Ennobling Japan's Savage Northeast

Ennobling Japan's Savage Northeast PDF Author: Nathan Hopson
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 1684175828
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 383

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Book Description
"Ennobling Japan’s Savage Northeast is the first comprehensive account in English of the discursive life of the Tōhoku region in postwar Japan from 1945 through 2011. The Northeast became the subject of world attention with the March 2011 triple disaster of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown. But Tōhoku’s history and significance to emic understandings of Japanese self and nationhood remain poorly understood. When Japan embarked on its quest to modernize in the mid-nineteenth century, historical prejudice, contemporary politics, and economic calculation together led the state to marginalize Tōhoku, creating a “backward” region in both fact and image. After 1945, a group of mostly local intellectuals attempted to overcome this image and rehabilitate the Northeast as a source of new national values. This early postwar Tōhoku recuperation movement has proved to be a critical source for the new Kyoto school’s neoconservative valorization of native Japanese identity, fueling that group’s antimodern, anti-Western discourse since the 1980s.Nathan Hopson unravels the contested postwar meanings of Tōhoku to reveal the complex and contradictory ways in which that region has been incorporated into Japan’s shifting self-images since World War II."

Ennobling Japan's Savage Northeast

Ennobling Japan's Savage Northeast PDF Author: Nathan Hopson
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 1684175828
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 383

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Book Description
"Ennobling Japan’s Savage Northeast is the first comprehensive account in English of the discursive life of the Tōhoku region in postwar Japan from 1945 through 2011. The Northeast became the subject of world attention with the March 2011 triple disaster of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown. But Tōhoku’s history and significance to emic understandings of Japanese self and nationhood remain poorly understood. When Japan embarked on its quest to modernize in the mid-nineteenth century, historical prejudice, contemporary politics, and economic calculation together led the state to marginalize Tōhoku, creating a “backward” region in both fact and image. After 1945, a group of mostly local intellectuals attempted to overcome this image and rehabilitate the Northeast as a source of new national values. This early postwar Tōhoku recuperation movement has proved to be a critical source for the new Kyoto school’s neoconservative valorization of native Japanese identity, fueling that group’s antimodern, anti-Western discourse since the 1980s.Nathan Hopson unravels the contested postwar meanings of Tōhoku to reveal the complex and contradictory ways in which that region has been incorporated into Japan’s shifting self-images since World War II."

Tōhoku Unbounded: Regional Identity and the Mobile Subject in Prewar Japan

Tōhoku Unbounded: Regional Identity and the Mobile Subject in Prewar Japan PDF Author: Anne Giblin Gedacht
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 900452794X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
In 1870, a prominent samurai from Tōhoku sells his castle to become an agrarian colonist in Hokkaidō. Decades later, a man also from northeast Japan stows away on a boat to Canada and establishes a salmon roe business. By 1930, an investigative journalist travels to Brazil and writes a book that wins the first-ever Akutagawa Prize. In the 1940s, residents from the same area proclaim that they should lead Imperial Japan in colonizing all of Asia. Across decades and oceans, these fractured narratives seem disparate, but show how mobility is central to the history of Japan’s Tōhoku region, a place often stereotyped as a site of rural stasis and traditional immobility, thereby collapsing boundaries between local, national, and global studies of Japan. This book examines how multiple mobilities converge in Japan’s supposed hinterland. Drawing on research from three continents, this monograph demonstrates that Tohoku’s regional identity is inextricably intertwined with Pacific migrations.

Literature After Fukushima

Literature After Fukushima PDF Author: Linda Flores
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000836282
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 199

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Book Description
Literature after Fukushima examines how aesthetic representation contributes to a critical understanding of the 3.11 triple disaster – the Great East Japan earthquake, tsunami, and multiple meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Through an examination of key works in the expanding corpus of 3.11 literature the book explores how the disaster—both its immediate aftereffects and its continued unfolding—reframed discourse in various areas such as trauma studies, eco-criticism, regional identity, food safety, civil society, and beyond. Individual chapters discuss aspects of these perspectival shifts, tracing the reshaping of Japanese identity after the triple disaster. The cultural productions explored offer a glimpse into the public imaginary and demonstrate how disasters can fundamentally redefine our individual and shared conception of both history and the present moment. Literature after Fukushima is the first English-language book to provide an in-depth analysis of such a wide range of representative post-3.11 literature and its social ramifications. Contributing to a more comprehensive understanding of the post-disaster climate of Japanese society and adding new perspectives through literary analysis, this book will be of interest to scholars and students of Japanese and Asian Studies, Literary Studies, Environmental Humanities, as well as Cultural and Transcultural Studies.

The Gods of the Sea

The Gods of the Sea PDF Author: Fynn Holm
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009305514
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
Challenging portrayals of Japan as a whaling nation, Holm shows that anti-whaling protests were widespread in early modern Northeast Japan.

Conjuring Up Prehistory: Landscape and the Archaic in Japanese Nationalism

Conjuring Up Prehistory: Landscape and the Archaic in Japanese Nationalism PDF Author: Mark J. Hudson
Publisher: Archaeopress Publishing Ltd
ISBN: 1803271159
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 90

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Book Description
This study considers the ways in which archaeology and landscapes of the archaic have been appropriated in Japanese nationalism since the early twentieth century, focusing on the writings of cultural historian Tetsurō Watsuji, philosopher Takeshi Umehara and environmental archaeologist Yoshinori Yasuda.

