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Dodonaeus in Japan
This collection of essays is the outcome of an international symposium, jointly organised by the International Research Center for Japanese Studies, Kyoto, and the Section of Japanese Studies of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in October 1998. It was the second in a series of three international symposia that the International Resaerch Center for Japanese Studies organised in Europe in conjunction with a European partner.The Leuven Symposium, which went under the general title of Translations of Culture, Culture of Translation, actually consisted of two parallel sessions. The first one was a workshop on Gender and Modernity in Japan. The second one was devoted to a reflection on Translati...
The Mercantile Ethical Tradition in Edo Period Japan
This book demonstrates that during Japan’s early modern Edo period (1603–1868) an ethical code existed among the merchant class comparable to that of the well-known Bushido. There is compelling evidence that contemporary merchants, who were widely and openly despised as immoral by the samurai, in fact acted in highly ethical ways in accordance with a well-articulated moral code. Japanese society was strictly stratified into four distinct and formally recognized classes: warrior, farmer, craftsman and merchant. From the warriors’ perspective, the merchants, at the base of the social order, had no virtue, and existed only to skim profits as middlemen between producers and consumers. But ...
The Premise of Fidelity
The Premise of Fidelity puts forward a new history of Japanese visuality through an examination of the discourses and practices surrounding the nineteenth century transposition of "the real" in the decades before photography was introduced. This intellectual history is informed by a careful examination of a network of local scholars—from physicians to farmers to bureaucrats—known as Shōhyaku-sha. In their archival materials, these scholars used the term shashin (which would, years later, come to signify "photography" in Japanese) in a wide variety of medical, botanical, and pictorial practices. These scholars pursued questions of the relationship between what they observed and what they...
A History of Japan
This is an updated edition of Conrad Totman's authoritative history of Japan from c.8000 BC to the present day. The first edition was widely praised for combining sophistication and accessibility. Covers a wide range of subjects, including geology, climate, agriculture, government and politics, culture, literature, media, foreign relations, imperialism, and industrialism. Updated to include an epilogue on Japan today and tomorrow. Now includes more on women in history and more on international relations. Bibliographical listings have been updated and enlarged. Part of The Blackwell History of the World Series The goal of this ambitious series is to provide an accessible source of knowledge a...
Network of Knowledge
Nagasaki during the Tokugawa (1603–1868) was truly Japan's window on the world with its Chinese residences and Deshima island, where Western foreigners, including representatives of the Dutch East India Company, were confined. In 1785 Ōtsuki Gentaku (1757–1827) journeyed from the capital to Nagasaki to meet Dutch physicians and the Japanese who acted as their interpreters. Gentaku was himself a physician, but he was also a Dutch studies (rangaku) scholar who passionately believed that European science and medicine were critical to Japan's progress. Network of Knowledge examines the development of Dutch studies during the crucial years 1770–1830 as Gentaku, with the help of likeminded ...
Darwin, Dharma, and the Divine
Darwin, Dharma, and the Divine is the first book in English on the history of evolutionary theory in Japan. Bringing to life more than a century of ideas, G. Clinton Godart examines how and why Japanese intellectuals, religious thinkers of different faiths, philosophers, biologists, journalists, activists, and ideologues engaged with evolutionary theory and religion. How did Japanese religiously think about evolution? What were their main concerns? Did they reject evolution on religious grounds, or—as was more often the case—how did they combine evolutionary theory with their religious beliefs? Evolutionary theory was controversial and never passively accepted in Japan: It took a hundred...
The Curious Case of the Camel in Modern Japan
In The Curious Case of the Camel in Modern Japan Ayelet Zohar critically analyzes camel images as a metonymy for Asia, and Japanese attitudes towards the continent. The book reads into encounters with the exotic animals, from nanban art, realist Dutch-influenced illustrations, through misemono roadshows of the first camel-pair imported in 1821. Modernity and Japan’s wars of Pan-Asiatic fantasies associated camels with Asia’s poverty, bringing camels into zoos, tourist venues, and military zones, as lowly beasts of burden, while postwar images project the imago of exotica and foreignness on camels as Buddhist ‘peace’ messengers. Zohar convincingly argues that in the Japanese imagination, camels serve as signifiers of Asia as Otherness, the opposite of Japan’s desire for self-association with Western cultures.
Making Time
Variable hours in a changing society -- Towers, pillows, and graphs: variation in clock design -- Astronomical time measurement and changing conceptions of time -- Geodesy, cartography, and time measurement -- Navigation and global time -- Time measurement on the ground in Kaga domain -- Clock-makers at the crossroads -- Western time and the rhetoric of enlightenment
Patricia Johanson and the Re-invention of Public Environmental Art, 1958-2010
Impeccably researched and richly detailed, this book addresses the issue of translation between visual arts and landscape design in the 50-year career of American painter and environmental artist Patricia Johanson. Exploring the artist's search for an art of the real as a member of the postwar New York art world, it demonstrates that visual translation cannot be understood solely through the works of art, instead attention must be paid to the process of creation. This book is an insightful attempt to confront a crucial question in the history of art through the work of a contemporary artist.
Kaempfer's Japan
Engelbert Kaempfer's History of Japan was a best-seller from the moment it was published in London in 1727. Born in Westphalia in 1651, Kaempfer traveled throughout the Near and Far East before settling in Japan as physician to the trading settlement of the Dutch East India Company at Nagasaki. During his two years residence, he made two extensive trips around Japan in 1691 and 1692, collecting, according to the British historian Boxer, "an astonishing amount of valuable and accurate information." He also learned all he could from the few Japanese who came to Deshima for instruction in the European sciences. To these observations, Kaempfer added details he had gathered from a wide reading of...
