Download or read book Reinventing Japan written by Martin Fackler and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2018-03-14 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Highly readable yet deeply researched, this book serves as an essential guide to the many ways in which Japan has risen to become one of the world's most creative and innovative societies. During its so-called Lost Decades, Japan has quietly reinvented itself from a nation with an economy playing catch-up into a global leader in innovation and creativity, one whose "soft power" extends from postmodern architecture to pluripotent stem cells. Written by a dozen experts in their fields, including architect Kengo Kuma, designer of Tokyo's 2020 Olympic stadium, this book describes Japan's contributions to the world in fields ranging from fashion and pop culture to development aid and historical reconciliation. In addition, it demonstrates how Japan has led efforts to contend with several social and economic challenges facing the entire developed world, including demographic aging, rising health-care costs, and wasteful consumption. Using these accomplishments as evidence, it argues that, in an era of questions surrounding the capability of American leadership, the time has come for Japan to step into a new role as a purveyor of models and values better suited to today's multipolar and diverse world.
Download or read book Reinventing Tokyo written by Samuel Crowell Morse and published by Amherst College. This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking examination of artists portrayals of Tokyo from the mid-nineteenth century to the present."
Download or read book Reinventing Japan written by Martin Fackler and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2018-03-14 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Highly readable yet deeply researched, this book serves as an essential guide to the many ways in which Japan has risen to become one of the world's most creative and innovative societies. During its so-called Lost Decades, Japan has quietly reinvented itself from a nation with an economy playing catch-up into a global leader in innovation and creativity, one whose "soft power" extends from postmodern architecture to pluripotent stem cells. Written by a dozen experts in their fields, including architect Kengo Kuma, designer of Tokyo's 2020 Olympic stadium, this book describes Japan's contributions to the world in fields ranging from fashion and pop culture to development aid and historical reconciliation. In addition, it demonstrates how Japan has led efforts to contend with several social and economic challenges facing the entire developed world, including demographic aging, rising health-care costs, and wasteful consumption. Using these accomplishments as evidence, it argues that, in an era of questions surrounding the capability of American leadership, the time has come for Japan to step into a new role as a purveyor of models and values better suited to today's multipolar and diverse world.
Download or read book Re inventing Japan written by Tessa Morris-Suzuki and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-03-04 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text rethinks the contours of Japanese history, culture and nationality. Challenging the mythology of a historically unitary, even monolithic Japan, it offers a different perspective on culture and identity in modern Japan.
Download or read book Reinventing Citizenship written by Kazuyo Tsuchiya and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2014-04-15 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 1960s and 1970s, the United States and Japan went through massive welfare expansions that sparked debates about citizenship. At the heart of these disputes stood African Americans and Koreans. Reinventing Citizenship offers a comparative study of African American welfare activism in Los Angeles and Koreans’ campaigns for welfare rights in Kawasaki. In working-class and poor neighborhoods in both locations, African Americans and Koreans sought not only to be recognized as citizens but also to become legitimate constituting members of communities. Local activists in Los Angeles and Kawasaki ardently challenged the welfare institutions. By creating opposition movements and voicing alternative visions of citizenship, African American leaders, Tsuchiya argues, turned Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty into a battle for equality. Koreans countered the city’s and the nation’s exclusionary policies and asserted their welfare rights. Tsuchiya’s work exemplifies transnational antiracist networking, showing how black religious leaders traveled to Japan to meet Christian Korean activists and to provide counsel for their own struggles. Reinventing Citizenship reveals how race and citizenship transform as they cross countries and continents. By documenting the interconnected histories of African Americans and Koreans in Japan, Tsuchiya enables us to rethink present ideas of community and belonging.
Download or read book The Business Reinvention of Japan written by Ulrike Schaede and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-16 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After two decades of reinvention, Japanese companies are re-emerging as major players in the new digital economy. They have responded to the rise of China and new global competition by moving upstream into critical deep-tech inputs and advanced materials and components. This new "aggregate niche strategy" has made Japan the technology anchor for many global supply chains. Although the end products do not carry a "Japan Inside" label, Japan plays a pivotal role in our everyday lives across many critical industries. This book is an in-depth exploration of current Japanese business strategies that make Japan the world's third-largest economy and an economic leader in Asia. To accomplish their reinvention, Japan's largest companies are building new processes of breakthrough innovation. Central to this book is how they are addressing the necessary changes in organizational design, internal management processes, employment, and corporate governance. Because Japan values social stability and economic equality, this reinvention is happening slowly and methodically, and has gone largely unnoticed by Western observers. Yet, Japan's more balanced model of "caring capitalism" is both competitive and transformative, and more socially responsible than the unbridled growth approach of the United States.
