reference for students and scholars in either field.
[more]

front cover of Japanese/Korean Linguistics, Volume 24
Japanese/Korean Linguistics, Volume 24
Edited by Kenshi Funakoshi, et al.
CSLI, 2017
Japanese and Korean are typologically similar, with linguistic phenomena in one often having counterparts in the other. The Japanese/Korean Linguistics Conference provides a forum for research, particularly through comparative study, on both languages. The papers in this volume are from the twenty-fourth conference, which was held at the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics. They include essays on the phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, historical linguistics, discourse analysis, prosody, and psycholinguistics of both languages. Such comparative studies deepen our understanding of both languages and will be a useful reference for students and scholars in either field.
[more]

front cover of Japanese/Korean Linguistics, Volume 25
Japanese/Korean Linguistics, Volume 25
Edited by Shinichiro Fukuda et al.
CSLI, 2018

Japanese and Korean are typologically similar, with linguistic phenomena in one often having counterparts in the other. The Japanese/Korean Linguistics Conference provides a forum for research, particularly through comparative study, on both languages. The papers in this volume are from the twenty-fifth conference, which was held at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa. They include essays on the phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, historical linguistics, discourse analysis, prosody, and psycholinguistics of both languages. Such comparative studies deepen our understanding of both languages and will be a useful reference for students and scholars in either field.

[more]

front cover of Japanese/Korean Linguistics, Volume 26
Japanese/Korean Linguistics, Volume 26
Edited by Shoichi Iwasaki, Susan Strauss, Shin Fukuda, and Sun-Ah Jun
CSLI, 2020
Japanese and Korean are typologically similar, with linguistic phenomena in one often having counterparts in the other. The Japanese/Korean Linguistics Conference provides a forum for research, particularly through comparative study, of both languages. This volume includes essays on the phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, historical linguistics, discourse analysis, prosody, and psycholinguistics of both languages. This volume will be a useful tool for any researcher or student in either field.
[more]

front cover of Japanese/Korean Linguistics, Volume 27
Japanese/Korean Linguistics, Volume 27
Edited by Michael Barrie
CSLI, 2020

front cover of Japanese/Korean Linguistics, Volume 28
Japanese/Korean Linguistics, Volume 28
Edited by Hae-Sung Jeon, Peter Sells, Zixi You, Sotaro Kita, and Jaehoon Yeon
CSLI, 2021
Japanese and Korean are typologically similar, with linguistic phenomena in one often having counterparts in the other. The Japanese/Korean Linguistics Conference provides a forum for research, particularly through comparative study, on both languages. The papers in this volume are from the twenty-eighth conference, which was held virtually at the University of Central Lancashire. They include essays on the phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, historical linguistics, discourse analysis, prosody, and psycholinguistics of both languages. Such comparative studies enrichen our comprehension of both languages and will be a valuable reference for students and scholars in either field.
 
[more]

front cover of Japanese/Korean Linguistics, Volume 4
Japanese/Korean Linguistics, Volume 4
Edited by Noriko Akatsuka
CSLI, 1995

front cover of Japanese/Korean Linguistics, Volume 5
Japanese/Korean Linguistics, Volume 5
Edited by Noriko Akatsuka, Shoichi Iwasaki, and Susan Strauss
CSLI, 1996
Japanese and Korean are typologically quite similar, so a linguistic phenomenon in one language often has a counterpart in the other. The papers in this volume are intended to further compare and/or contrast research in both languages. This volume reflects the Fifth Japanese/Korean Linguistics Conference's unique division into four distinct panels: Conversation, Grammaticalization and Semantics, Syntax and Semantics, and Korean Phonology. The Fifth Japanese/Korean Linguistics Conference was held at the University of California, Los Angeles
[more]

front cover of Japanese/Korean Linguistics, Volume 6
Japanese/Korean Linguistics, Volume 6
Edited by Ho-min Sohn and John Haig
CSLI, 1997

front cover of Japanese/Korean Linguistics, Volume 7
Japanese/Korean Linguistics, Volume 7
Edited by Noriko Akatsuka, et al
CSLI, 1998

