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412 books match the query 'Japan' and 10 start with f

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Faking Liberties

Religious Freedom in American-Occupied Japan

Jolyon Baraka Thomas

University of Chicago Press, 2019

Religious freedom is a founding tenet of the United States, and it has frequently been used to justify policies towards other nations. Such was the case in 1945 when Americans occupied Japan following World War II. Though the Japanese constitution had guaranteed freedom of religion since 1889, the United States declared that protection faulty, and when the occupation ended in 1952, they claimed to have successfully replaced it with “real” religious freedom.

Through a fresh analysis of pre-war Japanese law, Jolyon Baraka Thomas demonstrates that the occupiers’ triumphant narrative obscured salient Japanese political debates about religious freedom. Indeed, Thomas reveals that American occupiers also vehemently disagreed about the topic. By reconstructing these vibrant debates, Faking Liberties unsettles any notion of American authorship and imposition of religious freedom. Instead, Thomas shows that, during the Occupation, a dialogue about freedom of religion ensued that constructed a new global set of political norms that continue to form policies today.

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Fantasies of Ito Michio

Tara Rodman

University of Michigan Press, 2024

Winner of the 2025 Dance Studies Association Oscar Brockett Book Prize

Born in Japan and trained in Germany, dancer and choreographer Ito Michio (1893–1961) achieved prominence in London before moving to the U.S. in 1916 and building a career as an internationally acclaimed artist. During World War II, Ito was interned for two years, and then repatriated to Japan, where he contributed to imperial war efforts by creating propaganda performances and performing revues for the occupying Allied Forces in Tokyo. Throughout, Ito continually invented stories of voyages made, artists befriended, performances seen, and political activities carried out—stories later dismissed as false.

Fantasies of Ito Michio argues that these invented stories, unrealized projects, and questionable political affiliations are as fundamental to Ito’s career as his ‘real’ activities, helping us understand how he sustained himself across experiences of racialization, imperialism, war, and internment. Tara Rodman reveals a narrative of Ito’s life that foregrounds the fabricated and overlooked to highlight his involvement with Japanese artists, such as Yamada Kosaku and Ishii Baku, and global modernist movements. Rodman offers “fantasy” as a rubric for understanding how individuals such as Ito sustain themselves in periods of violent disruption and as a scholarly methodology for engaging the past.

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Feeling Media

Potentiality and the Afterlife of Art

Miryam Sas

Duke University Press, 2022

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.

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Fertility Change in Contemporary Japan

Robert W. Hodge and Naohiro Ogawa

University of Chicago Press, 1992

The authors examine the striking decline in Japan's birthrate in light of the rapid urbanization, industrialization, and socioeconomic development experienced by the nation since World War II.

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Film's Ghosts

Tatsumi Hijikata's Butoh and the Transmutation of 1960s Japan

Stephen Barber

Diaphanes, 2019

Tokyo during the 1960s was in a state of uproar, full of protests, riots, and insurrection. Tatsumi Hijikata—the initiator of the “Butoh” performance art and the seminal figure in Japan’s experimental arts culture of the 1960s—created his most famous works in the context of that turmoil, his experimental film projects and his horror and erotic films uniquely invoking the intensity of the decade. Based on original interviews with Hijikata’s collaborators as well as new research, Film’s Ghosts illuminates Hijikata’s work against the backdrop of 1960s urban culture in Tokyo. This will be an essential book for readers engaged with film and performance, urban cultures and architecture, and Japan’s experimental art and its histories.

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Finding Mars

Ned Rozell

University of Alaska Press, 2011

Finding Mars is an interwoven tale of science, travel, and adventure, as science writer Ned Rozell accompanies permafrost researcher—and inveterate wanderer—Kenji Yoshikawa on a 750-mile trek by snowmobile through the Alaska wilderness. Along the way, Rozell learns about Yoshikawa’s fascinating life, from his boyhood in Tokyo to the youthful wanderlust that led him to push a wheeled cart across the Sahara, ski to the South Pole, and take a sailboat into the frozen reaches of the Arctic Ocean, spending a winter frozen in the ice near Barrow. It’s an always on-the-move account of a man driven not just by the desire to fill in the blank spots on a map, but also to learn everything he can about them—and a ringing testament to the power of science, enthusiasm, and individual inspiration.

