Japanese Consciousness Research Articles

“Breast-Is-Best” and Care in Fukazawa Ushio’s Chibusa no kuni de

The “breast-is-best” ideology (bonyū shinwa), which is still firmly rooted in Japanese consciousness, can cause women stress and pain, becoming a source of anxiety and even depression. When used in fiction, we can read it as a topos that highlights the great pressure experienced by mothers as primary caregivers in contemporary Japanese society.In this paper, I analyze the representation of breastfeeding in relation to the concept of care in the novel Chibusa no kuni de (In the Country of Breasts, 2020) by Fukazawa Ushio. I argue that Fukazawa’s novel tackles the issue of “breast-is-best” discourse on several levels. On the one hand, this novel describes the discomfort that both the lack and overproduction of breastmilk can cause in women, and also depicts women who lack the so-called “maternal instinct.” On the other hand, the novel also questions the traditional view of care as something that should be performed at the individual level in the intimate sphere. My analysis of Fukazawa’s work will highlight the link between breastfeeding, care, and power, while shedding light on the interdependence between caregivers and care-receivers.

Japanese Consciousness of Narrowing from the Perspective of Architecture

One of the characteristics of Japanese culture is the “consciousness of narrowing”. Sei Shonagon once wrote in “The Pillow Book” that “no matter what, small things are exquisite.” The Japanese people's awareness of the beauty of smallness is widespread and is reflected in every aspect, and it can be said that “smallness” exists everywhere in Japan. Japan is a small island country surrounded by the sea on all sides, in such a geographical environment, the Japanese people have developed a “consciousness of narrowing”. This “consciousness of narrowing” has had a profound impact on many aspects of Japanese society, and has led to the formation of a unique Japanese culture. Culturally, the Japanese art of flower arrangement and architecture also pursues subtlety and delicacy in form and structure, and favors a small and exquisite style in its aesthetic sense. Throughout the history of mankind, no matter what era, architecture has always served to protect mankind and avoid danger. Even though the style of architecture has changed with the change of time, the cultural connotation embodied in it is still preserved. Therefore, this thesis analyzes the causes and effects of the “consciousness of narrowing” on Japanese society to further understand the unique culture of the Japanese people. At the same time, by citing representative Japanese buildings and understanding the “consciousness of narrowing” embodied in them, it is hoped that the national character and aesthetic sense of the Japanese people can be further understood, and that Sino-Japanese cultural exchanges can be promoted. At the end of this thesis, we will briefly compare the differences between Japanese traditional culture and Chinese traditional culture represented by “consciousness of narrowing”, hoping to further understand Japanese culture on this basis, and to help promote cultural exchanges between China and Japan.

Reflection of the Japanese Consciousness and Worldview in the Context of Globalization in the Novels of Haruki Murakami.

Contemporary literature encompasses not only works but also culture, defining the processes of the past preserved in the memory of posterity. Haruki Murakami influenced the shaping of this modern culture to a great extent. The research purpose is to investigate the phenomenon of Haruki Murakami analysing the components of the collective and individual consciousness of the Japanese nation in his fiction. At the methodological level, the following methods of analyzing literary phenomena were used in the training to solve the set tasks: hermeneutic interpretation and sociological method. The research reveals the main features of the urban world of the Japanese society portraying it in progress (from the post-war period to the present moment). The evolution process is portrayed as detachment, independence and solitude. The literary factors reflect both internal spiritual relations and global intercultural links. At the same time, the writer portrays Japan as a country experiencing technological and informational progress, thereby declaring that it is ready to accept and participate in the world changes and become a part of the globalisation process. The writer has made a great contribution to the treasury of Japanese literature and his works are considered an important part of the intercultural interactions between countries they are trying to achieve in a global world. The results close the theoretical and empirical gaps in the literature and literary criticism and contribute to the analysis of the cultural and literary traditions of Japan.

