Download or read book Consuming Life in Post Bubble Japan written by Katarzyna J. Cwiertka and published by Consumption and Sustainability in Asia. This book was released on 2018-02-14 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The bursting of the economic bubble in the 1990s shook the very foundation of the post-war economic 'miracle' and marked the beginning of a gradual shift in the environmental consciousness of the Japanese. Yet, it by no means removed consumption from the pivotal position it occupied within Japanese society. Consuming Life in Post-Bubble Japan argues that consumption in Japan today is no longer simply a component of everyday economic activities, but rather a reflection of a society guided by the 'logic of late capitalism'. The volume pins down the contradictory nature of the setting in which consuming occurs in Japan today: the veneration of material comfort and convenience on the one hand, and the new rhetoric of recycling and energy conservation on the other. Theoretical insights developed as part of an art-historical enquiry, such as notions of socially engaged art and its critique, offer a new paradigm for investigating this dilemma. By combining case studies analysing the production and consumption of contemporary art with ethnographic material related to ordinary commodities and shopping, this volume provides a novel, transdisciplinary approach to exploring how a 'society of consumers' operates in post-bubble Japan and how contemporary life is a 'consuming project'.
Download or read book Japan s Bubble Deflation and Long term Stagnation written by Kōichi Hamada and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 435 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New perspectives on Japan's "lost decade" viewed in the context of recent financial turmoil.
Download or read book Coffee Life in Japan written by Merry White and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2012-05 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This fascinating book—part ethnography, part memoir—traces Japan’s vibrant café society over one hundred and thirty years. Merry White traces Japan’s coffee craze from the turn of the twentieth century, when Japan helped to launch the Brazilian coffee industry, to the present day, as uniquely Japanese ways with coffee surface in Europe and America. White’s book takes up themes as diverse as gender, privacy, perfectionism, and urbanism. She shows how coffee and coffee spaces have been central to the formation of Japanese notions about the uses of public space, social change, modernity, and pleasure. White describes how the café in Japan, from its start in 1888, has been a place to encounter new ideas and experiments in thought, behavior, sexuality , dress, and taste. It is where a person can be socially, artistically, or philosophically engaged or politically vocal. It is also, importantly, an urban oasis, where one can be private in public.
Download or read book Japan After Japan written by Tomiko Yoda and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2006-10-04 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scholars of history, anthropology, literature, and film explore the transformations in Japanese politics, culture, and society since Japans recession of the early 1990s.
Download or read book Waste written by Eiko Maruko Siniawer and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-15 with total page 411 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Waste, Eiko Maruko Siniawer innovatively explores the many ways in which the Japanese have thought about waste—in terms of time, stuff, money, possessions, and resources—from the immediate aftermath of World War II to the present. She shows how questions about waste were deeply embedded in the decisions of everyday life, reflecting the priorities and aspirations of the historical moment, and revealing people’s ever-changing concerns and hopes. Over the course of the long postwar, Japanese society understood waste variously as backward and retrogressive, an impediment to progress, a pervasive outgrowth of mass consumption, incontrovertible proof of societal excess, the embodiment of resources squandered, and a hazard to the environment. Siniawer also shows how an encouragement of waste consciousness served as a civilizing and modernizing imperative, a moral good, an instrument for advancement, a path to self-satisfaction, an environmental commitment, an expression of identity, and more. From the late 1950s onward, a defining element of Japan’s postwar experience emerged: the tension between the desire for the privileges of middle-class lifestyles made possible by affluence and dissatisfaction with the logics, costs, and consequences of that very prosperity. This tension complicated the persistent search for what might be called well-being, a good life, or a life well lived. Waste is an elegant history of how people lived—how they made sense of, gave meaning to, and found value in the acts of the everyday.
Download or read book Sayonara Amerika Sayonara Nippon written by Michael K. Bourdaghs and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the beginning of the American Occupation in 1945 to the post-bubble period of the early 1990s, popular music provided Japanese listeners with a much-needed release, channeling their desires, fears, and frustrations into a pleasurable and fluid art. Pop music allowed Japanese artists and audiences to assume various identities, reflecting the country's uncomfortable position under American hegemony and its uncertainty within ever-shifting geopolitical realities. In the first English-language study of this phenomenon, Michael K. Bourdaghs considers genres as diverse as boogie-woogie, rockabilly, enka, 1960s rock and roll, 1970s new music, folk, and techno-pop. Reading these forms and their cultural import through music, literary, and cultural theory, he introduces readers to the sensual moods and meanings of modern Japan. As he unpacks the complexities of popular music production and consumption, Bourdaghs interprets Japan as it worked through (or tried to forget) its imperial past. These efforts grew even murkier as Japanese pop migrated to the nation's former colonies. In postwar Japan, pop music both accelerated and protested the commodification of everyday life, challenged and reproduced gender hierarchies, and insisted on the uniqueness of a national culture, even as it participated in an increasingly integrated global marketplace. Each chapter in Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon examines a single genre through a particular theoretical lens: the relation of music to liberation; the influence of cultural mapping on musical appreciation; the role of translation in transmitting musical genres around the globe; the place of noise in music and its relation to historical change; the tenuous connection between ideologies of authenticity and imitation; the link between commercial success and artistic integrity; and the function of melodrama. Bourdaghs concludes with a look at recent Japanese pop music culture.
