Download or read book San ya Blues written by Edward Fowler and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-18 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the years, Edward Fowler, an American academic, became a familiar presence in San'ya, a run-down neighborhood in northeastern Tokyo. The city's largest day-labor market, notorious for its population of casual laborers, drunks, gamblers, and vagrants, has been home for more than half a century to anywhere from five to fifteen thousand men who cluster in the mornings at a crossroads called Namidabashi (Bridge of Tears) in hopes of getting work. The day-labor market, along with gambling and prostitution, is run by Japan's organized crime syndicates, the yakuza. Working as a day laborer himself, Fowler kept a diary of his experiences. He also talked with day laborers and local merchants, union leaders and bureaucrats, gangsters and missionaries. The resulting oral histories, juxtaposed with Fowler's narrative and diary entries, bring to life a community on the margins of contemporary Japan.Located near a former outcaste neighborhood, on what was once a public execution ground, San'ya shows a hidden face of Japan and contradicts the common assumption of economic and social homogeneity. Fowler argues that differences in ethnicity and class, normally suppressed in mainstream Japanese society, are conspicuous in San'ya and similar communities. San'ya's largely middle-aged, male day-laborer population contains many individuals displaced by Japan's economic success, including migrants from village communities, castoffs from restructuring industries, and foreign workers from Korea and China. The neighborhood and its inhabitants serve as an economic buffer zone—they are the last to feel the effects of a boom and the first to feel a recession. They come alive in this book, telling urgent stories that personify such abstractions as the costs of modernization and the meaning of physical labor in postindustrial society.
Download or read book Sanya Blues written by and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Homesick Blues written by Scott W. Aalgaard and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2023-11-30 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Homesick Blues explores how artists, fans, amateur practitioners, and others have used music to tell stories of everyday life in Japan from the late 1940s to 2018, a practice that author Scott Aalgaard calls “musical storytelling.” At its core, musical storytelling is a political practice, presenting world-producing potentials as social actors generate and share stories of themselves and others in ways that intersect with and inform social and political life. Sometimes, musical storytelling is used by powerful entities to reinforce dominant geopolitical, cultural, or economic visions. More often, it is deployed as a means of interfering in or redirecting those visions. In all cases, attending to musical storytelling helps reveal the complex and unexpected ways that everyday life has been imagined and critiqued across disparate moments in modern Japanese history. Aalgaard pushes beyond the upheavals of the 1960s and early 1970s, challenging well-established characterizations of these years as fleeting moments when critical politics in Japan reached an apex, and an end. Instead, he asserts that musical storytelling is robust and ongoing, and proposes more nuanced and comprehensive understandings of critical political and cultural engagement in modern Japan. Homesick Blues is comprised of five chapters, each of which addresses specific instances of musical storytelling in the contexts of their own political, economic, and social histories. From postwar jazz to contemporary rock, from 1960s “anti-war folk” to Japanese pops (enka) and the “girls’ rock” of the 1980s, the book explores the political uses of music, reassesses “protest music,” and grapples with the complex political-ness of artists, many of whom have continued to interrogate conditions of everyday life well into the contemporary moment. Homesick Blues assembles a diverse ensemble of voices, some of whom appear in English-language scholarship for the first time, including industry stakeholders, rock stars, fans, newscasters, Kyoto-based folk singers, jazz singers, karaoke enthusiasts, and even US military personnel. An equally diverse selection of scholarship and methodology, from ethnomusicology to literary studies, from philosophy to history, creates a richly interdisciplinary and accessible analysis of musical modes of politics.
Download or read book Perilous Wagers written by Klaus K. Y. Hammering and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2024-08-15 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The lives of the men depicted in Perilous Wagers take place in the squalor of Tokyo's old day-laborer district, San'ya, where they can be found eking out a living from occasional construction work and welfare handouts, permanently displaced from their hometowns to metropolitan Tokyo. Although San'ya has nearly vanished during the past twenty years, its import persists as a black market where its small population of male day-laborers can be contracted for the most undesirable of tasks, without consideration for their health or safety. In this context, Hammering's book examines classic ethnographic themes of labor, exchange, value, honor, shame, temporality, desire, gender, and personhood. It explores how one group of day-laborers embodied a transgressive masculinity intimately intertwined with honorable mobster values of old, and how they created dignity and sociality under abject conditions of life. Perilous Wagers tracks these underdog values across construction sites, non-profit organizations, hospitals, bunkhouses, and illegal gambling dens, giving imaginative life to a stigmatized, forgotten social world.
