Download or read book Science and Culture in Traditional Japan written by Masayoshi Sugimoto and published by Tuttle Publishing. This book was released on 2016-02-03 with total page 537 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book of Japanese history explores the development of science and technology in traditional Japanese society. It may be surprising to some readers familiar with the history of Japan that that scientific thought existed at all in traditional Japan. However, Science and Culture in Traditional Japan show the development of premodern science in Japan in the context of that country's social and intellectual milieu. Anyone who wishes to understand the development of Japan's science and technology over the last hundred years will appreciate this history of the centuries that preceded modernization, for it is the story of why and how Japan was ready and, more importantly, able to make the leap from Eastern to Western science. The history and culture book shows how Japan's long pattern of assimilation—in advancing and receding waves—of Chinese science (and some Western science) laid the foundation for an appreciation of the need for and value of the "new" Western knowledge.
Download or read book One Hundred Million Philosophers written by Adam Bronson and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2016-03-31 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After the devastation of World War II, journalists, scholars, and citizens came together to foster a new culture of democracy in Japan. Adam Bronson explores this effort in a path-breaking study of the Institute for the Science of Thought, one of the most influential associations to emerge in the early postwar years. The institute's founders believed that the estrangement of intellectuals from the general public had contributed to the rise of fascism. To address this, they sought to develop a "science of thought" that would reconnect the world of ideas with everyday experience and thus reimagine Japan as a democratic nation, home to one hundred million philosophers. To tell the story of Science of Thought and postwar democracy, Bronson weaves together several strands of Japan's modern history that are often treated separately: the revival of interest in the social sciences and Marxism after the war, the appearance of new social movements that challenged traditional class and gender hierarchies, and the ascendance of a mass middle-class culture. This story is transnational in both connective and comparative senses. Most of the Science of Thought founders were educated in America, and they drew upon a network of American thinkers and institutions for support. They also derived inspiration from other efforts to promote a culture of democracy, ranging from thought reform campaigns in the People's Republic of China to the Mass Observation study of the British working classes. By tracing these sources of inspiration around the world, Bronson reveals the contours of a transnational intellectual milieu. Science of Thought embodied a vision of democratic experimentation that had to be re-articulated repeatedly in response to challenges that arose in connection with geopolitical events and social change, prompting the group's evolution from a small research circle in the 1940s into the standard-bearer for citizen activism in the 1960s. Through this history, Bronson argues that the significance of Science of Thought lay in the way it exemplified democracy in practice. The practical experience of the intellectuals and citizens associated with the group remains relevant to those who continue to grapple with the dilemmas of democracy today.
Download or read book Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons written by Haruo Shirane and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2012-03-20 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Elegant representations of nature and the four seasons populate a wide range of Japanese genres and media—from poetry and screen painting to tea ceremonies, flower arrangements, and annual observances. In Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons, Haruo Shirane shows how, when, and why this practice developed and explicates the richly encoded social, religious, and political meanings of this imagery. Refuting the belief that this tradition reflects Japan's agrarian origins and supposedly mild climate, Shirane traces the establishment of seasonal topics to the poetry composed by the urban nobility in the eighth century. After becoming highly codified and influencing visual arts in the tenth and eleventh centuries, the seasonal topics and their cultural associations evolved and spread to other genres, eventually settling in the popular culture of the early modern period. Contrasted with the elegant images of nature derived from court poetry was the agrarian view of nature based on rural life. The two landscapes began to intersect in the medieval period, creating a complex, layered web of competing associations. Shirane discusses a wide array of representations of nature and the four seasons in many genres, originating in both the urban and rural perspective: textual (poetry, chronicles, tales), cultivated (gardens, flower arrangement), material (kimonos, screens), performative (noh, festivals), and gastronomic (tea ceremony, food rituals). He reveals how this kind of "secondary nature," which flourished in Japan's urban architecture and gardens, fostered and idealized a sense of harmony with the natural world just at the moment it was disappearing. Illuminating the deeper meaning behind Japanese aesthetics and artifacts, Shirane clarifies the use of natural images and seasonal topics and the changes in their cultural associations and function across history, genre, and community over more than a millennium. In this fascinating book, the four seasons are revealed to be as much a cultural construction as a reflection of the physical world.
