Japanese Cultural Encounters

Japanese Cultural Encounters PDF

Author: Hiroko Kataoka

Publisher: McGraw Hill Professional

Published: 1991-02

Total Pages: 132

ISBN-13: 9780844285313

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Reveals subtle differences between Japanese culture and our own._

Japan Encounters the Barbarian

Japan Encounters the Barbarian PDF

Author: Emeritus Professor W G Beasley

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 1995-01-01

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 9780300063240

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For over a hundred years the Japanese have looked to the West for ideas, institutions and technology that would help them achieve their goal of 'national wealth and strength'. In this book a distinguished historian of Japan discusses Japan's 'cultural borrowing' from America and Europe. W. G. Beasley focuses on the mid-nineteenth century, when Japan's rulers dispatched diplomatic missions to the West to discover what Japan needed to learn, sent students abroad to assimilate information and invited foreign experts to Japan to help put the knowledge to practical use. Beasley examines the origins of the decision to initiate direct study of the West at a time when western countries counted as 'barbarian' by Confucian standards. Drawing on many colourful letters, diaries, memoirs and reports, he describes the missions sent overseas in 1860 and 1862, in 1865-1867 and in the years after 1868, in particular the prestigious embassy led by Iwakura in 1871-1873. The book also tells the story of the several hundred students who went overseas in this period. It concludes by assessing the impact of the encounters on the subsequent development of Japan, first by examining the later careers of the travellers and the influence they exercised (they included no fewer than six prime ministers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries), and then by considering the nature of the ideas they brought home.

Intimate Encounters

Intimate Encounters PDF

Author: Lieba Faier

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 299

ISBN-13: 0520252144

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Lieba Faier investigates the processes by which Filipina women who emigrated to work in rural Japan in hostess bars have overcome initial hostilities to become regarded as 'ideal, traditional Japanese brides'. 'Intimate Encounters' shows how changes to culture & identity come about through ordinary interpersonal exchanges.

The Forgotten Japanese

The Forgotten Japanese PDF

Author: Tsuneichi Miyamoto

Publisher: Stone Bridge Press

Published: 2010-03-01

Total Pages: 318

ISBN-13: 1933330805

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A revealing look into the hearts of the Japanese people and at rural lifestyles that have all but disappeared, in a long-awaited translation of a classic text by one of Japan's great folklore scholars.

Japanese Encounters

Japanese Encounters PDF

Author: Eyal Ben-Ari

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-11-27

Total Pages: 194

ISBN-13: 1351680080

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This book explores the multiplicity of special times and spaces in Japan within which people get together to decide, celebrate or play, in gatherings such as organizational meetings, community festivities, preschool games or drinking bouts. It analyzes these gatherings in relation to the theoretical model of sociocultural frames, examining how such occasions are put together, their unfolding stages, interactive encounters, and relations between participants and the wider social and cultural contexts. It considers the cognitive, emotional and behavioural dimensions, the scope for manipulation and the effects, intentional and unintentional, on participants and the connections to the ways in which in society and culture change. Overall, besides describing specific rites and ceremonies in Japan, the book provides great insights into the process whereby the interactions, feelings and action of individuals and groups shape popular culture.

Japenese Encounters With Postmod

Japenese Encounters With Postmod PDF

Author: Yoshio Sugimoto

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2012-11-12

Total Pages: 326

ISBN-13: 1136163824

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This is a systematic study of the sociological debate on postmodernity in the Japanese context. The volume consists of a collection of 12 papers that explore the idea of postmodernity primarily from sociological perspectives, covering a wide range of domains including work, feminism, communication, science and technology, social stratification, fine arts and literature. The contributors come from diverse disciplines ranging from sociology and history to political science and linguistics. They include advocates of postmodern theories and postmodernist analyses of Japanese society, as well as critics who argue that a suitable revised theory of modernity is still an adequate framework for comparing Japan and the West. Others take the view that an intermediate position might be more productive; that a qualified or provisional version of postmodern can throw new light on issues traditionally neglected by social theory. While the postmodernity debate has been carried out chiefly in the context of European and American experiences, this book aims to pave the way for the postmodernity question to be explored in the non-western but highly industrialized setting of Japan, and brings forward a series of open-ended questions about the bias in the debate. Written by academics based in universities in Japan and Australia, the volume itself is postmodern in its internal diversity and multi-cultural orientation.

