Happiness and the Good Life in Japan

Happiness and the Good Life in Japan PDF Author: Wolfram Manzenreiter
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317352726
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
Contemporary Japan is in a state of transition, caused by the forces of globalization that are derailing its ailing economy, stalemating the political establishment and generating alternative lifestyles and possibilities of the self. Amongst this nascent change, Japanese society is confronted with new challenges to answer the fundamental question of how to live a good life of meaning, purpose and value. This book, based on extensive fieldwork and original research, considers how specific groups of Japanese people view and strive for the pursuit of happiness. It examines the importance of relationships, family, identity, community and self-fulfilment, amongst other factors. The book demonstrates how the act of balancing social norms and agency is at the root of the growing diversity of experiencing happiness in Japan today.

Happiness and the Good Life in Japan

Happiness and the Good Life in Japan PDF Author: Wolfram Manzenreiter
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317352726
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
Contemporary Japan is in a state of transition, caused by the forces of globalization that are derailing its ailing economy, stalemating the political establishment and generating alternative lifestyles and possibilities of the self. Amongst this nascent change, Japanese society is confronted with new challenges to answer the fundamental question of how to live a good life of meaning, purpose and value. This book, based on extensive fieldwork and original research, considers how specific groups of Japanese people view and strive for the pursuit of happiness. It examines the importance of relationships, family, identity, community and self-fulfilment, amongst other factors. The book demonstrates how the act of balancing social norms and agency is at the root of the growing diversity of experiencing happiness in Japan today.

Intimate Japan

Intimate Japan PDF 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.

Japanese Geopolitics and the Western Imagination

Japanese Geopolitics and the Western Imagination PDF Author: Atsuko Watanabe
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3030043991
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
This book is the first attempt to comprehensively introduce Japanese geopolitics. Europe’s role in disseminating knowledge globally to shape the world according to its standards is an unchallenged premise in world politics. In this story, Japan is regarded as an enthusiastic importer of the knowledge. The book challenges this ground by examining how European geopolitics, the theory of the modern state, traveled to Japan in the first half of the last century, and demonstrates that the same theory can invoke diverged imaginations of the world by examining a range of historical, political, and literary texts. Focusing on the transformation of power, knowledge, and subjectivity in time and space, Watanabe provides a detailed account to reconsider the formation of contemporary world order of the modern territorial states.

Faking Liberties

Faking Liberties PDF Author: Jolyon Baraka Thomas
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022661882X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 371

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Book Description
Religious freedom is a founding tenet of the United States, and it has frequently been used to justify policies towards other nations. Such was the case in 1945 when Americans occupied Japan following World War II. Though the Japanese constitution had guaranteed freedom of religion since 1889, the United States declared that protection faulty, and when the occupation ended in 1952, they claimed to have successfully replaced it with “real” religious freedom. Through a fresh analysis of pre-war Japanese law, Jolyon Baraka Thomas demonstrates that the occupiers’ triumphant narrative obscured salient Japanese political debates about religious freedom. Indeed, Thomas reveals that American occupiers also vehemently disagreed about the topic. By reconstructing these vibrant debates, Faking Liberties unsettles any notion of American authorship and imposition of religious freedom. Instead, Thomas shows that, during the Occupation, a dialogue about freedom of religion ensued that constructed a new global set of political norms that continue to form policies today.

Role-Playing Game Studies

Role-Playing Game Studies PDF Author: Sebastian Deterding
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317268318
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 905

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Book Description
This handbook collects, for the first time, the state of research on role-playing games (RPGs) across disciplines, cultures, and media in a single, accessible volume. Collaboratively authored by more than 50 key scholars, it traces the history of RPGs, from wargaming precursors to tabletop RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons to the rise of live action role-play and contemporary computer RPG and massively multiplayer online RPG franchises, like Fallout and World of Warcraft. Individual chapters survey the perspectives, concepts, and findings on RPGs from key disciplines, like performance studies, sociology, psychology, education, economics, game design, literary studies, and more. Other chapters integrate insights from RPG studies around broadly significant topics, like transmedia worldbuilding, immersion, transgressive play, or player–character relations. Each chapter includes definitions of key terms and recommended readings to help fans, students, and scholars new to RPG studies find their way into this new interdisciplinary field.

