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Author: Louis-Frédéric Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: 9780674017535 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 1130
Book Description
"Knowing Japan and the Japanese better," Louis Frédéric states in the introduction to this encyclopedia, "is one of the necessities of modern life." The Japanese have a profound knowledge of every aspect and detail of Western societies. Unfortunately, we in the West cannot say the same about our knowledge of Japan. We tend to see Japan through a veil of exoticism, as a land of ancient customs and exquisite arts; or we view it as a powerful contributor to the global economy, the source of cutting-edge electronics and innovative management techniques. To go beyond these clichés, we must begin to see how apparently contradictory aspects of modern Japanese culture spring from the country's evolution through more than two millennia of history. This richly detailed yet concise encyclopedia is a guide to the full range of Japanese history and civilization, from the dawn of its prehistory to today, providing clear and accessible information on society and institutions, commerce and industry, sciences, sports, and politics, with particular emphasis on religion, material culture, and the arts. The volume is enhanced by maps and illustrations, along with a detailed chronology of more than 2,000 years of Japanese history and a comprehensive bibliography. Cross-references and an index help the reader trace themes from one article to the next. Japan Encyclopedia will be an indispensable one-volume reference for students, scholars, travelers, journalists, and anyone who wishes to learn more about the past and present of this great world civilization.
Author: Louis-Frédéric Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: 9780674017535 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 1130
Book Description
"Knowing Japan and the Japanese better," Louis Frédéric states in the introduction to this encyclopedia, "is one of the necessities of modern life." The Japanese have a profound knowledge of every aspect and detail of Western societies. Unfortunately, we in the West cannot say the same about our knowledge of Japan. We tend to see Japan through a veil of exoticism, as a land of ancient customs and exquisite arts; or we view it as a powerful contributor to the global economy, the source of cutting-edge electronics and innovative management techniques. To go beyond these clichés, we must begin to see how apparently contradictory aspects of modern Japanese culture spring from the country's evolution through more than two millennia of history. This richly detailed yet concise encyclopedia is a guide to the full range of Japanese history and civilization, from the dawn of its prehistory to today, providing clear and accessible information on society and institutions, commerce and industry, sciences, sports, and politics, with particular emphasis on religion, material culture, and the arts. The volume is enhanced by maps and illustrations, along with a detailed chronology of more than 2,000 years of Japanese history and a comprehensive bibliography. Cross-references and an index help the reader trace themes from one article to the next. Japan Encyclopedia will be an indispensable one-volume reference for students, scholars, travelers, journalists, and anyone who wishes to learn more about the past and present of this great world civilization.
Author: Sandra Wilson Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1135024456 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 222
Book Description
Nationalism was one of the most important forces in 20th century Japan. It pervaded almost all aspects of Japanese life, but was a complex phenomenon, frequently changing, and often meaning different things to different people. This book brings together interesting, original new work, by a range of international leading scholars who consider Japanese nationalism in a wide variety of its aspects. Overall, the book provides many new insights and much new thinking on what continues to be a crucially important factor shaping current developments in Japan.
Author: Eiko Maruko Siniawer Publisher: Cornell University Press ISBN: 0801454360 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 415
Book Description
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.
Author: Daniel V. Botsman Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 1400849292 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 338
Book Description
The kinds of punishment used in a society have long been considered an important criterion in judging whether a society is civilized or barbaric, advanced or backward, modern or premodern. Focusing on Japan, and the dramatic revolution in punishments that occurred after the Meiji Restoration, Daniel Botsman asks how such distinctions have affected our understanding of the past and contributed, in turn, to the proliferation of new kinds of barbarity in the modern world. While there is no denying the ferocity of many of the penal practices in use during the Tokugawa period (1600-1868), this book begins by showing that these formed part of a sophisticated system of order that did have its limits. Botsman then demonstrates that although significant innovations occurred later in the period, they did not fit smoothly into the "modernization" process. Instead, he argues, the Western powers forced a break with the past by using the specter of Oriental barbarism to justify their own aggressive expansion into East Asia. The ensuing changes were not simply imposed from outside, however. The Meiji regime soon realized that the modern prison could serve not only as a symbol of Japan's international progress but also as a powerful domestic tool. The first English-language study of the history of punishment in Japan, the book concludes by examining how modern ideas about progress and civilization shaped penal practices in Japan's own colonial empire.
Author: Karen Margaret Gerhart Publisher: University of Hawaii Press ISBN: 082483755X Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 286
Book Description
This study is the first in the English language to explore the ways medieval Japanese sought to overcome their sense of powerlessness over death. By attending to both religious practice and ritual objects used in funerals in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, it seeks to provide a new understanding of the relationship between the two. Karen Gerhart looks at how these special objects and rituals functioned by analyzing case studies culled from written records, diaries, and illustrated handscrolls, and by examining surviving funerary structures and painted and sculpted images. The work is divided into two parts, beginning with compelling depictions of funerary and memorial rites of several members of the aristocracy and military elite. The second part addresses the material culture of death and analyzes objects meant to sequester the dead from the living: screens, shrouds, coffins, carriages, wooden fences. This is followed by an examination of implements (banners, canopies, censers, musical instruments, offering vessels) used in memorial rituals. The final chapter discusses the various types of and uses for portraits of the deceased, focusing on the manner of their display, the patrons who commissioned them, and the types of rituals performed in front of them. Gerhart delineates the distinction between objects created for a single funeral—and meant for use in close proximity to the body, such as coffins—and those, such as banners, intended for use in multiple funerals and other Buddhist services. Richly detailed and generously illustrated, Gerhart introduces a new perspective on objects typically either overlooked by scholars or valued primarily for their artistic qualities. By placing them in the context of ritual, visual, and material culture, she reveals how rituals and ritual objects together helped to comfort the living and improve the deceased’s situation in the afterlife as well as to guide and cement societal norms of class and gender. Not only does her book make a significant contribution in the impressive amount of new information that it introduces, it also makes an important theoretical contribution as well in its interweaving of the interests and approaches of the art historian and the historian of religion. By directly engaging and challenging methodologies relevant to ritual studies, material culture, and art history, it changes once and for all our way of thinking about the visual and religious culture of premodern Japan.