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 Foreign Policy Maturation written by Kevin Cooney and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-09-05 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The sudden end of the Cold War took the Japanese foreign policy community by surprise. The Yoshida Doctrine which served Japanese foreign policy so well during the Cold War is no longer a viable foreign policy option. This dissertation examines the restructuring of Japanese foreign policy since the end of the Cold War. Through a series of 56 interviews with Japanese foregin policy elites, the changes in Japanese foreign policy are put into the context of the foreign policy literature.
Download or read book Shibata Renzabur and the Reinvention of Modernism in Postwar Japanese Popular Literature written by Artem Vorobiev and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-10-30 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shibata Renzaburō and the Reinvention of Modernism in Postwar Japanese Popular Literature explores the life and work of Shibata Renzaburō (柴田錬三郎, 1917–1978), the author of adventure and historical novels who was instrumental in reinvigorating popular Japanese literature in the postwar period. This book considers postwar Japanese society through the prism of Shibata’s writing, exploring how the postwar period under SCAP Occupation influenced Shibata’s writing and generated the extraordinary popularity of samurai fiction in the postwar era at large. Through the use of a nihilistic warrior, Nemuri Kyōshirō, and other samurai characters, Shibata Renzaburō addresses important social issues of the day, such as the trauma of defeat, postwar reconstruction, and the attending societal ills and neuroses, while keeping his literature entertaining and easy to read, which ensured its mass appeal in postwar Japan.
Download or read book Japan Restored written by Clyde Prestowitz and published by Tuttle Publishing. This book was released on 2015-11-10 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How Japan Can Reinvent Itself and Why This Is Important for America and the World. In 1979, the book Japan as Number One: Lessons for America by Harvard University professor Ezra Vogel caused a sensation in the United States by pointing out that Japan was surpassing America as world economic leader; the book remains to this day the all-time bestseller in Japan of non-fiction by a Western author. The book was timely: Japan's subsequent "bubble era" of the 1980s saw the country booming. But since the economic bubble burst at the start of the 1990s, Japan has been in decline. Japan Restored by Clyde Prestowitz, taking up Vogel's baton, is written as a vision of Japan in the year 2050, when the country's economic recovery has made it a world leader in every area of human endeavor. Prestowitz looks back to the present year as such a low point for Japan that a special reform commission was set up that helped the country regain its former position as a leader in technology, in business, and geopolitically. Looking at education, innovation, the role of women, corporate organization, energy, infrastructure, domestic government, and international alliances Prestowitz draws up a fascinating and controversial blueprint for the future success of Japan. As the eyes of the world turn towards Japan in the run-up to the 2020 Olympics, Japan Restored is as timely as the 1979 Vogel book that inspired it.
Download or read book The Global Japanese Restaurant written by James Farrer and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2023 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "With more than 120,000 Japanese restaurants around the world, Japanese cuisine has become truly global. Through the transnational culinary mobilities of migrant entrepreneurs, workers, ideas and capital, Japanese cuisine spread and adapted to international tastes. But this expansion is also entangled in culinary politics, ranging from authenticity claims and status competition among restaurateurs and consumers to societal racism, immigration policies, and soft power politics that have shaped the transmission and transformation of Japanese cuisine. Such politics has involved appropriation, oppression, but also cooperation across ethnic lines. Ultimately, the restaurant is a continually reinvented imaginary of Japan represented in concrete form to consumers by restaurateurs, cooks, and servers of varied nationalities and ethnicities who act as cultural intermediaries. The Global Japanese Restaurant: Mobilities, Imaginaries, and Politics uses an innovative global perspective and rich ethnographic data on six continents to fashion a comprehensive account of the creation and reception of the "global Japanese restaurant" in the modern world. Drawing heavily on untapped primary sources in multiple languages, this book centers on the stories of Japanese migrants in the first half of the twentieth century, and then on non-Japanese chefs and restaurateurs from Asia, Africa, Europe, Australasia, and the Americas whose mobilities, since the mid-1900s, who have been reshaping and spreading Japanese cuisine. The narrative covers a century and a half of transnational mobilities, global imaginaries, and culinary politics at different scales. It shifts the spotlight of Japanese culinary globalization from the "West" to refocus the story on Japan's East Asian neighbors and highlights the growing role of non-Japanese actors (chefs, restaurateurs, suppliers, corporations, service staff) since the 1980s. These essays explore restaurants as social spaces, creating a readable and compelling history that makes original contributions to Japan studies, food studies, and global studies. The transdisciplinary framework will be a pioneering model for combining fieldwork and archival research to analyze the complexities of culinary globalization"--
Download or read book Japan s Foreign Policy Since 1945 written by Kevin J. Cooney and published by M.E. Sharpe. This book was released on 2007 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides a detailed assessment of Japan's foreign policy since 1945, including policy options and choices that Japan faces in the twenty-first century. Using information based on interviews with policymakers in Japan, this text provides an insight into Japan's foreign policy options and analyzes the nation's role in international affairs.
