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Multiculturalism in the New Japan
Like other industrial nations, Japan is experiencing its own forms of, and problems with, internationalization and multiculturalism. This volume focuses on several aspects of this process and examines the immigrant minorities as well as their Japanese recipient communities. Multiculturalism is considered broadly, and includes topics often neglected in other works, such as: religious pluralism, domestic and international tourism, political regionalism and decentralization, sports, business styles in the post-Bubble era, and the education of immigrant minorities.
Flowers That Kill
Flowers are beautiful. People often communicate their love, sorrow, and other feelings to each other by offering flowers, like roses. Flowers can also be symbols of collective identity, as cherry blossoms are for the Japanese. But, are they also deceptive? Do people become aware when their meaning changes, perhaps as flowers are deployed by the state and dictators? Did people recognize that the roses they offered to Stalin and Hitler became a propaganda tool? Or were they like the Japanese, who, including the soldiers, did not realize when the state told them to fall like cherry blossoms, it meant their deaths? Flowers That Kill proposes an entirely new theoretical understanding of the role ...
Visions of Marriage
Grounded in multi-generational stories from Kinmen in Taiwan, Visions of Marriage explores the historical entanglements between the pursuit of new personal and national futures. Focusing on the relational and future-making aspects of marriage, the ethnography highlights the intersection of transformations across familial generations and shifting political economies in Taiwan, and more globally. While theories of modernity often treat marriage as an index of social change, without adequate attention to its transformative capacities generated through personal and familial agency, this volume provides comparative insights on family change and demographic shifts in Asia.
The Age of Asian Migration
The second half of the 20th century witnessed a series of mass migration in Asia due to war, politics and economic turbulence. Combined with recent global economic changes, the result is that Asia is now the world region producing the most international migrants and receiving the second most migrants. Asian migration has thus been of central concern to both academic researchers and policy communities. This book (together with its forthcoming second volume) provides a full span discussion of Asian migration from historical perspectives to updated analyses of current migration flows and diasporas. The book covers six sub-regional areas through focused themes: • Northeast Asia: Coping with Di...
Fanning the Flames
Fanning the Flames examines the worlds of fans in the exuberant and commercialized popular culture of contemporary Japan. The works collected here profile denizens of all-night rap clubs; sumo stable patrons; passionate fan clubs of a professional baseball team; enthusiasts of traditional rakugo storytelling; a club of middle-aged female fans of a popular music star; youthful followers of Japan's longest-running rock band; vinyl record collectors; and a thriving community of girls and women who produce and devour amateur comics. Grounded in close, often extended fieldwork with the fans themselves, each case study is an effort to understand both the personal pleasures and political economies of fandoms. The contributors explore the many ways that fans in and of Japanese mass culture actively search for intimacy and identity amid the powerful corporate structures that produce the leisure and entertainment of today's Japan.
The Art of Fate Calculation
From housewives to students and high-ranking officials, people from all social backgrounds in China and Taiwan visit fate calculation masters to learn about their destiny. How do clients assess the diviner’s skills? How does one become a fortune-teller? How is a person’s fate calculated? The Art of Fate Calculation explores how conceptions of fate circulate in Chinese and Taiwanese societies while resisting uniformization and institutionalization. This is not only due to the stigma of “superstition” but also to the internal dynamic of fate calculation practice and learning.
Sacred High City, Sacred Low City
The author argues that lived religion in Japan functions as an integral part of daily life; any apparent lack of interest masks a fundamental commitment to participating regularly in diverse, though diffused, religious practices. The book uses case studies of religious sites at two representative but contrasting Tokyo neighborhoods as a basis for reflecting on this apparently contradictory quality.
Knots
Knots are well known as symbols of moral relationships. This book develops an exciting new view of this otherwise taken-for-granted image and considers their metaphoric value in and for moral order. In chapters that focus on Japan, China, Europe, South America and in several Pacific Island societies, granular ethnography depicts how knots are deployed to express unity in daily and ritual embodiment, political authority and the cosmos, as well as in social thought. The volume will be of interest to anthropologists and other scholars concerned with metaphor and symbolism, material culture and technology.
Wind Over Water
Providing a comprehensive treatment of a full range of migrant destinies in East Asia by scholars from both Asia and North America, this volume captures the way migrants are changing the face of Asia, especially in cities, such as Beijing, Hong Kong, Hamamatsu, Osaka, Tokyo, and Singapore. It investigates how the crossing of geographical boundaries should also be recognized as a crossing of cultural and social categories that reveals the extraordinary variation in the migrants’ origins and trajectories. These migrants span the spectrum: from Korean bar hostesses in Osaka to African entrepreneurs in Hong Kong, from Vietnamese women seeking husbands across the Chinese border to Pakistani Muslim men marrying women in Japan, from short-term business travelers in China to long-term tourists from Japan who ultimately decide to retire overseas. Illuminating the ways in which an Asian-based analysis of migration can yield new data on global migration patterns, the contributors provide important new theoretical insights for a broader understanding of global migration, and innovative methodological approaches to the spatial and temporal complexity of human migration.
Stories from an Ancient Land
The Wa people have a rich civilization of their own, and a deep history in the mountains of Southeast Asia. Their mythology suggests their land is the first place inhabited by humans, which they care for on behalf of the world. This book introduces aspects of Wa culture, including their approach to the world’s troubles and the lessons others might learn from it. It also presents a new interpretation of Wa headhunting, questioning explanations that see it as a primitive custom, and instead placing it within the fraught history of the last few centuries.
