Download or read book New Directions in the Study of Meiji Japan written by Helen Hardacre and published by BRILL. This book was released on 1997 with total page 882 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These essays on Meiji Japan, written by scholars from nine nations, reflect a determination to destabilize existing paradigms in the social sciences and humanities, in favor of a multiplicity of perspectives that privilege subjectivity and the inclusion of non-elite groups.
Download or read book New Directions in the Study of Meiji Japan written by Helen Hardacre and published by BRILL. This book was released on 1997-06 with total page 872 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These essays on Meiji Japan, written by scholars from nine nations, reflect a determination to destabilize existing paradigms in the social sciences and humanities, in favor of a multiplicity of perspectives that privilege subjectivity and the inclusion of non-elite groups.
Download or read book Adaptions of Western Literature in Meiji Japan written by J. Miller and published by Springer. This book was released on 2001-12-06 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines three examples of late nineteenth-century Japanese adaptations of Western literature: a biography of U.S. Grant recasting him as a Japanese warrior, a Victorian novel reset as oral performance, and an American melodrama redone as a serialized novel promoting the reform of Japanese theater. Written from a comparative perspective, it argues that adaptation (hon'an) was a valid form of contemporary Japanese translation that fostered creative appropriation across many genres and among a diverse group of writers and artists. In addition, it invites readers to reconsider adaptation in the context of translation theory.
Download or read book The T kaid Road written by Jilly Traganou and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers a comparative study of representations of the Tôkaidô road, the most important route of Japan during the Edo (1600-1868) and Meiji (1868-1912) eras.
Download or read book Southern Exposure written by Michael Molasky and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2000-08-01 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Southern Exposure is the first anthology of Okinawan literature to appear in English translation, and it appears at a propitious time. Although Okinawa Prefecture comprises only one percent of Japan's population, its writers have been winning a disproportionate number of literary awards in recent years--including the prestigious Akutagawa Prize for fiction, which was awarded to Matayoshi Eiki in 1996 and to Medoruma Shun in 1997. Both Matayoshi and Medoruma are represented in this anthology, which includes a wide range of fiction as well as a sampling of poetry from the 1920s to the present day. Modern Okinawa has been forged by a history of conquest and occupation by mainland Japan and the United States. Its sense of dual subjugation and the propensity of its writers to confront their own complicity with Japanese militarism imbues Okinawa's literary tradition with insightful perspectives on a wide range of issues. But this tradition is as deeply rooted in the region's lush semitropical landscape as in the forces of history. As this anthology demonstrates, Okinawan writers often suffuse their works with a lyricism and humor that disarms readers while bringing them face to face with the region's richly ambiguous legacy.
Download or read book A Companion to Japanese History written by William M. Tsutsui and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2009-07-20 with total page 633 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Companion to Japanese History provides an authoritative overview of current debates and approaches within the study of Japan’s history. Composed of 30 chapters written by an international group of scholars Combines traditional perspectives with the most recent scholarly concerns Supplements a chronological survey with targeted thematic analyses Presents stimulating interventions into individual controversies
Download or read book Down and Out in Late Meiji Japan written by James L. Huffman and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2018-04-30 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A sweeping work of original scholarship, Down and Out in Late Meiji Japan examines the daily lives of Japan’s hinmin (poor people), particularly urban slum-dwellers, in the late 1800s and early 1900s. James Huffman draws on newspaper articles, official surveys, and reminiscences to recreate for readers life as experienced by the poor themselves—something not attempted before in scholarship on this era. He begins by explaining the causes behind the fast-increasing numbers of poor neighborhoods in major cities after the late 1880s and goes on to describe in fascinating detail what those neighborhoods looked like and what their inhabitants did for a living: collecting night soil, weaving textiles, making match boxes and other piecework, pulling rickshaws, building the structures that made Japan “modern,” and supplying much of the era’s entertainment, including sex. He also explores what hinmin did outside of work: what they ate, where they did their wash, how they stretched their meager budgets by using pawn brokers, and how they dealt with illness and other disasters and grappled with the painful necessity of sending children to work rather than to school. Huffman argues that despite the tremendous challenge of day-to-day living, hinmin confronted life as energetic agents, embracing it as avidly as members of the more affluent classes. Reading sources carefully, and often against the grain, he reveals that many of the poor found meaning in their work, took an active and even influential part in their cities’ politics, and nursed ambitions for a better life. And nearly all took part in the pleasures and festivities that urban neighborhoods offered. Later chapters examine poverty outside the cities and the large-scale emigration of indigent farmers to Hawai‘i’s sugar plantations, beginning in 1885. In his conclusion, Huffman looks at late-Meiji hardship in light of twenty-first-century poverty and the global income disparity that has captured the public’s attention in recent years.
