Title: Permitted and prohibited desires: mothers, comics, and censorship in Japan
Author: Allison, Anne 1950-
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: Anthropology | Gender Studies | Popular Culture | Japan
Publisher's Description: This provocative study of gender and sexuality in contemporary Japan investigates elements of Japanese popular culture including erotic comic books, stories of mother-son incest, lunchboxes - or obentos - that mothers ritualistically prepare for schoolchildren, and children's cartoons. Anne Allison brings recent feminist psychoanalytic and Marxist theory to bear on representations of sexuality, motherhood, and gender in these and other aspects of Japanese culture. Based on five years of fieldwork in a middle-class Tokyo neighborhood, this theoretically informed, accessible ethnographic study provides a provocative analysis of how sexuality, dominance, and desire are reproduced and enacted in late-capitalistic Japan.   [brief]
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Title: Postwar Japan as history
Author: Gordon, Andrew 1952-
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: History | Politics | Japan | Asian History
Publisher's Description: Japan's catapult to world economic power has inspired many studies by social scientists, but few have looked at the 45 years of postwar Japan through the lens of history. The contributors to this book seek to offer such a view. As they examine three related themes of postwar history, the authors describe an ongoing historical process marked by unexpected changes, such as Japan's extraordinary economic growth, and unanticipated continuities, such as the endurance of conservative rule. A provocative set of interpretative essays by eminent scholars, this book will appeal to anyone interested in the history of twentieth-century Japan and the dilemmas facing Japan today.   [brief]
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Title: The protocol of the gods: a study of the Kasuga cult in Japanese history
Author: Grapard, Allan G
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Religion | Asian History | Japan
Publisher's Description: The Protocol of the Gods is a pioneering study of the history of relations between Japanese native institutions (Shinto shrines) and imported Buddhist institutions (Buddhist temples). Using the Kasuga Shinto shrine and the Kofukuji Buddhist temple, one of the oldest and largest of the shrine-temple complexes, Allan Grapard characterizes what he calls the combinatory character of pre-modern Japanese religiosity. He argues that Shintoism and Buddhism should not be studied in isolation, as hitherto supposed. Rather, a study of the individual and shared characteristics of their respective origins, evolutions, structures, and practices can serve as a model for understanding the pre-modern Japanese religious experience.Spanning the years from a period before historical records to the forcible separation of the Kasuga-Kofukuji complex by the Meiji government in 1868, Grapard presents a wealth of little-known material. He includes translations of rare texts and provides new, accessible translations of familiar documents.   [brief]
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Title: Reconfiguring modernity: concepts of nature in Japanese political ideology
Author: Thomas, Julia Adeney 1958-
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: History | Japan | Intellectual History | Asian History
Publisher's Description: Julia Adeney Thomas turns the concept of nature into a powerful analytical lens through which to view Japanese modernity, bringing the study of both Japanese history and political modernity to a new level of clarity. She shows that nature necessarily functions as a political concept and that changing ideas of nature's political authority were central during Japan's transformation from a semifeudal world to an industrializing colonial empire. In political documents from the nineteenth to the early twentieth century, nature was redefined, moving from the universal, spatial concept of the Tokugawa period, through temporal, social Darwinian ideas of inevitable progress and competitive struggle, to a celebration of Japan as a nation uniquely in harmony with nature. The so-called traditional "Japanese love of nature" masks modern state power. Thomas's theoretically sophisticated study rejects the supposition that modernity is the ideological antithesis of nature, overcoming the determinism of the physical environment through technology and liberating denatured subjects from the chains of biology and tradition. In making "nature" available as a critical term for political analysis, this book yields new insights into prewar Japan's failure to achieve liberal democracy, as well as an alternative means of understanding modernity and the position of non-Western nations within it.   [brief]
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Title: Recreating Japanese women, 1600-1945
Author: Bernstein, Gail Lee
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: History | Asian History | Japan | Women's Studies
Publisher's Description: In thirteen wide-ranging essays, scholars and students of Asian and women's studies will find a vivid exploration of how female roles and feminine identity have evolved over 350 years, from the Tokugawa era to the end of World War II. Starting from the premise that gender is not a biological given, but is socially constructed and culturally transmitted, the authors describe the forces of change in the construction of female gender and explore the gap between the ideal of womanhood and the reality of Japanese women's lives. Most of all, the contributors speak to the diversity that has characterized women's experience in Japan. This is an imaginative, pioneering work, offering an interdisciplinary approach that will encourage a reconsideration of the paradigms of women's history, hitherto rooted in the Western experience.   [brief]
