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Hailed by Japanese critics as a milestone in the study of contemporary Japanese media, this book explores the contemporary ‘boom’ in Japanese media representations of the recent past. Recent years have seen the production of an unprecedented number of films, animation, manga, and television programmes representing a deeply nostalgic longing for the Japanese heyday of high economic growth in the 1960s and occasionally the 1970s known in Japan as the Shōwa ‘30s and ‘40s. Hidaka provides a comprehensive account of an under researched contemporary Japanese media phenomenon by exploring why this nostalgia has been sparked at this particular historical juncture and how that period is represented in the Japanese media today. The book accomplishes this through a detailed textual and narrative analysis of representative films and television programmes, in relation to their social and cultural context. While these nostalgic media renderings are seen by many critics as innocuous, this study demonstrates that they do not show a simple yearning for the period, but reflects a growing discontent with Japanese post-war society. In this regard, this book concludes that the current nostalgia wave is a critical reaction to the recent past as it seeks to revise historiography through a processes of introspection within popular conceptions of the meta narrative of ‘nostalgia’. Winner of the Japan Communication Association 2015 Outstanding Book Award.
The ancient civilization of Japan, with its Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples, is also closely associated with all that is new and modern. Looking outward, Japan sees what it has become since Hiroshima: the world’s second-largest economy, a source of fury and wonder, a power without arms. Looking inward, Japan sees old ways shaken and new ones developing at a hectic pace. Japan in the Twenty-first Century offers compelling insights into the current realities of the country and investigates the crucial political, economic, demographic, and environmental challenges that face the nation. A combination of text, maps, and photographs provides an essential understanding of Japan’s geography, cultural heritage, demography, economic and political development, and of many other important issues. Pradyumna P. Karan explores the obstacles and opportunities that will shape Japan and affect the world community in the coming years. He highlights strategies and policies that will facilitate economic and political change and stimulate the development of effective institutions for long-term, sustainable prosperity and economic vitality. Unique field reports drawn from direct observations of events and places in Japan illuminate Japanese traditions and sensibilities. The first full-length English-language textbook on Japan’s geography, culture, politics, and economy to appear in nearly four decades, Japan in the Twenty-first Century will be a vital resource for researchers, academics, general readers, and students of Japan. Pradyumna P. Karan, professor of geography and Japan studies at the University of Kentucky, is the author or editor of numerous books on Asian geography and culture, including The Japanese City and Japan in the Bluegrass.
A wide-ranging collection of essays on diverse aspects of contemporary Japan, held together by the thread of continuity within change, this volume presents fifteen distinct points of view on aspects from immigration to regulatory reform to critical thinking in education to theatre, literature, and religion. The essays are provocative, international in scope, and deeply analyical of the challenges facing both Japan and scholars as they enter the twenty-first century.
Between 2002 and 2008, Japan's economy saw constant expansion, a record among the world's advanced economies and Japan's longest period of economic growth since World War II. This remarkable achievement came about because of a transformation of Japanese business practices. This transformation was guided by strategies that enabled Japan's leading corporations, previously diversified to an exceptionally high degree, to become leaner, more nimble, and more competitive at home and in the global economy. In Choose and Focus, the first in-depth account of this strategic inflection point in Japanese business, Ulrike Schaede argues that the emerging practices and attitudes have created a New Japan. Drawing on profiles of several corporations, including Panasonic, Takeda and Astellas, Softbank, kakaku.com, and SBI E*Trade, Schaede explains how the fundamental principles of Japan's economy have been overturned. "Choose and focus" strategies, whereby corporations concentrate on core areas and spin off unrelated businesses, have completely altered the strategic logic of Japan's previous industrial architecture. These surprisingly aggressive moves, Schaede finds, have created new market opportunities for start-up enterprises and foreign investors, as well as a wave of mergers, acquisitions, and hostile takeovers that have shaken Japanese companies out of complacency. Unlike the advances made by Japanese firms in the 1970s and 1980s, the current transformation is taking root in component and materials industries rather than in consumer products. Because of the relative obscurity of the changes and the overshadowing story of China's ascent, the Japanese corporate revolution has gone largely unnoticed among Western observers. Choose and Focus is required reading for anyone doing business in Japan or trying to understand how contemporary Japanese business works and how Japanese corporations have reinvented themselves to face the challenges—and realize the opportunities—of the 21st century.
