Download or read book The Man Who Saved Kabuki written by Okamoto Shiro and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2001-04-01 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As part of its program to promote democracy in Japan after World War II, the American Occupation, headed by General Douglas MacArthur, undertook to enforce rigid censorship policies aimed at eliminating all traces of feudal thought in media and entertainment, including kabuki. Faubion Bowers (1917-1999), who served as personal aide and interpreter to MacArthur during the Occupation, was appalled by the censorship policies and anticipated the extinction of a great theatrical art. He used his position in the Occupation administration and his knowledge of Japanese theatre in his tireless campaign to save kabuki. Largely through Bowers's efforts, censorship of kabuki had for the most part been eliminated by the time he left Japan in 1948. Although Bowers is at the center of the story, this lively and skillfully adapted translation from the original Japanese treats a critical period in the long history of kabuki as it was affected by a single individual who had a commanding influence over it. It offers fascinating and little-known details about Occupation censorship politics and kabuki performance while providing yet another perspective on the history of an enduring Japanese art form. Read Bowers' impressions of Gen. MacArthur on the Japanese-American Veterans' Association website.
Download or read book The Failure of Civil Society written by Akihiro Ogawa and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2009-03-09 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A look at the voluntary sector in Japan, which has emerged strongly only in recent years.
Download or read book Visions of Japanese Modernity written by Aaron Andrew Gerow and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this study, Aaron Gerow focuses on the early period in which the institutional and narrational structure of Japanese cinema was in flux, arguing that the transnational intertext is less important than the power-laden operations by which the meaning of cinema itself was discursively defined. Both progressive critics of the 'pure film' movement and the more conservative Japanese cultural bureaucrats demanded a unitary text that suppressed the hybrid and unpredictable meanings attendant on early Japanese cinema's informal exhibition contexts. Gerow points out the irony that the progressive and individualist pure film movement critics worked in concert with the Japanese state to undo the 'theft' of Japanese cinema, proposing to replace representations of Japan in Western films by exporting a Japanese cinema 'reformed' to emulate the international norm.
Download or read book Collected Writings of Gordon Daniels written by Gordon Daniels and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-03-01 with total page 646 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally a student of Meiji Japan, Gordon Daniels is widely known for his work on the Pacific War and the Occupation of Japan, with particular regard to the world of communications in film and propaganda as well as Japanese sport. He has also been closely involved with the post-war era of international relations and Japan, as well as studies in Japanese history and historiography. In the 1980s he made significant contributions in reporting on the scope and development of Japanese Studies in Britain. His most recent work has been as joint editor (and contributor) with Chushichi Tsuzuki of Social and Cultural Perspectives - the fifth of the five-volume series on the history of Anglo-Japanese Relations (Palgrave, 2002).
Download or read book The History of the Book in East Asia written by Cynthia Brokaw and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-14 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The history of the book in East Asia is closely linked to problems of language and script, problems which have also had a profound impact on the technology of printing and on the social and intellectual impact of print in this area. This volume contains key readings on the history of printed books and manuscripts in China, Korea and Japan and includes an introduction which provides an overview of the history of the book in East Asia and sets the readings in their context.
Download or read book Street Performers and Society in Urban Japan 1600 1900 written by Gerald Groemer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-01-13 with total page 447 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a thoroughly researched and meticulously documented study of the emergence, development, and demise of music, theatre, recitation, and dance witnessed by the populace on thoroughfares, plazas, and makeshift outdoor performance spaces in Edo/Tokyo. For some three hundred years this city was the centre of such arts, both sacred and secular. This study outlines the nature of the performances, explores the social relations which lay behind them, and reveals vast complexity: an obligation of gift-giving on the part of observers; performers who were often economic migrants fallen on hard times; relations of performance to social class; a class system much more finely gradated than the official four caste system; and institutions of professional organization and registration, enforced by government, with penalties for unregistered performers. The book discusses how performing, witnessing, and rewarding performance were closely bound up with economy, society and government, how the interaction between various groups related to socio-economic advancement, how the system of street performance reinforced social control, and how the balance between different groups shifted over time.
