Title: From my grandmother's bedside: sketches of postwar Tokyo 
Author: Field, Norma 1947-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Literature | Autobiography | Asian History | Japan | Politics
Publisher's Description: From My Grandmother's Bedside is an experiment in genre, a moving and evocative reflection on contemporary Japan, human desire, family relations, life, and death. Norma Field, the daughter of a Japanese woman and an American G.I., and author of the acclaimed In the Realm of a Dying Emperor , returned to Japan in 1995 to tend to her slowly dying grandmother, who had been rendered speechless by multiple strokes. What she finds - both in the memories of her childhood in her grandmother's household and in the altered face of postmodern Japan - forms the substance of her narrative that transcends both memoir and essay to reveal, through crafted fragments, a refraction of the whole of Japan.Having spent her childhood in Japan and her adulthood in the United States, Field speaks from the position of one who straddles two worlds. Her testimony is highly personal, her voice is intimate, her observations are keen and clear. She juxtaposes details from daily life - conversations overheard on the subway; arguments between her mother and aunts; the struggle to feed, bathe, and care for her grandmother - with observations on the political and social changes that have transformed Japan. She shows how the belated coming to terms with the war and continuing avoidance of the same are intimately related to the look and feel of Japanese society today. She gently folds back the complicated layers of blame and responsibility for the war, touching in the process on subjects as diverse as the effects of the atomic bomb, comfort women, biracial/bicultural families, the farewells of Kamikaze pilots, and the dehumanizing effects of Japan's postwar economic boom. A recurrent theme is the observation of the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war. From My Grandmother's Bedside is also a contemplation of the many facets of language: the kinds of language with which her grandmother's illness has been negotiated, the wordless language her grandmother speaks, her own relationship to these languages. Through it all runs the realization that the personal and the political are perpetually entangled, that past and present converge and overlap.   [brief]
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Title: Importing diversity: inside Japan's JET Program
Author: McConnell, David L 1959-
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: Anthropology | Japan | Politics | Education
Publisher's Description: In 1987, the Japanese government inaugurated the Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) program in response to global pressure to "internationalize" its society. This ambitious program has grown to be a major government operation, with an annual budget of $400 million (greater than the United States NEA and NEH combined) and more than six thousand foreign nationals employed each year in public schools all over Japan.How does a relatively homogeneous and insular society react when a buzzword is suddenly turned into a reality? How did the arrival of so many foreigners affect Japan's educational bureaucracy? How did the foreigners themselves feel upon discovering that English teaching was not the primary goal of the program? In this balanced study of the JET program, David L. McConnell draws on ten years of ethnographic research to explore the cultural and political dynamics of internationalization in Japan. Through vignettes and firsthand accounts, he highlights and interprets the misunderstandings of the early years of the program, traces the culture clashes at all levels of the bureaucracy, and speculates on what lessons the JET program holds for other multicultural initiatives.This fascinating book's jargon-free style and interdisciplinary approach will make it appealing to educators, policy analysts, students of Japan, and prospective and former JET participants.   [brief]
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Title: Japan under construction: corruption, politics, and public works 
Author: Woodall, Brian
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Politics | Japan
Publisher's Description: In 1987, Japan excluded American firms from bidding on the multibillion-dollar New Kansai International Airport, sparking yet another trade dispute between the United States and Japan. The State Department, Congress, and the President himself were caught up in the dispute, which still smolders even after Congress passed a threatening resolution to retaliate. Scandal after scandal - both domestic and international - splashes across headlines in Japan, generating wave after wave of attempts at reform. Why is this industry so rife with bid-rigging, collusion, and pork-barrel politics? What are the political forces behind the industry? Brian Woodall answers these questions in this book, based on extensive research and over one hundred candid and revealing interviews with contractors, industry association officials, public works bureaucrats, elected politicians and aides, political party officials, journalists, and scholars.This inside view begins with a profile of the institutionalized system of bid-rigging in the public construction market. It explores the powerful positions of unelected bureaucrats, who are often hired by private-sector firms after retirement. Career politicians within the Liberal Democratic Party are revealed to use the construction industry to exploit party factions toward their own electoral ends. Recent events - the Sagawa affair and the massive "general contractors" (zenekon) scandal as well as the political reform movements that followed them - are examined in detail. Throughout, Brian Woodall illuminates the construction rift between Japan and the United States and demonstrates how international pressures were subverted within the shadowy domestic system. Japan Under Construction is must reading for anyone interested in Japanese politics, United States-Japan trade relations, and political corruption and reform anywhere in the world.   [brief]
