Download or read book Japan s Security Renaissance written by Andrew L. Oros and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-07 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For decades after World War II, Japan chose to focus on soft power and economic diplomacy alongside a close alliance with the United States, eschewing a potential leadership role in regional and global security. Since the end of the Cold War, and especially since the rise of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Japan's military capabilities have resurged. In this analysis of Japan's changing military policy, Andrew L. Oros shows how a gradual awakening to new security challenges has culminated in the multifaceted "security renaissance" of the past decade. Despite openness to new approaches, however, three historical legacies—contested memories of the Pacific War and Imperial Japan, postwar anti-militarist convictions, and an unequal relationship with the United States—play an outsized role. In Japan's Security Renaissance Oros argues that Japan's future security policies will continue to be shaped by these legacies, which Japanese leaders have struggled to address. He argues that claims of rising nationalism in Japan are overstated, but there has been a discernable shift favoring the conservative Abe and his Liberal Democratic Party. Bringing together Japanese domestic politics with the broader geopolitical landscape of East Asia and the world, Japan's Security Renaissance provides guidance on this century's emerging international dynamics.
Download or read book Kyoto s Renaissance written by John Breen and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Drawing on a significant archive of primary sources and critical writings, 'Kyoto’s Renaissance' is the first volume in English to take an in-depth look at Kyoto’s modern transformation – how it came to reinvent itself after its ‘collapse’ at the time of the Meiji Restoration of 1868 and relocation of the imperial court to Tokyo. Following a contextualised introduction, which also includes a scholarly appraisal of recent and contemporary studies on the city - in both English and Japanese – nine chapters focus on the most notable historical elements that sustain Kyoto as a quintessentially modern ‘ancient capital’ today. The topics examined are the Emperor System, Festivals and Pageants, Buddhism, the Reorganization of Urban Space, Celebrating Heian, Kyoto’s Forest Policy, Industrialization, Nihonga and trends in Modern Pottery. 'Kyoto’s Renaissance' represents current Japanese scholarship at its best and will be welcomed both as an informed reference book on today’s city and as a benchmark reference for further wide-ranging research."--taken from publisher web site.
Download or read book Daily Life and Demographics in Ancient Japan written by William Wayne Farris and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2020-08-06 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For centuries, scholars have wondered what daily life was like for the common people of Japan, especially for long bygone eras such as the ancient age (700–1150). Using the discipline of historical demography, William Wayne Farris shows that for most of this era, Japan’s overall population hardly grew at all, hovering around six million for almost five hundred years. The reasons for the stable population were complex. Most importantly, Japan was caught up in an East Asian pandemic that killed both aristocrat and commoner in countless numbers every generation. These epidemics of smallpox, measles, mumps, and dysentery decimated the adult population, resulting in wide-ranging social and economic turmoil. Famine recurred about once every three years, leaving large proportions of the populace malnourished or dead. Ecological degradation of central Japan led to an increased incidence of drought and soil erosion. And war led soldiers to murder innocent bystanders in droves. Under these harsh conditions, agriculture suffered from high rates of field abandonment and poor technological development. Both farming and industry shifted increasingly to labor-saving technologies. With workers at a premium, wages rose. Traders shifted from the use of money to barter. Cities disappeared. The family was an amorphous entity, with women holding high status in a labor-short economy. Broken families and an appallingly high rate of infant mortality were also part of kinship patterns. The average family lived in a cold, drafty dwelling susceptible to fire, wore clothing made of scratchy hemp, consumed meals just barely adequate in the best of times, and suffered from a lack of sanitary conditions that increased the likelihood of disease outbreak. While life was harsh for almost all people from 700 to 1150, these experiences represented investments in human capital that would bear fruit during the medieval epoch (1150–1600).
Download or read book Ryoma written by Romulus Hillsborough and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 652 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set in Meivi Restoration Era (mid-19th century Japan) during the last years of Tokugawa Shogunate, this is the first English language literary biography of samurai Sakamoto Ryoma, a founder of modern Japan.