front cover of JAPANimals
JAPANimals
History and Culture in Japan’s Animal Life
Gregory M. Pflugfelder and Brett L. Walker, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2005
From swift steeds to ritually slaughtered deer to symbolic serpents, nonhuman animals of every stripe have participated from the earliest of times in the construction of the cultural community that we know as Japan. Yet the historical accounts that have hitherto prevailed, claim the authors of this innovative volume, relegate our fellow animals to a silent and benign “nature” that lies beyond the realm of narrative and agency. What happens when we restore nonhuman creatures to the field of historical vision?
This book challenges many of the fundamental assumptions that have shaped contemporary scholarship on Japan, engaging from new perspectives questions of economic growth, isolation from and interaction with the outside world, the tools of conquest and empire, and the character of modernity. Essay by essay, this provocative collection compels readers to acknowledge the diversity of living beings who exist at the ragged edges of our human, as well as our historical, horizons.
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
The Japanization of Modernity
Murakami Haruki between Japan and the United States
Rebecca Suter
Harvard University Press, 2008

Murakami Haruki is perhaps the best-known and most widely translated Japanese author of his generation. Despite Murakami’s critical and commercial success, particularly in the United States, his role as a mediator between Japanese and American literature and culture is seldom discussed.

Bringing a comparative perspective to the study of Murakami’s fiction, Rebecca Suter complicates our understanding of the author’s oeuvre and highlights his contributions not only as a popular writer but also as a cultural critic on both sides of the Pacific. Suter concentrates on Murakami’s short stories—less known in the West but equally worthy of critical attention—as sites of some of the author’s bolder experiments in manipulating literary (and everyday) language, honing cross-cultural allusions, and crafting metafictional techniques. This study scrutinizes Murakami’s fictional worlds and their extraliterary contexts through a range of discursive lenses: modernity and postmodernity, universalism and particularism, imperialism and nationalism, Orientalism and globalization.

By casting new light on the style and substance of Murakami’s prose, Suter situates the author and his works within the sphere of contemporary Japanese literature and finds him a prominent place within the broader sweep of the global literary scene.

[more]

front cover of Japanoise
Japanoise
Music at the Edge of Circulation
David Novak
Duke University Press, 2013
Noise, an underground music made through an amalgam of feedback, distortion, and electronic effects, first emerged as a genre in the 1980s, circulating on cassette tapes traded between fans in Japan, Europe, and North America. With its cultivated obscurity, ear-shattering sound, and over-the-top performances, Noise has captured the imagination of a small but passionate transnational audience.

For its scattered listeners, Noise always seems to be new and to come from somewhere else: in North America, it was called "Japanoise." But does Noise really belong to Japan? Is it even music at all? And why has Noise become such a compelling metaphor for the complexities of globalization and participatory media at the turn of the millennium?

In Japanoise, David Novak draws on more than a decade of research in Japan and the United States to trace the "cultural feedback" that generates and sustains Noise. He provides a rich ethnographic account of live performances, the circulation of recordings, and the lives and creative practices of musicians and listeners. He explores the technologies of Noise and the productive distortions of its networks. Capturing the textures of feedback—its sonic and cultural layers and vibrations—Novak describes musical circulation through sound and listening, recording and performance, international exchange, and the social interpretations of media.

[more]

front cover of Japan's American Interlude
Japan's American Interlude
Kazuo Kawai
University of Chicago Press, 1979
How did the Japanese themselves respond to the American occupation? How were the sweeping reforms—political, social, and economic—of SCAP's program received? How permanent was their effect, and why did some succeed and others fail completely? How successful in the long view was the democratization induced by MacArthur's "artificial revolution"? And what tendencies existing in fundamental Japanese attitudes and history might account for this peculiar success?

