Representation Of Japan Research Articles

Japan in Early Modern Scholarly Journals, 1665–1750

SummaryThis article aims at exploring Japan and its cultural and symbolic representation in the Republic of Letters from the end of the seventeenth century until the mid-eighteenth century. In order to do this, the article focuses on early modern scholarly journals, as they were the most comprehensive and up-to-date instruments of communication for the international community of scholars during that time. By analysing the journals’ content we will see which topics were more commonly connected to Japan and understand the role Japan played in the development of the increasingly comprehensive and methodical knowledge of the early modern savants. This article provides a picture of the heuristic and rhetorical role of Japan in the shaping of new, expanded representations of the world. On the one hand, connections between the cultural representations of Japan and other extra-European lands are highlighted; on the other hand, Japan's peculiar and unique features within the cultural and scientific discourses of the Republic of Letters are examined. Finally, how the representations of Japan relate to the divisions and identities within the Republic of Letters itself is considered.

Kaempfers Lessons from Japan – Using Tokugawa Regulation for Educating Europe

During the “Age of Discovery”, Europeans came into contact with a variety of different cultures from all over the globe. In Asia, they stumbled upon China and Japan, two welldeveloped countries, which were considered as civilized as those of Europe (Rietbergen, 2002, p. 64). The Dutch were the only European allowed into Japan, where from 1641 onwards, they were confined on the little artificial island of Deshima in the bay of Nagasaki (Rietbergen, 2003, p. 176). Here a company of approximately 20 men lived for a year or longer, under strict supervision of the guards, often without any proficiency in the Japanese language, with professional translators controlling all contacts of these foreigners with Japan (ibid, p. 181). Consequently, these Europeans had a monopoly on the representation of Japan. One of the most notable works on Japan of this era was The History of Japan by Engelbert Kaempfer. Although the work contains ‘Othering’, neither of Thompson’s definitions would be encompassing. In line with the European realisation that these cultures were equally civilized, I argue that Kaempfer’s work notes the differences between Japan and Europe to highlight the faults of Europe. Constrained by both time and space, this chapter mainly discusses Kaempfer’s writing on the regulation of Japan, more specifically, the regulation as it was imposed by the shoguns of the Tokugawa dynasty. That subject is chosen because Japan’s isolation and generally harsh laws, which were the result of Tokugawa rule, were of particular interest to his European readership (Michel, 2000, p. 111). Regulation here refers to the manner in which the Japanese government sought to exert control; it encompasses law-making, regulation of foreigners and the actions of the Japanese people under regulation. Thus, this chapter addresses the way in which Kaempfer used Tokugawa regulation as a lens for describing the Other, and how this Other was used to express Kaempfer’s personal beliefs.

Augmenting Japan’s Bodies and Futures: The Politics of Human-Technology Encounters in Japanese Idol Pop

Augmenting Japan’s Bodies and Futures: The Politics of Human-Technology Encounters in Japanese Idol Pop

Diversity between and within: approaches to teaching about distant place in the secondary school curriculum

This study outlines some challenges of teaching about distant place and demonstrates how different strategies can influence school students’ framings of diversity. The analysis is based on an interpretive case study of 13–14 year-old students learning about Japan in a UK school. Their changing representations of Japan were tracked in detail over a 10 week period of study. The findings show that students’ representations of Japan were multi-stranded, demonstrating different levels of sophistication depending on the aspect of the country under consideration. Learning activities that enabled contact with the lives of young people from the distant place or that involved multiple images were shown to challenge stereotypes and to encourage more nuanced understandings of diversity between and within.

The Cultural Context and Social Representation The Japanese Schoolgirl in British Popular Culture

As an embodiment of the shoujo, a specific Japanese representation of 'girl', the schoolgirl often appears as a central character in Japanese popular culture. With the import, and widespread availability, of Japanese cultural products in the West (such as comics called manga, animated movies called anime, toys and games), the Japanese schoolgirl has gained a visibility in Western popular culture, and perceived as cute and shy. In this paper, the way the Japanese schoolgirl is represented in British popular culture is examined, and contrasted with the representation in Japan. It is concluded that cultural context influences the representation and, in agreement with the work of Saito (1996), the British representation is simplistic and distorted in comparison to that in Japan.

