Woman in the Crested Kimono

Woman in the Crested Kimono PDF Author: Edwin McClellan
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300046182
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
"The life of Shibue Io and her family, a kind of Japanese Buddenbrooks, may be unknown in the West, but her rich and engaging story marks the intersection of a remarkable woman with a fascinating time in history."--Arthur Golden, author of Memoirs of a Geisha "It stands clichÈs about traditional Japan on their heads. . . .Together with the people she knew, Io lives on in this literary album of old family pictures. It is well worth looking at."--Ian Buruma, New York Times Book Review "A most engaging book. Seeing Shibue Io through the various lenses of her husband, her son, Tamotsu (from whom much information is gleaned), the novelist Ogai, and the biographer McClellan is an interesting, moving, disarming experience."--Donald Richie, Japan Times "McClellan. . . has created a lively world, populated by women of various classes, samurai, doctors, poets, merchants, juvenile delinquents, and old eccentrics. The various incidents in which these people become involved provide a vivid picture of late Tokugawa society. This is a remarkable accomplishment."--Nakai Yoshiyuki, Monumenta Nipponica "An engrossing, informative, and extremely useful book. . . . Woman in the Crested Kimono is not simply the account of one unusual Tokugawa woman. It is an evocation of a family, and through a family the entire samurai class, going from the comparative affluence of the late Tokugawa period through the turmoils of the restoration and beyond."--Susan Napier, Journal of Asian Studies Daughter of a merchant family in nineteenth-century Japan and wife of a distinguished scholar-doctor of the samurai class, Shibue Io was a woman remarkable in her own right for her exceptionally keen mind and fearless spirit. Edwin McClellan now draws on the biography of her husband, written by Mori Ogai, to tell the story of Shibue Io, her society, and her times.

Woman in the Crested Kimono

Woman in the Crested Kimono PDF Author: Edwin McClellan
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300046182
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 212

Get Book

Book Description
"The life of Shibue Io and her family, a kind of Japanese Buddenbrooks, may be unknown in the West, but her rich and engaging story marks the intersection of a remarkable woman with a fascinating time in history."--Arthur Golden, author of Memoirs of a Geisha "It stands clichÈs about traditional Japan on their heads. . . .Together with the people she knew, Io lives on in this literary album of old family pictures. It is well worth looking at."--Ian Buruma, New York Times Book Review "A most engaging book. Seeing Shibue Io through the various lenses of her husband, her son, Tamotsu (from whom much information is gleaned), the novelist Ogai, and the biographer McClellan is an interesting, moving, disarming experience."--Donald Richie, Japan Times "McClellan. . . has created a lively world, populated by women of various classes, samurai, doctors, poets, merchants, juvenile delinquents, and old eccentrics. The various incidents in which these people become involved provide a vivid picture of late Tokugawa society. This is a remarkable accomplishment."--Nakai Yoshiyuki, Monumenta Nipponica "An engrossing, informative, and extremely useful book. . . . Woman in the Crested Kimono is not simply the account of one unusual Tokugawa woman. It is an evocation of a family, and through a family the entire samurai class, going from the comparative affluence of the late Tokugawa period through the turmoils of the restoration and beyond."--Susan Napier, Journal of Asian Studies Daughter of a merchant family in nineteenth-century Japan and wife of a distinguished scholar-doctor of the samurai class, Shibue Io was a woman remarkable in her own right for her exceptionally keen mind and fearless spirit. Edwin McClellan now draws on the biography of her husband, written by Mori Ogai, to tell the story of Shibue Io, her society, and her times.

Woman in the Crested Kimono

Woman in the Crested Kimono PDF Author: Edwin McClellan
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Mothers
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description


The Woman in the White Kimono

The Woman in the White Kimono PDF Author: Ana Johns
Publisher: Harlequin
ISBN: 148803513X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
Oceans and decades apart, two women are inextricably bound by the secrets between them. Japan, 1957. Seventeen-year-old Naoko Nakamura’s prearranged marriage to the son of her father’s business associate would secure her family’s status in their traditional Japanese community, but Naoko has fallen for another man—an American sailor, a gaijin—and to marry him would bring great shame upon her entire family. When it’s learned Naoko carries the sailor’s child, she’s cast out in disgrace and forced to make unimaginable choices with consequences that will ripple across generations. America, present day. Tori Kovac, caring for her dying father, finds a letter containing a shocking revelation—one that calls into question everything she understood about him, her family and herself. Setting out to learn the truth behind the letter, Tori’s journey leads her halfway around the world to a remote seaside village in Japan, where she must confront the demons of the past to pave a way for redemption. In breathtaking prose and inspired by true stories from a devastating and little-known era in Japanese and American history, The Woman in the White Kimono illuminates a searing portrait of one woman torn between her culture and her heart, and another woman on a journey to discover the true meaning of home.