The author, Japanese-born and educated in America, a political scientist and journalist, brings his unique experience and knowledge to bear on these questions. The result is a book which tells the story of the American occupation of Japan from the Japanese point of view.
[more]

front cover of Japan's Cuisines
Japan's Cuisines
Food, Place and Identity
Eric C. Rath
Reaktion Books, 2016
Cuisines in Japan have an ideological dimension that cannot be ignored. In 2013, ‘traditional Japanese dietary cultures’ (washoku) was added to UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage list. Washoku’s predecessor was “national people’s cuisine,” an attempt during World War II to create a uniform diet for all citizens.
Japan’s Cuisines reveals the great diversity of Japanese cuisine and explains how Japan’s modern food culture arose through the direction of private and public institutions. Readers discover how tea came to be portrayed as the origin of Japanese cuisine, how lunch became a gourmet meal, and how regions on Japan’s periphery are reasserting their distinct food cultures. From wartime foodstuffs to modern diets, this fascinating book shows how the cuisine from the land of the rising sun shapes national, local, and personal identity.
 
[more]

logo for University of Minnesota Press
Japan’s Economy in War and Reconstruction
Jerome B. Cohen
University of Minnesota Press, 1949

Japan's Economy in War and Reconstruction was first published in 1949. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Dr. Cohen's substantial monograph is a carefully documented account of Japan's economic development from 1937 to 1949. It describes with much statistical evidence a remarkable experiment in planned industrial expansion prior to 1941, then continues with a survey of the war years, showing both the successes and failures of the planning, controlling, financing, and developing of Japan's war industries.

The last part of the book deals with the post-war problems of Japan from the war's end to the latter part of 1948—three years of occupation by the Allied Powers. Dr. Cohen discusses the three key economic factors: the basic reforms, the rapidly mounting inflation, and the slowly increasing, but still low level of production.

Dr. Cohen's first chapter is devoted to the careful planning of the years before the war. The next chapters discuss Japan's efforts to cope with the problems of munitions, food supply, and labor as the Allied war effort gradually wore her down. There are detailed studies of separate industries, shipping, and agriculture, and a discussion of the parts played respectively by air, sea, and land operations in the destruction of Japan's ability to wage successful war.

One of the main theses of these chapters is that the increasingly enveloping blockade of Japan shut off necessary industrial raw materials, and so brought Japanese war production to a virtual standstill before the main weight of the strategic air attack was delivered, and so made it impossible for Japan to continue the war.

The author's grim picture of inter-service quarrels and overlapping and inconsistent controls demonstrates that the Japanese army, navy, and civil service, in spite of their reputation for exact and strict organization, in practice failed to make good use of their unlimited powers.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Japan’s First Student Radicals
Henry DeWitt Smith
Harvard University Press, 1972
Long obscured by the more dramatic activities of post–World War II student activists, the history of the Japanese left-wing student movement during its formative period from 1918 until its suppression in the 1930s is analyzed here in detail for the first time. Focusing on the Shinjinkai (New Man Society) of Tokyo Imperial University, the leading prewar student group, Henry DeWitt Smith describes the origins and evolution of student radicalism in the period between the two World Wars. He concludes with an analysis of the careers of the Shinjinkai members after graduation and with an explanation of the importance of the prewar tradition to the postwar student movement.
[more]

front cover of Japan's Holy War
Japan's Holy War
The Ideology of Radical Shinto Ultranationalism
Walter A. Skya
Duke University Press, 2009
Japan’s Holy War reveals how a radical religious ideology drove the Japanese to imperial expansion and global war. Bringing to light a wealth of new information, Walter A. Skya demonstrates that whatever other motives the Japanese had for waging war in Asia and the Pacific, for many the war was the fulfillment of a religious mandate. In the early twentieth century, a fervent nationalism developed within State Shintō. This ultranationalism gained widespread military and public support and led to rampant terrorism; between 1921 and 1936 three serving and two former prime ministers were assassinated. Shintō ultranationalist societies fomented a discourse calling for the abolition of parliamentary government and unlimited Japanese expansion.

