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Survey of the historical events and developments in medieval Japan's polity, economy, society and culture.
"A Sense of Place examines the vast Kantō region as a locus of cultural identity and an object of familial attachment during the political and military turmoil of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries in Japan. Through analysis of memoirs, letters, chronicles, poetry, travelogues, lawsuits, land registers, and archeological reports, David Spafford explores the relationships of the eastern elites to the space they inhabited: he considers the region both as a whole, in its literary representations and political and administrative dimensions, and as an aggregation of discrete locales, where struggles over land rights played out alongside debates about the meaning of ties between fam...
This book combines sociological insights in organizations with cultural history.
Modern Japan offers us a view of a highly developed society with its own internal logic. Eiko Ikegami makes this logic accessible to us through a sweeping investigation into the roots of Japanese organizational structures. She accomplishes this by focusing on the diverse roles that the samurai have played in Japanese history. From their rise in ancient Japan, through their dominance as warrior lords in the medieval period, and their subsequent transformation to quasi-bureaucrats at the beginning of the Tokugawa era, the samurai held center stage in Japan until their abolishment after the opening up of Japan in the mid-nineteenth century. This book demonstrates how Japan’s so-called harmoni...
This first in-depth study in English of one of Japan’s popular historians and a well-known journalist of the Meiji and Taish periods challenges the conventional view that Yamaji Aizan was essentially a ‘nationalist’ at heart eager to see Japan expand into Asia and a supporter of the colonization of Korea.
Through a close examination of economic trends and case studies of particular families, this study demonstrates that Japan’s protoindustrial economy was far more volatile than portrayed in most studies to date. Few rural elites survived the competitive and unstable climate of this era. Onerous exactions, interregional competition, market volatility, and succession problems propelled many wealthy families into steep decline and others into drastic shifts in the focus of their businesses.
A COMPANION TO GLOBAL HISTORICAL THOUGHT A Companion to Global Historical Thought provides an overview of the development of historical thinking from the earliest times to the present, directly addressing issues of historiography in a globalized context. Questions concerning the global dissemination of historical writing and the relationship between historiography and other ways of representing the past have become important not only in the academic study of history, but also in public arenas in many countries. With contributions from leading international scholars, the book considers the problem of “the global” – in the multiplicity of traditions of narrating the past; in the global d...
The Kamakura period, 1180-1333, is known as the era of Japan's first warrior government. As the essays in this book show, however, the period was notable for the coexistence of two centers of authority, the Bakufu military government at Kamakura and the civilian court in Kyoto, with the newer warrior government gradually gaining ascendancy.
Swords, Oaths, and Prophetic Visions investigates some of the most historically important political and social issues raised by the Genpei War (1180-1185). This epic civil conflict, which ushered in Japan’s age of the warriors, is most famously articulated in the monumental narrative Heike monogatari (The Tale of the Heike). Elizabeth Oyler’s ambitious work lays out the complex interconnections between the numerous variant texts of the Heike and the historical events they describe. But Oyler’s innovative methodology also brings other texts and genres—the Gikeiki, the Soga monogatari, the Azuma kagami, and pieces from the kōwakamai (ballad-dramas) repertoire—into her analysis. Rather than concentrating on individual texts, Oyler focuses on the inter-textual relationships within this larger body of narrative and drama and the collective role of these works in creating and disseminating stories about some of the Genpei War’s most contentious events. In so doing, she works toward a new understanding of the underlying cultural problems of which these tales are symptomatic and which they attempt to address.
The teaching of history in South African and Japanese schools has attracted sustained criticism for the alleged attempts to conceal the controversial aspects of their countries' past and to inculcate ideologies favourable to the ruling regimes. This book is the first attempt to systematically compare the ways in which education bureaucracy in both nations dealt with opposition and critics in the period from ca. 1945 to 1995, when both countries were dominated by single-party governments for most of the fifty years. The author argues that both South African and Japanese education bureaucracy did not overtly express its intentions in the curriculum documents or in the textbooks, but found ways to enhance its authority through a range of often subtle measures. A total of eight themes in 60 officially approved Standard 6 South African and Japanese middle-school history textbooks have been selected to demonstrate the changes and continuity. This work hopes to contribute to the existing literature of comparative history by drawing lessons that would probably not have emerged from the study of either country by itself.