Download or read book Visual Genesis of Japanese National Identity written by Ewa Machotka and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2009 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume offers an entirely new view of the concept of constructing nation-states. It inquires into the nature of national identity constructs produced in pre-modern Japan through examining two aspects of its cultural production, the sphere of fine arts and the sphere of literature.
Download or read book A History of Nationalism in Modern Japan written by Kevin Doak and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2007 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This magisterial history of Japanese nationalism reveals nationalism to be a contested and pluralistic practice that seeks to center the people in political life. It presents a wealth of primary source material on how Japanese themselves have understood their national identity.
Download or read book Rethinking Identity in Modern Japan written by Yumiko Iida and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-03-07 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is a major reconsideration of Japanese late modernity and national hegemony which examines the creative and academic works of a number of influential Japanese thinkers. The author situates the process of Japanese knowledge production in the interface between the immediate historical and the wider socio-economic and politico-cultural contexts accompanying the Japanese post-war experience of modernity. This book will be of great value to anyone interested in the history of contemporary Japanese culture and society.
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 Branding Japanese Food written by Katarzyna J. Cwiertka and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2020-02-29 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Branding Japanese Food is the first book in English on the use of food for the purpose of place branding in Japan. At the center of the narrative is the 2013 inscription of “Washoku, traditional dietary cultures of the Japanese, notably for the celebration of New Year” on UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. The authors challenge the very definition of washoku as it was presented in the UNESCO nomination, and expose the multitude of contradictions and falsehoods used in the promotion of Japanese cuisine as part of the nation-branding agenda. Cwiertka and Yasuhara argue further that the manipulation of historical facts in the case of washoku is actually a continuation of similar practices employed for centuries in the branding of foods as iconic markers of tourist attractions. They draw parallels with gastronomic meibutsu (famous products) and edible omiyage (souvenirs), which since the early modern period have been persistently marketed through questionable connections with historical personages and events. Today, meibutsu and omiyage play a central role in the travel experience in Japan and comprise a major category in the practices of gift exchange. Few seem to mind that the stories surrounding these foods are hardly ever factual, despite the fact that the stories, rather than the food itself, constitute the primary attraction. The practice itself is derived from the intellectual exercise of evoking specific associations and sentiments by referring to imaginary landscapes, known as utamakura or meisho. At first restricted to poetry, this exercise was expanded to the visual arts, and by the early modern period familiarity with specific locations and the culinary associations they evoked had become a fixed component of public collective knowledge. The construction of the myths of meibutsu, omiyage, and washoku as described in this book not only enriches the understanding of Japanese culinary culture, but also highlights the dangers of tweaking history for branding purposes, and the even greater danger posed by historians remaining silent in the face of this irreversible reshaping of the past into a consumable product for public enjoyment.
Download or read book Premodern Japan written by Mikiso Hane and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-04-17 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Japanese historian Louis Perez brings Mikiso Hane's rich and beloved account of early Japanese history up-to-date in this thoroughly revised Second Edition of Premodern Japan. The text traces the key developments of Japanese history in the premodern period, including the establishment of the imperial dynasty, early influences from China and Korea, the rise of the samurai class and the establishment of feudalism, the culture and society of the long Tokugawa period, the rise of Confucianism and Shinto nationalism, and finally, the end of Tokugawa rule. While the text provides many political developments through the early modern period, it also integrates the social, cultural, and intellectual aspects of Japanese history as well. Perez's updates to the text provide a comprehensive overview of the major social, political, and religious trends in premodern Japan as well as offering the most current scholarship.
Download or read book The Private World of Surimono written by Sadako Ohki and published by Yale University Art Gallery. This book was released on 2020-04-07 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A detailed look at a genre that combines virtuoso printmaking techniques, sophisticated imagery, and engaging, playful poetry This beautiful volume celebrates the tradition of the Japanese surimono print. Produced from around 1800 until 1840, during the Edo period, surimono (“printed things” in Japanese) combine intricate artwork and playful poetry, and their small print runs and exclusive audiences allowed for lavish yet subtle surface treatments, such as embossing and gilding. Enjoyed for their learned allusions to literature and contemporary culture, surimono continue to delight and perplex scholars with their visual puns and wordplay. Imagery ranges from delicate, domestic still lifes to spirited vignettes of the natural world, while the poems are often lighthearted takes on the classical Japanese waka form. With its rich text and scholarly apparatus—including names and titles in kanji characters as well as transliterations and translations of the poems on the catalogued prints—The Private World of Surimono serves as a critical resource for scholars of Japanese art and history and offers general readers insight into this rare and innovative print form.