Review: Whitewashing the Movies: Asian Erasure and White Subjectivity in U.S. Film Culture, by David C. Oh

Review: <i>Whitewashing the Movies: Asian Erasure and White Subjectivity in U.S. Film Culture</i>, by David C. Oh

Reading Oshiro Tatsuhiro’s Asa, Shanghai ni Tachitukusu ：Shousetsu Toua Doubun Shoin ：The Memories of Okinawans in China during The Second Sino-Japanese War

Oshiro Tatsuhiro (1925-2020) wrote a large number of works about Okinawa, which are generally referred to as “Oshiro literature”. Among them, the novel “Asa, Shanghai ni Tachitukus u：Shousetsu Toua Doubun Shoin” is unique. It is a first-person novel based on Oshiro’s experience of studying in Shanghai (1943-1945), and it describes the collapse of Japanese identity there and the budding of the Okinawan people’s consciousness. Other Okinawans who emigrated overseas during the war also had the same experience. Under the American occupation after World War II, Okinawans once again fell into a crisis of identity, which was related to the rebirth of Japanese consciousness and the thought of a “rebirth of Japan”. The memories formed by Okinawans during the prewar period and the war were unconsciously held long after the war. Therefore, this novel is also important as an origin of Okinawans’ memories and experiences in the postwar period.

Aesthetic Life: Beauty and Art in Modern Japan by Miya Elise Mizuta Lippit

Reviewed by: Aesthetic Life: Beauty and Art in Modern Japan by Miya Elise Mizuta Lippit Chelsea Foxwell (bio) Aesthetic Life: Beauty and Art in Modern Japan. By Miya Elise Mizuta Lippit. Harvard University Asia Center, Cambridge MA, 2019. xvi, 315 pages. $75.00. Aesthetic Life is an expansive study of the concept of feminine beauty and of the bijin (beauty or beautiful person) in Meiji literature. Arguing that Meiji [End Page 536] authors treated the concepts of beauty, Japan, art (in the broader sense of media, including literature), and women as interrelated problems in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Miya Elise Mizuta Lippit traces the bijin (a term that in the modern period applied almost exclusively to women) through literary works, journalistic essays, pictures, and ephemera such as postcards and photographs. Seven chapters underscore feminine beauty as a subject of central symbolic importance if not national obsession in literature and thought from the 1880s through the end of the Meiji period. The author begins by considering Meiji Japanese consciousness of mid- to late nineteenth-century Western fantasies about Japanese women. It shows how by 1889 Japanese writers began to define the bijin as "a woman perfect in spirit and appearance," a prognosis that assumed mastery of both "Western morality" and "old morality."1 From roughly this date onward, the works of critics, novelists, magazine and newspaper writers, department store and advertisement copy writers, and others reflected a flurry of activity to articulate the characteristics of the bijin. As Tomi Suzuki has written, "In the mid-1880s, both the 'reform of fiction' and the 'reform of women' began to be discussed seriously and widely."2 Aesthetic Life gathers a diverse range of literary and popular writing to show that these discourses were not merely occurring in parallel but were deeply intertwined. Magazines and advertisements marketed to women, massreproduced pictorial or photographic idols and advertisements directed toward men, and literary novels and short stories addressing both sexes show that the bijin, like the Western Orientalist construct of the "geisha girl" analyzed in chapters 1–2, was a leitmotif that stretched beyond discourses of femininity. The quest to define the bijin was part of the broader Meiji search for new ideals which sought to define or redefine almost every aspect of national customs, beliefs, and cultural forms. In seeking to understand why the bijin was so pervasive, the book points to the many literary and visual constructs, starting with those from the West, whereby idealized images of women also functioned as articulations of an ideal Japan, past, present, and future. The discourse on women and bijin in this sense transcended the sphere of gender. Even so, gender is nonetheless essential to understanding how women—in particular, women defined as visually enticing—were objectified to the extent that they could serve as stand-ins for the nation. In her first two chapters, Lippit emphasizes that nineteenth-century European and U.S. writers established the "geisha girl" in particular and "Japanese women" in general as literary and cultural figures that facilitated [End Page 537] the Western objectivization and trivialization of Japan as a feminized object of Orientalist male enjoyment. In doing so, these writers were engaging in an already established trope whereby Western Orientalist representations of the East simultaneously asserted fantasies of the West's dominance over the East together with "fantasies of men's limitless power to enjoy the bodies of women."3 It is well established that the hegemonic attitude of Europe and the United States toward Japan and Asia, which led in art to "interpretations of Japanese perception and expression as childlike," also invited the Western feminization of Japan as another means of expressing and emphasizing Euro-American dominance and masculinity.4 The rhetorical device of the work of art (such as a painting, photograph, or sculpture) concretized the arrangement by visualizing the literal objectivization of Japan and of Japanese women, doubling the image of masculine Western appropriation of the feminine Japan. In Aesthetic Life, we see Japanese authors inherit and at times speak back to the Western Orientalist discourse of a feminized Japan. However, we almost never hear how women readers and writers in Japan intersected with this discourse...