Download or read book The Arts of the Microbial World written by Victoria Lee and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2021-12-01 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first in-depth study of Japanese fermentation science in the twentieth century. The Arts of the Microbial World explores the significance of fermentation phenomena, both as life processes and as technologies, in Japanese scientific culture. Victoria Lee’s careful study documents how Japanese scientists and skilled workers sought to use the microbe’s natural processes to create new products, from soy-sauce mold starters to MSG, vitamins to statins. In traditional brewing houses as well as in the food, fine chemical, and pharmaceutical industries across Japan, they showcased their ability to deal with the enormous sensitivity and variety of the microbial world. Charting developments in fermentation science from the turn of the twentieth century, when Japan was an industrializing country on the periphery of the world economy, to 1980 when it had emerged as a global technological and economic power, Lee highlights the role of indigenous techniques in modern science as it took shape in Japan. In doing so, she reveals how knowledge of microbes lay at the heart of some of Japan’s most prominent technological breakthroughs in the global economy. At a moment when twenty-first-century developments in the fields of antibiotic resistance, the microbiome, and green chemistry suggest that the traditional eradication-based approach to the microbial world is unsustainable, twentieth-century Japanese microbiology provides a new, broader vantage for understanding and managing microbial interactions with society.
Download or read book The Sacred Science of Ancient Japan written by Avery Morrow and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2014-01-24 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first English translation and examination of secret Japanese writings dating from the paleolithic to classical eras • Examines four suppressed and secret texts to discover the deeper truths beneath Japanese mythology • Introduces evidence of ancient civilizations in Japan, the sacred geometry of primitive times, and claims of a non-Earthly origin of the Emperors • Explores how these texts convey the sacred spiritual science of Japan’s Golden Age with parallels in ancient India, Europe, and Egypt In Japan there are roughly two dozen secret manuscripts originally dating back to the paleolithic era, the age of heroes and gods, that have been handed down by the ruling families for centuries. Rejected by orthodox Japanese scholars and never before translated into English, these documents speak of primeval alphabets, lost languages, forgotten technologies, and the sacred spiritual science. Some even refer to UFOs, Atlantis, and Jesus coming to Japan. Translating directly from the original Japanese, Avery Morrow explores four of these manuscripts in full as well as reviewing the key stories of the other Golden Age chronicles. In the Kujiki manuscript Morrow uncovers the secret symbolism of a Buddhist saint and the origin of a modern prophecy of apocalypse. In the Hotsuma Tsutaye manuscript he reveals the exploits of a noble tribe who defeated a million-strong army without violence. In the Takenouchi Documents he shows us how the first Japanese emperor came from another world and ruled at a time when Atlantis and Mu still existed. And in the Katakamuna Documents the author unveils the sacred geometries of the universe from the symbolic songs of the 10,000-year-old Ashiya tribe. He also discusses the lost scripts known as the Kamiyo Moji and the magic spiritual science that underlies all of these texts, which enabled initiates to ascend to higher emotional states and increase their life force. Taking a spiritual approach à la Julius Evola to these “parahistorical” chronicles, Morrow shows how they access a higher order of knowledge and demonstrate direct parallels to many ancient texts of India, Europe, and Egypt.
Download or read book Japanese Popular Culture written by Shisō no Kagaku Kenkyūkai and published by . This book was released on 1959 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan written by Federico Marcon and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2015-07-16 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the early seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century Japan saw the creation, development, and apparent disappearance of the field of natural history, or "honzogaku." Federico Marcon traces the changing views of the natural environment that accompanied its development by surveying the ideas and practices deployed by "honzogaku" practitioners and by vividly reconstructing the social forces that affected them. These include a burgeoning publishing industry, increased circulation of ideas and books, the spread of literacy, processes of institutionalization in schools and academies, systems of patronage, and networks of cultural circles, all of which helped to shape the study of nature. In this pioneering social history of knowledge in Japan, Marcon shows how scholars developed a sophisticated discipline that was analogous to European natural history but formed independently. He also argues that when contacts with Western scholars, traders, and diplomats intensified in the nineteenth century, the previously dominant paradigm of "honzogaku "slowly succumbed to modern Western natural science not by suppression and substitution, as was previously thought, but by creative adaptation and transformation.
