On a December morning in 1925, a newspaper journalist reported receiving 25 different handbills in an hour's walk in downtown Tokyo, advertising everything from Western-style clothing and furniture to sweet shops, charity organizations, phonograph recordings, plays, and films. The activities of advertisers, and the new entertainment culture and patterns of consumption that they promoted, helped to define a new urban aesthetic emerging in the 1920s.
This book examines some of the responses of Japanese authors to the transformation of Tokyo in the early decades of the twentieth century. In particular, it explores the themes and formal strategies of the modernist literature that flourished in the 1920s, focusing on the work of Hagiwara Kyojiro (1899-1938) and Hayashi Fumiko (1903-1951). William Gardner shows how modernist works offer new constructions of individual subjectivity amid the social and technological changes that provided the ground for the appearance of "mass media." Hagiwara's conception of the poem and poet as an electric-radio "advertising tower" provides an emblem for the aesthetic tensions and multiple discourses of technology, media, urbanism, commerce, and propaganda that were circulating through the urban environment at the time; while Hayashi's work, with its references to popular songs, plays, and movies, suggests an understanding of "everyday life" as the interface between individual subjectivity and a highly mediated environment.
This study of modern Japan engages the fields of art history, literature, and cultural studies, seeking to understand how the “beautiful woman” (bijin) emerged as a symbol of Japanese culture during the Meiji period (1868–1912). With origins in the formative period of modern Japanese art and aesthetics, the figure of the bijin appeared across a broad range of visual and textual media: photographs, illustrations, prints, and literary works, as well as fictional, critical, and journalistic writing. It eventually constituted a genre of painting called bijinga (paintings of beauties).
Aesthetic Life examines the contributions of writers, artists, scholars, critics, journalists, and politicians to the discussion of the bijin and to the production of a national discourse on standards of Japanese beauty and art. As Japan worked to establish its place in the world, it actively presented itself as an artistic nation based on these ideals of feminine beauty. The book explores this exemplary figure for modern Japanese aesthetics and analyzes how the deceptively ordinary image of the beautiful Japanese woman—an iconic image that persists to this day—was cultivated as a “national treasure,” synonymous with Japanese culture.
Popular representations of the past are everywhere in Japan, from cell phone charms to manga, from television dramas to video games to young people dressed as their favorite historical figures hanging out in the hip Harajuku district. But how does this mass consumption of the past affect the way consumers think about history and what it means to be Japanese?
By analyzing representations of the famous sixteenth-century samurai leader Toyotomi Hideyoshi in historical fiction based on Taikōki, the original biography of him, this book explores how and why Hideyoshi has had a continued and ever-changing presence in popular culture in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Japan. The multiple fictionalized histories of Hideyoshi published as serial novels and novellas before, during, and after World War II demonstrate how imaginative re-presentations of Japan’s past have been used by various actors throughout the modern era.
Using close reading of several novels and short stories as well as the analysis of various other texts and paratextual materials, Susan Furukawa discovers a Hideyoshi who is always changing to meet the needs of the current era, and in the process expands our understanding of the powerful role that historical narratives play in Japan.
Popular representations of the past are everywhere in Japan, from cell phone charms to manga, from television dramas to video games to young people dressed as their favorite historical figures hanging out in the hip Harajuku district. But how does this mass consumption of the past affect the way consumers think about history and what it means to be Japanese?
By analyzing representations of the famous sixteenth-century samurai leader Toyotomi Hideyoshi in historical fiction based on Taikōki, the original biography of him, this book explores how and why Hideyoshi has had a continued and ever-changing presence in popular culture in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Japan. The multiple fictionalized histories of Hideyoshi published as serial novels and novellas before, during, and after World War II demonstrate how imaginative re-presentations of Japan’s past have been used by various actors throughout the modern era.
