In April 1859, at age fifty, Shinohara Chūemon left his old life behind. Chūemon, a well-off farmer in his home village, departed for the new port city of Yokohama, where he remained for the next ...fourteen years. There, as a merchant trading with foreigners in the aftermath of Japan's 1853 "opening" to the West, he witnessed the collapse of the Tokugawa shogunate, the civil war that followed, and the Meiji Restoration's reforms.The Merchant's Talelooks through Chūemon's eyes at the upheavals of this period.In a narrative history rich in colorful detail, Simon Partner uses the story of an ordinary merchant farmer and its Yokohama setting as a vantage point onto sweeping social transformation and its unwitting agents. Chūemon, like most newcomers to Yokohama, came in search of economic opportunity. His story sheds light on vital issues in Japan's modern history, including the legacies of the Meiji Restoration; the East Asian treaty port system; and the importance of everyday life-food, clothing, medicine, and hygiene-for national identity. Centered on an individual,The Merchant's Taleis also the story of a place. Created under pressure from aggressive foreign powers, Yokohama was the scene of gunboat diplomacy, a connection to global markets, the birthplace of new lifestyles, and the beachhead of Japan's modernization. Partner's history of a vibrant meeting place humanizes the story of Japan's revolutionary 1860s and their profound consequences for Japanese society and culture.
This indispensable one-volume narrative examines the history, culture, environment, economy, politics, future, and more of the city of Tokyo, Japan's political and cultural capital.Provides a ...Chronology of succinct, at-a-glance timeline of events in the history of the city Offers "Life in the City" inset boxes to help readers to gain a better understanding of what life is like in the city, told from the viewpoint of city inhabitants and visitorsUses sidebars to reveal fun facts about the city, such as interesting laws and cultural taboosIllustrates the text using photos of important sites, people, and cultural traditions found in the city Narratives in an accessible and engaging, ideal for students as well as general readersFeatures a complete table of Tokyo's past leaders highlighting their defining accomplishments within the context of Japan's history
Doctors of empire Kim, Hoi-eun
Doctors of empire,
2014, 20140723, 2014, 2015-03-18
eBook
In Doctors of Empire, Hoi-eun Kim recounts the story of the almost 1,200 Japanese medical students who rushed to German universities to learn cutting-edge knowledge from the world leaders in ...medicine, and of the dozen German physicians who were invited to Japan to transform the country's medical institutions and education.
Arbitraging Japan Miyazaki, Hirokazu
2013., 20121202, 2013, 2013-01-01, 20130101
eBook
For many financial market professionals worldwide, the era of high finance is over. The times in which bankers and financiers were the primary movers and shakers of both economy and society have come ...to an abrupt halt. What has this shift meant for the future of capitalism? What has it meant for the future of the financial industry? What about the lives and careers of financial operators who were once driven by utopian visions of economic, social, and personal transformation? And what does it mean for critics of capitalism who have long predicted the end of financial institutions? Hirokazu Miyazaki answers these questions through a close examination of the careers and intellectual trajectories of a group of pioneering derivatives traders in Japan during the 1990s and 2000s.
"During the Heian period (794-1185), the sacred mountain Kinpusen, literally the "Peak of Gold," came to cultural prominence as a pilgrimage destination for the most powerful men in Japan--the ...Fujiwara regents and the retired emperors. Real and Imagined depicts their one-hundred-kilometer trek from the capital to the rocky summit as well as the imaginative landscape they navigated. Kinpusen was believed to be a realm of immortals, the domain of an unconventional bodhisattva, and the home of an indigenous pantheon of kami. These nominally private journeys to Kinpusen had political implications for both the pilgrims and the mountain. While members of the aristocracy and royalty used pilgrimage to legitimate themselves and compete with one another, their patronage fed rivalry among religious institutions. Thus, after flourishing under the Fujiwara regents, Kinpusen's cult and community were rent by violent altercations with the great Nara temple Kōfukuji. The resulting institutional reconfigurations laid the groundwork for Shugendō, a new movement focused on religious mountain practice that emerged around 1300. Using archival sources, archaeological materials, noblemen's journals, sutras, official histories, and vernacular narratives, this original study sheds new light on Kinpusen, positioning it within the broader religious and political history of the Heian period.".
This book is a one-man ethnography that seeks to understand life at the bottom of Japanese society through the personality of day laborer and street-philosopher Kimitsu Nishikawa. Through interviews ...with Kimitsu, Tom Gill analyzes life in the Yokohama slum district of Kotobuki-a district in which welfare has come to replace labor.
Tokyo Thornbury, Barbara E; Schulz, Evelyn
2017., 2017, 2017-10-17
eBook
Tokyo: Memory, Imagination, and the City is a collection of eight essays that explore Tokyo urban space from the perspective of memory in works of the imagination—novels, short stories, poetry, ...essays, and films. Written by scholars of Japanese studies based in England, Germany, Japan, and the United States, the book focuses on texts produced in Japan since the 1980s. The closing years of the Shōwa period (1926-1989) were a watershed decade of spatial transformation in Tokyo. It was also a time (in Japan, as elsewhere) when conversations about the nature of memory—historical, cultural, collective, and individual—intensified. The contributors to the volume share the view that works of the imagination are constitutive elements of how cities are experienced and perceived. Each of the essays responds to the growing interest in studies on Tokyo with a literary-cultural orientation.
The chapters in this volume use diverse methodologies to challenge a number of long-standing assumptions regarding the principal contours of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Japanese society, ...especially regarding values, social hierarchy, state authority, and the construction and spread of identity.
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.
In September 1923, a magnitude 7.9 earthquake devastated eastern Japan, killing more than 120,000 people and leaving two million homeless. Using a rich array of source material, J. Charles Schencking ...tells for the first time the graphic tale of Tokyo's destruction and rebirth. In emotive prose, he documents how the citizens of Tokyo experienced this unprecedented calamity and explores the ways in which it rattled people's deep-seated anxieties about modernity. While explaining how and why the disaster compelled people to reflect on Japanese society, he also examines how reconstruction encouraged the capital's inhabitants to entertain new types of urbanism as they rebuilt their world.
Some residents hoped that a grandiose metropolis, reflecting new values, would rise from the ashes of disaster-ravaged Tokyo. Many, however, desired a quick return of the city they once called home. Opportunistic elites advocated innovative state infrastructure to better manage the daily lives of Tokyo residents. Others focused on rejuvenating society -- morally, economically, and spiritually -- to combat the perceived degeneration of Japan. Schencking explores the inspiration behind these dreams and the extent to which they were realized. He investigates why Japanese citizens from all walks of life responded to overtures for renewal with varying degrees of acceptance, ambivalence, and resistance. His research not only sheds light on Japan's experience with and interpretation of the earthquake but challenges widespread assumptions that disasters unite stricken societies, creating a "blank slate" for radical transformation. National reconstruction in the wake of the Great Kanto Earthquake, Schencking demonstrates, proved to be illusive.
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