Japan's economy and businesses are entering this century with new management systems but their values unchanged. Drawing on the author's analysis of the 1950s, financial systems, personnel management methods, role of the corporation and R&D capabilities are re-assessed to provide a comprehensive analysis of Japan's financial and industrial changes.
"Beyond the Modern Beauty is a holistic study of Takehisa Yumeji's (1884-1934) artistry that attempts to unify and understand the multiple discursive and social frameworks within which his images were animated with meaning. The book situates Yumeji's graphic art within the emerging mediascape of the 1900s and 1910s, when novel forms of reprographic media were enabling the creation of new spaces of visual culture and image circulation. Yumeji's graphic works developed in tandem with this quickly evolving sphere and ranged from illustrations in socialist bulletins with images of anti-war and leftist sentiment to fashionable images of beautiful women referred to as "Yumeji-style beauties" in books and magazines targeting a female audience. As such, Yumeji's works circulated widely and reveal his role in the cultivation of a new demographic of young female consumers, along with the reinvention of the woodblock medium from its centuries-long tradition of "floating-world pictures" (ukiyo-e) into a technically diverse vehicle of visual culture and avant-garde pictorialism. The book addresses Yumeji's art from the start of his career in 1905 to the 1920s, when his production of graphic works was the most prolific. The appendix introduces for the first time in English translation a substantial body of Yumeji's texts, including diary entries, poetry, essays, books, collection of works, and commentary alongside his illustrations. Commentaries and critiques by his contemporaries are also included and are translated for the first time"--
In the early twentieth century, Japan was awash with typographic text and mass-produced print. Over the short span of a few decades, affordable books and magazines became a part of everyday life, and a new generation of writers and thinkers considered how their world could be reconstructed through the circulation of printed language as a mass-market commodity. The Typographic Imagination explores how this commercial print revolution transformed Japan’s media ecology and traces the possibilities and pitfalls of type as a force for radical social change. Nathan Shockey examines the emergence of new forms of reading, writing, and thinking in Japan from the last years of the nineteenth century through the first decades of the twentieth. Charting the relationships among prose, politics, and print capitalism, he considers the meanings and functions of print as a staple commodity and as a ubiquitous and material medium for discourse and thought. Drawing on extensive archival research, The Typographic Imagination brings into conversation a wide array of materials, including bookseller trade circulars, language reform debates, works of experimental fiction, photo gazetteers, socialist periodicals, Esperanto primers, declassified censorship documents, and printing press strike bulletins. Combining the rigorous close analysis of Japanese literary studies with transdisciplinary methodologies from media studies, book history, and intellectual history, The Typographic Imagination presents a multivalent vision of the rise of mass print media and the transformations of modern Japanese literature, language, and culture.
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.
How and why does a catastrophic disaster change public discourse and social narratives? This is the first book to comprehensively investigate how Japanese newspapers, TV, documentary films, independent journalists, scientists, and intellectuals from the humanities and social sciences have critically responded to the Fukushima nuclear disaster over the last decade. In Japan, nuclear power consistently had more than 70% support in opinion polls. However, the Fukushima disaster of 2011 has caused a shift in public opinion, and the majority of the population now desires an end to nuclear power in Japan. Alternative energy and countermeasures against climate change have thus become hot-button issues in public discourse. Moreover, topics previously left undiscussed have become common talking points among journalists and intellectuals: Concealed power structural dynamics that work upon Japan’s politics, bureaucracy, industry, academia, and media; Japan’s peculiar, strong support for nuclear power, despite being a nation subjected to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and its latent ability to develop nuclear weapons by utilizing the plutonium generated by its power plants; and Japan’s dependence on the US’ nuclear umbrella. These discussions have often evolved into macro-level controversies over ‘Japan’ and its ‘modernity’. In this book, Hidaka critically evaluates how the Fukushima disaster has shaken hegemonic public discourse and compares it to the impact of previous moments of ‘disaster culture’ in modern Japanese history, such as The Great Kanto Earthquake and the Pacific War. Offers vital insights into contemporary Japanese culture and social discourse for students and scholars alike.
William Shakespeare and 21st-Century Culture, Politics, and Leadership examines problems, challenges, and crises in our contemporary world through the lens of William Shakespeare’s plays, one of the best-known, most admired, and often controversial authors of the last half-millennium.