Using close reading of several novels and short stories as well as the analysis of various other texts and paratextual materials, Susan Furukawa discovers a Hideyoshi who is always changing to meet the needs of the current era, and in the process expands our understanding of the powerful role that historical narratives play in Japan.
Reconstructing the dramatic struggle surrounding the building of the New Tokyo (Narita) International Airport near Sanrizuka, this scrutiny of modern protest politics dispels the myth of corporate Japan’s unassailable success. While sensitive to the specific events they describe, the authors provide analyses of broader contemporary issues—the sources of violence in an orderly society and the problems of democratic theory in an institutional setting.
Narita Airport, the largest single government project in Japan, has been the scene of intense conflict over what might be called the unfinished business of Japan as number one. Since 1965, small groups of farmers have been fighting to protect their land, first from the bulldozers, then from the environmental damage of a modern airport. They were joined in the battle by militants from New Left sects, students, and other protesters representing peace, antinuclear, and antipollution issues. Using field observation, in-depth interviewing, and firsthand experience drawn from living in the “fortresses” surrounding the airport, the authors examine the conflict and violence that ensued. They describe the confrontations from the point of view of each group of participants, pinpointing weaknesses in the Japanese political and bureaucratic systems that prolonged and heightened the struggle: the lack of effective due process, inadequate consultative mechanisms outside elite circles, and the failure of local government to represent local issues.
In a broad adaptation of their findings, David Apter and Nagayo Sawa show that the problems of the Narita situation are also endemic to other industrialized countries. Their discussion of violent protest in advanced societies explores how it evolves, who is caught up in it, and the ways that governments respond. Finally, they identify the limitations of contemporary social science theories in addressing in human terms such volcanic eruptions. To overcome these shortcomings they combine several approaches—structural, experiential, and functional—and devise alternative ways to enter the day-to-day lives of the people studied.
Against the State in no way diminishes the magnitude of Japan’s accomplishments. However, the authors find in the Narita protest evidence of that country’s still unfelt need to address its most abstract and pressing moral concerns. Their book raises important questions about the nature of extra-institutional protest and authority in modern states.
The Meiji Restoration of 1868 inaugurated a period of great change in Japan; it is seldom associated, however, with advances in civil and political rights. By studying parliamentarianism—the theories, arguments, and polemics marshaled in support of a representative system of government—Kyu Hyun Kim uncovers a much more complicated picture of this era than is usually given.
Bringing a fresh perspective as well as drawing on seldom-studied archival materials, Kim examines how parliamentarianism came to dominate the public sphere in the 1870s and early 1880s and gave rise to the movement among local activists and urban intellectuals to establish a national assembly. At the same time, Kim contends that we should confront the public sphere of Meiji Japan without insisting on fitting it into schemes of historical progress, from premodernity to modernity, from feudalism to democracy. The Japanese state was inextricably linked, in its origins as well as its continuing growth, to the self-transformation of Japanese society. One could not change without effecting a change in the other. The Meiji state's efforts to ensure that the state and society were connected only through channels firmly controlled by itself were constantly and successfully contested by the public sphere.
In the ten years since the first cases of AIDS were reported, the disease has spread around the world. Every country has had to come up with policies suited to its own conditions, economy, culture, and institutions. The differences among their approaches are striking. This volume, the first international comprehensive comparison of responses to AIDS, is a unique guide to the world's most urgent public health crisis.
Sixteen leading experts in public health, social science, government, and public policy from USA, Canada, Germany, Australia, Spain, Britain, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, and Japan candidly recount and analyze the responses of their own nations and comment on the lessons that can be drawn from each country's experience. For each country, they look critically at the tragic statistics of AIDS incidence; the circumstances of AIDS's first appearance; public health traditions of mandatory screening, contact tracing, and quarantine; attitudes toward drug abuse, homosexuality, sex education; publicity about AIDS; legal and customary protections of civil rights, minority groups, medical confidentiality; access to health care and insurance; and the interplay of formal and informal interest groups in shaping policy. The spectrum of AIDS policy ranges from severe "contain-and-control" programs to much more liberal plans based on education, cooperation, and inclusion.
