Some leading Japan scholars present new research and thinking on the profound relationship between culture and disaster in Japan, focusing on the triple disasters of March 2011, the great quakes of ...1995 and 1923, and the atomic bombings of 1945.
Japan after 3/11 Karan, Pradyumna P; Suganuma, Unryu
09/2016
eBook
On March 11, 2011, an underwater earthquake off the Pacific coast of Tohoku, Japan, triggered one of the most devastating tsunamis of a generation. The aftermath was overwhelming: communities were ...reduced to rubble, thousands of people were missing or dead, and relief organizations struggled to reach affected areas to provide aid for survivors and victims of radiation from compromised nuclear reactors.
InJapan after 3/11, editors Pradyumna P. Karan and Unryu Suganuma assemble geographers, economists, humanists, and scientists to consider the complex economic, physical, and social impacts of this heartbreaking disaster. Historical geographers place the events of March 2011 in context, while other contributors assess the damage and recommend strategies for the long process of reclamation and rebuilding. The book also includes interviews with victims that explore the social implications of radioactive contamination and invite comparisons to the discrimination faced by survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. Balancing the natural and social sciences, this timely volume offers not only a model of interdisciplinary research for scholars but also an invaluable guide to the planning and implementation of reconstruction.
Japan's invasion of Manchuria in September of 1931 initiated a new phase of brutal occupation and warfare in Asia and the Pacific. It forwarded the project of remaking the Japanese state along ...technocratic and fascistic lines and creating a self-sufficient Asian bloc centered on Japan and its puppet state of Manchukuo. InPlanning for Empire, Janis Mimura traces the origins and evolution of this new order and the ideas and policies of its chief architects, the reform bureaucrats. The reform bureaucrats pursued a radical, authoritarian vision of modern Japan in which public and private spheres were fused, ownership and control of capital were separated, and society was ruled by technocrats.
Mimura shifts our attention away from reactionary young officers to state planners-reform bureaucrats, total war officers, new zaibatsu leaders, economists, political scientists, engineers, and labor party leaders. She shows how empire building and war mobilization raised the stature and influence of these middle-class professionals by calling forth new government planning agencies, research bureaus, and think tanks to draft Five Year industrial plans, rationalize industry, mobilize the masses, streamline the bureaucracy, and manage big business. Deftly examining the political battles and compromises of Japanese technocrats in their bid for political power and Asian hegemony,Planning for Empireoffers a new perspective on Japanese fascism by revealing its modern roots in the close interaction of technology and right-wing ideology.
This groundbreaking study explores the recent dramatic changes brought about in Japan by the influx of a non-Japanese population, Filipina brides. Lieba Faier investigates how Filipina women who ...emigrated to rural Japan to work in hostess bars-where initially they were widely disparaged as prostitutes and foreigners-came to be identified by the local residents as "ideal, traditional Japanese brides."Intimate Encounters, an ethnography of cultural encounters, unravels this paradox by examining the everyday relational dynamics that drive these interactions. Faier remaps Japan, the Philippines, and the United States into what she terms a "zone of encounters," showing how the meanings of Filipino and Japanese culture and identity are transformed and how these changes are accomplished through ordinary interpersonal exchanges. Intimate Encounters provides an insightful new perspective from which to reconsider national subjectivities amid the increasing pressures of globalization, thereby broadening and deepening our understanding of the larger issues of migration and disapora.
Legacies of Fukushima Kyle Cleveland, Scott Gabriel Knowles, Ryuma Shineha / Kyle Cleveland, Scott Gabriel Knowles, Ryuma Shineha
2021, 2021-04-02
eBook
It was an unlikely convergence of events. A 9.0 magnitude earthquake, the largest in Japanese memory and the fourth largest recorded in world history; a tsunami that peaked at forty meters, ...devastating the seaboard of northeastern Japan; three reactors in meltdown at the Daiichi nuclear power plant in Fukushima; experts in disarray and suffering victims young and old. It was, as well, an unlikely convergence of legacies. Submerged traumas resurfaced and communities long accustomed to living quietly with hazards suddenly were heard. New legacies of disaster were handed down, unfolding slowly for generations to come.The defining disaster of contemporary Japanese history still goes by many different names: The Great East Japan Earthquake; the 2011 T?hoku Earthquake and Tsunami; the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Disaster; the 3.11 Triple Disaster. Each name represents a struggle to place the disaster on a map and fix a date to a timeline. But within each of these names hides a combination of disasters and legacies that converged on March 11, 2011, before veering away in all directions: to the past, to the future, across a nation, and around the world. Which pathways from the past will continue, which pathways ended with 3.11, and how are these legacies entangled? Legacies of Fukushima places these questions front and center. The authors collected here contextualize 3.11 as a disaster with a long period of premonition and an uncertain future. The volume employs a critical disaster studies approach, and the authors are drawn from the realms of journalism and academia, science policy and citizen science, activism and governance—and they come from East Asia, America, and Europe. 3.11 is a Japanese legacy with global impact, and the authors and their methods reflect this diversity of experience.Contributors: Sean Bonner, Azby Brown, Kyle Cleveland, Martin Fackler, Robert Jacobs, Paul Jobin, Kohta Juraku, Tatsuhiro Kamisato, Jeff Kingston, William J. Kinsella, Scott Gabriel Knowles, Robert Jay Lifton, Luis Felipe R. Murillo, Ba?ak Saraç-Lesavre, Sonja D. Schmid, Ryuma Shineha, James Simms, Tatsujiro Suzuki, Ekou Yagi.
