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This book presents an authoritative and illuminating insight into the development and most important characteristics of Japanese society and culture. Approaching the subject from a number of different points of view.
Originally published in 1963. ... Read more

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Since the end of the 1980s, scholarly work on Japan has attempted to escape the bounds of the previous discourse that continuously described it as ‘changing Japan’, a discourse which paradoxically also focused, in the main, on the hierarchical models of this so-called vertical society. While accepting the rapid rate of social change and enduring continuities within Japan, this new wave of work also looked at the micro-level by trying to place people within the framework of ‘the’ Japanese model.

The four volumes in this Routledge Major Work bring together the most useful new-wave essays written from the 1990s onwards, together with the several key and ‘classic’ articles written in earlier decades in order to build up a more nuanced portrait of modern Japanese culture and society.

The first part of Volume I looks at the macro level of politics and the economy. The second part moves from material focusing on the structure of society to the rise of civil society and the effect the recession in the 1990s has had on individuals.

The other three volumes have a similar two-part structure, with a key introductory article—or articles—to set the scene (in addition to the editor’s Introduction to the set as a whole). The focus moves from larger structures, to the life course of individuals in Volume II, through to key issues about Japanese culture in Volume III. Volume IV will address religion and the diversity of contemporary Japanese society.

This collection of essential journal articles and other extracts is an important research resource and will be welcomed by all scholars and students of modern Japan.

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Written for students working at Key Stage 3, the titles that make up the 'World Art and Culture' series explore the fine arts, the decorative arts and design through the ages and in different cultures throughout the world. This volume considers Japanese culture. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A Pathbreaking Precursor Past its Prime
This hefty tome is now half a century old, and, well, it shows. But while it hasn't aged so very gracefully perhaps, it nonetheless deserves respect. In its time it was a groundbreaking effort, dealing directly with subject matter that otherwise hardly made it on the radar of existing scholarship, English or Japanese. It is the foundation and probably original inspiration for many of the fine studies of Meiji religion that have appeared since (like the work of Helen Hardacre, Richard Jaffe, James Ketelaar, Janine Sawada, or Notto Thelle, for instance), and it's still often cited in such studies--so it continues to radiate a certain elder's influence on the field.

The book mostly breaks up its subject matter along religious institutional lines: After a rather standard description of religion during the prior Tokugawa period by Kishimoto Hideo and Wakimoto Tsuneya, we get chapters on Shinto by Hori Ichiro (of later "Folk Religion in Japan" fame) and Toda Yoshio, on Buddhism by Masutani Fumio and Undo Yoshimichi, and on Christianity by Ohata Kiyoshi and Ikado Fujio, after which we get a quick treatment of religion and social development by Oguchi Iichi and Takagi Hiroo (some of the "new religions" like Tenrikyo are covered here). The Haibutsu Kishaku persecution of Buddhism and Buddhist responses to this are covered in some depth, as are movements by Buddhist lay reformers such as Inoue Enryo. The Meiji government's love-hate relationship with Shinto is described pretty well, and the effect of Christianity on literature (such as the novelist Shimazaki Toson) is touched upon briefly. There's some really interesting stuff here, certainly.

So why do I say the book hasn't aged well? First of all, the translation method is extremely eccentric and by today's standards inexcusably inaccurate. The translator, John Howes, has for the most part paraphrased rather than translated, and has weeded out "unnecessary detail" in the process, so that much of the book seems choppy and full of vague generalizations. To Howes' credit, he describes this odd methodology in full detail, so he's not trying to pull a fast one; this just really did seem like a good idea at the time. More alarming is the presence of fascinating quotes that go uncited, ascribed only to "a certain scholar" or "a Buddhist priest" or "a newspaper article" or to no-one at all in a few cases--there is no way to follow up on these if one is so interested, or, well, to know who is really doing the talking here. Particularly dated but understandably so is the polemical stances taken by the authors--in the early 1950's, Japanese militarism and the American occupation were still quite recent experiences, and this accounts for the rather un-nuanced preachy tone found in the book for peace and democracy, and for the now dusty Marxist historiography informing the last section on social development. And of course it was still conventional wisdom that Tokugawa Buddhism was decadent--only recent scholarship has begun to question this assumption, so it's no big surprise to find it taken for granted here.