Download or read book Sustainability in Contemporary Rural Japan written by Stephanie Assmann and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-12-22 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rural communities in Japan have suffered from significant depopulation and economic downturn in post-war years. Low birth rates, aging populations, agricultural decline and youth migration to large cities have been compounded by the triple disaster of 11 March 2011, which destroyed farming and fishing communities and left thousands of people homeless. This book identifies these challenges and acknowledges that an era of post-growth has arrived in Japan. Through exploring new forms of regional employment, community empowerment, and reverse migration, the authors address potential opportunities and benefits that may help to create and ensure the quality of life in depopulating areas and post-disaster scenarios. This book will be of interest not only to students of Japanese society, but also to those outside of Japan who are seeking new approaches for tackling depopulation challenges.
Download or read book The Visual Culture of Meiji Japan written by Ayelet Zohar and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-11-29 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume examines the visual culture of Japan’s transition to modernity, from 1868 to the first decades of the twentieth century. Through this important moment in Japanese history, contributors reflect on Japan’s transcultural artistic imagination vis-a-vis the discernment, negotiation, assimilation, and assemblage of diverse aesthetic concepts and visual pursuits. The collected chapters show how new cultural notions were partially modified and integrated to become the artistic methods of modern Japan, based on the hybridization of major ideologies, visualities, technologies, productions, formulations, and modes of representation. The book presents case studies of creative transformation demonstrating how new concepts and methods were perceived and altered to match views and theories prevalent in Meiji Japan, and by what means different practitioners negotiated between their existing skills and the knowledge generated from incoming ideas to create innovative modes of practice and representation that reflected the specificity of modern Japanese artistic circumstances. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, Japanese studies, Asian studies, and Japanese history, as well as those who use approaches and methods related to globalization, cross-cultural studies, transcultural exchange, and interdisciplinary studies.
Download or read book Future Living written by Claudia Hildner and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2013-11-20 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Single-family houses are becoming increasingly outdated. They offer no response to demographic change or to the fact that there are fewer and fewer life-long relationships. They are often too inflexible for new family models or ways of cohabitation. This publication presents projects in recent years in Japan, which respond to the need for new forms of housing. The architects are developing solutions that allow residents to live together but still maintain enough distance and privacy. The presented apartment types and their layout allow for a variety of life models. Particularly interesting here is the use of spaces that provide a gradual transition from public to private space—an approach to building that, according to experts, could revolutionize western residential architecture. The publication portrays these new forms of building and living based on prominent Japanese examples that include Shigeru Ban, Sou Foujimoto, and Akihisa Hirata.
Download or read book Struggling Upward written by Timothy J. Van Compernolle and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-05-11 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Struggling Upward reconsiders the rise and maturation of the modern novel in Japan by connecting the genre to new discourses on ambition and social mobility. Collectively called risshin shusse, these discourses accompanied the spread of industrial capitalism and the emergence of a new nation-state in the archipelago. Drawing primarily on historicist strategies of literary criticism, the book situates the Meiji novel in relation to a range of texts from different culturally demarcated zones: the visual arts, scandal journalism, self-help books, and materials on immigration to the colonies, among others. Timothy J. Van Compernolle connects these Japanese materials to topics of broad theoretical interest within literary and cultural studies, including imperialism, gender, modernity, novel studies, print media, and the public sphere. As the first monograph to link the novel to risshin shusse, Struggling Upward argues that social mobility is the privileged lens through which Meiji novelists explored abstract concepts of national belonging, social hierarchy, and the new space of an industrializing nation.
Download or read book Islands of Discontent written by Laura Elizabeth Hein and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2003 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring contemporary Okinawan culture, politics, and historical memory, this book argues that the long Japanese tradition of defining Okinawa as a subordinate and peripheral part of Japan means that all claims of Okinawan distinctiveness necessarily become part of the larger debate over contemporary identity. The contributors trace the renascence of the debate in the burst of cultural and political expression that has flowered in the past decade, with the rapid growth of local museums and memorials and the huge increase in popularity of distinctive Okinawan music and literature, as well as in political movements targeting both U.S. military bases and Japanese national policy on ecological, developmental, and equity grounds. A key strategy for claiming and shaping Okinawan identity is the mobilization of historical memory of the recent past, particularly of the violent subordination of Okinawan interests to those of the Japanese and American governments in war and occupation. Its intertwining themes of historical memory, nationality, ethnicity, and cultural conflict in contemporary society address central issues in anthropology, sociology, contemporary history, Asian Studies, international relations, cultural studies, and post-colonial studies. Contributions by: Matt Allen, Linda Isako Angst, Asato Eiko, Gerald Figal, Aaron Gerow, Laura Hein, Michael Molasky, Steve Rabson, James E. Roberson, Mark Selden, and Julia Yonetani.
