Transforming Japan

Transforming Japan PDF Author: Kumiko Fujimura-Fanselow
Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY
ISBN: 1558617000
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 594

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Book Description
A volume of essays by Japan’s leading female scholars and activists exploring their country’s recent progressive cultural shift. When the feminist movement finally arrived in Japan in the 1990s, no one could have foreseen the wide-ranging changes it would bring to the country. Nearly every aspect of contemporary life has been impacted, from marital status to workplace equality, education, politics, and sexuality. Now more than ever, the Japanese myth of a homogenous population living within traditional gender roles is being challenged. The LGBTQ population is coming out of the closet, ever-present minorities are mobilizing for change, single mothers are a growing population, and women are becoming political leaders. In Transforming Japan, Kumiko Fujimura-Fanselow has gathered the most comprehensive collection of essays written by Japanese educators and researchers on the ways in which present-day Japan confronts issues of gender, sexuality, race, discrimination, power, and human rights.

Transforming Japan

Transforming Japan PDF Author: Kumiko Fujimura-Fanselow
Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY
ISBN: 1558617000
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 594

Get Book Here

Book Description
A volume of essays by Japan’s leading female scholars and activists exploring their country’s recent progressive cultural shift. When the feminist movement finally arrived in Japan in the 1990s, no one could have foreseen the wide-ranging changes it would bring to the country. Nearly every aspect of contemporary life has been impacted, from marital status to workplace equality, education, politics, and sexuality. Now more than ever, the Japanese myth of a homogenous population living within traditional gender roles is being challenged. The LGBTQ population is coming out of the closet, ever-present minorities are mobilizing for change, single mothers are a growing population, and women are becoming political leaders. In Transforming Japan, Kumiko Fujimura-Fanselow has gathered the most comprehensive collection of essays written by Japanese educators and researchers on the ways in which present-day Japan confronts issues of gender, sexuality, race, discrimination, power, and human rights.

Transforming Japanese Business

Transforming Japanese Business PDF Author: Anshuman Khare
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 9811503273
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
This book explores how the business transformation taking place in Japan is influenced by the digital revolution. Its chapters present approaches and examples from sectors commonly understood to be visible arenas of digital transformation—3D printing and mobility, for instance—as well as some from not-so-obvious sectors, such as retail, services, and fintech. Business today is facing unprecedented change especially due to the adoption of new, digital technologies, with a noticeable transformation of manufacturing and services. The changes have been brought by advanced robotics, the emergence of artificial intelligence, and digital networks that are growing in size and capability as the number of connected devices explodes. In addition, there are advanced manufacturing and collaborative connected platforms, including machine-to-machine communications. Adoption of digital technology has caused process disruptions in both the manufacturing and services sectors and led to new business models and new products. While examining the preparedness of the Japanese economy to embrace these changes, the book explores the impact of digitally influenced changes on some selected sectors from a Japanese perspective. It paints a big picture in explaining how a previously manufacturing-centric, successful economy adopts change to retain and rebuild success in the global environment. Japan as a whole is embracing, yet also avoiding—innovating but also restricting—various forms of digitalization of life and work. The book, with its 17 chapters, is a collaborative effort of individuals contributing diverse points of view as technologists, academics, and managers.

The Technological Transformation of Japan

The Technological Transformation of Japan PDF Author: Tessa Morris-Suzuki
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521424929
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
This landmark book is the first general English-language history of technology in modern Japan.

Kaizen

Kaizen PDF Author: Sarah Harvey
Publisher: The Experiment
ISBN: 1615196579
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Reach your goals with Kaizen—the Japanese art of gentle self-improvement From Hygge to Ikigai, positive philosophies have taken the world by storm. Now, Kaizen—meaning “good change”—will help you transform your habits, without being too hard on yourself along the way. With Kaizen, even the boldest intention becomes a series of small, achievable steps. Each person’s approach will be different, which is why it’s so effective. First popularized by Toyota, Kaizen is already proven in the worlds of business and sports. Here, Sarah Harvey shows how to apply it to your health, relationships, money, career, hobbies, and home—and how to tailor it to your personality. Kaizen is the key to lasting change!

