Download or read book Imagining Japan written by Robert N. Bellah and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2003-02-26 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Bellah is a sociologist with a grand vision of history, deeply concerned with the twists and turns of religious values, weaving pre-modern religious thinking into the debates of modernization and modernity. He takes a reflective turn with Imagining Japan, evidencing his profound concern with religious evolution."—Tetsuo Najita, University of Chicago "One of the most original attempts to understand some of the psychological and symbolic roots of the central problems in Japanese history. Bellah masterfully brings together intellectual and institutional dimensions of Japan, making a very important contribution to Japanese Studies."—S. N. Eisenstadt, Professor Emeritus at Hebrew University and author of Japanese Civilization: A Comparative View
Download or read book Imagining Japan in Post war East Asia written by Paul Morris and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-03-26 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the decades since her defeat in the Second World War, Japan has continued to loom large in the national imagination of many of her East Asian neighbours. While for many, Japan still conjures up images of rampant military brutality, at different times and in different communities, alternative images of the Japanese ‘Other’ have vied for predominance – in ways that remain poorly understood, not least within Japan itself. Imagining Japan in Postwar East Asia analyses the portrayal of Japan in the societies of East and Southeast Asia, and asks how and why this has changed in recent decades, and what these changing images of Japan reveal about the ways in which these societies construct their own identities. It examines the role played by an imagined ‘Japan’ in the construction of national selves across the East Asian region, as mediated through a broad range of media ranging from school curricula and textbooks to film, television, literature and comics. Commencing with an extensive thematic and comparative overview chapter, the volume also includes contributions focusing specifically on Chinese societies (the mainland PRC, Hong Kong and Taiwan), Korea, the Philippines, Malaysia and Singapore. These studies show how changes in the representation of Japan have been related to political, social and cultural shifts within the societies of East Asia – and in particular to the ways in which these societies have imagined or constructed their own identities. Bringing together contributors working in the fields of education, anthropology, history, sociology, political science and media studies, this interdisciplinary volume will be of interest to all students and scholars concerned with issues of identity, politics and culture in the societies of East Asia, and to those seeking a deeper understanding of Japan’s fraught relations with its regional neighbours.
Download or read book Ottomans Imagining Japan written by R. Worringer and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-01-29 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today's "clash of civilizations" between the Islamic world and the West are in many ways rooted in 19th-century resistance to Western hegemony. This compellingly argued and carefully researched transnational study details the ways in which Japan served as a model for Ottomans in attaining "non-Western" modernity in a Western-dominated global order.
Download or read book Re imagining Japan after Fukushima written by Tamaki Mihic and published by ANU Press. This book was released on 2020-03-11 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 2011 Tōhoku earthquake, tsunami and Fukushima nuclear disaster (collectively referred to as ‘3.11’, the date of the earthquake), had a lasting impact on Japan’s identity and global image. In its immediate aftermath, mainstream media presented the country as a disciplined, resilient and composed nation, united in the face of a natural disaster. However, 3.11 also drew worldwide attention to the negative aspects of Japanese government and society, thought to have caused the unresolved situation at Fukushima. Spurred by heightened emotions following the triple disaster, the Japanese became increasingly polarised between these two views of how to represent themselves. How did literature and popular culture respond to this dilemma? Re-imagining Japan after Fukushima attempts to answer that question by analysing how Japan was portrayed in post-3.11 fiction. Texts are selected from the Japanese, English and French languages, and the portrayals are also compared with those from non-fiction discourse. This book argues that cultural responses to 3.11 had a significant role to play in re-imagining Japan after Fukushima.
