Author: Susan Westhafer Furukawa
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 1684176379
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 240
Book Description
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.
The Afterlife of Toyotomi Hideyoshi
Author: Susan Westhafer Furukawa
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 1684176379
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 240
Book Description
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.
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 1684176379
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 240
Book Description
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.
The Afterlife of Toyotomi Hideyoshi
Author: Susan Westhafer Furukawa
Publisher: Harvard East Asian Monographs
ISBN: 9780674267923
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 260
Book Description
The Afterlife of Toyotomi Hideyoshi explores how sixteenth-century samurai leader Toyotomi Hideyoshi's continued and evolving presence in popular culture in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Japan changes with the needs of the current era, and in the process expands our understanding of the powerful role that historical narratives play in Japan.
Publisher: Harvard East Asian Monographs
ISBN: 9780674267923
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 260
Book Description
The Afterlife of Toyotomi Hideyoshi explores how sixteenth-century samurai leader Toyotomi Hideyoshi's continued and evolving presence in popular culture in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Japan changes with the needs of the current era, and in the process expands our understanding of the powerful role that historical narratives play in Japan.
Rethinking Japan's Modernity
Author: M. William Steele
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674299795
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 405
Book Description
History is not one story, but many. In Rethinking Japan’s Modernity, M. William Steele takes a new look at the people, places, and events associated with Japan’s engagement with modernity, starting with American Commodore Matthew Perry’s arrival in Japan in 1853. In many cases, this new look derives from visual sources, such as popular broadsheets, satirical cartoons, ukiyo-e and other woodblock prints, postcards, and photographs. The book illustrates the diverse, and sometimes conflicting, perceptions of people who experienced the unfolding of modern Japan. It focuses both on the experiences of people living the events “at that time” and on the reflections of others looking back. Also included are three new translations—two of them by Japan’s pioneer Westernizer, Fukuzawa Yukichi, and another by Mantei Ōga—parodying Fukuzawa’s monumental work advocating Western learning. These and other stories show how Japanese views of modernity evolved over time. Each chapter is prefaced with a short introduction to the topic covered and historiographical approach taken, allowing each to stand alone as well as support the overall goal of the work—to inform and challenge our understanding of the links between Japan’s past, present, and future.
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674299795
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 405
Book Description
History is not one story, but many. In Rethinking Japan’s Modernity, M. William Steele takes a new look at the people, places, and events associated with Japan’s engagement with modernity, starting with American Commodore Matthew Perry’s arrival in Japan in 1853. In many cases, this new look derives from visual sources, such as popular broadsheets, satirical cartoons, ukiyo-e and other woodblock prints, postcards, and photographs. The book illustrates the diverse, and sometimes conflicting, perceptions of people who experienced the unfolding of modern Japan. It focuses both on the experiences of people living the events “at that time” and on the reflections of others looking back. Also included are three new translations—two of them by Japan’s pioneer Westernizer, Fukuzawa Yukichi, and another by Mantei Ōga—parodying Fukuzawa’s monumental work advocating Western learning. These and other stories show how Japanese views of modernity evolved over time. Each chapter is prefaced with a short introduction to the topic covered and historiographical approach taken, allowing each to stand alone as well as support the overall goal of the work—to inform and challenge our understanding of the links between Japan’s past, present, and future.
Strange Tales from Edo
Author: William D. Fleming
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 1684176875
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 312
Book Description
In Strange Tales from Edo, William Fleming paints a sweeping picture of Japan’s engagement with Chinese fiction in the early modern period (1600–1868). Large-scale analyses of the full historical and bibliographical record—the first of their kind—document in detail the wholesale importation of Chinese fiction, the market for imported books and domestic reprint editions, and the critical role of manuscript practices—the ascendance of print culture notwithstanding—in the circulation of Chinese texts among Japanese readers and writers. Bringing this big picture to life, Fleming also traces the journey of a text rarely mentioned in studies of early modern Japanese literature: Pu Songling’s Liaozhai zhiyi (Strange Tales from Liaozhai Studio). An immediate favorite of readers on the continent, Liaozhai was long thought to have been virtually unknown in Japan until the modern period. Copies were imported in vanishingly small numbers, and the collection was never reprinted domestically. Yet beneath this surface of apparent neglect lies a rich hidden history of engagement and rewriting—hand-copying, annotation, criticism, translation, and adaptation—that opens up new perspectives on both the Chinese strange tale and its Japanese counterparts.