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Folk Religion in Japan

Continuity and Change

Ichiro Hori

University of Chicago Press, 1968

Ichiro Hori's is the first book in Western literature to portray how Shinto, Buddhist, Confucian, and Taoist elements, as well as all manner of archaic magical beliefs and practices, are fused on the folk level.

Folk religion, transmitted by the common people from generation to generation, has greatly conditioned the political, economic, and cultural development of Japan and continues to satisfy the emotional and religious needs of the people. Hori examines the organic relationship between the Japanese social structure—the family kinship system, village and community organizations—and folk religion. A glossary with Japanese characters is included in the index.

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For Dignity, Justice, and Revolution

An Anthology of Japanese Proletarian Literature

Edited by Heather Bowen-Struyk and Norma Field

University of Chicago Press, 2015

Fiction created by and for the working class emerged worldwide in the early twentieth century as a response to rapid modernization, dramatic inequality, and imperial expansion. In Japan, literary youth, men and women, sought to turn their imaginations and craft to tackling the ensuing injustices, with results that captured both middle-class and worker-farmer readers. This anthology is a landmark introduction to Japanese proletarian literature from that period.

Contextualized by introductory essays, forty expertly translated stories touch on topics like perilous factories, predatory bosses, ethnic discrimination, and the myriad indignities of poverty. Together, they show how even intensely personal issues form a pattern of oppression. Fostering labor consciousness as part of an international leftist arts movement, these writers, lovers of literature, were also challenging the institution of modern literature itself. This anthology demonstrates the vitality of the “red decade” long buried in modern Japanese literary history.

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Four Years in Izumi

Village Japan in the Early Sixteenth Century

Lee Butler

University of Michigan Press, 2026

Four Years in Izumi takes an in-depth and critical approach to understanding Japanese village life through analysis of the diary of Kujō Masamoto, the former chancellor of the imperial court who resided briefly in one of his provincial estates from 1501 to 1504. For a high ranking courtier to travel to the countryside and manage a family estate was unheard of during the era of Sengoku, the “country at war.” The diary Masamoto kept offers a remarkably rich and vivid portrait of village Japan, which has seen no significant study in English-language scholarship.

Through extensive examination of the diary and close and critical reading of it and complementary sources, Lee Butler provides a window into the inner workings of late-medieval village life that challenges typical portrayals of the period. In Four Years in Izumi, we see the complexity of relations between commoners and elites in action. We also see the ways in which an estate functioned in practice at the heart of the medieval economy and local social structure.

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From Confinement to Containment

Japanese/American Arts during the Early Cold War

Edward Tang

Temple University Press, 2019

During the early part of the Cold War, Japan emerged as a model ally, and Japanese Americans were seen as a model minority. From Confinement to Containment examines the work of four Japanese and Japanese/American artists and writers during this period: the novelist Hanama Tasaki, the actor Yamaguchi Yoshiko, the painter Henry Sugimoto, and the children’s author Yoshiko Uchida. The backgrounds of the four figures reveal a mixing of nationalities, a borrowing of cultures, and a combination of domestic and overseas interests.

Edward Tang shows how the film, art, and literature made by these artists revealed to the American public the linked processes of U.S. actions at home and abroad. Their work played into—but also challenged—the postwar rehabilitated images of Japan and Japanese Americans as it focused on the history of transpacific relations such as Japanese immigration to the United States, the Asia-Pacific War, U.S. and Japanese imperialism, and the wartime confinement of Japanese Americans. From Confinement to Containment shows the relationships between larger global forces as well as how the artists and writers responded to them in both critical and compromised ways.

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