Gender, Culture, and Disaster in Post-3.11 Japan

Gender, Culture, and Disaster in Post-3.11 Japan PDF Author: Mire Koikari
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350122513
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 211

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Book Description
The Great East Japan Disaster – a compound catastrophe of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown that began on March 11, 2011 – has ushered in a new era of cultural production dominated by discussions on safety and security, risk and vulnerability, and recovery and refortification. Gender, Culture, and Disaster in Post-3.11 Japan re-frames post-disaster national reconstruction as a social project imbued with dynamics of gender, race, and empire and in doing so Mire Koikari offers an innovative approach to resilience building in contemporary Japan. From juvenile literature to civic manuals to policy statements, Koikari examines a vast array of primary sources to demonstrate how femininity and masculinity, readiness and preparedness, militarism and humanitarianism, and nationalism and transnationalism inform cultural formation and transformation triggered by the unprecedented crisis. Interdisciplinary in its orientation, the book reveals how militarism, neoliberalism, and neoconservatism drive Japan's resilience building while calling attention to historical precedents and transnational connections that animate the ongoing mobilization toward safety and security. An important contribution to studies of gender and Japan, the book is essential reading for all those wishing to understand local and global politics of precarity and its proposed solutions amid the rising tide of pandemics, ecological hazards, industrial disasters, and humanitarian crises.

Eating Wild Japan

Eating Wild Japan PDF Author: Winifred Bird
Publisher: Stone Bridge Press, Inc.
ISBN: 1611729432
Category : Cooking
Languages : en
Pages : 219

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Book Description
From bracken to butterbur to "princess" bamboo, some of Japan's most iconic foods are foraged, not grown, in its forests, fields, and coastal waters--yet most Westerners have never heard of them. In this book, journalist Winifred Bird eats her way from one end of the country to the other in search of the hidden stories of Japan's wild foods, the people who pick them, and the places whose histories they've shaped. "A beautiful and thoughtful exploration of the deep relationship--past and present--between people and wild plants in one of the world's richest foraging regions."—Samuel Thayer, author of Incredible Wild Edibles and The Forager's Harvest

The Cold War [5 volumes]

The Cold War [5 volumes] PDF Author: Spencer C. Tucker
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 4179

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Book Description
This sweeping reference work covers every aspect of the Cold War, from its ignition in the ashes of World War II, through the Berlin Wall and the Cuban Missile Crisis, to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The Cold War superpower face-off between the Soviet Union and the United States dominated international affairs in the second half of the 20th century and still reverberates around the world today. This comprehensive and insightful multivolume set provides authoritative entries on all aspects of this world-changing event, including wars, new military technologies, diplomatic initiatives, espionage activities, important individuals and organizations, economic developments, societal and cultural events, and more. This expansive coverage provides readers with the necessary context to understand the many facets of this complex conflict. The work begins with a preface and introduction and then offers illuminating introductory essays on the origins and course of the Cold War, which are followed by some 1,500 entries on key individuals, wars, battles, weapons systems, diplomacy, politics, economics, and art and culture. Each entry has cross-references and a list of books for further reading. The text includes more than 100 key primary source documents, a detailed chronology, a glossary, and a selective bibliography. Numerous illustrations and maps are inset throughout to provide additional context to the material.

From Country to Nation

From Country to Nation PDF Author: Gideon Fujiwara
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501753959
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
From Country to Nation tracks the emergence of the modern Japanese nation in the nineteenth century through the history of some of its local aspirants. It explores how kokugaku (Japan studies) scholars envisioned their place within Japan and the globe, while living in a castle town and domain far north of the political capital. Gideon Fujiwara follows the story of Hirao Rosen and fellow scholars in the northeastern domain of Tsugaru. On discovering a newly "opened" Japan facing the dominant Western powers and a defeated Qing China, Rosen and other Tsugaru intellectuals embraced kokugaku to secure a place for their local "country" within the broader nation and to reorient their native Tsugaru within the spiritual landscape of an Imperial Japan protected by the gods. Although Rosen and his fellows celebrated the rise of Imperial Japan, their resistance to the Western influence and modernity embraced by the Meiji state ultimately resulted in their own disorientation and estrangement. By analyzing their writings—treatises, travelogues, letters, poetry, liturgies, and diaries—alongside their artwork, Fujiwara reveals how this socially diverse group of scholars experienced the Meiji Restoration from the peripheries. Using compelling firsthand accounts, Fujiwara tells the story of the rise of modern Japan, from the perspective of local intellectuals who envisioned their local "country" within a nation that emerged as an empire of the modern world.

Risk Society and Education in Post-Disaster Fukushima

Risk Society and Education in Post-Disaster Fukushima PDF Author: Kaoru Miyazawa
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000533549
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 219

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Book Description
In response to the explosion of the Fukushima Daiichi power plant in March 2011, this book examines how the concept of a risk society was handled in the various education programs implemented in post-disaster Fukushima. The explosion and subsequent radiation contamination that affected the biosphere of the Fukushima region and beyond, revealed that we live in a risk society. Despite this revelation, official discourses in Fukushima have been geared strictly toward the future, with the aim of restoring communities and resuming development projects. Based on the ethnographic data the author collected in Fukushima between 2013 and 2016, various contested emotions emerged in those education spaces as students and teachers remembered their romanticized and difficult past and dealt with the challenges presented by the risk society in their present lives. The emotionally-charged interactions between past and present also shaped their vision of their future community and of the actions they might take. The dialogues and actions that took places in these education spaces encourage readers to examine the meaning of development and question the basic assumptions and methods of education as society shifts to a risk society. A valuable resource for scholars and students in the fields of globalization and education, curriculum studies, sociology of education, and Japanese studies.