Download or read book Imagining Exile in Heian Japan written by Jonathan Stockdale and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2015-02-28 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For over three hundred years during the Heian period (794–1185), execution was customarily abolished in favor of banishment. During the same period, exile emerged widely as a concern within literature and legend, in poetry and diaries, and in the cultic imagination, as expressed in oracles and revelations. While exile was thus one sanction available to the state, it was also something more: a powerful trope through which members of court society imagined the banishment of gods and heavenly beings, of legendary and literary characters, and of historical figures, some transformed into spirits. This compelling and well-researched volume is the first in English to explore the rich resonance of exile in the cultural life of the Japanese court. Rejecting the notion that such narratives merely reflect a timeless literary archetype, Jonathan Stockdale shows instead that in every case narratives of exile emerged from particular historical circumstances—moments in which elites in the capital sought to reveal and to re-imagine their world and the circulation of power within it. By exploring the relationship of banishment to the structures of inclusion and exclusion upon which Heian court society rested, Stockdale moves beyond the historiographical discussion of "center and margin" to offer instead a theory of exile itself. Stockdale's arguments are situated in astute and careful readings of Heian sources. His analysis of a literary narrative, the Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, for example, shows how Kaguyahime's exile from the "Capital of the Moon" to earth implicitly portrays the world of the Heian court as a polluted periphery. His exploration of one of the most well-known historical instances of banishment, that of Sugawara Michizane, illustrates how the political sanction of exile could be met with a religious rejoinder through which an exiled noble is reinstated in divine form, first as a vengeful spirit and then as a deity worshipped at the highest levels of court society. Imagining Exile in Heian Japan is a model of interdisciplinary scholarship that will appeal to anyone interested in the interwoven connections among the literature, politics, law, and religion of early and classical Japan.
Download or read book Re Imaging Japanese Women written by Anne E. Imamura and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1996-07-31 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Re-Imaging Japanese Women takes a revealing look at women whose voices have only recently begun to be heard in Japanese society: politicians, practitioners of traditional arts, writers, radicals, wives, mothers, bar hostesses, department store and blue-collar workers. This unique collection of essays gives a broad, interdisciplinary view of contemporary Japanese women while challenging readers to see the development of Japanese women's lives against the backdrop of domestic and global change. These essays provide a "second generation" analysis of roles, issues and social change. The collection brings up to date the work begun in Gail Lee Bernstein's Recreating Japanese Women, 1600-1945 (California, 1991), exploring disparities between the current range of images of Japanese women and the reality behind the choices women make.
Download or read book Otaku and the Struggle for Imagination in Japan written by Patrick W. Galbraith and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2019-12-06 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From computer games to figurines and maid cafes, men called “otaku” develop intense fan relationships with “cute girl” characters from manga, anime, and related media and material in contemporary Japan. While much of the Japanese public considers the forms of character love associated with “otaku” to be weird and perverse, the Japanese government has endeavored to incorporate “otaku” culture into its branding of “Cool Japan.” In Otaku and the Struggle for Imagination in Japan, Patrick W. Galbraith explores the conflicting meanings of “otaku” culture and its significance to Japanese popular culture, masculinity, and the nation. Tracing the history of “otaku” and “cute girl” characters from their origins in the 1970s to his recent fieldwork in Akihabara, Tokyo (“the Holy Land of Otaku”), Galbraith contends that the discourse surrounding “otaku” reveals tensions around contested notions of gender, sexuality, and ways of imagining the nation that extend far beyond Japan. At the same time, in their relationships with characters and one another, “otaku” are imagining and creating alternative social worlds.
Download or read book Before the Nation written by Susan L Burns and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2003-12-02 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVShows how a modern nationalism was constructed in Japan from existing notions of community, at a time before the idea of “nation.”/div
Download or read book Imagining Prostitution in Modern Japan 1850 1913 written by Ann Marie L. Davis and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This cultural history examines representations of pleasure work during Japan's transformation into a modern nation-state. It traces the figure of the prostitute in the context of Japanese nation- and empire-building immediately before and during the Meiji era.
