The Premise of Fidelity

The Premise of Fidelity PDF Author: Maki Fukuoka
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804784620
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
The Premise of Fidelity puts forward a new history of Japanese visuality through an examination of the discourses and practices surrounding the nineteenth century transposition of "the real" in the decades before photography was introduced. This intellectual history is informed by a careful examination of a network of local scholars—from physicians to farmers to bureaucrats—known as Shōhyaku-sha. In their archival materials, these scholars used the term shashin (which would, years later, come to signify "photography" in Japanese) in a wide variety of medical, botanical, and pictorial practices. These scholars pursued questions of the relationship between what they observed and what they believed they knew, in the process investigating scientific ideas and practices by obsessively naming and classifying, and then rendering through highly accurate illustration, the objects of their study. This book is an exploration of the process by which the Shōhyaku-sha shaped the concept of shashin. As such, it disrupts the dominant narratives of photography, art, and science in Japan, providing a prehistory of Japanese photography that requires the accepted history of the discipline to be rewritten.

The Premise of Fidelity

The Premise of Fidelity PDF Author: Maki Fukuoka
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804784620
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 301

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Premise of Fidelity puts forward a new history of Japanese visuality through an examination of the discourses and practices surrounding the nineteenth century transposition of "the real" in the decades before photography was introduced. This intellectual history is informed by a careful examination of a network of local scholars—from physicians to farmers to bureaucrats—known as Shōhyaku-sha. In their archival materials, these scholars used the term shashin (which would, years later, come to signify "photography" in Japanese) in a wide variety of medical, botanical, and pictorial practices. These scholars pursued questions of the relationship between what they observed and what they believed they knew, in the process investigating scientific ideas and practices by obsessively naming and classifying, and then rendering through highly accurate illustration, the objects of their study. This book is an exploration of the process by which the Shōhyaku-sha shaped the concept of shashin. As such, it disrupts the dominant narratives of photography, art, and science in Japan, providing a prehistory of Japanese photography that requires the accepted history of the discipline to be rewritten.

Foreign Employees In Nineteenth Century Japan

Foreign Employees In Nineteenth Century Japan PDF Author: Edward R Beauchamp
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429713258
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
The product of research by US and Japanese scholars, this book is an assessment of the work of individual "yatoi", and their contributions to the rapid development that characterized Meiji Japan (1868-1912).

Licentious Fictions

Licentious Fictions PDF Author: Daniel Poch
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231550464
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
Nineteenth-century Japanese literary discourse and narrative developed a striking preoccupation with ninjō—literally “human emotion,” but often used in reference to amorous feeling and erotic desire. For many writers and critics, fiction’s capacity to foster both licentiousness and didactic values stood out as a crucial source of ambivalence. Simultaneously capable of inspiring exemplary behavior and a dangerous force transgressing social norms, ninjō became a focal point for debates about the role of the novel and a key motor propelling narrative plots. In Licentious Fictions, Daniel Poch investigates the significance of ninjō in defining the literary modernity of nineteenth-century Japan. He explores how cultural anxieties about the power of literature in mediating emotions and desire shaped Japanese narrative from the late Edo through the Meiji period. Poch argues that the Meiji novel, instead of superseding earlier discourses and narrative practices surrounding ninjō, complicated them by integrating them into new cultural and literary concepts. He offers close readings of a broad array of late Edo- and Meiji-period narrative and critical sources, examining how they shed light on the great intensification of the concern surrounding ninjō. In addition to proposing a new theoretical outlook on emotion, Licentious Fictions challenges the divide between early modern and modern Japanese literary studies by conceptualizing the nineteenth century as a continuous literary-historical space.

Women and Networks in Nineteenth-Century Japan

Women and Networks in Nineteenth-Century Japan PDF Author: Bettina Gramlich-Oka
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472127330
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
Although scholars have emphasized the importance of women’s networks for civil society in twentieth-century Japan, Women and Networks in Nineteenth-Century Japan is the first book to tackle the subject for the contentious and consequential nineteenth century. The essays traverse the divide when Japan started transforming itself from a decentralized to a centralized government, from legally imposed restrictions on movement to the breakdown of travel barriers, and from ad hoc schooling to compulsory elementary school education. As these essays suggest, such changes had a profound impact on women and their roles in networks. Rather than pursue a common methodology, the authors take diverse approaches to this topic that open up fruitful avenues for further exploration. Most of the essays in this volume are by Japanese scholars; their inclusion here provides either an introduction to their work or the opportunity to explore their scholarship further. Because women are often invisible in historical documentation, the authors use a range of sources (such as diaries, letters, and legal documents) to reconstruct the familial, neighborhood, religious, political, work, and travel networks that women maintained, constructed, or found themselves in, sometimes against their will. In so doing, most but not all of the authors try to decenter historical narratives built on men’s activities and men’s occupational and status-based networks, and instead recover women’s activities in more localized groupings and personal associations.

