This book thus offers a fresh view on Japanese society focussing on the role of comportment for group cohesiveness. It explores the stereotype that Japan is the world’s most polite country, examining how proper conduct is acquired and expressed, and how the apparent conflict with some of the concepts considered essential for Western modernity, such as society, freedom and the individual, are balanced with Japan’s great emphasis on courtesy, politeness and civility. By comparing the present situation in Japan with behavioural standards of former periods as well as with other cultural traditions the book explains some of the distinctive features of present-day Japanese society. Overall the book argues that Japan is a prime example of multiple modernities concerning individuals, collectives and relationships between state and society.
This book is a record of the international symposium held at the Kyoto International Conference Hall to mark the centennial of the Japanese Association of International Law. The purpose of the symposium was to reflect on past Japanese practice, to analyze current problems affecting Japan, and to seek to clarify the future role of Japan in the global community, in terms of international law. After joining the international community in the middle of the nineteenth century, Japan adopted a policy of wealth creation and armament in order to maintain its independence against the expanding Western States. At the same time, on the domestic scene, Japan vigorously promoted the modernization - Westernization - of its political, economic, and social institutions. Japan emerged as one of the victorious `Principal Allied and Associated Powers' in World War I, and started asserting its place in the international order. However, in the aftermath of the Great Depression, Japan failed to reach agreement with the international community, eventually left the League of Nations, invaded the Asian continent, and met with complete military defeat in World War II. In the subsequent years, Japan toiled to rebuild its economy and to rejoin the world community, but despite its miraculous economic recovery and expansion, Japan remains ambivalent in its policy of contributing to the maintenance of international peace and security. During these one and a half centuries the Japanese practice of international law has covered a wide range of fields. From these various fields, the symposium took up three specific topics: War and Peace, Economy, and Human Rights, because of their relevance to past Japanese practice and because future Japanese practice in these areas would be bound to affect international law in the coming century. In addition, the symposium discussed Japanese transactions, in general, with international law. The period covered by the symposium has witnessed many drastic changes in the world, and international law, which used to be applied almost exclusively to relations among the Western States, has now come to be applied universally. The Association wished to emphasize that an analysis of Japanese practice should be of significance for anyone interested in promoting and consolidating the rule of law in the world community at large.
In these buoyant and inventive stories, Karen Tei Yamashita transfers classic tales across boundaries and questions what an inheritance—familial, cultural, emotional, artistic—really means. In a California of the sixties and seventies, characters examine the contents of deceased relatives' freezers, tape-record high school locker-room chatter, or collect a community's gossip while cleaning the teeth of its inhabitants. Mr. Darcy is the captain of the football team, Mansfield Park materializes in a suburb of L.A., bake sales replace ballroom dances, and station wagons, not horse-drawn carriages, are the preferred mode of transit. The stories of traversing class, race, and gender leap into our modern world with and humor.
How the mindset of traditional Japanese society can guide our own efforts to lead a green lifestyle today. If we want to live sustainably, how should we feel about nature? About waste? About our forests and rivers? About food? Just Enough is a book of stories and sketches that give valuable insight into what it is like to live in a sustainable society by describing life in Japan some two hundred years ago, during the late Edo period, when cities and villages faced many of the same environmental challenges we do today and met them beautifully and inventively.
Note: This book was previously published in print format as "Landed: The guide to buying property in Japan," ISBN 978-98817147-3-2. The ebook edition contains a new introduction. Landed: The guide to buying property in Japan is a resource for anyone purchasing—or thinking of purchasing—real estate in Japan. Whether you're looking for a family home, a ski chalet or an investment property, Landed Japan will save you time, money and effort.
This book explores encounters and interactions between international students and local civil society organizations (CSOs) in Japan. Based on the results of a cross-case analysis, this study reveals the possibilities for international students in Japan of creating social capital in the short term in culturally and socially diverse groups. While a conventional approach sees universities as the main support providers, this research shows the role of local CSOs as alternative actors offering international student support. Unlike the long-standing paradigm viewing Japanese civil society as top-down and closely following the government, this book uncovers many decentralized and bottom-up organizational types. Furthermore, it highlights an active part taken by foreign staff and volunteers in Japanese CSOs, which challenges the guest–host dichotomy of the previous literature. Presenting a reconsidered insight into the role of international students and their interaction with CSOs in community building, this book will appeal to students and scholars of Asian studies and migration studies as well as organizers of CSOs and faculty of international higher education institutions.