My Year of Dirt and Water

My Year of Dirt and Water PDF Author: Tracy Franz
Publisher: Stone Bridge Press, Inc.
ISBN: 1611729300
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 355

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Book Description
Married to a Zen monk in training, an American woman in Japan chronicles her own year of growth and discovery In February 2004, when her American husband, a recently ordained Zen monk, leaves home to train for a year at a centuries-old Buddhist monastery, Tracy Franz embarks on her own year of Zen. An Alaskan alone—and lonely—in Japan, she begins to pay attention. My Year of Dirt and Water is a record of that journey. Allowed only occasional and formal visits to see her cloistered husband, Tracy teaches English, studies Japanese, and devotes herself to making pottery. Her teacher instructs her to turn cup after cup—creating one failure after another. Past and present, East and West intertwine as Tracy is twice compelled to return home to Alaska to confront her mother’s newly diagnosed cancer and the ghosts of a devastating childhood. Revolving through the days, My Year of Dirt and Water circles hard questions: What is love? What is art? What is practice? What do we do with the burden of suffering? The answers are formed and then unformed—a ceramic bowl born on the wheel and then returned again and again to dirt and water.

The Journal of Socho

The Journal of Socho PDF Author: S?ch?
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804735069
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 383

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Book Description
The author, Saiokuken Socho (1448-1532)—the preeminent linked-verse (renga) poet of his time—provides in his journal a vivid portrayal of cultural life in the capital and the provinces, together with descriptions of battles and great warrior families, the dangers of travel through war-torn countryside, and the plight of the poor.

Precarious Japan

Precarious Japan PDF Author: Anne Allison
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822377241
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
In an era of irregular labor, nagging recession, nuclear contamination, and a shrinking population, Japan is facing precarious times. How the Japanese experience insecurity in their daily and social lives is the subject of Precarious Japan. Tacking between the structural conditions of socioeconomic life and the ways people are making do, or not, Anne Allison chronicles the loss of home affecting many Japanese, not only in the literal sense but also in the figurative sense of not belonging. Until the collapse of Japan's economic bubble in 1991, lifelong employment and a secure income were within reach of most Japanese men, enabling them to maintain their families in a comfortable middle-class lifestyle. Now, as fewer and fewer people are able to find full-time work, hope turns to hopelessness and security gives way to a pervasive unease. Yet some Japanese are getting by, partly by reconceiving notions of home, family, and togetherness.

With Commodore Perry to Japan

With Commodore Perry to Japan PDF Author: John A Wolter
Publisher: Naval Institute Press
ISBN: 1612513379
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
With Commodore Perry to Japan offers a personal account of Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry’s expedition to Japan through the eyes of a sixteen-year-old purser’s clerk of the USS Mississippi. The documentary edition, endorsed by the National Historic Publications & Records Commission, provides excellent coverage of both the political mission of the Perry expedition, the opening of relations with Japan, and of the social history of a naval warship as well. Also included are fifty-five illustrations ranging from hand drawn, pen-and-ink scenes of everyday life sketched by Speiden and other members of the crew to exquisitely detailed pith paintings by Chinese artists.

Hiroshima Diary

Hiroshima Diary PDF Author: Michihiko Hachiya, M.D.
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 0807873551
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
The late Dr. Michihiko Hachiya was director of the Hiroshima Communications Hospital when the world's first atomic bomb was dropped on the city. Though his responsibilities in the appalling chaos of a devastated city were awesome, he found time to record the story daily, with compassion and tenderness. His compelling diary was originally published by the UNC Press in 1955, with the help of Dr. Warner Wells of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who was a surgical consultant to the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission and who became a friend of Dr. Hachiya. In a new foreword, John Dower reflects on the enduring importance of the diary fifty years after the bombing.