Download or read book Exploring Japanese Culture Not Inscrutable After All written by Nicos Rossides and published by Troubador Publishing Ltd. This book was released on 2020-06-28 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fascinating insight into Japanese life and society from an author who knows the country extraordinarily well. An understanding of that most elusive of concepts: “Japanese-ness.” The author brings a detachment, from being an outsider, to dissect the country’s society and culture
Download or read book EXPLORING JAPANESE CULTURE NOT INSCRUTABLE AFTER ALL written by Nicos Rossides and published by Troubador Publishing Ltd. This book was released on 2020-03-17 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dr. Nicos Rossides spent seven unforgettable years in Japan from the late 1970s, when the country began to emerge as a major player on the world stage. From a humbled nation, post-war Japan metamorphosed into an example to admire and emulate. Rossides witnessed this staggering growth and the “lost decade” that followed, only for the country to rebound again as a significant global player. Rossides eventually married into a Japanese family and grew a network of close Japanese friends. In eleven succinct and entertaining essays, the Author exposes the reader to multiple lenses or perspectives on Japanese culture and society. He does this based on what he experienced first-hand and only later digested as a kaleidoscope of different cultural nuances and insights. A fascinating read for those with a sincere interest in Japan and its socio-cultural practices and traditions and, may include students and academics, international businessmen and diplomats and their accompanying families. Written in a breezy style, Dr. Rossides offers his personal vision of how contemporary Japan is changing to address the realities of life in the twenty-first century.
Download or read book Introduction to Japanese Culture written by Daniel Sosnoski and published by Tuttle Publishing. This book was released on 2013-05-21 with total page 118 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Featuring full-color photographs and illustrations thoughout, this book presents a comprehensive guide to Japanese culture. The richness of Japan's history is renowned worldwide, and the cultural heritage that its society has produced and handed down to future generations is one of Japan's greatest accomplishments. Introduction to Japanese Culture presents an overview, through 68 original and informative essays, of Japan's most notable cultural achievements, including: Holidays and Festivals--Learn how the Japanese celebrate shogatsu (New Year's Day), hanami (the Cherry Blossom Festival), and more. Drama and Art--Discover yakimono (pottery), shodo(calligraphy), haiku poetry, kabuki, and karate Cuisine--Open your eyes to foods from kome (rice) to raw fish. Home and Recreation--Explore subjects ranging from board games like "Go" to origami, kimonos, and Japanese gardens. The Japan of today is a modern, 21st-century society in nearly every regard. Even so, the elements of an earlier age are clearly visible in the country's arts, festivals, and customs. This book focuses on the essential constants that remain in present-day Japan and their counterparts in Western culture. Edited by Daniel Sosnoski, an American writer who has lived in Japan since 1985, these well-researched articles, color photographs, and line illustrations provide a compact guide to aspects of Japan that may puzzle the outside observer at first. Introduction to Japanese Culture is a wonderfully informative primer on the cultural make-up and behaviors of the Japanese, and is certain to fascinate students, tourists, and anyone who seeks to know and understand Japanese culture, etiquette, and history.
Download or read book Windows on Japan written by Bruce Roscoe and published by Algora Publishing. This book was released on 2007 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Windows on Japan is a deeply insightful commentary that alternates chapters of physical travel with ‘travel’ through perception about Japan, and challenges the logic of much Western thought about the country that perplexes as much as it pleases. The author walked a route that connects the ports of Niigata and Yokohama and from these windows on the world considers perceptions of people and place. He also assesses the effect of Japan on writers from Jonathan Swift to Oscar Wilde, Shirley MacLaine and Paul Theroux with surprising results. The trading entity that wraps its tentacles around the globe, converses in most languages and understands most customs, is perceptive and urbane and none appears more capable or cosmopolitan. Yet the individuals who inhabit these islands take refuge in their language as a private habitat, resent intrusions, and are captured by a cultural particularism that distances them from others. The author discusses this paradox, as well as environmental and linguistic issues and topics of history and literature. Along the way, he lifts a veil on the life of a snow country geisha, discusses current events with a priest and a reporter, and takes advice on becoming a Japanese. Though he is understood, it is only on return visits to places he has come to love that he wins acceptance. Notes on music delightfully enrich the narrative.