Skya documents a transformation in the ideology of State Shintō in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth. He shows that within the religion, support for the German-inspired theory of constitutional monarchy that had underpinned the Meiji Constitution gave way to a theory of absolute monarchy advocated by the constitutional scholar Hozumi Yatsuka in the late 1890s. That, in turn, was superseded by a totalitarian ideology centered on the emperor: an ideology advanced by the political theorists Uesugi Shinkichi and Kakehi Katsuhiko in the 1910s and 1920s. Examining the connections between various forms of Shintō nationalism and the state, Skya demonstrates that where the Meiji oligarchs had constructed a quasi-religious, quasi-secular state, Hozumi Yatsuka desired a traditional theocratic state. Uesugi Shinkichi and Kakehi Katsuhiko went further, encouraging radical, militant forms of extreme religious nationalism. Skya suggests that the creeping democracy and secularization of Japan’s political order in the early twentieth century were the principal causes of the terrorism of the 1930s, which ultimately led to a holy war against Western civilization.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Japan’s Imperial House in the Postwar Era, 1945–2019
Kenneth J. Ruoff
Harvard University Press, 2020

With the ascension of a new emperor and the dawn of the Reiwa Era, Kenneth J. Ruoff has expanded upon and updated The People’s Emperor, his study of the monarchy’s role as a political, societal, and cultural institution in contemporary Japan. Many Japanese continue to define the nation’s identity through the imperial house, making it a window into Japan’s postwar history.

Ruoff begins by examining the reform of the monarchy during the US occupation and then turns to its evolution since the Japanese regained the power to shape it. To understand the monarchy’s function in contemporary Japan, the author analyzes issues such as the role of individual emperors in shaping the institution, the intersection of the monarchy with politics, the emperor’s and the nation’s responsibility for the war, nationalistic movements in support of the monarchy, and the remaking of the once-sacrosanct throne into a “people’s imperial house” embedded in the postwar culture of democracy. Finally, Ruoff examines recent developments, including the abdication of Emperor Akihito and the heir crisis, which have brought to the forefront the fragility of the imperial line under the current legal system, leading to calls for reform.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Japan’s Local Pragmatists
The Transition from Bakumatsu to Meiji in the Kawasaki Region
Neil L. Waters
Harvard University Press

Japanese local history is used as an ingredient in historiographical theories designed to prove that the rapid pace of change in Japan led either to phenomenal success or to dismal failure. Against the backdrop of a comprehensive overview of Japanese historiography, Neil Waters examines in detail the local politics of the Kawasaki region during the late nineteenth century. Historians have hitherto focused primarily upon those regions that experienced violent peasant uprisings, class conflict, or extreme government repression. He points out that localities which survived the transition between governments without violence far outnumber those marked by open struggle.

This study is one of the few to cover the political and economic history of a region in which “nothing happened.” From an examination of the implementation and impact of Restoration programs on the day-to-day level of local government in the Kawasaki region, a fascinating picture emerges of the adaptation and modifications local leaders were able to chart between open rebellion and outright capitulation.

[more]

front cover of Japan’s Political Marketplace
Japan’s Political Marketplace
With a New Preface
J. Mark Ramseyer and Frances M. Rosenbluth
Harvard University Press, 1993
Mark Ramseyer and Frances McCall Rosenbluth show how rational-choice theory can be applied to Japanese politics. Using the concept of principal and agent, Ramseyer and Rosenbluth construct a persuasive account of political relationships in Japan. In doing so, they demonstrate that political considerations and institutional arrangements reign in what, to most of the world, looks like an independently powerful bureaucratic state.
[more]

front cover of Japan’s Practice of International Law
Japan’s Practice of International Law
Hidehisa Horinouchi
Amsterdam University Press, 2022
Diplomacy is a series of crises, and the navigational beacon for a nation is international law. This book is a collection of articles on six selected international legal issues concerning Japan. It addresses various issues, including self-defence, post-war legal issues, chemical weapons, the law of the sea, consular immunities, and hijacking. It is a legal documentary through which the reader can look into the minds of Japanese officials challenged by one crisis after another. As a coherent whole, this book ably represents “Japan’s Practice of International Law” and remarkably portrays international law in action from a Japanese practitioner’s perspective.
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Japan's Prospect
Douglas Gilbert Haring
Harvard University Press, 1975

