Download or read book A Companion to the Anthropology of Japan written by Jennifer Robertson and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2008-03-10 with total page 546 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is an unprecedented collection of 29 original essays by some of the world’s most distinguished scholars of Japan. Covers a broad range of issues, including the colonial roots of anthropology in the Japanese academy; eugenics and nation building; majority and minority cultures; genders and sexualities; and fashion and food cultures Resists stale and misleading stereotypes, by presenting new perspectives on Japanese culture and society Makes Japanese society accessible to readers unfamiliar with the country
Download or read book Japan and National Anthropology written by Sonia Ryang and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In an attempt to move away from theoretical trends which identify Japanese cultural boundaries with Japan's nation-state boundaries, consequentially portraying the country as racially homogeneous and culturally unique, Ryang examines: how wartime enemy studies shaped the direction of post-war anthropology; the historical effects and significance of Chrysanthemum and the Sword; key texts from the anthropology enquiry that started within the US military occupation of Japan (1945-1952); Japanese kinship and its relationship to the study of Japan as a nation; and the origins and development of the studies of the Japanese self." "This book will be welcomed by all students of Japanese anthropology and Japanese history. Its historical breadth and criticism of existing approaches provide a fresh and reasoned insight into the development and future of anthropology of Japan."--Jacket.
Download or read book Japan and National Anthropology A Critique written by Sonia Ryang and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-08-02 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Japan and National Anthropology: A Critique is an empirically rich and theoretically sophisticated study which challenges the conventional view of Japanese studies in general and the Anglophone anthropological writings on Japan in particular. Sonia Ryang explores the process by which the postwar anthropology of Japan has come to be dominated by certain conceptual and methodological and exposes the extent to which this process has occluded our view of Japan.
Download or read book Multiculturalism in the New Japan written by Nelson H. H. Graburn and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2008 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Like other industrial nations, Japan is experiencing its own forms of, and problems with, internationalization and multiculturalism. This volume focuses on several aspects of this process and examines the immigrant minorities as well as their Japanese recipient communities. Multiculturalism is considered broadly, and includes topics often neglected in other works, such as: religious pluralism, domestic and international tourism, political regionalism and decentralization, sports, business styles in the post-Bubble era, and the education of immigrant minorities.
Download or read book Otaku and the Struggle for Imagination in Japan written by Patrick W. Galbraith and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2019-12-06 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From computer games to figurines and maid cafes, men called “otaku” develop intense fan relationships with “cute girl” characters from manga, anime, and related media and material in contemporary Japan. While much of the Japanese public considers the forms of character love associated with “otaku” to be weird and perverse, the Japanese government has endeavored to incorporate “otaku” culture into its branding of “Cool Japan.” In Otaku and the Struggle for Imagination in Japan, Patrick W. Galbraith explores the conflicting meanings of “otaku” culture and its significance to Japanese popular culture, masculinity, and the nation. Tracing the history of “otaku” and “cute girl” characters from their origins in the 1970s to his recent fieldwork in Akihabara, Tokyo (“the Holy Land of Otaku”), Galbraith contends that the discourse surrounding “otaku” reveals tensions around contested notions of gender, sexuality, and ways of imagining the nation that extend far beyond Japan. At the same time, in their relationships with characters and one another, “otaku” are imagining and creating alternative social worlds.
Download or read book Discourses of the Vanishing written by Marilyn Ivy and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-02-15 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Japan today is haunted by the ghosts its spectacular modernity has generated. Deep anxieties about the potential loss of national identity and continuity disturb many in Japan, despite widespread insistence that it has remained culturally intact. In this provocative conjoining of ethnography, history, and cultural criticism, Marilyn Ivy discloses these anxieties—and the attempts to contain them—as she tracks what she calls the vanishing: marginalized events, sites, and cultural practices suspended at moments of impending disappearance. Ivy shows how a fascination with cultural margins accompanied the emergence of Japan as a modern nation-state. This fascination culminated in the early twentieth-century establishment of Japanese folklore studies and its attempts to record the spectral, sometimes violent, narratives of those margins. She then traces the obsession with the vanishing through a range of contemporary reconfigurations: efforts by remote communities to promote themselves as nostalgic sites of authenticity, storytelling practices as signs of premodern presence, mass travel campaigns, recallings of the dead by blind mediums, and itinerant, kabuki-inspired populist theater.
