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For over a hundred years the Japanese have looked to the West for ideas, institutions and technology that would help them achieve their goal of 'national wealth and strength'. In this book a distinguished historian of Japan discusses Japan's 'cultural borrowing' from America and Europe. W. G. Beasley focuses on the mid-nineteenth century, when Japan's rulers dispatched diplomatic missions to the West to discover what Japan needed to learn, sent students abroad to assimilate information and invited foreign experts to Japan to help put the knowledge to practical use. Beasley examines the origins of the decision to initiate direct study of the West at a time when western countries counted as 'barbarian' by Confucian standards. Drawing on many colourful letters, diaries, memoirs and reports, he describes the missions sent overseas in 1860 and 1862, in 1865-1867 and in the years after 1868, in particular the prestigious embassy led by Iwakura in 1871-1873. The book also tells the story of the several hundred students who went overseas in this period. It concludes by assessing the impact of the encounters on the subsequent development of Japan, first by examining the later careers of the travellers and the influence they exercised (they included no fewer than six prime ministers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries), and then by considering the nature of the ideas they brought home.
This is a systematic study of the sociological debate on postmodernity in the Japanese context. The volume consists of a collection of 12 papers that explore the idea of postmodernity primarily from sociological perspectives, covering a wide range of domains including work, feminism, communication, science and technology, social stratification, fine arts and literature. The contributors come from diverse disciplines ranging from sociology and history to political science and linguistics. They include advocates of postmodern theories and postmodernist analyses of Japanese society, as well as critics who argue that a suitable revised theory of modernity is still an adequate framework for comparing Japan and the West. Others take the view that an intermediate position might be more productive; that a qualified or provisional version of postmodern can throw new light on issues traditionally neglected by social theory. While the postmodernity debate has been carried out chiefly in the context of European and American experiences, this book aims to pave the way for the postmodernity question to be explored in the non-western but highly industrialized setting of Japan, and brings forward a series of open-ended questions about the bias in the debate. Written by academics based in universities in Japan and Australia, the volume itself is postmodern in its internal diversity and multi-cultural orientation.
This book explores the multiplicity of special times and spaces in Japan within which people get together to decide, celebrate or play, in gatherings such as organizational meetings, community festivities, preschool games or drinking bouts. It analyzes these gatherings in relation to the theoretical model of sociocultural frames, examining how such occasions are put together, their unfolding stages, interactive encounters, and relations between participants and the wider social and cultural contexts. It considers the cognitive, emotional and behavioural dimensions, the scope for manipulation and the effects, intentional and unintentional, on participants and the connections to the ways in which in society and culture change. Overall, besides describing specific rites and ceremonies in Japan, the book provides great insights into the process whereby the interactions, feelings and action of individuals and groups shape popular culture.
From 1932 until the end of World War II, the Japanese established and maintained by bloody rule a puppet regime in the Chinese region of Manchuria. This region was composed of three northern provinces in China; the puppet ruler was the last Chinese Emperor, Pu Yi, and this rich industrial region was clearly coveted and managed by the Japanese as a critical element in their imperial dominion. Yamamuro Shin'ichi's extraordinary book rereads this occupation under new light. The author shows that right-wing Japanese military and civilian groups thought of construction in this sparsely populated region as an effort to build a paradise on earth, with roots deep in Asian traditions. At the same time, Chinese and Korean populations in the region were abused by the Japanese military, and many Japanese were deliberately misinformed about what was being done in their name. Yamamuro examines the policies and events unfolding on the ground during this time. With close attention to the Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans involved, and the links between the military and the home islands, he offers his own overall assessment of this distinctive instance of state-building. Making use of numerous sources in Chinese and Japanese, from legal documents and government decrees to memoirs and poetry, Manchuria Under Japanese Dominion goes beyond rhetoric to provide a unique assessment of the history of this period.
Critical examination of the factors which influenced American policy concerning Japan over the last century.
Educational Progressivism, Cultural Encounters and Reform in Japan provides a critical analysis of educational initiatives, progressive ideas and developments in curriculum and pedagogy in Japan, from 1900 to the present day. Drawing on evidence of both cultural encounters and internal drivers for progressivism and reform, this book re-evaluates the history of Japanese education to help inform ongoing and future debates about education policy and practice worldwide. With contributions from Japanese scholars specialising in the history and philosophy of education and curriculum studies, chapters consider key collaborative improvements to teacher education, as well as group learning, ‘life education’, the creative arts and writing, and education for girls and women. The book examines Western influences, including John Dewey, Carleton Washburne and A. S. Neill, as well as Japan’s own progressive exports, such as holistic Zenjin education, Children’s Villages and Lesson Study, highlighting cultural encounters and progressive initiatives at both transnational and national levels. The chapters reflect on historical and political background, motivations, influences and the impact of Japanese progressive education. They also stimulate, through argument and critical discussion, a continuing discourse concerning principles, policy, politics and practices of education in an increasingly globalised society. A rigorous and critical study of the history of progressive education in Japan, this book will interest an international readership of academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of progressive education, comparative education, social and cultural history, history of education, Japanese studies, curriculum studies, and the history of childhood.
This groundbreaking study explores the recent dramatic changes brought about in Japan by the influx of a non-Japanese population, Filipina brides. Lieba Faier investigates how Filipina women who emigrated to rural Japan to work in hostess bars-where initially they were widely disparaged as prostitutes and foreigners-came to be identified by the local residents as "ideal, traditional Japanese brides."Intimate Encounters, an ethnography of cultural encounters, unravels this paradox by examining the everyday relational dynamics that drive these interactions. Faier remaps Japan, the Philippines, and the United States into what she terms a "zone of encounters," showing how the meanings of Filipino and Japanese culture and identity are transformed and how these changes are accomplished through ordinary interpersonal exchanges. Intimate Encounters provides an insightful new perspective from which to reconsider national subjectivities amid the increasing pressures of globalization, thereby broadening and deepening our understanding of the larger issues of migration and disapora.
Showcasing moments of convergence between the German and Japanese cultures towards common points of interest over the last one hundred fifty years, the chapters in this book cover such topics as culture, diplomacy, geography, history, law, literature, philosophy, politics, and sports. From the creation of two similar modern nation-states, to the aggressive struggle for national supremacy and subsequent total defeat in 1945, the necessity of coping with their earlier militarism and parallel economic miracles in the postwar era, Germans and Japanese look back on a remarkably similar past.
Yosano Akiko was a highly acclaimed Japanese poet. She was also a prominent feminist. In 1928 she was invited to travel around areas with a strong Japanese presence in China's northeast. This is her account of that journey.
"How do Japanese and Western aesthetics differ? In this comparative cultural study, TAKASHINA Shūji, a leading scholar of Western art history and insightful commentator on Japanese art, compares the two artistic traditions to reveal the distinctive characteristics of the Japanese sense of beauty. The first section, Methods of Japanese Art, uses examples and cross-cultural comparisons to elucidate the techniques by which Japanese artists cultivated their unique approach. These include roving rather than fixed perspective, the 'aesthetic of negation' -- excising the unnecessary to emphasize what remains -- and the 'trailing bough' motif, which evokes a world beyond the work's borders and influenced Western artists such as Monet. In the second section, East-West Encounters, Takashina examines the history of cultural interaction between Japan and the West from the early modern period on and its influence on the art of both. The third section, Passing Beauty, Returning Memory, contains essays on Japanese culture more broadly, including its preference for recurring forms over fixed monuments and its tradition of combining multiple seasons in a single image. Japanese Art in Perspective is a guide not only to the art of Japan but to the essence of its spiritual culture." --