Practical Pursuits

Practical Pursuits PDF Author: Ellen Gardner Nakamura
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
Nakamura argues that the study of Western medicine assembled doctors from all over the country in efforts to effect social change. By examining the social impact of Western learning at the level of everyday life, the book offers a broad picture of the way in which Western medicine, and Western knowledge, was absorbed and adapted in Japan.

Capturing Japan in Nineteenth-century New England Photography Collections

Capturing Japan in Nineteenth-century New England Photography Collections PDF Author: Eleanor M. Hight
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 9781409404989
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
"Expanding the canon of photographic history, Capturing Japan in Nineteenth Century New England Photography Collections focuses on six New Englanders, whose travel and photograph collecting influenced the flowering of Japonism in late nineteenth-century Boston. The book also explores the history of Japanese photography and its main themes. The first history of its kind, this study illuminates the ways photographs, seeming conveyors of fact, imprint mental images and suppositions on their viewers"--

Stranger in the Shogun's City

Stranger in the Shogun's City PDF Author: Amy Stanley
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1501188542
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
*Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography* *Winner of the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Award* *Winner of the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography* A “captivating” (The Washington Post) work of history that explores the life of an unconventional woman during the first half of the 19th century in Edo—the city that would become Tokyo—and a portrait of a city on the brink of a momentous encounter with the West. The daughter of a Buddhist priest, Tsuneno was born in a rural Japanese village and was expected to live a traditional life much like her mother’s. But after three divorces—and a temperament much too strong-willed for her family’s approval—she ran away to make a life for herself in one of the largest cities in the world: Edo, a bustling metropolis at its peak. With Tsuneno as our guide, we experience the drama and excitement of Edo just prior to the arrival of American Commodore Perry’s fleet, which transformed Japan. During this pivotal moment in Japanese history, Tsuneno bounces from tenement to tenement, marries a masterless samurai, and eventually enters the service of a famous city magistrate. Tsuneno’s life provides a window into 19th-century Japanese culture—and a rare view of an extraordinary woman who sacrificed her family and her reputation to make a new life for herself, in defiance of social conventions. “A compelling story, traced with meticulous detail and told with exquisite sympathy” (The Wall Street Journal), Stranger in the Shogun’s City is “a vivid, polyphonic portrait of life in 19th-century Japan [that] evokes the Shogun era with panache and insight” (National Review of Books).

The American Merchant Experience in Nineteenth Century Japan

The American Merchant Experience in Nineteenth Century Japan PDF Author: Kevin C. Murphy
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134433972
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
Explores the interactions of 19th century American merchants with the Japanese in the treaty port system, how the Japanese leadership manipulated them, and how the merchants themselves defined the limitations of American business in Japan.

Translating the West

Translating the West PDF Author: Douglas R. Howland
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 9780824824624
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
In this rich and absorbing analysis of the transformation of political thought in nineteenth-century Japan, Douglas Howland examines the transmission to Japan of key concepts--liberty, rights, sovereignty, and society--from Western Europe and the United States. Because Western political concepts did not translate well into their language, Japanese had to invent terminology to engage Western political thought. This work of westernization served to structure historical agency as Japanese leaders undertook the creation of a modern state. Where scholars have previously treated the introduction of Western political thought to Japan as a simple migration of ideas from one culture to another, Howland undertakes an unprecedented integration of the history of political concepts and the semiotics of translation techniques. He demonstrates that Japanese efforts to translate the West must be understood as problems both of language and action--as the creation and circulation of new concepts and the usage of these new concepts in debates about the programs and policies to be implemented in a westernizing Japan. Translating the West will interest scholars of East Asian studies and translation studies and historians of political thought, liberalism, and modernity.

Antiquarians of Nineteenth-Century Japan

Antiquarians of Nineteenth-Century Japan PDF Author: Hiroyuki Suzuki
Publisher: Getty Publications
ISBN: 1606067427
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
This volume explores the changing process of evaluating objects during the period of Japan’s rapid modernization. Originally published in Japanese, Antiquarians of Nineteenth-Century Japan looks at the approach toward object-based research across the late Tokugawa and early Meiji periods, which were typically kept separate, and elucidates the intellectual continuities between these eras. Focusing on the top-down effects of the professionalizing of academia in the political landscape of Meiji Japan, which had advanced by attacking earlier modes of scholarship by antiquarians, Suzuki shows how those outside the government responded, retracted, or challenged new public rules and values. He explores the changing process of evaluating objects from the past in tandem with the attitudes and practices of antiquarians during the period of Japan’s rapid modernization. He shows their roots in the intellectual sphere of the late Tokugawa period while also detailing how they adapted to the new era. Suzuki also demonstrates that Japan's antiquarians had much in common with those from Europe and the United States. Art historian Maki Fukuoka provides an introduction to the English translation that highlights the significance of Suzuki’s methodological and intellectual analyses and shows how his ideas will appeal to specialists and nonspecialists alike.