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Author: Theodore C. Bestor
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824862236
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 425
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Book Description
Doing Fieldwork in Japan taps the expertise of North American and European specialists on the practicalities of conducting long-term research in the social sciences and cultural studies. In lively first-person accounts, they discuss their successes and failures doing fieldwork across rural and urban Japan in a wide range of settings: among religious pilgrims and adolescent consumers; on factory assembly lines and in high schools and wholesale seafood markets; with bureaucrats in charge of defense, foreign aid, and social welfare policy; inside radical political movements; among adherents of "New Religions"; inside a prosecutor's office and the JET Program for foreign English teachers; with journalists in the NHK newsroom; while researching race, ethnicity, and migration; and amidst fans and consumers of contemporary popular culture. Contributors: David M. Arase, Theodore C. Bestor, Victoria Lyon Bestor, Mary C. Brinton, John Creighton Campbell, Samuel Coleman, Suzanne Culter, Andrew Gordon, Helen Hardacre, Joy Hendry, David T. Johnson, Ellis S. Krauss, David L. McConnell, Ian Reader, Glenda S. Roberts, Joshua Hotaka Roth, Robert J. Smith, Sheila A. Smith, Patricia G. Steinhoff, Merry Isaacs White, Christine R. Yano.
Author: Theodore C. Bestor
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824862236
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 425
Get Book Here
Book Description
Doing Fieldwork in Japan taps the expertise of North American and European specialists on the practicalities of conducting long-term research in the social sciences and cultural studies. In lively first-person accounts, they discuss their successes and failures doing fieldwork across rural and urban Japan in a wide range of settings: among religious pilgrims and adolescent consumers; on factory assembly lines and in high schools and wholesale seafood markets; with bureaucrats in charge of defense, foreign aid, and social welfare policy; inside radical political movements; among adherents of "New Religions"; inside a prosecutor's office and the JET Program for foreign English teachers; with journalists in the NHK newsroom; while researching race, ethnicity, and migration; and amidst fans and consumers of contemporary popular culture. Contributors: David M. Arase, Theodore C. Bestor, Victoria Lyon Bestor, Mary C. Brinton, John Creighton Campbell, Samuel Coleman, Suzanne Culter, Andrew Gordon, Helen Hardacre, Joy Hendry, David T. Johnson, Ellis S. Krauss, David L. McConnell, Ian Reader, Glenda S. Roberts, Joshua Hotaka Roth, Robert J. Smith, Sheila A. Smith, Patricia G. Steinhoff, Merry Isaacs White, Christine R. Yano.
Author: Nora Kottmann
Publisher:
ISBN: 9783848750856
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 400
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Book Description
Studying Japan is the first comprehensive guide on qualitative methods, research designs and fieldwork in social science research on Japan. More than 70 Japan scholars from around the world provide an easy-to-read overview on qualitative methods used in research on Japan's society, politics, culture and history. The book covers the entire research process from the outset to the the first comprehensive guide on qualitative methods, research designs and fieldwork in social science research on Japan. More than 70 Japan scholars from around the world provide an easy-to-read overview on qualitative methods used in research on Japan's society, politics, culture and history. The book covers the entire research process from the outset to the completion of a thesis, a paper, or a book. The authors provide basic introductions to individual methods, discuss their experiences when applying these methods and highlight current trends in research on Japan. The book serves as a foundation for a course on qualitative research methods and can also be used as a reference for all researchers in Japanese Studies, the Social Sciences and Area Studies. It is an essential reading for students and researchers with an interest in Japan!
Author: Brian Moeran
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136795332
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 351
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Book Description
This is the only book of its kind - written by an anthropologist who spent twelve months doing fieldwork in a major Tokyo agency and who has spent the past 30 years studying and living in Japan. By examining the production of advertising, this book turns other semiotics, media and cultural studies theories on their heads. By analysing the social structure of a modern media organization from the inside, it makes anthropology relevant and intellectually stimulating. By treating the Japanese as a more-or-less normal and rational people, it explodes the usual myths of exotic Japan and steps boldly into a global arena that embraces 'east' and 'west' in a new theory of values.