logo for Harvard University Press
Japan’s Protoindustrial Elite
The Economic Foundations of the Gōnō
Edward E. Pratt
Harvard University Press, 1999
Students of the late Tokugawa and Meiji periods have long recognized the critical role of rural elites (the gōnō) in Japan’s economic transformation, but the largely impressionistic and episodic scholarship on this pivotal class has created an image of rural elites as successful trailblazers of industrial society. Through a close examination of economic trends and case studies of particular families, this study demonstrates that Japan’s protoindustrial economy was far more volatile than portrayed in most studies to date. Few rural elites survived the competitive and unstable climate of this era. Onerous exactions, interregional competition, market volatility, and succession problems propelled many wealthy families into steep decline and others into drastic shifts in the focus of their businesses.
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Japan’s Renaissance
The Politics of the Muromachi Bakufu
Kenneth Alan Grossberg
Harvard University Press, 1981

front cover of Japonisme and the Birth of Cinema
Japonisme and the Birth of Cinema
Daisuke Miyao
Duke University Press, 2020
In Japonisme and the Birth of Cinema, Daisuke Miyao explores the influence of Japanese art on the development of early cinematic visual style, particularly the actualité films made by the Lumière brothers between 1895 and 1905. Examining nearly 1,500 Lumière films, Miyao contends that more than being documents of everyday life, they provided a medium for experimenting with aesthetic and cinematic styles imported from Japan. Miyao further analyzes the Lumière films produced in Japan as a negotiation between French Orientalism and Japanese aesthetics. The Lumière films, Miyao shows, are best understood within a media ecology of photography, painting, and cinema, all indebted to the compositional principles of Japonisme and the new ideas of kinetic realism it inspired. The Lumière brothers and their cinematographers shared the contemporaneous obsession among Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artists about how to instantly and physically capture the movements of living things in the world. Their engagement with Japonisme, he concludes, constituted a rich and productive two-way conversation between East and West.
[more]

front cover of JAR vol 72 num 1
JAR vol 72 num 1
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2016

logo for University of Chicago Press Journals
JAR vol 72 num 2
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2016

logo for University of Chicago Press Journals
JAR vol 72 num 3
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2016

logo for University of Chicago Press Journals
JAR vol 72 num 4
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2016

logo for University of Chicago Press Journals
JAR vol 73 num 1
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2017

front cover of JAR vol 73 num 2
JAR vol 73 num 2
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2017

logo for University of Chicago Press Journals
JAR vol 73 num 3
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2017

front cover of JAR vol 73 num 4
JAR vol 73 num 4
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2017

logo for University of Chicago Press Journals
JAR vol 74 num 1
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2018

front cover of JAR vol 74 num 2
JAR vol 74 num 2
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2018

front cover of JAR vol 74 num 3
JAR vol 74 num 3
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2018

logo for University of Chicago Press Journals
JAR vol 74 num 4
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2018

front cover of JAR vol 75 num 1
JAR vol 75 num 1
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2019

logo for University of Chicago Press Journals
JAR vol 75 num 2
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2019

front cover of JAR vol 75 num 3
JAR vol 75 num 3
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2019

front cover of JAR vol 75 num 4
JAR vol 75 num 4
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2019

front cover of JAR vol 76 num 1
JAR vol 76 num 1
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2020

front cover of JAR vol 76 num 2
JAR vol 76 num 2
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2020

logo for University of Chicago Press Journals
JAR vol 76 num 3
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2020

front cover of JAR vol 76 num 4
JAR vol 76 num 4
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2020

front cover of JAR vol 77 num 1
JAR vol 77 num 1
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2021

front cover of Jarano
Jarano
By Ramón Beteta
University of Texas Press, 1970

Ramón Beteta was an important figure in Mexican life: politician, Cabinet member, diplomat, economist, professor, journalist. The manuscript of Jarano was found among his papers after his death in 1965 and was published in Mexico in 1966. "Jarano," the kind of broad sombrero worn by charros, was the secret nickname—partly disrespectful, partly amused, partly affectionate—which Ramón and his brother gave to their father. Except for part of the last chapter, the book is about Ramón's childhood and youth: sketches of family life, school experiences, a trip to Veracruz, and incidents of the Revolution.

