Download or read book Kabuki at the Crossroads written by Samuel L. Leiter and published by Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. This book was released on 2013-04-17 with total page 764 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Samuel L. Leiter's Kabuki at the Crossroads: Years of Crisis, 1952-1965 is the first detailed account of Japan's kabuki theatre in the years immediately following the end of the Occupation. It examines every aspect of this traditional theatre as it struggled to maintain its position in a rapidly changing postwar entertainment environment. It covers acting rivalries, major productions, theatres, international tours, the convention of men playing female roles, name-taking and memorial ceremonies, the company system and managerial strategies. In addition, the volume includes numerous appendixes chronicling the period, including a thorough chronology and 150 summaries of new plays never previously discussed in English.
Download or read book A History of Japanese Theatre written by Jonah Salz and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-07-14 with total page 1066 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Japan boasts one of the world's oldest, most vibrant and most influential performance traditions. This accessible and complete history provides a comprehensive overview of Japanese theatre and its continuing global influence. Written by eminent international scholars, it spans the full range of dance-theatre genres over the past fifteen hundred years, including noh theatre, bunraku puppet theatre, kabuki theatre, shingeki modern theatre, rakugo storytelling, vanguard butoh dance and media experimentation. The first part addresses traditional genres, their historical trajectories and performance conventions. Part II covers the spectrum of new genres since Meiji (1868–), and Parts III to VI provide discussions of playwriting, architecture, Shakespeare, and interculturalism, situating Japanese elements within their global theatrical context. Beautifully illustrated with photographs and prints, this history features interviews with key modern directors, an overview of historical scholarship in English and Japanese, and a timeline. A further reading list covers a range of multimedia resources to encourage further explorations.
Download or read book Historical Dictionary of Japanese Traditional Theatre written by Samuel L. Leiter and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2014-10-30 with total page 816 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historical Dictionary of Japanese Traditional Theatre is the only dictionary that offers detailed comprehensive coverage of the most important terms, people, and plays in the four principal traditional Japanese theatrical forms—nō, kyōgen, bunraku, and kabuki—supplemented with individual historical essays on each form. This updated edition adds well over 200 plot summaries representing each theatrical form in addition to: a chronology; introductory essay; appendixes; an extensive bibliography; over 1500 cross-referenced entries on important terms; brief biographies of the leading artists and writers; and plot summaries of significant plays. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about the Japanese theatre.
Download or read book Early Modern Japanese Literature written by Haruo Shirane and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2002-07-10 with total page 1054 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first anthology ever devoted to early modern Japanese literature, spanning the period from 1600 to 1900, known variously as the Edo or the Tokugawa, one of the most creative epochs of Japanese culture. This anthology, which will be of vital interest to anyone involved in this era, includes not only fiction, poetry, and drama, but also essays, treatises, literary criticism, comic poetry, adaptations from Chinese, folk stories and other non-canonical works. Many of these texts have never been translated into English before, and several classics have been newly translated for this collection. Early Modern Japanese Literature introduces English readers to an unprecedented range of prose fiction genres, including dangibon (satiric sermons), kibyôshi (satiric and didactic picture books), sharebon (books of wit and fashion), yomihon (reading books), kokkeibon (books of humor), gôkan (bound books), and ninjôbon (books of romance and sentiment). The anthology also offers a rich array of poetry—waka, haiku, senryû, kyôka, kyôshi—and eleven plays, which range from contemporary domestic drama to historical plays and from early puppet theater to nineteenth century kabuki. Since much of early modern Japanese literature is highly allusive and often elliptical, this anthology features introductions and commentary that provide the critical context for appreciating this diverse and fascinating body of texts. One of the major characteristics of early modern Japanese literature is that almost all of the popular fiction was amply illustrated by wood-block prints, creating an extensive text-image phenomenon. In some genres such as kibyôshi and gôkan the text in fact appeared inside the woodblock image. Woodblock prints of actors were also an important aspect of the culture of kabuki drama. A major feature of this anthology is the inclusion of over 200 woodblock prints that accompanied the original texts and drama.