Crested Kimono

Crested Kimono PDF Author: Matthews Masayuki Hamabata
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801499753
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
Matthews Hamabata got off to an unpromising start when he first arrived in Japan to study influential business families. An unmarried, third-generation Japanese-American graduate student, he was there to learn about business executives in their roles as male principals and heads of households. Some Japanese were less than hospitable and often downright rude to him, and the souvenirs bearing the Harvard University emblem that he had brought along for gifts proved to be inappropriate within the highly ritualized system of Japanese gift-giving. In this engaging and personal narrative, we watch Hamabata in the first disappointing six months of his fieldwork as he attempts to map the boundaries of culture, class, and sexuality. "I became my own biggest fieldwork problem," he writes. "Was I inside or out? When I thought I was in, I was actually out, but when I acknowledged the fact that I was out, I was let in." He soon recognized the importance of marital and filial relations in transmitting power in the business world, and he began to direct his study to examining the social and emotional lives of all members of the Japanese ie (household) and the way they affect business activity and ownership. He takes us behind the scenes of the family enterprise to see how the multiple "layers of reality"--biological, social, religious, emotional, and symbolic--relate and cause dilemmas for ie members. (Names, locations, and other details have been altered for the sake of anonymity.) We meet the Moriuchis, the Itoos, the Okimotos--people who must constantly balance their own personal desires against the good of the ie. Many telling vignettes illustrate a central tension in their lives--their need for love, power, and emotional expression versus the constraints of traditional attitudes toward their ancestors, public honor, the economic enterprise, and the obligation to continue the ie over time. A grandfather stubbornly refuses to hand over the reins of succession to the next generation, creating an impossible situation that eventually tears apart an economic empire, as well as the fabric of various interrelated families. Economic, familial, and religious factors figure in a clash for succession between the person who possesses the ancestral tablets and the head of the enterprise. A daughter must reconcile personal love with arranged marriage. Ambitions for the son in line for succession war with the realization that this spoiled, incompetent young man may well ruin the ie. A fascinating portrait of everyday life told with vibrant sensitivity as well as humor, this book is full of the vitality of common concerns: life choices, love and commitment, confrontations with death. It is about very real people trying to make sense of their lives--trying to reconcile the roles and duties dictated by custom and tradition with rapidly changing expectations in the international milieu of contemporary Japan.

Recreating Japanese Women, 1600-1945

Recreating Japanese Women, 1600-1945 PDF Author: Gail Lee Bernstein
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520910184
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
In thirteen wide-ranging essays, scholars and students of Asian and women's studies will find a vivid exploration of how female roles and feminine identity have evolved over 350 years, from the Tokugawa era to the end of World War II. Starting from the premise that gender is not a biological given, but is socially constructed and culturally transmitted, the authors describe the forces of change in the construction of female gender and explore the gap between the ideal of womanhood and the reality of Japanese women's lives. Most of all, the contributors speak to the diversity that has characterized women's experience in Japan. This is an imaginative, pioneering work, offering an interdisciplinary approach that will encourage a reconsideration of the paradigms of women's history, hitherto rooted in the Western experience.

