Ennobling Japan's Savage Northeast
Ennobling Japan's Savage Northeast

Author: Nathan Hopson

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2020-10-26

Total Pages: 383

ISBN-13: 1684175828

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"Ennobling Japan’s Savage Northeast is the first comprehensive account in English of the discursive life of the Tōhoku region in postwar Japan from 1945 through 2011. The Northeast became the subject of world attention with the March 2011 triple disaster of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown. But Tōhoku’s history and significance to emic understandings of Japanese self and nationhood remain poorly understood. When Japan embarked on its quest to modernize in the mid-nineteenth century, historical prejudice, contemporary politics, and economic calculation together led the state to marginalize Tōhoku, creating a “backward” region in both fact and image. After 1945, a group of mostly local intellectuals attempted to overcome this image and rehabilitate the Northeast as a source of new national values. This early postwar Tōhoku recuperation movement has proved to be a critical source for the new Kyoto school’s neoconservative valorization of native Japanese identity, fueling that group’s antimodern, anti-Western discourse since the 1980s.Nathan Hopson unravels the contested postwar meanings of Tōhoku to reveal the complex and contradictory ways in which that region has been incorporated into Japan’s shifting self-images since World War II."

Tōhoku Unbounded: Regional Identity and the Mobile Subject in Prewar Japan
Tōhoku Unbounded: Regional Identity and the Mobile Subject in Prewar Japan

Author: Anne Giblin Gedacht

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2022-11-28

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 900452794X

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In 1870, a prominent samurai from Tōhoku sells his castle to become an agrarian colonist in Hokkaidō. Decades later, a man also from northeast Japan stows away on a boat to Canada and establishes a salmon roe business. By 1930, an investigative journalist travels to Brazil and writes a book that wins the first-ever Akutagawa Prize. In the 1940s, residents from the same area proclaim that they should lead Imperial Japan in colonizing all of Asia. Across decades and oceans, these fractured narratives seem disparate, but show how mobility is central to the history of Japan’s Tōhoku region, a place often stereotyped as a site of rural stasis and traditional immobility, thereby collapsing boundaries between local, national, and global studies of Japan. This book examines how multiple mobilities converge in Japan’s supposed hinterland. Drawing on research from three continents, this monograph demonstrates that Tohoku’s regional identity is inextricably intertwined with Pacific migrations.

Literature After Fukushima
Literature After Fukushima

Author: Linda Flores

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-03-28

Total Pages: 199

ISBN-13: 1000836282

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Literature after Fukushima examines how aesthetic representation contributes to a critical understanding of the 3.11 triple disaster – the Great East Japan earthquake, tsunami, and multiple meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Through an examination of key works in the expanding corpus of 3.11 literature the book explores how the disaster—both its immediate aftereffects and its continued unfolding—reframed discourse in various areas such as trauma studies, eco-criticism, regional identity, food safety, civil society, and beyond. Individual chapters discuss aspects of these perspectival shifts, tracing the reshaping of Japanese identity after the triple disaster. The cultural productions explored offer a glimpse into the public imaginary and demonstrate how disasters can fundamentally redefine our individual and shared conception of both history and the present moment. Literature after Fukushima is the first English-language book to provide an in-depth analysis of such a wide range of representative post-3.11 literature and its social ramifications. Contributing to a more comprehensive understanding of the post-disaster climate of Japanese society and adding new perspectives through literary analysis, this book will be of interest to scholars and students of Japanese and Asian Studies, Literary Studies, Environmental Humanities, as well as Cultural and Transcultural Studies.

Historical Dictionary of Postwar Japan
Historical Dictionary of Postwar Japan

Author: William D. Hoover

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2018-12-15

Total Pages: 653

ISBN-13: 153811156X

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Japan is a mix of the old and the new, traditional and modern, and old fashion and innovative. It has traveled the road to a modern destination without totally losing sight of its traditions and values. Although some in Japan lament the passing of old ways, Japan has held on to a reasonable amount of its traditions and values. This is easier to find in its arts and crafts and its literature and films as well as in its social habits. This book will introduce the broad sweep of people, events, and trends, including the successes and failures, of postwar Japan. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of Postwar Japan contains a chronology, an introduction, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 500 cross-referenced entries on important personalities, politics, economy, foreign relations, religion, and culture. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Japan.

The Gods of the Sea
The Gods of the Sea

Author: Fynn Holm

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2023-08-31

Total Pages: 235

ISBN-13: 1009305514

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Challenging portrayals of Japan as a whaling nation, Holm shows that anti-whaling protests were widespread in early modern Northeast Japan.