Download or read book Japan s Renaissance written by Kenneth A. Grossberg and published by Cornell East Asia Series. This book was released on 2000 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1981, Japan's Renaissance is a detailed and exhaustively researched account of the regime of Japan's second shogunate, and also an agile comparative analysis of the political economy of the period with other Renaissance systems. The book argues that the development of shogunal power in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Japan was similar to the evolution of monarchic power in France and England during the same period. Contrary to the received wisdom that the government of the Ashikaga shoguns was the low point of premodern Japan, this book demonstrates that it was the incubator for many developments and the administrative technology which reached their maturity in the Tokugawa period. Applying the ideas of political economy to medieval Japanese history makes this book an essential companion for all Japan and East Asia specialists, students of comparative feudalism and monarchical development, as well as educated generalists who are interested in premodern Japan. The book is illustrated with antique maps and Japanese paintings of the period which add to the reader's understanding of this dramatic age in Japan's history.
Download or read book Japan s Medieval Population written by William Wayne Farris and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2006-01-01 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Japan's Medieval Population will be required reading for specialists in pre-modern Japanese history, who will appreciate it not only for its thought-provoking arguments, but also for its methodology and use of sources. It will be of interest as well to modern Japan historians and scholars and students of comparative social and economic development."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book Dirty Japanese written by Matt Fargo and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2007-04-26 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Learn cool slang, funny insults and all the words they didn’t teach you in class with this comprehensive guide to dirty Japanese. You’ve taken Japanese lessons and learned all kinds of useful phrases. You know how to order dinner, get directions, and ask for the bathroom. But what happens when it’s time to drop the textbook formality? To really know a language, you need to know it’s bad words, too. You need Dirty Japanese. From common slang and insulting curses to explicit sexual expressions, this volume teaches the kind of Japanese heard heard every day on the streets from Tokyo to Kyoto from “What’s up?” (Ossu?) to “I’m smashed,” (Beron beron ni nattekita.).
Download or read book Voice Silence and Self written by Christopher Bondy and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-05-11 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Burakumin. Stigmatized throughout Japanese history as an outcaste group, their identity is still “risky,” their social presence mostly silent, and their experience marginalized in public discourse. They are contemporary Japan’s largest minority group—between 1.5 and 3 million people. How do young people today learn about being burakumin? How do they struggle with silence and search for an authentic voice for their complex experience? Voice, Silence, and Self examines how the mechanisms of silence surrounding burakumin issues are reproduced and challenged in Japanese society. It explores the ways in which schools and social relationships shape people’s identity as burakumin within a “protective cocoon” where risk is minimized. Based on extensive ethnographic research and interviews, this longitudinal work explores the experience of burakumin youth from two different communities and with different social movement organizations. Christopher Bondy explores how individuals navigate their social world, demonstrating the ways in which people make conscious decisions about the disclosure of a stigmatized identity. This compelling study is relevant to scholars and students of Japan studies and beyond. It provides crucial examples for all those interested in issues of identity, social movements, stigma, and education in a comparative setting."
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.
Download or read book Lost Histories written by Kirsten L. Ziomek and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-10-26 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A grandson’s photo album. Old postcards. English porcelain. A granite headstone. These are just a few of the material objects that help reconstruct the histories of colonial people who lived during Japan’s empire. These objects, along with oral histories and visual imagery, reveal aspects of lives that reliance on the colonial archive alone cannot. They help answer the primary question of Lost Histories: Is it possible to write the history of Japan’s colonial subjects? Kirsten Ziomek contends that it is possible, and in the process she brings us closer to understanding the complexities of their lives.Lost Histories provides a geographically and temporally holistic view of the Japanese empire from the early 1900s to the 1970s. The experiences of the four least-examined groups of Japanese colonial subjects—the Ainu, Taiwan’s indigenous people, Micronesians, and Okinawans—are the centerpiece of the book. By reconstructing individual life histories and following these people as they crossed colonial borders to the metropolis and beyond, Ziomek conveys the dynamic nature of an empire in motion and explains how individuals navigated the vagaries of imperial life."