Download or read book Revenge Drama in European Renaissance and Japanese Theatre written by K. Wetmore and published by Springer. This book was released on 2008-04-14 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Revenge Drama in European Renaissance and Japanese Theatre is a collection of essays that both explores the tradition of revenge drama in Japan and compares that tradition with that in European Renaissance drama. Why are the two great plays of each tradition, plays regarded as defining their nations and eras, Kanadehon Chushingura and Hamlet, both revenge plays? What do the revenge dramas of Europe and Japan tell us about the periods that produced them and how have they been modernized to speak to contemporary audiences? By interrogating the manifestation of evil women, ghosts, satire, parody, and censorship, contributors such as Leonard Pronko, J. Thomas Rimer, Carol Sorgenfrei, Laurence Kominz explore these issues.
Download or read book Football Goes East written by John Horne and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-09-23 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The development of football as a major participatory sport in Japan, Korea and China makes it an ideal case study for analysis of the complex relationship between sport, culture, society and economy in the East, and the forces of globalization.
Download or read book Kabuki Drama written by Shūtarō Miyake and published by . This book was released on 1954 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Gender and Power in the Japanese Visual Field written by Joshua S. Mostow and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2003-05-31 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this, the first collection in English of feminist-oriented research on Japanese art and visual culture, an international group of scholars examines representations of women in a wide range of visual work. The volume begins with Chino Kaori's now-classic essay "Gender in Japanese Art," which introduced feminist theory to Japanese art. This is followed by a closer look at a famous thirteenth-century battle scroll and the production of bijin (beautiful women) prints within the world of Edo-period advertising. A rare homoerotic picture-book is used to extrapolate the "grammar of desire" as represented in late seventeenth-century Edo. In the modern period, contributors consider the introduction to Meiji Japan of the Western nude and oil-painting and examine Nihonga (Japanese-style painting) and the role of one of its famous artists. The book then shifts its focus to an examination of paintings produced for the Japanese-sponsored annual salons held in colonial Korea. The postwar period comes under scrutiny in a study of the novel Woman in the Dunes and its film adaptation. The critical discourse that surrounded women artists of the late twentieth-century--the "Super Girls of Art"--is analyzed, followed by a consideration of gender ambiguity and cross-gender identification in contemporary anime and manga. Contributors: Grunhild Borggreen, Norman Bryson, Chino Kaori, Doris Croissant, Ikeda Shinobu, Kim Hye-shin, Chigusa Kimura-Steven, Joshua S. Mostow, Sharalyn Orbaugh, David Pollack.
Download or read book Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons written by Haruo Shirane and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2012-03-20 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Elegant representations of nature and the four seasons populate a wide range of Japanese genres and media—from poetry and screen painting to tea ceremonies, flower arrangements, and annual observances. In Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons, Haruo Shirane shows how, when, and why this practice developed and explicates the richly encoded social, religious, and political meanings of this imagery. Refuting the belief that this tradition reflects Japan's agrarian origins and supposedly mild climate, Shirane traces the establishment of seasonal topics to the poetry composed by the urban nobility in the eighth century. After becoming highly codified and influencing visual arts in the tenth and eleventh centuries, the seasonal topics and their cultural associations evolved and spread to other genres, eventually settling in the popular culture of the early modern period. Contrasted with the elegant images of nature derived from court poetry was the agrarian view of nature based on rural life. The two landscapes began to intersect in the medieval period, creating a complex, layered web of competing associations. Shirane discusses a wide array of representations of nature and the four seasons in many genres, originating in both the urban and rural perspective: textual (poetry, chronicles, tales), cultivated (gardens, flower arrangement), material (kimonos, screens), performative (noh, festivals), and gastronomic (tea ceremony, food rituals). He reveals how this kind of "secondary nature," which flourished in Japan's urban architecture and gardens, fostered and idealized a sense of harmony with the natural world just at the moment it was disappearing. Illuminating the deeper meaning behind Japanese aesthetics and artifacts, Shirane clarifies the use of natural images and seasonal topics and the changes in their cultural associations and function across history, genre, and community over more than a millennium. In this fascinating book, the four seasons are revealed to be as much a cultural construction as a reflection of the physical world.