No matter what policy a nation has constructed to deal with AIDS, the coming decade will test how well that policy conforms to democratic ideals. By scrutinizing the responses to AIDS so far, this book aims to give countries around the world a chance to learn from each others' mistakes and triumphs. It will be essential reading for all students and professionals in public health and public policy.
One of the more intriguing developments within medieval Japanese literature is the incorporation into the teaching of waka poetry of the practices of initiation ceremonies and secret transmissions found in esoteric Buddhism. The main figure in this development was the obscure thirteenth-century poet Fujiwara Tameaki, grandson of the famous poet Fujiwara Teika and a priest in a tantric Buddhist sect. Tameaki's commentaries and teachings transformed secular texts such as the Tales of Ise and poetry anthologies such as the Kokin waka shu into complex allegories of Buddhist enlightenment. These commentaries were transmitted to his students during elaborate initiation ceremonies. In later periods, Tameaki's specific ideas fell out of vogue, but the habit of interpreting poetry allegorically continued.
This book examines the contents of these commentaries as well as the qualities of the texts they addressed that lent themselves to an allegorical interpretation; the political, economic, and religious developments of the Kamakura period that encouraged the development of this method of interpretation; and the possible motives of the participants in this school of interpretation. Through analyses of six esoteric commentaries, Susan Blakeley Klein presents examples of this interpretive method and discusses its influence on subsequent texts, both elite and popular.
Ambient Media examines music, video art, film, and literature as tools of atmospheric design in contemporary Japan, and what it means to use media as a resource for personal mood regulation. Paul Roquet traces the emergence of ambient styles from the environmental music and Erik Satie boom of the 1960s and 1970s to the more recent therapeutic emphasis on healing and relaxation.
Focusing on how an atmosphere works to reshape those dwelling within it, Roquet shows how ambient aesthetics can provide affordances for reflective drift, rhythmic attunement, embodied security, and urban coexistence. Musicians, video artists, filmmakers, and novelists in Japan have expanded on Brian Eno’s notion of the ambient as a style generating “calm, and a space to think,” exploring what it means to cultivate an ambivalent tranquility set against the uncertain horizons of an ever-shifting social landscape. Offering a new way of understanding the emphasis on “reading the air” in Japanese culture, Ambient Media documents both the adaptive and the alarming sides of the increasing deployment of mediated moods.
Arguing against critiques of mood regulation that see it primarily as a form of social pacification, Roquet makes a case for understanding ambient media as a neoliberal response to older modes of collective attunement—one that enables the indirect shaping of social behavior while also allowing individuals to feel like they are the ones ultimately in control.
This pioneering study of United States direct investment in Japan will interest academic specialists, business managers, and government policymakers in America, Japan, and elsewhere. Drawing on rich historical materials from both sides of the Pacific, including corporate records and government documents never before made public, Mason examines the development of both Japanese policy towards foreign investment and the strategic responses of American corporations. This history is related in part through original case studies of Coca-Cola, Dow Chemical, Ford, General Motors, International Business Machines, Motorola, Otis Elevator, Texas Instruments, Western Electric, and Victor Talking Machine.
The book seeks to explain why s little foreign direct investment has entered modern Japan. In contrast to the widely held view that emphasizes an alleged lack of effort on the part of foreign corporations, this study finds that Japanese restrictions merit greater attention. Many analysts of the modern Japanese political economy identify the Japanese government as the key actor in initiating such restrictions. Mason finds that the influence of Japanese business has often proved more potent than these analysts suggest. This book offers fresh insights into both the operation of the modern Japanese political economy and of its relations with the world economy.
During World War II, Japan was vilified by America as our hated enemy in the East. Though we distinguished "good Germans" from the Nazis, we condemned all Japanese indiscriminately as fanatics and savages. As the Cold War heated up, however, the U.S. government decided to make Japan its bulwark against communism in Asia.