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Title: Reflections on the way to the gallows: rebel women in prewar Japan
Author: Hane, Mikiso
Published: University of California Press,  1988
Subjects: History | Asian Studies | Japan | Women's Studies | Asian History
Publisher's Description: In this book, for the first time, we can hear the startling, moving voices of adventurous and rebellious Japanese women as they eloquently challenged the social repression of prewar Japan. The extraordinary women whose memoirs, recollections, and essays are presented here constitute a strong current . . . [more]
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Title: Refuge of the honored: social organization in a Japanese retirement community 
Author: Kinoshita, Yasuhito 1953-
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Sociology | Japan
Publisher's Description: Faced with the decline of the traditional family and the explosive growth of the over-65 population, the Japanese are looking for new ways to care for their elders. This timely study documents the birth of a major social phenomenon in Japan - the planned retirement community.In the mid-1980s, Yasuhito Kinoshita spent a year living in Japan's first such community, Fuji-no-Sato. His collaboration with Christie W. Kiefer, a cultural gerontologist, is the first detailed study of a retirement community in a non-Western culture.Fuji-no-Sato is a social community with no visible traditions. Kinoshita and Kiefer show that its residents' preference for long-established relationships creates the need for the invention of relationships that have no precedent in Japanese society.This book reveals much about Japanese culture, and about the "graying of society" that plagues the newly industrialized countries of Asia. Its lessons about sensitivity to the elderly's values and the need for clear communication have important applications in other cultures as well.   [brief]
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Title: Re-imaging Japanese women
Author: Imamura, Anne E 1946-
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: History | Asian History | Cultural Anthropology | Women's Studies | Politics | Japan
Publisher's Description: Re-Imaging Japanese Women takes a revealing look at women whose voices have only recently begun to be heard in Japanese society: politicians, practitioners of traditional arts, writers, radicals, wives, mothers, bar hostesses, department store and blue-collar workers. This unique collection of essays gives a broad, interdisciplinary view of contemporary Japanese women while challenging readers to see the development of Japanese women's lives against the backdrop of domestic and global change.These essays provide a "second generation" analysis of roles, issues and social change. The collection brings up to date the work begun in Gail Lee Bernstein's Recreating Japanese Women, 1600-1945 (California, 1991), exploring disparities between the current range of images of Japanese women and the reality behind the choices women make.   [brief]
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Title: The rhetoric of confession: shishōsetsu in early twentieth-century Japanese fiction 
Author: Fowler, Edward
Published: University of California Press,  1988
Subjects: Literature | Japan | Literary Theory and Criticism | Asian Literature
Publisher's Description: The shishosetsu is a Japanese form of autobiographical fiction that flourished during the first two decades of this century. Focusing on the works of Chikamatsu Shuko, Shiga Naoya, and Kasai Zenzo, Edward Fowler explores the complex and paradoxical nature of shishosetsu , and discusses its linguisti . . . [more]
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Title: A sheep's song: a writer's reminiscences of Japan and the world 
Author: Katō, Shūichi 1919-
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Literature | Asian History | Japan | Autobiographies and Biographies
Publisher's Description: This critically acclaimed autobiography was an instant bestseller in Japan, where it has gone through more than forty printings since its first publication. Cultural critic, literary historian, novelist, poet, and physician, Kato Shuichi reconstructs his dramatic spiritual and intellectual journey from the militarist era of prewar Japan to the dynamic postwar landscapes of Japan and Europe. This fluid translation of A Sheep's Song captures Kato's unique voice and brings his insightful interpretation of modern Japan and its tumultuous relations with the outside world to English-speaking readers for the first time.Kato describes his youthful interest in the natural sciences as well as in Japanese and Western literatures - from the Man'yoshu to Akutagawa Ryunosuke, Baudelaire, Valéry, and Proust. Turning to the rise of Japanese fascism in the late 1930s, he recalls his rebellion against the jingoistic political atmosphere of the time. The chapters on the war and its aftermath include experiences of Hiroshima shortly after the bombing and the often tragicomic encounters between the defeated Japanese nation and the American Occupation forces. Throughout, memories of his wide-ranging literary career and broad experiences in Europe as a student, traveler, and cultural observer are punctuated by his unique perspectives on the relation between imagination, art, and politics.A postscript written especially for the English-language edition discusses the Vietnam War, the subsequent transformation of Japan, the cultures and societies of Europe, the United States, and China, and the collapse of the Soviet Union.   [brief]