Download or read book Japanese are Like That written by Ichiro Kawasaki and published by Tuttle Publishing. This book was released on 2012-01-09 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This classic book on Japanese culture and etiquette takes a candid look at Asia's most modern, yet misread society. Here is a different book about the Japanese. A far cry from the purple prose of the starry-eyed Western visitor or the sterile style of the government gazette, The Japanese Are Like That is a down to earth scrutiny of the so called "inscrutable" Japanese. Armed with a cool head, the gift of clear expression, and an objectivity born of years of foreign residence, the author discusses with refreshing candor the national traits and ways of life of his countrymen, and compares them with those of other peoples, letting the chips fall where they may Despite his background as a career diplomat, Mr. Kawasaki in this book dispenses with top hat and striped trousers and pulls no punches in exploding some popular myths and romantic illusions about Japan and the Japanese. This book is certain to provide the reader with new insights into little known facets of Japan which very few authors have cared or dared to treat so openly.
Download or read book The New Japan written by David Ricky Matsumoto and published by Nicholas Brealey Publishing. This book was released on 2002 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book sets out to describe the anxiety and unrest that plague current Japanese society, the rift between the older, more traditional generations and the younger, more cosmopolitan and Westernized generations. Citing current academic studies and surveys, the author debunks seven common stereotypes of Japanese culture: collectivism, consciousness of others, perceptions of self, emotionality, the 'salaryman', education and lifetime employment, marriage." -- BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book Wrong about Japan written by Peter Carey and published by Random House Australia. This book was released on 2004 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 2002, the author travelled to Japan, accompanied by his twelve-year-old son Charley, on a special kind of pilgrimage. In a stunning memoir-cum-travelogue he charts this journey, inspired by Charley's passion for manga and anime.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of the Latin American Novel written by Juan E. De Castro and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-03-07 with total page 889 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Latin American novel burst onto the international literary scene with the Boom era--led by Julio Cortázar, Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, and Mario Vargas Llosa--and has influenced writers throughout the world ever since. García Márquez and Vargas Llosa each received the Nobel Prize in literature, and many of the best-known contemporary novelists are inspired by the region's fiction. Indeed, magical realism, the style associated with García Márquez, has left a profound imprint on African American, African, Asian, Anglophone Caribbean, and Latinx writers. Furthermore, post-Boom literature continues to garner interest, from the novels of Roberto Bolaño to the works of César Aira and Chico Buarque, to those of younger novelists such as Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Alejandro Zambra, and Valeria Luiselli. Yet, for many readers, the Latin American novel is often read in a piecemeal manner delinked from the traditions, authors, and social contexts that help explain its evolution. The Oxford Handbook of the Latin American Novel draws literary, historical, and social connections so that readers will come away understanding this literature as a rich and compelling canon. In forty-five chapters by leading and innovative scholars, the Handbook provides a comprehensive introduction, helping readers to see the region's intrinsic heterogeneity--for only with a broader view can one fully appreciate García Márquez or Bolaño. This volume charts the literary tradition of the Latin American novel from its beginnings during colonial times, its development during the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century, and its flourishing from the 1960s onward. Furthermore, the Handbook explores the regions, representations of identity, narrative trends, and authors that make this literature so diverse and fascinating, reflecting on the Latin American novel's position in world literature.
Download or read book Never Let Me Go written by Sachin Garg and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book An Artist of the Floating World written by Kazuo Ishiguro and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-09-05 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and author of the Booker Prize–winning novel The Remains of the Day In the face of the misery in his homeland, the artist Masuji Ono was unwilling to devote his art solely to the celebration of physical beauty. Instead, he put his work in the service of the imperialist movement that led Japan into World War II. Now, as the mature Ono struggles through the aftermath of that war, his memories of his youth and of the "floating world"—the nocturnal world of pleasure, entertainment, and drink—offer him both escape and redemption, even as they punish him for betraying his early promise. Indicted by society for its defeat and reviled for his past aesthetics, he relives the passage through his personal history that makes him both a hero and a coward but, above all, a human being.
