Recreating Japanese Men
Recreating Japanese Men

Author: Sabine Frühstück

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2011-10-04

Total Pages: 358

ISBN-13: 0520950321

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The essays in this groundbreaking book explore the meanings of manhood in Japan from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries. Recreating Japanese Men examines a broad range of attitudes regarding properly masculine pursuits and modes of behavior. It charts breakdowns in traditional and conventional societal roles and the resulting crises of masculinity. Contributors address key questions about Japanese manhood ranging from icons such as the samurai to marginal men including hermaphrodites, robots, techno-geeks, rock climbers, shop clerks, soldiers, shoguns, and more. In addition to bringing historical evidence to bear on definitions of masculinity, contributors provide fresh analyses on the ways contemporary modes and styles of masculinity have affected Japanese men’s sense of gender as authentic and stable.

Recreating Japanese Men
Recreating Japanese Men

Author: Sabine Fruhstuck

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2011-10-04

Total Pages: 358

ISBN-13: 0520267370

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“Recreating Japanese Men is a wonderful and invaluable book. Its interdisciplinary mix of essays opens the door to a new world of scholarship on masculinity in Japan." —David L. Howell, Harvard University “By considering a wide variety of alternative masculinities throughout Japanese history, these essays reveal the tensions, conflicts and overlapping between competing masculine and feminine ideals and practices in surprising ways.” —Robert A. Nye, Oregon State University “This gallery of striking but also subtle images of Japanese masculinity both reinforces old and reveals new historical understandings of Japanese political and military institutions, social divisions, and cultural anxieties. Essential reading in both Japan and masculinity studies.“ --Gary Cross, author of Men to Boys: The Making of Modern Immaturity.

Cool Japanese Men
Cool Japanese Men

Author: Brigitte Steger

Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 239

ISBN-13: 3643909551

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Japanese men are becoming cool. The suit-and-tie salaryman remodels himself with beauty treatments and 'cool biz' fashion. Loyal company soldiers are reborn as cool, attentive fathers. Hip hop dance is as manly as martial arts. Could it even be cool for middle-aged men to idolize teenage girl popstars? This collection of studies from the University of Cambridge provides fascinating insights into the contemporary lives of Japanese men as it looks behind the image of 'Cool Japan.' (Series: Japanese Studies / Japanologie, Vol. 6) [Subject: Japanese Studies, Cultural Studies]

Recreating Japanese Women, 1600-1945
Recreating Japanese Women, 1600-1945

Author: Gail Lee Bernstein

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 1991-07-09

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13: 0520070178

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In thirteen wide-ranging essays, scholars and students of Asian and women's studies will find a vivid exploration of how female roles and feminine identity have evolved over 350 years, from the Tokugawa era to the end of World War II. Starting from the premise that gender is not a biological given, but is socially constructed and culturally transmitted, the authors describe the forces of change in the construction of female gender and explore the gap between the ideal of womanhood and the reality of Japanese women's lives. Most of all, the contributors speak to the diversity that has characterized women's experience in Japan. This is an imaginative, pioneering work, offering an interdisciplinary approach that will encourage a reconsideration of the paradigms of women's history, hitherto rooted in the Western experience.

Reconstructing Adult Masculinities
Reconstructing Adult Masculinities

Author: Emma E. Cook

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-03-22

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 1317433440

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Over the past two decades, Japan’s socioeconomic environment has undergone considerable changes prompted by both a long recession and the relaxation of particular labour laws in the 1990s and 2000s. Within this context, "freeters", part-time workers aged between fifteen and thirty-four who are not housewives or students, emerged into the public arena as a social problem. This book, drawing on six years of ethnographic research, takes the lives of male freeters as a lens to examine contemporary ideas and experiences of adult masculinities. It queries how notions of adulthood and masculinity are interwoven and how these ideals are changing in the face of large-scale employment shifts. Highlighting the continuing importance of productivity and labour in understandings of masculinities, it argues that men experience and practice multiple masculinities which are often contradictory, sometimes limiting, and change as they age and in interaction with others, and with social structures, institutions, and expectations. Providing a fascinating alternative to the stereotypical idea of the Japanese male as a salaryman, this book will be of huge interest to students and scholars of Japanese culture and society, social and cultural anthropology, gender and men's studies.

