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In the late twelfth century, Japanese people called the transitional period in which they were living the "age of warriors." This book provides an account of the religious, intellectual, and literary practices of medieval Japan in order to reveal the era's own cultural creativity and enormous economic potential.

Yoshimasa may have been the worst shogun ever to rule Japan. He was a failure as a soldier, incompetent at dealing with state business, and dominated by his wife. But his influence on the cultural life of Japan was unparalleled. According to Donald Keene, Yoshimasa was the only shogun to leave a lasting heritage for the entire Japanese people.Today Yoshimasa is remembered primarily as the builder of the Temple of the Silver Pavilion and as the ruler at the time of the Onin War (1467-1477), after which the authority of the shogun all but disappeared. Unable to control the daimyos-provincial military governors-he abandoned politics and devoted himself to the quest for beauty. It was then, after Yoshimasa resigned as shogun and made his home in the mountain retreat now known as the Silver Pavilion, that his aesthetic taste came to define that of the Japanese: the no theater flourished, Japanese gardens were developed, and the tea ceremony had its origins in a small room at the Silver Pavilion. Flower arrangement, ink painting, and shoin-zukuri architecture began or became of major importance under Yoshimasa. Poets introduced their often barely literate warlord-hosts to the literary masterpieces of the past and taught them how to compose poetry. Even the most barbarous warlord came to want the trappings of culture that would enable him to feel like a civilized man.Yoshimasa and the Silver Pavilion gives this long-neglected but critical period in Japanese history the thorough treatment it deserves.

This book explores entangled Easts to reconsider global history from the margins. Examining the politics of history and memory, Jie-Hyun Lim reveals the affinities linking Eastern Europe and East Asia.

Few scholars have done more than Harry Harootunian to shape the study of modern Japan. Uneven Moments presents a selection of Harootunian's essays on Japan's intellectual and cultural history from the late Tokugawa period to the present that span the many phases of his distinguished career and point to new directions for Japanese studies.

John Nathan provides a lucid and vivid account of Natsume Soseki, the father of the modern novel in Japan. This biography elevates Soseki to his rightful place as a great synthesizer of literary traditions and a brilliant chronicler of universal experience who, no less than his Western contemporaries, anticipated twentieth-century modernism.

In a narrative history rich in colorful detail, Simon Partner uses the story of an ordinary merchant farmer as a vantage point onto sweeping social transformation and its unwitting agents. Partner's history of Yokahama as a vibrant meeting place humanizes the story of Japan's revolutionary 1860s and their profound consequences.

Memories of World War II exert a powerful influence over Japan's culture and society. In The Japanese and the War, Michael Lucken details how World War II manifested in the literature, art, film, funerary practices, and education reform of the time. Concentrating on the years immediately before and after (1937 to 1952), Lucken explores the creation of an idea of Japanese identity that still resonates in everything from soap operas to the response to the Fukushima nuclear disaster.Lucken defines three distinct layers of Japan's memory of World War II: the population's expectations at the beginning, the trauma caused by conflict and defeat, and the politics of memory that arose after Japan lost to the Allied powers. Emphasizing Japanese-language sources, Lucken writes a narrative of the making of Japanese cultural memory that moves away from Western historical modes and perspectives. His approach also paints a new portrait of the U.S. occupation, while still maintaining a cultural focus. Lucken sets out to capture the many ways people engage with war, but particularly the full range of Japan's experiences, which, he argues, the Japanese state has yet to fully confront, leading to a range of tensions at home and abroad.

Many books in Japanese have been devoted to the poet and critic Ishikawa Takuboku (1886-1912). Although he died at the age of twenty-six and wrote many of his best-known poems in the space of a few years, his name is familiar to every literate Japanese. Takuboku's early death added to the sad romance of the unhappy poet, but there has been no satisfactory biography of his life or career, even in Japanese, and only a small part of his writings have been translated. His mature poetry was based on the work of no predecessor, and he left no disciples. Takuboku stands unique.Takuboku's most popular poems, especially those with a humorous overlay, are often read and memorized, but his diaries and letters, though less familiar, contain rich and vivid glimpses of the poet's thoughts and experiences. They reflect the outlook of an unconstrained man who at times behaved in a startling or even shocking manner. Despite his misdemeanors, Takuboku is regarded as a national poet, all but a saint to his admirers, especially in the regions of Japan where he lived. His refusal to conform to the Japan of the time drove him in striking directions and ranked him as the first poet of the new Japan.

The idea that Japanese art is produced through rote copy and imitation is an eighteenth-century colonial construct, with roots in Romantic ideals of originality. Offering a much-needed corrective to this critique, Michael Lucken demonstrates the distinct character of Japanese mimesis and its dynamic impact on global culture, showing through several twentieth-century masterpieces the generative and regenerative power of Japanese arts.Choosing a representative work from each of four modern genres-painting, film, photography, and animation-Lucken portrays the range of strategies that Japanese artists use to re-present contemporary influences. He examines Kishida Ryusei's portraits of Reiko (1914-1929), Kurosawa Akira's Ikiru (1952), Araki Nobuyoshi's photographic novel Sentimental Journey-Winter (1991), and Miyazaki Hayao's popular anime film Spirited Away (2001), revealing the sophisticated patterns of mimesis that are unique but not exclusive to modern Japanese art. In doing so, Lucken identifies the tensions that drive the Japanese imagination, which are much richer than a simple opposition between progress and tradition, and their reflection of human culture's universal encounter with change. This global perspective explains why, despite its non-Western origins, Japanese art has earned such a vast following.

