Download or read book A Reader in Edo Period Travel written by Herbert Plutschow and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-03-07 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Largely ignored hitherto by Western scholars, Plutschow’s Edo Period Travel provides the first in-depth study of the subject which is centred on fifteen of the period’s most notable travellers, some of whom are well known in other fields – as intellectuals, artists, poets, folklorists and natural scientists , for example – but rarely, if at all, as travellers. The first traveller put in the spotlight is the celebrated intellectual and botanist Kaibara Ekiken (1630-1714) and the last is the explorer of Ezo (now Hokkaido) and government official Matsuura Takeshiro (1818-88). Such was the thirst for knowledge in the Edo period that some travel accounts (estimated to number over 2000) became best-sellers in their day, not least for their voyeuristic appeal, including those of Kaibara Ekiken and Tachibana Nankei, which are included in this volume. This important research on how the Japanese discovered their own country and cultural identity has considerable interdisciplinary appeal. Of particular interest also is the author’s discussion on the nature of this new travel writing and the self-centred observation and ‘seeing’ that developed in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, he calls the ‘Japanese Enlightenment’.
Download or read book The T kaid Road written by Jilly Traganou and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers a comparative study of representations of the Tôkaidô road, the most important route of Japan during the Edo (1600-1868) and Meiji (1868-1912) eras.
Download or read book Excursions in Identity written by Laura Nenzi and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2008-04-16 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the Edo period (1600–1868), status- and gender-based expectations largely defined a person’s place and identity in society. The wayfarers of the time, however, discovered that travel provided the opportunity to escape from the confines of the everyday. Cultured travelers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries wrote travel memoirs to celebrate their profession as belle-lettrists. For women in particular the open road and the blank page of the diary offered a precious opportunity to create personal hierarchies defined less by gender and more by culture and refinement. After the mid-eighteenth century—which saw the popularization of culture and the rise of commercial printing—textbooks, guides, comical fiction, and woodblock prints allowed not a few commoners to acquaint themselves with the historical, lyrical, or artistic pedigree of Japan’s famous sites. By identifying themselves with famous literary and historical icons of the past, some among these erudite commoners saw an opportunity to rewrite their lives and re-create their identities in the pages of their travel diaries. The chapters in Part One, “Re-creating Spaces,” introduce the notion that the spaces of travel were malleable, accommodating reconceptualization across interpretive frames. Laura Nenzi shows that, far from being static backgrounds, these travelscapes proliferated in a myriad of loci where one person’s center was another’s periphery. In Part Two, “Re-creating Identities,” we see how, in the course of the Edo period, educated persons used travel to, or through, revered lyrical sites to assert and enhance their roles and identities. Finally, in Part Three, “Purchasing Re-creation,” Nenzi looks at the intersection between recreational travel and the rising commercial economy, which allowed visitors to appropriate landscapes through new means: monetary transactions, acquisition of tangible icons, or other forms of physical interaction.
Download or read book The Cambridge History of Japanese Literature written by Haruo Shirane and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-12-31 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cambridge History of Japanese Literature provides, for the first time, a history of Japanese literature with comprehensive coverage of the premodern and modern eras in a single volume. The book is arranged topically in a series of short, accessible chapters for easy access and reference, giving insight into both canonical texts and many lesser known, popular genres, from centuries-old folk literature to the detective fiction of modern times. The various period introductions provide an overview of recurrent issues that span many decades, if not centuries. The book also places Japanese literature in a wider East Asian tradition of Sinitic writing and provides comprehensive coverage of women's literature as well as new popular literary forms, including manga (comic books). An extensive bibliography of works in English enables readers to continue to explore this rich tradition through translations and secondary reading.
Download or read book Monumenta Nipponica written by and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Includes section "Reviews".
