Making and Unmaking Modern Japan
Making and Unmaking Modern Japan

Author: Ritu Vij

Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand

Published: 2016-04-12

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 3741218863

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The papers assembled here share the dual conviction that (1) understanding the lineaments of Japanese modernity entails an appreciation of the specific forms of distinctions, discriminations and exclusions constitutive of it; (2) that the socio-economic-political fractures increasingly visible under conditions of late modernity reveal the precarious nature of the making of modernity in Japan. Bringing together a group of critical intellectuals, mostly based in Japan with long-standing political commitments to groups emblematic of modern Japan’s constitutive outside - inorities, migrants, foreigners, victims of the Fukushima disaster, welfare recipients among others this collection of essays aims to draw attention to processes of ‘making and unmaking’ that constellate Japanese modernity. Unlike previous attempts, however, devoted to destabilizing positivist/culturalist approaches to a post-war ‘miracle’ Japan via a critical post-structural theoretical vocabulary and episteme, the essays gathered here aim principally to examine traces of the making of modern Japan in the fissures and displacements visible at sites of modernity’s unmaking. Deploying a range of theoretical approaches, rather than a commitment to any single framework, the essays that follow aim to locate contemporary Japan and the ravages of its modernity within a wider critical discourse of modernity.

Unmaking the Japanese Miracle
Unmaking the Japanese Miracle

Author: William M. Grimes

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2018-08-06

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 1501725254

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In the last fifteen years, Japan's economy has gone from model of success to object lesson in failure. William W. Grimes offers a richly detailed, insider's view of the key macroeconomic policies and events in contemporary Japan, as well as a close examination of the causes and effects of these upheavals. It is difficult to believe that the "Bubble Economy" of the late 1980s and the failed attempts at economic stimulation in the following decade both arose from the same policies. In Unmaking the Japanese Miracle, Grimes shows that this is precisely what happened. Focusing less on what went wrong than on why it went wrong, Grimes finds that mistaken macroeconomic policies—loose money in the late 1980s, excessively tight money until 1992, and only grudging use of expansionary fiscal policy until 1998—largely caused Japan's economic problems. Based on scores of interviews with Japanese policymakers, his is the first political explanation of why these catastrophic policies were carried out by the Ministry of Finance, the Bank of Japan, and the Diet. Various economic shocks were met, Grimes says, with a consistent and often inappropriate pattern of responses. This pattern has fundamentally altered because of changes within the three policymaking institutions since 1998.

A Companion to the Anthropology of Japan
A Companion to the Anthropology of Japan

Author: Jennifer Robertson

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2008-03-10

Total Pages: 546

ISBN-13: 140518289X

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This book is an unprecedented collection of 29 original essays by some of the world’s most distinguished scholars of Japan. Covers a broad range of issues, including the colonial roots of anthropology in the Japanese academy; eugenics and nation building; majority and minority cultures; genders and sexualities; and fashion and food cultures Resists stale and misleading stereotypes, by presenting new perspectives on Japanese culture and society Makes Japanese society accessible to readers unfamiliar with the country

Unmasking Japan
Unmasking Japan

Author: David Ricky Matsumoto

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 9780804727198

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The last twenty years has seen a growth of interest and fascination with the Japanese, and the emergence of Japan as a world economic power has stimulated many works that have attempted to understand Japanese culture. The focus of this book is not on Japanese culture or society per se: rather, it is on how Japanese culture and society structure, shape, and mold the emotions of the Japanese people. All cultures shape and mold emotions, but the degree to which the Japanese culture shapes emotion has led to several misunderstandings about the emotional life of the Japanese, which this book attempts to correct. Describing the findings of over two decades of research, this book presents the Japanese as human beings with real feelings and emotions rather than as mindless pawns caught in the web of their own culture. In the process, it unmasks many myths that have grown around the subject and reveals important similarities as well as differences between the emotional life of the Japanese and that of people of other cultures.

