Download or read book Philipp Franz von Siebold and the Opening of Japan written by Herbert Plutschow and published by Global Oriental. This book was released on 2007-03-22 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on new documents, especially von Siebold’s correspondence (including letters to his wife Taki), written advice and draft treaties which were placed in the public domain in 2002 by the Brandenstein-Zeppelin family, the author argues that such is their significance a full re-evaluation of von Siebold’s advisory role vis a vis the United States, Russia and the Netherlands in particular, both before and after the successful opening of Japan in the 1850s is now justified. This new study challenges the conventional Western scholarly view that the key figures involved in the opening of Japan were confined to the US Navy’s Commodore Matthew Perry, and the diplomats Townsend Harris of the US and Rutherford Alcock of the UK. A close examination of the new sources suggests otherwise and also puts von Siebold’s agenda to ‘save’ Japan from being overtaken by what he referred to as the colonial and commercial ambitions of the West’s great maritime nations in a new light. The author also takes pains to debunk the long-held view that von Siebold was a Russian spy. Even so, it is accepted that von Siebold remains a controversial figure whose role was more often than not ‘tinged with considerable selfish aspirations and a belief in his personal infallibility’.
Download or read book Siebold and Japan written by A. Kouwenhoven and published by Kit Pub. This book was released on 2000 with total page 118 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Philipp Franz von Siebold (1796-1866) played a major role in the development of Western scientific disciplines in Japan, in particular medicine. Equally important were his contributions to Western knowledge about Japan. Siebold and Japan depicts the life of this impassioned man, whose love for Japan and its people resulted in the creation of several definitive ethnographic, zoological and botanical collections. These are now part of the collections of the world-renowned National Museum of Ethnology and the Naturalis (National Museum of Natural History) in Leiden, The Netherlands.
Download or read book Siebold s Daughter written by Akira Yoshimura and published by Merwinasia. This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set against the political drama of Japan's nineteenth-century transition to a modern state, Yoshimura Akira tells the compelling story of the first Western trained female physician in Japan and the obstacles she faced as a mixed blood child in pre-modern Japan.
Download or read book Manners and Customs of the Japanese in the Nineteenth Century written by and published by . This book was released on 1841 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Dutch Language in Japan 1600 1900 written by Christopher Joby and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-12-29 with total page 514 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Dutch Language in Japan (1600-1900) Christopher Joby offers the first book-length account of the knowledge and use of the Dutch language in Tokugawa and early Meiji Japan, which had a profound effect on Japan’s language, society and culture.
Download or read book Philipp Franz Von Siebold and Russian Policy and Action on Opening Japan to the West in the Middle of the Nineteenth Century written by Edgar Franz and published by IUDICIUM Verlag. This book was released on 2005 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Edgar Franz deserves credit for having been the first to use Siebold’s private papers and manuscripts to provide a detailed analysis of his influence on Russia’s policy on opening up Japan. Franz proves that Siebold’s intimate knowledge of Japan and his sensitive attitude to the Japanese mentality were crucial to Russian negotiations. Subsequently Russia was the first foreign nation to succeed in concluding a treaty with Japan that included establishing trade relations between the two nations. It has been possible to verify Siebold’s significance for the modernization of Japan, the political dimension of Japan’s activities and Siebold’s great influence on the opening of Japan for trade and navigation
Download or read book Japan s Defense Policy and Bureaucratic Politics 1976 2007 written by Takao Sebata and published by University Press of America. This book was released on 2010 with total page 437 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is a well known fact that Japan spends only a small percentage of her gross national product on defense. What is not well known, however, is the fact that Japan's defense budget ranks among the top in the world and that her self-defense forces are considered to be amongst the best conventional armed forces in the world. Since empirical studies concerning Japan's military expansion are rare both in Japanese and English, the book takes up this neglected area. It examines Japan's military expansion and the decision-making of her defense policy between 1976 and 2007, focusing on the National Defense Program outline and the guidelines for United States-Japan Defense Cooperation. This book deals with how the bureaucratic politics model applies to the case of Japan's defense policy and demonstrates some similarities and differences between Japanese and United States decision-making.
