A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
673 books about Japan and 14
start with K
673 books about Japan and 14
673 books about Japan
14 start with K start with K
14 start with K start with K
Kafu the Scribbler
The Life and Writings of Nagai Kafu, 1897–1959
Edward Seidensticker
University of Michigan Press, 1990
Kafū the Scribbler is neither pure biography nor pure criticism nor yet a pure anthology, but a blending of the three. It is an introduction to Nagai Kafū and his city, accompanied by a fairly generous sampling from his works. Marleigh Ryan writes:
“In this book Edward Seidensticker presents a unique combination of biography and literary criticism by skillfully interweaving details of the life of Nagai Kafū with studies of his writing. With quotations of from Kafū’s fiction and nonfiction alike, Seidensticker is able to reconstruct many incidents in the author’s life which had previously been little understood. The latter half of the book is given over to translations of short stories and to selections from two novels and a journal. Seidensticker has thoughtfully given cross references to the material in both parts of the book which enable the reader to handle this wealth of material with some dexterity.
“Seidensticker’s skill as a translator is so well established that it seems almost unnecessary to comment on it further here but one cannot help being impressed by his rendering of Kafū’s lyrical style. As we realize when reading the critical material, there is remarkably little plot or character development in Kafū’s fiction. His position as leading modern writer is dependent to a considerable degree upon the beauty and grace of his style, and we are fortunate indeed to have such masterful translations as these to convey that style.”*
*Ryan, Marleigh. Journal of the American Oriental Society 88, no. 3 (1968): 624. doi:10.2307/596924.
[more]
Kamikaze Biker
Parody and Anomy in Affluent Japan
Ikuya Sato
University of Chicago Press, 1991
In this firsthand account of high-risk car and motorcycle racing in Japan, Ikuya Sato shows how affluence and consumerism have spawned various experimental and deviant life-styles among youth. Kamikaze Biker offers an intriguing look at a form of delinquency in a country traditionally thought to be devoid of social problems.
"Ikuya Sato's Kamikaze Biker is an exceptionally fine ethnographic analysis of a recurrent form of Japanese collective youth deviance. . . . Sato has contributed a work of value to a wide range of scholarly audiences."—Jack Katz, Contemporary Sociology
"A must for anyone interested in Japan, juvenile delinquency and/or youth behavior in general, or the impact of affluence on society."—Choice
"The volume provides a sophisticated . . . discussion of changes happening in Japanese society in the early 1980s. As such, it serves as a window on the 1990s and beyond."—Ross Mouer, Asian Studies Review
"Kamikaze Biker is a superlative study, one that might help liberate American social science from the simplistic notion that behavior not directly contributing to economic productivity should be summarily dismissed as 'dangerous' and 'deviant.' "—Los Angeles Times Book Review
"Ikuya Sato's Kamikaze Biker is an exceptionally fine ethnographic analysis of a recurrent form of Japanese collective youth deviance. . . . Sato has contributed a work of value to a wide range of scholarly audiences."—Jack Katz, Contemporary Sociology
"A must for anyone interested in Japan, juvenile delinquency and/or youth behavior in general, or the impact of affluence on society."—Choice
"The volume provides a sophisticated . . . discussion of changes happening in Japanese society in the early 1980s. As such, it serves as a window on the 1990s and beyond."—Ross Mouer, Asian Studies Review
"Kamikaze Biker is a superlative study, one that might help liberate American social science from the simplistic notion that behavior not directly contributing to economic productivity should be summarily dismissed as 'dangerous' and 'deviant.' "—Los Angeles Times Book Review
[more]
Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms, and Nationalisms
The Militarization of Aesthetics in Japanese History
Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney
University of Chicago Press, 2002
Why did almost one thousand highly educated "student soldiers" volunteer to serve in Japan's tokkotai (kamikaze) operations near the end of World War II, even though Japan was losing the war? In this fascinating study of the role of symbolism and aesthetics in totalitarian ideology, Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney shows how the state manipulated the time-honored Japanese symbol of the cherry blossom to convince people that it was their honor to "die like beautiful falling cherry petals" for the emperor.
Drawing on diaries never before published in English, Ohnuki-Tierney describes these young men's agonies and even defiance against the imperial ideology. Passionately devoted to cosmopolitan intellectual traditions, the pilots saw the cherry blossom not in militaristic terms, but as a symbol of the painful beauty and unresolved ambiguities of their tragically brief lives. Using Japan as an example, the author breaks new ground in the understanding of symbolic communication, nationalism, and totalitarian ideologies and their execution.