Download or read book Kabuki Democracy written by Eric Alterman and published by Bold Type Books. This book was released on 2011-01-11 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this agenda-setting essay, journalist and historian Eric Alterman explains what is really happening with the Obama presidency. While Obama's many compromises have disappointed liberals, Alterman argues that these concessions are largely due to a political system that is rigged against progressive change. These structural impediments to democracy have made the keeping of Obama's campaign promises all but impossible. Brilliantly blending incisive political analysis with a clear agenda for change, Kabuki Democracy cuts through the clich's of conservative propaganda and lazy mainstream media analysis to demonstrate that genuine "change" will come to America only when people care enough to challenge the system.
Download or read book The Politics of Public Broadcasting in Britain and Japan written by Henry Laurence and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-07-29 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The BBC and NHK have dominated their national media systems since the 1920s and still play a central role in shaping political, social and cultural life. Both are highly trusted news organizations, and vitally influence national identity. Yet despite remarkably similar organizational and funding structures, they differ in their editorial autonomy, relationship to the state, and in the social and cultural roles they play. While the BBC, proud of its independence, acts as a watchdog on the powerful, NHK prefers a guide dog role cooperating with rather than confronting political elites. The BBC is also more willing to challenge prevailing social norms, often serving as an agent of social change. NHK prefers to avoid controversy, serving as an agent of social stability. The book argues that these differences were shaped by decades of conflict and cooperation between broadcasters, governments, commercial media, interest groups and audiences. The broadcasters adopted distinctive editorial strategies to retain public support and elite approval in the face of technological upheaval, hostility from commercial rivals, and continuous political interference. Both, however, continue to uphold the belief that democratic and social goals are better served by public rather than commercial media.
Download or read book Ishiro Honda written by Steve Ryfle and published by Wesleyan University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-10 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “An appreciation of Japanese fantasy-film history through the eyes of a filmmaker whose name is obscure but populism remains influential.” —Chicago Tribune Ishiro Honda, arguably the most internationally successful Japanese director of his generation, made an unmatched succession of science fiction films that were commercial hits worldwide. From the atomic allegory of Godzilla and the beguiling charms of Mothra to the tragic mystery of Matango and the disaster and spectacle of Rodan, The Mysterians, King Kong vs. Godzilla, Honda’s films reflected postwar Japan’s anxieties and incorporated fantastical special effects, a formula that created an enduring pop culture phenomenon. Now, in the first full account of this overlooked director’s life and career, Steve Ryfle and Ed Godziszewski shed new light on Honda’s work and the experiences that shaped it—including his days as a reluctant Japanese soldier, witnessing the aftermath of Hiroshima, and his lifelong friendship with Akira Kurosawa. The book features close analysis of Honda’s films (including, for the first time, his rarely seen dramas, comedies, and war films) and draws on previously untapped documents and interviews to explore how creative, economic, and industrial factors impacted his career. Fans of Godzilla and tokusatsu (special effects) film, and of Japanese film in general, will welcome this in-depth study of a highly influential director who occupies a uniquely important position in science fiction and fantasy cinema, as well as world cinema. “Provides the reader with a lasting sense of the man—his temperament, values, philosophies, dreams, and disappointments?behind some of cinema’s most beloved characters.” —Film Comment
Download or read book Kabuki s Nineteenth Century written by Zwicker and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-09-07 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kabuki's Nineteenth Century examines the theater culture of nineteenth-century Japan from the perspective of the history and materiality of the book, the nature of reception, and the making and making use of images. The aim of this book is to rediscover the kabuki theater of nineteenth-century Japan by shifting our critical focus from performance to print and the public sphere, and thus embedding theater history within the larger world of printed matter by means of which theatricality circulated beyond the stage and through which performance was most often consumed. Fundamental to Kabuki's Nineteenth Century is a reconsideration of the nature of the printed archive itself. The book argues that the archive of printed material related to the theater in nineteenth-century Japan (playbills, actor critiques, theater guides, maps, actor prints, calendars, and broadsheets) is something more than--and more complicated than--a set of materials out of which we might reconstitute the always transient event of performance. Rather, the archive constitutes an object of inquiry unto itself, an object that reveals as much about the interrelations between and among various printed media and genres circulating beyond the confines of the theater as it does about what happened on stage. Even as we use these materials to examine the history of performance, a series of different questions might be asked: what can the production, consumption, and collecting of this enormous body of printed matter tell us about such problems as the role of print in everyday life, the construction of specialized knowledges, and the manner in which a culture archives itself?
