American Political and Cultural Perspectives on Japan

American Political and Cultural Perspectives on Japan PDF Author: John H. Miller
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739189131
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 185

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Book Description
American Political and Cultural Perspectives on Japan: From Perry to Obama is an historical survey of how Americans have viewed Japan during the past 160 years. It encompasses the diplomatic, political, economic, social, and cultural dimensions of the relationship, with an emphasis on changing American images, myths, and stereotypes of Japan and the Japanese. It begins with the American “opening” of Japan in the 1850s and 1860s. Subsequent chapters explore American attitudes toward Japan during the Gilded Age, the early 1900s, the 1920s, the 1930s, and the Pacific War. The second part of the book, organized round the theme of the postwar Japanese-American partnership, covers the Occupation, the 1960s, the troubled 1970s and1980s, and the post-Cold War decades down to the Obama presidency. The conclusion offers some predictions about how Americans are likely to view Japan in the future.

The idea of Japan 1853-1895

The idea of Japan 1853-1895 PDF Author: John Ashmead
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 631

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Abstract Series

Abstract Series PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 544

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Book Description


Japan's War

Japan's War PDF Author: Edwin P. Hoyt
Publisher: Cooper Square Press
ISBN: 1461602068
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 567

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Book Description
Tracing the history of Japanese aggression from 1853 onward, Hoyt masterfully addresses some of the biggest questions left from the Pacific front of World War II.

Abstracts of Completed Doctoral Dissertations for the Academic Year

Abstracts of Completed Doctoral Dissertations for the Academic Year PDF Author: United States. Department of State. Office of Intelligence Research
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Dissertations, Academic
Languages : en
Pages : 556

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Foreign Images and Experiences of Japan

Foreign Images and Experiences of Japan PDF Author: William McOmie
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004213856
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 534

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Book Description
The first in a three-volume series, Volume 1 begins with the earliest written reports from China in the first century AD and ends with a survey of Dutch reports from 1841, which marks the point when ‘Japan had been amply described in all major respects’, and at a time when it began to be perceived as a less remote and more important country in Western eyes ‘yet still emphatically closed to all foreign trade except that of the Dutch and the Chinese’. Furthermore, in little more than a decade later the number and variety of accounts were to increase greatly following the American, Russian and British expeditions of 1853/54 – accounts which are to form a key element of Volume 2. The Contents are divided into two parts: chronological and thematic. Part I is devoted to a discussion and analysis of the dominant views and images of Japan found in each historical era. It also provides brief biographical data about those European and American travellers to Japan whose reports are quoted in Part II, including some sixty eyewitness accounts, along with concise summaries and commentaries. Compared to previous surveys, a significant aspect of this volume is the greater amount of biographical information regarding the leading European visitors to Japan that is provided, together with a concise analysis and evaluation of their original accounts by both contemporary and more recent critics. As a further innovation, excerpts from the reports of Russian visitors to Japan, including Adam Laxman and V.M.Golvnin are quoted for the first time alongside those of West European and American accounts. The volume is supported by a significant Glossary and Bibliography, as well as Subject and Name/Place Indexes.

Inventing Japan

Inventing Japan PDF Author: Ian Buruma
Publisher: Modern Library
ISBN: 0812972864
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
In a single short book as elegant as it is wise, Ian Buruma makes sense of the most fateful span of Japan’s history, the period that saw as dramatic a transformation as any country has ever known. In the course of little more than a hundred years from the day Commodore Matthew Perry arrived in his black ships, this insular, preindustrial realm mutated into an expansive military dictatorship that essentially supplanted the British, French, Dutch, and American empires in Asia before plunging to utter ruin, eventually emerging under American tutelage as a pseudo-Western-style democracy and economic dynamo. What explains the seismic changes that thrust this small island nation so violently onto the world stage? In part, Ian Buruma argues, the story is one of a newly united nation that felt it must play catch-up to the established Western powers, just as Germany and Italy did, a process that involved, in addition to outward colonial expansion, internal cultural consolidation and the manufacturing of a shared heritage. But Japan has always been both particularly open to the importation of good ideas and particularly prickly about keeping their influence quarantined, a bipolar disorder that would have dramatic consequences and that continues to this day. If one book is to be read in order to understand why the Japanese seem so impossibly strange to many Americans, Inventing Japan is surely it.

The Zen Arts

The Zen Arts PDF Author: Rupert Cox
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136855513
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
The tea ceremony and the martial arts are intimately linked in the popular and historical imagination with Zen Buddhism, and Japanese culture. They are commonly interpreted as religio-aesthetic pursuits which express core spiritual values through bodily gesture and the creation of highly valued objects. Ideally, the experience of practising the Zen arts culminates in enlightenment. This book challenges that long-held view and proposes that the Zen arts should be understood as part of a literary and visual history of representing Japanese culture through the arts. Cox argues that these texts and images emerged fully as systems for representing the arts during the modern period, produced within Japan as a form of cultural nationalism and outside Japan as part of an orientalist discourse. Practitioners' experiences are in fact rarely referred to in terms of Zen or art, but instead are spatially and socially grounded. Combining anthropological description with historical criticism, Cox shows that the Zen arts are best understood in terms of a dynamic relationship between an aesthetic discourse on art and culture and the social and embodied experiences of those who participate in them.

Education in Japan

Education in Japan PDF Author: Edward R. Beauchamp
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351387146
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 405

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Book Description
This book, first published in 1989, includes essays on a number of the most important topics in Japanese education as well as the highly selected, and annotated, bibliographies. It is the editors' belief that understanding educational matters requires insight into the historical context, and have therefore placed contemporary Japanese educational matters in historical perspective.

No Place of Grace

No Place of Grace PDF Author: T. J. Jackson Lears
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226469700
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 397

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Book Description
T. J. Jackson Lears draws on a wealth of primary sources — sermons, diaries, letters — as well as novels, poems, and essays to explore the origins of turn-of-the-century American antimodernism. He examines the retreat to the exotic, the pursuit of intense physical or spiritual experiences, and the search for cultural self-sufficiency through the Arts and Crafts movement. Lears argues that their antimodern impulse, more pervasive than historians have supposed, was not "simple escapism," but reveals some enduring and recurring tensions in American culture. "It's an understatement to call No Place of Grace a brilliant book. . . . It's the first clear sign I've seen that my generation, after marching through the '60s and jogging through the '70s might be pausing to examine what we've learned, and to teach it."—Walter Kendrick, Village Voice "One can justly make the claim that No Place of Grace restores and reinterprets a crucial part of American history. Lears's method is impeccable."—Ann Douglas, The Nation