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Title: Japanese workers in protest: an ethnography of consciousness and experience 
Author: Turner, Christena L 1949-
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Japan | Sociology
Publisher's Description: This first ethnographic study of factory workers engaged in radical labor protest gives a voice to a segment of the Japanese population that has been previously marginalized. These blue-collar workers, involved in prolonged labor disputes, tell their own story as they struggle to make sense of their lives and their culture during a time of conflict and instability. What emerges is a sensitive portrait of how workers grapple with a slowed economy and the contradictions of Japanese industry in the late postwar era. The ways that they think and feel about accommodation, resistance, and protest raise essential questions about the transformation of labor practices and limits of worker cooperation and compliance.   [brief]
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Title: Japan's administrative elite 
Author: Koh, Byung Chol
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Asian Studies | Japan | Economics and Business
Publisher's Description: A major player in Japanese society is its government bureaucracy. Neither Japan's phenomenal track record in the world marketplace nor its remarkable success in managing its domestic affairs can be understood without insight into how its government bureaucracy works - how its elite administrators are recruited, socialized, and promoted; how they interact among themselves and with other principal players in Japan, notably politicians; how they are rewarded; and what happens to them when they retire at a relatively young age. Yet, despite its pivotal importance, there is no comprehensive and up-to-date study of Japan's administrative elite in the English language. This book seeks to fill that gap.Koh examines patterns of continuity and change, identifies similarities and differences between Japan and four other industrialized democracies (the United States, Britain, France, and Germany), and assesses the implications of the Japanese model of public management. Though many features of Japanese bureaucracy are found in the Western democracies, the degree to which they manifest themselves in Japan appears to be unsurpassed.Koh shows that the Japanese model of public management contains both strengths and weaknesses. For example, the price Japan pays for the high caliber of its administrative elite is the stifling rigidity of a multiple track system, a system with second-class citizens and demoralized "non-career" civil servants who actually bear a lion's share of administrative burden. The Japanese experience demonstrates not only how steep the price of success can be but also the enduring effects of culture over structure.   [brief]
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Title: Japan's Orient: rendering pasts into history
Author: Tanaka, Stefan
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: History | Asian History | Japan
Publisher's Description: Stefan Tanaka examines how late nineteenth and early twentieth century Japanese historians created the equivalent of an "Orient" for their new nation state. He argues that the Japanese attempted to use a variety of pasts - Chinese, Indian, and proto-historic Japanese - to construct an identity that . . . [more]
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Title: Japan's total empire: Manchuria and the culture of wartime imperialism
Author: Young, Louise 1960-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: History | Asian History | Asian Studies | East Asia Other | Japan | Postcolonial Studies
Publisher's Description: In this first social and cultural history of Japan's construction of Manchuria, Louise Young offers an incisive examination of the nature of Japanese imperialism. Focusing on the domestic impact of Japan's activities in Northeast China between 1931 and 1945, Young considers "metropolitan effects" of empire building: how people at home imagined and experienced the empire they called Manchukuo.Contrary to the conventional assumption that a few army officers and bureaucrats were responsible for Japan's overseas expansion, Young finds that a variety of organizations helped to mobilize popular support for Manchukuo - the mass media, the academy, chambers of commerce, women's organizations, youth groups, and agricultural cooperatives - leading to broad-based support among diverse groups of Japanese. As the empire was being built in China, Young shows, an imagined Manchukuo was emerging at home, constructed of visions of a defensive lifeline, a developing economy, and a settler's paradise.   [brief]
