Download or read book Beyond Brushtalk written by Christopher T. Keaveney and published by Hong Kong University Press. This book was released on 2008-11-01 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beyond Brushtalk explores interactions between Japanese and Chinese writers during the golden age of such exchange, 1919 to 1937. During this period, there were unprecedented opportunities for exchange between writers, which was made possible by the ease of travel between Japan and China during these years and the educational background of Chinese writers as students in Japan. Although the salubrious interaction that developed during that period was destined not to last, it nevertheless was significant as a courageous essay at cultural interaction. This book will appeal not only to those interested in Sino-Japanese studies, an increasingly important field of study in its own right, but will also appeal to scholars of both Japanese literature and Chinese literature and researchers whose areas of interest correspond to the major writers included in this work such as Lu Xun and Zhou Zuoren on the Chinese side and Tanizaki Jun'ichirō and Hayashi Fumiko on the Japanese side. The relations and resulting literary works involving these major writers are often relatively neglected aspects of their total output and will draw interest from scholars of their work. This book will be accessible to both Sinologists and Japanologists with little background in the corresponding field, and to the generalist possessing an interest in literary exchange.
Download or read book The Utopians written by Anna Neima and published by Pan Macmillan. This book was released on 2021-06-10 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Fascinating and richly documented . . . Few books manage to be so informative and so entertaining.' – Sunday Times 'Thanks to Neima’s rigorous research, each chapter offers something new.' – Spectator 'Neima ranges with impressive confidence across the world'. – Literary Review Santiniketan-Sriniketan in India, Dartington Hall in England, Atarashiki Mura in Japan, the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man in France, the Bruderhof in Germany and Trabuco College in America: six experimental communities established in the aftermath of the First World War, each aiming to change the world. The Utopians is an absorbing and vivid account of these collectives and their charismatic leaders and reveals them to be full of eccentric characters, outlandish lifestyles and unchecked idealism. Dismissed and even mocked in their time, yet, a century later, their influence still resonates in progressive education, environmentalism, medical research and mindfulness training. Without such inspirational experiments in how to live, post-war society would have been a poorer place.
Download or read book Brush Conversation in the Sinographic Cosmopolis written by David C. S. Li and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-04-28 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For hundreds of years until the 1900s, in today’s China, Japan, North and South Korea, and Vietnam, literati of Classical Chinese or Literary Sinitic (wényán 文言) could communicate in writing interactively, despite not speaking each other’s languages. This book outlines the historical background of, and the material conditions that led to, widespread literacy development in premodern and early modern East Asia, where reading and writing for formal purposes was conducted in Literary Sinitic. To exemplify how ‘silent conversation’ or ‘brush-assisted conversation’ is possible through writing-mediated brushed interaction, synchronously face-to-face, this book presents contextualized examples from recurrent contexts involving (i) boat drifters; (ii) traveling literati; and (iii) diplo- matic envoys. Where profound knowledge of classical canons and literary works in Sinitic was a shared attribute of the brush-talkers concerned, their brush-talk would characteristically be intertwined with poetic improvisation. Being the first monograph in English to address this fascinating lingua-cultural practice and cross-border communication phenomenon, which was possibly sui generis in Sinographic East Asia, it will be of interest to students of not only East Asian languages and linguistics, history, international relations, and diplomacy, but also (historical) pragmatics, sociolinguistics, sociology of language, scripts and writing systems, and cultural and linguistic anthropology.
Download or read book Japan s Living Politics written by Tessa Morris-Suzuki and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-05-07 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first two decades of the twenty-first century have witnessed a rise of populism and decline of public confidence in many of the formal institutions of democracy. This crisis of democracy has stimulated searches for alternative ways of understanding and enacting politics. Against this background, Tessa Morris-Suzuki explores the long history of informal everyday political action in the Japanese context. Despite its seemingly inflexible and monolithic formal political system, Japan has been the site of many fascinating small-scale experiments in 'informal life politics': grassroots do-it-yourself actions which seek not to lobby governments for change, but to change reality directly, from the bottom up. She explores this neglected history by examining an interlinked series of informal life politics experiments extending from the 1910s to the present day.