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 1684176875
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 312
Book Description
In Strange Tales from Edo, William Fleming paints a sweeping picture of Japan’s engagement with Chinese fiction in the early modern period (1600–1868). Large-scale analyses of the full historical and bibliographical record—the first of their kind—document in detail the wholesale importation of Chinese fiction, the market for imported books and domestic reprint editions, and the critical role of manuscript practices—the ascendance of print culture notwithstanding—in the circulation of Chinese texts among Japanese readers and writers. Bringing this big picture to life, Fleming also traces the journey of a text rarely mentioned in studies of early modern Japanese literature: Pu Songling’s Liaozhai zhiyi (Strange Tales from Liaozhai Studio). An immediate favorite of readers on the continent, Liaozhai was long thought to have been virtually unknown in Japan until the modern period. Copies were imported in vanishingly small numbers, and the collection was never reprinted domestically. Yet beneath this surface of apparent neglect lies a rich hidden history of engagement and rewriting—hand-copying, annotation, criticism, translation, and adaptation—that opens up new perspectives on both the Chinese strange tale and its Japanese counterparts.
Meanings of Antiquity
Author: Matthieu Felt
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 1684176859
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 376
Book Description
Meanings of Antiquity is the first dedicated study of how the oldest Japanese myths, recorded in the eighth-century texts Kojiki and Nihon shoki, changed in meaning and significance between 800 and 1800 CE. Generations of Japanese scholars and students have turned to these two texts and their creation myths to understand what it means to be Japanese and where Japan fits into the world order. As the shape and scale of the world explained by these myths changed, these myths evolved in turn. Over the course of the millennium covered in this study, Japan transforms from the center of a proud empire to a millet seed at the edge of the Buddhist world, from the last vestige of China’s glorious Zhou Dynasty to an archipelago on a spherical globe. Analyzing historical records, poetry, fiction, religious writings, military epics, political treatises, and textual commentary, Matthieu Felt identifies the geographical, cosmological, epistemological, and semiotic changes that led to new adaptations of Japanese myths. Felt demonstrates that the meanings of Japanese antiquity and of Japan’s most ancient texts were—and are—a work in progress, a collective effort of writers and thinkers over the past 1,300 years.
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 1684176859
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 376
Book Description
Meanings of Antiquity is the first dedicated study of how the oldest Japanese myths, recorded in the eighth-century texts Kojiki and Nihon shoki, changed in meaning and significance between 800 and 1800 CE. Generations of Japanese scholars and students have turned to these two texts and their creation myths to understand what it means to be Japanese and where Japan fits into the world order. As the shape and scale of the world explained by these myths changed, these myths evolved in turn. Over the course of the millennium covered in this study, Japan transforms from the center of a proud empire to a millet seed at the edge of the Buddhist world, from the last vestige of China’s glorious Zhou Dynasty to an archipelago on a spherical globe. Analyzing historical records, poetry, fiction, religious writings, military epics, political treatises, and textual commentary, Matthieu Felt identifies the geographical, cosmological, epistemological, and semiotic changes that led to new adaptations of Japanese myths. Felt demonstrates that the meanings of Japanese antiquity and of Japan’s most ancient texts were—and are—a work in progress, a collective effort of writers and thinkers over the past 1,300 years.
Hong Kong Takes Flight
Author: John D. Wong
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674301137
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 420
Book Description
Commercial aviation took shape in Hong Kong as the city developed into a powerful economy. Rather than accepting air travel as an inevitability in the era of global mobility, John Wong argues that Hong Kong’s development into a regional and global airline hub was not preordained. By underscoring the shifting process through which this hub emerged, Hong Kong Takes Flight aims to describe globalization and global networks in the making. Viewing the globalization of the city through the prism of its airline industry, Wong examines how policymakers and businesses asserted themselves against international partners and competitors in a bid to accrue socioeconomic benefits, negotiated their interests in Hong Kong’s economic success, and articulated their expressions of modernity.
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674301137
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 420
Book Description
Commercial aviation took shape in Hong Kong as the city developed into a powerful economy. Rather than accepting air travel as an inevitability in the era of global mobility, John Wong argues that Hong Kong’s development into a regional and global airline hub was not preordained. By underscoring the shifting process through which this hub emerged, Hong Kong Takes Flight aims to describe globalization and global networks in the making. Viewing the globalization of the city through the prism of its airline industry, Wong examines how policymakers and businesses asserted themselves against international partners and competitors in a bid to accrue socioeconomic benefits, negotiated their interests in Hong Kong’s economic success, and articulated their expressions of modernity.
