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.”

Rethinking Japan

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

Get Book Here

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.”

Rethinking Locality in Japan

Rethinking Locality in Japan PDF Author: Sonja Ganseforth
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000415406
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 343

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Book Description
This book inquires what is meant when we say "local" and what "local" means in the Japanese context. Through the window of locality, it enhances an understanding of broader political and socio-economic shifts in Japan. This includes demographic change, electoral and administrative reform, rural decline and revitalization, welfare reform, as well as the growing metabolic rift in energy and food production. Chapters throughout this edited volume discuss the different and often contested ways in which locality in Japan has been reconstituted, from historical and contemporary instances of administrative restructuring, to more subtle social processes of making – and unmaking – local places. Contributions from multiple disciplinary perspectives are included to investigate the tensions between overlapping and often incongruent dimensions of locality. Framed by a theoretical discussion of socio-spatial thinking, such issues surrounding the construction and renegotiation of local places are not only relevant for Japan specialists, but also connected with topical scholarly debates further afield. Accordingly, Rethinking Locality in Japan will appeal to students and scholars from Japanese studies and human geography to anthropology, history, sociology and political science.

Rethinking Japanese Feminisms

Rethinking Japanese Feminisms PDF Author: Julia C. Bullock
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 9780824866693
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
Rethinking Japanese Feminisms offers a broad overview of the great diversity of feminist thought and practice in Japan from the early twentieth century to the present. Drawing on methodologies and approaches from anthropology, cultural studies, gender and sexuality studies, history, literature, media studies, and sociology, each chapter presents the results of research based on some combination of original archival research, careful textual analysis, ethnographic interviews, and participant observation. The volume is organized into sections focused on activism and activists, employment and education, literature and the arts, and boundary crossing. Some chapters shed light on ideas and practices that resonate with feminist thought but find expression through the work of writers, artists, activists, and laborers who have not typically been considered feminist; others revisit specific moments in the history of Japanese feminisms in order to complicate or challenge the dominant scholarly and popular understandings of specific activists, practices, and beliefs. The chapters are contextualized by an introduction that offers historical background on feminisms in Japan, and a forward-looking conclusion that considers what it means to rethink Japanese feminism at this historical juncture. Building on more than four decades of scholarship on feminisms in Japanese and English, as well as decades more on women's history, Rethinking Japanese Feminisms offers a diverse and multivocal approach to scholarship on Japanese feminisms unmatched by existing publications. Written in language accessible to students and non-experts, it will be at home in the hands of students and scholars, as well as activists and others interested in gender, sexuality, and feminist theory and activism in Japan and in Asia more broadly.

Rethinking Japanese Security

Rethinking Japanese Security PDF Author: Peter J. Katzenstein
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135976945
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
This collection brings together Peter J. Katzenstein’s selected essays on the regional and domestic dimensions of Japan’s security policy. Using a theoretical and comparative perspective, it covers recent developments in Japanese security.

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.

Rethinking Japanese Studies

Rethinking Japanese Studies PDF Author: Kaori Okano
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1351654969
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
Japanese Studies has provided a fertile space for non-Eurocentric analysis for a number of reasons. It has been embroiled in the long-running internal debate over the so-called Nihonjinron, revolving around the extent to which the effective interpretation of Japanese society and culture requires non-Western, Japan-specific emic concepts and theories. This book takes this question further and explores how we can understand Japanese society and culture by combining Euro-American concepts and theories with those that originate in Japan. Because Japan is the only liberal democracy to have achieved a high level of capitalism outside the Western cultural framework, Japanese Studies has long provided a forum for deliberations about the extent to which the Western conception of modernity is universally applicable. Furthermore, because of Japan’s military, economic and cultural dominance in Asia at different points in the last century, Japanese Studies has had to deal with the issues of Japanocentrism as well as Eurocentrism, a duality requiring complex and nuanced analysis. This book identifies variations amongst Japanese Studies academic communities in the Asia-Pacific and examines the extent to which relatively autonomous scholarship, intellectual approach or theories exist in the region. It also evaluates how studies on Japan in the region contribute to global Japanese Studies and explores their potential for formulating concrete strategies to unsettle Eurocentric dominance of the discipline.

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 Sino-Japanese Alienation

Rethinking Sino-Japanese Alienation PDF Author: Barry Buzan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192592106
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
Bitterly contested memories of war, colonisation, and empire among Japan, China, and Korea have increasingly threatened regional order and security over the past three decades. In Sino-Japanese relations, identity, territory, and power pull together in a particularly lethal direction, generating dangerous tensions in both geopolitical and memory rivalries. Buzan and Goh explore a new approach to dealing with this history problem. First, they construct a more balanced and global view of China and Japan in modern world history. Second, building on this, they sketch out the possibilities for a 21st century great power bargain between them. Buzan puts Northeast Asia's history since 1840 into both a world historical and a systematic normative context, exposing the parochial nature of the China-Japan history debate in relation to what is a bigger shared story about their encounter with modernity and the West, within which their modern encounter with each other took place. Arguing that regional order will ultimately depend substantially on the relationship between these two East Asian great powers, Goh explores the conditions under which China and Japan have been able to reach strategic bargains in the course of their long historical relationship, and uses this to sketch out the main modes of agreement that might underpin a new contemporary great power bargain between them in a variety of future scenarios for the region. The frameworks adopted here consciously blend historical contextualisation, enduring concerns with wealth, power and interest, and the complex relationship between Northeast Asian states' evolving encounters with each other and with global international society.

Rethinking Japan Vol 1.

Rethinking Japan Vol 1. PDF Author: Adriana Boscaro
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135880468
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
These papers explore the debate over new directions in Japanese studies.

Rethinking Japan: Literature, visual arts, and linguistics

Rethinking Japan: Literature, visual arts, and linguistics PDF Author: Adriana Boscaro
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780904404791
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description