Politics of the Meiji Press
Politics of the Meiji Press

Author: James L. Huffman

Publisher: University of Hawaii Press

Published: 2019-03-31

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 0824880137

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This biography introduces the young Fukuchi, in the first months after the Meiji Restoration of 1868, as a newspaper editor just beginning to write critically on social and political issues. His outspoken and politically indiscreet editorials soon made him the first journalist in history of Japan to be jailed for his writings. During the early Meiji years, he continued to grope for an ideal and a position, even joining the regime as a brash and innovative official. Only when he was independent of the government bureaucracy, however, did Fukuchi assume a position of pivotal importance. During the peak years of his career from 1874 to 1888, he demonstrated the crucial advantage enjoyed by those Japanese who had gained Western knowledge and, as editor of the Tokyo Nichi Nichi, made his most distinctive contributions to Meiji society and to journalism in Japan. Using a politically awakened press, which he had invigorated with Western techniques of journalism, Fukuchi provided the popular rationale for the course followed by the government and became the period’s leading nonofficial advocate of the “gradualist” approach toward constitutional government. He also founded Japan’s first “gradualist” political party. The Constitutionalist Imperial Party, during his years as an editor. Despite his great influence, Fukuchi left the press world in 1888, disappointed over failures and changing alliances, a vivid illustration of the precarious nature of leadership in a transitional period. Too long allied with the forces of innovation to become a casualty of change, however, he embarked on a new life as a writer of novels, plays, and history, and emerged in the 1890’s as Japan’s foremost playwright. In the life of Fukuchi Gen’ichirō is the story of a history-making figure, a man whose career embodied the response of Meiji Japan to the Western challenge of modernization, and yet a man whose personal life was inescapably subject to the tensions of an era of rapid social and political change. James Huffman’s fine biography is a notable book about an exciting man, a maker and mirror of his times.

Japan
Japan

Author: Tetsuo Najita

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2018-12-09

Total Pages: 161

ISBN-13: 022666595X

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Historians have long been aware of the richness and complexity of the intellectual history of modern Japanese politics. Najita's study, however, is the first in a Western language to present a consistent and broad synthesis of this subject. Najita elucidates the political dynamics of the past two hundred years of Japanese history by focusing on the interplay of restorationism and bureaucratism within the context of Japan's modern revolution, the Meiji Restoration.

Health Insurance Politics in Japan
Health Insurance Politics in Japan

Author: Takakazu Yamagishi

Publisher: ILR Press

Published: 2022

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 9781501763496

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"Covering the period from the Meiji Restoration to the Abe administration, this book examines what has driven the development of health politics, particularly regarding health insurance policy, of Japan and what role the government and medical professionals have played in the policy development"--

Creating a Public
Creating a Public

Author: James L. Huffman

Publisher: University of Hawaii Press

Published: 1997-06-01

Total Pages: 585

ISBN-13: 0824862015

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No institution did more to create a modern citizenry than the newspaper press of the Meiji period (1868-1912). Here was a collection of highly diverse, private voices that provided increasing numbers of readers—many millions by the end of the period—with both its fresh picture of the world and a changing sense of its own place in that world. Creating a Public is the first comprehensive history of Japan's early newspaper press to appear in English in more than half a century. Drawing on decades of research in newspaper articles and editorials, journalists' memoirs and essays, it tells the story of Japan's newspaper press from its elitist beginnings just before the fall of the Tokugawa regime through its years as a shaper of a new political system in the 1880s to its emergence as a nationalistic, often sensational, medium early in the twentieth century.

Japan Transformed
Japan Transformed

Author: Frances Rosenbluth

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2010-04-12

Total Pages: 263

ISBN-13: 1400835097

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With little domestic fanfare and even less attention internationally, Japan has been reinventing itself since the 1990s, dramatically changing its political economy, from one managed by regulations to one with a neoliberal orientation. Rebuilding from the economic misfortunes of its recent past, the country retains a formidable economy and its political system is healthier than at any time in its history. Japan Transformed explores the historical, political, and economic forces that led to the country's recent evolution, and looks at the consequences for Japan's citizens and global neighbors. The book examines Japanese history, illustrating the country's multiple transformations over the centuries, and then focuses on the critical and inexorable advance of economic globalization. It describes how global economic integration and urbanization destabilized Japan's postwar policy coalition, undercut the ruling Liberal Democratic Party's ability to buy votes, and paved the way for new electoral rules that emphasized competing visions of the public good. In contrast to the previous system that pitted candidates from the same party against each other, the new rules tether policymaking to the vast swath of voters in the middle of the political spectrum. Regardless of ruling party, Japan's politics, economics, and foreign policy are on a neoliberal path. Japan Transformed combines broad context and comparative analysis to provide an accurate understanding of Japan's past, present, and future.