Building a Nation at War
Author: J. Megan Greene
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 1684176700
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 336
Book Description
Building a Nation at War argues that the Chinese Nationalist government’s retreat inland during the Sino–Japanese War (1937–1945), its consequent need for inland resources, and its participation in new scientific and technical relationships with the United States led to fundamental changes in how the Nationalists engaged with science and technology as tools to promote development. The war catalyzed an emphasis on applied sciences, comprehensive economic planning, and development of scientific and technical human resources—all of which served the Nationalists’ immediate and long-term goals. It created an opportunity for the Nationalists to extend control over inland China and over education and industry. It also provided opportunities for China to mobilize transnational networks of Chinese-Americans, Chinese in America, and the American government and businesses. These groups provided technical advice, ran training programs, and helped the Nationalists acquire manufactured goods and tools. J. Megan Greene shows how the Nationalists worked these programs to their advantage, even in situations where their American counterparts clearly had the upper hand. Finally, this book shows how, although American advisers and diplomats criticized China for harboring resources rather than putting them into winning the war against Japan, U.S. industrial consultants were also strongly motivated by postwar goals.
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 1684176700
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 336
Book Description
Building a Nation at War argues that the Chinese Nationalist government’s retreat inland during the Sino–Japanese War (1937–1945), its consequent need for inland resources, and its participation in new scientific and technical relationships with the United States led to fundamental changes in how the Nationalists engaged with science and technology as tools to promote development. The war catalyzed an emphasis on applied sciences, comprehensive economic planning, and development of scientific and technical human resources—all of which served the Nationalists’ immediate and long-term goals. It created an opportunity for the Nationalists to extend control over inland China and over education and industry. It also provided opportunities for China to mobilize transnational networks of Chinese-Americans, Chinese in America, and the American government and businesses. These groups provided technical advice, ran training programs, and helped the Nationalists acquire manufactured goods and tools. J. Megan Greene shows how the Nationalists worked these programs to their advantage, even in situations where their American counterparts clearly had the upper hand. Finally, this book shows how, although American advisers and diplomats criticized China for harboring resources rather than putting them into winning the war against Japan, U.S. industrial consultants were also strongly motivated by postwar goals.
The Tokugawa World
Author: Gary P. Leupp
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000427331
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1199
Book Description
With over 60 contributions, The Tokugawa World presents the latest scholarship on early modern Japan from an international team of specialists in a volume that is unmatched in its breadth and scope. In its early modern period, under the Tokugawa shoguns, Japan was a world apart. For over two centuries the shogun’s subjects were forbidden to travel abroad and few outsiders were admitted. Yet in this period, Japan evolved as a nascent capitalist society that could rapidly adjust to its incorporation into the world system after its forced "opening" in the 1850s. The Tokugawa World demonstrates how Japan’s early modern society took shape and evolved: a world of low and high cultures, comic books and Confucian academies, soba restaurants and imperial music recitals, rigid enforcement of social hierarchy yet also ongoing resistance to class oppression. A world of outcasts, puppeteers, herbal doctors, samurai officials, businesswomen, scientists, scholars, blind lutenists, peasant rebels, tea-masters, sumo wrestlers, and wage workers. Covering a variety of features of the Tokugawa world including the physical landscape, economy, art and literature, religion and thought, and education and science, this volume is essential reading for all students and scholars of early modern Japan.
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000427331
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1199
Book Description
With over 60 contributions, The Tokugawa World presents the latest scholarship on early modern Japan from an international team of specialists in a volume that is unmatched in its breadth and scope. In its early modern period, under the Tokugawa shoguns, Japan was a world apart. For over two centuries the shogun’s subjects were forbidden to travel abroad and few outsiders were admitted. Yet in this period, Japan evolved as a nascent capitalist society that could rapidly adjust to its incorporation into the world system after its forced "opening" in the 1850s. The Tokugawa World demonstrates how Japan’s early modern society took shape and evolved: a world of low and high cultures, comic books and Confucian academies, soba restaurants and imperial music recitals, rigid enforcement of social hierarchy yet also ongoing resistance to class oppression. A world of outcasts, puppeteers, herbal doctors, samurai officials, businesswomen, scientists, scholars, blind lutenists, peasant rebels, tea-masters, sumo wrestlers, and wage workers. Covering a variety of features of the Tokugawa world including the physical landscape, economy, art and literature, religion and thought, and education and science, this volume is essential reading for all students and scholars of early modern Japan.