Yasukuni Shrine
Yasukuni Shrine

Author: Akiko Takenaka

Publisher: University of Hawaii Press

Published: 2015-07-31

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 0824856937

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This is the first extensive English-language study of Yasukuni Shrine as a war memorial. It explores the controversial shrine’s role in waging war, promoting peace, honoring the dead, and, in particular, building Japan’s modern national identity. It traces Yasukuni’s history from its conceptualization in the final years of the Tokugawa period and Japan’s wars of imperialism to the present. Author Akiko Takenaka departs from existing scholarship on Yasukuni by considering various themes important to the study of war and its legacies through a chronological and thematic survey of the shrine, emphasizing the spatial practices that took place both at the shrine and at regional sites associated with it over the last 150 years. Rather than treat Yasukuni as a single, unchanging ideological entity, she takes into account the social and political milieu, maps out gradual transformations in both its events and rituals, and explicates the ideas that the shrine symbolizes. Takenaka illuminates the ways the shrine’s spaces were used during wartime, most notably in her reconstructions, based on primary sources, of visits by war-bereaved military families to the shrine during the Asia-Pacific War. She also traces important episodes in Yasukuni’s postwar history, including the filing of lawsuits against the shrine and recent attempts to reinvent it for the twenty-first century. Through a careful analysis of the shrine’s history over one and a half centuries, her work views the making and unmaking of a modern militaristic Japan through the lens of Yasukuni Shrine. Yasukuni Shrine: History, Memory, and Japan’s Unending Postwar is a skilled and innovative examination of modern and contemporary Japan’s engagement with the critical issues of war, empire, and memory. It will be of particular interest to readers of Japanese history and culture as well as those who follow current affairs and foreign relations in East Asia. Its discussion of spatial practices in the life of monuments and the political use of images, media, and museum exhibits will find a welcome audience among those engaged in memory, visual culture, and media studies.

Modern Japan
Modern Japan

Author: Mikiso Hane

Publisher: Westview Press

Published: 1992-04-30

Total Pages: 492

ISBN-13:

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Japan before the Seventeenth Century -- Establishment of the Tokugawa Bakufu -- The late Tokugawa period -- The fall of the Tokugawa Bakufu -- The Meiji restoration: the new order -- The continuing Meiji revolution (I) -- The continuing Meiji revolution (II) -- Political developments in later Meiji -- The conclusion of the Meiji Era -- Era of Parliamentary Ascendancy (I) -- Era of Parliamentary Ascendancy (II) -- The ascendancy of militarism -- The road to war -- War and defeat -- The postwar years: reform and reconstruction -- Developments since 1970.

Impossible Subjects
Impossible Subjects

Author: Mae M. Ngai

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2014-04-27

Total Pages: 411

ISBN-13: 1400850231

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This book traces the origins of the "illegal alien" in American law and society, explaining why and how illegal migration became the central problem in U.S. immigration policy—a process that profoundly shaped ideas and practices about citizenship, race, and state authority in the twentieth century. Mae Ngai offers a close reading of the legal regime of restriction that commenced in the 1920s—its statutory architecture, judicial genealogies, administrative enforcement, differential treatment of European and non-European migrants, and long-term effects. She shows that immigration restriction, particularly national-origin and numerical quotas, remapped America both by creating new categories of racial difference and by emphasizing as never before the nation's contiguous land borders and their patrol. Some images inside the book are unavailable due to digital copyright restrictions.

Hard Times in the Hometown
Hard Times in the Hometown

Author: Martin Dusinberre

Publisher:

Published: 2012-02-29

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13:

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Taking as its departure point the decision by the town of Kaminoseki to essentially preserve its existence by risking its environment, this book historicizes that extraordinary decision by reconstructing the everyday lives of Kaminosekis townspeople in vivid details across the modern period, so as to bring new understanding to explore the larger phenomenon of decline that is affecting not only Japan but most of the world.