Download or read book Imagination without Borders written by Laura Hein and published by U of M Center For Japanese Studies. This book was released on 2010-01-08 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tomiyama Taeko, a Japanese visual artist born in 1921, is changing the way World War II is remembered in Japan, Asia, and the world. Her work deals with complicated moral and emotional issues of empire and war responsibility that cannot be summed up in simple slogans, which makes it compelling for more than just its considerable beauty. Japanese today are still grappling with the effects of World War II, and, largely because of the inconsistent and ambivalent actions of the government, they are widely seen as resistant to accepting responsibility for their nation’s violent actions against others during the decades of colonialism and war. Yet some individuals, such as Tomiyama, have produced nuanced and reflective commentaries on those experiences, and on the difficulty of disentangling herself from the priorities of the nation despite her lifelong political dissent. Tomiyama’s sophisticated visual commentary on Japan’s history—and on the global history in which Asia is embedded—provides a compelling guide through the difficult terrain of modern historical remembrance, in a distinctively Japanese voice.
Download or read book Imagining China in Tokugawa Japan written by Wai-ming Ng and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2019-02-28 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pioneering study of the localization of Chinese culture in early modern Japan, using legends, classics, and historical terms as case studies. While current scholarship on Tokugawa Japan (1603–1868) tends to see China as either a model or “the Other,” Wai-ming Ng’s pioneering and ambitious study offers a new perspective by suggesting that Chinese culture also functioned as a collection of “cultural building blocks” that were selectively introduced and then modified to fit into the Japanese tradition. Chinese terms and forms survived, but the substance and the spirit were made Japanese. This borrowing of Chinese terms and forms to express Japanese ideas and feelings could result in the same things having different meanings in China and Japan, and this process can be observed in the ways in which Tokugawa Japanese reinterpreted Chinese legends, Confucian classics, and historical terms. Ng breaks down the longstanding dichotomies between model and “the other,” civilization and barbarism, as well as center and periphery that have been used to define Sino-Japanese cultural exchange. He argues that Japanese culture was by no means merely an extended version of Chinese culture, and Japan’s uses and interpretations of Chinese elements were not simply deviations from the original teachings. By replacing a Sinocentric perspective with a cross-cultural one, Ng’s study represents a step forward in the study of Tokugawa intellectual history. Wai-ming Ng is Professor of Japanese Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is the author of The I Ching in Tokugawa Thought and Culture.
Download or read book Imagining Japan written by Robert Neelly Bellah and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Bellah is a sociologist with a grand vision of history, deeply concerned with the twists and turns of religious values, weaving pre-modern religious thinking into the debates of modernization and modernity. He takes a reflective turn with Imagining Japan, evidencing his profound concern with religious evolution."--Tetsuo Najita, University of Chicago "One of the most original attempts to understand some of the psychological and symbolic roots of the central problems in Japanese history. Bellah masterfully brings together intellectual and institutional dimensions of Japan, making a very important contribution to Japanese Studies."--S. N. Eisenstadt, Professor Emeritus at Hebrew University and author of Japanese Civilization: A Comparative View
Download or read book Imagining Japan in Post war East Asia written by Paul Morris and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-03-26 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the decades since her defeat in the Second World War, Japan has continued to loom large in the national imagination of many of her East Asian neighbours. While for many, Japan still conjures up images of rampant military brutality, at different times and in different communities, alternative images of the Japanese ‘Other’ have vied for predominance – in ways that remain poorly understood, not least within Japan itself. Imagining Japan in Postwar East Asia analyses the portrayal of Japan in the societies of East and Southeast Asia, and asks how and why this has changed in recent decades, and what these changing images of Japan reveal about the ways in which these societies construct their own identities. It examines the role played by an imagined ‘Japan’ in the construction of national selves across the East Asian region, as mediated through a broad range of media ranging from school curricula and textbooks to film, television, literature and comics. Commencing with an extensive thematic and comparative overview chapter, the volume also includes contributions focusing specifically on Chinese societies (the mainland PRC, Hong Kong and Taiwan), Korea, the Philippines, Malaysia and Singapore. These studies show how changes in the representation of Japan have been related to political, social and cultural shifts within the societies of East Asia – and in particular to the ways in which these societies have imagined or constructed their own identities. Bringing together contributors working in the fields of education, anthropology, history, sociology, political science and media studies, this interdisciplinary volume will be of interest to all students and scholars concerned with issues of identity, politics and culture in the societies of East Asia, and to those seeking a deeper understanding of Japan’s fraught relations with its regional neighbours.
