Visions Of Japanese Modernity

Download or read book Visions of Japanese Modernity written by Aaron Andrew Gerow and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this study, Aaron Gerow focuses on the early period in which the institutional and narrational structure of Japanese cinema was in flux, arguing that the transnational intertext is less important than the power-laden operations by which the meaning of cinema itself was discursively defined. Both progressive critics of the 'pure film' movement and the more conservative Japanese cultural bureaucrats demanded a unitary text that suppressed the hybrid and unpredictable meanings attendant on early Japanese cinema's informal exhibition contexts. Gerow points out the irony that the progressive and individualist pure film movement critics worked in concert with the Japanese state to undo the 'theft' of Japanese cinema, proposing to replace representations of Japan in Western films by exporting a Japanese cinema 'reformed' to emulate the international norm.

Download or read book Anarchist Modernity written by Sho Konishi and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-05-11 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Mid-nineteenth century Russian radicals who witnessed the Meiji Restoration saw it as the most sweeping revolution in recent history and the impetus for future global progress. Acting outside imperial encounters, they initiated underground transnational networks with Japan. Prominent intellectuals and cultural figures, from Peter Kropotkin and Lev Tolstoy to Saigo Takamori and Tokutomi Roka, pursued these unofficial relationships through correspondence, travel, and networking, despite diplomatic and military conflicts between their respective nations.Tracing these non-state networks, Anarchist Modernity uncovers a major current in Japanese intellectual and cultural life between 1860 and 1930 that might be described as “cooperatist anarchist modernity”—a commitment to realizing a modern society through mutual aid and voluntary activity, without the intervention of state governance. These efforts later crystallized into such movements as the Nonwar Movement, Esperantism, and the popularization of the natural sciences.Examining cooperatist anarchism as an intellectual foundation of modern Japan, Sho Konishi offers a new approach to Japanese history that fundamentally challenges the “logic” of Western modernity. It looks beyond this foundational construct of modern history writing to understand people, practices, and cultural expressions that have been forgotten or dismissed as products of anti-modern nativist counter urges against the West."

Download or read book The Making of Modern Japan written by Marius B. Jansen and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-01 with total page 933 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Magisterial in vision, sweeping in scope, this monumental work presents a seamless account of Japanese society during the modern era, from 1600 to the present. A distillation of more than fifty years’ engagement with Japan and its history, it is the crowning work of our leading interpreter of the modern Japanese experience. Since 1600 Japan has undergone three periods of wrenching social and institutional change, following the imposition of hegemonic order on feudal society by the Tokugawa shogun; the opening of Japan’s ports by Commodore Perry; and defeat in World War II. The Making of Modern Japan charts these changes: the social engineering begun with the founding of the shogunate in 1600, the emergence of village and castle towns with consumer populations, and the diffusion of samurai values in the culture. Marius Jansen covers the making of the modern state, the adaptation of Western models, growing international trade, the broadening opportunity in Japanese society with industrialization, and the postwar occupation reforms imposed by General MacArthur. Throughout, the book gives voice to the individuals and views that have shaped the actions and beliefs of the Japanese, with writers, artists, and thinkers, as well as political leaders given their due. The story this book tells, though marked by profound changes, is also one of remarkable consistency, in which continuities outweigh upheavals in the development of society, and successive waves of outside influence have only served to strengthen a sense of what is unique and native to Japanese experience. The Making of Modern Japan takes us to the core of this experience as it illuminates one of the contemporary world’s most compelling transformations.

Download or read book Topographies of Japanese Modernism written by Seiji M. Lippit and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lippit offers the first book-length study in English of Japanese modernist fiction from the 1920s to the 1930s. Through close readings of four leading figures of this movement--Akutagawa, Yokomitsu, Kawabata, and Hayashi--Lippit aims to establish a theoretical and historical framework for the analysis of Japanese modernism.

Download or read book Origins of Modern Japanese Literature written by Kōjin Karatani and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Karatani Kojin is one of Japan's leading critics. In his work as a theoretician, he has described Modernity as have few others; he has re-evaluated the literature of the entire Meiji period and beyond. As one critic has said, Karatani's thought "has had a profound effect on the way we formulate the questions we ask about modern literature and culture ... [his] argument is compelling, moving even, and in the end the reader comes away with a different understanding not only of modern Japanese literature but of modern Japan itself." Among the many authors discussed are Soseki Natsume, Doppo Kunikida, Katai Tayama, and Shoyo Tsubouchi.

Download or read book Kitano Takeshi written by Aaron Gerow and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-07-25 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Combining a detailed account of the situation in Japanese film and criticism with unique close analyses of Kitano's films from Violent Cop to Takeshis, the author relates the director to issues of contemporary cinema, Japanese national identity, and globalism.

Download or read book Visions of Desire written by Ken Ito and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1991-07-01 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No Japanese writer was more obsessed with desire than Tanizaki Jun'ichiro (1886–1965). Over a career that spanned half a century, he explored, with both joyful fascination and ruthless insight, the dazzling varieties of sexuality, the complementary attractions of exoticism and nostalgia, the human yearning for mastery over others, and the tense relationship between fantasy and the exterior world. His fiction is filled with portrayals of desire in all its violence, irony, pathos, and comedy. In one of Tanizaki's novels, a young engineer fascinated with the West sets out to transform a Japanese bar girl into his very own version of Mary Pickford. He succeeds to such an extent that the girl, growing tired of his immutable Japaneseness, begins to take foreign lovers. Cuckolded and humiliated though his is, the engineer is unable to leave his fantasy-come-to-life and resigns himself to enslavement. In another novel, a Westernized Japanese finds himself gradually drawn to the past. Specifically, he is attracted to his father-in-law's companion, a young woman who has been trained and costumed to play the part of an old-fashioned mistress. Though this woman is no more a flesh-and-blood embodiment of tradition than a bunraku doll, the protagonist contemplates a life with someone like her, a life defined by the pursuit of abstract, dehumanized cultural ideals. Visions of Desire locates such novels in the shifting discourse on cultural identity and cultural aspiration that permeates Japanese life. Ito argues that Tanizaki's novels do not merely end in the reification and contemplation of cultural ideals but rather problematize the desire behind such ideals. He finds in the writer's fiction a subtle understanding of cultural aspiration as a process riddled with subversions, influenced by patterns of mediation, and circumscribed by the lonely efforts of individual subjectivity. He discovers in Tanizaki's fables about the male effort to transform women into cultural icons a clear awareness of the sexual and class hierarchies that make such transformation possible. Visions of Desire is the first book in English on a writer who is possibly modern Japan's greatest novelist. Ito has written for both the specialist and the general reader, setting his argument in a discussion both of Tanizaki's times and of the life of a writer who believed in living out the fantasies that fueled his fictions.