Download or read book Hokusai s Great Wave written by Christine M. E. Guth and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2015-01-31 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hokusai’s “Great Wave,” as it is commonly known today, is arguably one of Japan’s most successful exports, its commanding cresting profile instantly recognizable no matter how different its representations in media and style. In this richly illustrated and highly original study, Christine Guth examines the iconic wave from its first publication in 1831 through the remarkable range of its articulations, arguing that it has been a site where the tensions, contradictions, and, especially, the productive creativities of the local and the global have been negotiated and expressed. She follows the wave’s trajectory across geographies, linking its movements with larger political, economic, technological, and sociocultural developments. Adopting a case study approach, Guth explores issues that map the social life of the iconic wave across time and place, from the initial reception of the woodblock print in Japan, to the image’s adaptations as part of “international nationalism,” its place in American perceptions of Japan, its commercial adoption for lifestyle branding, and finally to its identification as a tsunami, bringing not culture but disaster in its wake. Wide ranging in scope yet grounded in close readings of disparate iterations of the wave, multidisciplinary and theoretically informed in its approach, Hokusai’s Great Wave will change both how we look at this global icon and the way we study the circulation of Japanese prints. This accessible and engagingly written work moves beyond the standard hagiographical approach to recognize, as categories of analysis, historical and geographic contingency as well as visual and technical brilliance. It is a book that will interest students of Japan and its culture and more generally those seeking fresh perspectives on the dynamics of cultural globalization.
Download or read book Japanese Painting and National Identity written by Victoria Weston and published by U of M Center for Japanese Studies. This book was released on 2004 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first monograph in English to address the art and philosophy of a group of painters regarded as seminal figures in the development of modern Japanese painting. Lead by the outspoken and widely published art critic Okakura Tenshin, a group of mostly Tokyo-based painters took on nothing less than the modernization of traditional Japanese painting. The painters who looked to Okakura Tenshin as their leader saw themselves not just as artists but as servants of the nation. Their task, they believed, was to give expression to the vitality of Meiji Japan while also helping to shape public opinion at home and abroad. Thus, they chose themes purposefully redolent with what they identified as Japanese cultural values; they experimented with painting techniques based on tradition yet revitalized through innovation. This book details how these artists came to this mission, as well as their training, their philosophical objectives, and their works.
Download or read book Teaching Games and Game Studies in the Literature Classroom written by Tison Pugh and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-09-22 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Teaching Games and Game Studies in the Literature Classroom offers practical suggestions for educators looking to incorporate ludic media, ranging from novels to video games and from poems to board games, into their curricula. Across the globe, video games and interactive media have already been granted their own departments at numerous larger institutions and will increasingly fall under the purview of language and literature departments at smaller schools. This volume considers fundamental ways in which literature can be construed as a game and the benefits of such an approach. The contributors outline pedagogical strategies for integrating the study of video games with the study of literature and consider the intersections of identity and ideology as they relate to literature and ludology. They also address the benefits (and liabilities) of making the process of learning itself a game, an approach that is quickly gaining currency and increasing interest. Every chapter is grounded in theory but focuses on practical applications to develop students' critical thinking skills and intercultural competence through both digital and analog gameful approaches.
Download or read book Beyond the Great Wave written by James King and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2010 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Japanese landscape print has had a tremendous influence on Western art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In Japan and in the West it is often seen as the dominant form in Ukiyo-e, pictures from the floating world. And yet for all its importance, it is a genre whose history has never been written. Beyond The Great Wave is a survey or overview for all those interested in discovering the inner dynamics of one of art history's most remarkable achievements. However, it is also a quest narrative, in which landscapes and notions of Japan as a homeland are intertwined and interconnected. Although there has never been a book-length study of the Japanese landscape print in either Japanese or English, a great deal has been written about the two giants of the genre, Hokusai and Hiroshige. From what traditions did these two nineteenth-century artists emerge? Who were their predecessors? What influence, if any, did they have on other Ukiyo-e artists? Can their influence be seen in the shin-hanga and sôsaku-hanga artists of the twentieth century? This book addresses these issues, but it also looks at a number of other factors, such as the growth of tourism in nineteenth-century Japan, necessary for understanding this genre.
Download or read book Japandemonium Illustrated written by Toriyama Sekien and published by Courier Dover Publications. This book was released on 2017-01-18 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Japanese folklore abounds with bizarre creatures collectively referred to as the yokai ― the ancestors of the monsters populating Japanese film, literature, manga, and anime. Artist Toriyama Sekien (1712–88) was the first to compile illustrated encyclopedias detailing the appearances and habits of these creepy-crawlies from myth and folklore. Ever since their debut over two centuries ago, the encyclopedias have inspired generations of Japanese artists. Japandemonium Illustrated represents the very first time they have ever been available in English. This historically groundbreaking compilation includes complete translations of all four of Sekien's yokai masterworks: the 1776 Gazu Hyakki Yagyō (The Illustrated Demon Horde's Night Parade), the 1779 Konjaku Gazu Zoku Hyakki (The Illustrated Demon Horde from Past and Present, Continued), the 1781 Konjaku Hyakki Shū (More of the Demon Horde from Past and Present), and the 1784 Hyakki Tsurezure Bukuro (A Horde of Haunted Housewares). The collection is complemented by a detailed introduction and helpful annotations for modern-day readers.