전쟁 동원의 만화 [노라쿠로(のらくろ)] 재고 - 일본 미디어 리터러시의 방법론으로 -

The purpose of this paper is to reconsider the Japan media literacy by analyzing how Anime was utilized in some ways in the early stages of its establishment and consequently working as media mix of war mobilization for Japanese Imperialism. Today, the features of nationalism on Anime is still in progress. Therefore, this paper starts from the past in order to read the modern Japan as well and focuses on Norakuro of Tagawa Suihō(1899󰠏1989) as a starting point. In Norakuro, the war could be glorified by strategically using traditions of Japan and featuring animal characters which soften harsh situations at those times. Besides, the nationalism of the distorted reality unfolded against the backdrop of Manchuria and was used as propaganda for the purpose of arousing will to fight. Since then, for the injustice of the aggressor nation, today it has flown into space and changed its context to SF dealing with a future society. But it still repeats its repertoire. Although we looked at Norakuro produced during the war, the consciousness of pseudo󰠏family community, which is based on the experience of comrades in arms, is still working after the war. Norakuro is also a consistent demonstration of how the uncritically modern Japanese consciousness has been formed. It is now clear that it was much easier to form the consciousness by using ordinary animal characters such as “Norakuro the stray dog,” rather than fantasy developments led by “Momotaro”, represented as a hero, the main character of the old story used for Japanese Imperialism.

Mapping vanished mountain shapes – The struggle between limestone mining and establishing a natural park at Mount Bukō –

Abstract. This report searches for the Japanese view of beauty and nature through a study of the mapping of the transformation of a mountain’s shape. A normal map primarily intends to express existing shapes, but this report maps the vanished shape of a mountain from the limestone mining of its slopes. This is done to consider how its vanished shape has impacted the Japanese view of beauty and nature. The mountain studied is Mount Bukō located in Chichibu City and Yokozemachi in Saitama Prefecture. Mount Bukō is suitable for limestone mining, and during the Edō Period, limestone was mined on this mountain to obtain material for mortar and fertilizer. In the Meiji Period, cement was used in Japan to construct buildings and surface roads, and limestone (raw material for cement) was produced and consumed in large quantities. During the Taishō Period, corporations started to mine vast quantities of limestone. At Mount Bukō, the shape of the mountain was heavily transformed by limestone mining (Figure 1,2).However, during the 1940s, Mount Bukō was mentioned as a candidate site for a national park. In 1957, the entire area – including the mining site – was designated the Saitama Prefectural Natural Park. Parks are designated in Japan in imitation of Europe and America, and their major purposes are to preserve beautiful scenery and serve as places for residents’ recreational activities. Thus, by the Meiji Period, national parks such as Nikko National Park (which includes the Tōshōgū Shrine) were already being designated. Considering the above historical background, the movement to designate Mount Bukō as a park can be understood as an effort to preserve its scenery and provide a place for residents’ activities. But limestone mining continues to transform the shape of the mountain as, for example, a total of roughly 6.99 million tons of limestone were mined on Mount Bukō in 2016. By analyzing the facts of this case, this study can portray the Japanese consciousness of the change of the shapes of mountains and clarify the nature of their view of beauty and nature in mountains.This paper reports on the preparation of a stereoscopic map based on topographical maps and photos created since the start of the Meiji Period, Chichibu fudasho temple drawings from the Edō Period, and the chronological mapping of the shape of the mountain before and since its designation as a park. Mapping using diverse source materials to represent exposed rock and landslides caused by limestone mining permits a detailed study that would be impossible based on topographical maps lacking contour lines, photographs, or drawings from one direction, primarily from the northern side of the mountain (Figure 3,4). This study shows which parts of the disappearing Mount Bukō are important to people and which parts of the remaining mountain shape they value highly. It also portrays the Japanese view of beauty and nature from a cultural perspective to aesthetically evaluate artificially formed “nature” as seen in temple gardens or bonsai.