Rethinking Japan's Modernity
Rethinking Japan's Modernity

Author: M. William Steele

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2024-09-03

Total Pages: 405

ISBN-13: 0674299795

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History is not one story, but many. In Rethinking Japan’s Modernity, M. William Steele takes a new look at the people, places, and events associated with Japan’s engagement with modernity, starting with American Commodore Matthew Perry’s arrival in Japan in 1853. In many cases, this new look derives from visual sources, such as popular broadsheets, satirical cartoons, ukiyo-e and other woodblock prints, postcards, and photographs. The book illustrates the diverse, and sometimes conflicting, perceptions of people who experienced the unfolding of modern Japan. It focuses both on the experiences of people living the events “at that time” and on the reflections of others looking back. Also included are three new translations—two of them by Japan’s pioneer Westernizer, Fukuzawa Yukichi, and another by Mantei Ōga—parodying Fukuzawa’s monumental work advocating Western learning. These and other stories show how Japanese views of modernity evolved over time. Each chapter is prefaced with a short introduction to the topic covered and historiographical approach taken, allowing each to stand alone as well as support the overall goal of the work—to inform and challenge our understanding of the links between Japan’s past, present, and future.

Conjuring Up Prehistory: Landscape and the Archaic in Japanese Nationalism
Conjuring Up Prehistory: Landscape and the Archaic in Japanese Nationalism

Author: Mark J. Hudson

Publisher: Archaeopress Publishing Ltd

Published: 2021-11-11

Total Pages: 90

ISBN-13: 1803271159

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This study considers the ways in which archaeology and landscapes of the archaic have been appropriated in Japanese nationalism since the early twentieth century, focusing on the writings of cultural historian Tetsurō Watsuji, philosopher Takeshi Umehara and environmental archaeologist Yoshinori Yasuda.

Gender, Culture, and Disaster in Post-3.11 Japan
Gender, Culture, and Disaster in Post-3.11 Japan

Author: Mire Koikari

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2020-10-15

Total Pages: 211

ISBN-13: 1350122513

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The Great East Japan Disaster – a compound catastrophe of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown that began on March 11, 2011 – has ushered in a new era of cultural production dominated by discussions on safety and security, risk and vulnerability, and recovery and refortification. Gender, Culture, and Disaster in Post-3.11 Japan re-frames post-disaster national reconstruction as a social project imbued with dynamics of gender, race, and empire and in doing so Mire Koikari offers an innovative approach to resilience building in contemporary Japan. From juvenile literature to civic manuals to policy statements, Koikari examines a vast array of primary sources to demonstrate how femininity and masculinity, readiness and preparedness, militarism and humanitarianism, and nationalism and transnationalism inform cultural formation and transformation triggered by the unprecedented crisis. Interdisciplinary in its orientation, the book reveals how militarism, neoliberalism, and neoconservatism drive Japan's resilience building while calling attention to historical precedents and transnational connections that animate the ongoing mobilization toward safety and security. An important contribution to studies of gender and Japan, the book is essential reading for all those wishing to understand local and global politics of precarity and its proposed solutions amid the rising tide of pandemics, ecological hazards, industrial disasters, and humanitarian crises.

Eating Wild Japan
Eating Wild Japan

Author: Winifred Bird

Publisher: Stone Bridge Press, Inc.

Published: 2021-03-09

Total Pages: 219

ISBN-13: 1611729432

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From bracken to butterbur to "princess" bamboo, some of Japan's most iconic foods are foraged, not grown, in its forests, fields, and coastal waters--yet most Westerners have never heard of them. In this book, journalist Winifred Bird eats her way from one end of the country to the other in search of the hidden stories of Japan's wild foods, the people who pick them, and the places whose histories they've shaped. "A beautiful and thoughtful exploration of the deep relationship--past and present--between people and wild plants in one of the world's richest foraging regions."—Samuel Thayer, author of Incredible Wild Edibles and The Forager's Harvest

The Cold War [5 volumes]
The Cold War [5 volumes]

Author: Spencer C. Tucker

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2020-10-27

Total Pages: 4179

ISBN-13:

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This sweeping reference work covers every aspect of the Cold War, from its ignition in the ashes of World War II, through the Berlin Wall and the Cuban Missile Crisis, to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The Cold War superpower face-off between the Soviet Union and the United States dominated international affairs in the second half of the 20th century and still reverberates around the world today. This comprehensive and insightful multivolume set provides authoritative entries on all aspects of this world-changing event, including wars, new military technologies, diplomatic initiatives, espionage activities, important individuals and organizations, economic developments, societal and cultural events, and more. This expansive coverage provides readers with the necessary context to understand the many facets of this complex conflict. The work begins with a preface and introduction and then offers illuminating introductory essays on the origins and course of the Cold War, which are followed by some 1,500 entries on key individuals, wars, battles, weapons systems, diplomacy, politics, economics, and art and culture. Each entry has cross-references and a list of books for further reading. The text includes more than 100 key primary source documents, a detailed chronology, a glossary, and a selective bibliography. Numerous illustrations and maps are inset throughout to provide additional context to the material.