"...I pray that You will stay by me and protect me and save me. " The best way for me to assure myself of Your company and protection is to chant Your names. I ask You to please remind me to regularly chant and to do so in a humble state of mind, keeping myself lower than a blade of grass, more tolerant than a tree, and ready to offer all respect to others without expection any honor for myself. "--Page 4 of cover.
Since 1855, nearly half a million Japanese immigrants have settled in the United States, and today more than twice that number claim Japanese ancestry. While these immigrants worked hard, established networks, and repeatedly distinguished themselves as entrepreneurs, they also encountered harsh discrimination. Nowhere was this more evident than on the West Coast during World War II, when virtually the entire population of Japanese Americans was forced into internment camps solely on the basis of ethnicity.
Japan in Transformation, 1945–2020 has been newly revised and updated to examine the 3.11 natural and nuclear disasters, Emperor Akihito’s abdication, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s legacies, the 2019 World Cup and the postponement of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics due to COVID-19. Through a chronological approach, this volume traces the development of Japan’s history from the US Occupation in 1945 to the political consequences of the coronavirus pandemic. It evaluates the impact of the Lost Decade of the 1990s as well as key issues such as the demographic crisis, war memory, regional relations, security concerns, constitutional revision and political stagnation. In response to post-2010 developments such as Abenomics, the demise of the Democratic Party of Japan and immigration policy, chapters have been reassessed to account for changes in politics, the role of women, Japan’s relationships with Asia and how and why policies have fallen short of stated goals. Overall, the volume reveals how Japan transformed into one of the largest economic and technological powers of the modern world. With a Chronology, Who’s who and Glossary, this edition is the ideal resource for all students interested in Japanese politics, economy and society since the end of World War II.
First published in Japan in 1983, this book is now a classic in modern Japanese literary studies. Covering an astonishing range of texts from the Meiji period (1868–1912), it presents sophisticated analyses of the ways that experiments in literary language produced multiple new—and sometimes revolutionary—forms of sensibility and subjectivity. Along the way, Kamei Hideo carries on an extended debate with Western theorists such as Saussure, Bakhtin, and Lotman, as well as with such contemporary Japanese critics as Karatani Kojin and Noguchi Takehiko. Transformations of Sensibility deliberately challenges conventional wisdom about the rise of modern literature in Japan and offers highly original close readings of works by such writers as Futabatei Shimei, Tsubouchi Shoyo, Higuchi Ichiyo, and Izumi Kyoka, as well as writers previously ignored by most scholars. It also provides a new critical theorization of the relationship between language and sensibility, one that links the specificity of Meiji literature to broader concerns that transcend the field of Japanese literary studies. Available in English translation for the first time, it includes a new preface by the author and an introduction by the translation editor that explain the theoretical and historical contexts in which the work first appeared.
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.
Regionalism has played an increasingly important role in the changing international relations of East Asia in recent decades, with early signs of integration and growing regional cooperation. This in-depth volume analyzes various historical approaches to the construction of a regional order and a regional identity in East Asia. It explores the ideology of Pan-Asianism as a predecessor of contemporary Asian regionalism, which served as the basis for efforts at regional integration in East Asia, but also as a tool for legitimizing Japanese colonial rule. This mobilization of the Asian peoples occurred through a collective regional identity established from cohesive cultural factors such as language, religion, geography and race. In discussing Asian identity, the book succeeds in bringing historical perspective to bear on approaches to regional cooperation and integration, as well as analyzing various utilizations and manifestations of the pan-Asian ideology. Pan-Asianism in Modern Japanese History provides an illuminating and extensive account of the historical backgrounds of current debates surrounding Asian identity and essential information and analyses for anyone with an interest in history as well as Asian and Japanese studies.
In the 1980s the performance of Japan’s economy was an international success story, and led many economists to suggest that the 1990s would be a Japanese decade. Today, however, the dominant view is that Japan is inescapably on a downward slope. Rather than focusing on the evolution of the performance of Japanese capitalism, this book reflects on the changes that it has experienced over the past 30 years, and presents a comprehensive analysis of the great transformation of Japanese capitalism from the heights of the 1980s, through the lost decades of the 1990s, and well into the 21st century. This book posits an alternative analysis of the Japanese economic trajectory since the early 1980s, and argues that whereas policies inspired by neo-liberalism have been presented as a solution to the Japanese crisis, these policies have in fact been one of the causes of the problems that Japan has faced over the past 30 years. Crucially, this book seeks to understand the institutional and organisational changes that have characterised Japanese capitalism since the 1980s, and to highlight in comparative perspective, with reference to the ‘neo-liberal moment’, the nature of the transformation of Japanese capitalism. Indeed, the arguments presented in this book go well beyond Japan itself, and examine the diversity of capitalism, notably in continental Europe, which has experienced problems that in many ways are also comparable to those of Japan. The Great Transformation of Japanese Capitalism will appeal to students and scholars of both Japanese politics and economics, as well as those interested in comparative political economy.
Japanese Diasporas examines the relationship of overseas Japanese and their descendents (Nikkei) with their home and host nations, focusing on the political, social and economic struggles of Nikkei. Frequently abandoned by their homeland, and experiencing alienation in their host nations, the diaspora have attempted to carve out lives between two worlds. Examining Nikkei communities and Japanese migration to Manchuria, China, Canada, the Philippines, Singapore and Latin America, the book compares Nikkei experiences with those of Japanese transnational migrants living abroad. The authors connect theoretical issues of ethnic identity with the Japanese and Nikkei cases, analyzing the hidden dynamics of the social construction of race, ethnicity and homeland, and suggesting some of the ways in which diasporas are transforming global society today. Presenting new perspectives on socio-political and cultural issues of transnational migrants and diaspora communities in an economically intertwined world, this book will be of great interest to scholars of diaspora studies and Japanese studies.
During the rapid growth period of the Japanese economy, from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s, the economic system that became entrenched in Japan -- the so-called Japanese-style capitalism -- was based on the government-business-bureaucracy triad. Although its distinct features survived the subsequent two decades of slow growth, there are many indications that the Japanese economy is once again struggling to transform itself. These translations from the Japanese economic literature expertly address this transformation.
Mired in national crises since the early 1990s, Japan has had to respond to a rapid population decline; the Asian and global financial crises; the 2011 triple disaster of earthquake, tsunami, and the Fukushima nuclear meltdown; the COVID-19 pandemic; China’s economic rise; threats from North Korea; and massive public debt. In Crisis Narratives, Institutional Change, and the Transformation of the Japanese State, established specialists in a variety of areas use a coherent set of methodologies, aligning their sociological, public policy, and political science and international relations perspectives, to account for discrepancies between official rhetoric and policy practice and actual perceptions of decline and crisis in contemporary Japan. Each chapter focuses on a distinct policy field to gauge the effectiveness and the implications of political responses through an analysis of how crises are narrated and used to justify policy interventions. Transcending boundaries between issue areas and domestic and international politics, these essays paint a dynamic picture of the contested but changing nature of social, economic, and, ultimately political institutions as they constitute the transforming Japanese state.
