Experimental Arts in Postwar Japan

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Publisher : BRILL
ISBN 13 : 168417502X
Total Pages : 310 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (841 download)

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Book Synopsis Experimental Arts in Postwar Japan by : Miryam Sas

Download or read book Experimental Arts in Postwar Japan written by Miryam Sas and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-03-17 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In the years of rapid economic growth following the protest movements of the 1960s, artists and intellectuals in Japan searched for a means of direct impact on the whirlwind of historical and cultural transformations of their time. Yet while the artists often called for such “direct” encounter, their works complicate this ideal with practices of interruption, self-reflexive mimesis, and temporal discontinuity. In an era known for idealism and activism, some of the most cherished ideals—intimacy between subjects, authenticity, a sense of home—are limitlessly desired yet always just out of reach. In this book, Miryam Sas explores the theoretical and cultural implications of experimental arts in a range of media. Casting light on important moments in the arts from the 1960s to the early 1980s, this study focuses first on underground (post-shingeki) theater and then on related works of experimental film and video, buto dance and photography. Emphasizing the complex and sophisticated theoretical grounding of these artists through their works, practices, and writings, this book also locates Japanese experimental arts in an extensive, sustained dialogue with key issues of contemporary critical theory."

Art, Anti-art, Non-art

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Publisher : Getty Publications
ISBN 13 : 9780892368662
Total Pages : 164 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (686 download)

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Book Synopsis Art, Anti-art, Non-art by : Reiko Tomii

Download or read book Art, Anti-art, Non-art written by Reiko Tomii and published by Getty Publications. This book was released on 2007 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduction to two decades of artistic ferment in postwar Japan. As that devastated nation confronted the fraught legacy of World War II, a rapid succession of avant-garde groups began experimenting with new media and processes of making art, disrupting conventions to address the changes occurring around them. The works that remain from this era are largely ephemeral - exhibition flyers, programs for performances, musical scores, issues of short-lived journals, documentary photographs, pieces of mail art, and multiples made from the detritus of modern life - but the ideals of engagement and innovation that invigorated this creative surge are not.

Feeling Media

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Publisher : Duke University Press
ISBN 13 : 1478023090
Total Pages : 222 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (78 download)

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Book Synopsis Feeling Media by : Miryam Sas

Download or read book Feeling Media written by Miryam Sas and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2022-08-22 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Feeling Media Miryam Sas explores the potentialities and limitations of media theory and media art in Japan. Opening media studies and affect theory up to a deeper engagement with works and theorists outside Euro-America, Sas offers a framework of analysis she calls the affective scale—the space where artists and theorists work between the level of the individual and larger global and historical shifts. She examines intermedia, experimental animation, and Marxist theories of the culture industries of the 1960s and 1970s in the work of artists and thinkers ranging from filmmaker Matsumoto Toshio, photographer Nakahira Takuma, and the Three Animators' Group to art critic Hanada Kiyoteru and landscape theorist Matsuda Masao. She also outlines how twenty-first-century Japanese artists—especially those responding to the Fukushima disaster—adopt and adapt this earlier work to reframe ideas about collectivity, community, and connectivity in the space between the individual and the system.

Art and Engagement in Early Postwar Japan

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Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 1501715054
Total Pages : 472 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (17 download)

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Book Synopsis Art and Engagement in Early Postwar Japan by : Justin Jesty

Download or read book Art and Engagement in Early Postwar Japan written by Justin Jesty and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-15 with total page 472 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Justin Jesty’s Art and Engagement in Early Postwar Japan reframes the history of art and its politics in Japan post-1945. This fascinating cultural history addresses our broad understanding of the immediate postwar era moving toward the Cold War and subsequent consolidations of political and cultural life. At the same time, Jesty delves into an examination of the relationship between art and politics that approaches art as a mode of intervention, but he moves beyond the idea that the artwork or artist unilaterally authors political significance to trace how creations and expressive acts may (or may not) actually engage the terms of shared meaning and value. Art and Engagement in Early Postwar Japan centers on a group of social realists on the radical left who hoped to wed their art with anti-capitalist and anti-war activism, a liberal art education movement whose focus on the child inspired innovation in documentary film, and a regional avant-garde group split between ambition and local loyalty. In each case, Jesty examines writings and artworks, together with the social movements they were a part of, to demonstrate how art—or more broadly, creative expression—became a medium for collectivity and social engagement. He reveals a shared if varied aspiration to create a culture founded in amateur-professional interaction, expanded access to the tools of public authorship, and dispersed and participatory cultural forms that intersected easily with progressive movements. Highlighting the transformational nature of the early postwar, Jesty deftly contrasts it with the relative stasis, consolidation, and homogenization of the 1960s.