Download or read book Japanese Geopolitics and the Western Imagination written by Atsuko Watanabe and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-03-04 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the first attempt to comprehensively introduce Japanese geopolitics. Europe’s role in disseminating knowledge globally to shape the world according to its standards is an unchallenged premise in world politics. In this story, Japan is regarded as an enthusiastic importer of the knowledge. The book challenges this ground by examining how European geopolitics, the theory of the modern state, traveled to Japan in the first half of the last century, and demonstrates that the same theory can invoke diverged imaginations of the world by examining a range of historical, political, and literary texts. Focusing on the transformation of power, knowledge, and subjectivity in time and space, Watanabe provides a detailed account to reconsider the formation of contemporary world order of the modern territorial states.
Download or read book Imag in ing the War in Japan written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2010-03-02 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study examines how various Japanese authors and other artists seeking artistic representation of traumatic Asia Pacific War experience have drawn upon their imaginative powers to create affect-charged images of the extreme violence, psychological damage and ideological contradiction surrounding the conflict.
Download or read book Imagining the Global written by Fabienne Darling-Wolf and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2014-12-22 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on a series of case studies of globally distributed media and their reception in different parts of the world, Imagining the Global reflects on what contemporary global culture can teach us about transnational cultural dynamics in the 21st century. A focused multisited cultural analysis that reflects on the symbiotic relationship between the local, the national, and the global, it also explores how individuals’ consumption of global media shapes their imagination of both faraway places and their own local lives. Chosen for their continuing influence, historical relationships, and different geopolitical positions, the case sites of France, Japan, and the United States provide opportunities to move beyond common dichotomies between East and West, or United States and “the rest.” From a theoretical point of view, Imagining the Global endeavors to answer the question of how one locale can help us understand another locale. Drawing from a wealth of primary sources—several years of fieldwork; extensive participant observation; more than 80 formal interviews with some 160 media consumers (and occasionally producers) in France, Japan, and the United States; and analyses of media in different languages—author Fabienne Darling-Wolf considers how global culture intersects with other significant identity factors, including gender, race, class, and geography. Imagining the Global investigates who gets to participate in and who gets excluded from global media representation, as well as how and why the distinction matters.
Download or read book REIMAGINING JAPAN written by Brian Salsberg and published by VIZ Media LLC. This book was released on 2011-07-12 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: REMINGINING JAPAN: Contributors to this volume include some of the world’s most brilliant thinkers from fields as diverse as business, politics, academia, science and technology, journalism and art and design. In the aftermath of the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear crisis of March 2011, Japan has become a bigger part of the world’s consciousness than it has been for years. But Japan also is grappling with other problems that, over the long run, pose a much greater challenge to its national well-being than the devastation in Tohoku.... How can the country compete with a rising China? Cope with a fast-aging society? Deal with its enormous debt? Rediscover its entrepreneurial verve? Regain its position as a leader in technology and innovation? In Reimagining Japan, McKinsey & Company, the world’s top management consulting firm, asked more than 80 global leaders and experts to consider these questions. In essays brimming with insight, affection and occasional humor, the authors offer their assessments of Japan’s past, present and --most important -- future. What sets Reimagining Japan apart is the breadth and diversity of its contributors. They range from Fortune 500 CEOs to acclaimed writers (including three Pulitzer Prize winners) to a star videogame creator, a soccer coach, a school principal and a manga artist. There has not been such a comprehensive book about Japan in the past generation - and perhaps ever. NOTABLE CONTRIBUTORS Bernard Arnault, Ian Buruma, Gerald Curtis, John Chambers, Steven Covey, John Dower, Bill Emmott, Victor Fung, Carlos Ghosn, Pico Iyer, Bob McDonald, Stephen Roach, Masahiro Sakane, Masayoshi Son, Howard Schultz, Klaus Schwab, Bobby Valentine, Steve Van Andel, Ezra Vogel, Robert Whiting, Tadashi Yanai and more than 50 others.
