Values, Identity, and Equality in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Japan
Values, Identity, and Equality in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Japan

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2015-09-17

Total Pages: 392

ISBN-13: 9004300988

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The chapters in this volume variously challenge a number of long-standing assumptions regarding eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Japanese society, and especially that society’s values, structure and hierarchy; the practical limits of state authority; and the emergence of individual and collective identity. By interrogating the concept of equality on both sides of the 1868 divide, the volume extends this discussion beyond the late-Tokugawa period into the early-Meiji and even into the present. An Epilogue examines some of the historiographical issues that form a background to this enquiry. Taken together, the chapters offer answers and perspectives that are highly original and should prove stimulating to all those interested in early modern Japanese cultural, intellectual, and social history Contributors include: Daniel Botsman, W. Puck Brecher, Gideon Fujiwara, Eiko Ikegami, Jun’ichi Isomae, James E. Ketelaar, Yasunori Kojima, Peter Nosco, Naoki Sakai, Gregory Smits, M. William Steele, and Anne Walthall.

From Country to Nation
From Country to Nation

Author: Gideon Fujiwara

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2021-05-15

Total Pages: 383

ISBN-13: 1501753940

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From Country to Nation tracks the emergence of the modern Japanese nation in the nineteenth century through the history of some of its local aspirants. It explores how kokugaku (Japan studies) scholars envisioned their place within Japan and the globe, while living in a castle town and domain far north of the political capital. Gideon Fujiwara follows the story of Hirao Rosen and fellow scholars in the northeastern domain of Tsugaru. On discovering a newly "opened" Japan facing the dominant Western powers and a defeated Qing China, Rosen and other Tsugaru intellectuals embraced kokugaku to secure a place for their local "country" within the broader nation and to reorient their native Tsugaru within the spiritual landscape of an Imperial Japan protected by the gods. Although Rosen and his fellows celebrated the rise of Imperial Japan, their resistance to the Western influence and modernity embraced by the Meiji state ultimately resulted in their own disorientation and estrangement. By analyzing their writings—treatises, travelogues, letters, poetry, liturgies, and diaries—alongside their artwork, Fujiwara reveals how this socially diverse group of scholars experienced the Meiji Restoration from the peripheries. Using compelling firsthand accounts, Fujiwara tells the story of the rise of modern Japan, from the perspective of local intellectuals who envisioned their local "country" within a nation that emerged as an empire of the modern world.

Imagining Prostitution in Modern Japan, 1850–1913
Imagining Prostitution in Modern Japan, 1850–1913

Author: Ann Marie L. Davis

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2019-03-13

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 1498542158

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In the winter of 1913, a small crowd gathered on the streets of a famous red-light district on the outskirts of Tokyo. Curious patrons, journalists, and onlookers formed a steady procession to see the prostitute, Wada Yoshiko, and celebrate the release of her new book. A Prostitute’s Tale divulged inner secrets about her co-workers, patrons, and difficult confinement in a government-run syphilis hospital. According to the press, the author was a literary prostitute, a new expert, and a compelling version of Japan’s new woman. Soon widely acclaimed, her literary work heralded a growing public desire for inside knowledge about the lived experiences of pleasure workers. Wada’s success was the product of more than half-a-century of high-stakes conversations about the future of Japan. Her fame as an author simultaneously challenged and complemented previous discussions about the role of the female prostitute in the modern nation-state. However, while her perspective was new, the information she shared invoked key themes that had proliferated about her in prior decades. Since the 1850s, when Japan was forced to sign the “unequal” commercial treaties with the Western imperial powers, wide-ranging debates had taken place that linked the prostitute to national security and international prestige in imperative new ways. Imagining Prostitution in Modern Japan traces the symbol of the prostitute as a project of nation- and empire-building from the 1850s to 1913, ending one year after the death of the Meiji emperor, and coincidentally, the year of Wada’s publication. It untangles how ideas about pleasure work intersected with Japan’s transformation into a modern nation according to Western models. It asserts that the figure of the prostitute was a powerful symbolic resource that wide-ranging interest groups deployed, variously, to negotiate and define shifting distinctions of status, identity, and power. Each of the debates about the prostitute was in turn central to and mutually constitutive of the emergent social order in Meiji Japan.

Equality
Equality

Author: Darrin McMahon

Publisher: Bonnier Books UK

Published: 2024-04-11

Total Pages: 506

ISBN-13: 1804186848

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Equality is in crisis. Our world is filled with soaring inequalities, spanning wealth, race, identity, and nationality. Yet how can we strive for equality if we don't understand it? As much as we have struggled for equality, we have always been profoundly sceptical about it. How much do we want, and for whom? Darrin M. McMahon's Equality is the definitive intellectual history, tracing equality's global origins and spread from the dawn of humanity through the Enlightenment to today. Equality has been reimagined continually, in the great world religions and the politics of the ancient world, by revolutionaries and socialists, Nazis and fascists, and post-war reformers and activists. A magisterial exploration of why equality matters and why we continue to reimagine it, Equality offers all the tools to rethink equality anew for our own age. 'Fascinating' - New York Times