Radicals and Realists in the Japanese Nonverbal Arts

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Publisher : University of Hawaii Press
ISBN 13 : 0824842049
Total Pages : 308 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (248 download)

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Book Synopsis Radicals and Realists in the Japanese Nonverbal Arts by : Thomas R. H. Havens

Download or read book Radicals and Realists in the Japanese Nonverbal Arts written by Thomas R. H. Havens and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2006-07-31 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Radicals and Realists is the first book in any language to discuss Japan’s avant-garde artists, their work, and the historical environment in which they produced it during the two most creative decades of the twentieth century, the 1950s and 1960s. Many of the artists were radicals, rebelling against existing canons and established authority. Yet at the same time they were realists in choosing concrete materials, sounds, and themes from everyday life for their art and in gradually adopting tactics of protest or resistance through accommodation rather than confrontation. Whatever the means of expression, the production of art was never devoid of historical context or political implication. Focusing on the nonverbal genres of painting, sculpture, dance choreography, and music composition, this work shows that generational and political differences, not artistic doctrines, largely account for the divergent stances artists took vis-a-vis modernism, the international arts community, Japan’s ties to the United States, and the alliance of corporate and bureaucratic interests that solidified in Japan during the 1960s. After surveying censorship and arts policy during the American occupation of Japan (1945–1952), the narrative divides into two chronological sections dealing with the 1950s and 1960s, bisected by the rise of an artistic underground in Shinjuku and the security treaty crisis of May 1960. The first section treats Japanese artists who studied abroad as well as the vast and varied experiments in each of the nonverbal avant-garde arts that took place within Japan during the 1950s, after long years of artistic insularity and near-stasis throughout war and occupation. Chief among the intellectuals who stimulated experimentation were the art critic Takiguchi Shuzo, the painter Okamoto Taro, and the businessman-painter Yoshihara Jiro. The second section addresses the multifront assault on formalism (confusingly known as "anti-art") led by visual artists nationwide. Likewise, composers of both Western-style and contemporary Japanese-style music increasingly chose everyday themes from folk music and the premodern musical repertoire for their new presentations. Avant-garde print makers, sculptors, and choreographers similarly moved beyond the modern—and modernism—in their work. A later chapter examines the artistic apex of the postwar period: Osaka’s 1970 world exposition, where more avant-garde music, painting, sculpture, and dance were on display than at any other point in Japan’s history, before or since. Radicals and Realists is based on extensive archival research; numerous concerts, performances, and exhibits; and exclusive interviews with more than fifty leading choreographers, composers, painters, sculptors, and critics active during those two innovative decades. Its accessible prose and lucid analysis recommend it to a wide readership, including those interested in modern Japanese art and culture as well as the history of the postwar years.

Unspeakable Acts

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Publisher : University of Hawaii Press
ISBN 13 : 082486543X
Total Pages : 353 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (248 download)

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Book Synopsis Unspeakable Acts by : Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei

Download or read book Unspeakable Acts written by Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2005-08-31 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Terayama Shûji (1935–1983) was one of postwar Japan’s most gifted and controversial playwrights/directors. Since his death more than twenty years ago, he has been transformed into a cult hero in Japan. Despite this notoriety, Unspeakable Acts is the first book in any language to analyze the theater of Terayama in depth. It interrogates postwar Japanese culture and theater through the creative work of this unique yet emblematic artist. By situating Terayama in his historical milieu and by using tools derived from Japanese and Western theories of psychoanalysis, anthropology, sociology, gender studies, and aesthetics, Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei has woven a sophisticated and provocative study.