Drawing on diaries never before published in English, Ohnuki-Tierney describes these young men's agonies and even defiance against the imperial ideology. Passionately devoted to cosmopolitan intellectual traditions, the pilots saw the cherry blossom not in militaristic terms, but as a symbol of the painful beauty and unresolved ambiguities of their tragically brief lives. Using Japan as an example, the author breaks new ground in the understanding of symbolic communication, nationalism, and totalitarian ideologies and their execution.
[more]
Kamikaze Diaries
Reflections of Japanese Student Soldiers
Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney
University of Chicago Press, 2006
“We tried to live with 120 percent intensity, rather than waiting for death. We read and read, trying to understand why we had to die in our early twenties. We felt the clock ticking away towards our death, every sound of the clock shortening our lives.” So wrote Irokawa Daikichi, one of the many kamikaze pilots, or tokkotai, who faced almost certain death in the futile military operations conducted by Japan at the end of World War II.
This moving history presents diaries and correspondence left by members of the tokkotai and other Japanese student soldiers who perished during the war. Outside of Japan, these kamikaze pilots were considered unbridled fanatics and chauvinists who willingly sacrificed their lives for the emperor. But the writings explored here by Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney clearly and eloquently speak otherwise. A significant number of the kamikaze were university students who were drafted and forced to volunteer for this desperate military operation. Such young men were the intellectual elite of modern Japan: steeped in the classics and major works of philosophy, they took Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am” as their motto. And in their diaries and correspondence, as Ohnuki-Tierney shows, these student soldiers wrote long and often heartbreaking soliloquies in which they poured out their anguish and fear, expressed profound ambivalence toward the war, and articulated thoughtful opposition to their nation’s imperialism.
A salutary correction to the many caricatures of the kamikaze, this poignant work will be essential to anyone interested in the history of Japan and World War II.
This moving history presents diaries and correspondence left by members of the tokkotai and other Japanese student soldiers who perished during the war. Outside of Japan, these kamikaze pilots were considered unbridled fanatics and chauvinists who willingly sacrificed their lives for the emperor. But the writings explored here by Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney clearly and eloquently speak otherwise. A significant number of the kamikaze were university students who were drafted and forced to volunteer for this desperate military operation. Such young men were the intellectual elite of modern Japan: steeped in the classics and major works of philosophy, they took Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am” as their motto. And in their diaries and correspondence, as Ohnuki-Tierney shows, these student soldiers wrote long and often heartbreaking soliloquies in which they poured out their anguish and fear, expressed profound ambivalence toward the war, and articulated thoughtful opposition to their nation’s imperialism.
A salutary correction to the many caricatures of the kamikaze, this poignant work will be essential to anyone interested in the history of Japan and World War II.
[more]
Karma and Punishment
Prison Chaplaincy in Japan
Adam J. Lyons
Harvard University Press
Despite being one of the most avowedly secular nations in the world, Japan may have more prison chaplains per inmate than any other country, the majority of whom are Buddhist priests. In this groundbreaking study of prison religion in East Asia, Adam Lyons introduces a form of chaplaincy rooted in the Buddhist concept of doctrinal admonition rather than Euro-American notions of spiritual care.
Based on archival research, fieldwork inside prisons, and interviews with chaplains, Karma and Punishment reveals another dimension of Buddhist modernism that developed as Japan’s religious organizations carved out a niche as defenders of society by fighting crime. Between 1868 and 2020, generations of clergy have been appointed to bring religious instruction to bear on a range of offenders, from illegal Christian heretics to Marxist political dissidents, war criminals, and death row inmates. The case of the prison chaplaincy shows that despite constitutional commitments to freedom of religion and separation of religion from state, statism remains an enduring feature of mainstream Japanese religious life in the contemporary era.