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Title: Labor and imperial democracy in prewar Japan
Author: Gordon, Andrew 1952-
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Asian Studies | Japan | Politics | Asian History | Labor Studies
Publisher's Description: Labor and Imperial Democracy in Prewar Japan examines the political role played by working men and women in prewar Tokyo and offers a reinterpretation of the broader dynamics of Japan's prewar political history. Gordon argues that such phenomena as riots, labor disputes, and union organizing can best be understood as part of an early twentieth-century movement for "imperial democracy" shaped by the nineteenth-century drive to promote capitalism and build a modern nation and empire. When the propertied, educated leaders of this movement gained a share of power in the 1920s, they disagreed on how far to go toward incorporating working men and women into an expanded body politic. For their part, workers became ambivalent toward working within the imperial democratic system. In this context, the intense polarization of laborers and owners during the Depression helped ultimately to destroy the legitimacy of imperial democracy.Gordon suggests that the thought and behavior of Japanese workers both reflected and furthered the intense concern with popular participation and national power that has marked Japan's modern history. He points to a post-World War II legacy for imperial democracy in both the organization of the working class movement and the popular willingness to see GNP growth as an index of national glory. Importantly, Gordon shows how historians might reconsider the roles of tenant farmers, students, and female activists, for example, in the rise and transformation of imperial democracy.   [brief]
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Title: Learning to go to school in Japan: the transition from home to preschool life
Author: Peak, Lois
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Japan | Education
Publisher's Description: Japanese two-year-olds are indulged, dependent, and undisciplined toddlers, but by the age of six they have become obedient, self-reliant, and cooperative students. When Lois Peak traveled to Japan in search of the "magical childrearing technique" behind this transformation, she discovered that the answer lies not in the family but in the preschool, where teachers gently train their pupils in proper group behavior. Using case studies drawn from two contrasting schools, Peak documents the important early stages of socialization in Japanese culture.Contrary to popular perceptions, Japanese preschools are play-centered environments that pay little attention to academic preparation. It is here that Japanese children learn their first lessons in group life. The primary goal of these cheerful--even boisterous--settings is not to teach academic facts of learning-readiness skills but to inculcate behavior and attitudes appropriate to life in public social situations.Peak compares the behavior considered permissible at home with that required of children at preschool, and argues that the teacher is expected to be the primary agent in the child's transition. Step by step, she brings the socialization process to life, through a skillful combination of classroom observations, interviews with mothers and teachers, transcripts of classroom events, and quotations from Japanese professional literature.   [brief]
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Title: Losing face: status politics in Japan 
Author: Pharr, Susan J
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: History | Asian Studies | Asian History | Japan | Politics
Publisher's Description: How does a "homogeneous" society like Japan treat the problem of social inequality? Losing Face looks beyond conventional structural categories (race, class, ethnicity) to focus on conflicts based on differences in social status. Three rich and revealing case studies explore crucial asymmetries of a . . . [more]
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Title: The lure of the modern: writing modernism in semicolonial China, 1917-1937
Author: Shi, Shumei 1961-
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Literature | China | Asian Literature | Asian History | Cultural Anthropology | Postcolonial Studies | Japan | Comparative Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism
Publisher's Description: Shu-mei Shih's study is the first book in English to offer a comprehensive account of Chinese literary modernism from Republican China. In The Lure of the Modern, Shih argues for the contextualization of Chinese modernism in the semicolonial cultural and political formation of the time. Engaging critically with theories of modernism, postcoloniality, and global and local cultural studies, Shih analyzes pivotal issues - such as psychoanalysis, decadence, Orientalism, Occidentalism, semicolonial subjectivity, cosmopolitanism, and urbanism - that were mediated by Japanese as well as Western modernisms.   [brief]
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Title: Making health work: human growth in modern Japan 
Author: Mosk, Carl
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Sociology | Demography | Japan | Asian History | Economics and Business
Publisher's Description: Mosk shows how population quality provides a key to understanding economic growth and social change in Japan.
