Rethinking Identity in Modern Japan

Rethinking Identity in Modern Japan PDF Author: Yumiko Iida
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134564651
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
This volume is a major reconsideration of Japanese late modernity and national hegemony which examines the creative and academic works of a number of influential Japanese thinkers. The author situates the process of Japanese knowledge production in the interface between the immediate historical and the wider socio-economic and politico-cultural contexts accompanying the Japanese post-war experience of modernity. This book will be of great value to anyone interested in the history of contemporary Japanese culture and society.

Rethinking Identity in Modern Japan

Rethinking Identity in Modern Japan PDF Author: Yumiko Iida
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134564651
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 338

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume is a major reconsideration of Japanese late modernity and national hegemony which examines the creative and academic works of a number of influential Japanese thinkers. The author situates the process of Japanese knowledge production in the interface between the immediate historical and the wider socio-economic and politico-cultural contexts accompanying the Japanese post-war experience of modernity. This book will be of great value to anyone interested in the history of contemporary Japanese culture and society.

Rethinking Japan

Rethinking Japan PDF Author: Arthur Stockwin
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498537936
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
The authors argue that with the election of the Abe Government in December 2012, Japanese politics has entered a radically new phase they describe as the “2012 Political System.” The system began with the return to power of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), after three years in opposition, but in a much stronger electoral position than previous LDP-based administrations in earlier decades. Moreover, with the decline of previously endemic intra-party factionalism, the LDP has united around an essentially nationalist agenda never absent from the party’s ranks, but in the past was generally blocked, or modified, by factions of more liberal persuasion. Opposition weakness following the severe defeat of the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) administration in 2012 has also enabled the Abe Government to establish a political stability largely lacking since the 1990s. The first four chapters deal with Japanese political development since 1945 and factors leading to the emergence of Abe Shinzō as Prime Minister in 2012. Chapter 5 examines the Abe Government’s flagship economic policy, dubbed “Abenomics.” The authors then analyse four highly controversial objectives promoted by the Abe Government: revision of the 1947 ‘Peace Constitution’; the introduction of a Secrecy Law; historical revision, national identity and issues of war apology; and revised constitutional interpretation permitting collective defence. In the final three chapters they turn to foreign policy, first examining relations with China, Russia and the two Koreas, second Japan and the wider world, including public diplomacy, economic relations and overseas development aid, and finally, the vexed question of how far Japanese policies are as reactive to foreign pressure. In the Conclusion, the authors ask how far right wing trends in Japan exhibit common causality with shifts to the right in the United States, Europe and elsewhere. They argue that although in Japan immigration has been a relatively minor factor, economic stagnation, demographic decline, a sense of regional insecurity in the face of challenges from China and North Korea, and widening gaps in life chances, bear comparison with trends elsewhere. Nevertheless, they maintain that “[a] more sane regional future may be possible in East Asia.”

The Crisis of Identity in Contemporary Japanese Film

The Crisis of Identity in Contemporary Japanese Film PDF Author: Timothy Iles
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9047424697
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
This study, from a variety of analytical approaches, examines ways in which contemporary Japanese film presents a critical engagement with Japan's project of modernity to demonstrate the 'crisis' in conceptions of identity. The work discusses gender, the family, travel, the 'everyday' as horror, and ways in which animated films can offer an ideal space in which an ideal conception of identity may emerge and thrive. It presents close, theoretically-informed textual analyses of the thematic issues contemporary Japanese films raise, through a wide range of genres, from comedy, family drama, and animation, to science fiction and horrror by directors such as Kurosawa Kiyoshi, Morita Yoshimitsu, Miike Takashi, Oshii Mamoru, Kon Satoshi, and Miyazaki Hayao, in language that is accessible but precise.

Rethinking Japanese Modernism

Rethinking Japanese Modernism PDF Author: Roy Starrs
Publisher: Global Oriental
ISBN: 9004211306
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 561

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Book Description
Edited by Roy Starrs, this collection of essays by an international group of leading Japan scholars presents new research and thinking on Japanese modernism, a topic that has been increasingly recognized in recent years to be key to an understanding of contemporary Japanese culture and society. By adopting an open, multidisciplinary, and transnational approach to this multifaceted topic, the book sheds new light both on the specific achievements and on the often-unexpected interrelationships of the writers, artists and thinkers who helped to define the Japanese version of modernism and modernity. Specific topics addressed include the literary modernism of major writers such as Akutagawa, Kawabata, Kajii, Miyazawa, and Murakami, avant-garde modernism in painting, music, theatre, and in the performance art of Yoko Ono, and the everyday modernism of popular culture and of new urban activities such as shopping and sports.

Mirror of Modernity

Mirror of Modernity PDF Author: Stephen Vlastos
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520206373
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 362

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Book Description
This collection of essays challenges the notion that Japan's present cultural identity is the simple legacy of its pre-modern and insular past. Scholars examine "age-old" Japanese cultural practices and show these to be largely creations of the modern era.