Semiotics of Otherness in Japanese Mythology

This article examines the tropes of "otherness" embedded in Japanese myths and legends in which the protagonist has a physical or intellectual disability to uncover the sociohistorical attitudes toward such people in Japan. Using the theory of semiotics, I will explicate the narrative signifiers of "the Other" represented in Japanese mythology; examine the binary perceptions of disability in ancient myths, medieval literature, and latter-day folklore in Japan; and demonstrate how perceptions have changed historically. I argue that some of these antique perceptions of the Other that have survived in contemporary Japanese consciousness may be hampering our effort to understand human variation.

A Quantitative Research on Changes of Religious Consciousness in Japan: Findings from “Japanese Consciousness Survey” Based on Cohort Analysis

A Quantitative Research on Changes of Religious Consciousness in Japan: Findings from “Japanese Consciousness Survey” Based on Cohort Analysis

Reinventing Nagasaki: the Christianization of Nagasaki and the revival of an imperial legacy in postwar Japan

ABSTRACTThis paper explores how Nagasaki was reinvented from an imperial city to an “International Cultural, Christian city” and elicits the continuity of Japanese imperialism in postwar Nagasaki as well as the discontinuity between the war and postwar periods in the city. The paper seeks to determine what history and whose memory have been excluded or erased in the process of remaking Nagasaki into an international Christian city; it examines the particular historical and political conditions that enabled Nagai Takashi, Urakami Catholics and Kitamura Seibou’s Memorial Peace Statue to symbolize Nagasaki’s atomic bomb memory and postwar city identity as an “International Christian city” that “prays.” While Nagai is widely known as a spiritual, religious leader in postwar Nagasaki/Japan, and Kitamura’s Peace Memorial statue dominates Nagasaki’s commemoration space, this paper analyses how US dominance over Japan enabled the country to rehabilitate its imperial past and to revive the imperial legacy by appropriating the GHQ’s (General Headquarters of the Allied Powers’) demilitarization and Christianization policies. It argues that Nagasaki’s postwar reconstruction signifies the failure of what Kuan-Hsing Chen (2010) calls the “deimperialization” of Japanese consciousness and subjectivity.

Influence of Media on the Japanese Consciousness after the Great East Japan Earthquake Disaster

Influence of Media on the Japanese Consciousness after the Great East Japan Earthquake Disaster

