Japan's Space Program

Japan's Space Program

Author: Steven Berner

Publisher: Rand Corporation

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 37

ISBN-13: 9780833038005

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Reviews the history of Japan's space program, its organization and recent changes, the origins and status of its satellite reconnaissance program, factors affecting its spave program, and the directions the program may take next.


Church Space and the Capital in Prewar Japan

Church Space and the Capital in Prewar Japan

Author: Garrett L. Washington

Publisher: University of Hawaii Press

Published: 2022-01-31

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 0824891724

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Christians have never constituted one percent of Japan’s population, yet Christianity had a disproportionately large influence on Japan’s social, intellectual, and political development. This happened despite the Tokugawa shogunate’s successful efforts to criminalize Christianity and even after the Meiji government took measures to limit its influence. From journalism and literature, to medicine, education, and politics, the mark of Protestant Japanese is indelible. Herein lies the conundrum that has interested scholars for decades. How did Christianity overcome the ideological legacies of its past in Japan? How did Protestantism distinguish itself from the other options in the religious landscape like Buddhism and New Religions? And how did the religious movement’s social relevance and activism persist despite the government’s measures to weaken the relationship between private religion and secular social life in Japan? In Church Space and the Capital in Prewar Japan, Garrett L. Washington responds to these questions with a spatially explicit study on the influence of the Protestant church in imperial Japan. He examines the physical and social spaces that Tokyo’s largest Japanese-led congregations cultivated between 1879 and 1923 and their broader social ties. These churches developed alongside, and competed with, the locational, architectural, and social spaces of Buddhism, Shinto, and New Religions. Their success depended on their pastors’ decisions about location and relocation, those men’s conceptualizations of the new imperial capital and aspirations for Japan, and the Western-style buildings they commissioned. Japanese pastors and laypersons grappled with Christianity’s relationships to national identity, political ideology, women’s rights, Japanese imperialism, and modernity; church-based group activities aimed to raise social awareness and improve society. Further, it was largely through attendees’ externalized ideals and networks developed at church but expressed in their public lives outside the church that Protestant Christianity exerted such a visible influence on modern Japanese society. Church Space offers answers to longstanding questions about Protestant Christianity’s reputation and influence by using a new space-centered perspective to focus on Japanese agency in the religion’s metamorphosis and social impact, adding a fresh narrative of cultural imperialism.


In Defense of Japan

In Defense of Japan

Author: Saadia Pekkanen

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2010-08-12

Total Pages: 408

ISBN-13: 0804775001

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In Defense of Japan provides the first complete, up-to-date, English-language account of the history, politics, and policy of Japan's strategic space development. The dual-use nature of space technologies, meaning that they cut across both market and military applications, has had two important consequences for Japan. First, Japan has developed space technologies for the market in its civilian space program that have yet to be commercially competitive. Second, faced with rising geopolitical uncertainties and in the interest of their own economics, the makers of such technologies have been critical players in the shift from the market to the military in Japan's space capabilities and policy. This book shows how the sum total of market-to-military moves across space launch vehicles, satellites and spacecraft, and emerging related technologies, already mark Japan as an advanced military space power.


Japan In Space

Japan In Space

Author: Brian Harvey

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2023-11-16

Total Pages: 441

ISBN-13: 3031455738

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Guided by genius engineer Hideo Itokawa, Japan’s space program began with small scientific satellites more than 50 years ago. Since then, its space probes have travelled to the Moon, Venus, the asteroids and even a comet. The country launched weather satellites to warn of typhoons, communications satellites to connect the Japanese archipelago and remote sensing technology to observe the Earth and warn of climate change. Engineering technology satellites became the basis of Japan’s electronic industry as Japanese astronauts flew into space, working on their Kibo module on the International Space Station. Now, Japan is one of Asia’s leading space powers, alongside China and India, vying for influence in the region. Its solid and liquid-fueled rockets are estimated to be among the most advanced and reliable in the world, its technology among the best. This book examines the history of Japan’s space program, the country’s current state of development and its future. It describes the extensive infrastructure that has gone into the forging of Japan’s picturesque oceanside launch sites, training centers, testing facilities and tracking stations. This book also outlines the politics of space in Japan, financial difficulties, its space industry, the symbiotic relationship with the United States and the recent sharp change-of-course to invest in military satellites. From the role of influential personalities, such as Hideo Shima and Shinichi Nakasuka, to political leaders, such as Yasuhiro Nakasone and Takeo Kawamura, you will read about how Japan has paved its own star-lit path to space. The future may expect to send Japanese probes to Mercury and the moons of Mars, all while the first Japanese astronauts set foot on our own Moon and drive innovative rovers across its surface.