Download or read book The Street of a Thousand Blossoms written by Gail Tsukiyama and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2007-09-04 with total page 455 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gail Tsukiyama's The Street of a Thousand Blossoms is a powerfully moving masterpiece about tradition and change, loss and renewal, and love and family from a glorious storyteller at the height of her powers. It is Tokyo in 1939. On the Street of a Thousand Blossoms, two orphaned brothers dream of a future firmly rooted in tradition. The older boy, Hiroshi, shows early signs of promise at the national obsession of sumo wrestling, while Kenji is fascinated by the art of Noh theater masks. But as the ripples of war spread to their quiet neighborhood, the brothers must put their dreams on hold—and forge their own paths in a new Japan. Meanwhile, the two young daughters of a renowned sumo master find their lives increasingly intertwined with the fortunes of their father's star pupil, Hiroshi.
Download or read book Excess Baggage written by Karen Ma and published by China Books & Periodicals. This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With vivid prose, Karen Ma takes us on a momentous journey with a Chinese family as it tries to grow new roots in a foreign land."-Geling Yan, author of Banquet Bug, White Snake, and The Flowers of War Karen Ma's debut novel chronicles two Chinese sisters, one raised in China during the desolate years of the Cultural Revolution; the other in Japan during the freewheeling years of bubble capitalism. They reunite as adults in Tokyo in the early 1990s, and as the sisters circle warily, their distrust grows, fueled by family lies and secrets. Exploring themes of identity, alienation, love, jealousy, and family obligations in the face of cultural and geographic adversity, ultimately each must confront a fundamental question: what's the meaning of home when your roots aren't secure? Karen Ma is the author of The Modern Madame Butterfly (Tuttle Publishing, 2006). She has lived a combined twenty years in China and Japan working as a writer and journalist."
Download or read book Japanthem Countercultural Experiences Cross Cultural Remixes written by Jillian Marshall and published by Three Rooms Press. This book was released on 2022-04-12 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Both personally revealing and informed by years of immersive research, JAPANTHEM: Countercultural Experiences, Cross-Cultural Remixes is filled with honest vignettes that delve beyond the aspects of Japanese culture that have captivated the western world to portray a society's deep relationship with music, and what it means to listen and understand as a cultural outsider. Informed by a decade of back-and-forth across the Pacific and years of immersive research for a doctoral thesis in ethnomusicology, Jillian Marshall explores the music of contemporary Japan through a prism of serendipity, romance, learning life lessons the hard way, and an insatiable curiosity for the human spirit. The book's twenty vignettes--including what it's like to be subtly bullied by your Buddhist dance teacher, go to a secret rave in woods near Mt. Fuji, meet a pop star at a basement club, and experience a nuclear disaster unfold by the minute--are based on first-hand experiences, and illustrate music's fascinating relationship to Japanese society with honesty, intelligence, and humor. JAPANTHEM offers a uniquely nuanced portrayal of life in the Land of the Rising Sun--while encouraging us to listen more deeply in (and to) Japan in the process.
Download or read book The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet written by David Mitchell and published by Knopf Canada. This book was released on 2010-06-29 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By the New York Times bestselling author of The Bone Clocks and Cloud Atlas | Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize In 2007, Time magazine named him one of the most influential novelists in the world. He has twice been short-listed for the Man Booker Prize. The New York Times Book Review called him simply “a genius.” Now David Mitchell lends fresh credence to The Guardian’s claim that “each of his books seems entirely different from that which preceded it.” The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is a stunning departure for this brilliant, restless, and wildly ambitious author, a giant leap forward by even his own high standards. A bold and epic novel of a rarely visited point in history, it is a work as exquisitely rendered as it is irresistibly readable. The year is 1799, the place Dejima in Nagasaki Harbor, the “high-walled, fan-shaped artificial island” that is the Japanese Empire’s single port and sole window onto the world, designed to keep the West at bay; the farthest outpost of the war-ravaged Dutch East Indies Company; and a de facto prison for the dozen foreigners permitted to live and work there. To this place of devious merchants, deceitful interpreters, costly courtesans, earthquakes, and typhoons comes Jacob de Zoet, a devout and resourceful young clerk who has five years in the East to earn a fortune of sufficient size to win the hand of his wealthy fiancée back in Holland. But Jacob’s original intentions are eclipsed after a chance encounter with Orito Aibagawa, the disfigured daughter of a samurai doctor and midwife to the city’s powerful magistrate. The borders between propriety, profit, and pleasure blur until Jacob finds his vision clouded, one rash promise made and then fatefully broken. The consequences will extend beyond Jacob’s worst imaginings. As one cynical colleague asks, “Who ain’t a gambler in the glorious Orient, with his very life?” A magnificent mix of luminous writing, prodigious research, and heedless imagination, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is the most impressive achievement of its eminent author. Praise for The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet “A page-turner . . . [David] Mitchell’s masterpiece; and also, I am convinced, a masterpiece of our time.”