The most serious flaw with the book though is the inordinate weight granted to Christianity, even given its influence on small circles of urban intellectuals in Meiji. The section on Shinto is 64 pages, the section on Buddhism is 72 pages, and the section on Christianity is 140 pages. So the religion that accounts for like 1% or 2% of the population gets double the coverage of either of the other two, and is in fact longer by a few pages than both of them combined. Yes, bias was at work here, I'm afraid. Howes is largely the culprit here, with his avowed "special interest" in the "influence of Christianity, particularly Protestantism, on the development of modern Japan"--while this indeed totally smacks of the 1950's, it could still be seen as a legitimate research interest, but it got way out of control here. Compounding the problem is the facile equation of Christianity with progress and civilization found in the actual text itself, with strong doses of unabashed Christian triumphalism and missionary propaganda, all of which makes what is unfortunately the longest chunk of the book almost obnoxious to read.

But with all that, there is a lot of good, reliable, and interesting information in the book and some fascinating and illuminating quotations (both cited and uncited), making this good old book still a worthwhile read for anyone interested in the subject, and if you are taking up the study of Meiji religion as an aspiring scholar then you owe it to yourself to do your homework and familiarize yourself with this flawed ancestor, wrinkles and all. ... Read more

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The Handbook of Japanese Culture and Society is an interdisciplinary resource that focuses on contemporary Japan and the social and cultural trends that are important at the beginning of the twenty-first century. This handbook provides a cutting-edge and comprehensive survey of significant phenomena, institutions, and directions in Japan today, on issues ranging from gender and family, the environment, race and ethnicity, and urban life, to popular culture and electronic media. As such, it is an invaluable reference tool for anyone interested in Japan’s culture and society.

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Globalisation – the global movement, and control, of products, capital, technologies, persons and images – increasingly takes place through the work of organisations, perhaps the most powerful of which are multinational corporations. Based in an ethnographic analysis of cross-cultural social interactions in everyday workplace practices at a subsidiary of an elite, Japanese consumer electronics multinational in France, this book intimately examines, and theorises, contemporary global dynamics. Japanese corporate ‘know-how’ is described not simply as the combination of technological innovation riding on financial ‘clout’ but as a reflection of Japanese social relations, powerfully expressed in Japanese organisational dynamics. The book details how Japanese organisational power does and does not adapt in overseas settings: how Japanese managers and engineers negotiate conflicts between their understanding of appropriate practices with those of local, non-Japanese staff – in this case, French managers and engineers – who hold their own distinctive cultural and organisational inclinations in the workplace. The book argues that the insights provided by the intimate study of persons interacting within and across organisations is crucial to a fulsome understanding of globalisation. This is assisted, further, by a grounded examination of how ‘networks’– as social constructions – are both expanded and bounded, a move which assists in collapsing the common reliance on micro and macro levels of analysis in considering global phenomena. The book poses important theoretical and methodological challenges for organisational studies as well as for analysis of the forces of globalisation by anthropologists and other social scientists.

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A collection of essays on popular culture in Japan during the 20th century, considering topics ranging from animation heroes and films to unsuccessful politicians. They pay particular attention to issues of gender, commercialization and nationalisms. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

harking back to a preindustrial vision
To a non-Japanese fan of manga or anima, this book offers a cultural perspective on the roots of anima in Japanese society. It was written in 1985, after the first generation of anima, like Astro Boy and Space Ace and Gigantor. But it deliberately does not offer images or much discuss those cartoons. Instead the images in the text and the accompanying descriptions are all photos of items like traditional buildings, wells, clothing and manuscripts.

Essentially, all the photos are of old items, rooted in preindustrial Japanese society. This harking back to what is perhaps an imagined or idealised past forms the basis of much current perceptions of anima in current society. ... Read more

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Containing over 1000 entries, this work deals with every aspect of Japanese life, including its history, culture and social structures. The topics covered range from hi-tech commerce to flower arranging, wars and unrest to Buddhist enlightenment. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Like Rain upon Medicinal Herbs, Something for Everyone
There are a dizzying multitude of Buddhist scriptures, but in East Asia one of the most influential by far is the Lotus Sutra. This book contains an excellent array of fine scholarly articles exploring this influence in the case of Japan from before the Nara period to the present. And it does this from a wide variety of angles: artistic, poetic, political, geographical, doctrinal, liturgical, and so on. The Sutra's place in both Tendai and Nichiren is addressed in the process, though the discussions are not limited to the sectarian dimension. A great variety of people should find this book interesting and useful.