High economic growth and relatively equitable distribution were among the most conspicuous characteristics of the postwar Japanese political economy. The lure of the Japanese model, however, has ...faded since the 1990s. Growth is in short supply and equality a thing of the past. InWelfare through Work, Mari Miura looks in depth at Japan's social protection system as a factor in the contemporary malaise of the Japanese political economy.
The Japanese social protection system should be understood as a system of "welfare through work," Miura suggests, because employment protection has functionally substituted for income maintenance. A gendered dual system in the labor market allowed a high degree of labor market flexibility, which enabled Japan to achieve high employment rates as well as strong legal protections for regular workers. In recent years, conservatives gradually replaced the productivism and cooperatism that had resulted from earlier party politics with neoliberalism, which, in turn, hampered the effectiveness of the welfare through work system.
In Miura's view, the dynamics of partisan competition fostered ideational renewal, just as the political visions and ideologies of the governing party strongly affected the design of the social protection system. In the scenario Miura describes, the partisan dynamics since the 1990s resulted in the policy change that further undermined the social protection system, and the ensuing disruption has been felt throughout Japan.
In The Periodical Press in Treaty-Port Japan, Munson offers an analytical survey of English- and Japanese-language print media published in the 'treaty port' of Yokohama during the tumultuous final ...decade of the Tokugawa shogunate.
The triple disaster that struck Japan in March 2011 forced people living there to confront new risks in their lives. Despite the Japanese government's reassurance that radiation exposure would be ...small and unlikely to affect the health of the general population, many questioned the government's commitment to protecting their health. The disaster prompted them to become vigilant about limiting their risk exposure, and food emerged as a key area where citizens could determine their own levels of acceptable risk.
Food Safety after Fukushima examines the process by which notions about what is safe to eat were formulated after the nuclear meltdown. Its central argument is that as citizens informed themselves about potential risks, they also became savvier in their assessment of the government's handling of the crisis. The author terms this "Scientific Citizenship," and he shows that the acquisition of scientific knowledge on the part of citizens resulted in a transformed relationship between individuals and the state. Groups of citizens turned to existing and newly formed organizations where food was sourced from areas far away from the nuclear accident or screened to stricter standards than those required by the state. These organizations enabled citizens to exchange information about the disaster, meet food producers, and work to establish networks of trust where food they considered safe could circulate.
Based on extensive fieldwork and interviews with citizens groups, mothers' associations, farmers, government officials, and retailers, Food Safety after Fukushima reflects on how social relations were affected by the accident. The author vividly depicts an environment where trust between food producers and consumers had been shaken, where people felt uneasy about their food choices and the consequences they might have for their children, and where farmers were forced to deal with the consequences of pollution that was not of their making. Most poignantly, the book conveys the heavy burden now attached to the name "Fukushima" in the popular imagination and explores efforts to resurrect it.
Although stereotypically homogenized and hostile to immigrants, Japan has experienced an influx of foreigners from Asia and Latin America in recent decades. InFighting for Foreigners, Apichai W. ...Shipper details how, in response, Japanese citizens have established a variety of local advocacy groups-some faith based, some secular-to help immigrants secure access to social services, economic equity, and political rights.
Drawing on his years of ethnographic fieldwork and a pragmatic account of political motivation he calls associative activism, Shipper asserts that institutions that support illegal foreigners make the most dramatic contributions to democratic multiculturalism. The changing demographics of Japan have been stimulating public discussions, the political participation of marginalized groups, and calls for fair treatment of immigrants. Nongovernmental organizations established by the Japanese have been more effective than the ethnically particular associations formed by migrants themselves, Shipper finds. Activists who initially work in concert to solve specific and local problems eventually become more ambitious in terms of political representation and opinion formation.
As debates about the costs and benefits of immigration rage across the developed world, Shipper's research offers a refreshing new perspective: rather than undermining democracy in industrialized society, immigrants can make a positive institutional contribution to vibrant forms of democratic multiculturalism.