Download or read book Nihonomics written by Preethi Amaresh and published by Notion Press. This book was released on 2020-01-13 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Japan is considered the third-largest economy in the world and a highly developed free-market economy. From the European contact in the 16th century to the Abenomics age, Japan has experienced fluctuations from rapid economic growth to the economic bubble crisis in the 20th century. Under Shinzo Abe administration, the government is keen to bring out a forward and positive outlook for the Japanese people and economy. Japan can achieve this only by reforming the country’s economic system, accomplishing substantial domestic-led growth and opening up Japan’s markets further. While the Heisei era was a turbulent period for the country’s economy, the Reiwa era that began in 2019 promises a new economic dawn to overcome decades of economic stagnation.
Download or read book Otaku written by Hiroki Azuma and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Printbegrænsninger: Der kan printes 10 sider ad gangen og max. 40 sider pr. session
Download or read book Underground written by Haruki Murakami and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2001-04-10 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this haunting work of journalistic investigation, Haruki Murakami tells the story of the horrific terrorist attack on Japanese soil that shook the entire world. On a clear spring day in 1995, five members of a religious cult unleashed poison gas on the Tokyo subway system. In attempt to discover why, Haruki Murakmi talks to the people who lived through the catastrophe, and in so doing lays bare the Japanese psyche. As he discerns the fundamental issues that led to the attack, Murakami paints a clear vision of an event that could occur anytime, anywhere.
Download or read book Financial Euphoria Consumer Culture and Literature of 1980s Japan written by Ikuho Amano and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-12-30 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is an interdisciplinary study of Japan during the socially euphoric years of the Bubble Economy in the 1980s. Shedding light on consumer experiences, this study explores the socio-cultural landscape of Japan, the nation that boasted the second largest economy in the late twentieth century. Drawing its analysis from various media sources, popular literary works, and public reports, the book articulates how the late 1980s calibrated consumer demands, lifestyles, and perceptions of wealth. Through an examination of the qualitative effects of ‘Bubble money’ on consumers, the book disentangles the anatomy of the festive ambience in the economic phase, closely reading fictional and non-fictional literary works that play the role of reportage, critique, and satire. Through observations of human behaviours in consumption, the book reveals psychosomatic experiences and self-consciousness. Featuring a wide range of sources from Japanese media and literary works which have yet to be translated for an English audience, this book will be a valuable resource for students and scholars of modern Japanese culture and literature who are interested in the socio-economic landscape of late-twentieth-century Japan.
Download or read book Gender and Sexuality in Modern Japan written by Sabine Frühstück and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-03-31 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A lively, accessible survey of genders and sexualities in modern Japanese history from the 1860s to the present.
Download or read book Being Young in Super Aging Japan written by Patrick Heinrich and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-05-15 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Japan is not only the oldest society in the world today, but also the oldest society to have ever existed. This aging trend, however, presents many challenges to contemporary Japan, as it permeates all areas of life, from the economy and welfare to social cohesion and population decline. Nobody is more affected by these changes than the young generation. This book studies Japanese youth in the aging society in detail. It analyses formative events and cultural reactions. Themes include employment, parenthood, sexuality, but also art, literature and language, thus demonstrating how the younger generation can provide insights into the future of Japanese society more generally. This book argues that the prolonged crisis resulted in a commonly shared destabilization of thoughts and attitudes and that this has shaped a new generation that is unlike any other in post-war Japan. Presenting an inter-disciplinary approach to the study of the aging trend and what it implies for young Japanese, this book will be useful to students and scholars of Japanese culture and society, as well cultural anthropology and demography.