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Title: Shoshaman: a tale of corporate Japan
Author: Arai, Shinya
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Economics and Business | Japan | Literature in Translation | Fiction
Publisher's Description: Acknowledging no god but the corporate good, the shoshamen - high-powered professionals within Japan's integrated trading companies - serve as the unrelenting cogs of an economic machine. Or do they? Shoshaman takes us inside the world of Japan Inc. to explore the daily lives of the people who inhabit it. Written by a senior executive in a major sogo shosha, this absorbing novel reveals, as no textbook can, the strategies required to win the race to the top. It also makes painfully clear the ethical and psychological choices that such a race demands. The cast of characters is as varied as the corporate world itself, from the devoted Ojima, who has been passed over by the company, to the spirited Masako, who strikes out on her own. The hero, Nakasato Michio, finds that the road to success is long and perilous, as he tries to satisfy his ambitions while remaining faithful to his values.First published as Kigyoka sarariman in 1986 and made into a prize-winning television miniseries in 1988, the book has been acclaimed in Japan for the verisimilitude of its characters and situations. It offers a clear understanding of what it is like - in human terms - to survive and perhaps succeed within the confines of the Japanese corporation.   [brief]
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Title: Songs to make the dust dance: the Ryōjin hishō of twelfth-century Japan 
Author: Kwon, Yung-Hee K
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Literature | Asian Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | Japan | Asian Studies
Publisher's Description: Breaking through the long-established image of Heian Japan (794-1185) as a culture dominated by ritualized aristocratic values, Yung-Hee Kim presents the picture of a country in transition, filled with a wide variety of common people responding to very ordinary situations. In popular songs called imayo , they expressed their concerns about religion, love, aging, and even current affairs.In 1179 Emperor Go-Shirakawa compiled Ryojin hisho , a twenty-volume collection of this song genre that juxtaposes the sacred with the profane, the high with the low, the male with the female, the old with the new. Kim makes these songs the core of her book, in translations that faithfully reflect the sounds and images of the originals and bring them to life within their own literary and cultural context.   [brief]
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Title: Splendid monarchy: power and pageantry in modern Japan
Author: Fujitani, Takashi
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: History | Cultural Anthropology | Asian Studies | Japan
Publisher's Description: Using ceremonials such as imperial weddings and funerals as models, T. Fujitani illustrates what visual symbols and rituals reveal about monarchy, nationalism, city planning, discipline, gender, memory, and modernity. Focusing on the Meiji Period (1868-1912), Fujitani brings recent methods of cultur . . . [more]
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Title: State and intellectual in imperial Japan: the public man in crisis 
Author: Barshay, Andrew E
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: History | Asian History | Japan | Intellectual History
Publisher's Description: In this superbly written and eminently readable narrative, Andrew E. Barshay presents the contrasting lives of Nanbara Shigeru (1889-1974) and Hasegawa Nyoze-kan (1875-1969), illuminating the complex predicament of modern Japanese intellectuals and their relation to state and society.Following the Meiji Restoration of 1868, a powerful modern state began to emerge in Japan, and with it, the idea of a "public" sphere of action. This sphere brought with it a new type of intellectual - a "public man" whose role was to interpret and nationalize "universal" (and largely foreign) ideas and ideologies.Activity within the public sphere took many forms as Japanese intellectuals sought to define their changing roles. At no time was such public activity as intense as during the crisis years of later imperial and early postwar Japan. In contrasting case studies, Andrew E. Barshay presents the lives of two modern Japanese intellectuals, Nanbara Shigeru (1889-1974), professor of Western political thought at Tokyo Imperial University, and Hasegawa Nyozekan (1875-1969), a versatile independent journalist. Through their writings and experiences, Barshay examines the power of the idea of "national community" in public life. He treats Nanbara's and Hasegawa's ideas and actions as they developed within the contexts of Western intellectual tradition and modern Japanese history. The result is a superbly written narrative that illuminates the complex predicament of modern Japanese intellectuals and their relation to the state and society. Barshay's work is ultimately a study of intellectual mobilization in a modern state, and of the price of national identity in the twentieth century.   [brief]
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Title: The state and the mass media in Japan, 1918-1945
Author: Kasza, Gregory James
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Politics | Public Policy | Japan | Asian History
Publisher's Description: Gregory Kasza examines state-society relations in interwar Japan through a case study of public policy toward radio, film, newspapers, and magazines.