Download or read book Hu Feng written by Ruth Y. Y. Hung and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2020-11-01 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Ruth Y. Y. Hung provides a study of Hu Feng (1902–1985) as a critic, writer, and editor within the context of the People's Republic of China's political ascendancy. A member of the Japanese Communist Party and the Chinese Communist Party, Hu rose to fame in the 1940s and became a representative persecuted intellectual soon after 1949. "The Hu Feng Case" of 1955—more than a decade before the Cultural Revolution—was a significant, large-scale campaign of intellectual persecution. Hung examines Hu's work as a literary critic in this context, and examines the intricate historical and sociopolitical forces against which intellectuals in his milieu in twentieth-century China adopted Marxism as a measure of their critical position. She demonstrates how this first generation of modern Chinese literary critics practiced criticism, examining the skills and arguments they used to negotiate their institutional and ideological relations with state-party power. This exceptional case of intellectual engagement offers broader insight on critical literature's humanistic aims and methods in the context of intellectual globalization and changing political climates.
Download or read book Japanese New York written by Olga Kanzaki Sooudi and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2014-10-31 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spend time in New York City and, soon enough, you will encounter some of the Japanese nationals who live and work there—young English students, office workers, painters, and hairstylists. New York City, one of the world’s most vibrant and creative cities, is also home to one of the largest overseas Japanese populations in the world. Among them are artists and designers who produce cutting-edge work in fields such as design, fashion, music, and art. Part of the so-called “creative class” and a growing segment of the neoliberal economy, they are usually middle-class and college-educated. They move to New York for anywhere from a few years to several decades in the hope of realizing dreams and aspirations unavailable to them in Japan. Yet the creative careers they desire are competitive, and many end up working illegally in precarious, low paying jobs. Though they often migrate without fixed plans for return, nearly all eventually do, and their migrant trajectories are punctuated by visits home. Japanese New York offers an intimate, ethnographic portrait of these Japanese creative migrants living and working in NYC. At its heart is a universal question—how do adults reinvent their lives? In the absence of any material or social need, what makes it worthwhile for people to abandon middle-class comfort and home for an unfamiliar and insecure life? Author Olga Sooudi explores these questions in four different venues patronized by New York’s Japanese: a grocery store and restaurant, where hopeful migrants work part-time as they pursue their ambitions; a fashion designer’s atelier and an art gallery, both sites of migrant aspirations. As Sooudi’s migrant artists toil and network, biding time until they “make it” in their chosen industries, their optimism is complicated by the material and social limitations of their lives. The story of Japanese migrants in NYC is both a story about Japan and a way of examining Japan from beyond its borders. The Japanese presence abroad, a dynamic process involving the moving, settling, and return to Japan of people and their cultural products, is still underexplored. Sooudi’s work will help fill this lacuna and will contribute to international migration studies, to the study of contemporary Japanese culture and society, and to the study of Japanese youth, while shedding light on what it means to be a creative migrant worker in the global city today.
Download or read book The Avant Garde and the Popular in Modern China written by Liang Luo and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2014-07-15 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides a new perspective on the Chinese avant-garde through the figure of artist and activist Tian Han
Download or read book Sino Japanese Reflections written by Joshua A. Fogel and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2022-05-09 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sino-Japanese Reflections offers ten richly detailed case studies that examine various forms of cultural and literary interaction between Japanese and Chinese intellectuals from the late Ming to the early twentieth century. The authors consider efforts by early modern scholars on each side of the Yellow Sea to understand the language and culture of the other, to draw upon received texts and forms, and to contribute to shared literary practices. Whereas literary and cultural flow within the Sinosphere is sometimes imagined to be an entirely unidirectional process of textual dissemination from China to the periphery, the contributions to this volume reveal a more complex picture: highlighting how literary and cultural engagement was always an opportunity for creative adaptation and negotiation. Examining materials such as Chinese translations of Japanese vernacular poetry, Japanese engagements with Chinese supernatural stories, adaptations of Japanese historical tales into vernacular Chinese, Sinitic poetry composed in Japan, and Japanese Sinology, the volume brings together recent work by literary scholars and intellectual historians of multiple generations, all of whom have a strong comparative interest in Sino-Japanese studies.
Download or read book Transcultural Lyricism written by Jane Qian Liu and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2017-01-05 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Transcultural Lyricism, Jane Qian Liu discusses the extent to which modern Chinese writer-translators borrowed from foreign literary works to create new ways to express emotion and by extension radically transformed the lyrical modes of modern Chinese literature.
Download or read book The Cultural Evolution of Postwar Japan written by Christopher Keaveney and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-12-05 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Yamamoto Sanehiko's (1885-1952) achievements as a publisher, writer, and politician in the interwar period served as both a catalyst and a template for developments after the wars. While exploring the accomplishments the compelling figure, this study sheds new light on the social, cultural, and political changes that occurred in postwar Japan.