The Weak Body of a Useless Woman

The Weak Body of a Useless Woman PDF Author: Anne Walthall
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226872353
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 440

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Book Description
In 1862, fifty-one-year-old Matsuo Taseko left her old life behind by traveling to Kyoto, the old imperial capital. Peasant, poet, and local political activist, Taseko had come to Kyoto to support the nativist campaign to restore the Japanese emperor and expel Western "barbarians." Although she played a minor role in the events that led to the Meiji Restoration of 1868, her actions were nonetheless astonishing for a woman of her day. Honored as a hero even before her death, Taseko has since been adopted as a patron saint by rightist nationalists. In telling Taseko's story, Anne Walthall gives us not just the first full biography in English of a peasant woman of the Tokugawa period (1603-1868), but also fresh perspectives on the practices and intellectual concerns of rural entrepreneurs and their role in the Meiji Restoration. Writing about Taseko with a depth and complexity that has thus far been accorded only to men of that time, Walthall has uncovered a tale that will captivate anyone concerned with women's lives and with Japan's dramatic transition to modernity.

Counting Dreams

Counting Dreams PDF Author: Roger K. Thomas
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501760017
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
Counting Dreams tells the story of Nomura Bōtō, a Buddhist nun, writer, poet, and activist who joined the movement to oppose the Tokugawa Shogunate and restore imperial rule. Banished for her political activities, Bōtō was imprisoned on a remote island until her comrades rescued her in a dramatic jailbreak, spiriting her away under gunfire. Roger K. Thomas examines Bōtō's life, writing, and legacy, and provides annotated translations of two of her literary diaries, shedding light on life and society in Japan's tumultuous bakumatsu period and challenging preconceptions about women's roles in the era. Thomas interweaves analysis of Bōtō's poetry and diaries with the history of her life and activism, examining their interrelationship and revealing how she brought two worlds—the poetic and the political—together. Counting Dreams illustrates Bōtō's significant role in the loyalist movement, depicting the adventurous life of a complex woman in Japan on the cusp of the Meiji Restoration.

Modern Japan, Student Economy Edition

Modern Japan, Student Economy Edition PDF Author: Mikiso Hane
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429961987
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 610

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Book Description
This book presents the essential facts of modern Japanese history. It covers a variety of important developments through the 1990s, giving special consideration to how traditional Japanese modes of thought and behavior have affected the recent developments.

Koume’s World

Koume’s World PDF Author: Simon Partner
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231559100
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 203

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Book Description
Kawai Koume (1804–1889) was an accomplished poet and painter and a wife, mother, and grandmother in a lower-ranking samurai family in the provincial castle town of Wakayama. She was an eyewitness to many of the key events leading up to the Meiji Restoration and the radical changes that followed, including the famine of 1837, the great earthquake of 1854, the cholera epidemic of 1859, and the departure of samurai to fight in the civil wars of the 1860s. For more than fifty years, she kept a diary recording her family’s daily life—meals and expenses, visitors and the weather, small-town gossip and news of momentous events. Through Koume’s eyes and words, Simon Partner opens a window on social, economic, and cultural life amid some of the most dramatic periods of Japan’s transformative nineteenth century. Koume’s World vividly portrays the everyday activities, social interactions, information networks, cultural production, and household economy of a samurai family across the Tokugawa-Meiji divide. Partner’s narrative offers a remarkably detailed portrait of the dynamic working life of a female artist and household manager while also giving a regional perspective on the upheavals surrounding the Meiji Restoration. A compelling microhistorical study of gender, economy, and society in nineteenth-century Japan, Koume’s World is a compelling account of how one woman experienced both mundane routines and drastic social transformations.

Commemorating Meiji

Commemorating Meiji PDF Author: D.V. Botsman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000441350
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 152

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Book Description
2018 marked the 150th anniversary of Japan’s Meiji Restoration, a milestone that the government of Prime Minister Abe Shinzō has actively sought to highlight and celebrate. Whereas other studies have focused on the events of the Meiji Restoration itself, this volume reflects upon the politically charged history of commemorating Meiji, particularly in the twentieth century. This other history of Meiji remains largely unknown outside of Japan, even though it is particularly relevant in the aftermath of a wide range of government-sponsored celebrations marking the Meiji Sesquicentennial. At moments of official historical commemoration, it is natural enough to imagine a direct line linking the act of commemoration to the original event that is the ostensible focus of remembrance and celebration. In fact, the commemoration of Meiji today cannot be understood simply in terms of the relationship between the present and 1868, or even the longer Meiji period. The chapters in this volume highlight the politics of memory as they played out across a series of milestones over the twentieth century. Together they show the pressing need to look more closely at issues of commemoration as a key topic in their own right. The chapters in this book were originally published in Japanese Studies.