Learning to Bow

Learning to Bow PDF Author: Bruce Feiler
Publisher: Zondervan
ISBN: 0061863599
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
Learning to Bow has been heralded as one of the funniest, liveliest, and most insightful books ever written about the clash of cultures between America and Japan. With warmth and candor, Bruce Feiler recounts the year he spent as a teacher in a small rural town. Beginning with a ritual outdoor bath and culminating in an all-night trek to the top of Mt. Fuji, Feiler teaches his students about American culture, while they teach him everything from how to properly address an envelope to how to date a Japanese girl.

Learning to Bow

Learning to Bow PDF Author: Bruce Feiler
Publisher: Zondervan
ISBN: 0061863599
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 340

Get Book Here

Book Description
Learning to Bow has been heralded as one of the funniest, liveliest, and most insightful books ever written about the clash of cultures between America and Japan. With warmth and candor, Bruce Feiler recounts the year he spent as a teacher in a small rural town. Beginning with a ritual outdoor bath and culminating in an all-night trek to the top of Mt. Fuji, Feiler teaches his students about American culture, while they teach him everything from how to properly address an envelope to how to date a Japanese girl.

Chronicles of My Life

Chronicles of My Life PDF Author: Donald Keene
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231144415
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 203

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Book Description
"I sometimes think that if, as the result of an accident, I were to lose my knowledge of Japanese, there would not be much left for me. Japanese, which at first had no connection with my ancestors, my literary tastes, or my awareness of myself as a person, has become the central element of my life." In this eloquent and wholly absorbing memoir, the renowned scholar Donald Keene shares more than half a century of his extraordinary adventures as a student of Japan. Keene begins with an account of his bittersweet childhood in New York; then he describes his initial encounters with Asia and Europe and the way in which World War II complicated that experience. He captures the sights, scents, and sounds of Japan as they first enveloped him, and talks of the unique travels and well-known intellectuals who later shaped the contours of his academic career. Keene traces the movement of his passions with delicacy and subtlety, deftly weaving his love for Japan into a larger narrative about identity and home and the circumstances that led a Westerner to find solace in a country on the opposite side of the world. Chronicles of My Life is not only a fascinating tale of two cultures colliding, but also a thrilling account of the emotions and experiences that connect us all, regardless of our individual origins.

Seeds in the Heart

Seeds in the Heart PDF Author:
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231114417
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 1284

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Book Description
Donald Keene, a noted authority in the field, offers a guide through the first 900 years of Japanese literature. This period not only defined the unique properties of Japanese prose and prosody, but also produced some of its greatest works.

Bringing Zen Home

Bringing Zen Home PDF Author: Paula Arai
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824835352
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
Healing lies at the heart of Zen in the home, as Paula Arai discovered in her pioneering research on the ritual lives of Zen Buddhist laywomen. She reveals a vital stream of religious practice that flourishes outside the bounds of formal institutions through sacred rites that women develop and transmit to one another. Everyday objects and common materials are used in inventive ways. For example, polishing cloths, vivified by prayer and mantra recitation, become potent tools. The creation of beauty through the arts of tea ceremony, calligraphy, poetry, and flower arrangement become rites of healing. Bringing Zen Home brings a fresh perspective to Zen scholarship by uncovering a previously unrecognized but nonetheless vibrant strand of lay practice. The creativity of domestic Zen is evident in the ritual activities that women fashion, weaving tradition and innovation, to gain a sense of wholeness and balance in the midst of illness, loss, and anguish. Their rituals include chanting, ingesting elixirs and consecrated substances, and contemplative approaches that elevate cleaning, cooking, child-rearing, and caring for the sick and dying into spiritual disciplines. Creating beauty is central to domestic Zen and figures prominently in Arai’s analyses. She also discovers a novel application of the concept of Buddha nature as the women honor deceased loved ones as “personal Buddhas.” One of the hallmarks of the study is its longitudinal nature, spanning fourteen years of fieldwork. Arai developed a “second-person,” or relational, approach to ethnographic research prompted by recent trends in psychobiology. This allowed her to cultivate relationships of trust and mutual vulnerability over many years to inquire into not only the practices but also their ongoing and changing roles. The women in her study entrusted her with their life stories, personal reflections, and religious insights, yielding an ethnography rich in descriptive and narrative detail as well as nuanced explorations of the experiential dimensions and effects of rituals. In Bringing Zen Home, the first study of the ritual lives of Zen laywomen, Arai applies a cutting-edge ethnographic method to reveal a thriving domain of religious practice. Her work represents an important contribution on a number of fronts—to Zen studies, ritual studies, scholarship on women and religion, and the cross-cultural study of healing.

Nothingness in the Heart of Empire

Nothingness in the Heart of Empire PDF Author: Harumi Osaki
Publisher: Suny Press
ISBN: 9781438473109
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Reveals the complicity between the Kyoto School's moral and political philosophy, based on the school's founder Nishida Kitarō's metaphysics of nothingness, and Japanese imperialism.

Jazz Journeys to Japan

Jazz Journeys to Japan PDF Author: William Minor
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472113453
Category : Jazz
Languages : en
Pages : 412

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Book Description
One author's personal odyssey through the jazz scene in Japan

The Heart of the Warrior

The Heart of the Warrior PDF Author: Catharina Blomberg
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134240333
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
Traces the development of the samurai, both in the way they regarded themselves and their role in society.

Heart of a Samurai

Heart of a Samurai PDF Author: Margi Preus
Publisher: Perfection Learning
ISBN: 9781613833773
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Rescued by an American whaler after a terrible shipwreck leaves him and his four companions castaways on a remote island in 1841, Manjiro learns new laws and customs as he becomes the first Japanese person to set foot in the United States.

Kokoro

Kokoro PDF Author: Lafcadio Hearn
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Folklore
Languages : en
Pages : 440

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Book Description


The Heart of Japan (Routledge Revivals)

The Heart of Japan (Routledge Revivals) PDF Author: Clarence Ludlow Brownell
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317805712
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 365

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Book Description
This collection of commentaries and reflections on Japanese culture, first published in 1904, was written shortly after the return of two English aristocrats from five years spent immersed in the ‘Land of the Rising Sun’. Their intention through these anecdotes – some humorous and charming, others tragic and thought-provoking – was to offer glimpses into the "real inner spirit of the native life," and to provide insights into the remarkable idiosyncrasies of Japanese society during a period of unprecedented change. Touching on such diverse topics as sport, religion, music, censorship, drama and bathing, The Heart of Japan will be of particular interest to students of Japanese, as well as to those intrigued by cultural difference and exchange.