Download or read book Shingu written by Arne Kalland and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-10-18 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From being an important centre which attracted a large number of merchants during the feudal period, Shingū, on the northern shores of Kyushu is today a suburb of Fukuoka City. Fishing is a slowly-dying occupation and this volume analyses how the fishermen adjust to changing circumstances. Although Japan is the largest fishing nation in the world, when originally published this book was the first to be published in English which focussed on the composition and role performance of the crews and larger net-groups. This analysis has been set in an historical perspective, showing how the vertical structures during the Tokugawa period have changed to more egalitarian structures where much energy is spent to hinder the development of any new hierarchy.
Download or read book An Intellectual History of Wartime Japan written by Shunsuke Tsurumi and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-10-18 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When this book was published in Japanese in 1982 it was awarded the prestigious Jiro Osaragi Prize. It is an important contribution to the understanding of the mental and spiritual world of Japan just over two generations ago. The author argues that just as the period of isolation up to the middle of the 19th century was crucial for Japan’s development, so the Second World War represented another crucial period for the country. These years were a period of intellectual isolation during which significant development took place.
Download or read book Dark Cloud 2 written by Gerald Guess and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Build Your World. Invent Your Weapons. Create Your Adventure. - Tips on navigating the dungeons - Detailed walkthrough with valuable maps - Complete training section - Strategies for fishing, creating a Georama, and using the camera effectively - Monster stats and tables
Download or read book Enjoy Japan written by Walt Sheldon and published by Tuttle Publishing. This book was released on 2012-02-14 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This casual Japan travel guide contains a wealth of information for the business traveler or tourist For several years author, Walt Sheldon has been helping visitors and foreign residents to understand and appreciate things Japanese through the medium of his popular weekly radio program "Enjoy Japan" over the U.S. Forces' Far East Network. Now, in his latest book, Mr. Sheldon presents his own "personal and highly unofficial guide" to Japan, its people, places, and outstanding features. In chatty and intimate style he discusses, among other things, such wide-ranging topics as the geisha, the ancient gods, the emperor system, the Japanese "salary man, "resorts, cities, food, costume, language, sports, and theater. The visitor to Japan, as well as the newcomer who has arrived for a longer stay and the Westerner who is just plain interested in this Asian land will find here an assortment of interesting facts wittily presented and charmingly illustrated.
Download or read book A Cultural History of Postwar Japan written by Shunsuke Tsurumi and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-10-18 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shunsuke Tsurumi, one of Japan’s most distinguished contemporary philosophers, continues his study of the intellectual and social history of modern Japan with this penetrating analysis of popular culture in the post-war years. Japanese manga (comics), manzai (dialogues), television, advertising and popular songs are the medium for a revealing examination of the many contradictory forces at work beneath the surface of an apparently uniform and universal culture. The author argues that the iconography of these popular forms has deep and significant implication for the development of Japanese national life in the post-growth years that lie ahead.
Download or read book Sovereignty written by Hermann Heller and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-03-19 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hermann Heller was one of the leading public lawyers and legal and political theorists of the Weimar era, whose main interlocutors were two of the giants of twentieth century legal and political thought, Hans Kelsen and Carl Schmitt. In this 1927 work, Hermann Heller addresses the paradox of sovereignty. That is, how the sovereign can be both the highest authority and subject to law. Unlike Kelsen and Schmitt, who seek to dissolve the paradox, Heller sees that the tensions the paradox highlights are an essential part of a society ruled by law. Sovereignty, in the sense of national and popular sovereignty, is often perceived today as being under threat, as power devolves from nation states to international bodies, and important decisions seem increasingly made by elite-dominated institutions. Hermann Heller wrote Sovereignty in 1927 amidst the very similar tensions of the Weimar Republic. In an exploration of history, constitutional and political theory, and international law, Heller speaks clearly to our contemporary concerns, and shows that democrats must defend a legal idea of sovereignty suitable for a pluralistic world.