Capturing Contemporary Japan
Capturing Contemporary Japan

Author: Satsuki Kawano

Publisher: University of Hawaii Press

Published: 2014-01-31

Total Pages: 370

ISBN-13: 0824838696

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What are people’s life experiences in present-day Japan? This timely volume addresses fundamental questions vital to understanding Japan in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Its chapters collectively reveal a questioning of middle-class ideals once considered the essence of Japaneseness. In the postwar model household a man was expected to obtain a job at a major firm that offered life-long employment; his counterpart, the “professional” housewife, managed the domestic sphere and the children, who were educated in a system that provided a path to mainstream success. In the past twenty years, however, Japanese society has seen a sharp increase in precarious forms of employment, higher divorce rates, and a widening gap between haves and have-nots. Contributors draw on rich, nuanced fieldwork data collected during the 2000s to examine work, schooling, family and marital relations, child rearing, entertainment, lifestyle choices, community support, consumption and waste, material culture, well-being, aging, death and memorial rites, and sexuality. The voices in these pages vary widely: They include schoolchildren, teenagers, career women, unmarried women, young mothers, people with disabilities, small business owners, organic farmers, retirees, and the elderly.

Modern Japan
Modern Japan

Author: Elise Tipton

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-09-19

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 1317672402

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This thoroughly revised and updated third edition of Modern Japan provides a concise and fascinating introduction to the social, cultural and political history of modern Japan. Ranging from the Tokugawa period to the present day, Tipton links everyday lives with major historical developments, charting the country’s evolution into a modernized, economic and political world power. Drawing on the latest research, the book features new material on the global financial crisis, the Fukushima nuclear disaster and continuing political instability. While retaining analysis of women's issues, minorities and popular culture, this third edition's expanded coverage of Japan's role in the Second World War, life in the empire and the history of science, medicine and technology contributes to a sense of the complexity and diversity of modern Japan. Including an updated chronology, glossary and guide to further reading, as well as new maps and illustrations to help students to engage directly with the subject matter, this highly accessible and comprehensive textbook is an essential resource for students, scholars and teachers of Japanese history, politics, culture and society.

Japan and the Shackles of the Past
Japan and the Shackles of the Past

Author: R. Taggart Murphy

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2014-11-07

Total Pages: 432

ISBN-13: 0190213256

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Japan is one of the world's wealthiest and most technologically advanced nations, and its rapid ascent to global power status after 1853 remains one of the most remarkable stories in modern world history. Yet it has not been an easy path; military catastrophe, political atrophy, and economic upheavals have made regular appearances from the feudal era to the present. Today, Japan is seen as a has-been with a sluggish economy, an aging population, dysfunctional politics, and a business landscape dominated by yesterday's champions. Though it is supposed to be America's strongest ally in the Asia-Pacific region, it has almost entirely disappeared from the American radar screen. In Japan and the Shackles of the Past, R. Taggart Murphy places the current troubles of Japan in a sweeping historical context, moving deftly from early feudal times to the modern age that began with the Meiji Restoration. Combining fascinating analyses of Japanese culture and society over the centuries with hard-headed accounts of Japan's numerous political regimes, Murphy not only reshapes our understanding of Japanese history, but of Japan's place in the contemporary world. He concedes that Japan has indeed been out of sight and out of mind in recent decades, but contends that this is already changing. Political and economic developments in Japan today risk upheaval in the pivotal arena of Northeast Asia, inviting comparisons with Europe on the eve of the First World War. America's half-completed effort to remake Japan in the late 1940s is unraveling, and the American foreign policy and defense establishment is directly culpable for what has happened. The one apparent exception to Japan's malaise is the vitality of its pop culture, but it's actually no exception at all; rather, it provides critical clues to what is going on now. With insights into everything from Japan's politics and economics to the texture of daily life, gender relations, the changing business landscape, and popular and high culture, Japan and the Shackles of the Past is the indispensable guide to understanding Japan in all its complexity.