The Stakes of Exposure

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Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
ISBN 13 : 1452953767
Total Pages : 419 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (529 download)

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Book Synopsis The Stakes of Exposure by : Namiko Kunimoto

Download or read book The Stakes of Exposure written by Namiko Kunimoto and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2017-02-21 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How would artistic practice contribute to political change in post–World War II Japan? How could artists negotiate the imbalanced global dynamics of the art world and also maintain a sense of aesthetic and political authenticity? While the contemporary art world has recently come to embrace some of Japan’s most daring postwar artists, the interplay of art and politics remains poorly understood in the Americas and Europe. The Stakes of Exposure fills this gap and explores art, visual culture, and politics in postwar Japan from the 1950s to the 1970s, paying special attention to how anxiety and confusion surrounding Japan’s new democracy manifested in representations of gender and nationhood in modern art. Through such pivotal postwar episodes as the Minamata Disaster, the Lucky Dragon Incident, the budding antinuclear movement, and the ANPO protests of the 1960s, The Stakes of Exposure examines a wide range of issues addressed by the period’s prominent artists, including Tanaka Atsuko and Shiraga Kazuo (key members of the Gutai Art Association), Katsura Yuki, and Nakamura Hiroshi. Through a close study of their paintings, illustrations, and assemblage and performance art, Namiko Kunimoto reveals that, despite dissimilar aesthetic approaches and divergent political interests, Japanese postwar artists were invested in the entangled issues of gender and nationhood that were redefining Japan and its role in the world. Offering many full-color illustrations of previously unpublished art and photographs, as well as period manga, The Stakes of Exposure shows how contention over Japan’s new democracy was expressed, disavowed, and reimagined through representations of the gendered body.

Touching the Unreachable

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Publisher : University of Michigan Press
ISBN 13 : 0472129309
Total Pages : 253 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (721 download)

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Book Synopsis Touching the Unreachable by : Fusako Innami

Download or read book Touching the Unreachable written by Fusako Innami and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2021-09-15 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fusako Innami offers the first comprehensive study of touch and skinship—relationality with the other through the skin—in modern Japanese writing. The concept of the unreachable—that is, the lack of characters’ complete ability to touch what they try to reach for—provides a critical intervention on the issue of intimacy. Touch has been philosophically addressed in France, but literature is an effective—or possibly the most productive—venue for exploring touch in Japan, as literary texts depict what the characters may be concerned with but may not necessarily say out loud. Such a moment of capturing the gap between the felt and the said—the interaction between the body and language—can be effectively analyzed by paying attention to layers of verbalization, or indeed translation, by characters’ utterances, authors’ depictions, and readers’ interpretations. Each of the writers discussed in this book—starting with Nobel prize winner Kawabata Yasunari, Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, Yoshiyuki Junnosuke, and Matsuura Rieko—presents a particular obsession with objects or relationality to the other constructed via the desire for touch. In Touching the Unreachable, phenomenological and psychoanalytical approaches are cross-culturally interrogated in engaging with literary touch to constantly challenge what may seem like the limit of transferability regarding concepts, words, and practices. The book thereby not only bridges cultural gaps beyond geographic and linguistic constraints, but also aims to decentralize a Eurocentric hegemony in its production and use of theories and brings Japanese cultural and literary analyses into further productive and stimulating intellectual dialogues. Through close readings of the authors’ treatment of touch, Innami develops a theoretical framework with which to examine intersensorial bodies interacting with objects and the environment through touch.

Tokyo, 1955-1970

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Publisher : The Museum of Modern Art
ISBN 13 : 0870708341
Total Pages : 238 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (77 download)

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Book Synopsis Tokyo, 1955-1970 by : Doryun Chong

Download or read book Tokyo, 1955-1970 written by Doryun Chong and published by The Museum of Modern Art. This book was released on 2012 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Catalog of an exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Nov. 18, 2012-Feb. 25, 2013.

Transgenerational Remembrance

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Publisher : Northwestern University Press
ISBN 13 : 0810141310
Total Pages : 303 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (11 download)

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Book Synopsis Transgenerational Remembrance by : Jessica Nakamura