Beteta brought to these reminiscences the skills of the short story writer, making superb use of dialogue, descriptive details, characterization, and mood. For a small book, the range of emotions is unusually wide, from the comedy of an evening meal to which Jarano has come home drunk to the tragedy of the indio and his wife in the chapter entitled "San Vicente Chicoloapan"—a chapter that gives more of the "feel" of the Revolution than do many longer works.

[more]

front cover of Jardinería desértica
Jardinería desértica
Mes por mes
George Brookbank y Félix P. Hurtado
University of Arizona Press, 2001
¿Cuál es el mejor tiempo del año para plantar? ¿Cuándo es el mejor tiempo para fertilizar el árbol frutal? ¿Cuándo se debe plantar la mata de tomate en la primavera? Los jardineros que viven en el desierto del sudoeste no pueden contar con las prácticas recomendadas para otras partes del país. El sol del verano, las lluvias esporádicas y las cortas e inestables temporadas de cultivación producen una nueva serie de reglas para el jardinero del desierto.

Jardinería desértica---mes por mes le servirá de guía para cuidar las plantas de su jardín y determinar el mejor tiempo para plantar, podar, y regar. Este libro es especialmente útil para los jardineros y residentes recién llegados al sudoeste desértico. Si usted cultiva vegetales o árboles frutales y cítricos, o si sencillamente quiere mantener un jardín hermoso, encontrará que este libro práctico le informará sobre las labores necesarias y le ayudará a recordar las tareas importantes que inadvertidamente podría olvidar.

Now available in a Spanish-language edition, this popular guide provides pointers to the maintenance needed to keep gardens flourishing and landscapes attractive throughout the year. Translated by master gardener Félix Hurtado, Jardinería desértica makes a wealth of common-sense wisdom available to Spanish-speaking readers.

[more]

logo for Intellect Books
JARMAN (all this maddening beauty) and other plays
Caridad Svich
Intellect Books, 2016
“JARMAN (all this maddening beauty”) and Other Plays is a collection of three radically poetic works for live performance by OBIE Award–winning playwright Caridad Svich. The playtexts includes a lyrical meditation on the legacy of iconic queer artist Derek Jarman, a meditation on displacement and human suffering (Carthage/Cartagena), and an intimately operatic reflection on Penelope and Odysseus (The Orphan Sea). Accompanied by scholarly essays placing the plays in context, this book showcases the beautiful strangeness and profound resistance in Svich’s work.

“Svich is one of the finest poet/playwrights of this generation. . . . She is a playwright whose plays perform like dramatic poems that are wondrous to the ear and moving to the heart.”—Seth Gordon, Repertory Theatre of St. Louis
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
The Jataka-mala
Stories of Buddha's Former Incarnations, Otherwise Entitled Bodhisattva-Avadana-Mala, by Arya-Cura, Edited in Sanskrit (Nagari letters)
Hendrik Kern
Harvard University Press

logo for University of Chicago Press
Java Man
How Two Geologists Changed Our Understanding of Human Evolution
Carl C. Swisher III, Garniss H. Curtis, and Roger Lewin
University of Chicago Press, 2001
"'Garniss, lend me your knife for a second, will you,' I whispered." So begins Java Man, the inside story of how one discovery—a human skull found on the island of Java—by two geologists shook the foundations of science. By uncovering new evidence about the hominid known as Java man, Carl C. Swisher and Garniss H. Curtis were able to date his fossil remains at 1.7 million years, an age that stunned the scientific community because it pushed back the time when humans migrating out of Africa first reached Eurasia by nearly one million years. Cowritten by the popular science writer Roger Lewin, this is a gripping and informative account of the discovery that breathed new life into the human origins debate.

Originally published by Scribner
2000 ISBN: 0-684-80000-4
[more]

front cover of Javanese
Javanese
A Cultural Approach
Ward Keeler
Ohio University Press, 1984
Foreign language lessons often provide translations into a foreign language of phrases students would normally use in their native language and cultural setting. Particularly when studying a non-Western language, such direct translation is very misleading. Students must instead learn the conventions that guide human interactions, so they know both what to say and how to say it.

