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Offering a concise, entertaining snapshot of Japanese society, Manners and Mischief examines etiquette guides, advice literature, and other such instruction for behavior from the early modern period to the present day and discovers how manners do in fact make the nation. Eleven accessibly written essays consider a spectrum of cases, from the geisha party to gay bar cool, executive grooming, and good manners for subway travel. Together, they show that etiquette is much more than fussy rules for behavior. In fact the idiom of manners, packaged in conduct literature, reveals much about gender and class difference, notions of national identity, the dynamics of subversion and conformity, and more. This richly detailed work reveals how manners give meaning to everyday life and extraordinary occasions, and how they can illuminate larger social and cultural transformations.
This book, which deals with the life and ideas of the poet and philosopher Tadano Makuzu (1763-1825), presents insights into gender discourses of the late Tokugawa period (1600-1868), and thereby opens a way to break away from conventional intellectual history.
This book analyzes how women’s bodies became a subject and object of modern bio-power by examining the history of women’s reproductive health in Japan between the seventeenth century and the mid-twentieth century. Yuki Terazawa combines Foucauldian theory andfeminist ideas with in-depth historical research. She argues that central to the rise of bio-power and the colonization of people by this power was modern scientific taxonomies that classify people into categories of gender, race, nationality, class, age, disability, and disease. Whilediscussions of the roles played by the modern state are of critical importance to this project, significant attention is also paid to the increasing influences of male obstetricians and the parts that trained midwives and public health nurses played in the dissemination of modern powerafter the 1868 Meiji Restoration.
In the late Nineteenth-century, the Japanese embarked on a program of westernization in the hope of building a strong and modern nation. Science, technology and medicine played an important part, showing European nations that Japan was a world power worthy of respect. It has been acknowledged that state policy was important in the development of industries but how well-organized was the state and how close were government-business relations? The book seeks to answer these questions and others. The first part deals with the role of science and medicine in creating a healthy nation. The second part of the book is devoted to examining the role of technology, and business-state relations in building a modern nation.
This book rewrites the history of East Asia by rethinking the contentious relationship between "Confucianisms" and "women."
Twenty-first-century Japan is known for the world's most aged population. Faced with this challenge, Japan has been a pioneer in using science to find ways of managing a declining birth rate. Science for Governing Japan's Population considers the question of why these population phenomena have been seen as problematic. What roles have population experts played in turning this demographic trend into a government concern? Aya Homei examines the medico-scientific fields around the notion of population that developed in Japan from the 1860s to the 1960s, analyzing the role of the population experts in the government's effort to manage its population. She argues that the formation of population sciences in modern Japan had a symbiotic relationship with the development of the neologism, 'population' (jinkō), and with the transformation of Japan into a modern sovereign power. Through this history, Homei unpacks assumptions about links between population, sovereignty, and science. This title is also available as Open Access.
This book tells the story of a society reversing deeply held worldviews and revolutionizing its demography. In parts of eighteenth-century Japan, couples raised only two or three children. As villages shrank and domain headcounts dwindled, posters of child-murdering she-devils began to appear, and governments offered to pay their subjects to have more children. In these pages, the long conflict over the meaning of infanticide comes to life once again. Those who killed babies saw themselves as responsible parents to their chosen children. Those who opposed infanticide redrew the boundaries of humanity so as to encompass newborn infants and exclude those who would not raise them. In Eastern Ja...
Bringing together historians, sociologists, and political scientists, this volume documents persistent prejudices against consistently marginal groups in China, and the moral claims they have mustered in response.
The first anthology of its kind, The Modern Murasaki brings the vibrancy and rich imagination of women's writing from the Meiji period to English-language readers. Along with traditional prose, the editors have chosen and carefully translated short stories, plays, poetry, speeches, essays, and personal journal entries. Selected readings include writings by the public speaker Kishida Toshiko, the dramatist Hasegawa Shigure, the short-fiction writer Shimizu Shikin, the political writer Tamura Toshiko, and the novelists Miyake Kaho, Higuchi Ichiyo, Tazawa Inabune, Kitada Usurai, Nogami Yaeko, and Mizuno Senko. The volume also includes a thorough introduction to each reading, an extensive index listing historical, social, and literary concepts, and a comprehensive guide to further research. The fierce tenor and bold content of these texts refute the popular belief that women of this era were passive and silent. A vital addition to courses in women's studies and Japanese literature and history, The Modern Murasaki is a singular resource for students and scholars.
Variable hours in a changing society -- Towers, pillows, and graphs: variation in clock design -- Astronomical time measurement and changing conceptions of time -- Geodesy, cartography, and time measurement -- Navigation and global time -- Time measurement on the ground in Kaga domain -- Clock-makers at the crossroads -- Western time and the rhetoric of enlightenment