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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 ...
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 Transgression in Japanese Women’s Writing
This book argues for a new articulation of the ways in which transgression is theorized in contemporary literature by Japanese women. Exploring the rhetorical and discursive mechanics of literary “bad girls” from fiction produced during the millennial turn (1990–2010), the book contends that women writers today deploy truant, unruly, restless, and aggressive female protagonists not to challenge the status quo but rather to reaffirm it. While Japanese women’s fiction has long been invested in cultivating an uncomfortable politics of opposition through “unladylike” themes such as sex, sexuality, and violence, the book argues that today authors turn to such acts of defiance to quiet...
Literature After Fukushima
Literature after Fukushima examines how aesthetic representation contributes to a critical understanding of the 3.11 triple disaster – the Great East Japan earthquake, tsunami, and multiple meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Through an examination of key works in the expanding corpus of 3.11 literature the book explores how the disaster—both its immediate aftereffects and its continued unfolding—reframed discourse in various areas such as trauma studies, eco-criticism, regional identity, food safety, civil society, and beyond. Individual chapters discuss aspects of these perspectival shifts, tracing the reshaping of Japanese identity after the triple disaster. The ...
Rethinking Japanese Studies
Japanese Studies has provided a fertile space for non-Eurocentric analysis for a number of reasons. It has been embroiled in the long-running internal debate over the so-called Nihonjinron, revolving around the extent to which the effective interpretation of Japanese society and culture requires non-Western, Japan-specific emic concepts and theories. This book takes this question further and explores how we can understand Japanese society and culture by combining Euro-American concepts and theories with those that originate in Japan. Because Japan is the only liberal democracy to have achieved a high level of capitalism outside the Western cultural framework, Japanese Studies has long provid...
Fukushima Fiction
Fukushima Fiction introduces readers to the powerful literary works that have emerged out of Japan’s triple disaster, now known as 3/11. The book provides a broad and nuanced picture of the varied literary responses to this ongoing tragedy, focusing on “serious fiction” (junbungaku), the one area of Japanese cultural production that has consistently addressed the disaster and its aftermath. Examining short stories and novels by both new and established writers, author Rachel DiNitto effectively captures this literary tide and names it after the nuclear accident that turned a natural disaster into an environmental and political catastrophe. The book takes a spatial approach to a new lit...
Immigrant and Ethnic-Minority Writers since 1945
This study analyses how immigrant and ethnic-minority writers have challenged the understanding of certain national literatures and have markedly changed them. In other national contexts, ideologies and institutions have contained the challenge these writers pose to national literatures. Case studies of the emergence and recognition of immigrant and ethnic-minority writing come from fourteen national contexts. These include classical immigration countries, such as Canada and the United States, countries where immigration accelerated and entered public debate after World War II, such as the United Kingdom, France and Germany, as well as countries rarely discussed in this context, such as Brazil and Japan. Finally, this study uses these individual analyses to discuss this writing as an international phenomenon. Sandra R.G. Almeida, Maria Zilda F. Cury, Sarah De Mul, Sneja Gunew, Dave Gunning, Kristina Iwata-Weickgenannt, Martina Kamm, Liesbeth Minnaard, Maria Oikonomou, Wenche Ommundsen, Marie Orton, Laura Reeck, Daniel Rothenbühler, Cathy J. Schlund-Vials, Wiebke Sievers, Bettina Spoerri, Christl Verduyn, Sandra Vlasta.
Reframing Disability in Manga
Reframing Disability in Manga analyzes popular Japanese manga published from the 1990s to the present that portray the everyday lives of adults and children with disabilities in an ableist society. It focuses on five representative conditions currently classified as shōgai (disabilities) in Japan—deafness, blindness, paraplegia, autism, and gender identity disorder—and explores the complexities and sociocultural issues surrounding each. Author Yoshiko Okuyama begins by looking at preindustrial understandings of difference in Japanese myths and legends before moving on to an overview of contemporary representations of disability in popular culture, uncovering sociohistorical attitudes to...
Historical Dictionary of Postwar Japan
Japan is a mix of the old and the new, traditional and modern, and old fashion and innovative. It has traveled the road to a modern destination without totally losing sight of its traditions and values. Although some in Japan lament the passing of old ways, Japan has held on to a reasonable amount of its traditions and values. This is easier to find in its arts and crafts and its literature and films as well as in its social habits. This book will introduce the broad sweep of people, events, and trends, including the successes and failures, of postwar Japan. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of Postwar Japan contains a chronology, an introduction, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 500 cross-referenced entries on important personalities, politics, economy, foreign relations, religion, and culture. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Japan.
Aum Shinrikyo and religious terrorism in Japanese collective memory
Aum Shinriky?'s sarin attack on the Tokyo subway in March 1995 left an indelible mark on Japanese society. This is the first book to offer a comprehensive study of the competing memories of Aum Shinriky?'s religious terrorism. Developing a sociological framework for how uneven distributions of power and resources shape commemorative processes, this book explores how the Aum Affair developed as a 'cultural trauma' in Japanese collective memory following the Tokyo attack. Interrogating an array of sources including mass media reports and interviews with victims and ex-members, it reveals the multiple clashing narratives over the causes of Aum's violence, the efficacy of 'brainwashing' and 'mind control', and whether capital punishment is justified. It shows that although cultural trauma construction requires the use of moral binaries such as 'good vs. evil', 'pure vs. impure', and 'sacred vs. profane', the entrenchment of such binary codes in commemorative processes can ultimately hinder social repair and reconciliation.