Download or read book Transgenerational Remembrance written by Jessica Nakamura and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2020-01-15 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Transgenerational Remembrance, Jessica Nakamura investigates the role of artistic production in the commemoration and memorialization of the Asia-Pacific War (1931–1945) in Japan since 1989. During this time, survivors of Japanese aggression and imperialism, previously silent about their experiences, have sparked contentious public debates about the form and content of war memories. The book opens with an analysis of the performance of space at Yasukuni Shinto Shrine, which continues to promote an anachronistic veneration of the war. After identifying the centrality of performance in long-standing dominant narratives, Transgenerational Remembrance offers close readings of artistic performances that tackle subject matter largely obscured before 1989: the kamikaze pilot, Japanese imperialism, comfort women, the Battle of Okinawa, and Japanese American internment. These case studies range from Hirata Oriza’s play series about Japanese colonial settlers in Korea and Shimada Yoshiko’s durational performance about comfort women to Kondo Aisuke’s videos and gallery installations about Japanese American internment. Working from theoretical frameworks of haunting and ethics, Nakamura develops an analytical lens based on the Noh theater ghost. Noh emphasizes the agency of the ghost and the dialogue between the dead and the living. Integrating her Noh-inflected analysis into ethical and transnational feminist queries, Nakamura shows that performances move remembrance beyond current evidentiary and historiographical debates.

Artist and Patron in Postwar Japan

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Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 140085539X
Total Pages : 336 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (8 download)

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Book Synopsis Artist and Patron in Postwar Japan by : Thomas R.H. Havens

Download or read book Artist and Patron in Postwar Japan written by Thomas R.H. Havens and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-14 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work explains how and why Japan supports a community of professional dancers, musicians, production companies, and visual artists that has nearly tripled in size during the past 25 years. Originally published in 1982. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Designing Modern Japan

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Publisher : Reaktion Books
ISBN 13 : 1780232306
Total Pages : 425 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (82 download)

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Book Synopsis Designing Modern Japan by : Sarah Teasley

Download or read book Designing Modern Japan written by Sarah Teasley and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2022-05-06 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A revealing look at Japanese design weaving together the stories of people who shaped Japan’s design industries with social history, economic conditions, and geopolitics. From cars to cameras, design from Japan is ubiquitous. So are perceptions of Japanese design, from calming, carefully crafted minimalism to avant-garde catwalk fashion, or the cute, Kawaii aesthetic populating Tokyo streets. But these portrayals overlook the creativity, generosity, and sheer hard work that has gone into creating and maintaining design industries in Japan. In Designing Modern Japan, Sarah Teasley deftly weaves together the personal stories of people who shaped and shape Japan’s design industries with social history, economic conditions, and geopolitics.. Key to her account is how design has been a strategy to help communities thrive during turbulent times, and for making life better along the way. Deeply researched and superbly illustrated, Designing Modern Japan appeals to a wide audience for Japanese design, history, and culture.

Critical Memory Studies

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Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 135023012X
Total Pages : 433 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (52 download)

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Book Synopsis Critical Memory Studies by : Brett Ashley Kaplan

Download or read book Critical Memory Studies written by Brett Ashley Kaplan and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-04-06 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bringing together a diverse array of new and established scholars and creative writers in the rapidly expanding field of memory studies, this collection creatively delves into the multiple aspects of this wide-ranging field. Contributors explore race-ing memory; environmental studies and memory; digital memory; monuments, memorials, and museums; and memory and trauma. Organised around 7 sections, this book examines memory in a global context, from Kashmir and Chile to the US and UK. Featuring contributions on topics such as the Black Lives Matter movement; the AIDS crisis; and memory and the anthropocene, this book traces and consolidates the field while analysing and charting some of the most current and cutting-edge work, as well as new directions that could be taken.

A History of Modern Japan

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Publisher : Tuttle Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1462922511
Total Pages : 516 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (629 download)

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Book Synopsis A History of Modern Japan by : Christopher Harding

Download or read book A History of Modern Japan written by Christopher Harding and published by Tuttle Publishing. This book was released on 2020-06-30 with total page 516 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Lucid and lyrical…a vivid history of Japan's turbocharged (and painful) modernization." --The Daily Telegraph In A History of Modern Japan, cultural historian Christopher Harding delves into the untold stories of Japan's recent history--from a pop star's nuclear power protest song in 2011, to Japanese feminists who fought for an equal political voice in the 1890s. Though highly successful, and typically portrayed as a unified effort, Japan's rebuilding throughout the 20th century faced a lot of domestic criticism. This story-led account gives a voice to those who felt they didn't fit in with what Japan was becoming. It's that push and pull that made the country what it is today. This book will be a fascinating read for anyone interested in Japanese culture--whether film and literature, or pop culture and manga--as big shifts in Japanese ideology and society tend to come from culture and the arts, rather than being politically-driven. It will also be of interest to those traveling to Japan who want a better sense of the place, or anyone seeking to better understand Japan's role on the global stage. With over 100 photographs, maps and prints, A History of Modern Japan showcases the compelling story of Japan's amazing growth and its resulting struggles. For all the country's advancement, the Japanese people continue to wrestle with the notion of what it means to be Japanese in a changing world.