After an introduction by the editors, the articles are as follows:
1. "The Meaning of the Formation and Structure of the Lotus Sutra" by Shiori Ryodo
2. "The Ideas of the Lotus Sutra" by Tamura Yoshiro
3. "The Lotus Sutra and Saicho's Interpretation of the Realization of Buddhahood with This Very Body" by Paul Groner
4. "Pictorial Art of the Lotus Sutra in Japan" by Miya Tsugio (includes eight illustrations)
5. "Poetry and Meaning: Medieval Poets and the Lotus Sutra" by Yamada Shozen
6. "The Lotus Sutra and Politics in the Mid-Heian Period" by Neil McMullin
7. "Historical Consciousness and Honjaku Philosophy in the Medieval Period on Mount Hiei" by Kuroda Toshio
8. "The Textualized Mountain--Enmountained Text: The Lotus Sutra in Kunisaki" by Allan G. Grapard
9. "Tanaka Chigaku: The Lotus Sutra and the Body Politic" by George J. Tanabe, Jr.
10. "The Lotus Sutra in Modern Japan" by Helen Hardacre ... Read more

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Maido, maido and welcome to the Kansai region of western Japan. Whether visiting or living in this area, you will quickly notice the locals aren’t speaking standard Japanese taught in textbooks and classrooms. The language on the streets is Kansai-ben: a dialect said to be earthier and more direct. With clear explanations of grammar, a Kansai-ben dictionary, and a helpful index, Colloquial Kansai Japanese is an indispensable guide to the rich speech of Kyoto, Osaka and Kobe.
... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

Kind of a cool book, but you'd be better off on your own.
This book is not a bad buy if you've money to spend. It has a nice sense of humor and does a good job with the basics. However, the (arguably) most important aspect of Kansai-ben, intonation, can't be learned here. Students who are serious about learning a new dialect should use what I call "the Skype Method." Seek out Osakans on the internet and chat with them. They'll be more than glad to help you out.

Best Kansai-ben book out there
I'm a college student about to study abroad in the Kansai area and I was looking for a book that would help me to better understand the local dialect. This book is very well laid out and clearly explains the differences between standard Japanese and Kansai dialect and how to use them. There are plenty of examples that help the reader along the way.

Good but much missing
Maybe I expected too much from a book that was only ~$10 but it wasn't very clear on several very important topics in the book and too often resorted straight to simple conversations. Although this was a downfall, overall the book was a very enjoyable read, and was fairly informative. I hate the fact that it uses romanization, but since it always had the hiragana/kanji right below it, I will not complain too much :) overall a good book for intermediate Japanese students that want a very basic guide to speaking (and understanding) one of the more colorful dialects of Japan.

Interesting Stuff...
This book does a great job of looking at the Kansai area forms of Japanese.As a dialectology fan, I found this book entertaining.Explanations and examples are extremely detailed, and a large amount of different subject material is highlighted.

In addition to people who intend to interact with Kansai area speakers, I suggest this book to those who are interested in the dialects of Japan in general.Language is an ever-changing organism, and much of the original flavor of local dialects is forever being lost in many areas.This book goes beyond being practical in that sense, because even if Kansai-ben has been greatly eroded by Tokyo Japanese in the future, this book will be a surviving record of what used to be.

A good find.

Oki ni, Parutaa-san, Kaori-san!
"Colloquial Kansai Japanese" is an updated and expanded edition of Palter and Slotsve's classic "Kinki Japanese*". This book was the key that unlocked the mysteries taking place in everyday conversations during a homestay in Kyoto. It enabled me to answer a very polite cabdriver in Osaka about what I had done while in Osaka. Just the other day, I became friends with a Kyoto native who was really happy to hear my "Kyoto accent", although I spoke not a word of Kansai-ben!

I highly recommend this book to:

* anyone who will spend more than two weeks in the Kansai area, especially homestay students and company workers that will need to converse with homestay family members, colleagues, local merchants, and others.
* anime otaku who watch subs rather than dubs.
* Japanese students interested in dialects.

Since I can't seem to locate my battered copy of "Kinki Japanese" after moving, I'm going to pick up a copy of "Colloquial Kansai Japanese". It's that good.

*Don't laugh, "Kinki" has nothing to do with love hotels or hostess bars. "Kinki" refers to the time when the Kansai area was the political center of Japan, and "kinki" means "the neighborhood of the capital". For many years, Kyoto was the capital of Japan. I suggest you read The Tale of Genji or Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book to capture the flavor of that era's history.

Why the title change? At one time, Tuttle published two books on this subject, the other being Peter Tse's "Kansai Japanese". Tse's book is no longer in print. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (5)

Japanese Cinema at its best
Kurosawa is the master of the Japanese Cinema and this book is a perfect accompaniment to his films.You will not be disappointed!

quite a low-leveleddiscussion on famous kurosawa
I am a Japanese Kurosawa fan. This book is full of already-known knowledges, andfatally lacks detailed analyses of Kurosawa films. The book is full of quotations from the contemporryJapanese banal film reviews, which are not worthy of quoating.Yoshimoto, the author of the book, cannot make original discussions on Kurosawa. He does anything but persuasive discussions.To the Japanese readers, the book is boring to death, full of banal opinions. Yoshimoto has no status to call himself a film scholar. If he reads this book by any chance, Kurosawa mustweep in the heaven. Duke University Press should not have published the book, if it wants to be an aclaimed publisher.

