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Japan today is at an important historical juncture. Buffeted in recent years by rapid economic, social, and political change, yet still very much steeped in custom and history, the nation has become an amalgam of the traditional and the modern. As a result, the country has become increasingly difficult to categorize: How are we to represent today's Japan effectively, and fairly predict its future? This critical, multi-disciplinary collection explores the convergence of past and future in contemporary Japan. Contributors comment on a wide range of economic, socio-cultural, and political trends--such as the mobilization of Japanese labour, the burgeoning Ainu identity movement, and the shifting place of the modern woman--and conclude that despite the rapid changes, many of the traditional facets of Japanese society have remained intact, institutional change, they assert, is unlikely to occur quickly, and Japan must find alternate ways to adjust to twenty-first-century pressures of global competition and interdependence. A pleasure to read, this broad volume will be welcomed by upper-level undergraduates, graduates, and specialists in Japanese studies.
The Hanshin Earthquake was the largest disaster to affect postwar Japan and one of the most destructive postwar natural disasters to strike a developed country. Although the media focused on the disaster's immediate effects, the long-term reconstruction efforts have gone largely unexplored. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, David Edgington records the first ten years of reconstruction and recovery and asks whether planners successfully exploited opportunities to make a more sustainable and disaster-proof city. This book is an intricate investigation of one of the largest redevelopment projects in recent memory.
The Trash Phenomenon looks at how writers of the late twentieth century not only have integrated the events, artifacts, and theories of popular culture into their works but also have used those works as windows into popular culture's role in the process of nation building. Taking her cue from Donald Barthelme's 1967 portrayal of popular culture as "trash" and Don DeLillo's 1997 description of it as a subversive "people's history," Stacey Olster explores how literature recycles American popular culture so as to change the nationalistic imperative behind its inception. The Trash Phenomenon begins with a look at the mass media's role in the United States' emergence as the twentieth century's do...
This book brings together a series of contributions which examine the processes of contemporary city development and urban planning in Japan. A central theme of the book is to consider, from a range of perspectives and situations, the role, policies, methods, and effectiveness of planning in guiding city development in Japan and in addressing present and emerging urban issues. Areas of particular concern include inner city development, the urban periphery, the institutional and regulatory context of planning, and planning for urban and regional economic and technological change. In many instances, the book draws parallels between Japan's urban experience and planning approach with those of E...
Twenty-four news networks, a plethora of newspapers and magazines, vibrant news-talk radio, and the ubiquitous Internet highlight our society as information-driven. With such a steady stream of hard facts mixed with publicised opinions, the mainstream population has an opinion on everything. Most anyone seems itching to argue their side of an issue, making once private beliefs fodder for general consumption. A staple of any medium's content is a regular public opinion poll on whatever hot topic strikes the editor's fancy. From the significant to the mundane, public opinion permeates society. Accordingly, politicians have taken note of these opinions and adopted stands and values that put them in tune with public sentiment. An understanding of the nature of public opinion, therefore, is paramount in today's world. This book assembles and presents a carefully chosen bibliography on public opinion in its many forms. The collection of references makes for a valuable resource in studying and researching the critical issue of public opinion. Easy access to these pieces of literature are then provided with author, title, and subject indexes.
FROST (copy 2): From the John Holmes Library collection.
Representing the Other in Modern Japanese Literature looks at the ways in which authors writing in Japanese in the twentieth century constructed a division between the ‘Self’ and the ‘Other’ in their work. Drawing on methodology from Foucault and Lacan, the clearly presented essays seek to show how Japanese writers have responded to the central question of what it means to be ‘Japanese’ and of how best to define their identity. Taking geographical, racial and ethnic identity as a starting point to explore Japan's vision of 'non-Japan', representations of the Other are examined in terms of the experiences of Japanese authors abroad and in the imaginary lands envisioned by authors in Japan. Using a diverse cross-section of writers and texts as case studies, this edited volume brings together contributions from a number of leading international experts in the field and is written at an accessible level, making it essential reading for those working in Japanese studies, colonialism, identity studies and nationalism.
Over the last fifteen years local citizens' movements have spread rapidly throughout Japan. This volume examines the growth and nature of civil society participation in local urban and environmental governance.
In Beyond the Metropolis, Louise Young looks at the emergence of urbanism in the interwar period, a global moment when the material and ideological structures that constitute “the city” took their characteristic modern shape. In Japan, as elsewhere, cities became the staging ground for wide ranging social, cultural, economic, and political transformations. The rise of social problems, the formation of a consumer marketplace, the proliferation of streetcars and streetcar suburbs, and the cascade of investments in urban development reinvented the city as both socio-spatial form and set of ideas. Young tells this story through the optic of the provincial city, examining four second-tier cit...
From Urban Enclave to Ethnic Suburb focuses on the migration, settlement, and adaptation of Chinese and other Asian immigrants and their impacts on the transformation of metropolitan areas in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. These stories of the interactivity of Asian "people and place" in four nation-states are framed within the larger context of spatial and social patterns, migration, acculturation/assimilation, and racialization theories, and emerging landscapes in the inner cities and suburbs of metropolitan areas like Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Toronto, Vancouver, Sydney, and Auckland. The book's primary arguments center on revisioning traditional "assim...