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Kenmu
Go–Daigo's Revolution
Andrew Edmund Goble
Harvard University Press, 1996
The short-lived Kenmu regime (1333–1336) of Japanese Emperor Go-Daigo is often seen as an inevitably doomed, revanchist attempt to shore up the old aristocratic order. But far from resisting change, Andrew Edmund Goble here forcefully argues, the flamboyant Go-Daigo and his iconoclastic associates were among the competitors seeking to overcome the old order and renegotiate its structure and ethos. Their ultimate defeat did not automatically spell failure; rather, the revolutionary nature of their enterprise decisively moved Japan into its medieval age.By birth, education, and circumstances, Go-Daigo should have been a weak, fatalistic bit player. Instead this student of Chinese political theory was a bold actor with an unprecedented knowledge of the various regions of Japan, who forced situations to his own benefit and led a rebellion that overthrew the Kamakura bakufu. Kenmu: Go-Daigo’s Revolution tells his extraordinary personal story vividly, reexamines original sources to discover the real nature of the Kenmu polity, and sets both within the broader backdrop of social, economic, and intellectual change at a dynamic moment in Japanese history.
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Kimono
A Modern History
Terry Satsuki Milhaupt
Reaktion Books, 2014
What is the kimono? Everyday garment? Art object? Symbol of Japan? As this book shows, the kimono has served all of these roles, its meaning changing across time and with the perspective of the wearer or viewer.
Kimono: A Modern History begins by exposing the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century foundations of the modern kimono fashion industry. It explores the crossover between ‘art’ and ‘fashion’ in this period at the hands of famous Japanese painters who worked with clothing pattern books and painted directly onto garments. With Japan’s exposure to Western fashion in the nineteenth century, and Westerners’ exposure to Japanese modes of dress and design, the kimono took on new associations and came to symbolize an exotic culture and an alluring female form. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the kimono industry was sustained through government support. The line between fashion and art became blurred as kimonos produced by famous designers were collected for their beauty and displayed in museums, rather than being worn as clothing. Today, the kimono has once again taken on new dimensions, as the Internet and social media proliferate images of the kimono as a versatile garment to be integrated into a range of individual styles.
Kimono: A Modern History, the inspiration for a major exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York,not only tells the story of a distinctive garment’s ever-changing functions and image, but provides a novel perspective on Japan’s modernization and encounter with the West.
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Kingdom of Beauty
Mingei and the Politics of Folk Art in Imperial Japan
Kim Brandt
Duke University Press, 2007
A Study of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University
Kingdom of Beauty shows that the discovery of mingei (folk art) by Japanese intellectuals in the 1920s and 1930s was central to the complex process by which Japan became both a modern nation and an imperial world power. Kim Brandt’s account of the mingei movement locates its origins in colonial Korea, where middle-class Japanese artists and collectors discovered that imperialism offered them special opportunities to amass art objects and gain social, cultural, and even political influence. Later, mingei enthusiasts worked with (and against) other groups—such as state officials, fascist ideologues, rival folk art organizations, local artisans, newspaper and magazine editors, and department store managers—to promote their own vision of beautiful prosperity for Japan, Asia, and indeed the world. In tracing the history of mingei activism, Brandt considers not only Yanagi Muneyoshi, Hamada Shōji, Kawai Kanjirō, and other well-known leaders of the folk art movement but also the often overlooked networks of provincial intellectuals, craftspeople, marketers, and shoppers who were just as important to its success. The result of their collective efforts, she makes clear, was the transformation of a once-obscure category of pre-industrial rural artifacts into an icon of modern national style.
Kingdom of Beauty shows that the discovery of mingei (folk art) by Japanese intellectuals in the 1920s and 1930s was central to the complex process by which Japan became both a modern nation and an imperial world power. Kim Brandt’s account of the mingei movement locates its origins in colonial Korea, where middle-class Japanese artists and collectors discovered that imperialism offered them special opportunities to amass art objects and gain social, cultural, and even political influence. Later, mingei enthusiasts worked with (and against) other groups—such as state officials, fascist ideologues, rival folk art organizations, local artisans, newspaper and magazine editors, and department store managers—to promote their own vision of beautiful prosperity for Japan, Asia, and indeed the world. In tracing the history of mingei activism, Brandt considers not only Yanagi Muneyoshi, Hamada Shōji, Kawai Kanjirō, and other well-known leaders of the folk art movement but also the often overlooked networks of provincial intellectuals, craftspeople, marketers, and shoppers who were just as important to its success. The result of their collective efforts, she makes clear, was the transformation of a once-obscure category of pre-industrial rural artifacts into an icon of modern national style.