Maneuvers of Multiculturalism: International Representations of Minority Politics in Japan

This article argues that multicultural representations of Japan make demands of the populations they describe as much as they open new social and political possibilities. This argument mirrors others that have been made about the myth of Japanese homogeneity, i.e. that representations of the Japanese citizenry are historical formations, entrenched in institutionalized practice, and with characterizable effects. Examining contemporary representations of Buraku issues within the work of political organizations, foreign scholars, and funding agencies such as the Japan Foundation, I explore four maneuvers of multicultural political practice: enlistment, equilibration, authentication, and woundedness. In this examination, I aim to shed light simultaneously upon the processes through which multiculturalism disciplines the subjects it describes and upon the ways in which such maneuvers help achieve international recognition of a liberal, multicultural Japan.

Investigating change in young people’s understandings of Japan: a study of learning about a distant place

This article demonstrates how a set of complementary qualitative methods can be used to construct a detailed picture not only of the nature of young people’s representations of a distant place but the processes of learning by which such representations develop over the medium term. The analysis is based on an interpretive case study of a class of 13‐ to 14‐year‐olds in England learning about Japan as part of their geography curriculum. The findings identify three processes through which students’ representations of Japan became more detailed and nuanced over time: transfer of existing knowledge from other locational contexts to the distant place; active connection with new information; and processing of that information through categorisation and category refinement. Evidence from the study suggests the potential for learning activities designed to encourage these processes and highlights the need for additional longitudinal research in geography education.

The Parallel System of Single Member Simple Plurality and Proportional Representation in Japan - the institutional feature and the implication for Korea

The Parallel System of Single Member Simple Plurality and Proportional Representation in Japan - the institutional feature and the implication for Korea

Korea-Japan Amity and the Representation of Japan -Cinema Censorship and Korean Cinema in the First Half of the 1960s-

Korea-Japan Amity and the Representation of Japan -Cinema Censorship and Korean Cinema in the First Half of the 1960s-

Women and Representation in Japan

Japan's high level of socio-economic advancement notwithstanding, the level of women's representation in Japan lags behind that in not only other advanced countries but also many developing countries. This article aims to elucidate the causes of the under-representation of women in Japan. Preceding studies suggest that multiple, intertwining factors have had a collective influence on the number of women representatives. Based on these studies, I highlight four factors which affect women's representation: the electoral system; socio-political culture; electoral quotas; and the activities and attitudes of women concerning their own representation. I discuss how these factors have influenced the under-representation of Japanese women, in effect demonstrating that all the above factors have had negative impacts. Among these, the most serious obstacle is women's lack of enthusiasm for a larger political presence, which is sustained by Japanese political culture and social customs. I argue that strong women's voices calling for more women representatives are the necessary basis for measures to improve the under-representation of women.

Children constructing Japan: material practices and relational learning

Children's understandings of place have been researched from the differing perspectives of ‘new social studies of childhood’, developmental psychology and geography education. However, the processes by which children construct their understandings of distant places have received relatively little attention. This paper summarises insights from the existing literature and outlines the findings from empirical research which employed a range of interpretive methods within a class of 14-year-olds studying Japan. Representations of Japan and the richly diverse material and relational contexts of their construction are summarised and illustrated by an in depth case study.

Doppelgängers, Misogyny, and the San Francisco System: The Occupation Narratives of Ōe Kenzaburō

Ōe Kenzaburō's status as the left-wing conscience of postwar Japan was consolidated long before his Nobel prize of 1994. Several works dating from the late 1950s, however, give the lie to this radicalism and suggest instead a tendency toward the reactionary. In particular, Ōe's politico-sexual series on occupied Japan—five narratives that center on a love triangle between a Japanese youth, his prostitute mistress, and her Euro-American patron—veer noticeably toward misogyny in their representation of Japan under Pax Americana. Although this series of texts purports to be a call to arms to Japanese male youth during the intense debates over the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, a closer inspection reveals that Ōe's hidden preoccupation is with his female characters, who become scapegoats for "crimes" of complicity with Japan's conquerors that were, in fact, extremely widespread.

The Floating World: Representations of Japan in Lost in Translation and demonlover

In Japan during the Edo period (1603-1868), the shogunate heaped together all things immoral -- gambling, theater, prostitution, bars – into districts separate from the rest of the city in an attempt to both provide and control licentious activities. These areas came to be known collectively as the “floating world,” a heady terrain of sex and art, an island of hedonism in a balancing act with strict patriarchal morality and social code. Tokyo’s district, called Yoshiwara, or “happy fields,” was the most famous. In Lost in Translation and demonlover , Tokyo is depicted as a floating world in the here and now, a contemporary mecca of fleeting pleasures disconnected from the West’s heavy-handed morality, from meaningful relationships, from Christian guilt.