Author: Allison Alexy
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 082488244X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 289
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Book Description
How do couples build intimacy in an era that valorizes independence and self-responsibility? How can a man be a good husband when full-time jobs are scarce? How can unmarried women find fulfillment and recognition outside of normative relationships? How can a person express their sexuality when there is no terminology that feels right? In contemporary Japan, broad social transformations are reflected and refracted in changing intimate relationships. As the Japanese population ages, the low birth rate shrinks the population, and decades of recession radically restructure labor markets, Japanese intimate relationships, norms, and ideals are concurrently shifting. This volume explores a broad range of intimate practices in Japan in the first decades of the 2000s to trace how social change is becoming manifest through deeply personal choices. From young people making decisions about birth control to spouses struggling to connect with each other, parents worrying about stigma faced by their adopted children, and queer people creating new terms to express their identifications, Japanese intimacies are commanding a surprising amount of attention, both within and beyond Japan. With ethnographic analysis focused on how intimacy is imagined, enacted, and discussed, the volume's chapters offer rich and complex portraits of how people balance personal desires with feasible possibilities and shifting social norms. Intimate Japan will appeal to scholars and students in anthropology and Japanese or Asian studies, particularly those focusing on gender, kinship, sexuality, and labor policy. The book will also be of interest to researchers across social science subject areas, including sociology, political science, and psychology.
Author: Iza Kavedžija
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812251369
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 208
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Book Description
What makes for a meaningful life? In the Japanese context, the concept of ikigai provides a clue. Translated as "that which makes one's life worth living," ikigai has also come to mean that which gives a person happiness. In Japan, where the demographic cohort of elderly citizens is growing, and new modes of living and relationships are revising traditional multigenerational family structures, the elderly experience of ikigai is considered a public health concern. Without a relevant model for meaningful and joyful older age, the increasing older population of Japan must create new cultural forms that center the ikigai that comes from old age. In Making Meaningful Lives, Iza Kavedžija provides a rich anthropological account of the lives and concerns of older Japanese women and men. Grounded in years of ethnographic fieldwork at two community centers in Osaka, Kavedžija offers an intimate narrative analysis of the existential concerns of her active, independent subjects. Alone and in groups, the elderly residents of these communities make sense of their lives and shifting ikigai with humor, conversation, and storytelling. They are as much providers as recipients of care, challenging common images of the elderly as frail and dependent, while illustrating a more complex argument: maintaining independence nevertheless requires cultivating multiple dependences on others. Making Meaningful Lives argues that an anthropology of the elderly is uniquely suited to examine the competing values of dependence and independence, sociality and isolation, intimacy and freedom, that people must balance throughout all of life's stages.
Author: Theodore C. Bestor
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520220242
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 440
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Book Description
Publisher Description
Author: Patrick W. Galbraith
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 147800701X
Category : Comics & Graphic Novels
Languages : en
Pages : 249
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Book Description
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.
Author: John K. Nelson
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824862384
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 336
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Book Description
Enduring Identities is an attempt to understand the continuing relevance of Shinto to the cultural identity of contemporary Japanese. The enduring significance of this ancient yet innovative religion is evidenced each year by the millions of Japanese who visit its shrines. They might come merely seeking a park-like setting or to make a request of the shrine's deities, asking for a marriage partner, a baby, or success at school or work; or they might come to give thanks for benefits received through the intercession of deities or to legitimate and sacralize civic and political activities. Through an investigation of one of Japan's most important and venerated Shinto shrines, Kamo Wake Ikazuchi Jinja (more commonly Kamigamo Jinja), the book addresses what appears through Western and some Asian eyes to be an exotic and incongruous blend of superstition and reason as well as a photogenic juxtaposition of present and past. Combining theoretical sophistication with extensive fieldwork and a deep knowledge of Japan, John Nelson documents and interprets the ancient Kyoto shrine's yearly cycle of rituals and festivals, its sanctified landscapes, and the people who make it viable. At local and regional levels, Kamigamo Shrine's ritual traditions (such as the famous Hollyhock Festival) and the strategies for their perpetuation and implementation provide points of departure for issues that anthropologists, historians, and scholars of religion will recognize as central to their disciplines. These include the formation of social memory, the role of individual agency within institutional politics, religious practice and performance, the shaping of sacred space and place, ethnic versus cultural identity, and the politics of historical representation and cultural nationalism. Nelson links these themes through a detailed ethnography about a significant place and institution, which until now has been largely closed to both Japanese and foreign scholars. In contrast to conventional notions of ideology and institutions, he shows how a religious tradition's lack of centralized dogma, charismatic leaders, and sacred texts promotes rather than hinders a broad-based public participation with a variety of institutional agendas, most of which have very little to do with belief. He concludes that it is this structural flexibility, coupled with ample economic, human, and cultural resources, that nurtures a reworking of multiple identities--all of which resonate with the past, fully engage the present, and, with care, will endure well into the future.