Japanese Art in Perspective

Japanese Art in Perspective PDF

Author: 高階秀爾

Publisher:

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 191

ISBN-13: 9784866581804

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"How do Japanese and Western aesthetics differ? In this comparative cultural study, TAKASHINA Shūji, a leading scholar of Western art history and insightful commentator on Japanese art, compares the two artistic traditions to reveal the distinctive characteristics of the Japanese sense of beauty. The first section, Methods of Japanese Art, uses examples and cross-cultural comparisons to elucidate the techniques by which Japanese artists cultivated their unique approach. These include roving rather than fixed perspective, the 'aesthetic of negation' -- excising the unnecessary to emphasize what remains -- and the 'trailing bough' motif, which evokes a world beyond the work's borders and influenced Western artists such as Monet. In the second section, East-West Encounters, Takashina examines the history of cultural interaction between Japan and the West from the early modern period on and its influence on the art of both. The third section, Passing Beauty, Returning Memory, contains essays on Japanese culture more broadly, including its preference for recurring forms over fixed monuments and its tradition of combining multiple seasons in a single image. Japanese Art in Perspective is a guide not only to the art of Japan but to the essence of its spiritual culture." --

Encounter with Enlightenment

Encounter with Enlightenment PDF

Author: Robert E. Carter

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2012-02-01

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 0791490300

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In Encounter with Enlightenment, Robert E. Carter puts forth the East, and specifically Japan, as a source of possible solutions to the world's social, economic, and environmental problems. Not only is the book a sustained scholarly analysis of both the religious and philosophical roots of Japan's distinctive ethical approach to life, but it also provides the Western reader with a context for understanding Eastern values—values that although familiar to the West tend to be deemphasized. Encounter with Enlightenment begins a horizontal fusion between East and West, and establishes a common ground for mutual understanding and for working toward an ethical approach that could resolve some of the earth's difficulties.

Mirror in the Shrine

Mirror in the Shrine PDF

Author: Robert A. Rosenstone

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 1988

Total Pages: 342

ISBN-13: 9780674576414

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Based on the travels of Griffis, Morse, and Hearn in the late 1800s, these stories evoke the immediacy of daily experience in Meiji, Japan, a nation still feudal in many of its habits yet captivating to Westerners for its gentleness, beauty, and pure charm. Illustrated.

Encounters with Aging

Encounters with Aging PDF

Author: Margaret M. Lock

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 1994-01-20

Total Pages: 494

ISBN-13: 9780520916623

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Margaret Lock explicitly compares Japanese and North American medical and political accounts of female middle age to challenge Western assumptions about menopause. She uses ethnography, interviews, statistics, historical and popular culture materials, and medical publications to produce a richly detailed account of Japanese women's lives. The result offers irrefutable evidence that the experience and meanings—even the endocrinological changes—associated with female midlife are far from universal. Rather, Lock argues, they are the product of an ongoing dialectic between culture and local biologies. Japanese focus on middle-aged women as family members, and particularly as caretakers of elderly relatives. They attach relatively little importance to the end of menstruation, seeing it as a natural part of the aging process and not a diseaselike state heralding physical decline and emotional instability. Even the symptoms of midlife are different: Japanese women report few hot flashes, for example, but complain frequently of stiff shoulders. Articulate, passionate, and carefully documented, Lock's study systematically undoes the many preconceptions about aging women in two distinct cultural settings. Because it is rooted in the everyday lives of Japanese women, it also provides an excellent entree to Japanese society as a whole. Aging and menopause are subjects that have been closeted behind our myths, fears, and misconceptions. Margaret Lock's cross-cultural perspective gives us a critical new lens through which to examine our assumptions.