Download or read book Doctors of Empire written by Hoi-eun Kim and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2014-07-31 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The history of German medicine has undergone intense scrutiny because of its indelible connection to Nazi crimes. What is less well known is that Meiji Japan adopted German medicine as its official model in 1869. In Doctors of Empire, Hoi-eun Kim recounts the story of the almost 1,200 Japanese medical students who rushed to German universities to learn cutting-edge knowledge from the world leaders in medicine, and of the dozen German physicians who were invited to Japan to transform the country’s medical institutions and education. Shifting fluently between German, English, and Japanese sources, Kim’s book uses the colourful lives of these men to examine the impact of German medicine in Japan from its arrival to the pinnacle of its influence and its abrupt but temporary collapse at the outbreak of the First World War. Transnational history at its finest, Doctors of Empire not only illuminates the German origins of modern medical science in Japan but also reinterprets the nature of German imperialism in East Asia.
Download or read book French Policy Towards the Bakufu and Meiji Japan 1854 95 written by Richard Sims and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Little serious work has been done on the policies towards Japan of countries other than the US or Britain in the seminal Meiji period. This study looks to fill this gap by investigating French policy from the opening of Japan to the Japanese triumph in the Sino-Japanese war.
Download or read book The Okinawan Diaspora in Japan written by Steve Rabson and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2012-01-31 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The experiences of Okinawans in mainland Japan, like those of migrant minorities elsewhere, derive from a legacy of colonialism, war, and alien rule. Okinawans have long coped with a society in which differences are often considered “strange” or “wrong,” and with a central government that has imposed a mono-cultural standard in education, publicly priding itself on the nation’s mythical “homogeneity.” They have felt strong pressures to assimilate by adopting mainland Japanese culture and concealing or discarding their own. Recently, however, a growing pride in roots has inspired more Okinawan migrants and their descendants to embrace their own history and culture and to speak out against inequities. Their experiences, like those of minorities in other countries, have opened them to an acute and illuminating perspective, given voice in personal testimony, literature, and song. Although much has been written on Okinawan emigration abroad, this is the first book in English to consider the Okinawan diaspora in Japan. It is based on a wide variety of secondary and primary sources, including interviews conducted by the author in the greater Osaka area over a two-year period. The work begins with the experiences of women who worked in Osaka’s spinning factories in the early twentieth century, covers the years of the Pacific War and the prolonged U.S. military occupation of Okinawa, and finally treats the period following Okinawa’s reversion to Japan in 1972. Throughout, it examines the impact of government and corporate policies, along with popular attitudes, for a compelling account of the Okinawan diaspora in the context of contemporary Japan’s struggle to acknowledge its multiethnic society. The Okinawan Diaspora in Japan will find a ready audience among students of contemporary Japanese history and East Asian societies, as well as general readers interested in Okinawans and other minorities living in Japan.
Download or read book Martial Arts and the Body Politic in Meiji Japan written by Denis Gainty and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-08-22 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1895, the newly formed Greater Japan Martial Virtue Association (Dainippon Butokukai) held its first annual Martial Virtue Festival (butokusai) in the ancient capital of Kyoto. The Festival marked the arrival of a new iteration of modern Japan, as the Butokukai’s efforts to define and popularise Japanese martial arts became an important medium through which the bodies of millions of Japanese citizens would experience, draw on, and even shape the Japanese nation and state. This book shows how the notion and practice of Japanese martial arts in the late Meiji period brought Japanese bodies, Japanese nationalisms, and the Japanese state into sustained contact and dynamic engagement with one another. Using a range of disciplinary approaches, Denis Gainty shows how the metaphor of a national body and the cultural and historical meanings of martial arts were celebrated and appropriated by modern Japanese at all levels of society, allowing them to participate powerfully in shaping the modern Japanese nation and state. While recent works have cast modern Japanese and their bodies as subject to state domination and elite control, this book argues that having a body – being a body, and through that body experiencing and shaping social, political, and even cosmic realities – is an important and underexamined aspect of the late Meiji period. Martial Arts and the Body Politic in Meiji Japan is an important contribution to debates in Japanese and Asian social sciences, theories of the body and its role in modern historiography, and related questions of power and agency by suggesting a new and dramatic role for human bodies in the shaping of modern states and societies. As such, it will be valuable to students and scholars of Japanese studies, Japanese history, modern nations and nationalisms, and sport and leisure studies, as well as those interested in the body more broadly.
