Author: Douglas Slaymaker
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134354037
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 217
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Book Description
This book explores one of the crucial themes in postwar Japanese fiction. Through an examination of the work of a number of prominent twentieth century Japanese writers, the book analyses the meaning of the body in postwar Japanese discourse, the gender constructions of the imagery of the body and the implications for our understanding of individual and national identity. This book will be of interest to all students of modern Japanese literature.
Author: Douglas Slaymaker
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134354029
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 328
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Book Description
This book explores one of the crucial themes in postwar Japanese fiction. Through an examination of the work of a number of prominent twentieth century Japanese writers, the book analyses the meaning of the body in postwar Japanese discourse, the gender constructions of the imagery of the body and the implications for our understanding of individual and national identity. This book will be of interest to all students of modern Japanese literature.
Author: Alex Bates
Publisher: Modern Language Association
ISBN: 160329595X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 199
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Book Description
As Japan moved from the devastation of 1945 to the economic security that survived even the boom and bust of the 1980s and 1990s, its literature came to embrace new subjects and styles and to reflect on the nation's changing relationship to other Asian countries and to the West. This volume will help instructors introduce students to novels, short stories, and manga that confront postwar Japanese experiences, including the suffering caused by the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the echoes of Japan's colonialism and imperialism, new ways of thinking about Japanese identity and about minorities such as the zainichi Koreans, changes in family structures, and environmental disasters. Essays provide context for understanding the particularity of postwar Japanese literature, its place in world literature, and its connections to the Japanese past.
Author: William H Bridges
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472054422
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 307
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Book Description
Playing in the Shadows considers the literature engendered by postwar Japanese authors’ robust cultural exchanges with African Americans and African American literature. The Allied Occupation brought an influx of African American soldiers and culture to Japan, which catalyzed the writing of black characters into postwar Japanese literature. This same influx fostered the creation of organizations such as the Kokujin kenkyu no kai (The Japanese Association for Negro Studies) and literary endeavors such as the Kokujin bungaku zenshu (The Complete Anthology of Black Literature). This rich milieu sparked Japanese authors’—Nakagami Kenji and Oe Kenzaburo are two notable examples—interest in reading, interpreting, critiquing, and, ultimately, incorporating the tropes and techniques of African American literature and jazz performance into their own literary works. Such incorporation leads to literary works that are “black” not by virtue of their representations of black characters, but due to their investment in the possibility of technically and intertextually black Japanese literature. Will Bridges argues that these “fictions of race” provide visions of the way that postwar Japanese authors reimagine the ascription of race to bodies—be they bodies of literature, the body politic, or the human body itself.
Author: Irina Holca
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1793623880
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 317
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Book Description
This collection brings together fifteen chapters written by scholars specializing in disciplines ranging from anthropology and sociology to literature, film, and performance studies. These scholars analyze complex questions about how the body is lived and imagined as a locus of meaning-making in contemporary Japan. Exploring such topics as mind-body dualism, aging and illness, spirit possession, beauty, performance, and gender, this collection addresses the wide array of socio-cultural and literary contexts in which the body is interpreted in Japanese culture and thought.
Author: Sharalyn Orbaugh
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004155465
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 535
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Book Description
The reconstruction of identity in post World War II Japan after the trauma of war, defeat and occupation forms the subject of this latest volume in Brill's monograph series Japanese Studies Library. Closely examining the role of fiction produced during the Allied Occupation, Sharalyn Orbaugh begins with an examination of the rhetoric of wartime propaganda, and explores how elements of that rhetoric were redeployed postwar as authors produced fiction linked to the redefinition of what it means to be Japanese. Drawing on tools and methods from trauma studies, gender and race studies, and film and literary theory, the study traces important nodes in the construction and maintenance of discourses of identity through attention to writers' representations of the gaze, the body, language, and social performance. This book will be of interest to any student of the literary or cultural history of World War II and its aftermath. "Japanese Fiction of the Allied Occupation was awarded Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2007,"
Author: Oliviero Frattolillo
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000909670
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 215
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Book Description
This book is a political and cultural history of the early postwar Japan aiming at exploring how the perception and cultural values of everyday life in the country changed along with the rise of the kasutori culture. Such a process was closely tied with both a refusal of the samurai culture and the interwar debate on modernity, and it resulted in a decadent way of life, exemplified by intellectuals such as Sakaguchi Ango. It depicts a short-lived radical cultural and social alternative, one that forced people to rethink their relationship to the kokutai, modernity, social roles, daily practices, and the production of knowledge. The subjectivity and daily practices in those years were more important in shaping the cultural identities of the Japanese than the new public ideology of the nation. This challenges some Euro-American historical notions that the new private sphere has emerged in Japan as an effect of the country’s Americanization, rather than from within it. This work not only looks at the immediate aftermath of WWII from the perspective of Japan, but also tries to rethink Westernization in the light of its global appropriation. This volume is addressed to specialists of Japanese or Asian history, but it will also attract historians of the United States and readers from political and intellectual history, cultural studies, and historiography in general.
Author: Roman Rosenbaum
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136936211
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 268
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Book Description
When we look in detail at the various peripheral groups of disenfranchised people emerging from the aftermath of the Asia–Pacific War the list is startling: Koreans in Japan (migrants or forced labourers), Burakumin, Hibakusha, Okinawans, Asian minorities, comfort women and many others. Many of these groups have been discussed in a large corpus of what we may call ‘disenfranchised literature’, and the research presented in this book intends to add an additional and particularly controversial example to the long list of the voice- and powerless. The presence of members of what is known as the yakeato sedai or the generation of people who experienced the fire-bombings of the Asia–Pacific War is conspicuous in all areas of contemporary Japan. From literature to the visual arts, from music to theatre, from architecture to politics, their influence and in many cases guiding principles is evident everywhere and in many cases forms the keystone of modern Japanese society and culture. The contributors to this book explore the impact of the yakeato generation - and their literary, creative and cultural and works - on the postwar period by drawing out the importance of the legacy of those people who truly survived the darkest hour of the twentieth century and re-evaluate the ramifications of their experiences in contemporary Japanese society and culture. As such this book will be of huge interest to those studying Japanese history, literature, poetry and cultural studies.
Author: Fusako Innami
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472054988
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 253
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Book Description
How can one construct relationality with the other through the skin, when touch is inevitably mediated by memories of previous contact, accumulated sensations, and interstitial space?
Author: Rachael Hutchinson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134233914
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 368
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Book Description
Representing the Other in Modern Japanese Literature looks at the ways in which authors writing in Japanese in the twentieth century constructed a division between the ‘Self’ and the ‘Other’ in their work. Drawing on methodology from Foucault and Lacan, the clearly presented essays seek to show how Japanese writers have responded to the central question of what it means to be ‘Japanese’ and of how best to define their identity. Taking geographical, racial and ethnic identity as a starting point to explore Japan's vision of 'non-Japan', representations of the Other are examined in terms of the experiences of Japanese authors abroad and in the imaginary lands envisioned by authors in Japan. Using a diverse cross-section of writers and texts as case studies, this edited volume brings together contributions from a number of leading international experts in the field and is written at an accessible level, making it essential reading for those working in Japanese studies, colonialism, identity studies and nationalism.
