Japan Emerging Friday, Karl
2012, 20180419, 2018-04-19, 2012-03-06
eBook
Japan Emerging provides a comprehensive survey of Japan from prehistory to the nineteenth century. Incorporating the latest scholarship and methodology, leading authorities writing specifically for ...this volume outline and explore the main developments in Japanese life through ancient, classical, medieval, and early modern periods. Instead of relying solely on lists of dates and prominent names, the authors focus on why and how Japanese political, social, economic, and intellectual life evolved. Each part begins with a timeline and a set of guiding questions and issues to help orient readers and enhance continuity. Engaging, thorough, and accessible, this is an essential text for all students and scholars of Japanese history.
This Open Access book includes chapters on the key turning points in modern Japanese history from the Meiji Restoration to Japan-China diplomatic normalization in the 1970s and beyond. The topics ...covered include the First Sino-Japanese War, the Russo-Japanese War, the First and Second World Wars, the Manchurian Crisis, the US Occupation, postwar Japan-China relations, and postwar decolonization. Readers will learn how new research by Japanese historians has led to the revision of conventional views on the turbulent history of Japan, once the enemy of the United States in the war in the Asia-Pacific and now the US’s closest ally in the region. Historical research on the modern history of Japan has been constantly updated. From the Meiji Restoration to the present day, Japan has experienced the effects of modernization and globalization. Recent historical inquiries in Japan tend to focus on the merging of modern history with global history. During the past 150 years, Japan has never been separated from events in international affairs. Scholars and general readers will appreciate the new factual details and philosophical perspectives that this volume provides drawing on the work of fourteen authors who are recognized leaders in their fields. Yuichi Hosoya is Professor of International Politics at Keio University. Masayuki Yamauchi is Specially Appointed Professor at the Musashino University Institute for Global Affairs and Professor Emeritus, the University of Tokyo.
This innovative study demonstrates how Japanese empire-builders invented and appropriated the discourse of overpopulation to justify Japanese settler colonialism across the Pacific. Lu defines this ...overpopulation discourse as 'Malthusian expansionism'. This was a set of ideas that demanded additional land abroad to accommodate the supposed surplus people in domestic society on the one hand and emphasized the necessity of national population growth on the other. Lu delineates ideological ties, human connections and institutional continuities between Japanese colonial migration in Asia and Japanese migration to Hawaii and North and South America from 1868 to 1961. He further places Malthusian expansionism at the center of the logic of modern settler colonialism, challenging the conceptual division between migration and settler colonialism in global history. This title is also available as Open Access.
Using ceremonials such as imperial weddings and funerals as models, T. Fujitani illustrates what visual symbols and rituals reveal about monarchy, nationalism, city planning, discipline, gender, ...memory, and modernity. Focusing on the Meiji Period (1868-1912), Fujitani brings recent methods of cultural history to a study of modern Japanese nationalism for the first time.
This volume tackles long-standing interpretative problems in the study of the Opening of Japan. Thinking outside of existing methods, concepts, and theories for writing about Japan and the world, the ...authors eschew national and global history for new organising frameworks.
Few scholars have done more than Harry Harootunian to shape the study of modern Japan. Uneven Moments presents a selection of Harootunian's essays on Japan's intellectual and cultural history from ...the late Tokugawa period to the present that span the many phases of his distinguished career and point to new directions for Japanese studies.
In 1829, three women and three men were paraded through Osaka and crucified. Placards set up at the execution ground proclaimed their crime: they were devotees of the "pernicious creed" of ...Christianity. Middle-aged widows, the women made a living as mediums, healers, and fortune-tellers. Two of the men dabbled in divination; the third was a doctor who collected books in Chinese on Western learning and Christianity. This was a startling development. No one in Japan had been identified and punished as a Christian for more than a century, and now, avowed devotees of the proscribed sect had appeared in the very heart of the realm. Just decades before the arrival of Perry's black ships and the fall of the Tokugawa shogunate, the incident reignited fears of Christians as evil sorcerers, plotting to undermine society and overthrow the country. Christian Sorcerers on Trial offers annotated translations of a range of sources on this sensational event, from the 1827 arrest of the alleged Christians through the case's afterlife. The protagonists' testimonies relate with striking detail their life histories, practices, and motivations. The record of deliberations in Edo and communications between Osaka and Edo officials illuminate the operation of the Tokugawa system of criminal justice. Retellings of the incident show how the story was transmitted and received. Translated and put in context by Fumiko Miyazaki, Kate Wildman Nakai, and Mark Teeuwen, the sources provide students and scholars alike with an extraordinarily rich picture of late Edo social life, religious practices, and judicial procedures.
In Complicit Fictions , James Fujii challenges traditional
approaches to the study of Japanese narratives and Japanese culture
in general. He employs current Western literary-critical theory to
...reveal the social and political contest inherent in modern Japanese
literature and also confronts recent breakthroughs in literary
studies coming out of Japan. The result is a major work that
explicitly questions the eurocentric dimensions of our conception
of modernity. Modern Japanese literature has long been judged by
Western and Japanese critics alike according to its ability to
measure up to Western realist standards-standards that assume the
centrality of an essential self, or subject. Consequently, it has
been made to appear deficient, derivative, or exotically different.
Fujii challenges this prevailing characterization by reconsidering
the very notion of the subject. He focuses on such disparate
twentieth-century writers as Natsume Soseki, Tokuda Shusei,
Shimazaki Toson, and Origuchi Shinobu, and particularly on their
divergent strategies to affirm subjecthood in narrative form. The
author probes what has been ignored or suppressed in earlier
studies-the contestation that inevitably marks the creation of
subjects in a modern nation-state. He demonstrates that as writers
negotiate the social imperatives of national interests (which
always attempt to dictate the limits of subjecthood) they are
ultimately unable to avoid complicity with the aims of the state.
Fujii confronts several historical issues in ways that will
enlighten historians as well as literary critics. He engages theory
to highlight what prevailing criticism typically ignores: the
effects of urbanization on Japanese family life; the relation of
literature to an emerging empire and to popular culture; the
representations of gender, family, and sexuality in Meiji society.
Most important is his exposure of the relationship between state
formation and cultural production. His skillful weaving of literary
theory, textual interpretation, and cultural history makes this a
book that students and scholars of modern Japanese culture will
refer to for years to come.
According to the Marxist interpretation still dominant in Japanese studies, the last century and a half of the Tokugawa period was a time of economic and demographic stagnation. Professors Hanley and ...Yamamura argue that a more satisfactory explanation can be provided within the framework of modem economic theory, and they advance and test three important new hypotheses in this book.
The authors suggest that the Japanese economy grew throughout the Tokugawa period, though slowly by modern standards and unevenly. This growth, they show, tended to exceed the rate of population increase even in the poorer regions, thus raising the living standard despite major famines. Population growth was controlled by a variety of methods, including abortion and infanticide, for the primary purpose of raising the standard of living.
Contrary to the prevailing view of scholars, thus, the conclusions advanced here indicate that the basis for Japan's rapid industrialization in the Meiji period was in many ways already established during the latter part of the Tokugawa period. The authors' analysis combines original fieldwork with study of data based on findings of the postwar years.
Originally published in 1978.
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