Japan Transformed

Japan Transformed PDF Author: Frances Rosenbluth
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400835097
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
With little domestic fanfare and even less attention internationally, Japan has been reinventing itself since the 1990s, dramatically changing its political economy, from one managed by regulations to one with a neoliberal orientation. Rebuilding from the economic misfortunes of its recent past, the country retains a formidable economy and its political system is healthier than at any time in its history. Japan Transformed explores the historical, political, and economic forces that led to the country's recent evolution, and looks at the consequences for Japan's citizens and global neighbors. The book examines Japanese history, illustrating the country's multiple transformations over the centuries, and then focuses on the critical and inexorable advance of economic globalization. It describes how global economic integration and urbanization destabilized Japan's postwar policy coalition, undercut the ruling Liberal Democratic Party's ability to buy votes, and paved the way for new electoral rules that emphasized competing visions of the public good. In contrast to the previous system that pitted candidates from the same party against each other, the new rules tether policymaking to the vast swath of voters in the middle of the political spectrum. Regardless of ruling party, Japan's politics, economics, and foreign policy are on a neoliberal path. Japan Transformed combines broad context and comparative analysis to provide an accurate understanding of Japan's past, present, and future.

Japan's Quiet Transformation

Japan's Quiet Transformation PDF Author: Jeff Kingston
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134478275
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 375

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Book Description
The 1990s have been termed as 'Japan's lost decade' to describe how the phenomenal growth in the Japanese economy ground to a halt and the country was crippled by enormous and ongoing political, economic and social problems. In responding to these unprecedented difficulties, wide-ranging reforms have been adopted including NPO, information disclosure and judicial reform legislation. Controversially, this book argues that such reforms are creating a more robust civil society and demonstrate that Japan is far more dynamic than is generally recognized.

Japan in Transformation, 1945-2020

Japan in Transformation, 1945-2020 PDF Author: Jeff Kingston
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429767366
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
Japan in Transformation, 1945–2020 has been newly revised and updated to examine the 3.11 natural and nuclear disasters, Emperor Akihito’s abdication, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s legacies, the 2019 World Cup and the postponement of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics due to COVID-19. Through a chronological approach, this volume traces the development of Japan’s history from the US Occupation in 1945 to the political consequences of the coronavirus pandemic. It evaluates the impact of the Lost Decade of the 1990s as well as key issues such as the demographic crisis, war memory, regional relations, security concerns, constitutional revision and political stagnation. In response to post-2010 developments such as Abenomics, the demise of the Democratic Party of Japan and immigration policy, chapters have been reassessed to account for changes in politics, the role of women, Japan’s relationships with Asia and how and why policies have fallen short of stated goals. Overall, the volume reveals how Japan transformed into one of the largest economic and technological powers of the modern world. With a Chronology, Who’s who and Glossary, this edition is the ideal resource for all students interested in Japanese politics, economy and society since the end of World War II.

Transforming the Past

Transforming the Past PDF Author: Sylvia Yanagisako
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804766835
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 608

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Book Description
This book is at once a cultural history of Japanese American kinship and a contribution to the study of the contemporary kinship system of the United States. It brings to the analysis of American kinship a theoretical perspective that attends to the historically situated, symbolic processes through which people interpret and thereby transform their kinship relations. By examining kinship change among Japanese Americans, I elucidate a particular case of a general process I take as having been central to the development of contemporary American kinship. For, while Japanese Americans have a unique and rich cultural heritage and a distinctive and troubled social history, the process of kinship change they have undergone since the turn of the century has been shared by many other Americans. I begin with the premise that kinship relations are structured by symbolic relations and serve symbolic functions as well as social ones. It follows from this that kinship change involves symbolic processes, and that a study of it must attend to the manner in which relations among symbols, meanings, and actions have shaped relations among people. My second premise is that we can comprehend the system of symbols and meanings structuring people's kinship relations in the present only if we know their kinship relations in the past. If symbolic systems help people answer the questions and cope with the problems of meaning they confront in their everyday lives, symbolic analysis can only be enriched by a knowledge of the social history that has given rise to these questions and problems. Conversely, we can comprehend that social history only if we comprehend the system of symbols and meanings through which people interpret and thereby transform the past. In this study I treat the oral kinship autobiographies I elicited from first- and second-generation Japanese Americans in Seattle, Washington, both as cultural tales and as accounts with a good degree of historical veracity. Because people's recollections of the past are reasonably accurate and do not obliterate facts so much as reinterpret them, they can be mined to reconstruct a social history of events and actions. At the same time they can be used, along with what people say about the present, as material for a symbolic analysis. Unlike most Japanese Americans, and most of those who have studied them, I do not uncritically assume a timeless past of "Japanese tradition" in which stem-family households were endlessly reproduced by people who obeyed the "rules of the Japanese family system." Instead, on the one hand, I reconstruct kinship relations in Japan from immigrants' accounts of their kinship biographies and, on the other, regard the Japanese past and the American present that figure so centrally in these accounts as complex symbols whose meanings must be explicated. The analytic strategy I have formulated for this study is one I think can be usefully applied to groups besides Japanese Americans and other ethnic groups whose conceptions of their particular cultural traditions and experiences as immigrants are similarly prominent in their discourse on kinship relations. It can help us better understand the social and symbolic processes shaping kinship even among those sectors of our society whose ethnicity has been made invisible by hegemonic processes that cast a particular cultural system as a generalized American one. For whether they view themselves as having an ethnic past that is Polish, Italian, African, English, or, in the case of "just plain American," one supposedly unmarked by ethnicity, all these folk commonly speak of a "traditional" past in opposition to the "modern" present. Like Japanese Americans, they too construct tradition by reconceptualizing the past in relation to the meaning of their actions in the present, thereby transforming past and present in a dialectic of interpretation.