But how was the American public made to accept an alliance with Japan so soon after the "Japs" had been demonized as subhuman, bucktoothed apes with Coke-bottle glasses? In this revelatory work, Naoko Shibusawa charts the remarkable reversal from hated enemy to valuable ally that occurred in the two decades after the war. While General MacArthur's Occupation Forces pursued our nation's strategic goals in Japan, liberal American politicians, journalists, and filmmakers pursued an equally essential, though long-unrecognized, goal: the dissemination of a new and palatable image of the Japanese among the American public.
With extensive research, from Occupation memoirs to military records, from court documents to Hollywood films, and from charity initiatives to newspaper and magazine articles, Shibusawa demonstrates how the evil enemy was rendered as a feminized, submissive nation, as an immature youth that needed America's benevolent hand to guide it toward democracy. Interestingly, Shibusawa reveals how this obsession with race, gender, and maturity reflected America's own anxieties about race relations and equity between the sexes in the postwar world. America's Geisha Ally is an exploration of how belligerents reconcile themselves in the wake of war, but also offers insight into how a new superpower adjusts to its role as the world's preeminent force.
Mid-nineteenth century Russian radicals who witnessed the Meiji Restoration saw it as the most sweeping revolution in recent history and the impetus for future global progress. Acting outside imperial encounters, they initiated underground transnational networks with Japan. Prominent intellectuals and cultural figures, from Peter Kropotkin and Lev Tolstoy to Saigo Takamori and Tokutomi Roka, pursued these unofficial relationships through correspondence, travel, and networking, despite diplomatic and military conflicts between their respective nations.
Tracing these non-state networks, Anarchist Modernity uncovers a major current in Japanese intellectual and cultural life between 1860 and 1930 that might be described as “cooperatist anarchist modernity”—a commitment to realizing a modern society through mutual aid and voluntary activity, without the intervention of state governance. These efforts later crystallized into such movements as the Nonwar Movement, Esperantism, and the popularization of the natural sciences.
Examining cooperatist anarchism as an intellectual foundation of modern Japan, Sho Konishi offers a new approach to Japanese history that fundamentally challenges the “logic” of Western modernity. It looks beyond this foundational construct of modern history writing to understand people, practices, and cultural expressions that have been forgotten or dismissed as products of anti-modern nativist counter urges against the West.
The Anime Boom in the United States is a comprehensive and empirically grounded study of the expansion of anime marketing and sales into the United States. Using the example of Japanese animation, it examines the supporting organizational and cultural processes that constitute a transnational system for globalizing and localizing cultural commodities.
Drawing on field research, survey data, and in-depth interviews with Japanese and American professionals in the animation industry, the authors investigate anime’s arrival in the United States beginning in the 1960s, and explores the transnational networks of anime production and marketing as well as the cultural and artistic processes the genre has inspired.
This detailed study of the anime boom in the United States is the starting point for a wider investigation of the globalization of contemporary culture and the way in which global creative industries operate in an age of media digitalization and convergence. It is an indispensable guide for all those interested in understanding the dynamics of power structures in cultural and media globalization.
A formal approach to anime rethinks globalization and transnationality under neoliberalism
Anime has become synonymous with Japanese culture, but its global reach raises a perplexing question—what happens when anime is produced outside of Japan? Who actually makes anime, and how can this help us rethink notions of cultural production? In Anime’s Identity, Stevie Suan examines how anime’s recognizable media-form—no matter where it is produced—reflects the problematics of globalization. The result is an incisive look at not only anime but also the tensions of transnationality.
Far from valorizing the individualistic “originality” so often touted in national creative industries, anime reveals an alternate type of creativity based in repetition and variation. In exploring this alternative creativity and its accompanying aesthetics, Suan examines anime from fresh angles, including considerations of how anime operates like a brand of media, the intricacies of anime production occurring across national borders, inquiries into the selfhood involved in anime’s character acting, and analyses of various anime works that present differing modes of transnationality.