Download or read book Traveling Bodies written by Nicole Maruo-Schröder and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-09-29 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traveling Bodies: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Traveling as an Embodied Practice explores the central role the body has in and for traveling and thus complements and expands upon existing research in travel studies with new perspectives on and insights in the entanglement of bodies and traveling. The case studies assembled in this volume discuss a variety of traveling practices, experiences, and media with chapters featuring Asian, American, and European historical and contemporary perspectives. Truly interdisciplinary in its approach, the volume identifies and examines diverse literary, historical and cultural texts, contexts, and modes in which traveling and the body intersect, including ‘classic’ travelogues, (new) media (e.g., film, digital travel apps), surf culture, and travel-inspired tattoos. The contributions offer various avenues for further research, not only for scholars working with body theory and travel (writing), but also for anyone interested in the intersections of literature, culture, media, and embodied practices of traveling.
Download or read book Japanese Tourism and Travel Culture written by Sylvie Guichard-Anguis and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2008-11-27 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines Japanese tourism and travel, both today and in the past, showing how over hundreds of years a distinct culture of travel developed, and exploring how this has permeated the perceptions and traditions of Japanese society. It considers the diverse dimensions of modern tourism including appropriation and consumption of history, nostalgia, identity, domesticated foreignness, and the search for authenticity and invention of tradition. Japanese people are one of the most widely travelling peoples in the world both historically and in contemporary times. What may be understood as incipient mass tourism started around the 17th century in various forms (including religious pilgrimages) long before it became a prevalent cultural phenomenon in the West. Within Asia, Japan has long remained the main tourist sending society since the beginning of the 20th century when it started colonising Asian countries. In 2005, some 17.8 million Japanese travelled overseas across Europe, Asia, the South Pacific and America. In recent times, however, tourist demands are fast growing in other Asian countries such as Korea and China. Japan is not only consuming other Asian societies and cultures, it is also being consumed by them in tourist contexts. This book considers the patterns of travelling of the Japanese, examining travel inside and outside the Japanese archipelago and how tourist demands inside influence and shape patterns of travel outside the country. Overall, this book draws important insights for understanding the phenomenon of tourism on the one hand and the nature of Japanese society and culture on the other.
Download or read book Japan written by Conrad Totman and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2014-01-30 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the outset, society in Japan has been shaped by its environmental context. The lush green mountainous archipelago of today, with its highly productive lowlands, supports a population of more than 127 million people and one of the most advanced economies in the world. How has this come about and at what environmental cost? Conrad Totman, one of the world's foremost scholars on Japanese, here provides a comprehensive and detailed account of the country's environmental history, from its beginnings to the present day. Professor Totman traces the country's development through successive historical phases, as early agricultural society based on non-intensive forms of cultivation gave way to more intensified forms. With each stage came greater utilisation of natural resources but a steady reduction in the richness of the indigenous biosystem. By the late seventeenth century the country was well on the way to ecological disaster. Yet Japan's isolation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries led to an unusually enlightened set of environmental policies, and the system of regenerative forestry brought in during the Tokugawa period prevented certain devastation of the country's forests. At the end of the nineteenth century, however, the country began to go to the opposite extreme, as industrialisation brought with it a period of unprecedented change. Growth and diversification led to a surge in environmental pollution as it became necessary to look beyond the country's domestic natural resources to meet the demand for foodstuffs, fossil fuels and the raw materials necessary to an advanced industrial economy. The population was particularly badly affected, and some of the problems that emerged, especially from the 1960s onwards, provided important test cases not just for Japan but worldwide. What makes the Japanese story particularly instructive is that the country's boundaries are uncommonly clear and the nature, timing, and extent of external influences on its history are unusually identifiable. The Japanese experience, therefore, not only yields important insights into the processes of environmental history, it offers important lessons for the wider environmental history of the planet and for our understanding of current global ecological problems. A work of immense erudition and reflecting a lifetime of scholarship, Japan: an Environmental History will be welcomed by all with an interest in environmental history and the historical development of Japan.