Transactions, Transgressions, Transformations

Transactions, Transgressions, Transformations PDF Author: Heide Fehrenbach
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 9781571811080
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
From an April 1996 colloquium, The American Cultural Impact on Germany, France, Italy, and Japan, 1945-1995: An International Comparison, 11 essays examine the reception and impact of American products and images. Most of the contributors are historians, but others from fields such as architecture and literature. They move beyond the standard model of cultural colonialism and democratic modernization, while never loosing sight of the asymmetry in power relations between the countries and the US. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Original Enlightenment and the Transformation of Medieval Japanese Buddhism

Original Enlightenment and the Transformation of Medieval Japanese Buddhism PDF Author: Jacqueline I. Stone
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 9780824827717
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 578

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Book Description
Original enlightenment thought (hongaku shiso) dominated Buddhist intellectual circles throughout Japan’s medieval period. Enlightenment, this discourse claims, is neither a goal to be achieved nor a potential to be realized but the true status of all things. Every animate and inanimate object manifests the primordially enlightened Buddha just as it is. Seen in its true aspect, every activity of daily life—eating, sleeping, even one’s deluded thinking—is the Buddha’s conduct. Emerging from within the powerful Tendai School, ideas of original enlightenment were appropriated by a number of Buddhist traditions and influenced nascent theories about the kami (local deities) as well as medieval aesthetics and the literary and performing arts. Scholars and commentators have long recognized the historical importance of original enlightenment thought but differ heatedly over how it is to be understood. Some tout it as the pinnacle of the Buddhist philosophy of absolute non-dualism. Others claim to find in it the paradigmatic expression of a timeless Japanese spirituality. According other readings, it represents a dangerous anti-nomianism that undermined observance of moral precepts, precipitated a decline in Buddhist scholarship, and denied the need for religious discipline. Still others denounce it as an authoritarian ideology that, by sacralizing the given order, has in effect legitimized hierarchy and discriminative social practices. Often the acceptance or rejection of original enlightenment thought is seen as the fault line along which traditional Buddhist institutions are to be differentiated from the new Buddhist movements (Zen, Pure Land, and Nichiren) that arose during Japan’s medieval period. Jacqueline Stone’s groundbreaking study moves beyond the treatment of the original enlightenment doctrine as abstract philosophy to explore its historical dimension. Drawing on a wealth of medieval primary sources and modern Japanese scholarship, it places this discourse in its ritual, institutional, and social contexts, illuminating its importance to the maintenance of traditions of lineage and the secret transmission of knowledge that characterized several medieval Japanese elite culture. It sheds new light on interpretive strategies employed in pre-modern Japanese Buddhist texts, an area that hitherto has received a little attention. Through these and other lines of investigation, Stone problematizes entrenched notions of “corruption” in the medieval Buddhist establishment. Using the examples of Tendai and Nichiren Buddhism and their interactions throughout the medieval period, she calls into question both overly facile distinctions between “old” and “new” Buddhism and the long-standing scholarly assumptions that have perpetuated them. This study marks a significant contribution to ongoing debates over definitions of Buddhism in the Kamakura era (1185–1333), long regarded as a formative period in Japanese religion and culture. Stone argues that “original enlightenment thought” represents a substantial rethinking of Buddhist enlightenment that cuts across the distinction between “old” and “new” institutions and was particularly characteristic of the medieval period.