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Title: The making of a Japanese periphery, 1750-1920
Author: Wigen, Kären 1958-
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: History | Geography | Asian History | Japan
Publisher's Description: Contending that Japan's industrial and imperial revolutions were also geographical revolutions, Kären Wigen's interdisciplinary study analyzes the changing spatial order of the countryside in early modern Japan. Her focus, the Ina Valley, served as a gateway to the mountainous interior of central Japan. Using methods drawn from historical geography and economic development, Wigen maps the valley's changes - from a region of small settlements linked in an autonomous economic zone, to its transformation into a peripheral part of the global silk trade, dependent on the state. Yet the processes that brought these changes - industrial growth and political centralization - were crucial to Japan's rise to imperial power. Wigen's elucidation of this makes her book compelling reading for a broad audience.   [brief]
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Title: The Manchurian myth: nationalism, resistance and collaboration in modern China
Author: Mitter, Rana 1969-
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: History | China | Japan
Publisher's Description: A powerful element in twentieth-century Chinese politics has been the myth of Chinese resistance to Japan's seizure of Manchuria in 1931. Investigating the shifting alliances of key players in that event, Rana Mitter traces the development of the narrative of resistance to the occupation and shows how it became part of China's political consciousness, enduring even today. After Japan's September 1931 military strike leading to a takeover of the Northeast, the Chinese responded in three major ways: collaboration, resistance in exile, and resistance on the ground. What motives prompted some Chinese to collaborate, others to resist? What were conditions like under the Japanese? Through careful reading of Chinese and Japanese sources, particularly local government records, newspapers, and journals published both inside and outside occupied Manchuria, Mitter sheds important new light on these questions.   [brief]
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Title: Mapping early modern Japan: space, place, and culture in the Tokugawa period, 1603-1868
Author: Yonemoto, Marcia 1964-
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: History | Asian Studies | Geography | Japan
Publisher's Description: This elegant history considers a fascinating array of texts, cultural practices, and intellectual processes - including maps and mapmaking, poetry, travel writing, popular fiction, and encyclopedias - to chart the emergence of a new geographical consciousness in early modern Japan. Marcia Yonemoto's wide-ranging history of ideas traces changing conceptions and representations of space by looking at the roles played by writers, artists, commercial publishers, and the Shogunal government in helping to fashion a new awareness of space and place in this period. Her impressively researched study shows how spatial and geographical knowledge confined to elites in early Japan became more generalized, flexible, and widespread in the Tokugawa period. In the broadest sense, her book grasps the elusive processes through which people came to name, to know, and to interpret their worlds in narrative and visual forms.   [brief]
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Title: Mirror of modernity: invented traditions of modern Japan
Author: Vlastos, Stephen 1943-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: History | Japan | Asian History
Publisher's Description: This collection of essays challenges the notion that Japan's present cultural identity is the simple legacy of Japan's premodern and insular past. Building on the pathbreaking historical analysis of British traditions, The Invention of Tradition , sixteen American and Japanese scholars examine "age- . . . [more]
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Title: Native and newcomer: making and remaking a Japanese city 
Author: Robertson, Jennifer Ellen
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Anthropology | Japan | Asian History | Urban Studies | Cultural Anthropology
Publisher's Description: This expertly crafted ethnography examines the ways in which native and new citizens of Kodaira, a Tokyo suburb, have both remade the past and imagined the future of their city in a quest for an "authentic" Japanese community.
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Title: Native sources of Japanese industrialization, 1750-1920
Author: Smith, Thomas C. (Thomas Carlyle) 1916-
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: Asian Studies | Japan | Asian History
Publisher's Description: Native Sources is a collection of seminal essays on the demographic, economic, and social history of Tokugawa and modern Japan by one of the most eminent historians of Japan in this country. Gathered together for the first time and made accessible to students and scholars, Professor Smith's essays a . . . [more]
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Title: Peasant protests and uprisings in Tokugawa Japan
Author: Vlastos, Stephen 1943-
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: History | Japan | Asian History
Publisher's Description: The Japanese peasant has been thought of as an obedient and passive subject of the feudal ruling class. Yet Tokugawa villagers frequently engaged in unlawful and disruptive protests. Moreover, the frequency and intensity of the peasants' collective action increased markedly at the end of the Tokugawa period. Stephen Vlastos's examination of the changing patterns of peasant protest in the Fukushima area shows that peasant mobilization was restricted both ideologically and organizationally and that peasants did not become a prime moving force in the Meiji Restoration.   [brief]
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Title: Perfectly Japanese: making families in an era of upheaval
Author: White, Merry I 1941-
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Social Science | Japan | Cultural Anthropology | Asian History | Gender Studies | Popular Culture
Publisher's Description: Are Japanese families in crisis? In this dynamic and substantive study, Merry Isaacs White looks back at two key moments of "family making" in the past hundred years - the Meiji era and postwar period - to see how models for the Japanese family have been constructed. The models had little to do with families of their eras and even less to do with families today, she finds. She vividly portrays the everyday reality of a range of families: young married couples who experience fleeting togetherness until the first child is born; a family separated by job shifts; a family with a grandmother as babysitter; a marriage without children.   [brief]
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