Download or read book Imaginative Mapping written by Nobuko Toyosawa and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-02-01 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Landscape has always played a vital role in shaping Japan’s cultural identity. Imaginative Mapping analyzes how intellectuals of the Tokugawa and Meiji eras used specific features and aspects of the landscape to represent their idea of Japan and produce a narrative of Japan as a cultural community. These scholars saw landscapes as repositories of local history and identity, stressing Japan’s differences from the models of China and the West. By detailing the continuities and ruptures between a sense of shared cultural community that emerged in the seventeenth century and the modern nation state of the late nineteenth century, this study sheds new light on the significance of early modernity, one defined not by temporal order but rather by spatial diffusion of the concept of Japan. More precisely, Nobuko Toyosawa argues that the circulation of guidebooks and other spatial narratives not only promoted further movement but also contributed to the formation of subjectivity by allowing readers to imagine the broader conceptual space of Japan. The recurring claims to the landscape are evidence that it was the medium for the construction of Japan as a unified cultural body.
Download or read book House and Home in Modern Japan written by Jordan Sand and published by Harvard Univ Asia Center. This book was released on 2005 with total page 516 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A house is a site, the bounds and focus of a community. It is also an artifact, a material extension of its occupants' lives. This book takes the Japanese house in both senses, as site and as artifact, and explores the spaces, commodities, and conceptions of community associated with it in the modern era. As Japan modernized, the principles that had traditionally related house and family began to break down. Even where the traditional class markers surrounding the house persisted, they became vessels for new meanings, as housing was resituated in a new nexus of relations. The house as artifact and the artifacts it housed were affected in turn. The construction and ornament of houses ceased to be stable indications of their occupants' social status, the home became a means of personal expression, and the act of dwelling was reconceived in terms of consumption. Amid the breakdown of inherited meanings and the fluidity of modern society, not only did the increased diversity of commodities lead to material elaboration of dwellings, but home itself became an object of special attention, its importance emphasized in writing, invoked in politics, and articulated in architectural design. The aim of this book is to show the features of this culture of the home as it took shape in Japan.
Download or read book The Afterlife of Toyotomi Hideyoshi written by Susan Westhafer Furukawa and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2023-11-20 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Popular representations of the past are everywhere in Japan, from cell phone charms to manga, from television dramas to video games to young people dressed as their favorite historical figures hanging out in the hip Harajuku district. But how does this mass consumption of the past affect the way consumers think about history and what it means to be Japanese? By analyzing representations of the famous sixteenth-century samurai leader Toyotomi Hideyoshi in historical fiction based on Taikōki, the original biography of him, this book explores how and why Hideyoshi has had a continued and ever-changing presence in popular culture in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Japan. The multiple fictionalized histories of Hideyoshi published as serial novels and novellas before, during, and after World War II demonstrate how imaginative re-presentations of Japan’s past have been used by various actors throughout the modern era. Using close reading of several novels and short stories as well as the analysis of various other texts and paratextual materials, Susan Furukawa discovers a Hideyoshi who is always changing to meet the needs of the current era, and in the process expands our understanding of the powerful role that historical narratives play in Japan.
