Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
A Life Adrift
A Life Adrift, the memoir of balladeer-political activist Soeda Azembo (1872-1944), chronicles his life as one of Japan’s first modern mass entertainers and imparts an understanding of how ordinary people experienced and accommodated the tumult of life in prewar Japan. Azembo created enka songs sung by tenant farmers in rural hinterlands and factory hands in Tokyo and Osaka. Although his work is still largely unknown outside Japan, his poems and lyrics were so well known at his career’s peak that a single verse served as shorthand expressing popular attitudes about political corruption, sex scandals, spiralling prices, war, and love of motherland. As these categories attest, he embedded in his songs contemporary views on class conflict, gender relations, and racial attitudes toward international rivals. Ordinary people valued Azembo’s music because it was of them and for them. They also appreciated it for being distinctively modern and home-grown, qualities rare among the cultural innovations that flooded into Japan from the mid-nineteenth century. A Life Adrift stands out as the only memoir of its kind, one written first-hand by a leader in the world of enka singing.
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...
Japan-Bashing
The aim of this book is to examine and analyse the phenomenon of ‘Japan-bashing’, from its invention and popularisation in the United States in the late 1970s to the emergence of other national variants, including in Australia and Japan, to its gradual decline in the late 1990s. It is the first major book-length study of ‘Japan-bashing from a multinational perspective, one that attempts to place ‘Japan-bashing’ in its proper historical context and to examine its operation and legacy in the twenty-first century. Despite its importance in the study of discourses about Japan, as well as in understanding broader global changes in the late twentieth century and beyond, the phenomenon of...
The Quest for Japan's New Constitution
This book examines the many attempts over the last three decades to revise Japan’s constitution. As the book shows, these attempts at revision have been relatively conservative, aiming to embed in the constitution visions of a different future for Japan. Specific reforms advocated include: enabling Japan to have a more proactive foreign policy, more independent of the US-Japan alliance; strengthening the role of the Emperor, and excluding female succession to the throne; and emphasising more citizens’ duties, rather than their rights, in order to strengthen community and societal cohesion. By far the most comprehensive analysis of constitutional reform debate in Japan to be published to ...
Party Politics in Japan
The Japanese political system is a parliamentary democracy and was the first western style government in Asia when the parliamentary system was adopted in the 1880s. It has a multiparty system, free elections, and a parliament that functions much the same way that any other democratic parliament functions, however for much of its existence the Japanese party system has been dominated by one party. This fact is crucial to understanding contemporary politics in Japan, especially since the long term ruling party, the Liberal Democratic Party, is once again back in power. This book presents an up-to-date analysis of the political parties that make up the Japanese party system and their impact on...
Japan's Contested War Memories
Japan's Contested War Memories is an important and significant book that explores the struggles within contemporary Japanese society to come to terms with Second World War history. Focusing particularly on 1972 onwards, the period starts with the normalization of relations with China and the return of Okinawa to Japan in 1972, and ends with the sixtieth anniversary commemorations. Analyzing the variety of ways in which the Japanese people narrate, contest and interpret the past, the book is also a major critique of the way the subject has been treated in much of the English-language. Philip Seaton concludes that war history in Japan today is more divisive and widely argued over than in any of the other major Second World War combatant nations. Providing a sharp contrast to the many orthodox statements about Japanese 'ignorance', amnesia' and 'denial' about the war, this is an engaging and illuminating study that will appeal to scholars and students of Japanese history, politics, cultural studies, society and memory theory.
The Rise of Japanese NGOs
Looking at domestic politics, transnational diffusion, the state’s relationship with civil society and societal actors, the book demonstrates how and why NGOs active in global issues have become more visible in Japan and are now established players in the policy making process.
Legacies of the Asia-Pacific War
When we look in detail at the various peripheral groups of disenfranchised people emerging from the aftermath of the Asia–Pacific War the list is startling: Koreans in Japan (migrants or forced labourers), Burakumin, Hibakusha, Okinawans, Asian minorities, comfort women and many others. Many of these groups have been discussed in a large corpus of what we may call ‘disenfranchised literature’, and the research presented in this book intends to add an additional and particularly controversial example to the long list of the voice- and powerless. The presence of members of what is known as the yakeato sedai or the generation of people who experienced the fire-bombings of the Asia–Pacif...
Homosexuality and Manliness in Postwar Japan
This book examines the history of the relationship between male homosexuality and conceptions of manliness in postwar Japan. It provides a detailed account of the formative years of the homo magazine genre in the 1970s, and explores its evolution in subsequent years, analyzing key issues including homophobia; gay liberation; male-male sex, love and friendship; the masculine body; and manly identity.
Nationalism, Political Realism and Democracy in Japan
Masao Maruyama was the most influential and respected political thinker in post-WWII Japan. He believed that the collective mentality, inherent in the traditional Japanese way of thinking, was a key reason for the defeat in WWII and was convinced that such thought needed to be modernized. In this book Fumiko Sasaki argues that the cause of the prolonged political, economic and social decline in Japan since the early 1990s can be explained by the same characteristics Maruyama identified after 1945. Using Maruyama’s thought Sasaki explores how the Japanese people see their role in their nation, the democracy imposed by the US, and the relationship between power and international relations. F...
