Wrong about Japan

Wrong about Japan PDF Author: Peter Carey
Publisher: Random House Australia
ISBN: 1740513258
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 130

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Book Description
In 2002, the author travelled to Japan, accompanied by his twelve-year-old son Charley, on a special kind of pilgrimage. In a stunning memoir-cum-travelogue he charts this journey, inspired by Charley's passion for manga and anime.

Wrong about Japan

Wrong about Japan PDF Author: Peter Carey
Publisher: Random House Australia
ISBN: 1740513258
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 130

Get Book Here

Book Description
In 2002, the author travelled to Japan, accompanied by his twelve-year-old son Charley, on a special kind of pilgrimage. In a stunning memoir-cum-travelogue he charts this journey, inspired by Charley's passion for manga and anime.

Bad Water

Bad Water PDF Author: Robert Stolz
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822376504
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
Bad Water is a sophisticated theoretical analysis of Japanese thinkers and activists' efforts to reintegrate the natural environment into Japan's social and political thought in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth. The need to incorporate nature into politics was revealed by a series of large-scale industrial disasters in the 1890s. The Ashio Copper Mine unleashed massive amounts of copper, arsenic, mercury, and other pollutants into surrounding watersheds. Robert Stolz argues that by forcefully demonstrating the mutual penetration of humans and nature, industrial pollution biologically and politically compromised the autonomous liberal subject underlying the political philosophy of the modernizing Meiji state. In the following decades, socialism, anarchism, fascism, and Confucian benevolence and moral economy were marshaled in the search for new theories of a modern political subject and a social organization adequate to the environmental crisis. With detailed considerations of several key environmental activists, including Tanaka Shōzō, Bad Water is a nuanced account of Japan's environmental turn, a historical moment when, for the first time, Japanese thinkers and activists experienced nature as alienated from themselves and were forced to rebuild the connections.

Dave Barry Does Japan

Dave Barry Does Japan PDF Author: Dave Barry
Publisher: Ballantine Books
ISBN: 0449908100
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description
The award-winning author and syndicated columnist shares his humorous observations on his trip to Japan, sharing his thoughts on culture shock in all its numerous forms--from kabuki to public bathing. Reprint.

Japan Rising

Japan Rising PDF Author: Kenneth Pyle
Publisher: PublicAffairs
ISBN: 0786732024
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 536

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Book Description
Japan is on the verge of a sea change. After more than fifty years of national pacifism and isolation including the "lost decade" of the 1990s, Japan is quietly, stealthily awakening. As Japan prepares to become a major player in the strategic struggles of the 21st century, critical questions arise about its motivations. What are the driving forces that influence how Japan will act in the international system? Are there recurrent patterns that will help explain how Japan will respond to the emerging environment of world politics? American understanding of Japanese character and purpose has been tenuous at best. We have repeatedly underestimated Japan in the realm of foreign policy. Now as Japan shows signs of vitality and international engagement, it is more important than ever that we understand the forces that drive Japan. In Japan Rising, renowned expert Kenneth Pyle identities the common threads that bind the divergent strategies of modern Japan, providing essential reading for anyone seeking to understand how Japan arrived at this moment -- and what to expect in the future.

Fifty Words for Rain

Fifty Words for Rain PDF Author: Asha Lemmie
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1524746371
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 464

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Book Description
A Good Morning America Book Club Pick and New York Times Bestseller! From debut author Asha Lemmie, “a lovely, heartrending story about love and loss, prejudice and pain, and the sometimes dangerous, always durable ties that link a family together.” —Kristin Hannah, #1 New York Times–bestselling author of The Nightingale Kyoto, Japan, 1948. “Do not question. Do not fight. Do not resist.” Such is eight-year-old Noriko “Nori” Kamiza’s first lesson. She will not question why her mother abandoned her with only these final words. She will not fight her confinement to the attic of her grandparents’ imperial estate. And she will not resist the scalding chemical baths she receives daily to lighten her skin. The child of a married Japanese aristocrat and her African American GI lover, Nori is an outsider from birth. Her grandparents take her in, only to conceal her, fearful of a stain on the royal pedigree that they are desperate to uphold in a changing Japan. Obedient to a fault, Nori accepts her solitary life, despite her natural intellect and curiosity. But when chance brings her older half-brother, Akira, to the estate that is his inheritance and destiny, Nori finds in him an unlikely ally with whom she forms a powerful bond—a bond their formidable grandparents cannot allow and that will irrevocably change the lives they were always meant to lead. Because now that Nori has glimpsed a world in which perhaps there is a place for her after all, she is ready to fight to be a part of it—a battle that just might cost her everything. Spanning decades and continents, Fifty Words for Rain is a dazzling epic about the ties that bind, the ties that give you strength, and what it means to be free.

Geisha

Geisha PDF Author: Mineko Iwasaki
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 9780743444293
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
A Kyoto geisha describes her initiation into an okiya at the age of four, the intricate training that made up most of her education, her successful career, and the traditions surrounding the geisha culture.

Wrong About Japan

Wrong About Japan PDF Author: Peter Carey
Publisher: Vintage Canada
ISBN: 030736867X
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description
Previous winner of two Booker Prizes, Peter Carey expands his extraordinary achievement with each new novel — but now gives us something entirely different. When famously shy Charley Carey becomes obsessed with Japanese manga and anime, Peter is not only delighted for his son, but entranced himself. Thus, with a father sharing his twelve-year-old’s exotic comic books, begins a journey that will lead them both to Tokyo, where a strange Japanese boy will become both their guide and judge. The visitors quickly plunge deep into the lanes of Shitimachi — into the “weird stuff” of modern Japan — meeting manga artists and anime directors, “visualists” who painstakingly impersonate cartoons, and solitary “otakus” who lead a computerized existence. What emerges from these encounters is a pithy, far-ranging study of history and culture both high and low — from samurai to salaryman, from kabuki theatre to the post-war robot craze. Peter Carey’s observations are provocative, even though his hosts often point out, politely, that he is wrong about Japan. In adventures that are comic, surprising, and ultimately moving, father and son cope with and learn from each other in a place far from home. “No Real Japan,” said Charley. “You’ve got to promise. No temples. No museums.” “What could we do?” “We could buy cool manga.” “There’ll be no English translations.” “I don’t care. I’d eat raw fish.” —excerpt from Wrong About Japan

Japan Through the Looking Glass

Japan Through the Looking Glass PDF Author: Alan MacFarlane
Publisher: Profile Books
ISBN: 1847650589
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
This entertaining and endlessly surprising book takes us on an exploration into every aspect of Japanese society from the most public to the most intimate. A series of meticulous investigations gradually uncovers the multi-faceted nature of a country and people who are even more extraordinary than they seem. Our journey encompasses religion, ritual, martial arts, manners, eating, drinking, hot baths, geishas, family, home, singing, wrestling, dancing, performing, clans, education, aspiration, sexes, generations, race, crime, gangs, terror, war, kindness, cruelty, money, art, imperialism, emperor, countryside, city, politics, government, law and a language that varies according to whom you are speaking. Clear-sighted, persistent, affectionate, unsentimental and honest - Alan Macfarlane shows us Japan as it has never been seen before.

Otaku and the Struggle for Imagination in Japan

Otaku and the Struggle for Imagination in Japan PDF 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.

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.