Japanese Cinema in Search of a Discipline
Sometimes a marginal position in a faculty department or a personal discomfort with established disciplines can provide an impregnable view on the academic world. The tools that academics use for cognition and recognition--assigning people a place in the academic field, distinguishing between major and minor subjects, establishing traditions and ruptures in a particular area of inquiry--are turned inwards and become revealers of one's own position. By understanding his or her own social conditions of production and the position he or she occupies in society, the scholar is able to expose the whole social space that players fully caught in the game can only partially reveal. This act of reflexive lucidity is often perceived as an unforgivable aggression by insiders, who confuse analysis with denunciation, precision with envy, and realism with cynicism. Pierre Bourdieu, who applied this kind of reflexive sociology to the French academic world, was thus the object of constant criticism.

Although he doesn't quote Bourdieu, Matsuhiro Yoshimoto applies a similar methodology to the field of Japanese film studies. By putting Japanese cinema in search of a discipline, he not only reveals the limitations of film studies as an academic discipline, but also the difficulty in aligning a study of a Japanese filmmaker with other intellectual pursuits in the humanities, such as literary criticism, Japanese scholarship, area studies, comparative literature, post-structuralist theory or the new, post-disciplinary discourse of cultural studies.

As noted in his introductory chapter, Japanese cinema played a significant role in the establishment of film studies as a discrete discipline and in the legitimation of cinema as an object of serious academic research. Yet the history of American scholarship on Japanese cinema also reveals the impasse in which the discipline has fallen. From the cult of the auteur that started with Rashomon's Kurosawa to the theoretical turn of post-marxist or structuralist scholarship and the identity politics of cross-cultural studies, Yoshimoto documents the analytical flaws and methodological shortcomings in scholarly discourse on Japanses cinema (and as he wrily notes, "dropping theorists' names [Derrida, Lyotard, Lacan, Barthes] or their key terms [differend, meconnaissance, punctum, grand recit] does not make an analysis of Japanese cinema automatically theoretical.")

If film studies and their mechanical application of what passes as theory in humanities departments have exhausted their critical vein to the point of being "totally repetitive and uninteresting", then can one anchor the study of Japanese cinema in another supporting discipine? Unfortunately, none is in a position to offer much to the kind of film criticism that the author has in mind. For Yoshimoto, Japanese studies suffer from the original sin of their contribution to the wartime effort and the postwar attempt to "modernize" Japan. Besides, because film cannot be either "translated" or "annotated," traditionnally trained literary scholars do not know what to do with Japanese cinema. Movie critics who see in Japanese movies a reflexion of abstract values and Japaneseness are not of much help either. Comparative literature seems at first a more welcoming discipline, but failed to develop a strong body of research methods and results and recently suffered from the onslaught of cultural studies. Indeed, it is under this last label, conceived as post-disciplinary practice or "a tactical intervention in the structures and practices of the established disciplines", that Yoshimoto decides to record his study of Kurosawa movies.

This introductory chapter on Japanese Cinema in Search of a Discipline is itself worth acquiring the book. But the remainder is even more fascinating: after having cleared the space from unwanted cliches and cumbersome interpretations, Yoshimoto then attempts to build his own strand of film studies through a fine-grained and detailed analysis of each and every movie directed by Akira Kurosawa. Each chapter, of variable length, provides a unique perspective to Kurosawa's movies. The book will prove a valuable read not only to film studies scholars, but also to every Kurosawa fan who will discover more reasons to revere their favorite director.

Much more than a study on Kurosawa
Although the book covers every film of Kurosawa's career, this is not a work of 'auteur' criticism.In fact, Yoshimoto addresses the very shortcomings of such an approach in the introduction of his text.As suggested by the book's secondary title, the work tackles something much more broad in scope and does so more critically than any other work related to the films of Kurosawa.

First and foremost, what sets this work apart from most studies of either Kurosawa or more generally Japanese cinema (that are published in English) is Yoshimoto's close and careful attention to history. Not only does he 'historicize' both Kurosawa-as-author and his catalogue of films but he also does the same to the recent tradition of criticism on Japanese cinema that has become so popular in Western academia.He convincingly critiques the previous work of Donald Richie, Noel Burch, Stephen Prince (and more briefly David Desser and James Goodwin), and his analysis of Western criticism on Japan as falling into 3 phases (humanist - formalist/marxist - 'cross-cultural') is most helpful.