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The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan
Federico Marcon
University of Chicago Press, 2015
Between the early seventeenth and the mid-nineteenth century, the field of natural history in Japan separated itself from the discipline of medicine, produced knowledge that questioned the traditional religious and philosophical understandings of the world, developed into a system (called honzogaku) that rivaled Western science in complexity—and then seemingly disappeared. Or did it? In The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan, Federico Marcon recounts how Japanese scholars developed a sophisticated discipline of natural history analogous to Europe’s but created independently, without direct influence, and argues convincingly that Japanese natural history succumbed to Western science not because of suppression and substitution, as scholars traditionally have contended, but by adaptation and transformation.
The first book-length English-language study devoted to the important field of honzogaku, The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan will be an essential text for historians of Japanese and East Asian science, and a fascinating read for anyone interested in the development of science in the early modern era.
The first book-length English-language study devoted to the important field of honzogaku, The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan will be an essential text for historians of Japanese and East Asian science, and a fascinating read for anyone interested in the development of science in the early modern era.
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Korea Letters in the William Elliot Griffis Collection
An Annotated Selection
Young-mee Yu Cho
Rutgers University Press, 2024
William Elliot Griffis (1843 – 1928) graduated from Rutgers College in 1869 and taught four years in Fukui and Tokyo. After his return to the United States, he devoted himself to his research and writing on East Asia throughout his life. He authored 20 books about Japan and five books about Korea including, Corea: The Hermit Nation (1882), Corea, Without and Within: Chapters on Corean History, Manners and Religion (1885), The Unmannerly Tiger, and Other Korean Tales (1911), A Modern Pioneer in Korea: The Life Story of Henry G. Appenzeller (1912), and Korean Fairy Tales (1922). In particular, his bestseller, Corea: The Hermit Nation (1882) was reprinted numerous times through nine editions over thirty years. He was not only known as "the foremost interpreter of Japan to the West before World War I but also the American expert on Korea. After his death, his collection of books, documents, photographs and ephemera was donated to Rutgers.
The Korean materials in the Griffis Collection at Rutgers University consist of journals, correspondence, articles, maps, prints, photos, postcards, manuscripts, scrapbooks, and ephemera. These papers reflect Griffis's interests and activities in relation to Korea as a historian, scholar, and theologian. They provide a rare window into the turbulent period of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Korea, witnessed and evaluated by Griffis and early American missionaries in East Asia. The Korea Letters in the William Elliot Griffis Collection are divided into two parts: letters from missionaries and letters from Japanese and Korean political figures. Newly available and accessible through this collection, these letters develop a multifaceted history of early American missionaries in Korea, the Korean independence movement, and Griffis's views on Korean culture.
The Korean materials in the Griffis Collection at Rutgers University consist of journals, correspondence, articles, maps, prints, photos, postcards, manuscripts, scrapbooks, and ephemera. These papers reflect Griffis's interests and activities in relation to Korea as a historian, scholar, and theologian. They provide a rare window into the turbulent period of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Korea, witnessed and evaluated by Griffis and early American missionaries in East Asia. The Korea Letters in the William Elliot Griffis Collection are divided into two parts: letters from missionaries and letters from Japanese and Korean political figures. Newly available and accessible through this collection, these letters develop a multifaceted history of early American missionaries in Korea, the Korean independence movement, and Griffis's views on Korean culture.
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Korean "Comfort Women"
Military Brothels, Brutality, and the Redress Movement
Pyong Gap Min
Rutgers University Press, 2021
Arguably the most brutal crime committed by the Japanese military during the Asia-Pacific war was the forced mobilization of 50,000 to 200,000 Asian women to military brothels to sexually serve Japanese soldiers. The majority of these women died, unable to survive the ordeal. Those survivors who came back home kept silent about their brutal experiences for about fifty years. In the late 1980s, the women’s movement in South Korea helped start the redress movement for the victims, encouraging many survivors to come forward to tell what happened to them. With these testimonies, the redress movement gained strong support from the UN, the United States, and other Western countries.
Korean “Comfort Women” synthesizes the previous major findings about Japanese military sexual slavery and legal recommendations, and provides new findings about the issues “comfort women” faced for an English-language audience. It also examines the transnational redress movement, revealing that the Japanese government has tried to conceal the crime of sexual slavery and to resolve the women’s human rights issue with diplomacy and economic power.