Download or read book The Imperial Screen written by Peter B. High and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 628 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the late 1920s through World War II, film became a crucial tool in the state of Japan. Detailing the way Japanese directors, scriptwriters, company officials, and bureaucrats colluded to produce films that supported the war effort, Imperial Screen is a highly readable account of the realities of cultural life in wartime Japan. High's treatment of the Japanese film world as a microcosm of the entire sphere of Japanese wartime culture demonstrates what happens when conscientious artists and intellectuals become enmeshed in a totalitarian regime. This English language edition is revised and expanded from the original Japanese edition.
Download or read book Rising from the Flames written by Samuel L. Leiter and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2009 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On August 15, 1945, when the war ended, almost all of Tokyo and Osaka's theaters had been destroyed or heavily damaged by American bombs. The Japanese urban infrastructure was reduced to dust, and so, one might have thought, would be the nation's spirit, especially in the face of nuclear bombing and foreign occupation. Yet, less than two weeks after the atom bombs had been dropped, theater began to show signs of life. Before long, all forms of Japanese theater were back on stage, and from death's ashes arose the flower of art. Rising from the Flames contains sixteen essays, many accompanied by photographic illustrations, by thirteen specialists. They explore the triumphs and tribulations of Occupation-period (1945-1952) theater, and cover not only such traditional forms as kabuki, no, kyogen, bunraku puppet theater (as well as the traditional marionette theater, the Yuki-za), and the comic narrator's art of rakugo, but also the modern genres of shingeki, musical comedy, and the all-female Takarazuka Revue. Among the numerous topics discussed are censorship, theater reconstruction, politics, internationalization, unionization, the search for a national identity through drama, and the treatment of the emperor on the pre- and postwar stage. The essays in this volume examine how Japanese theater, subject to oppressive thought control by prewar authorities, responded to the new--if temporarily limited--freedom allowed by the American occupiers, attesting to Japan's remarkable resilience in the face of national defeat.
Download or read book Performing the Politics of Translation in Modern Japan written by Aragorn Quinn and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-12-09 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Performing the Politics of Translation in Modern Japan sheds new light on the adoption of concepts that motivated political theatres of resistance for nearly a century and even now underpin the collective understanding of the Japanese nation. Grounded in the aftermath of the Meiji Restoration in 1868 and analyzing its legacy on stage, this book tells the story of the crucial role that performance and specifically embodied memory played in the changing understanding of the imported Western concepts of "liberty" (jiyū) and "revolution" (kakumei). Tracing the role of the post-Restoration movement itself as an important touchstone for later performances, it examines two key moments of political crisis. The first of these is the Proletarian Theatre Movement of the 1920s and '30s, in which the post-Restoration years were important for theorizing the Japanese communist revolution. The second is in the postwar years when Rights Movement theatre and thought again featured as a vehicle for understanding the present through the past. As such, this book presents the translation of "liberty" and "revolution", not through a one-to-one correspondence model, but rather as a many-to-many relationship. In doing so, it presents a century of evolution in the dramaturgy of resistance in Japan. This book will be useful to students and scholars of Japanese history, society and culture, as well as literature and translation studies alike.
Download or read book Japan and Russia written by Yulia Mikhailova and published by Global Oriental. This book was released on 2008-08-28 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume recognizes the growing awareness of the importance of images in international relations, exploring the phenomenon over three centuries as it relates to Russia and Japan. The general perception of one country by another – the ‘stereotypical collective mentality’ – is an historic phenomenon that continues to be a fundamental component in international relations at all levels, but especially in the political and business arenas, and remains an ongoing challenge for future generations. Bringing together international scholars from various disciplines, this innovative study focuses especially on modes of seeing and on the enigma of visual experience. It draws on numerous visual representations from propaganda posters and cartoons to artworks and films and to more recent media, such as television, the internet, pop-culture icons, as well as direct visual encounters. The volume raises questions of how different cultures observe, understand and represent each other, how and why mutual representations have changed or remained unchanged during the long history of Japanese-Russian interactions, what mental frameworks exist on both sides of the encounter; and how visions of otherness influence the construction of national, cultural and social identities.