In this text, therefore, the sociological context of Javanese is explained as thoroughly as Javanese grammar. The book presents Javanese in its full complexity and range in order to illustrate a cultural appoach to a non-Western language; it will therefore be of interest not only to language learners, but to linguists, sociologists, anthropologists, and many others.
[more]

front cover of Javanese Lives
Javanese Lives
Women and Men in Modern Indonesian Society
Williams, Walter L.
Rutgers University Press, 1991

Java is the most populous island of Indonesia, the fifth largest nation in the world. Yet despite its importance, outsiders know little about the country or its people. With the help of Indonesian students and scholars, Walter L. Williams has collected and translated the life histories of twenty-seven Javanese women and men. The people interviewed tell how they have coped with rapid social and economic change, and the transformation of their traditions. Williams has carefully selected the individuals he includes to represent a wide diversity of Java's people. We hear from fascinating men and women of various religions, from the rich and the poor, and from different ethnic backgrounds. Diversity is a constant theme, as evidenced by a poor pedicab driver who can barely scrape along, by a rich businesswoman who explains how she balances her professional and domestic roles, by an educated and respected homosexual school principal, and by an illiterate mother of fourteen children. All of them present in their lives a unique Javanese approach to living.

These oral histories were derived from elderly people, who have a larger perspective on the changes they have seen in their lifetimes. The focus of the first section of the book is the way people have adapted in their daily lives to massive social and economic changes. In the middle section, we hear from the Javanese who represent traditional values in the midst of change. Finally, we hear from educators and parents who tell us of their concerns for Indonesian youth and the future of Indonesia.

[more]

front cover of The Javanese Way of Law
The Javanese Way of Law
Early Modern Sloka Phenomena
Mason Hoadley
Amsterdam University Press, 2019
The author's investigation of early-modern Javanese law reveals that judicial authority does not come from the contents of legal titles or juridical texts, but from legal maxims and variations thereof. A century and a half ago Simon Keyzer, a recognized scholar of Javanese law, noted that understanding of that law is dependent upon a grasp of such pithy expressions, which provide the key to the whole body of suits. (*Preface*, C.F. Winter, *Javaansche Zamenspraken*, 1858, which examines hundreds of *sloka*, the majority of which are directed to prevailing legal practice).Drawing upon the contents of 18th century Javanese legal texts, the present work builds upon Keyzer's and Winter's references to '*sloka*-phenomena', namely *sloka* proper (maxims) and its derivatives *sinalokan* (that made of *sloka*), *aksara* here meaning legal principles, and *prakara* (matter, case). These are usually conveyed in vignettes illustrating their function and as a group, constitute the essence of traditional Javanese written law.
[more]

front cover of Javanmardi
Javanmardi
The Ethics and Practice of Persianate Perfection
Edited by Lloyd Ridgeon
Gingko, 2018
Javanmardi is one of those Persian terms that is frequently mentions in discussions of Persian identity, and yet its precise meaning is difficult to comprehend. A number of equivalents have been offered, including chivalry and manliness, and while these terms are not incorrect, javanmardi transcends them. The concept encompasses character traits of generosity, selflessness, hospitality, bravery, courage, honesty, truthfulness and justice--and yet there are occasions when the exact opposite of these is required for one to be a javanmard. At times it would seem that being a javanmard is about knowing and doing the right thing, although this definition, too, falls short of the term's full meaning.
The present collection is the product of a three-year project financed by the British Institute of Persian Studies on the theme of "Javanmardi in the Persianate world." The articles in this volume represent the sheer range, influence, and importance that the concept has had in creating and contributing to Persianate identities over the past one hundred and fifty years. The contributions are intentionally broad in scope. Rather than focus, for example, on medieval Sufi manifestations of javanmardi, both medieval and modern studies were encouraged, as were literary, artistic, archaeological, and sociological studies among others. The opening essays examine the concept’s origin in medieval history and legends throughout a geographical background that spans from modern Iran to Turkey, Armenia, and Bosnia, among both Muslim and Christian communities. Subsequent articles explore modern implications of javanmardi within such contexts as sportsmanship, political heroism, gender fluidity, cinematic representations, and the advent of digitalization.
[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter