Download or read book Peak Japan written by Brad Glosserman and published by Georgetown University Press. This book was released on 2019-04-01 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The post-Cold War era has been difficult for Japan. A country once heralded for evolving a superior form of capitalism and seemingly ready to surpass the United States as the world’s largest economy lost its way in the early 1990s. The bursting of the bubble in 1991 ushered in a period of political and economic uncertainty that has lasted for over two decades. There were hopes that the triple catastrophe of March 11, 2011—a massive earthquake, tsunami, and accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant—would break Japan out of its torpor and spur the country to embrace change that would restart the growth and optimism of the go-go years. But several years later, Japan is still waiting for needed transformation, and Brad Glosserman concludes that the fact that even disaster has not spurred radical enough reform reveals something about Japan's political system and Japanese society. Glosserman explains why Japan has not and will not change, concluding that Japanese horizons are shrinking and that the Japanese public has given up the bold ambitions of previous generations and its current leadership. This is a critical insight into contemporary Japan and one that should shape our thinking about this vital country.

Download or read book The Great Kanto Earthquake and the Chimera of National Reconstruction in Japan written by J. Charles Schenking and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2013-07-09 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In September 1923, a magnitude 7.9 earthquake devastated eastern Japan, killing more than 120,000 people and leaving two million homeless. Using a rich array of source material, J. Charles Schencking tells for the first time the graphic tale of Tokyo's destruction and rebirth. In emotive prose, he documents how the citizens of Tokyo experienced this unprecedented calamity and explores the ways in which it rattled people's deep-seated anxieties about modernity. While explaining how and why the disaster compelled people to reflect on Japanese society, he also examines how reconstruction encouraged the capital's inhabitants to entertain new types of urbanism as they rebuilt their world. Some residents hoped that a grandiose metropolis, reflecting new values, would rise from the ashes of disaster-ravaged Tokyo. Many, however, desired a quick return of the city they once called home. Opportunistic elites advocated innovative state infrastructure to better manage the daily lives of Tokyo residents. Others focused on rejuvenating society--morally, economically, and spiritually--to combat the perceived degeneration of Japan. Schencking explores the inspiration behind these dreams and the extent to which they were realized. He investigates why Japanese citizens from all walks of life responded to overtures for renewal with varying degrees of acceptance, ambivalence, and resistance. His research not only sheds light on Japan's experience with and interpretation of the earthquake but challenges widespread assumptions that disasters unite stricken societies, creating a "blank slate" for radical transformation. National reconstruction in the wake of the Great Kanto Earthquake, Schencking demonstrates, proved to be illusive.

Download or read book Japan s Great Stagnation and Abenomics written by Masazumi Wakatabe and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-04-23 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the global Great Recession continues, policymakers, economists, and the public are turning to Japenses economic revitalization for answers. Paul Krugman, Nobel laureate in Economics, once said that Japan was a "full-dress rehearsal for the current crisis." Japan has experienced and valiantly overcome the burst of their Bubble economy, financial crisis, lukewarm recovery, and more than a decade-long deflation and stagnation to become one of the most stable economies today. Japan's Great Stagnation and Abenomics reveals the striking similarities of economic events and policies between the Great Stagnation and the current Great Recession. It also suggests possible dangers ahead and way-outs in the future. This exciting new volume is based on Wakatabe's expertise in economic history and the history of economic ideas and argues that any policy decision is related to cultural ideology. An investigation into the relationship between cultural ideology and policy helps us better understand the policy-making process.

Download or read book Learning from Megadisasters written by Federica Ranghieri and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2014-06-26 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While not all natural disasters can be avoided, their impact on a population can be mitigated through effective planning and preparedness. These are the lessons to be learned from Japan's own megadisaster: the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011, the fi rst disaster ever recorded that included an earthquake, a tsunami, a nuclear power plant accident, a power supply failure, and a large-scale disruption of supply chains. It is a sad fact that poor communities are often hardest hit and take the longest to recover from disaster. Disaster risk management (DRM) should therefore be taken into account as a major development challenge, and countries must shift from a tradition of response to a culture of prevention and resilience. Learning from Megadisasters: Lessons from the Great East Japan Earthquake consolidates a set of 36 Knowledge Notes, research results of a joint study undertaken by the Government of Japan and the World Bank. These notes highlight key lessons learned in seven DRM thematic clusters—structural measures; nonstructural measures; emergency response; reconstruction planning; hazard and risk information and decision making; the economics of disaster risk, risk management, and risk fi nancing; and recovery and relocation. Aimed at sharing Japanese cutting-edge knowledge with practitioners and decision makers, this book provides valuable guidance to other disaster-prone countries for mainstreaming DRM in their development policies and weathering their own natural disasters.

Download or read book The Era of Great Disasters written by Makoto Iokibe and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2020-09-25 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Era of Great Disasters examines modern disaster response in Japan, from the changing earthquake preparations and regulations, to immediate emergency procedures from the national, prefectural, and city levels, and finally the evolving efforts of rebuilding and preparing for the next great disaster in the hopes of minimizing their tragic effects. This book focuses on three major earthquakes from Japan’s modern history. The first is the 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake, which struck the capital region. The second is the 1995 Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake, affecting the area between Kobe and Osaka. The third is the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, the magnitude 9.0 quake that struck off the Pacific coast of the Tōhoku region, causing a devastating tsunami and nuclear accident. While the events of (and around) each of these earthquakes are unique, Professor Iokibe brings his deep expertise and personal experience to each disaster, unveiling not only the disasters themselves but the humanity underneath. In each case, he gives attention and gratitude to those who labored to save lives and restore the communities affected, from the individuals on the scene to government officials and military personnel and emergency responders, in the hope that we might learn from the past and move forward with greater wisdom, knowledge, and common purpose.

Download or read book Performing the Great Peace written by Luke S. Roberts and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2015-03-31 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Performing the Great Peace offers a cultural approach to understanding the politics of the Tokugawa period, at the same time deconstructing some of the assumptions of modern national historiographies. Deploying the political terms uchi (inside), omote (ritual interface), and naisho (informal negotiation)—all commonly used in the Tokugawa period—Luke Roberts explores how daimyo and the Tokugawa government understood political relations and managed politics in terms of spatial autonomy, ritual submission, and informal negotiation. Roberts suggests as well that a layered hierarchy of omote and uchi relations strongly influenced politics down to the village and household level, a method that clarifies many seeming anomalies in the Tokugawa order. He analyzes in one chapter how the identities of daimyo and domains differed according to whether they were facing the Tokugawa or speaking to members of the domain and daimyo household: For example, a large domain might be identified as a“country” by insiders and as a “private territory” in external discourse. In another chapter he investigates the common occurrence of daimyo who remained formally alive to the government months or even years after they had died in order that inheritance issues could be managed peacefully within their households. The operation of the court system in boundary disputes is analyzed as are the “illegal” enshrinements of daimyo inside domains that were sometimes used to construct forms of domain-state Shinto. Performing the Great Peace’s convincing analyses and insightful conceptual framework will benefit historians of not only the Tokugawa and Meiji periods, but Japan in general and others seeking innovative approaches to premodern history.

Download or read book Imaging Disaster written by Gennifer Weisenfeld and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2012-11-14 with total page 494 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on one landmark catastrophic event in the history of an emerging modern nation—the Great Kanto Earthquake that devastated Tokyo and surrounding areas in 1923—this fascinating volume examines the history of the visual production of the disaster. The Kanto earthquake triggered cultural responses that ran the gamut from voyeuristic and macabre thrill to the romantic sublime, media spectacle to sacred space, mournful commemoration to emancipatory euphoria, and national solidarity to racist vigilantism and sociopolitical critique. Looking at photography, cinema, painting, postcards, sketching, urban planning, and even scientific visualizations, Weisenfeld demonstrates how visual culture has powerfully mediated the evolving historical understanding of this major national disaster, ultimately enfolding mourning and memory into modernization.

Download or read book Japan and the Great Divergence written by Penelope Francks and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 2016-10-27 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text offers an accessible guide to the ways in which our growing knowledge of development in early-modern and modernising Japan can throw light on the paths that industrialisation was eventually to take across the globe. It has long been taken as read that the industrial revolution was the product of some form of ‘European superiority’ dating back to at least early-modern times. In The Great Divergence, Kenneth Pomeranz challenged this assumption on the basis of his evidence that parts of eighteenth-century China were as well placed as northern Europe to achieve sustained economic growth, thus igniting what has been called ‘the single most important debate in recent global history’. Japan, as the only non-Western country to experience significant industrialisation before the Second World War, ought to provide crucial – and intriguing – evidence in the debate, but analysis of the Japanese case in such a context has remained limited. This work suggests ways of re-interpreting Japanese economic history in the light of the debate, so arguing that global historians and scholars of Japan have in fact much to say to each other within the comparative framework that the Great Divergence provides.

Download or read book Japan and the World Since 1868 written by Michael A. Barnhart and published by Hodder Education Publishers. This book was released on 1995 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A survey of Japan's foreign relations since 1868. Far from being a monolithic state, Japan, in this study, emerges as one deeply divided in its image and hopes for itself and its place in the world, divisions that have persisted from the Meiji Restoration

Download or read book War and National Reinvention written by Frederick R. Dickinson and published by Harvard Univ Asia Center. This book was released on 1999 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For Japan, as one of the victorious allies, World War I meant territorial gains in China and the Pacific. At the end of the war, however, Japan discovered that in modeling itself on imperial Germany since the nineteenth century, it had perhaps been imitating the wrong national example. Japanese policy debates during World War I, particularly the clash between proponents of greater democratization and those who argued for military expansion, thus became part of the ongoing discussion of national identity among Japanese elites. This study links two sets of concerns--the focus of recent studies of the nation on language, culture, education, and race; and the emphasis of diplomatic history on international developments--to show how political, diplomatic, and cultural concerns work together to shape national identity.

Download or read book Japan s Great Stagnation written by W. R. Garside and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2012-01-01 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Recent events have rendered Japan's lost decades all the more relevant to the rest of us. Rick Garside, in this wide-ranging and accessible account, explores the political economy of Japan's great stagnation with an eye toward describing how other advanced economies can avoid going down the same path.' – Barry Eichengreen, University of California, Berkeley, US 'Professor Garside's timely book transcends the national preoccupation suggested by its title. From one viewpoint this is a case study (admittedly on a grand scale) of the experience of one country in one historical period. But in analyzing the dynamic relationship between Japan's post-war economic miracle and its chronic stagnation from the 1990's he offers a penetrating insight into the links between profound and embedded institutional and ideological influences, global upheaval, and almost disastrous national economic performance. Hence, Japan's Great Stagnation – the unfolding story of that country's declining experience from masterful economic power to seeming economic paralysis – provides us with an all-too familiar scenario with which to approach the contemporaneous ills of the world's developed economies. The interaction between banking crises, unwieldy institutions (especially, but not only, financial institutions), policy frailties, and stagnating demand – all conspired to create crisis and then handicap or prevent recovery. And the familiarity of the story is aggravated by the global financial crisis which now threatens to engulf us. History never fully repeats itself, but Professor Garside's illuminating examination of Japan's recent experiences must surely provide important points of relevance for the world's current malaise. He is to be congratulated on the depth and scope of what he has achieved – and for its relevance to what we are experiencing.' – Barry Supple, University of Cambridge, UK This timely book presents a critical examination of the developmental premises of Japan's high-growth success and its subsequent drift into recession, stagnation and piecemeal reform. The country, which within a few decades of wartime defeat mounted a serious challenge to American hegemony, appeared incapable of fully adjusting to shifting economic circumstance once the impulses of catch-up growth and the good fortune of an accommodating international environment faded. The banking crises, spiralling government debt, and stagnant growth experienced by major industrialized nations in recent years have evoked renewed interest in Japan's economic denouement since the 1990s. To many, Japan's drift into recession and financial crisis during the early 1990s, and later into stagnation and prolonged deflation, demonstrated precisely what not to do when fashioning remedial policy. This book details the legacies of Japan's high-growth success and how they affected Japan's capacity to cope with shifting national and international circumstance from the 1980s. It reviews the contentious debates over the causes and consequences of the 'bubble economy' and the 'lost decade', and assesses the extent to which reforms since 1997 have been compromised by lingering attachments to Japan's distinctive post-war political economy. Providing an analytical overview of both the high growth and recessionary periods and of subsequent reform agendas, this timely book will appeal to students, academics and researchers of economic history, development and politics, particularly those with an interest in Japan and Asian studies more generally.

Download or read book Just Enough written by Azby Brown and published by Stone Bridge Press, Inc.. This book was released on 2022-06-28 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How the mindset of traditional Japanese society can guide our own efforts to lead a green lifestyle today. If we want to live sustainably, how should we feel about nature? About waste? About our forests and rivers? About food? Just Enough is a book of stories and sketches that give valuable insight into what it is like to live in a sustainable society by describing life in Japan some two hundred years ago, during the late Edo period, when cities and villages faced many of the same environmental challenges we do today and met them beautifully and inventively.

Download or read book The Four Great Temples written by Donald F. McCallum and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2008-11-30 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his detailed analysis of the four temples, McCallum considers historiographical issues, settings and layouts, foundations, tiles, relics, and icons and allows readers to follow their chronological evolutions.