Anime’s Identity deftly merges theories from media studies and performance studies, introducing innovative formal concepts that connect anime to questions of dislocation on a global scale, creating a transformative new lens for analyzing popular media.
In Anime’s Media Mix, Marc Steinberg convincingly shows that anime is far more than a style of Japanese animation. Beyond its immediate form of cartooning, anime is also a unique mode of cultural production and consumption that led to the phenomenon that is today called “media mix” in Japan and “convergence” in the West.
According to Steinberg, both anime and the media mix were ignited on January 1, 1963, when Astro Boy hit Japanese TV screens for the first time. Sponsored by a chocolate manufacturer with savvy marketing skills, Astro Boy quickly became a cultural icon in Japan. He was the poster boy (or, in his case, “sticker boy”) both for Meiji Seika’s chocolates and for what could happen when a goggle-eyed cartoon child fell into the eager clutches of creative marketers. It was only a short step, Steinberg makes clear, from Astro Boy to Pokémon and beyond.
Steinberg traces the cultural genealogy that spawned Astro Boy to the transformations of Japanese media culture that followed—and forward to the even more profound developments in global capitalism supported by the circulation of characters like Doraemon, Hello Kitty, and Suzumiya Haruhi. He details how convergence was sparked by anime, with its astoundingly broad merchandising of images and its franchising across media and commodities. He also explains, for the first time, how the rise of anime cannot be understood properly—historically, economically, and culturally—without grasping the integral role that the media mix played from the start. Engaging with film, animation, and media studies, as well as analyses of consumer culture and theories of capitalism, Steinberg offers the first sustained study of the Japanese mode of convergence that informs global media practices to this day.
Anthropology Confronts the Problems of the Modern World is the first English translation of a series of lectures Claude Lévi-Strauss delivered in Tokyo in 1986. Written with an eye toward the future as his own distinguished career was drawing to a close, this volume presents a synthesis of the author’s major ideas about structural anthropology, a field he helped establish. Critiquing insights of his earlier writings on the relationship between race, history, and civilization, Lévi-Strauss revisits the social issues that never ceased to fascinate him.
He begins with the observation that the cultural supremacy enjoyed by the West for over two centuries is at an end. Global wars and genocides in the twentieth century have fatally undermined Western faith in humanity’s improvement through scientific progress. Anthropology, however, can be the vehicle of a new “democratic humanism,” broadening traditional frameworks that have restricted cross-cultural understandings of the human condition, and providing a basis for inquiries into what other civilizations, such as those of Asia, can teach.
Surveying a world on the brink of the twenty-first century, Lévi-Strauss assesses some of the dilemmas of cultural and moral relativism a globalized society faces—ethical dimensions of economic inequality, the rise of different forms of religious fundamentalism, the promise and peril of genetic and reproductive engineering. A laboratory of thought opening onto the future, Anthropology Confronts the Problems of the Modern World is an important addition to the canon of one of the twentieth-century’s most influential theorists.
This study analyzes New Theses (Shinron), by Aizawa Seishisai (1781—1863), and its contribution to Japanese political thought and policy during the early–modern era. New Theses is found to be indispensable to our understanding of Japan's transformation from a feudal to a modern state.
Focusing on Aizawa, Wakabayashi traces the development of xenophobia during the Tokugawa period and examines the basis of anti–Western sentiment. He shows how knowledge of Christianity inspired Aizawa to develop thepotent concept of kokutai (“what is essential to a nation”). His analysis explains why the Edobakufu's policies of national isolation (sakoku) and armed expulsion of Westerners (jõi) gained widespread support in the late Tokugawa. Wakabayashi also describes how information on Western affairs and world conditions decisively altered Tokugawa Confucian conceptions of civilization and barbarism, and how this in turn enabled the Japanese to redefine their nation's relationship to China and the West.
