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Critical Perspectives on Classicism in Japanese Painting, 1600-1700
In the West, classical art—inextricably linked to concerns of a ruling or dominant class—commonly refers to art with traditional themes and styles that resurrect a past golden era. Although art of the early Edo period (1600–1868) encompasses a spectrum of themes and styles, references to the past are so common that many Japanese art historians have variously described this period as a "classical revival," "era of classicism," or a "renaissance." How did seventeenth-century artists and patrons imagine the past? How did classical manners relate to other styles and themes found in Edo art? In considering such questions, the contributors to this volume hold that classicism has been an amor...
Education in Tokugawa Japan
Japanese cultural life had reached a low ebb at the beginning of the Tokugawa period. The Japanese society which emerged when Tokugawa Ieyasu had completed the process of pacifying warring baronies was neither literary, nor hardly literate. The rulers were warriors and the people they ruled were largely illiterate. The Japan of 1868 was a very different society: practically every samurai was literate and it was a world in which books abounded. The transformation which had occurred in these two and a half centuries was an essential precondition for the success of the policy which the leaders of the Meiji Restoration were to adopt. An in-depth survey of the development and education during the period, this book remains one of the key analyses of the effects of Tokugawa educators and education on modern day Japan.
Re-understanding Japan
To many Chinese, the rise and expansion of Japanese power during the years between the two Sino-Japanese wars (1895–1945) presented a paradox: With its successful modernization, Japan became a model to be emulated; yet as the country’s imperial ambitions on the continent grew, it posed an ever-increasing threat. Drawing on an extraordinary array of source materials, Lu Yan shows that this attraction to and apprehension of Japan prompted the Chinese to engage in a variety of long-term relationships with the Japanese. Re-understanding Japan examines transnational and transcultural interactions between China and Japan during those five dramatic and tragic decades at the intimate level of pe...
Voices of East Asia
Voices of East Asia provides significant yet accessible readings in translation chosen to stimulate interest in the long and rich cultural history of East Asia, the countries of China, Japan, and Korea. The readings range from ancient to modern, elite to popular, and include poetry, stories, essays, and drama. Each section begins with a broad but brief overview of that country’s political and cultural history. Each reading is preceded by a concise explanation of its literary and cultural context. As expertise in East Asian studies has exploded in the West in recent decades, a novice could be overwhelmed by all the materials available now. In this volume, however, the reader will find a man...
Practical Pursuits
The idea that personal cultivation leads to social and material well-being became widespread in late Tokugawa Japan (1600–1868). Practical Pursuits explores theories of personal development that were diffused in the early nineteenth century by a network of religious groups in the Edo (Tokyo) area, and explains how, after the Meiji Restoration of 1868, the leading members of these communities went on to create ideological coalitions inspired by the pursuit of a modern form of cultivation. Variously engaged in divination, Shinto purification rituals, and Zen practice, these individuals ultimately used informal political associations to promote the Confucian-style assumption that personal imp...
Language and Popular Culture in Japan
When this book was originally published it was the first work of its kind to examine the way in which language is used to express the ‘myth’ of advertising slogans and other popular cultural forms. By making use of general theories from the disciplines of anthropology, linguistics, media studies and semiotics, the book attempts to demystify Japanese culture as it has been hitherto presented in the West, and shows how such cultural forms as ‘noodle westerns’ and high-school baseball uphold the well-known ideologies of ‘selflessness’, ‘diligence’, ‘compliance’ and ‘co-operation’ typically associated with the Japanese. Ultimately, the book poses the question: are those whom we call the Japanese ‘real’ people in their own right, or merely a nation acting out a part written for them by Western civilisation?
Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons
"Elegant representations of nature and the four seasons populate a wide range of Japanese genres and media. In Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons, Haruo Shirane shows how, when, and why this practice developed and explicates the richly encoded social, religious, and political meanings of this imagery. Shirane discusses textual, cultivated, material, performative, and gastronomic representations of nature. He reveals how this kind of 'secondary nature, ' which flourished in Japan's urban environment, fostered and idealized a sense of harmony with the natural world just at the moment when it began to recede from view. Illuminating the deeper meaning behind Japanese aesthetics and artifacts, Shirane also clarifies the use of natural and seasonal topics as well as the changes in their cultural associations and functions across history, genre, and community over more than a millennium. In this book, the four seasons are revealed to be as much a cultural construction as a reflection of the physical world."--Back cover.
Encyclopedia of Asian-American Literature
Traces American writers whose roots are in all parts of Asia, including China, Korea, Japan, Southeast Asia, the Philippines, the Indian subcontinent, and the Middle East.
A History of Japan
This volume presents the Japanese version of the history of Japan from its origins, through the subjection of Korea, the introduction of Chinese culture, rebellion in Korea, Buddhism, Taika reforms, Ainu insurrection, the founding of Kyoto as the capital, the power of Fujiwara, the founding of the Kamakura Shogunate, Hojo family, Ashikaga Shogunate, Oda & Toyotomi families, Tokugawa Shogunate, the beginning of the Meiji, relations with Korea, Russia and the Chino-Japanese war of 1894, ending with the Russo-Japanese war of 1904.