Individuality in Early Modern Japan
Individuality in Early Modern Japan

Author: Peter Nosco

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-09-13

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 1351389610

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Two of the most commonly alleged features of Japanese society are its homogeneity and its encouragement of conformity, as represented by the saying that the nail that sticks up gets pounded. This volume’s primary goal is to challenge these and a number of other long-standing assumptions regarding Tokugawa (1600-1868) society, and thereby to open a dialogue regarding the relationship between the Japan of two centuries ago and the present. The volume’s central chapters concentrate on six aspects of Tokugawa society: the construction of individual identity, aggressive pursuit of self-interest, defiant practice of forbidden religious traditions, interest in self-cultivation and personal betterment, understandings of happiness and well-being, and embrace of "neglected" counter-ideological values. The author argues that when taken together, these point to far higher degrees of individuality in early modern Japan than has heretofore been acknowledged, and in an Afterword the author briefly examines how these indicators of individuality in early modern Japan are faring in contemporary Japan at the time of writing.

In Search of the Way
In Search of the Way

Author: Richard Bowring

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 0198795238

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A history of intellectual and religious developments in Japan during the Tokugawa period (1582-1860), this volume deals with social, cultural, and religious interplay, primarily focusing on the Neo-Confucian search for the Way, a pattern of existence that could provide order for society at large, as well as self-fulfilment for the individual.

Recent Scholarship on Japan
Recent Scholarship on Japan

Author: Richard Donovan

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2019-12-02

Total Pages: 186

ISBN-13: 1527544141

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This anthology presents a survey of recent scholarship on Japanese literature—classical, postwar, and contemporary—and Japan studies from both established and up-and-coming academics based in the West and East. This collection of cutting-edge scholarship offers a snapshot of the current state of Japan studies in the second decade of the twenty-first century. The first section of the book considers the Heian period and its literature from the perspective of female authors and their works. The second part explores postwar prose and poetry, as well as the writing of contemporary author Haruki Murakami, relating them all to issues present in Japan’s wider society. Finally, the third section puts Japan and its writings within the global context, comparing them with other historical, cultural and linguistic milieus, and considering the role of translation in representing Japanese literature to the world.

Handbook of Research on Education for Participative Citizenship and Global Prosperity
Handbook of Research on Education for Participative Citizenship and Global Prosperity

Author: Pineda-Alfonso, José A.

Publisher: IGI Global

Published: 2018-11-23

Total Pages: 718

ISBN-13: 1522571116

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Active participation in processes of change are an essential aspect of community participation, and proper recognition of opportunities for participation facilitate community engagement nationally and internationally. Education and its relation to citizenship in recent years has become one of the most important fields of research. From different areas and contexts, it has been revealed that there is a prevailing need for education for citizens to take part actively in the processes of change and improvement that the current global situation requires. The Handbook of Research on Education for Participative Citizenship and Global Prosperity is a pivotal reference source focusing on the productions and fields of study that are carried out all over the world on education for citizenship, namely the devices that provide young people with the consciousness and highlight the aspects of an active democratic life. While highlighting topics such as citizenship identity, educational policy, and social justice, this publication explores participation instruction, as well as the methods of community involvement. This book is ideally designed for educational administrators, policymakers, researchers, professionals, and educators seeking current research on instructional methods for teaching active community and political involvement.

Defamiliarizing Japan’s Asia-Pacific War
Defamiliarizing Japan’s Asia-Pacific War

Author: W. Puck Brecher

Publisher: University of Hawaii Press

Published: 2019-10-31

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 0824879678

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This wide-ranging collection seeks to reassess conventional understanding of Japan’s Asia-Pacific War by defamiliarizing and expanding the rhetorical narrative. Its nine chapters, diverse in theme and method, are united in their goal to recover a measured historicity about the conflict by either introducing new areas of knowledge or reinterpreting existing ones. Collectively, they cast doubt on the war as familiar and recognizable, compelling readers to view it with fresh eyes. Following an introduction that problematizes timeworn narratives about a “unified Japan” and its “illegal war” or “race war,” early chapters on the destruction of Japan’s diplomatic records and government interest in an egalitarian health care policy before, during, and after the war oblige us to question selective histories and moral judgments about wartime Japan. The discussion then turns to artistic/cultural production and self-determination, specifically to Osaka rakugo performers who used comedy to contend with state oppression and to the role of women in creating care packages for soldiers abroad. Other chapters cast doubt on well-trod stereotypes (Japan’s lack of pragmatism in its diplomatic relations with neutral nations and its irrational and fatalistic military leadership) and examine resistance to the war by a prominent Japanese Christian intellectual. The volume concludes with two nuanced responses to race in wartime Japan, one maintaining the importance of racial categories while recognizing the “performance of Japaneseness,” the other observing that communities often reflected official government policies through nationality rather than race. Contrasting findings like these underscore the need to ask new questions and fill old gaps in our understanding of a historical event that, after more than seventy years, remains as provocative and divisive as ever. Defamiliarizing Japan’s Asia-Pacific War will find a ready audience among World War II historians as well as specialists in war and society, social history, and the growing fields of material culture and civic history.