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With the Meiji Restoration in 1868, Japan opened its doors to the West and underwent remarkable changes as it sought to become a modern nation. Accompanying the political changes that Western trade ushered in were widespread social and cultural changes. Newspapers, novels, poems, and plays from the Western world were soon adapted and translated into Japanese. The combination of the rich storytelling tradition of Japan with the realism and modernism of the West produced some of the greatest literature of the modern age. Historical Dictionary of Modern Japanese Literature and Theater, Second Edition contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has more than 500 cross-referenced entries authors, literary and historical developments, trends, genres, and concepts that played a central role in the evolution of modern Japanese literature.
Defensive Positions focuses on the role of regional domains in early modern Japan’s coastal defense, shedding new light on this system’s development. This examination, in turn, has significant long-term political implications for the involvement of those domains in Tokugawa state formation. Noell Wilson argues that domainal autonomy in executing maritime defense slowly escalated over the course of the Tokugawa period to the point where the daimyo ultimately challenged Tokugawa authorities as the primary military interface with the outside world. By first exploring localized maritime defense at Nagasaki and then comparing its organization with those of the Yokohama and Hakodate harbors du...
Eastwards is a collection of essays each of whom focuses on a special aspect or on an episode within the cross-cultural narrative that imposes on our minds the terms "West" and "East". The volume assembles seventeen essays by eighteen authors divided into three chapters. Being the outcome of the first international conference for East Asian studies that was held in the Baltic states in 2008 at the University of Latvia in Riga, the volume contains not only contributions by scholars from Vilnius, Tallinn and Riga but also rather rare topics like critiques of translation from Japanese and Classical Chinese into Latvian. The book contains also an essay on the life and personality of an almost neglected Baltic "pioneer" in Manchuria
Significantly expanded and updated—a lively excursion into Japanese folklore and its increasing influence within global popular culture. Monsters, spirits, fantastic beings, and supernatural creatures haunt the folklore and popular culture of Japan. Broadly labeled yōkai, they appear in many forms, from tengu mountain goblins and kappa water sprites, to shape-shifting kitsune foxes and long-tongued ceiling-lickers. Popular today in anime, manga, film, and video games, many yōkai originated in local legends, folktales, and regional ghost stories. The Book of Yōkai invites readers to examine how people create, transmit, and collect folklore, and how they make sense of the mysteries in the world around them. Revised and expanded, this second edition features fifty new illustrations, including an all-new yōkai gallery of stunning color images tracing the visual history of yōkai across centuries. In clear and accessible language, Michael Dylan Foster unpacks the cultural and historical contexts of yōkai, interpreting their varied meanings and introducing people who have pursued them through the ages.
An unprecedented collection of feminist voices from four millennia of global history Throughout written history and across the world, women have protested the restrictions of gender and the limitations placed on women's bodies and women's lives. People–of any and no gender–have protested and theorized, penned manifestos and written poetry and songs, testified and lobbied, gone on strike and fomented revolution, quietly demanded that there is an "I" and loudly proclaimed that there is a "we." The Book of Feminism chronicles this history of defiance and tracks it around the world as it develops into a multivocal and unabashed force. Global in scope, The Book of Feminism shows the breadth o...
Under the Ancestors’ Eyes presents a new approach to Korean social history by focusing on the origin and development of the indigenous descent group. Martina Deuchler maintains that the surprising continuity of the descent-group model gave the ruling elite cohesion and stability and enabled it to retain power from the early Silla (fifth century) to the late nineteenth century. This argument, underpinned by a fresh interpretation of the late-fourteenth-century Koryŏ-Chosŏn transition, illuminates the role of Neo-Confucianism as an ideological and political device through which the elite regained and maintained dominance during the Chosŏn period. Neo-Confucianism as espoused in Korea did ...
The Princess Nun tells the story of Bunchi (1619–1697), daughter of Emperor Go-Mizunoo and founder of Enshōji. Bunchi advocated strict adherence to monastic precepts while devoting herself to the posthumous welfare of her family. As the first full-length biographical study of a premodern Japanese nun, this book incorporates issues of gender and social status into its discussion of Bunchi’s ascetic practice and religious reforms to rewrite the history of Buddhist reform and Tokugawa religion. Gina Cogan’s approach moves beyond the dichotomy of oppression and liberation that dogs the study of non-Western and premodern women to show how Bunchi’s aristocratic status enabled her to carry...
In Satō Haruo and Modern Japanese Literature, Charles Exley offers the first comprehensive examination of Satō’s literary oeuvre from the 1910s through the 1930s. The study examines the ways in which selected novels and short stories interact with cultural discourses of the time, including the fantastic, the discourse on melancholy and mental illness, detective fiction and early film, colonial encounter and critique of civilization, and hysteria and psychoanalysis. Exley’s alignment of Satō’s fictional work with its cultural and historical context illustrates the complex ways in which Satō’s aesthetic projections derived from and comment on Japan’s experience with modernization during the twentieth century.
Uniquely covering literary, visual and performative expressions of culture, this volume aims to correlate the conjunctions of nation building, gender and representation in late 19th and early 20th century China and Japan. Focusing on gender formation, the chapters explore the changing constructs of masculinities and femininities in China and Japan from the early modern up to the 1930s. Chapters focus on the dynamism that links the remodeling of traditional arts and media to the political and cultural power relations between China, Japan, and the Western world. A true tribute to multidisciplinary studies.
Upon its U.S. release in the mid 1990s Ghost in the Shell , directed by Mamoru Oshii, quickly became one of the most popular Japanese animated films, or anime, in the country. Despite these accolades, Oshii is known as a contrarian within anime, a self-proclaimed 'stray dog', avoiding the limelight in favour of his own personal cinematic vision. He cannot be pigeon-holed, working in both live-action film and animation, directing everything from absurdist comedy to thrillers to meditations on the nature of reality. Stray Dog of Anime is the first book to take an in-depth look at Oshii's major films, form his early days working on Urusei Yatsura to Avalon , his most recent feature. Ruh details Oshii's evolution as a director, paying special attention to his personal style and symbolism, resulting in a unique guide that will appeal to anime fans and cinestes of all kinds.