Spectacular Accumulation
Author: Morgan Pitelka
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824857364
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 241
Book Description
In Spectacular Accumulation, Morgan Pitelka investigates the significance of material culture and sociability in late sixteenth-century Japan, focusing in particular on the career and afterlife of Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543–1616), the founder of the Tokugawa shogunate. The story of Ieyasu illustrates the close ties between people, things, and politics and offers us insight into the role of material culture in the shift from medieval to early modern Japan and in shaping our knowledge of history. This innovative and eloquent history of a transitional age in Japan reframes the relationship between culture and politics. Like the collection of meibutsu, or "famous objects," exchanging hostages, collecting heads, and commanding massive armies were part of a strategy Pitelka calls "spectacular accumulation," which profoundly affected the creation and character of Japan's early modern polity. Pitelka uses the notion of spectacular accumulation to contextualize the acquisition of "art" within a larger complex of practices aimed at establishing governmental authority, demonstrating military dominance, reifying hierarchy, and advertising wealth. He avoids the artificial distinction between cultural history and political history, arguing that the famed cultural efflorescence of these years was not subsidiary to the landscape of political conflict, but constitutive of it. Employing a wide range of thoroughly researched visual and material evidence, including letters, diaries, historical chronicles, and art, Pitelka links the increasing violence of civil and international war to the increasing importance of samurai social rituals and cultural practices. Moving from the Ashikaga palaces of Kyoto to the tea utensil collections of Ieyasu, from the exchange of military hostages to the gift-giving rituals of Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi, Spectacular Accumulation traces Japanese military rulers' power plays over famous artworks as well as objectified human bodies.
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824857364
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 241
Book Description
In Spectacular Accumulation, Morgan Pitelka investigates the significance of material culture and sociability in late sixteenth-century Japan, focusing in particular on the career and afterlife of Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543–1616), the founder of the Tokugawa shogunate. The story of Ieyasu illustrates the close ties between people, things, and politics and offers us insight into the role of material culture in the shift from medieval to early modern Japan and in shaping our knowledge of history. This innovative and eloquent history of a transitional age in Japan reframes the relationship between culture and politics. Like the collection of meibutsu, or "famous objects," exchanging hostages, collecting heads, and commanding massive armies were part of a strategy Pitelka calls "spectacular accumulation," which profoundly affected the creation and character of Japan's early modern polity. Pitelka uses the notion of spectacular accumulation to contextualize the acquisition of "art" within a larger complex of practices aimed at establishing governmental authority, demonstrating military dominance, reifying hierarchy, and advertising wealth. He avoids the artificial distinction between cultural history and political history, arguing that the famed cultural efflorescence of these years was not subsidiary to the landscape of political conflict, but constitutive of it. Employing a wide range of thoroughly researched visual and material evidence, including letters, diaries, historical chronicles, and art, Pitelka links the increasing violence of civil and international war to the increasing importance of samurai social rituals and cultural practices. Moving from the Ashikaga palaces of Kyoto to the tea utensil collections of Ieyasu, from the exchange of military hostages to the gift-giving rituals of Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi, Spectacular Accumulation traces Japanese military rulers' power plays over famous artworks as well as objectified human bodies.
Japonius Tyrannus
Author: Jeroen P. Lamers
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004289259
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 292
Book Description
Oda Nobunaga (1534-82) is one of the best-known figures in Japanese history. However, no standard biography existed on this warlord who was the prime mover behind Japan's military and political unification in the late 16th century. Japonius Tyrannus fills the gap in our knowledge about Nobunaga, and the chronological narrative providesa thorough analysis of his political and military career.
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004289259
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 292
Book Description
Oda Nobunaga (1534-82) is one of the best-known figures in Japanese history. However, no standard biography existed on this warlord who was the prime mover behind Japan's military and political unification in the late 16th century. Japonius Tyrannus fills the gap in our knowledge about Nobunaga, and the chronological narrative providesa thorough analysis of his political and military career.