Korean “Comfort Women” synthesizes the previous major findings about Japanese military sexual slavery and legal recommendations, and provides new findings about the issues “comfort women” faced for an English-language audience. It also examines the transnational redress movement, revealing that the Japanese government has tried to conceal the crime of sexual slavery and to resolve the women’s human rights issue with diplomacy and economic power.
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Kore-eda Hirokazu
Marc Yamada
University of Illinois Press, 2023
Films like Shoplifters and After the Storm have made Kore-eda Hirokazu one of the most acclaimed auteurs working today. Critics often see Kore-eda as a director steeped in the Japanese tradition defined by Yasujirō Ozu. Marc Yamada, however, views Kore-eda’s work in relation to the same socioeconomic concerns explored by other contemporary international filmmakers. Yamada reveals that a type of excess, not the minimalism associated with traditional aesthetics, defines Kore-eda’s trademark humanism. This excess manifests in small moments when a desire for human connection exceeds the logic of the institutions and policies formed by the neoliberal values that have shaped modern-day Japan. As Yamada shows, Kore-eda captures the shared spaces formed by bodies that move, perform, and assemble in ways that express the humanistic impulse at the core of the filmmaker’s expanding worldwide appeal.
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Kurosawa
Film Studies and Japanese Cinema
Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto
Duke University Press, 2000
The films of Akira Kurosawa have had an immense effect on the way the Japanese have viewed themselves as a nation and on the way the West has viewed Japan. In this comprehensive and theoretically informed study of the influential director’s cinema, Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto definitively analyzes Kurosawa’s entire body of work, from 1943’s Sanshiro Sugata to 1993’s Madadayo. In scrutinizing this oeuvre, Yoshimoto shifts the ground upon which the scholarship on Japanese cinema has been built and questions its dominant interpretive frameworks and critical assumptions.
Arguing that Kurosawa’s films arouse anxiety in Japanese and Western critics because the films problematize Japan’s self-image and the West’s image of Japan, Yoshimoto challenges widely circulating clichés about the films and shows how these works constitute narrative answers to sociocultural contradictions and institutional dilemmas. While fully acknowledging the achievement of Kurosawa as a filmmaker, Yoshimoto uses the director’s work to reflect on and rethink a variety of larger issues, from Japanese film history, modern Japanese history, and cultural production to national identity and the global circulation of cultural capital. He examines how Japanese cinema has been “invented” in the discipline of film studies for specific ideological purposes and analyzes Kurosawa’s role in that process of invention. Demonstrating the richness of both this director’s work and Japanese cinema in general, Yoshimoto’s nuanced study illuminates an array of thematic and stylistic aspects of the films in addition to their social and historical contexts.
Beyond aficionados of Kurosawa and Japanese film, this book will interest those engaged with cultural studies, postcolonial studies, cultural globalization, film studies, Asian studies, and the formation of academic disciplines.
Arguing that Kurosawa’s films arouse anxiety in Japanese and Western critics because the films problematize Japan’s self-image and the West’s image of Japan, Yoshimoto challenges widely circulating clichés about the films and shows how these works constitute narrative answers to sociocultural contradictions and institutional dilemmas. While fully acknowledging the achievement of Kurosawa as a filmmaker, Yoshimoto uses the director’s work to reflect on and rethink a variety of larger issues, from Japanese film history, modern Japanese history, and cultural production to national identity and the global circulation of cultural capital. He examines how Japanese cinema has been “invented” in the discipline of film studies for specific ideological purposes and analyzes Kurosawa’s role in that process of invention. Demonstrating the richness of both this director’s work and Japanese cinema in general, Yoshimoto’s nuanced study illuminates an array of thematic and stylistic aspects of the films in addition to their social and historical contexts.
Beyond aficionados of Kurosawa and Japanese film, this book will interest those engaged with cultural studies, postcolonial studies, cultural globalization, film studies, Asian studies, and the formation of academic disciplines.
[more]
Kyoto’s Renaissance
Ancient Capital for Modern Japan
John Breen
Amsterdam University Press, 2020
Draws on archive of material, a first in English to take an in-depth look at Kyoto’s modern transformation – its reinvention after ‘collapse’ (Meiji Restoration) and relocation of the imperial court to Tokyo. Includes: introduction, chapters on notable historical elements that sustain Kyoto as a quintessentially modern ‘ancient capital’ today.
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