—Richard Eder, The Boston Globe “An achingly romantic story of forbidden love . . . Mitchell’s incredible prose is on stunning display. . . . A novel of ideas, of longing, of good and evil and those who fall somewhere in between [that] confirms Mitchell as one of the more fascinating and fearless writers alive.”—Dave Eggers, The New York Times Book Review “The novelist who’s been showing us the future of fiction has published a classic, old-fashioned tale . . . an epic of sacrificial love, clashing civilizations and enemies who won’t rest until whole family lines have been snuffed out.”—Ron Charles, The Washington Post “By any standards, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is a formidable marvel.”—James Wood, The New Yorker “A beautiful novel, full of life and authenticity, atmosphere and characters that breathe.”—Maureen Corrigan, NPR
Download or read book Orienting written by Pallavi Aiyar and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2021-08-03 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How is Tokyo, a city of thirty million people, so safe that six-year-old children commute to school on their own? Why are there no trashcans in Japanese cities? Why are Ganesha idols in Japanese temples hidden from public view? Globe-trotting journalist Pallavi Aiyar moves to Japan and takes an in-depth look at the island country including its culinary, sanitary and floral idiosyncrasies. Steering through the many (mis)adventures that come from learning a new language, imbibing new cultural etiquette, and asking difficult questions about race, Aiyar explores why Japan and India find it hard to work together despite sharing a long civilizational history. Part travelogue, part reportage, Orienting answers questions that have long confounded the rest of the world with Aiyar's trademark humour. Tackling both the significant and the trivial, the quirky and the quotidian, here is an Indian's account of Japan that is as thought-provoking as it is charming.
Download or read book American Stories written by Kafū Nagai and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2000-03-30 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nagai Kafu is one of the greatest modern Japanese writers, but until now his classic collection, American Stories, based on his sojourn from Japan to Washington State, Michigan, and New York City in the early years of the twentieth century, has never been available in English. Here, with a detailed and insightful introduction, is an elegant translation of Kafu's perceptive and lyrical account. Like de Tocqueville a century before, Kafu casts a fresh, keen eye on vibrant and varied America—world fairs, concert halls, and college campuses; saloons, the immigrant underclass, and red-light districts. Many of his vignettes involve encounters with fellow Japanese or Chinese immigrants, some of whom are poorly paid laborers facing daily discrimination. The stories paint a broad landscape of the challenges of American life for the poor, the foreign born, and the disaffected, peopled with crisp individual portraits that reveal the daily disappointments and occasional euphorias of modern life. Translator Mitsuko Iriye's introduction provides important cultural and biographical background about Kafu's upbringing in rapidly modernizing Japan, as well as literary context for this collection. In the first story, "Night Talk in a Cabin," three young men sailing from Japan to Seattle each reveal how poor prospects, shattered confidence, or a broken heart has driven him to seek a better life abroad. In "Atop the Hill," the narrator meets a fellow Japanese expatriate at a small midwestern religious college, who slowly reveals his complex reasons for leaving behind his wife in Japan. Caught between the pleasures of America's cities and the stoicism of its small towns, he wonders if he can ever return home. Kafu plays with the contradictions and complexities of early twentieth-century America, revealing the tawdry, poor, and mundane underside of New York's glamour in "Ladies of the Night" while celebrating the ingenuity, cosmopolitanism, and freedom of the American city in "Two Days in Chicago." At once sensitive and witty, elegant and gritty, these stories provide a nuanced outsider's view of the United States and a perfect entrance into modern Japanese literature.
Download or read book The Book that Made Me written by Judith Ridge and published by Candlewick Press. This book was released on 2017-03-14 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays by popular children's authors reveal the books that shaped their personal and literary lives, explaining how the stories they loved influenced them creatively, politically, and intellectually.
