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Socialism first gained a major foothold in Japan after the revolution and the subsequent Meiji restoration of 1868. Against the background of the rapid development of capitalism in Japan after the revolution, and the accompanying emergence of the working class, this study shows how early Japanese socialists drew on both Western influences and elements from traditional Japanese culture. In the early 1980s most of the world interested in Japan was fascinated by its educational system, industrial policy or low crime rates – things which explained the economic miracle and made it ‘Number One’. John Crump, however, was searching for the origins of socialist thought there. Historians of the ...
In this study, Aaron Gerow focuses on the early period in which the institutional and narrational structure of Japanese cinema was in flux, arguing that the transnational intertext is less important than the power-laden operations by which the meaning of cinema itself was discursively defined. Both progressive critics of the 'pure film' movement and the more conservative Japanese cultural bureaucrats demanded a unitary text that suppressed the hybrid and unpredictable meanings attendant on early Japanese cinema's informal exhibition contexts. Gerow points out the irony that the progressive and individualist pure film movement critics worked in concert with the Japanese state to undo the 'theft' of Japanese cinema, proposing to replace representations of Japan in Western films by exporting a Japanese cinema 'reformed' to emulate the international norm.
How did nerves and neuroses take the place of ghosts and spirits in Meiji Japan? How does Natsume Soseki’s canonical novel Kokoro pervert the Freudian teleology of sexual development? What do we make of Jacques Lacan’s infamous claim that because of the nature of their language the Japanese people were unanalyzable? And how are we to understand the re-awakening of collective memory occasioned by the sudden appearance of a Japanese Imperial soldier stumbling out of the jungle in Guam in 1972? In addressing these and other questions, the essays collected here theorize the relation of unconscious fantasy and perversion to discourses of nation, identity, and history in Japan. Against a tradi...
China’s rise and processes of Sinicization suggest that recombination of new and old elements rather than a total rupture with or return to the past is China’s likely future. In both space and time, civilizational politics offers the broadest social context. It is of particular salience in China. Reification of civilizations into simple categories such as East and West is widespread in everyday politics and common in policy and academic writings. This book’s emphasis on Sinicization as a specific instance of civilizational processes counters political and intellectual shortcuts and corrects the mistakes to which they often lead. Sinicization illustrates that like other civilizations Ch...
The role of translation in the formation of modern Japanese identities has become one of the most exciting new fields of inquiry in Japanese studies. This book marks the first attempt to establish the contours of this new field, bringing together seminal works of Japanese scholarship and criticism with cutting-edge English-language scholarship. Collectively, the contributors to this book address two critical questions: 1) how does the conception of modern Japan as a culture of translation affect our understanding of Japanese modernity and its relation to the East/West divide? and 2) how does the example of a distinctly East Asian tradition of translation affect our understanding of translati...
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Includes entries for maps and atlases.