Rethinking Japanese History

Rethinking Japanese History PDF Author: Yoshihiko Amino
Publisher: U of M Center for Japanese Studies
ISBN: 9781929280704
Category : Japan
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
A call to reconsider Japanese history from the perspective of the deep past

Japan

Japan PDF Author: Conrad Totman
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1786731525
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
From the outset, society in Japan has been shaped by its environmental context. The lush green mountainous archipelago of today, with its highly productive lowlands, supports a population of more than 127 million people and one of the most advanced economies in the world. How has this come about and at what environmental cost? Conrad Totman, one of the world's foremost scholars on Japanese, here provides a comprehensive and detailed account of the country's environmental history, from its beginnings to the present day. Professor Totman traces the country's development through successive historical phases, as early agricultural society based on non-intensive forms of cultivation gave way to more intensified forms. With each stage came greater utilisation of natural resources but a steady reduction in the richness of the indigenous biosystem. By the late seventeenth century the country was well on the way to ecological disaster. Yet Japan's isolation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries led to an unusually enlightened set of environmental policies, and the system of regenerative forestry brought in during the Tokugawa period prevented certain devastation of the country's forests. At the end of the nineteenth century, however, the country began to go to the opposite extreme, as industrialisation brought with it a period of unprecedented change. Growth and diversification led to a surge in environmental pollution as it became necessary to look beyond the country's domestic natural resources to meet the demand for foodstuffs, fossil fuels and the raw materials necessary to an advanced industrial economy. The population was particularly badly affected, and some of the problems that emerged, especially from the 1960s onwards, provided important test cases not just for Japan but worldwide. What makes the Japanese story particularly instructive is that the country's boundaries are uncommonly clear and the nature, timing, and extent of external influences on its history are unusually identifiable. The Japanese experience, therefore, not only yields important insights into the processes of environmental history, it offers important lessons for the wider environmental history of the planet and for our understanding of current global ecological problems. A work of immense erudition and reflecting a lifetime of scholarship, Japan: an Environmental History will be welcomed by all with an interest in environmental history and the historical development of Japan.

Japan's National Identity and Foreign Policy

Japan's National Identity and Foreign Policy PDF Author: Alexander Bukh
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134058357
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 191

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Book Description
In Japan's National Identity and Foreign Policy, Alexander Bukh focuses on the construction of the Japanese self using Russia as the other, examining the history of bilateral relations and comparisons between the Russian and Japanese national character.

Embedded Racism

Embedded Racism PDF Author: Debito Arudou
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1793653968
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 515

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Book Description
Despite domestic constitutional provisions and international treaty promises, Japan has no law against racial discrimination. Consequently, businesses around Japan display “Japanese Only” signs, denying entry to all 'foreigners' on sight. Employers and landlords routinely refuse jobs and apartments to foreign applicants. Japanese police racially profile “foreign-looking” bystanders for invasive questioning on the street. Legislators, administrators, and pundits portray foreigners as a national security threat and call for their segregation and expulsion. Nevertheless, Japan’s government and media claim there is no discrimination by race in Japan, therefore no laws are necessary. How does Japan resolve the cognitive dissonance of racial discrimination being unconstitutional yet not illegal? Embedded Racism untangles Japan's complex narrative on race. Starting with case studies of hundreds of “Japanese Only" exclusionary businesses, it carefully analyzes the social construction of Japanese identity through laws, public policy, jurisprudence, and media messages. It reveals how the concept of a “Japanese" has been racialized to the point where one must look “Japanese" to have equal civil and human rights in Japan. Completely revised and updated for this Second Edition (including landmark events like the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, the Covid Pandemic, and the Carlos Ghosn Case), Embedded Racism is the product of three decades of research and fieldwork by a scholar living in Japan as a naturalized Japanese citizen. It offers a perspective into how Japan's entrenched, misunderstood, and deliberately overlooked racial discrimination not only undermines Japan's economic future but also emboldens white supremacists worldwide who see Japan as their template ethnostate.

Inexorable Modernity

Inexorable Modernity PDF Author: Hiroshi Nara
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 9780739118429
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Beginning in the late Edo period, the Japanese faced a rapidly and irreversibly changing world in which industrialization, westernization, and internationalization were exerting pressure upon an entrenched traditional culture. The Japanese themselves felt threatened by Western powers, with their sense of superiority and military might. Yet the Japanese were more prepared to meet this challenge than was thought at the time, and they used a variety of strategies to address the tension between modernity and tradition. Inexorable Modernity illuminates our understanding of how Japan has dealt with modernity and of what mechanisms, universal and local, we can attribute to the mode of negotiation between tradition and modernity in three major forms of art: theatre, the visual arts, and literature. Dr. Hiroshi Nara brings together a thoughtful collection of essays that demonstrate that traditional and modern approaches to life draw from one another, and tradition, whether real or created, was sought out in order to find a way to live with the burden of modernity. Inexorable Modernity is a valuable and enlightening read for those interested in Asian studies and history. Book jacket.