소세키(漱石)텍스트에 나타난 제국주의적 시선－『만한 여기저기(満韓ところどころ)』와『문(門)』을 연계하여－

This thesis examines Natsume Soseki’s imperialistic attitude in his novel 󰡔The Gate󰡕 and his travelogue 󰡔Journey to Manchuria and Korea󰡕. These two books belong to different genres but were written consecutively. 󰡔The Gate󰡕 being a novel has ways to conceal the writer’s unconscious orientation toward imperialism; however, 󰡔Journey to Manchuria and Korea󰡕 is more illuminating as it reveals the writer’s true voice. The itinerary of 󰡔Journey to Manchuria and Korea󰡕 was cautiously and meticulously planned by the South Manchuria Railway. Therefore, it appears that Soseki was expressing Japan’s views on the management of its colonies and the enterprising spirit of the Japanese people. This view can be regarded as congruent with the imperialistic ideology that Japan was pursuing. We find Japan’s version of Orientalism in Soseki’s considerations of Manchuria and Korea, which were Japan’s colonies. Differences were interpreted in terms of superiority and inferiority. This view greatly influenced the formation of Japanese consciousness. Soseki is an intellectual figure who represents early modern Japan, a time that laid emphasis on morals. In his critical essays and lectures, he stressed balanced judgment. His writings, however, display his view of Manchuria and Korea, which is defined by the dualistic counterposition of civilization and barbarism. 󰡔The Gate󰡕 also distinguishes Japan from its colonies, employing the same dualistic view. This leads to a discussion that justifies Japan’s colonizing of those areas. The colonies in Soseki’s texts are places of opportunity where those who failed to join the newly rising capitalistic system moved to. Soseki avoided dealing with the imperialist period that he lived in. His texts, however, could not conceal his unconscious bias.

Kawashima and the changing focus on Japanese legal consciousness: a selective history of the sociology of law in Japan

AbstractKawashima's well-known arguments on Japanese legal consciousness represent characteristic concerns of Japanese socio-legal scholarship: comparison between Japan and the West on the one hand, and law and practice on the other. Such concerns originated much earlier, before World War II. Suehiro, the early founder, relied on Ehrlich's idea of living law to make law fit social reality. In contrast, Kawashima urged Japanese people to make modern law ‘our living law’. He also argued that Japanese consciousness was the main cause of the small volume of litigation. This thesis became a focus of empirical research by Japanese and foreign scholars. Kawashima played a significant role in establishing the sociology of law as a subject in law. In subsequent empirical studies, Kawashima's thesis has been critically assessed. Yet the sociology of law as an empirical science and the characteristic concerns his work represents are distinctive features of the sociology of law in Japan.

Tanegashima: The Arrival of Europe in Japan (review)

Reviewed by: Tanegashima: The Arrival of Europe in Japan Marcia Yonemoto (bio) Tanegashima: The Arrival of Europe in Japan. By Olof G. Lidin. NIAS Press, Copenhagen, 2002. xiv, 304 pages. £45.00, cloth; £17.99, paper. In this recent study, Olof G. Lidin is interested in beginnings, specifically in exploring various perspectives on the first encounter between Europeans and Japanese in the mid-sixteenth century. He discusses in considerable detail the arrival of the first Portuguese merchants in Japan and their introduction of the new Western technology of firearms. He discusses more briefly the coming of Christianity via the teachings of Portuguese missionaries. Lidin pays particular attention to primary texts, both Japanese and European, that describe these early encounters and he offers partial and complete translations of several key Japanese and Western-language accounts. Ultimately, [End Page 196] he is concerned with the emergence of a new Japanese consciousness of the world outside of Asia: "Japan's first encounter with Europeans was epoch-making in both Japanese and world history. It meant first of all that Japan's second internationalization began and that the process started that has continued until this day. Before, Japan had been a part of the East Asian world with China at the centre; now it became a part of the whole world" (p.34). Lidin begins his investigation in the place in which the Japanese-European encounter began: Tanegashima, the largest of a chain of twelve islands off the southern tip of Kyushu (there are helpful maps included in the text to orient the reader). In the first chapter, Lidin recounts, in detailed and fairly straightforward terms, the arrival on Tanegashima of two Portuguese traders in the eighth month of 1543 and the dramatic consequences of this event, the first of which was the introduction of the gun. The two merchants had with them several muskets, which they demonstrated for and eventually sold to the local daimyo, Tanegashima Tokitaka. By coincidence, Tanegashima was an island rich in iron ore and thus had a long tradition of metalworking. One of the skilled smiths on the island, a man named Yaita Kinbee Kiyosada, was charged by the Tanegashima lord with the task of making a copy of the Portuguese musket, which he apparently accomplished within months. News of the musket spread rapidly, largely due to the fact that the Tanegashima lords had traditionally maintained a tributary relationship (solidified by marriage ties) with the Shimazu, the powerful lords of nearby Satsuma, who had contact with domains throughout the archipelago. By 1544, muskets were being manufactured in Sakai and in the Kii peninsula and as any fan of Japanese historical dramas knows, by the 1570s musket corps had become decisive and highly destructive forces in the final battles of the Warring States period. Lidin adds texture to this narrative of encounter by including translations from the Teppōki (Record of the musket, 1606) and the Tanegashima kafū, both of which describe in some detail the local reaction to the European visitors and their firearms. The awe with which the Japanese regarded the new guns is evident in the words of Nanpo Bunshi, author of the Teppōki: "One shot from this object can make a mountain of silver crumble and break through a wall of iron. Someone with aggression in mind toward a neighbouring country would lose his life instantly when hit....The many ways this object can be used in the world cannot possibly be counted" (p.38). The text is also full of memorable images like that of Tanegashima officials attempting to communicate with the Chinese navigators of the junk bearing the Portuguese by sketching Chinese characters in the sand with sticks. The compilers of the Tanegashima kafū, by contrast, utilize the spare descriptive language characteristic of genealogical records to focus, in the portion of the [End Page 197] text translated here, on the role of the young Tanegashima daimyo Tokitaka in acquiring, reproducing, and spreading the new technology. The translations of the two texts, which comprise chapters two and three, are followed by a rather digressive discussion of the history of the Tanegashima family as revealed in the Tanegashima kafū(chapter four). Certainly the family history...