Download or read book Music and Protest in 1968 written by Beate Kutschke and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-04-25 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In fifteen case studies from around the world, contributors explore the relationship between music and socio-political protest in 1968.
Download or read book Migrant Futures written by Aimee Bahng and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2017-04-27 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Migrant Futures Aimee Bahng traces the cultural production of futurity by juxtaposing the practices of speculative finance against those of speculative fiction. While financial speculation creates a future based on predicting and mitigating risk for wealthy elites, the wide range of speculative novels, comics, films, and narratives Bahng examines imagines alternative futures that envision the multiple possibilities that exist beyond capital’s reach. Whether presenting new spatial futures of the US-Mexico borderlands or inventing forms of kinship in Singapore in order to survive in an economy designed for the few, the varied texts Bahng analyzes illuminate how the futurity of speculative finance is experienced by those who find themselves mired in it. At the same time these displaced, undocumented, unbanked, and disavowed characters imagine alternative visions of the future that offer ways to bring forth new political economies, social structures, and subjectivities that exceed the framework of capitalism.
Download or read book Yuming s The 14th Moon written by Lasse Lehtonen and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2022-06-16 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is not an exaggeration that Matsutoya Yumi-better known by her stage name Yuming-is one of the most influential figures in Japanese popular music history. A singer-songwriter recognized globally for her songs used in Miyazaki Hayao's beloved animations, Yuming has captured the hearts of listeners of different generations since her debut in the early 1970s. Her fourth album, The 14th Moon, released in 1976, was a milestone in establishing her signature style: the posh, “city” sound that later paved the way to the 1980s City Pop and 1990s J-pop. In addition to examining the album's astonishing stylistic versatility, this book explores how Yuming revolutionized the position of women in Japanese popular music and how her work can help us understand social changes in Japan of the 1970s.
Download or read book Popular Music in Japan written by Toru Mitsui and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2020-07-09 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Popular music in Japan has been under the overwhelming influence of American, Latin American and European popular music remarkably since 1945, when Japan was defeated in World War II. Beginning with gunka and enka at the turn of the century, tracing the birth of hit songs in the record industry in the years preceding the War, and ranging to the adoption of Western genres after the War--the rise of Japanese folk and rock, domestic exoticism as a new trend and J-Pop--Popular Music in Japan is a comprehensive discussion of the evolution of popular music in Japan. In eight revised and updated essays written in English by renowned Japanese scholar Toru Mitsui, this book tells the story of popular music in Japan since the late 19th century when Japan began positively embracing the West.
Download or read book Men of Uncertainty written by Tom Gill and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2001-01-11 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fascinating exploration of the subculture of Japanese day laborers, whose lives depart radically from the traditions of stability Westerners associate with Japan.
Download or read book Tokyo Stories written by Lawrence Rogers and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2002-06-27 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of translated stories about life in Tokyo throughout most of the twentieth century.
Download or read book The Rough Guide to Japan written by Jan Dodd and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2011-02-01 with total page 1733 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Perfectly navigate one of the world's most fascinating countries with the award-winning Rough Guide to Japan. This opinionated guide is packed with essential information on everything from the latest and best places to sleep, eat, party and shop to pointers on etiquette and sustainable travel. All the major and many off the beaten track sights are covered including tropical dives in Okinawa, mountain traverses across the Japan Alps and contemporary art exhibits on islands in the Inland Sea. Different sections introduce Japan's delicious regional cuisines, its dynamic pop culture including manga and anime, and its rich variety of festivals. Gain a richer understanding of the country through chapters on Japan's history, religions, arts, movies and music plus coverage of pressing environmental issues. There are maps of all the main tourist destinations, together with separate diagrams of Tokyo and Osaka's train and subway systems.