Ruffians, Yakuza, Nationalists
Ruffians, Yakuza, Nationalists

Author: Eiko Maruko Siniawer

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2015-03-19

Total Pages: 415

ISBN-13: 0801454360

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Violence and democracy may seem fundamentally incompatible, but the two have often been intimately and inextricably linked. In Ruffians, Yakuza, Nationalists, Eiko Maruko Siniawer argues that violence has been embedded in the practice of modern Japanese politics from the very inception of the country's experiment with democracy. As soon as the parliament opened its doors in 1890, brawls, fistfights, vandalism, threats, and intimidation quickly became a fixture in Japanese politics, from campaigns and elections to legislative debates. Most of this physical force was wielded by what Siniawer calls "violence specialists": ruffians and yakuza. Their systemic and enduring political violence-in the streets, in the halls of parliament, during popular protests, and amid labor strife-ultimately compromised party politics in Japan and contributed to the rise of militarism in the 1930s. For the post-World War II years, Siniawer illustrates how the Japanese developed a preference for money over violence as a political tool of choice. This change in tactics signaled a political shift, but not necessarily an evolution, as corruption and bribery were in some ways more insidious, exclusionary, and undemocratic than violence. Siniawer demonstrates that the practice of politics in Japan has been dangerous, chaotic, and far more violent than previously thought. Additionally, crime has been more political. Throughout the book, Siniawer makes clear that certain yakuza groups were ideological in nature, contrary to the common understanding of organized crime as nonideological. Ruffians, Yakuza, Nationalists is essential reading for anyone wanting to comprehend the role of violence in the formation of modern nation-states and its place in both democratic and fascist movements.

The Political History of Modern Japan
The Political History of Modern Japan

Author: Kitaoka Shinichi

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-10-10

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 0429808461

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Spanning the 130-year period between the end of the Tokugawa Era and the end of the Cold War, this book introduces students to the formation, collapse, and rebirth of the modern Japanese state. It demonstrates how, faced with foreign threats, Japan developed a new governing structure to deal with these challenges and in turn gradually shaped its international environment. Had Japan been a self-sufficient power, like the United States, it is unlikely that external relations would have exercised such great control over the nation. And, if it were a smaller country, it may have been completely pressured from the outside and could not have influenced the global stage on its own. For better or worse therefore, this book argues, Japan was neither too large nor too small. Covering the major events, actors, and institutions of Japan’s modern history, the key themes discussed include: Building the Meiji state and Constitution. The establishment of Parliament. The First Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese Wars. Party Politics and International Cooperation. The Pacific War. Development of LDP politics. Changes in the international order and the end of the Cold War. This book, written by one of Japan's leading experts on Japan's political history, will be an essential resource for students of Japanese modern history and politics.

The Politics of Dialogic Imagination
The Politics of Dialogic Imagination

Author: Katsuya Hirano

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2013-11-21

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 022606073X

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In The Politics of Dialogic Imagination, Katsuya Hirano seeks to understand why, with its seemingly unrivaled power, the Tokugawa shogunate of early modern Japan tried so hard to regulate the ostensibly unimportant popular culture of Edo (present-day Tokyo)—including fashion, leisure activities, prints, and theater. He does so by examining the works of writers and artists who depicted and celebrated the culture of play and pleasure associated with Edo’s street entertainers, vagrants, actors, and prostitutes, whom Tokugawa authorities condemned to be detrimental to public mores, social order, and political economy. Hirano uncovers a logic of politics within Edo’s cultural works that was extremely potent in exposing contradictions between the formal structure of the Tokugawa world and its rapidly changing realities. He goes on to look at the effects of this logic, examining policies enacted during the next era—the Meiji period—that mark a drastic reconfiguration of power and a new politics toward ordinary people under modernizing Japan. Deftly navigating Japan’s history and culture, The Politics of Dialogic Imaginationprovides a sophisticated account of a country in the process of radical transformation—and of the intensely creative culture that came out of it.

Machiavelli's Children
Machiavelli's Children

Author: Richard J. Samuels

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2019-06-30

Total Pages: 475

ISBN-13: 1501720295

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Two late-developing nations, Japan and Italy, similarly obsessed with achieving modernity and with joining the ranks of the great powers, have traveled parallel courses with very different national identities. In this audacious book about leadership and historical choices, Richard J. Samuels emphasizes the role of human ingenuity in political change. He draws on interviews and archival research in a fascinating series of paired biographies of political and business leaders from Italy and Japan. Beginning with the founding of modern nation-states after the Meiji Restoration and the Risorgimento, Samuels traces the developmental dynamic in both countries through the failure of early liberalism, the coming of fascism, imperial adventures, defeat in wartime, and reconstruction as American allies. Highlights of Machiavelli's Children include new accounts of the making of postwar Japanese politics—using American money and Manchukuo connections—and of the collapse of Italian political parties in the Clean Hands (Mani Pulite) scandal.The author also tells the more recent stories of Umberto Bossi's regional experiment, the Lega Nord, the different choices made by Italian and Japanese communist party leaders after the collapse of the USSR, and the leadership of Silvio Berlusconi and Ishihara Shintar on the contemporary right in each country.

Kingdom of Beauty
Kingdom of Beauty

Author: Kim Brandt

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2007-07-20

Total Pages: 319

ISBN-13: 0822389541

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A Study of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University Kingdom of Beauty shows that the discovery of mingei (folk art) by Japanese intellectuals in the 1920s and 1930s was central to the complex process by which Japan became both a modern nation and an imperial world power. Kim Brandt’s account of the mingei movement locates its origins in colonial Korea, where middle-class Japanese artists and collectors discovered that imperialism offered them special opportunities to amass art objects and gain social, cultural, and even political influence. Later, mingei enthusiasts worked with (and against) other groups—such as state officials, fascist ideologues, rival folk art organizations, local artisans, newspaper and magazine editors, and department store managers—to promote their own vision of beautiful prosperity for Japan, Asia, and indeed the world. In tracing the history of mingei activism, Brandt considers not only Yanagi Muneyoshi, Hamada Shōji, Kawai Kanjirō, and other well-known leaders of the folk art movement but also the often overlooked networks of provincial intellectuals, craftspeople, marketers, and shoppers who were just as important to its success. The result of their collective efforts, she makes clear, was the transformation of a once-obscure category of pre-industrial rural artifacts into an icon of modern national style.