衣服選択に関する女子大学生の意識構造と文化的背景 日米の比較

Two approximately equivalent groups of Japanese and American female college students were asked about their conscious clothing preferences on a 5-point scale. One group consisted of 140 Japanese child psychology/development majors at Otsuma Women's University, and the other group consisted of 140 American counterparts in the University of Oregon. The results of one group were compared with those of the other. The Japanese consciousness, especially, Kigane is considered to be a typical defense mechanism and is reflected in their clothing preferences. Although Kigane is a difficult concept to translate into English, it is roughly equivalent to hesitant or feeling constraint in doing something, being consious of others. Generally, the Japanese students expressed different emotions from American students. The Japanese students chose the clothing that would be most acceptable to others, considering what they would think of them. In contrast, the American students made their choices independent of group influences, choosing what they would like to wear and what was comfortable to them. The major difference in clothing preference between the two groups of students could be attributed to the differences in their upbringing, independence, and individuality, as well as more general cultural and social differences.

Secularization in a Japanese context

DEFINING THE PROBLEM Pointing out the paradoxical situation of religion in Japan has long been a classic starting point for any discussion on religiosity in this country. In the West, controversies over the implications of contemporary sociocultural changes on man's religious aspirations and expressions formulated in terms of secularization, and the corresponding difficulty of coming to a unanimous evaluation, have characterized sociological theories of religion especially during the last decade. But the western observer of the Japanese religious scene has been facing the question whether Japan should be called a secular or religious society for a much longer time. It might seem, therefore, as if the introduction of Western concepts and theories of secularization and their application to Japanese religion, society, and the changes in both, have only furnished a new framework for discussing a paradoxical situation with which scholars of Japanese religion were already familiar. But there is more to it than that. Attention should be called to a new paradox, namely, that of the coexistence and tension between forms of religiosity (or non-religiosity) inherited from the past, and forms that seem specific to the age in which we now live. In other words, a discussion of secularization in the Japanese context should not content itself merely with repeating the old arguments about the peculiar nature of Japanese religiosity, the difficulty of explaining it in terms of the sacred/secular dichotomy familiar to the West, and the possibility, nonetheless, of employing such an approach because of the inroads of Western ways of thinking upon the Japanese consciousness. In view of the fact that it is precisely these traditional Western ways of thinking that are currently being called into question, and the fact that the