Author: Levi McLaughlin
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824877896
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 241
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Book Description
Soka Gakkai is Japan’s largest and most influential new religious organization: It claims more than 8 million Japanese households and close to 2 million members in 192 countries and territories. The religion is best known for its affiliated political party, Komeito (the Clean Government Party), which comprises part of the ruling coalition in Japan’s National Diet, and it exerts considerable influence in education, media, finance, and other key areas. Levi McLaughlin’s comprehensive account of Soka Gakkai draws on nearly two decades of archival research and non-member fieldwork to account for its institutional development beyond Buddhism and suggest how we should understand the activities and dispositions of its adherents. McLaughlin explores the group’s Nichiren Buddhist origins and turns to insights from religion, political science, anthropology, and cultural studies to characterize Soka Gakkai as mimetic of the nation-state. Ethnographic vignettes combine with historical evidence to demonstrate ways Soka Gakkai’s twin Buddhist and modern humanist legacies inform the organization’s mimesis of the modern Japan in which the group took shape. To make this argument, McLaughlin analyzes Gakkai sources heretofore untreated in English-language scholarship; provides a close reading of the serial novel The Human Revolution, which serves the Gakkai as both history and de facto scripture; identifies ways episodes from members’ lives form new chapters in its growing canon; and contributes to discussions of religion and gender as he chronicles the lives of members who simultaneously reaffirm generational transmission of Gakkai devotion as they pose challenges for the organization’s future. Readers looking for analyses of the nation-state and strategies for understanding New Religions and modern Buddhism will find Soka Gakkai’s Human Revolution to be an especially thought-provoking study that offers widely applicable theoretical models.
Author: John W. Traphagan
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 252
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Book Description
The Practice of Concern: Ritual, Well-Being, and Aging in Rural Japan explores ideas and practices related to religious ritual and health among older people in northern Japan. Drawing on more than three years of ethnographic fieldwork, Traphagan considers various forms of ritual performance and contextualizes these in terms of private and public spheres of activity. An important theme of the book is that for Japanese the expression of concern about family, friends, the community, and the nation is a central symbolic element in religious ritual practice. The book has important implications for research into religion and health, because it suggests that, in order to carry out successful cross-cultural research, it is necessary to move beyond conceptualizations of religion -- largely centering on concepts of belief, faith, forgiveness -- that have shaped much of the work in this area to date, because, as consideration of the Japanese context shows, the theological language of Western religions is not necessarily adequate to the task of understanding how health and religion are tied together in other cultures. Traphagan argues that there is a need to focus on how religious rituals are markers that symbolically convey information about embodied experience and how these markers express and are expressions of concerns about health and well-being. The Practice of Concern provides a detailed examination of Japanese religious practices both within the home and in the community, as well as a thorough discussion of Japanese concepts of health, well-being, and aging. In addition to those who are interested in medical anthropology, this book will be useful to gerontologists who are concerned with cross-cultural studies in aging. Because of the rich ethnographic detail presented, the book also provides an excellent introduction to Japanese religious and ritual practice and Japanese culture and society more broadly. This book is part of the Ethnographic Studies in Medical Anthropology Series, edited by Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew Strathern, Department of Anthropology, University of Pittsburgh. "[T]he book's basic argument is indeed innovative... well worth reading." -- Pacific Affairs "John Traphagan demonstrates why cross-cultural studies are critically necessary if we are to understand the range of meanings and experiences of age and aging in a pluralistic world." -- Journal of Japanese Studies "Gerontologists will find the book illuminating in its treatment of aging in cultural context in Japan as well as the meaning and significance of ritual and religion in this society. The key concepts of aging--ritual--health/wellness are intertwined; Traphagan does an excellent job of explaining the linkages as well as the cultural factors responsible for maintaining these links." -- Journal of Intergenerational Relationship "In addressing the full spectrum of topics concerning older adults' health and well-being along with the vast array of Japanese religious rituals, The Practice of Concern is uniquely ambitious in scope. At the same time, it is a thoughtful, ethnographically grounded account of rural life in Japan that produces useful insights for anyone with an interest in the cross-cultural study of aging and religion." -- Journal of Religion, Spirituality & Aging