Download or read book Japanese Society written by Chie Nakane and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1972-02 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A brilliant wedding of 'national character' studies and analyses of small societies through the structural approach of British anthropology. One is of course reminded of Ruth Benedict's Chrysanthemum and the Sword which deals also with Japanese national culture. Studies by Margaret Mead and Geoffrey Gorer deal with other national cultures; however, all of these studies take off from national psychology. Professor Nakane comes to explanation of the behavior of Japanese through analysis rather of historical social structure of Japanese society, beginning with the way any two Japanese perceive each other, and following through to the nature of the Japanese corporation and the whole society. Nakane's remarkable achievement, which has already given new insight about themselves to the Japanese, promises to open up a new field of large-society comparative social anthropology which is long overdue." —Sol Tax "This is an important book!"--Robert E. Cole, Journal of Asian Studies "If you have time for just one book on Japan, try this one."--David Plath, Asian Student "Should be taken to heart by everyone who has dealings with Japan. . . .Even those--or, perhaps, most of all those--who know Japan intimately will be grateful to Professor Nakane for her brilliant study."--Times Literary Supplement
Download or read book Cultural Nationalism in Contemporary Japan written by Kosaku Yoshino and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2005-10-18 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The debate about Japan's 'uniqueness' is central to Japanese studies. This book aims to illuminate that debate from a comparative and theoretical perspective. It also tests theories of ethnicity and cultural nationalism through the use of Japan as a case study. Yoshino examines how ideas of national distinctiveness are `produced' and `consumed' in Japanese society through a study of intellectuals, teachers and businessmen. He finds that ideas of Japanese uniqueness, the nihonjinron, have been embraced more by those in business than in education. He looks at the Japanese perception of their own 'uniqueness' and at the ways in which ideas of cultural distinctiveness are formulated in different national and historical contexts. This extremely readable book combines anthropology and sociology to present both a historical analysis of the roots of the Japanese sense of national identity and a discussion of the ways in which that sense is changing.
Download or read book Home and Family in Japan written by Richard Ronald and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-12-04 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the Japanese language the word ‘ie’ denotes both the materiality of homes and family relations within. The traditional family and family house - often portrayed in ideal terms as key foundations of Japanese culture and society - have been subject to significant changes in recent years. This book comprehensively addresses various aspects of family life and dwelling spaces, exploring how homes, household patterns and kin relations are reacting to contemporary social, economic and urban transformations, and the degree to which traditional patterns of both houses and households are changing. The book contextualises the shift from the hegemonic post-war image of standard family life, to the nuclear family and to a situation now where Japanese homes are more likely to include unmarried singles; childless couples; divorcees; unmarried adult children and elderly relatives either living alone or in nursing homes. It discusses how these new patterns are both reinforcing and challenging typical understandings of Japanese family life.
Download or read book Primary School in Japan written by Peter Cave and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2007-11-30 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The balance between individual independence and social interdependence is a perennial debate in Japan. A series of educational reforms since 1990, including the implementation of a new curriculum in 2002, has been a source of fierce controversy. This book, based on an extended, detailed study of two primary schools in the Kinki district of Japan, discusses these debates, shows how reforms have been implemented at the school level, and explores how the balance between individuality and social interdependence is managed in practice. It discusses these complex issues in relation to personal identity within the class and within the school, in relation to gender issues, and in relation to the teaching of specific subjects, including language, literature and mathematics. The book concludes that, although recent reforms have tended to stress individuality and independence, teachers in primary schools continue to balance the encouragement of individuality and self-direction with the development of interdependence and empathy.
Download or read book Folk Art Potters of Japan written by Brian Moeran and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-12-19 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a study of a group of potters living in a small community in the south of Japan, and about the problems they face in the production, marketing and aesthetic appraisal of a kind of stoneware pottery generally referred to as mingei, or folk art. It shows how different people in an art world bring to bear different sets of values as they negotiate the meaning of mingei and try to decide whether a pot is 'art', 'folk art', or mere 'craft'. At the same time, this book is an unusual monograph in that it reaches beyond the mere study of an isolated community to trace the origins and history of 'folk art' in general. By showing how a set of aesthetic ideals originating in Britain was taken to Japan, and thence back to Europe and the United States - as a result of the activities of people like William Morris, Yanagi So etsu, Bernard Leach and Hamada Sho ji - this book rewrites the history of contemporary western ceramics.