Download or read book REIMAGINING JAPAN written by Brian Salsberg and published by VIZ Media LLC. This book was released on 2011-07-12 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: REMINGINING JAPAN: Contributors to this volume include some of the world’s most brilliant thinkers from fields as diverse as business, politics, academia, science and technology, journalism and art and design. In the aftermath of the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear crisis of March 2011, Japan has become a bigger part of the world’s consciousness than it has been for years. But Japan also is grappling with other problems that, over the long run, pose a much greater challenge to its national well-being than the devastation in Tohoku.... How can the country compete with a rising China? Cope with a fast-aging society? Deal with its enormous debt? Rediscover its entrepreneurial verve? Regain its position as a leader in technology and innovation? In Reimagining Japan, McKinsey & Company, the world’s top management consulting firm, asked more than 80 global leaders and experts to consider these questions. In essays brimming with insight, affection and occasional humor, the authors offer their assessments of Japan’s past, present and --most important -- future. What sets Reimagining Japan apart is the breadth and diversity of its contributors. They range from Fortune 500 CEOs to acclaimed writers (including three Pulitzer Prize winners) to a star videogame creator, a soccer coach, a school principal and a manga artist. There has not been such a comprehensive book about Japan in the past generation - and perhaps ever. NOTABLE CONTRIBUTORS Bernard Arnault, Ian Buruma, Gerald Curtis, John Chambers, Steven Covey, John Dower, Bill Emmott, Victor Fung, Carlos Ghosn, Pico Iyer, Bob McDonald, Stephen Roach, Masahiro Sakane, Masayoshi Son, Howard Schultz, Klaus Schwab, Bobby Valentine, Steve Van Andel, Ezra Vogel, Robert Whiting, Tadashi Yanai and more than 50 others.
Download or read book Japanese Monetary Policy written by Kenneth J. Singleton and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2007-12-01 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How has the Bank of Japan (BOJ) helped shape Japan's economic growth during the past two decades? This book comprehensively explores the relations between financial market liberalization and BOJ policies and examines the ways in which these policies promoted economic growth in the 1980s. The authors argue that the structure of Japan's financial markets, particularly restrictions on money-market transactions and the key role of commercial banks in financing corporate investments, allowed the BOJ to influence Japan's economic success. The first two chapters provide the most in-depth English-language discussion of the BOJ's operating procedures and policymaker's views about how BOJ actions affect the Japanese business cycle. Chapter three explores the impact of the BOJ's distinctive window guidance policy on corporate investment, while chapter four looks at how monetary policy affects the term structure of interest rates in Japan. The final two chapters examine the overall effect of monetary policy on real aggregate economic activity. This volume will prove invaluable not only to economists interested in the technical operating procedures of the BOJ, but also to those interested in the Japanese economy and in the operation and outcome of monetary reform in general.
Download or read book Tokyo Junkie written by Robert Whiting and published by Stone Bridge Press, Inc.. This book was released on 2021-04-20 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tokyo Junkie is a memoir that plays out over the dramatic 60-year growth of the megacity Tokyo, once a dark, fetid backwater and now the most populous, sophisticated, and safe urban capital in the world. Follow author Robert Whiting (The Chrysanthemum and the Bat, You Gotta Have Wa, Tokyo Underworld) as he watches Tokyo transform during the 1964 Olympics, rubs shoulders with the Yakuza and comes face to face with the city’s dark underbelly, interviews Japan’s baseball elite after publishing his first best-selling book on the subject, and learns how politics and sports collide to produce a cultural landscape unlike any other, even as a new Olympics is postponed and the COVID virus ravages the nation. A colorful social history of what Anthony Bourdain dubbed, “the greatest city in the world,” Tokyo Junkie is a revealing account by an accomplished journalist who witnessed it all firsthand and, in the process, had his own dramatic personal transformation.
Download or read book The Spell of Capital written by Samir Suresh Gandesha and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the tradition, impact, and contemporary relevance of two key ideas from Western Marxism: Georg Lukács's concept of reification, in which social aspects of humanity are viewed in objectified terms, and Guy Debord's concept of the spectacle, where the world is packaged and presented to consumers in uniquely mediated ways. Bringing the original, yet now often forgotten, theoretical contexts for these terms back to the fore, Johan Hartle and Samir Gandesha offer a new look at the importance of Western Marxism from its early days to the present moment-and reveal why Marxist cultural critique must continue to play a vital role in any serious sociological analysis of contemporary society.
Download or read book Modern Japanese Cuisine written by Katarzyna Joanna Cwiertka and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2006 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Katarzyna Cwiertka shows that key shifts in the Japanese diet were, in many cases, a consequence of modern imperialism. Exploring reforms in home cooking and military catering, wartime food management and the rise of urban gastronomy, she reveals how Japan's pre-modern culinary diversity was eventually replaced by a truly 'national' cuisine - a set of foods and practices with which the majority of Japanese today ardently identify." "The result of more than a decade of research, Modern Japanese Cuisine is a look at the historical roots of one of the world's best cuisines. It includes additional information on the influx of Japanese food and restaurants in Western countries, and how in turn these developments have informed our view of Japanese cuisine. This book is appetizing reading for all those interested in Japanese culture and its influences."--BOOK JACKET.