The Space of Effusion

The Space of Effusion

Author: Richard Speer

Publisher: Scheidegger and Spiess

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9783858818614

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One of the twentieth century's leading abstract expressionists, Sam Francis (1923-94) was one of the few visual artists who traversed the globe multiple times during the 1950s and 1960s, becoming one of the first postwar American painters to develop a truly international reputation. Francis's engagement with the world and his fascination and involvement with different cultures, in particular that of Japan, is explored in this compelling volume, published in conjunction with the exhibition Sam Francis and Japan: Emptiness Overflowing at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Richard Speer, a co-curator of the exhibition, offers astute insights into the visual, technical, and philosophical affinities between traditional Asian art and Francis's work as a modern abstract painter. He delves into the relationship of Francis's aesthetics to much older Japanese artistic traditions, in particular the concept of ma, a symbolically rich in-between zone that is paralleled in the lyrical deployment of negative space in Francis's paintings. In addition, Speer looks at Francis's friendships with many of the Gutai and Monoha artists and highlights their shared conceptual theories involving notions of time, space, and a limitless continuum. A contemplative and discerning overview of the artist in Japan, the book draws on archival research and individual interviews with Francis's Japanese colleagues, as well as family and friends. It suggests the transformative power of art as a cultural bridge while expanding our insight into the artist's visual language and his devotion to the image. Francis's own aphoristic essay "One Ocean One Cup," first published in Japan in 1977, revealing the artist's reactions to living and working in the transcendental Japanese environment, rounds out the book. Exhibition: The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, United-States (04.10.2020 - 24.01.2021).


Sound, Space and Sociality in Modern Japan

Sound, Space and Sociality in Modern Japan

Author: Joseph D. Hankins

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-12-04

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 1135018499

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This book argues that sound – as it is created, transmitted, and perceived – plays a key role in the constitution of space and community in contemporary Japan. The book examines how sonic practices reflect politics, aesthetics, and ethics, with transformative effects on human relations. From right-wing sound trucks to left-wing protests, from early 20th century jazz cafes to contemporary avant-garde art forms, from the sounds of U.S. military presence to exuberant performances organized in opposition, the book, rich in ethnographic detail, contributes to sensory anthropology and the anthropology of contemporary Japan.


House and Home in Modern Japan

House and Home in Modern Japan

Author: Jordan Sand

Publisher: Harvard Univ Asia Center

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 516

ISBN-13: 9780674019669

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A house is a site, the bounds and focus of a community. It is also an artifact, a material extension of its occupants' lives. This book takes the Japanese house in both senses, as site and as artifact, and explores the spaces, commodities, and conceptions of community associated with it in the modern era. As Japan modernized, the principles that had traditionally related house and family began to break down. Even where the traditional class markers surrounding the house persisted, they became vessels for new meanings, as housing was resituated in a new nexus of relations. The house as artifact and the artifacts it housed were affected in turn. The construction and ornament of houses ceased to be stable indications of their occupants' social status, the home became a means of personal expression, and the act of dwelling was reconceived in terms of consumption. Amid the breakdown of inherited meanings and the fluidity of modern society, not only did the increased diversity of commodities lead to material elaboration of dwellings, but home itself became an object of special attention, its importance emphasized in writing, invoked in politics, and articulated in architectural design. The aim of this book is to show the features of this culture of the home as it took shape in Japan.


Emerging Space Powers

Emerging Space Powers

Author: Brian Harvey

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2011-01-30

Total Pages: 644

ISBN-13: 1441908749

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This work introduces the important emerging space powers of the world. Brian Harvey describes the origins of the Japanese space program, from rocket designs based on WW II German U-boats to tiny solid fuel 'pencil' rockets, which led to the launch of the first Japanese satellite in 1970. The next two chapters relate how Japan expanded its space program, developing small satellites into astronomical observatories and sending missions to the Moon, Mars, comet Halley, and asteroids. Chapter 4 describes how India's Vikram Sarabhai developed a sounding rocket program in the 1960s. The following chapter describes the expansion of the Indian space program. Chapter 6 relates how the Indian space program is looking ahead to the success of the moon probe Chandrayan, due to launch in 2008, and its first manned launching in 2014. Chapters 7, 8, and 9 demonstrate how, in Iran, communications and remote sensing drive space technology. Chapter 10 outlines Brazil's road to space, begun in the mid-1960's with the launch of the Sonda sounding rockets. The following two chapters describe Brazil's satellites and space launch systems and plans for the future. Chapters 13 and 14 study Israel's space industry. The next chapters look at the burgeoning space programs of North and South Korea. The book ends by contrasting and comparing all the space programs and speculating how they may evolve in the future. An appendix lists all launches and launch attempts to date of the emerging space powers.


Mapping Early Modern Japan

Mapping Early Modern Japan

Author: Marcia Yonemoto

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2003-04-21

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 0520232690

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Annotation This is a book about "geographical imagination" through the prism of maps, travel accounts, fiction, and other cultural works that helped fashion understandings of space and place in early modern Japan.


Re-inventing Japan

Re-inventing Japan

Author: Tessa Morris-Suzuki

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-03-04

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 1317461150

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This text rethinks the contours of Japanese history, culture and nationality. Challenging the mythology of a historically unitary, even monolithic Japan, it offers a different perspective on culture and identity in modern Japan.