Download or read book The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet written by David Mitchell and published by Knopf Canada. This book was released on 2010-06-29 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By the New York Times bestselling author of The Bone Clocks and Cloud Atlas | Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize In 2007, Time magazine named him one of the most influential novelists in the world. He has twice been short-listed for the Man Booker Prize. The New York Times Book Review called him simply “a genius.” Now David Mitchell lends fresh credence to The Guardian’s claim that “each of his books seems entirely different from that which preceded it.” The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is a stunning departure for this brilliant, restless, and wildly ambitious author, a giant leap forward by even his own high standards. A bold and epic novel of a rarely visited point in history, it is a work as exquisitely rendered as it is irresistibly readable. The year is 1799, the place Dejima in Nagasaki Harbor, the “high-walled, fan-shaped artificial island” that is the Japanese Empire’s single port and sole window onto the world, designed to keep the West at bay; the farthest outpost of the war-ravaged Dutch East Indies Company; and a de facto prison for the dozen foreigners permitted to live and work there. To this place of devious merchants, deceitful interpreters, costly courtesans, earthquakes, and typhoons comes Jacob de Zoet, a devout and resourceful young clerk who has five years in the East to earn a fortune of sufficient size to win the hand of his wealthy fiancée back in Holland. But Jacob’s original intentions are eclipsed after a chance encounter with Orito Aibagawa, the disfigured daughter of a samurai doctor and midwife to the city’s powerful magistrate. The borders between propriety, profit, and pleasure blur until Jacob finds his vision clouded, one rash promise made and then fatefully broken. The consequences will extend beyond Jacob’s worst imaginings. As one cynical colleague asks, “Who ain’t a gambler in the glorious Orient, with his very life?” A magnificent mix of luminous writing, prodigious research, and heedless imagination, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is the most impressive achievement of its eminent author. Praise for The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet “A page-turner . . . [David] Mitchell’s masterpiece; and also, I am convinced, a masterpiece of our time.”—Richard Eder, The Boston Globe “An achingly romantic story of forbidden love . . . Mitchell’s incredible prose is on stunning display. . . . A novel of ideas, of longing, of good and evil and those who fall somewhere in between [that] confirms Mitchell as one of the more fascinating and fearless writers alive.”—Dave Eggers, The New York Times Book Review “The novelist who’s been showing us the future of fiction has published a classic, old-fashioned tale . . . an epic of sacrificial love, clashing civilizations and enemies who won’t rest until whole family lines have been snuffed out.”—Ron Charles, The Washington Post “By any standards, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is a formidable marvel.”—James Wood, The New Yorker “A beautiful novel, full of life and authenticity, atmosphere and characters that breathe.”—Maureen Corrigan, NPR
Download or read book Revisiting Japan s Restoration written by Timothy Amos and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-11-29 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents the reader with thirty-one short chapters that capture an exciting new moment in the study of the Meiji Restoration. The chapters offer a kaleidoscope of approaches and interpretations of the Restoration that showcase the strengths of the most recent interpretative trends in history writing on Japan while simultaneously offering new research pathways. On a scale probably never before seen in the study of the Restoration outside Japan, the short chapters in this volume reveal unique aspects of the transformative event and process not previously explored in previous research. They do this in three core ways: through selecting and deploying different time frames in their historical analysis; by creative experimentation with different spatial units through which to ascertain historical experience; and by innovative selection of unique and highly original topics for analysis. The volume offers students and teachers of Japanese history, modern history, and East Asian studies an important resource for coming to grips with the multifaceted nature of Japan’s nineteenth-century transformation. The volume will also have broader appeal to scholars working in fields such as early modern/modern world history, global history, Asian modernities, gender studies, economic history, and postcolonial studies.
Download or read book The Japanese Discovery of Europe 1720 1830 written by Donald Keene and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1969-06-01 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is an account of the growth and uses of Western learning in Japan from 1720 to 1830. These are the dates of the beginning of official interest in Western learning and of the expulsion of Siebold from the country, the first stage of a crisis that could be resolved only by the opening of the country of the West. The century and more included by the two dates was a most important period in Japanese history, when intellectuals, rebelling at the isolation of their country, desperately sought knowledge from abroad. The amazing energy and enthusiasm of men like Honda Toshiaki made possible the spectacular changes in Japan, which are all too often credited to the arrival of Commodore Perry. The author chose Honda Toshiaki (1744-1821) as his central figure. A page from any one of Honda's writings suffices to show that with him one has entered a new age, that of modern Japan. One finds in his books a new spirit, restless, curious and receptive. There is in him the wonder at new discoveries, the delight in widening horizons. Honda took a kind of pleasure even in revealing that Japan, after all, was only a small island in a large world. To the Japanese who had thought of Chinese civilization as being immemorial antiquity, he declared that Egypt's was thousands of years older and far superior. The world, he discovered, was full of wonderful things, and he insisted that Japan take advantage of them. Honda looked at Japan as he thought a Westerner might, and saw things that had to be changed, terrible drains on the country's moral and physical strength. Within him sprang the conviction that Japan must become one of the great nations of the world.