Download or read book Japanese Capitals in Historical Perspective written by Nicolas Fieve and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-11-05 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Japan's ability to develop its own brand of modernity has often been attributed in part to the sophistication of its cities. Concentrating on Kyoto, Edo and Tokyo, the contributors to this volume weave together the links between past and future, memory and vision, symbol and structure, between marginality and power, and between Japan's two great capital cities.
Download or read book Kalamandalam Krishnan Nair the Mozart of Kathakali written by Mohan Gopinath and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2022-11-07 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents novel insights into the work and practice of the actor Krishnan Nair, who was unique in the field of Kathakali, the dance drama of South India. It shows how, because of his superb ability to connect with his audiences and the sheer charisma of his personality, Nair was able to achieve his burning ambitions. It highlights how Nair was able to ensure that Kathakali performers were invested with status and were paid a decent wage, allowing them to live in reasonable comfort.
Download or read book A Beggar s Art written by M. Cody Poulton and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2010-05-31 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essential reading for the growing number of Westerners interested in the roots of modern Japanese theatre
Download or read book Not Yo Butterfly written by Nobuko Miyamoto and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2021-06-15 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Intro -- Relocation, or a travelin' girl -- Don't fence me in -- A tisket, a tasket, a brown and yellow basket... -- From a broken past into the future -- Twice as good -- Shall we dance! -- School daze -- Chop suey -- We shall overcome -- Power to the people -- A single stone, many ripples -- Something about me today -- The people's beat -- A song for ourselves -- Nosotro somos Asiaticos -- Foster children of the Pepsi Generation -- A grain of sand -- Free the land -- What will people think? -- Some things live a moment -- How to mend what's broken -- Women hold up half the sky -- Our own chop suey -- What is the color of love? -- Talk story -- Yuiyo, just dance -- Float hands like clouds -- Deep is the chasm -- To all relations -- Bismillah Ir Rahman Ir Rahim -- The seed of the dandelion -- I dream a garden -- Mottainai : waste nothing -- Black Lives Matter -- Bambutsu : all things connected -- Epilogue.
Download or read book Edo Kabuki in Transition written by Satoko Shimazaki and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2016-04-26 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Satoko Shimazaki revisits three centuries of kabuki theater, reframing it as a key player in the formation of an early modern urban identity in Edo Japan and exploring the process that resulted in its re-creation in Tokyo as a national theatrical tradition. Challenging the prevailing understanding of early modern kabuki as a subversive entertainment and a threat to shogunal authority, Shimazaki argues that kabuki instilled a sense of shared history in the inhabitants of Edo (present-day Tokyo) by invoking "worlds," or sekai, derived from earlier military tales, and overlaying them onto the present. She then analyzes the profound changes that took place in Edo kabuki toward the end of the early modern period, which witnessed the rise of a new type of character: the vengeful female ghost. Shimazaki's bold reinterpretation of the history of kabuki centers on the popular ghost play Tokaido Yotsuya kaidan (The Eastern Seaboard Highway Ghost Stories at Yotsuya, 1825) by Tsuruya Nanboku IV. Drawing not only on kabuki scripts but also on a wide range of other sources, from theatrical ephemera and popular fiction to medical and religious texts, she sheds light on the development of the ubiquitous trope of the vengeful female ghost and its illumination of new themes at a time when the samurai world was losing its relevance. She explores in detail the process by which nineteenth-century playwrights began dismantling the Edo tradition of "presenting the past" by abandoning their long-standing reliance on the sekai. She then reveals how, in the 1920s, a new generation of kabuki playwrights, critics, and scholars reinvented the form again, "textualizing" kabuki so that it could be pressed into service as a guarantor of national identity.