Author: Barbara Molony Publisher: BRILL ISBN: 1684172837 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 420
Book Description
The chemical industry was Japan's first "high-tech" industry, and its companies the most important examples of a noteworthy business structure in the prewar period, the so-called "new zaibatsu." Molony deals with one branch of the chemical industry--electrochemicals--with shorter descriptions of related branches. At the hear of the book is the story of Noguchi Jun, founder of Japan Nitrogenous Fertilizers (Nippon Chisso Hiryō) and one of Japan's best known twentieth-century entrepreneurs. Noguchi's firm developed from a fertilizer company to a multifaceted company producing a wide range of technologically sophisticated products while he forged ties with civilian and military leaders in Japan and Korea who controlled access to capital and to the hydroelectricity needed for chemical manufacture. The book also treats the second and third waves of investment and electrochemicals during the 1920s and 1930s. This study analyzes the nature of prewar Japanese entrepreneurship, the links between technology and investment, the emergence of a class of scientific managers, and the relationship of business strategy to imperialism in the years leading up to World War II.
Author: Hidemasa Morikawa Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0195351207 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 241
Book Description
This book analyzes the top management of leading Japanese enterprises. Drawing on the work of Alfred Chandler, Morikawa demonstrates the difference between family-owned firms and professionally managed firms.
Author: Lori R. Meeks Publisher: University of Hawaii Press ISBN: 0824860640 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 425
Book Description
Hokkeji, an ancient Nara temple that once stood at the apex of a state convent network established by Queen-Consort Komyo (701–760), possesses a history that in some ways is bigger than itself. Its development is emblematic of larger patterns in the history of female monasticism in Japan. In Hokkeji and the Reemergence of Female Monastic Orders in Premodern Japan, Lori Meeks explores the revival of Japan’s most famous convent, an institution that had endured some four hundred years of decline following its establishment. With the help of the Ritsu (Vinaya)-revivalist priest Eison (1201–1290), privately professed women who had taken up residence at Hokkeji succeeded in reestablishing a nuns’ ordination lineage in Japan. Meeks considers a broad range of issues surrounding women’s engagement with Buddhism during a time when their status within the tradition was undergoing significant change. The thirteenth century brought women greater opportunities for ordination and institutional leadership, but it also saw the spread of increasingly androcentric Buddhist doctrine. Hokkeji explores these contradictions. In addition to addressing the socio-cultural, economic, and ritual life of the convent, Hokkeji examines how women interpreted, used, and "talked past" canonical Buddhist doctrines, which posited women’s bodies as unfit for buddhahood and the salvation of women to be unattainable without the mediation of male priests. Texts associated with Hokkeji, Meeks argues, suggest that nuns there pursued a spiritual life untroubled by the so-called soteriological obstacles of womanhood. With little concern for the alleged karmic defilements of their gender, the female community at Hokkeji practiced Buddhism in ways resembling male priests: they performed regular liturgies, offered memorial and other priestly services to local lay believers, and promoted their temple as a center for devotional practice. What distinguished Hokkeji nuns from their male counterparts was that many of their daily practices focused on the veneration of a female deity, their founder Queen-Consort Komyo, whom they regarded as a manifestation of the bodhisattva Kannon. Hokkeji rejects the commonly accepted notion that women simply internalized orthodox Buddhist discourses meant to discourage female practice and offers new perspectives on the religious lives of women in premodern Japan. Its attention to the relationship between doctrine and socio-cultural practice produces a fuller view of Buddhism as it was practiced on the ground, outside the rarefied world of Buddhist scholasticism.
Author: Joseph A. Maguire Publisher: Psychology Press ISBN: 9780714653587 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 200
Book Description
Examines the tension between traditional models of Japanese sport, developed over centuries of relative isolation, and the forces of modernization and Japanese determination to become a global power.
Author: John S. Brownlee Publisher: UBC Press ISBN: 0774842547 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 269
Book Description
In Japanese Historians and the National Myths, John Brownlee examines how Japanese historians between 1600 and 1945 interpreted the ancient myths of their origins. Ancient tales tell of Japan's creation in the Age of the Gods, and of Jinmu, a direct descendant of the Sun Goddess and first emperor of the imperial line. These founding myths went unchallenged until Confucian scholars in the Tokugawa period initiated a reassessment of the ancient history of Japan. These myths lay at the core of Japanese identity and provided legitimacy for the imperial state. Focusing on the theme of conflict and accommodation between scholars on one side and government and society on the other, Brownlee follows the historians' reactions to pressure and trends and their eventual understanding of history as a science in the service of the Japanese nation.
Author: Louis-Frédéric
Author: Louis-Frédéric
Author: Sandra Wilson
Author: Eiko Maruko Siniawer
Author: Daniel V. Botsman
Author: Karen Margaret Gerhart
Author: Barbara Molony
Author: Hidemasa Morikawa
Author: Lori R. Meeks
Author: Joseph A. Maguire
Author: John S. Brownlee