Download or read book The Holy Grail of Macroeconomics written by Richard C. Koo and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2011-11-21 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The revised edition of this highly acclaimed work presents crucial lessons from Japan's recession that could aid the US and other economies as they struggle to recover from the current financial crisis. This book is about Japan's 15-year long recession and how it affected current theoretical thinking about its causes and cures. It has a detailed explanation on what happened to Japan, but the discoveries made are so far-reaching that a large portion of economics literature will have to be modified to accommodate another half to the macroeconomic spectrum of possibilities that conventional theorists have overlooked. The author developed the idea of yin and yang business cycles where the conventional world of profit maximization is the yang and the world of balance sheet recession, where companies are minimizing debt, is the yin. Once so divided, many varied theories developed in macro economics since the 1930s can be nicely categorized into a single comprehensive theory- The Holy Grail of Macro Economics

Download or read book The Japanese Empire written by S. C. M. Paine and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-06 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An accessible, analytical survey of the rise and fall of Imperial Japan in the context of its grand strategy to transform itself into a great power.

Download or read book The First Ghosts written by Irving Finkel and published by Hodder & Stoughton. This book was released on 2021-11-11 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'It's enthralling stuff, mixing the scholarly with the accessible and placing storytelling right at the heart of the human experience.' - History Revealed 'A fascinating journey' - Yorkshire Post 'Marvellous...Finkel is an expert in Mesopotamian cultures at the British Museum, and is one of the most clever, and nicest, of people it has ever been my pleasure to encounter...A fascinating journey' - The Scotsman There are few things more in common across cultures than the belief in ghosts. Ghosts inhabit something of the very essence of what it is to be human. Whether we personally 'believe' or not, we are all aware of ghosts and the rich mythologies and rituals surrounding them. They have inspired, fascinated and frightened us for centuries - yet most of us are only familiar with the vengeful apparitions of Shakespeare, or the ghastly spectres haunting the pages of 19th century gothic literature. But their origins are much, much older... The First Ghosts: Most Ancient of Legacies takes us back to the very beginning. A world-renowned authority on cuneiform, the form of writing on clay tablets which dates back to 3400BC, Irving Finkel has embarked upon an ancient ghost hunt, scouring these tablets to unlock the secrets of the Sumerians, Babylonians and Assyrians to breathe new life into the first ghost stories ever written. In The First Ghosts, he uncovers an extraordinarily rich seam of ancient spirit wisdom which has remained hidden for nearly 4000 years, covering practical details of how to live with ghosts, how to get rid of them and bring them back, and how to avoid becoming one, as well as exploring more philosophical questions: what are ghosts, why does the idea of them remain so powerful despite the lack of concrete evidence, and what do they tell us about being human?

Download or read book The Great Wave written by Christopher Benfey and published by Random House. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the United States entered the Gilded Age after the Civil War, argues cultural historian Christopher Benfey, the nation lost its philosophical moorings and looked eastward to “Old Japan,” with its seemingly untouched indigenous culture, for balance and perspective. Japan, meanwhile, was trying to reinvent itself as a more cosmopolitan, modern state, ultimately transforming itself, in the course of twenty-five years, from a feudal backwater to an international power. This great wave of historical and cultural reciprocity between the two young nations, which intensified during the late 1800s, brought with it some larger-than-life personalities, as the lure of unknown foreign cultures prompted pilgrimages back and forth across the Pacific. In The Great Wave, Benfey tells the story of the tightly knit group of nineteenth-century travelers—connoisseurs, collectors, and scientists—who dedicated themselves to exploring and preserving Old Japan. As Benfey writes, “A sense of urgency impelled them, for they were convinced—Darwinians that they were—that their quarry was on the verge of extinction.” These travelers include Herman Melville, whose Pequod is “shadowed by hostile and mysterious Japan”; the historian Henry Adams and the artist John La Farge, who go to Japan on an art-collecting trip and find exotic adventures; Lafcadio Hearn, who marries a samurai’s daughter and becomes Japan’s preeminent spokesman in the West; Mabel Loomis Todd, the first woman to climb Mt. Fuji; Edward Sylvester Morse, who becomes the world’s leading expert on both Japanese marine life and Japanese architecture; the astronomer Percival Lowell, who spends ten years in the East and writes seminal works on Japanese culture before turning his restless attention to life on Mars; and President (and judo enthusiast) Theodore Roosevelt. As well, we learn of famous Easterners come West, including Kakuzo Okakura, whose The Book of Tea became a cult favorite, and Shuzo Kuki, a leading philosopher of his time, who studied with Heidegger and tutored Sartre. Finally, as Benfey writes, his meditation on cultural identity “seeks to capture a shared mood in both the Gilded Age and the Meiji Era, amid superficial promise and prosperity, of an overmastering sense of precariousness and impending peril.”