Download or read book Manga and the Representation of Japanese History written by Roman Rosenbaum and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited collection explores how graphic art and in particular Japanese manga represent Japanese history. The articles explore the representation of history in manga from disciplines that include such diverse fields as literary studies, politics, history, cultural studies, linguistics, narratology, and semiotics. Despite this diversity of approaches all academics from these respective fields of study agree that manga pose a peculiarly contemporary appeal that transcends the limitation imposed by traditional approaches to the study and teaching of history. The representation of history via manga in Japan has a long and controversial historiographical dimension. Thereby manga and by extension graphic art in Japanese culture has become one of the world's most powerful modes of expressing contemporary historical verisimilitude. The contributors to this volume elaborate how manga and by extension graphic art rewrites, reinvents and re-imagines the historicity and dialectic of bygone epochs in postwar and contemporary Japan. Manga and the Representation of Japanese History will be of interest to students and scholars of Asian studies, Asian history, Japanese culture and society, as well as art and visual culture
Download or read book From White to Yellow written by Rotem Kowner and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2014-12-01 with total page 707 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Europeans first landed in Japan they encountered people they perceived as white-skinned and highly civilized, but these impressions did not endure. Gradually the Europeans' positive impressions faded away and Japanese were seen as yellow-skinned and relatively inferior. Accounting for this dramatic transformation, From White to Yellow is a groundbreaking study of the evolution of European interpretations of the Japanese and the emergence of discourses about race in early modern Europe. Transcending the conventional focus on Africans and Jews within the rise of modern racism, Rotem Kowner demonstrates that the invention of race did not emerge in a vacuum in eighteenth-century Europe, but rather was a direct product of earlier discourses of the "Other." This compelling study indicates that the racial discourse on the Japanese, alongside the Chinese, played a major role in the rise of the modern concept of race. While challenging Europe's self-possession and sense of centrality, the discourse delayed the eventual consolidation of a hierarchical worldview in which Europeans stood immutably at the apex. Drawing from a vast array of primary sources, From White to Yellow traces the racial roots of the modern clash between Japan and the West.
Download or read book written by Cambridge University Library and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1991-03-28 with total page 553 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A complete catalogue of early books acquired by the diplomats W. G. Aston, Ernest Satow, and Heinrich von Siebold in Japan. The bulk of the 2,500 items are wood-block printed books of the Edo period. The editors' introduction is followed by entries giving title, author/editor/illustrator, date of publication and/or printing, all participating publishers, and the seals of previous owners.
Download or read book The Worlds of Japanese Popular Culture written by Dolores P. Martinez and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1998-10-13 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dolores Martinez heads an international team of scholars in this lively discussion of Japanese popular culture. The book's contributors include Japanese as well as British, Icelandic and North American writers, offering a diversity of views of what Japanese popular culture is, and how it is best approached and understood. They bring an anthropological perspective to a broad range of topics, including sumo, karaoke, manga, vampires, women's magazines, soccer and morning television. Through these topics - many of which have never previously been addressed by scholars - the contributors also explore several deeper themes: the construction of gender in Japan; the impact of globalisation and modern consumerism; and the rapidly shifting boundaries of Japanese culture and identity. This innovative study will appeal to those interested in Japanese culture, sociology and cultural anthropology.
Download or read book Unbeaten Tracks in Japan written by Isabella Lucy Bird and published by . This book was released on 1888 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Premise of Fidelity written by Maki Fukuoka and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2012-08-15 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Premise of Fidelity puts forward a new history of Japanese visuality through an examination of the discourses and practices surrounding the nineteenth century transposition of "the real" in the decades before photography was introduced. This intellectual history is informed by a careful examination of a network of local scholars—from physicians to farmers to bureaucrats—known as Shōhyaku-sha. In their archival materials, these scholars used the term shashin (which would, years later, come to signify "photography" in Japanese) in a wide variety of medical, botanical, and pictorial practices. These scholars pursued questions of the relationship between what they observed and what they believed they knew, in the process investigating scientific ideas and practices by obsessively naming and classifying, and then rendering through highly accurate illustration, the objects of their study. This book is an exploration of the process by which the Shōhyaku-sha shaped the concept of shashin. As such, it disrupts the dominant narratives of photography, art, and science in Japan, providing a prehistory of Japanese photography that requires the accepted history of the discipline to be rewritten.
Download or read book The Making of Modern Japan written by Marius B. Jansen and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-01 with total page 933 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Magisterial in vision, sweeping in scope, this monumental work presents a seamless account of Japanese society during the modern era, from 1600 to the present. A distillation of more than fifty years’ engagement with Japan and its history, it is the crowning work of our leading interpreter of the modern Japanese experience. Since 1600 Japan has undergone three periods of wrenching social and institutional change, following the imposition of hegemonic order on feudal society by the Tokugawa shogun; the opening of Japan’s ports by Commodore Perry; and defeat in World War II. The Making of Modern Japan charts these changes: the social engineering begun with the founding of the shogunate in 1600, the emergence of village and castle towns with consumer populations, and the diffusion of samurai values in the culture. Marius Jansen covers the making of the modern state, the adaptation of Western models, growing international trade, the broadening opportunity in Japanese society with industrialization, and the postwar occupation reforms imposed by General MacArthur. Throughout, the book gives voice to the individuals and views that have shaped the actions and beliefs of the Japanese, with writers, artists, and thinkers, as well as political leaders given their due. The story this book tells, though marked by profound changes, is also one of remarkable consistency, in which continuities outweigh upheavals in the development of society, and successive waves of outside influence have only served to strengthen a sense of what is unique and native to Japanese experience. The Making of Modern Japan takes us to the core of this experience as it illuminates one of the contemporary world’s most compelling transformations.