Download or read book Japanese Visual Culture written by Mark W. MacWilliams and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-12-18 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Born of Japan's cultural encounter with Western entertainment media, manga (comic books or graphic novels) and anime (animated films) are two of the most universally recognized forms of contemporary mass culture. Because they tell stories through visual imagery, they vault over language barriers. Well suited to electronic transmission and distributed by Japan's globalized culture industry, they have become a powerful force in both the mediascape and the marketplace.This volume brings together an international group of scholars from many specialties to probe the richness and subtleties of these deceptively simple cultural forms. The contributors explore the historical, cultural, sociological, and religious dimensions of manga and anime, and examine specific sub-genres, artists, and stylistics. The book also addresses such topics as spirituality, the use of visual culture by Japanese new religious movements, Japanese Goth, nostalgia and Japanese pop, "cute" (kawali) subculture and comics for girls, and more. With illustrations throughout, it is a rich source for all scholars and fans of manga and anime as well as students of contemporary mass culture or Japanese culture and civilization.
Download or read book Translating the West written by Douglas R. Howland and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2001-09-30 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this rich and absorbing analysis of the transformation of political thought in nineteenth-century Japan, Douglas Howland examines the transmission to Japan of key concepts--liberty, rights, sovereignty, and society--from Western Europe and the United States. Because Western political concepts did not translate well into their language, Japanese had to invent terminology to engage Western political thought. This work of westernization served to structure historical agency as Japanese leaders undertook the creation of a modern state. Where scholars have previously treated the introduction of Western political thought to Japan as a simple migration of ideas from one culture to another, Howland undertakes an unprecedented integration of the history of political concepts and the semiotics of translation techniques. He demonstrates that Japanese efforts to translate the West must be understood as problems both of language and action--as the creation and circulation of new concepts and the usage of these new concepts in debates about the programs and policies to be implemented in a westernizing Japan. Translating the West will interest scholars of East Asian studies and translation studies and historians of political thought, liberalism, and modernity.
Download or read book Evaluating Evidence written by George Akita and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2008-05-20 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Evaluating Evidence is based on the grueling lessons learned by a senior scholar during three decades of tutoring by, and collaboration with, Japanese historians. George Akita persisted in the difficult task of reading documentary sources in Japanese, most written in calligraphic style (sôsho), out of the conviction of their centrality to the historian’s craft and his commitment to a positivist methodology to research and scholarship. He argues forcefully in this volume for an inductive process in which the scholar seeks out facts on a subject and, through observation and examination of an extensive body of data, is able to discern patterns until it is possible to formulate certain propositions. In his introduction, Akita relates how and why he decided to adopt a positivist approach and explains what he means by the term as it applies to humanistic studies. He enumerates the difficulties linked with reading primary sources in Japanese by looking at a variety of unpublished and published materials and identifying a major problem in reading published primary sources: the intervention of editors and compilers. He illustrates the pitfalls of such intervention by comparing the recently published seventeen-volume diary of Prime Minister Hara Takashi (1856–1921), a photo reproduction of the diary in Hara’s own hand, and an earlier published version. Using documents related to Yamagata Aritomo (1838–1922), a figure of central importance in Japan’s post-Restoration political history, he demonstrates the use of published and transcribed primary sources to sustain, question, or strengthen some of the themes and approaches adopted by non-Japanese scholars working on modern Japanese history. He ends his inquiry with two "case studies," examining closely the methods of the highly acclaimed American historians John W. Dower and Herbert P. Bix.
Download or read book Aesthetic Life written by Miya Elise Mizuta Lippit and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-10-26 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This study of modern Japan engages the fields of art history, literature, and cultural studies, seeking to understand how the “beautiful woman” (bijin) emerged as a symbol of Japanese culture during the Meiji period (1868–1912). With origins in the formative period of modern Japanese art and aesthetics, the figure of the bijin appeared across a broad range of visual and textual media: photographs, illustrations, prints, and literary works, as well as fictional, critical, and journalistic writing. It eventually constituted a genre of painting called bijinga (paintings of beauties).Aesthetic Life examines the contributions of writers, artists, scholars, critics, journalists, and politicians to the discussion of the bijin and to the production of a national discourse on standards of Japanese beauty and art. As Japan worked to establish its place in the world, it actively presented itself as an artistic nation based on these ideals of feminine beauty. The book explores this exemplary figure for modern Japanese aesthetics and analyzes how the deceptively ordinary image of the beautiful Japanese woman—an iconic image that persists to this day—was cultivated as a “national treasure,” synonymous with Japanese culture."
Download or read book Dominant Narratives of Colonial Hokkaido and Imperial Japan written by M. Mason and published by Springer. This book was released on 2012-12-23 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recasts the commonly dismissed colonial project pursued in Hokkaido during the Meiji era (1868-1912) as a major force in the production of modern Japan's national identity, imperial ideology, and empire.
Download or read book Burning and Building written by Brian Platt and published by Harvard Univ Asia Center. This book was released on 2004 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Among the most radical of the Meiji reforms was a plan for a centralized, compulsory educational system modeled after those in Europe and America. But with almost no support from the government, local officials, teachers, and citizens pursued alternative visions. Their efforts led to the growth and consolidation of a new educational system.