This collection focuses on metaphorical as well as temporal and physical border-crossing in writing from and about Japan. With a strong consciousness of gender and socio-historic contexts, contributors to the book adopt an intercultural and interdisciplinary approach to examine the writing of authors whose works break free from the confines of hegemonic Japanese literary endeavour. By demonstrating how the texts analysed step outside the space of ‘Japan’, they accordingly foreground the volatility of textual expression related to that space. The authors discussed include Takahashi Mutsuo and Nagai Kafū, both of whom take literary inspiration from geographical sites outside Japan. Several chapters examine the work of exemplary border-crossing poet, novelist and essayist, Itō Hiromi. There are discussions of the work of Tawada Yōko whose ability to publish in German and Japanese marks her also as a representative writer of border-crossing texts. Two chapters address works by Murakami Haruki who, although clearly affiliating with western cultural form, is rarely discussed in specific border-crossing terms. The chapter on Ainu narratives invokes topics such as translation, indigeneity and myth, while an analysis of Japanese prisoner-of-war narratives notes the language and border-crossing nexus. A vital collection for scholars and students of Japanese literature.
This trailblazing study examines the history of narcotics in Japan to explain the development of global criteria for political legitimacy in nations and empires in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Japan underwent three distinct crises of sovereignty in its modern history: in the 1890s, during the interwar period, and in the 1950s. Each crisis provoked successively escalating crusades against opium and other drugs, in which moral entrepreneurs--bureaucrats, cultural producers, merchants, law enforcement, scientists, and doctors, among others--focused on drug use as a means of distinguishing between populations fit and unfit for self-rule. Moral Nation traces the instrumental role of ideologies about narcotics in the country's efforts to reestablish its legitimacy as a nation and empire. As Kingsberg demonstrates, Japan's growing status as an Asian power and a "moral nation" expanded the notion of "civilization" from an exclusively Western value to a universal one. Scholars and students of Japanese history, Asian studies, world history, and global studies will gain an in-depth understanding of how Japan's experience with narcotics influenced global standards for sovereignty and shifted the aim of nation building, making it no longer a strictly political activity but also a moral obligation to society.
This book explores the growth and operations of the Japanese restaurant in Australia since the early 2000s from perspectives of both restaurant workers and consumers. Through first-hand testimonies, collected from chefs, restaurateurs, gourmets and casual diners, it demonstrates how Japanese restaurants act as cultural hubs, connecting a diverse community of migrants, Australian citizens and international tourists, while also disseminating knowledge of Japanese culinary cultures. The ethnographic evidence presented challenges the colonialist and essentialist understandings of the ‘exotic’ and ‘Japaneseness’ as the ‘inferior other’ to the West. In so doing, the book highlights the complex manifestations of cross-cultural desires, translating practices and the performative racial-ethnic mimesis of Japanese ethnicity. Featuring critical investigation into the fixed notions of otherness, race, ethnicity and authenticity, this book will be a valuable resource to students and scholars of Japanese society and culture, particularly Japanese food culture.
In this groundbreaking work, Susan L. Burns examines the history of leprosy in Japan from medieval times until the present. At the center of Kingdom of the Sick is the rise of Japan’s system of national leprosy sanitaria, which today continue to house more than 1,500 former patients, many of whom have spent five or more decades within them. Burns argues that long before the modern Japanese government began to define a policy toward leprosy, the disease was already profoundly marked by ethical and political concerns and associated with sin, pollution, heredity, and outcast status. Beginning in the 1870s, new anxieties about race and civilization that emanated from a variety of civic actors, including journalists, doctors, patent medicine producers, and Christian missionaries transformed leprosy into a national issue. After 1900, a clamor of voices called for the quarantine of all sufferers of the disease, and in the decades that followed bureaucrats, politicians, physicians, journalists, local communities, and leprosy sufferers themselves grappled with the place of the biologically vulnerable within the body politic. At stake in this “citizenship project” were still evolving conceptions of individual rights, government responsibility for social welfare, and the delicate balance between care and control. Refusing to treat leprosy patients as simply victims of state power, Burns recovers their voices in the debates that surrounded the most controversial aspects of sanitarium policy, including the use of sterilization, segregation, and the continuation of confinement long after leprosy had become a curable disease. Richly documented with both visual and textual sources and interweaving medical, political, social, and cultural history, Kingdom of the Sick tells an important story for readers interested in Japan, the history of medicine and public health, social welfare, gender and sexuality, and human rights.