L'ambassade de France à Tokyo, une lente gestation

This text proposes a stroll troughout the major steps of the French representation in Japan since the Meiji era till 1952, when France is officially back in this country. As a chronological course, this evocation associates closely the land's property question to the form of the representation itself. If at a certain point it moves towards a much more modern shapes, this turn is less the consequence of a political decision than of a friendly relations between Paul Claudel and Antonin Raymond.

In a 'borrowed tongue': the representation of Japan in the English language by Nitobe, Okakura, and Uchimura

In a 'borrowed tongue': the representation of Japan in the English language by Nitobe, Okakura, and Uchimura

Print club photography in Japan

The authors examine the popularity of a new form of photographic representation in Japan, namely Print Club, or Purikura. Print Club machines initially delivered a page of 16 postage‐stamp‐sized photographs of their patrons, but many other formats have become common. This paper describes the 1995 emergence and development of the technology, image content, decorative frames, picture uses and functions and the incorporation of Print Club into a broad range of personal, social and even business and artistic life in Japan. The authors review connections to patterns of popular culture, consumerism, gender bias, adolescent youth culture, and interpersonal communication alongside issues of individual identity and group membership. Some claim Print Club as a fad, but six years later, all indicators point to a lasting contribution to Japanese visual culture.

Nonunion employee representation in Japan

Nonunion employee representation in Japan

On the edge of the orient: english representations of Japan, circa 1895–1910

On the edge of the orient: english representations of Japan, circa 1895–1910

Dialogue, distance and difference

Abstract In this article, I examine the ways in which women’s groups in Japan have attempted to deal with issues of difference prompted by the co-existence of residents of different ethnicities in contemporary Japan, and the new issues raised by labour migration in the context of globalization of economies and labour markets. Japan’s place in contemporary East Asia can be clarified by using the term colonial modernity , to refer to Japan’s early 20th-century history; and the term postcoloniality to refer to the legacy of the colonial project in the culture of the metropolitan society. In representations of Japan’s contemporary “Others,” notions of gendered difference interact with representations of ethnic and cultural difference. Contemporary attempts to deal with these issues will be placed in the context of several decades of feminist activism in Japan.

Le saimon des Princes de la Terre à Monobe-Mura (Kōchi)

The saimon of the Princes of the Earth analyzed and translated in this article comes from a poor mountain village, Monobe-mura, on Tosa Island, in Kōchi prefecture, Kami district. It was chosen as the subject of an article honoring the memory of Anna Seidel because of its significance in the history of mythico-ritual representation in Japan. Coming probably from the time of the transition to the modern era (in the fifteenth to sixteenth centuries), this text shows that the acceptance by the peasant elite of Chinese structural principles of cosmogony and political ideology proceeded hand in hand with an extraordinary wealth of mythico-ritual creativity. The text under consideration was apparently compiled by local ritual masters, tayū, who were inspired by the Japanese version of the legend of Pan K'ou (Banko) in which this figure was identified with the deity Dokkū of the ommyōdō and the god Kōjin, who occupies a central place in various religious currents emerging from medieval civilization. The original nature of this saimon lies in the way it presents a theory of ritual as the basis of the socio-cosmic order; (a) Pan K'ou and his five sons, as the King and Princes of the Earth, give shape to both space and time, especially the morphology of the chief's house and the kagura dances that recapitulate the history of the creation of Japan told in the saimon; (b) the ancient kagura pattern called that of the iwato-biraki, the "opening of the grotto," is given a new sense, with the hot/cold syndrome representing the yin/yang balance that controls solar energy, dividing the political and natural order; (c) the polarity between political chiefs and ritual masters, is presented as homologous to that between exoteric and esoteric practice, with the local priestly caste thus holding the keys to peace among men and among the five cosmic agents; (d) mastery of the teaching allows the achievement, by means of ritual, of the incarnation of the originally undifferentiated cosmic energy through the "royal" individual and the head of the agnatic family on the one hand, and, through its secret double, the guardian deity of esoterism on the other. Banko is the primordial model revealing this possibility, that is to say, the passage from chaos to a diacritical hierarchical order.