Rather than place Aizawa and his New Theses of 1825 at the beginning of a process leading up to the Meiji Restoration, Wakabayashi discusses New Theses in conjunction with the bakufu's Expulsion Edict issued in the same year. He concludes that the convergence of the two events in 1825 marks the emergence of modern nationalism in Japan, and therefore should perhaps be seen as more epoch–making than the 1868 Restoration itself.
The study also presents a complete translation of New Theses.
Joshua Fogel offers an incisive historical look at Sino-Japanese relations from three different perspectives. Using first a wide lens, he suggests a new way to capture the relationship between China and Japan by characterizing the nature of their contact. From the first century CE, the primary reasons for contact moved from political and ceremonial to cultural, and on to commercial ties. This period ends at the dawn of the modern age, when contacts involved treaties, consulates, and international law.
Switching to a microhistorical view, Fogel examines several important behind-the-scenes players in the launching of the countries’ modern diplomatic relations. He focuses on the voyage of the Senzaimaru from Nagasaki to Shanghai in 1862—the first official meeting of Chinese and Japanese in the modern era—and the Dutchman who played an important intermediary role. Finally, he examines the first expatriate Japanese community in the modern era, in Shanghai from the 1860s to the mid-1890s, when the first Sino-Japanese War erupted.
Introducing the concept of “Sinosphere” to capture the nature of Sino-foreign relations both spatially and temporally, Fogel presents an original and thought-provoking study on the long, complex relationship between China and Japan.
War, defeat, and the collapse of empire in 1945 touched every aspect of postwar Japanese society, profoundly shaping how the Japanese would reconstruct national identity and reengage with the peoples of Asia. While “America” offered a vision of re-genesis after cataclysmic ruin, “Asia” exposed the traumata of perpetration and the torment of ethnic responsibility. Obscured in the shadows of a resurgent postwar Japan lurked a postimperial specter whose haunting presence both complicated and confounded the spiritual rehabilitation of the nation.
Asia and Postwar Japan examines Japanese deimperialization from 1945 until the early twenty-first century. It focuses on the thought and activism of progressive activists and intellectuals as they struggled to overcome rigid preconceptions about “Asia,” as they grappled with the implications of postimperial responsibility, and as they forged new regional solidarities and Asian imaginaries. Simon Avenell reveals the critical importance of Asia in postwar Japanese thought, activism, and politics—Asia as a symbolic geography, Asia as a space for grassroots engagement, and ultimately, Asia as an aporia of identity and the source of a new politics of hope.
An unflinching examination of the moral and professional dilemmas faced by physicians who took part in the Manhattan Project.
After his father died, James L. Nolan, Jr., took possession of a box of private family materials. To his surprise, the small secret archive contained a treasure trove of information about his grandfather’s role as a doctor in the Manhattan Project. Dr. Nolan, it turned out, had been a significant figure. A talented ob-gyn radiologist, he cared for the scientists on the project, organized safety and evacuation plans for the Trinity test at Alamogordo, escorted the “Little Boy” bomb from Los Alamos to the Pacific Islands, and was one of the first Americans to enter the irradiated ruins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Participation on the project challenged Dr. Nolan’s instincts as a healer. He and his medical colleagues were often conflicted, torn between their duty and desire to win the war and their oaths to protect life. Atomic Doctors follows these physicians as they sought to maximize the health and safety of those exposed to nuclear radiation, all the while serving leaders determined to minimize delays and maintain secrecy. Called upon both to guard against the harmful effects of radiation and to downplay its hazards, doctors struggled with the ethics of ending the deadliest of all wars using the most lethal of all weapons. Their work became a very human drama of ideals, co-optation, and complicity.
A vital and vivid account of a largely unknown chapter in atomic history, Atomic Doctors is a profound meditation on the moral dilemmas that ordinary people face in extraordinary times.
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