Download or read book Rise of a Japanese Chinatown written by Eric C. Han and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-05-11 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Rise of a Japanese Chinatown is the first English-language monograph on the history of a Chinese immigrant community in Japan. It focuses on the transformations of that population in the Japanese port city of Yokohama from the Sino–Japanese War of 1894–1895 to the normalization of Sino–Japanese ties in 1972 and beyond. Eric C. Han narrates the paradoxical story of how, during periods of war and peace, Chinese immigrants found an enduring place within a monoethnic state. This study makes a significant contribution to scholarship on the construction of Chinese and Japanese identities and on Chinese migration and settlement. Using local newspapers, Chinese and Japanese government records, memoirs, and conversations with Yokohama residents, it retells the familiar story of Chinese nation building in the context of Sino-Japanese relations. But it builds on existing works by directing attention as well to non-elite Yokohama Chinese, those who sheltered revolutionary activists and served as an audience for their nationalist messages. Han also highlights contradictions between national and local identifications of these Chinese, who self-identified as Yokohama-ites (hamakko) without claiming Japaneseness or denying their Chineseness. Their historical role in Yokohama’s richly diverse cosmopolitan past can offer insight into a future, more inclusive Japan."
Download or read book Anarchist Modernity written by Sho Konishi and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-05-11 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Mid-nineteenth century Russian radicals who witnessed the Meiji Restoration saw it as the most sweeping revolution in recent history and the impetus for future global progress. Acting outside imperial encounters, they initiated underground transnational networks with Japan. Prominent intellectuals and cultural figures, from Peter Kropotkin and Lev Tolstoy to Saigo Takamori and Tokutomi Roka, pursued these unofficial relationships through correspondence, travel, and networking, despite diplomatic and military conflicts between their respective nations. Tracing these non-state networks, Anarchist Modernity uncovers a major current in Japanese intellectual and cultural life between 1860 and 1930 that might be described as “cooperatist anarchist modernity”—a commitment to realizing a modern society through mutual aid and voluntary activity, without the intervention of state governance. These efforts later crystallized into such movements as the Nonwar Movement, Esperantism, and the popularization of the natural sciences. Examining cooperatist anarchism as an intellectual foundation of modern Japan, Sho Konishi offers a new approach to Japanese history that fundamentally challenges the “logic” of Western modernity. It looks beyond this foundational construct of modern history writing to understand people, practices, and cultural expressions that have been forgotten or dismissed as products of anti-modern nativist counter urges against the West."
Download or read book Japan in the American Century written by Kenneth B. Pyle and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-15 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No nation was more deeply affected by America’s rise to world power than Japan. President Franklin Roosevelt’s uncompromising policy of unconditional surrender led to the catastrophic finale of the Asia-Pacific War and the most intrusive international reconstruction of another nation in modern history. Japan in the American Century examines how Japan, with its deeply conservative heritage, responded to the imposition of a new liberal order. The price Japan paid to end the occupation was a cold war alliance with the United States that ensured America’s dominance in the region. Still traumatized by its wartime experience, Japan developed a grand strategy of dependence on U.S. security guarantees so that the nation could concentrate on economic growth. Yet from the start, despite American expectations, Japan reworked the American reforms to fit its own circumstances and cultural preferences, fashioning distinctively Japanese variations on capitalism, democracy, and social institutions. Today, with the postwar world order in retreat, Japan is undergoing a sea change in its foreign policy, returning to an activist, independent role in global politics not seen since 1945. Distilling a lifetime of work on Japan and the United States, Kenneth Pyle offers a thoughtful history of the two nations’ relationship at a time when the character of that alliance is changing. Japan has begun to pull free from the constraints established after World War II, with repercussions for its relations with the United States and its role in Asian geopolitics.
Download or read book Naomi written by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki and published by ببلومانيا للنشر والتوزيع. This book was released on 2024-03-16 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A hilarious story of one man’s obsession and a brilliant reckoning of a nation’s cultural confusion—from a master Japanese novelist. When twenty-eight-year-old Joji first lays eyes upon the teenage waitress Naomi, he is instantly smitten by her exotic, almost Western appearance. Determined to transform her into the perfect wife and to whisk her away from the seamy underbelly of post-World War I Tokyo, Joji adopts and ultimately marries Naomi, paying for English and music lessons that promise to mold her into his ideal companion. But as she grows older, Joji discovers that Naomi is far from the naïve girl of his fantasies. And, in Tanizaki’s masterpiece of lurid obsession, passion quickly descends into comically helpless masochism.