Download or read book Out of China written by Robert Bickers and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2017-03-30 with total page 749 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2018 WOLFSON HISTORY PRIZE The extraordinary and essential story of how China became the powerful country it is today. Even at the high noon of Europe's empires China managed to be one of the handful of countries not to succumb. Invaded, humiliated and looted, China nonetheless kept its sovereignty. Robert Bickers' major new book is the first to describe fully what has proved to be one of the modern era's most important stories: the long, often agonising process by which the Chinese had by the end of the 20th century regained control of their own country. Out of China uses a brilliant array of unusual, strange and vivid sources to recreate a now fantastically remote world: the corrupt, lurid modernity of pre-War Shanghai, the often tiny patches of 'extra-territorial' land controlled by European powers (one of which, unnoticed, had mostly toppled into a river), the entrepôts of Hong Kong and Macao, and the myriad means, through armed threats, technology and legal chicanery, by which China was kept subservient. Today Chinese nationalism stays firmly rooted in memories of its degraded past - the quest for self-sufficiency, a determination both to assert China's standing in the world and its outstanding territorial claims, and never to be vulnerable to renewed attack. History matters deeply to Beijing's current rulers - and Out of China explains why.
Download or read book The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature written by J. Thomas Rimer and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2011-11-15 with total page 981 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Featuring choice selections from the core anthologies The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature: From Restoration to Occupation, 1868–1945, and The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature: From 1945 to the Present, this collection offers a concise yet remarkably rich introduction to the fiction, poetry, drama, and essays of Japan's modern encounter with the West. Spanning a period of exceptional invention and transition, this volume is not only a critical companion to courses on Japanese literary and intellectual development but also an essential reference for scholarship on Japanese history, culture, and interactions with the East and West. The first half covers the three major styles of literary expression that informed Japanese writing and performance in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: classical Japanese fiction and drama, Chinese poetry, and Western literary representation and cultural critique. Their juxtaposition brilliantly captures the social, intellectual, and political challenges shaping Japan during this period, particularly the rise of nationalism, the complex interaction between traditional and modern forces, and the encroachment of Western ideas and writing. The second half conveys the changes that have transformed Japan since the end of the Pacific War, such as the heady transition from poverty to prosperity, the friction between conflicting ideologies and political beliefs, and the growing influence of popular culture on the country's artistic and intellectual traditions. Featuring sensitive translations of works by Nagai Kafu, Natsume Soseki, Oe Kenzaburo, Kawabata Yasunari, Mishima Yukio, and many others, this anthology relates an essential portrait of Japan's dynamic modernization.
Download or read book Going to the Countryside written by Yu Zhang and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2020-03-03 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the beginning of the twentieth century, modern Chinese intellectuals, reformers, revolutionaries, leftist journalists, and idealistic youth had often crossed the increasing gap between the city and the countryside, which made the act of “going to the countryside” a distinctively modern experience and a continuous practice in China. Such a spatial crossing eventually culminated in the socialist state program of “down to the villages” movements during the 1960s and 1970s. What, then, was the special significance of “going to the countryside” before that era? Going to the Countryside deals with the cultural representations and practices of this practice between 1915 and 1965, focusing on individual homecoming, rural reconstruction, revolutionary journeys to Yan’an, the revolutionary “going down to the people” as well as going to the frontiers and rural hometowns for socialist construction. As part of the larger discourses of enlightenment, revolution, and socialist industrialization, “going to the countryside” entailed new ways of looking at the world and ordinary people, brought about new experiences of space and time, initiated new means of human communication and interaction, generated new forms of cultural production, revealed a fundamental epistemic shift in modern China, and ultimately created a new aesthetic, social, and political landscape. As a critical response to the “urban turn” in the past few decades, this book brings the rural back to the central concern of Chinese cultural studies and aims to bridge the city and the countryside as two types of important geographical entities, which have often remained as disparate scholarly subjects of inquiry in the current state of China studies. Chinese modernity has been characterized by a dual process that created problems from the vast gap between the city and the countryside but simultaneously initiated constant efforts to cope with the gap personally, collectively, and institutionally. The process of “crossing” two distinct geographical spaces was often presented as continuous explorations of various ways of establishing the connectivity, interaction, and relationship of these two imagined geographical entities. Going to the Countryside argues that this new body of cultural productions did not merely turn the rural into a constantly changing representational space; most importantly, the rural has been constructed as a distinct modern experiential and aesthetic realm characterized by revolutionary changes in human conceptions and sentiments.