Download or read book Science and Cultural Exchange in Modern History Japan and the West written by Masao Watanabe and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Japanese popular culture studies in mass communication and cultural change written by Hidetoshi Kato and published by . This book was released on 1959 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Handbook of Japanese Popular Culture written by Richard Gid Powers and published by Greenwood. This book was released on 1989-06-26 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Born out of the editor's inability to find a suitable book for teaching the subject, this is a welcome title. . . . a fine contribution in a field where works in English are seriously lacking. Choice The Handbook of Japanese Popular Culture provides a convenient and efficient guide to the prevalent ways of life, recreations, and artistic creations of contemporary Japan. Designed for the general reader as well as the specialist in Japanese culture. The areas explored are those that have proven to be of durable interest to the Japanese, such as sports, science fiction, and popular music, as well as passing fads and fancies. The extremely readable essays, contributed by specialists in the field, provide a wealth of interesting information, including a survey of the historical development of the topic under discussion, with special attention paid to the most useful published works in the field, followed by a guide to the research collections and reference works that should be consulted by those wishing to deepen their knowledge of the subject. Exploring the most salient aspects of Japanese popular culture, the chapters include such topics as popular architecture, new religions, popular performing arts, film, television, comics, and mystery literature. The editor's introduction suggests that the study of popular culture as a discipline with its own unique subject matter and methodology represents a form of protest against the concept of culture as a selective tradition consisting of the best that has been thought and said. This comprehensive survey of Japanese popular culture will be an essential additon to all libraries and a useful resource in the study of popular culture, sociology, Japanese history and culture, humanities, communications, and journalism.
Download or read book Japanese Culture written by Robert John Smith and published by . This book was released on 1962 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Papers presented at the Tenth Pacific Science Congress of the Pacific Science Association, held at the University of Hawaii, U.S.A., 21 August to 6 September, 1961, and sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences, Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum, and the University of Hawaii.
Download or read book Japanese Popular Culture written by Shisō no Kagaku Kenkyūkai and published by Praeger. This book was released on 1973-07-18 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Japanese Political Culture written by Takeshi Ishida and published by Transaction Publishers. This book was released on with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume provides a perceptive background to modern Japanese culture. Ishida attempts a balanced evaluation of modern Japan, seeking to explain why the basic characteristics of Japanese society permit two almost opposite assessments. He divides the development of modern Japan into two stages: first, the period starting from the Meiji Restoration (1868) up to the end of World War II; second, from the defeat of Japan in World War II up to the present. Ishida investigates the essential features of the modern Japanese value system and the social structure, which comprise both traditional and modern elements. He examines how Japanese society has adapted Western influences to suit its own needs-the real "miracle" of modern Japan. As the Japanese economy grows and Japan becomes an economic superpower, political self-confidence is also emerging. Ishida, however, remains critical of Japanese society, because he feels that Japan lacked the internal resources to change the political system from within until its defeat by the Allies forced it to introduce various reforms ordered by the occupation authorities. Despite the rapid changes taking place in Japanese society, certain attitudes, such as conformity and competition, are common to both the prewar and postwar periods. The final section is devoted to the field of peace research. Ishida presents differences of meaning in the concepts of peace in ancient Hebrew, Greek, Roman, Chinese, and Indian cultures in order to characterize the Japanese concept of peace, which, akin to the Chinese, emphasizes harmony rather than justice. He goes on to discuss Japan's images of Gandhi, which, according to the author, were projections of ultranationalist prejudice and missed the significance of his nonviolent direct action. Ishida emphasizes the importance of such nonviolent action as a means to carry out social change toward the realization of justice.
Download or read book Illness and Culture in Contemporary Japan written by Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1984-06-29 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The cultural practices and cultural meaning of health care in urban Japan.
Download or read book Japanese History Culture from Ancient to Modern Times written by John W. Dower and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 1986 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Building a Modern Japan written by M. Low and published by Springer. This book was released on 2005-05-05 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the late Nineteenth-century, the Japanese embarked on a program of westernization in the hope of building a strong and modern nation. Science, technology and medicine played an important part, showing European nations that Japan was a world power worthy of respect. It has been acknowledged that state policy was important in the development of industries but how well-organized was the state and how close were government-business relations? The book seeks to answer these questions and others. The first part deals with the role of science and medicine in creating a healthy nation. The second part of the book is devoted to examining the role of technology, and business-state relations in building a modern nation.
Download or read book A Study of the Expression of Traditional Japanese Culture Through Selected Social Rituals as Revealed in Popular Novels written by Midori Yamanouchi Banks and published by . This book was released on 1973 with total page 766 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
