Blind in Early Modern Japan

Blind in Early Modern Japan PDF Author: Wei Yu Wayne Tan
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472220438
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
While the loss of sight—whether in early modern Japan or now—may be understood as a disability, blind people in the Tokugawa period (1600–1868) could thrive because of disability. The blind of the era were prominent across a wide range of professions, and through a strong guild structure were able to exert contractual monopolies over certain trades. Blind in Early Modern Japan illustrates the breadth and depth of those occupations, the power and respect that accrued to the guild members, and the lasting legacy of the Tokugawa guilds into the current moment. The book illustrates why disability must be assessed within a particular society’s social, political, and medical context, and also the importance of bringing medical history into conversation with cultural history. A Euro-American-centric disability studies perspective that focuses on disability and oppression, the author contends, risks overlooking the unique situation in a non-Western society like Japan in which disability was constructed to enhance blind people’s power. He explores what it meant to be blind in Japan at that time, and what it says about current frameworks for understanding disability.

Blind in Early Modern Japan

Blind in Early Modern Japan PDF Author: Wei Yu Wayne Tan
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472220438
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 267

Get Book Here

Book Description
While the loss of sight—whether in early modern Japan or now—may be understood as a disability, blind people in the Tokugawa period (1600–1868) could thrive because of disability. The blind of the era were prominent across a wide range of professions, and through a strong guild structure were able to exert contractual monopolies over certain trades. Blind in Early Modern Japan illustrates the breadth and depth of those occupations, the power and respect that accrued to the guild members, and the lasting legacy of the Tokugawa guilds into the current moment. The book illustrates why disability must be assessed within a particular society’s social, political, and medical context, and also the importance of bringing medical history into conversation with cultural history. A Euro-American-centric disability studies perspective that focuses on disability and oppression, the author contends, risks overlooking the unique situation in a non-Western society like Japan in which disability was constructed to enhance blind people’s power. He explores what it meant to be blind in Japan at that time, and what it says about current frameworks for understanding disability.

Blind in Early Modern Japan

Blind in Early Modern Japan PDF Author: Wei Yu Wayne Tan
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780472075485
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
A history of the blind in Japan that challenges contemporary notions of disability

Blind in Early Modern Japan

Blind in Early Modern Japan PDF Author: Wei Yu Wayne Tan
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472055488
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
A history of the blind in Japan that challenges contemporary notions of disability

Stumbling Blocks Before the Blind

Stumbling Blocks Before the Blind PDF Author: Edward Wheatley
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472117203
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
"Bold, deeply learned, and important, offering a provocative thesis that is worked out through legal and archival materials and in subtle and original readings of literary texts. Absolutely new in content and significantly innovative in methodology and argument, Stumbling Blocks Before the Blind offers a cultural geography of medieval blindness that invites us to be more discriminating about how we think of geographies of disability today." ---Christopher Baswell, Columbia University "A challenging, interesting, and timely book that is also very well written . . . Wheatley has researched and brought together a leitmotiv that I never would have guessed was so pervasive, so intriguing, so worthy of a book." ---Jody Enders, University of California, Santa Barbara Stumbling Blocks Before the Blind presents the first comprehensive exploration of a disability in the Middle Ages, drawing on the literature, history, art history, and religious discourse of England and France. It relates current theories of disability to the cultural and institutional constructions of blindness in the eleventh through fifteenth centuries, examining the surprising differences in the treatment of blind people and the responses to blindness in these two countries. The book shows that pernicious attitudes about blindness were partially offset by innovations and ameliorations---social; literary; and, to an extent, medical---that began to foster a fuller understanding and acceptance of blindness. A number of practices and institutions in France, both positive and negative---blinding as punishment, the foundation of hospices for the blind, and some medical treatment---resulted in not only attitudes that commodified human sight but also inhumane satire against the blind in French literature, both secular and religious. Anglo-Saxon and later medieval England differed markedly in all three of these areas, and the less prominent position of blind people in society resulted in noticeably fewer cruel representations in literature. This book will interest students of literature, history, art history, and religion because it will provide clear contexts for considering any medieval artifact relating to blindness---a literary text, a historical document, a theological treatise, or a work of art. For some readers, the book will serve as an introduction to the field of disability studies, an area of increasing interest both within and outside of the academy. Edward Wheatley is Surtz Professor of Medieval Literature at Loyola University, Chicago.

Portraits of Edo and Early Modern Japan

Portraits of Edo and Early Modern Japan PDF Author: Gerald Groemer
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 9811373760
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 396

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Book Description
This volume presents a series of five portraits of Edo, the central region of urban space today known as Tokyo, from the great fire of 1657 to the devastating earthquake of 1855. This book endeavors to allow Edo, or at least some of the voices that constituted Edo, to do most of the speaking. These voices become audible in the work of five Japanese eye-witness observers, who notated what they saw, heard, felt, tasted, experienced, and remembered. “An Eastern Stirrup,” presents a vivid portrait of the great conflagration of 1657 that nearly wiped out the city. “Tales of Long Long Ago,” details seventeenth-century warrior-class ways as depicted by a particularly conservative samurai. “The River of Time,” describes the city and its flourishing cultural and economic development during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. “The Spider’s Reel” looks back at both the attainments and calamities of Edo in the 1780s. Finally, “Disaster Days,” offers a meticulous account of Edo life among the ruins of the catastrophic 1855 tremor. Read in sequence, these five pieces offer a unique “insider’s perspective” on the city of Edo and early modern Japan.

Early Modern Japanese Literature

Early Modern Japanese Literature PDF Author: Haruo Shirane
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231516143
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 572

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Book Description
This abridged edition of Haruo Shirane's popular anthology, Early Modern Japanese Literature, retains the essential texts that have made the original volume such a valuable resource. The book introduces English-speaking readers to prose fiction genres, including dangibon, kibyoshi (satiric picture books), sharebon (books of wit and fashion), yomihon, kokkeibon (books of humor), gokan (bound books), and ninjobon (books of romance and sentiment). It also features poetic genres such as waka, haiku, senryu, and kyoka, and plays ranging from Chikamatsu's puppet plays to nineteenth-century kabuki. Readers will continue to benefit from the anthology's selection of significant essays, treatises, literary criticism, folk stories, and other noncanonical works, as well as the numerous prints that accompanied these works. They will also find Shirane's introductions and critical commentary, which guide the reader through the allusive and often elliptical nature of these incredible selections.

The Tokugawa World

The Tokugawa World PDF Author: Gary P. Leupp
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000427412
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1484

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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.

Anti-foreignism and Western Learning in Early-modern Japan

Anti-foreignism and Western Learning in Early-modern Japan PDF Author: Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi
Publisher: Harvard Univ Asia Center
ISBN: 9780674040373
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
ESSAYS ON THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE OF THE JAPANESE BETWEEN 1600-1870.

Handbook to Life in Medieval and Early Modern Japan

Handbook to Life in Medieval and Early Modern Japan PDF Author: William E. Deal
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195331265
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 433

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Book Description
This book is an introduction the Japanese history, culture, and society from 1185 - the beginning of the Kamakura period - through the end of the Edo period in 1868.

Early Modern Japan

Early Modern Japan PDF Author: Conrad Totman
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520203569
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 624

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Book Description
A survey of Japan's early modern period (1568-1868) that blends political, economic, intellectual, literary, and cultural history. It also introduces a fresh ecological perspective, covering natural disasters, resource use, demographics, and river control.