Download or read book Fragrant Orchid written by Yoshiko Yamaguchi and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2015-02-28 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The acclaimed actress and legendary singer, Yamaguchi Yoshiko (aka Li Xianglan, 1920-2014), emerged from Japan-occupied Manchuria to become a transnational star during the Second Sino-Japanese war. Born to Japanese parents, raised in Manchuria, and educated in Beijing, the young Yamaguchi learned to speak impeccable Mandarin Chinese and received professional training in operatic singing. When recruited by the Manchurian Film Association in 1939 to act in "national policy" films in the service of Japanese imperialism in China, she allowed herself to be presented as a Chinese, effectively masking her Japanese identity in both her professional and private lives. Yamaguchi soon became an unprecedented transnational phenomenon in Manchuria, Shanghai, and Japan itself as the glamorous female lead in such well-known films as Song of the White Orchid (1939), China Nights (1940), Pledge in the Desert (1940), and Glory to Eternity (1943). Her signature songs, including "When Will You Return?" and "The Evening Primrose," swept East Asia in the waning years of the war and remained popular well into the postwar decades. Ironically, although her celebrated international stardom was without parallel in wartime East Asia, she remained a puppet within a puppet state, choreographed at every turn by Japanese film studios in accordance with the expediencies of Japan's continental policy. In a dramatic turn of events after Japan's defeat, she was placed under house arrest in Shanghai by the Chinese Nationalist forces and barely escaped execution as a traitor to China. Her complex and intriguing life story as a convenient pawn, willing instrument, and tormented victim of Japan's imperialist ideology is told in her bestselling autobiography, translated here in full for the first time in English. An addendum reveals her postwar career in Hollywood and Broadway in the 1950s, her friendship with Charlie Chaplin, her first marriage to Isamu Noguchi, and her postwar life as singer, actress, political figure, television celebrity, and private citizen. A substantial introduction by Chia-ning Chang contextualizes Yamaguchi's life and career within the historical and cultural zeitgeist of wartime Manchuria, Japan, and China and the postwar controversies surrounding her life in East Asia.
Download or read book Western Rock Artists Madame Butterfly and the Allure of Japan written by Christopher T. Keaveney and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-08-06 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using the framework of Edward Said’s Orientalism, this work examines how Western rock and pop artists—particularly during the age of album rock from the 1970s through the 1990s—perpetuated long-held stereotypes of Japan in their direct encounters with the country and in songs and music videos with Japanese content.
Download or read book Translingual Narration written by Bert Mittchell Scruggs and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2015-07-31 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Translingual Narration is a study of colonial Taiwanese fiction, its translation from Japanese to Chinese, and films produced during and about the colonial era. It is a postcolonial intervention into a field largely dominated by studies of colonial Taiwanese writing as either a branch of Chinese fiction or part of a larger empire of Japanese language texts. Rather than read Taiwanese fiction as simply belonging to one of two discourses, Bert Scruggs argues for disengaging the nation from the former colony to better understand colonial Taiwan and its postcolonial critics. Following early chapters on the identity politics behind Chinese translations of Japanese texts, attempts to establish a vernacular Taiwanese literature, and critical space, Scruggs provides close readings of short fiction through the critical prisms of locative and cultural or ethnic identity to suggest that cultural identity is evidence of free will. Stories and novellas are also viewed through the critical prism of class-consciousness, including the writings of Yang Kui (1906–1985), who unlike most of his contemporaries wrote politically engaged literature. Scruggs completes his core examination of identity by reading short fiction through the prism of gender identity and posits a resemblance between gender politics in colonial Taiwan and pre-independence India. The work goes on to test the limits of nostalgia and solastalgia in fiction and film by looking at how both the colonial future and past are remembered before concluding with political uses of cinematic murder. Films considered in this chapter include colonial-era government propaganda documentaries and postcolonial representations of colonial cosmopolitanism and oppression. Finally, ideas borrowed from translation and memory studies as well as indigenization are suggested as possible avenues of discovery for continued interventions into the study of postcolonial and colonial Taiwanese fiction and culture. With its insightful and informed analysis of the diverse nature of Taiwanese identity, Translingual Narration will engage a broad audience with interests in East Asian and postcolonial literature, film, history, and culture.
Download or read book Sat Haruo and Modern Japanese Literature written by Charles Exley and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2016-01-19 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Satō Haruo and Modern Japanese Literature, Charles Exley examines Satō’s novels and short stories from the 1910 s through the 1930s, placing them in discursive and historical context.