Download or read book Crossing Boundaries in Tokugawa Society written by Takeshi Moriyama and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2013-03-27 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Suzuki Bokushi (1770-1842) was an elite villager in Echigo, a snowy province of Japan. Crossing Boundaries in Tokugawa Society presents a vivid picture of the life and world of this rural commoner, focusing on his interaction with the changing social and cultural environment of the late Tokugawa period (1603-1868). Bokushi's life and texts challenge notions of the rigidity of social boundaries between the urban and the rural, between social statuses, and between cultural and intellectual communities. However, his activities were still restrained by the external environment because of geographical remoteness, infrastractural limitations, political restrictions, cultural norms and the complexities of human relationships. His life exemplifies both the potentiality and the restraint of his historical moment for a well-placed member of the rural elite.
Download or read book Travel Writing written by Carl Thompson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2011-05-16 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An increasingly popular genre – addressing issues of empire, colonialism, post-colonialism, globalization, gender and politics – travel writing offers the reader a movement between the familiar and the unknown. In this volume, Carl Thompson: introduces the genre, outlining competing definitions and key debates provides a broad historical survey from the medieval period to the present day explores the autobiographical dimensions of the form looks at both men and women’s travel writing, surveying a range of canonical and more marginal works, drawn from both the colonial and postcolonial era utilises both British and American travelogues to consider the genre's role in shaping the history of both nations. Concise and practical, Travel Writing is the ideal introduction for those new to the subject, as well as a crucial overview of current debates in the field.
Download or read book Cultural Histories of Sociabilities Spaces and Mobilities written by Colin Divall and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-10-06 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the majority of us the opportunity to travel has never been greater, yet differences in mobility highlight inequalities that have wider social implications. Exploring how and why attitudes towards movement have evolved across generations, the case studies in this essay collection range from medieval to modern times and cover several continents.
Download or read book Walking the Kiso Road written by William Scott Wilson and published by Shambhala Publications. This book was released on 2015-10-13 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Step back into old Japan with this fascinating travelogue of the famous Kiso Road, an ancient route used by samurai and warlords The Kisoji, which runs through the Kiso Valley in the Japanese Alps, has been in use since at least 701 C.E. In the seventeenth century, it was the route that the daimyo (warlords) used for their biennial trips—along with their samurai and porters—to the new capital of Edo (now Tokyo). The natural beauty of the route is renowned—and famously inspired the landscapes of Hiroshige, as well as the work of many other artists and writers. William Scott Wilson, esteemed translator of samurai philosophy, has walked the road several times and is a delightful and expert guide to this popular tourist destination; he shares its rich history and lore, literary and artistic significance, cuisine and architecture, as well as his own experiences.
Download or read book Strange Tales from Edo written by William D. Fleming and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2024-09-09 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Strange Tales from Edo, William Fleming paints a sweeping picture of Japan’s engagement with Chinese fiction in the early modern period (1600–1868). Large-scale analyses of the full historical and bibliographical record—the first of their kind—document in detail the wholesale importation of Chinese fiction, the market for imported books and domestic reprint editions, and the critical role of manuscript practices—the ascendance of print culture notwithstanding—in the circulation of Chinese texts among Japanese readers and writers. Bringing this big picture to life, Fleming also traces the journey of a text rarely mentioned in studies of early modern Japanese literature: Pu Songling’s Liaozhai zhiyi (Strange Tales from Liaozhai Studio). An immediate favorite of readers on the continent, Liaozhai was long thought to have been virtually unknown in Japan until the modern period. Copies were imported in vanishingly small numbers, and the collection was never reprinted domestically. Yet beneath this surface of apparent neglect lies a rich hidden history of engagement and rewriting—hand-copying, annotation, criticism, translation, and adaptation—that opens up new perspectives on both the Chinese strange tale and its Japanese counterparts.