Download or read book Men and Masculinities in Contemporary Japan written by James E. Roberson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2005-06-29 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the first comprehensive account of the changing role of men and the construction of masculinity in contemporary Japan. The book moves beyond the stereotype of the Japanese white-collar businessman to explore the diversity of identities and experiences that may be found among men in contemporary Japan, including those versions of masculinity which are marginalized and subversive. The book makes a significant contribution to our understanding of contemporary Japanese society and identity.
Download or read book The Rough Guide to Tokyo written by Simon Richmond and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2011-03-01 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Rough Guide to Tokyo is the ultimate insider's guide to Japan's hyperactive capital. All major and many off-the-beaten-tracks sights are covered in detail - from the soaring Tokyo Sky Tree, the city's newest, highest viewpoint, to the exciting new contemporary art complex 3331 Arts Chiyoda and the reborn architectural treasure Mitsubishi Ichigokan. It cuts through the hype to reveal the metropolis's best places to sleep, eat, drink and shop, with a new chapter highlighting what a fantastic destination Tokyo is to take the kids. There's all you need to know for great day-trips to, among other places, the onsens of Hakone, the tranquil temples of Kamakura, and Yokohama's Chinatown. Full-colour sections introduce Tokyo's highlights, its delicious array of cuisines (and the best places to find them) and the world leading design role the city has in everything from architecture to fashion. Easy-to-read maps are provided throughout the guide, plus there's handy colour subway map.
Download or read book The Encyclopedia of Contemporary Japanese Culture written by Sandra Buckley and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2009 with total page 665 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This encyclopedia covers culture from the end of the Imperialist period in 1945 right up to date to reflect the vibrant nature of contemporary Japanese society and culture.
Download or read book The Rough Guide to Tokyo written by Martin Zatko and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2014-07-01 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The new-look Rough Guide to Tokyo, now in full color throughout, is the ultimate travel companion to Japan's jaw-dropping capital. Augmented by stunning photography and full listings sections, this guide also contains color-coded maps that provide the key to this hectic, sometimes indecipherable city. You'll find detailed practical advice on what to see and do in Tokyo, from ancient temples and the Imperial Palace to the searing neon lights of Shibuya and Shinjuku. Whatever your budget, the best places to sleep, eat, drink, and shop are all covered, with best-of boxes picking out the highlights you won't want to miss. Before long, you could be eating the world's finest sushi, drinking sake in a local izakaya, watching a sumo or robot battle, or sleeping in one of the city's famed capsule hotels. Make the most of your trip with The Rough Guide to Tokyo.
Download or read book Multiethnic Japan written by John Lie and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2004-03-01 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Multiethnic Japan challenges the received view of Japanese society as ethnically homogeneous. Employing a wide array of arguments and evidence--historical and comparative, interviews and observations, high literature and popular culture--John Lie recasts modern Japan as a thoroughly multiethnic society. Lie casts light on a wide range of minority groups in modern Japanese society, including the Ainu, Burakumin (descendants of premodern outcasts), Chinese, Koreans, and Okinawans. In so doing, he depicts the trajectory of modern Japanese identity. Surprisingly, Lie argues that the belief in a monoethnic Japan is a post–World War II phenomenon, and he explores the formation of the monoethnic ideology. He also makes a general argument about the nature of national identity, delving into the mechanisms of social classification, signification, and identification.
Download or read book Bodies of Evidence written by Amanda C. Seaman and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2004-02-28 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The publication in 1992 of Miyabe Miyuke’s highly anticipated Kasha (translated into English as All She Was Worth) represents a watershed in the history of Japanese women’s detective fiction. Inspired by Miyabe’s success and the increasing number of Western mysteries in translation, women began writing mysteries of all types, employing the narrative and conceptual resources of the detective genre to depict and critique contemporary Japanese society—and the situation of women in it. Bodies of Evidence examines this recent boom and the ways in which five contemporary authors (Miyabe, Nonami Asa, Shibata Yoshiki, Kirino Natsuo, and Matsuo Yumi) critically engage with a variety of social issues and concerns: consumerism and the crisis of identity, discrimination and harassment in the workplace, sexual harassment and sexual violence, and motherhood. Bodies of Evidence moves beyond the borders of detective fiction scholarship by exploring the worlds constructed by these authors in their novels and showing how they intersect with other political, cultural, and economic discourses and with the lived experiences of contemporary Japanese women.
