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Career Women in Contemporary Japan
Since Japan’s economic recession began in the 1990s, the female workforce has experienced revolutionary changes as greater numbers of women have sought to establish careers. Employment trends indicate that increasingly white-collar professional women are succeeding in breaking through the "glass ceiling", as digital technologies blur and redefine work in spatial, gendered, and ideological terms. This book examines what motivates Japanese women to pursue professional careers in the contemporary neoliberal economy, and how they reconfigure notions of selfhood while doing so. It analyses how professional women contest conventional notions of femininity in contemporary Japan and in turn, negot...
Visions of Precarity in Japanese Popular Culture and Literature
Recent natural as well as man-made cataclysmic events have dramatically changed the status quo of contemporary Japanese society, and following the Asia-Pacific war’s never-ending ‘postwar’ period, Japan has been dramatically forced into a zeitgeist of saigo or ‘post-disaster.’ This radically new worldview has significantly altered the socio-political as well as literary perception of one of the world’s potential superpowers, and in this book the contributors closely examine how Japan’s new paradigm of precarious existence is expressed through a variety of pop-cultural as well as literary media. Addressing the transition from post-war to post-disaster literature, this book exami...
The End of Cool Japan
Today’s convergent media environment offers unprecedented opportunities for sourcing and disseminating previously obscure popular culture material from Japan. However, this presents concerns regarding copyright, ratings and exposure to potentially illegal content which are serious problems for those teaching and researching about Japan. Despite young people’s enthusiasm for Japanese popular culture, these concerns spark debate about whether it can be judged harmful for youth audiences and could therefore herald the end of ‘cool Japan’. This collection brings together Japan specialists in order to identify key challenges in using Japanese popular culture materials in research and teac...
Social Inequality in Post-Growth Japan
In recent decades Japan has changed from a strongly growing, economically successful nation regarded as prime example of social equality and inclusion, to a nation with a stagnating economy, a shrinking population and a very high proportion of elderly people. Within this, new forms of inequality are emerging and deepening, and a new model of Japan as 'gap society' (kakusa shakai) has become common-sense. These new forms of inequality are complex, are caused in different ways by a variety of factors, and require deep-seated reforms in order to remedy them. This book provides a comprehensive overview of inequality in contemporary Japan. It examines inequality in labour and employment, in welfare and family, in education and social mobility, in the urban-rural divide, and concerning immigration, ethnic minorities and gender. The book also considers the widespread anxiety effect of the fear of inequality; and discusses how far these developments in Japan represent a new form of social problem for the wider world.
Examining Japan's Lost Decades
This book examines five features of Japan’s ‘Lost Decades’: the speed of the economic decline in Japan compared to Japan’s earlier global prowess; a rapidly declining population; considerable political instability and failed reform attempts; shifting balances of power in the region and changing relations with Asian neighbouring nations; and the lingering legacy of World War Two. Addressing the question of why the decades were lost, this book offers 15 new perspectives ranging from economics to ideology and beyond. Investigating problems such as the risk-averse behaviour of Japan’s bureaucracy and the absence of strong political leadership, the authors analyse how the delay of ‘lo...
Decision-Making Reform in Japan
In the election to the House of Representatives in 2009, the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) almost tripled the number of its lower house members by winning 308 seats. It subsequently formed a coalition government with the Social Democratic Party and the People’s New Party. The new ruling party promised to completely overhaul policymaking mechanisms that had been shaped over the past decades. Yet, the Japanese people quickly felt disappointed with the DPJ’s ‘policymaking engineering’. Examining the evolution of the decision-making process in Japan under the DPJ administration between the years 2009-2012, this book offers a multidimensional explanation for the reasons for the DPJ’s ...
The EU Migrant Generation in Asia
Drawing on an extensive study with young individuals who migrated to Singapore and Tokyo in the 2010s, this book sheds light on the friendships, emotions, hopes and fears involved in establishing life as Europeans in Asia. It demonstrates how migration to Asian business centres has become a way of distinction and an alternative route of middle-class reproduction for young Europeans during that period. The perceived insecurities of life in the crisis-ridden EU result in these migrants' onward migration or prolonged stays in Asia. Capturing the changing roles of Singapore and Japan as migration destinations, this pioneering work makes the case for EU citizens' aspired lifestyles and professional employment that is no longer only attainable in Europe or the West.
Fukushima and the Arts
The natural and man-made cataclysmic events of the 11 March 2011 disaster, or 3.11, have dramatically altered the status quo of contemporary Japanese society. While much has been written about the social, political, economic, and technical aspects of the disaster, this volume represents one of the first in-depth explorations of the cultural responses to the devastating tsunami, and in particular the ongoing nuclear disaster of Fukushima. This book explores a wide range of cultural responses to the Fukushima nuclear calamity by analyzing examples from literature, poetry, manga, theatre, art photography, documentary and fiction film, and popular music. Individual chapters examine the changing ...
Japan's Border Issues
Japan was sometimes described as a country of "peace" during the Cold War period, in contrast to the continental border conflicts taking place at the time, such as the China-Soviet rivalry. However, as the maritime frontier was "rediscovered" and defined by the regional powers and legal refinements of the 1970s, the process of states seeking a secure maritime zone has accelerated and maritime rivalries have become as intense as inland rivalries. This book examines the territorial disputes souring relations between Japan and its three neighbours: Russia, South Korea and China. It combines an empirical study with theoretical advancements in comparative research to understand the Cold War and p...