When I suggest that he 'historicizes' these three methods of critique, I mean he demonstrates how these approaches perhaps worked not to better illuminate the objects 'Kurosawa' and 'Japanese cinema' but to 'naturalize' or legitimate other historical developments 'outside' the intended object of scrutiny. For instance, Yoshimoto argues that humanist and auteur forms of criticism (that were popular in the 1960s) when applied to Kurosawa's films did less to interpret the films-themselves and instead worked to legitimate the contemporaneous formation of 'film studies' as a proper field of scholarship.He goes on to critique the other phases of critical approach in a similar fashion.

Yoshimoto also performs historical critiques of other interpretive frameworks that are often assumed to make sense of Japanese film production.He puts into question the category 'samurai film' as assumed by critics like David Desser by demonstrating its 'orientalist' function in recent 'cross-cultural' discourse.He challenges careless appeals to 'zen' that do less to make sense of films and more to 'essentialize' certain contingent aspects of Japanese culture. Also, he reads the typical grouping of Japanese film into two genres, 'jidaigeki' and 'gendaigeki', in the context of current historical struggles by showing this division to function as a kind of effacement of certain contradictions and invasions that took place in recent global events. These are only some of the enlightening points made throughout this book - mainly the ones that really stuck with me.

As stated before, this book is more than an investigation of Kurosawa - this is a convincing challenge to the practice of 'Japanese film studies' as a discipline.However, in relation to Kurosawa, the highlites (in my opinion) are his readings of 'Stray Dog', 'Seven Samurai', 'Throne of Blood', and 'High and Low'. Personally, I wish there was more on both 'Rashomon' and 'Yojimbo' - but that, in no way, alters my high opinion of this work. By far, this is the best work on Japanese film I have ever read.His writing is clear - his arguments are convincing, and his ideas are original. This is a 5 star work of scholarship.

Also, I recommend reading his article "The Difficulty of Being Radical: The Discipline of Film Studies and the Postcolonial World Order" in 'boundary 2' (Autumn 1991).

a relatively in-depth compendium into cinema history...
the book is structured in a straight-foward manner. with it's frame-of-reference established from the very beginning, this text then progresses forward film-by-film in Kurosawa's career, and much of japanese cinema history and general japanese history. where this text adds and others deny is its dedication to pick at each film and argue and stress points, utilizing examples from films in a relativley-in-depth manner. Kurosawa's films are contextualized not only from humanities-type critique, but from literary and cinema theory, as well as an admirable effort into the muddled language of post-structuralism, etc. however, there are some disappointments when some films aren't covered heavily as compared to others, but this was probably to save on redundancy. This book is a necessary for those not familiar with Kurosawa's works and desire an extensive analysis, and it can also act as a good springboard into general literary and cinema theory. ... Read more

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A study of Japan's tendency to make the most out of miniaturization - a study of a philosophy of living that reveals the essence of Japanese culture. ... Read more

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First published in 1988 and now available in a photo-reprint paperback edition, this book provides an important perspective on the theatre, culture, and politics of Japan in the 1960s. It contains translations of five plays representative of the period, with analytical commentary by a leading authority on postwar Japanese drama. The author’s central thesis is that the 1960 demonstrations against the renewal of the U.S.-Japan Mutual Security Treaty was a major turning point in Japanese intellectual life, one characterized by disillusionment with the old left and the legacy of prewar left-wing formulations and by a quest for an alternative to the dominant Hegelian-Marxist system. The book argues that the 1960s were a period of eschatological reflection in which profound questions about ultimate ends were being asked. ... Read more

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A fully-illustrated introduction to the archaeology of the Jomon period in Japan, this book explores the complex relationships between Jomon people and their rich natural environment. From the end of the last Ice Age 12,000 years ago to the appearance of rice agriculture around 400 BC, Jomon people subsisted by hunting, fishing and gathering; but abundant and predictable sources of wild food enabled Jomon people to live in large, relatively permanent settlements, and to develop an elaborate material culture. This book explores thematic issues in Jomon archaeology: the appearance of sedentism in the Japanese archipelago and the nature of Jomon settlements; the invention of pottery and the development and meaning of regional pottery styles; social and spiritual life; as well as the astronomical significance of causeway monuments and the conceptualisation of landscape in the Jomon period. These ideas are considered in the light of current work in the European Mesolithic and Neolithic, setting Jomon archaeology within a global context. The book draws extensively on new archaeological information from various parts of Japan, including the sites of Sannai Maruyama, Isedotai, Komankino among others. Extensive colour illustrations provide a vivid demonstration of Jomon ideology and creativity. ... Read more