Download or read book European Studies in Asia written by Georg Wiessala and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-03-21 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As countries across Asia continue to rise and become more assertive global powers, the role that Higher Education has played, and continues to play, in this process is an issue of growing pertinence. Furthermore, understanding the relationship between Europe and Asia fostered by historical and contemporary knowledge transfer, including Higher Education, is crucial to analysing and encouraging the progress of both regional integration and inter-regional cooperation. With a specific focus on international Higher Education, European Studies in Asia investigates knowledge transfer and channels of learning between Europe and Asia from historical, contemporary and teaching perspectives. The book examines a selection of significant historical precedents of intellectual dialogue between the two regions and, in turn, explores contemporary cross-regional discourses both inside and outside of the official frameworks of the European Union (EU) and the Asia--Europe Meetings (ASEM). Drawing on extensive case studies based on many of his own teaching experiences, Georg Wiessala addresses key questions, such as the nature and construction of the European Studies in Asia curriculum; aspects of ‘values’, co-constructed learning and adult pedagogy in the discipline of European Studies in Asia; the politics of Asian host cultures, the ‘internationalization’ of Asian Higher Education and the experiences and expectations of tertiary sector students of this subject in Asia, Australia and New Zealand. In doing so, the author articulates a range of outcomes for the further development of Higher Education cooperation agendas between Asia and Europe, in the discipline of European Studies, and in related fields such as International Relations. This case study-led book makes an original and novel contribution to our understanding of European Studies in Asia. As such, it will be of great interest to students and scholars of Asian Education, Comparative Education, European Studies and International Relations.
Download or read book Imaginative Mapping written by Nobuko Toyosawa and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-02-01 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Landscape has always played a vital role in shaping Japan’s cultural identity. Imaginative Mapping analyzes how intellectuals of the Tokugawa and Meiji eras used specific features and aspects of the landscape to represent their idea of Japan and produce a narrative of Japan as a cultural community. These scholars saw landscapes as repositories of local history and identity, stressing Japan’s differences from the models of China and the West. By detailing the continuities and ruptures between a sense of shared cultural community that emerged in the seventeenth century and the modern nation state of the late nineteenth century, this study sheds new light on the significance of early modernity, one defined not by temporal order but rather by spatial diffusion of the concept of Japan. More precisely, Nobuko Toyosawa argues that the circulation of guidebooks and other spatial narratives not only promoted further movement but also contributed to the formation of subjectivity by allowing readers to imagine the broader conceptual space of Japan. The recurring claims to the landscape are evidence that it was the medium for the construction of Japan as a unified cultural body.
Download or read book Literary Creations on the Road written by Keiko Shiba and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2012 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Keiko Shiba, a noted researcher in early modern Japanese history, has spent years collecting hundreds of travel diaries written by women during the reign of the Tokugawa shogunate (17th through mid-19th centuries). The fruit of her research, originally published in Japanese, is now available in an English translation by Motoko Ezaki, with notes provided for general English readers. Shiba intersperses her narration abundantly with excerpts from the actual travel diaries; the book therefore is an invaluable source that offers us direct access to the individual voices of a large number of Tokugawa women, who energetically composed prose and poetry while traveling, sometimes in collaboration with their male companions. This work also sheds new light on women's literary activities in early modern Japan, which are still noticeably understudied compared to other genres of Japanese literary history.
Download or read book Selling Women written by Amy Stanley and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2012-06-19 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces the social history of early modern Japan’s sex trade, from its beginnings in seventeenth-century cities to its apotheosis in the nineteenth-century countryside. Drawing on legal codes, diaries, town registers, petitions, and criminal records, it describes how the work of "selling women" transformed communities across the archipelago. By focusing on the social implications of prostitutes’ economic behavior, this study offers a new understanding of how and why women who work in the sex trade are marginalized. It also demonstrates how the patriarchal order of the early modern state was undermined by the emergence of the market economy, which changed the places of women in their households and the realm at large.