The Japanese Cinema Book

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Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1844576817
Total Pages : 625 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (445 download)

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Book Synopsis The Japanese Cinema Book by : Hideaki Fujiki

Download or read book The Japanese Cinema Book written by Hideaki Fujiki and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-04-02 with total page 625 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Japanese Cinema Book provides a new and comprehensive survey of one of the world's most fascinating and widely admired filmmaking regions. In terms of its historical coverage, broad thematic approach and the significant international range of its authors, it is the largest and most wide-ranging publication of its kind to date. Ranging from renowned directors such as Akira Kurosawa to neglected popular genres such as the film musical and encompassing topics such as ecology, spectatorship, home-movies, colonial history and relations with Hollywood and Europe, The Japanese Cinema Book presents a set of new, and often surprising, perspectives on Japanese film. With its plural range of interdisciplinary perspectives based on the expertise of established and emerging scholars and critics, The Japanese Cinema Book provides a groundbreaking picture of the different ways in which Japanese cinema may be understood as a local, regional, national, transnational and global phenomenon. The book's innovative structure combines general surveys of a particular historical topic or critical approach with various micro-level case studies. It argues there is no single fixed Japanese cinema, but instead a fluid and varied field of Japanese filmmaking cultures that continue to exist in a dynamic relationship with other cinemas, media and regions. The Japanese Cinema Book is divided into seven inter-related sections: · Theories and Approaches · * Institutions and Industry · * Film Style · * Genre · * Times and Spaces of Representation · * Social Contexts · * Flows and Interactions

Dissenting Japan

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Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 1849045798
Total Pages : 384 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (49 download)

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Book Synopsis Dissenting Japan by : William Andrews

Download or read book Dissenting Japan written by William Andrews and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conformist, mute and malleable? Andrews tackles head-on this absurd caricature of Japanese society in his fascinating history of its militant sub-cultures, radical societies and well-established traditions of dissent Following the March 2011 tsunami and Fukushima nuclear crisis, the media remarked with surprise on how thousands of demonstrators had flocked to the streets of Tokyo. But mass protest movements are nothing new in Japan and the post-war period experienced years of unrest and violence on both sides of the political spectrum: from demos to riots, strikes, campus occupations, faction infighting, assassinations and even international terrorism. This is the first comprehensive history in English of political radicalism and counterculture in Japan, as well as the artistic developments during this turbulent time. It chronicles the major events and movements from 1945 to the new flowering of protests and civil dissent in the wake of Fukushima. Introducing readers to often ignored aspects of Japanese society, it explores the fascinating ideologies and personalities on the Right and the Left, including the student movement, militant groups and communes. While some elements parallel developments in Europe and America, much of Japan's radical recent past (and present) is unique and offers valuable lessons for understanding the context to the new waves of anti-government protests the nation is currently witnessing.

Ennobling Japan's Savage Northeast

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Author :
Publisher : BRILL
ISBN 13 : 1684175828
Total Pages : 383 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (841 download)

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Book Synopsis Ennobling Japan's Savage Northeast by : Nathan Hopson

Download or read book Ennobling Japan's Savage Northeast written by Nathan Hopson and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-10-26 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Ennobling Japan’s Savage Northeast is the first comprehensive account in English of the discursive life of the Tōhoku region in postwar Japan from 1945 through 2011. The Northeast became the subject of world attention with the March 2011 triple disaster of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown. But Tōhoku’s history and significance to emic understandings of Japanese self and nationhood remain poorly understood. When Japan embarked on its quest to modernize in the mid-nineteenth century, historical prejudice, contemporary politics, and economic calculation together led the state to marginalize Tōhoku, creating a “backward” region in both fact and image. After 1945, a group of mostly local intellectuals attempted to overcome this image and rehabilitate the Northeast as a source of new national values. This early postwar Tōhoku recuperation movement has proved to be a critical source for the new Kyoto school’s neoconservative valorization of native Japanese identity, fueling that group’s antimodern, anti-Western discourse since the 1980s.Nathan Hopson unravels the contested postwar meanings of Tōhoku to reveal the complex and contradictory ways in which that region has been incorporated into Japan’s shifting self-images since World War II."