Download or read book National Identity and Japanese Revisionism written by Michal Kolmas and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-09-26 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the course of the twentieth century, Japan has experienced a radical shift in its self-perception. After World War II, Japan embraced a peaceful and anti-militarist identity, which was based on its war-prohibiting Constitution and the foreign policy of the Yoshida doctrine. For most of the twentieth century, this identity was unusually stable. In the last couple of decades, however, Japan’s self-perception and foreign policy seem to have changed. Tokyo has conducted a number of foreign policy actions as well as symbolic internal gestures that would have been unthinkable a few decades ago and that symbolize a new and more confident Japan. Japanese politicians – including Prime Minister Abe Shinzō – have adopted a new discourse depicting pacifism as a hindrance, rather than asset, to Japan’s foreign policy. Does that mean that “Japan is back”? In order to better understand the dynamics of contemporary Japan, Kolmaš joins up the dots between national identity theory and Japanese revisionism. The book shows that while political elites and a portion of the Japanese public call for re-articulation of Japan’s peaceful identity, there are still societal and institutional forces that prevent this change from entirely materializing.
Download or read book Courtly Visions written by Joshua S. Mostow and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2015-02-04 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Courtly Visions: The Ise Stories and the Politics of Cultural Appropriation traces—through the visual and literary record—the reception and use of the tenth-century literary romance through the seventeenth century. Ise monogatari (The Ise Stories) takes shape in a salon of politically disenfranchised courtiers, then transforms later in the Heian period (794-1185) into a key subtext for autobiographical writings by female aristocrats. In the twelfth century it is turned into an esoteric religious text, while in the fourteenth it is used as cultural capital in the struggles within the imperial household. Mostow further examines the development of the standardized iconographies of the Rinpa school and the printed Saga-bon edition, exploring what these tell us about how the Ise was being read and why. The study ends with an Epilogue that briefly surveys the uses Ise was put to throughout the Edo period and into the modern day.
Download or read book Encountering China s Past written by Lintao Qi and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-04-12 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book features articles contributed by leading scholars and scholar-translators in Translation Studies and Chinese Studies from around the world. Written in English, the articles examine the translation of classical Chinese literature, from classics to poetry, from drama to fiction, into a range of Asian and European languages including Japanese, English, French, Czech, and Danish. The collection therefore provides a platform for readers to make comparative and critical readings of scholarship across languages, cultures, disciplines, and genres. With its integration of textual and paratextual materials, this collection of essays is of potential interest to not only academics in the area of Translation Studies, Chinese Studies, Literary Studies and Intercultural Communications, but it may also appeal to communities outside the academia who simply enjoy reading about literature.
Download or read book Picturing Japaneseness written by Darrell William Davis and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the role of 1930s Japanese cinema in the construction of a national identity and in the larger context of Japan's encounter-and struggle-with the West and modernity. Davis lends a new perspective to such celebrated films as Gate of Hell, Kagemusha, and Ran.
Download or read book Imagining Japan in Post war East Asia written by Paul Morris and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-03-26 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the decades since her defeat in the Second World War, Japan has continued to loom large in the national imagination of many of her East Asian neighbours. While for many, Japan still conjures up images of rampant military brutality, at different times and in different communities, alternative images of the Japanese ‘Other’ have vied for predominance – in ways that remain poorly understood, not least within Japan itself. Imagining Japan in Postwar East Asia analyses the portrayal of Japan in the societies of East and Southeast Asia, and asks how and why this has changed in recent decades, and what these changing images of Japan reveal about the ways in which these societies construct their own identities. It examines the role played by an imagined ‘Japan’ in the construction of national selves across the East Asian region, as mediated through a broad range of media ranging from school curricula and textbooks to film, television, literature and comics. Commencing with an extensive thematic and comparative overview chapter, the volume also includes contributions focusing specifically on Chinese societies (the mainland PRC, Hong Kong and Taiwan), Korea, the Philippines, Malaysia and Singapore. These studies show how changes in the representation of Japan have been related to political, social and cultural shifts within the societies of East Asia – and in particular to the ways in which these societies have imagined or constructed their own identities. Bringing together contributors working in the fields of education, anthropology, history, sociology, political science and media studies, this interdisciplinary volume will be of interest to all students and scholars concerned with issues of identity, politics and culture in the societies of East Asia, and to those seeking a deeper understanding of Japan’s fraught relations with its regional neighbours.