Download or read book The Making of Anthropology in East and Southeast Asia written by Shinji Yamashita and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2004 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a path-breaking series of essays the contributors to this collection explore the development of anthropological research in Asia. The volume includes writings on Japan, China, Taiwan, Korea, Malaysia and the Philippines.
Download or read book Globalizing Japan written by Harumi Befu and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-09-02 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the social and cultural dimensions of Japan's global presence as an economic giant. Areas examined include Japanese multinational corporations, popular music and perceptions of Japan in France and Korea.
Download or read book Breaking the Silence written by Yasuko I. Takezawa and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A unique interpretation of how wartime internment and the movement for redress affected Japanese Americans.
Download or read book Robo Sapiens Japanicus written by Jennifer Robertson and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Japan is arguably the first postindustrial society to embrace the prospect of human-robot coexistence. Over the past decade, Japanese humanoid robots designed for use in homes, hospitals, offices, and schools have become celebrated in mass and social media throughout the world. In Robo sapiens japanicus, Jennifer Robertson casts a critical eye on press releases and public relations videos that misrepresent robots as being as versatile and agile as their science fiction counterparts. An ethnography and sociocultural history of governmental and academic discourse of human-robot relations in Japan, this book explores how actual robots—humanoids, androids, and animaloids—are “imagineered” in ways that reinforce the conventional sex/gender system and political-economic status quo. In addition, Robertson interrogates the notion of human exceptionalism as she considers whether “civil rights” should be granted to robots. Similarly, she juxtaposes how robots and robotic exoskeletons reinforce a conception of the “normal” body with a deconstruction of the much-invoked Theory of the Uncanny Valley.
Download or read book Japanese Tourism and Travel Culture written by Sylvie Guichard-Anguis and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2008-11-27 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines Japanese tourism and travel, both today and in the past, showing how over hundreds of years a distinct culture of travel developed, and exploring how this has permeated the perceptions and traditions of Japanese society. It considers the diverse dimensions of modern tourism including appropriation and consumption of history, nostalgia, identity, domesticated foreignness, and the search for authenticity and invention of tradition. Japanese people are one of the most widely travelling peoples in the world both historically and in contemporary times. What may be understood as incipient mass tourism started around the 17th century in various forms (including religious pilgrimages) long before it became a prevalent cultural phenomenon in the West. Within Asia, Japan has long remained the main tourist sending society since the beginning of the 20th century when it started colonising Asian countries. In 2005, some 17.8 million Japanese travelled overseas across Europe, Asia, the South Pacific and America. In recent times, however, tourist demands are fast growing in other Asian countries such as Korea and China. Japan is not only consuming other Asian societies and cultures, it is also being consumed by them in tourist contexts. This book considers the patterns of travelling of the Japanese, examining travel inside and outside the Japanese archipelago and how tourist demands inside influence and shape patterns of travel outside the country. Overall, this book draws important insights for understanding the phenomenon of tourism on the one hand and the nature of Japanese society and culture on the other.
Download or read book Jesus Loves Japan written by Suma Ikeuchi and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After the introduction of the "long-term resident" visa, the mass-migration of Nikkeis (Japanese Brazilians) has led to roughly 190,000 Brazilian nationals living in Japan. While the ancestry-based visa confers Nikkeis' right to settlement virtually as a right of blood, their ethnic ambiguity and working-class profile often prevent them from feeling at home in their supposed ethnic homeland. In response, many have converted to Pentecostalism, reflecting the explosive trend across Latin America since the 1970s. Jesus Loves Japan offers a rare window into lives at the crossroads of return migration and global Pentecostalism. Suma Ikeuchi argues that charismatic Christianity appeals to Nikkei migrants as a "third culture"--one that transcends ethno-national boundaries and offers a way out of a reality marked by stagnant national indifference. Jesus Loves Japan insightfully describes the political process of homecoming through the lens of religion, and the ubiquitous figure of the migrant as the pilgrim of a transnational future.