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Title: Strategies for learning: small-group activities in American, Japanese, and Swedish industry 
Author: Cole, Robert E
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Sociology | Technology and Society | Japan | Economics and Business
Publisher's Description: How do firms become motivated to adopt small-group activities such as quality circles and self-managing teams? How do they acquire expertise in these activities? Noted sociologist and management expert Robert E. Cole addresses these issues through an examination of small-group activities in the Unit . . . [more]
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Title: Takarazuka: sexual politics and popular culture in modern Japan
Author: Robertson, Jennifer Ellen
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Anthropology | Japan | Cultural Anthropology | GayLesbian and Bisexual Studies | Women's Studies | Theatre | Popular Culture
Publisher's Description: The all-female Takarazuka Revue is world-famous today for its rococo musical productions, including gender-bending love stories, torridly romantic liaisons in foreign settings, and fanatically devoted fans. But that is only a small part of its complicated and complicit performance history. In this sophisticated and historically grounded analysis, anthropologist Jennifer Robertson draws from over a decade of fieldwork and archival research to explore how the Revue illuminates discourses of sexual politics, nationalism, imperialism, and popular culture in twentieth-century Japan.The Revue was founded in 1913 as a novel counterpart to the all-male Kabuki theater. Tracing the contradictory meanings of Takarazuka productions over time, with special attention to the World War II period, Robertson illuminates the intricate web of relationships among managers, directors, actors, fans, and social critics, whose clashes and compromises textured the theater and the wider society in colorful and complex ways. Using Takarazuka as a key to understanding the "logic" of everyday life in Japan and placing the Revue squarely in its own social, historical, and cultural context, she challenges both the stereotypes of "the Japanese" and the Eurocentric notions of gender performance and sexuality.   [brief]
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Title: Tokugawa village practice: class, status, power, law 
Author: Ooms, Herman
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: History | Asian History | Japan | Law
Publisher's Description: In contrast to modern Japanese citizens, during the Tokugawa period (1600-1868) villagers frequently resorted to lawsuits to settle conflicts. Herman Ooms uses colorful, skillfully analyzed case studies to trace the evolution of class and status conflicts through lawsuits and petitions in villages. Inspired by the work of Max Weber and Pierre Bourdieu, this exploration of social and legal history illuminates the texture and detail of village life, focusing on relations to authority.Opening with a story of an angry peasant woman's lifelong struggle against village authority (a story involving murder and revenge), Ooms highlights the role played by obscure historical actors including local elites, commoners, women, and outcastes. He also discusses the important role lineages played in village politics and examines the origins of discrimination against Japan's burakumin , or outcastes.   [brief]
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Title: Tokyo life, New York dreams: urban Japanese visions of America, 1890-1924 
Author: Sawada, Mitziko 1928-
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: History | Asian Studies | Japan | Asian American Studies
Publisher's Description: Tokyo Life, New York Dreams is a bicultural study focusing on Japanese immigrants in New York and the ideas they had about what they would find there. It is one of the first works to consider Japanese immigration to the East Coast, where immigrants were of a different class and social background from the laborers who came to the West Coast and Hawaii. Beginning with a portrait of immigrants' lives in New York City, Mitziko Sawada returns to Tokyo to examine the pre-immigration experience in depth, using rich sources of popular Japanese literature to trace the origins of immigrant perceptions of the U.S.Along with discussions of economics and politics in Tokyo, Sawada explores the prevalent images, ideologies, social myths, and attitudes of late Meiji and Early Taisho Japan. Her lively narrative draws on guide books, magazines, success literature, and popular novels to illuminate the formation of ideas about work, class, gender relations, and freedom in American society. This study analyzes the Japanese construction of a mythic America, perceived as a homogeneous and exotic "other."   [brief]
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Title: What makes life worth living?: how Japanese and Americans make sense of their worlds
Author: Mathews, Gordon
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | American Studies | Japan
Publisher's Description: Here is an original and provocative anthropological approach to the fundamental philosophical question of what makes life worth living. Gordon Mathews considers this perennial issue by examining nine pairs of similarly situated individuals in the United States and Japan. In the course of exploring how people from these two cultures find meaning in their daily lives, he illuminates a vast and intriguing range of ideas about work and love, religion, creativity, and self-realization.Mathews explores these topics by means of the Japanese term ikigai, "that which most makes one's life seem worth living." American English has no equivalent, but ikigai applies not only to Japanese lives but to American lives as well. Ikigai is what, day after day and year after year, each of us most essentially lives for.Through the life stories of those he interviews, Mathews analyzes the ways Japanese and American lives have been affected by social roles and cultural vocabularies. As we approach the end of the century, the author's investigation into how the inhabitants of the world's two largest economic superpowers make sense of their lives brings a vital new understanding to our skeptical age.   [brief]
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