Rather than resist the vast social and cultural changes sweeping Japan in the nineteenth century, the poet Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902) instead incorporated new Western influences into his country's native haiku and tanka verse. By reinvigorating these traditional forms, Shiki released them from outdated conventions and made them more responsive to newer trends in artistic expression. Altogether, his reforms made the haiku Japan's most influential modern cultural export.Using extensive readings of Shiki's own writings and accounts of the poet by his contemporaries and family, Donald Keene charts Shiki's revolutionary (and often contradictory) experiments with haiku and tanka, a dynamic process that made the survival of these traditional genres possible in a globalizing world. Keene particularly highlights random incidents and encounters in his impressionistic portrait of this tragically young life, moments that elicited significant shifts and discoveries in Shiki's work. The push and pull of a profoundly changing society is vividly felt in Keene's narrative, which also includes sharp observations of other recognizable characters, such as the famous novelist and critic Natsume Soseki. In addition, Keene reflects on his own personal relationship with Shiki's work, further developing the nuanced, deeply felt dimensions of its power.

From the beginning of the American Occupation in 1945 to the post-bubble period of the early 1990s, popular music provided Japanese listeners with a much-needed release, channeling their desires, fears, and frustrations into a pleasurable and fluid art. Pop music allowed Japanese artists and audiences to assume various identities, reflecting the country's uncomfortable position under American hegemony and its uncertainty within ever-shifting geopolitical realities. In the first English-language study of this phenomenon, Michael K. Bourdaghs considers genres as diverse as boogie-woogie, rockabilly, enka, 1960s rock and roll, 1970s new music, folk, and techno-pop. Reading these forms and their cultural import through music, literary, and cultural theory, he introduces readers to the sensual moods and meanings of modern Japan. As he unpacks the complexities of popular music production and consumption, Bourdaghs interprets Japan as it worked through (or tried to forget) its imperial past. These efforts grew even murkier as Japanese pop migrated to the nation's former colonies. In postwar Japan, pop music both accelerated and protested the commodification of everyday life, challenged and reproduced gender hierarchies, and insisted on the uniqueness of a national culture, even as it participated in an increasingly integrated global marketplace. Each chapter in Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon examines a single genre through a particular theoretical lens: the relation of music to liberation; the influence of cultural mapping on musical appreciation; the role of translation in transmitting musical genres around the globe; the place of noise in music and its relation to historical change; the tenuous connection between ideologies of authenticity and imitation; the link between commercial success and artistic integrity; and the function of melodrama. Bourdaghs concludes with a look at recent Japanese pop music culture.

Aisin Gioro Xianyu (1907-1948) was the fourteenth daughter of a Manchu prince and a legendary figure in China's bloody struggle with Japan. After the fall of the Manchu dynasty in 1912, Xianyu's father gave his daughter to a Japanese friend who was sympathetic to his efforts to reclaim power. This man raised Xianyu, now known as Kawashima Yoshiko, to restore the Manchus to their former glory. Her fearsome dedication to this cause ultimately got her killed.Yoshiko had a fiery personality and loved the limelight. She shocked Japanese society by dressing in men's clothes and rose to prominence as Commander Jin, touted in Japan's media as a new Joan of Arc. Boasting a short, handsome haircut and a genuine military uniform, Commander Jin was credited with many daring exploits, among them riding horseback as leader of her own army during the Japanese occupation of China. While trying to promote the Manchus, Yoshiko supported the puppet Manchu state established by the Japanese in 1932-one reason she was executed for treason after Japan's 1945 defeat. The truth of Yoshiko's life is still a source of contention between China and Japan: some believe she was exploited by powerful men, others claim she relished her role as political provocateur. China holds her responsible for unspeakable crimes, while Japan has forgiven her transgressions. This biography presents the richest and most accurate portrait to date of the controversial princess spy, recognizing her truly novel role in conflicts that transformed East Asia.

The attack on Pearl Harbor, which precipitated the Greater East Asia War and its initial triumphs, aroused pride and a host of other emotions among the Japanese people. Yet the single year in which Japanese forces occupied territory from Alaska to Indonesia was followed by three years of terrible defeat. Nevertheless, until the shattering end of the war, many Japanese continued to believe in the invincibility of their country. But in the diaries of well-known writers including Nagai Kafu, Takami Jun, Yamada Futaru, and Hirabayashi Taiko and the scholar Watanabe Kazuo, varying doubts were vividly, though privately, expressed.Donald Keene, renowned scholar of Japan, selects from these diaries, some written by authors he knew well. Their revelations were sometimes poignant, sometimes shocking to Keene. Ito Sei's fervent patriotism and even claims of racial superiority stand in stark contrast to the soft-spoken, kindly man Keene knew. Weaving archival materials with personal recollections and the intimate accounts themselves, Keene reproduces the passions aroused during the war and the sharply contrasting reactions in the year following Japan's surrender. Whether detailed or fragmentary, these entries communicate the reality of false victory and all-too-real defeat.

Frog in the Well is a vivid and revealing account of Watanabe Kazan, one of the most important intellectuals of the late Tokugawa period. From his impoverished upbringing to his tragic suicide in exile, Kazan's life and work reflected a turbulent period in Japan's history. He was a famous artist, a Confucian scholar, a student of Western culture, a samurai, and a critic of the shogunate who, nevertheless, felt compelled to kill himself for fear that he had caused his lord anxiety. During this period, a typical Japanese scholar or artist refused to acknowledge the outside world, much like a "e;frog in the well that knows nothing of the ocean,"e; but Kazan actively sought out Western learning. He appreciated European civilization and bought every scrap of European art that was available in Japan. He became a painter to help his family out of poverty and, by employing the artistic techniques of the West, achieved great success with his realistic and stylistically advanced portraits.Although he remained a nationalist committed to the old ways, Kazan called on the shogunate to learn from the West or risk disaster. He strove to improve the agricultural and economic conditions of his province and reinforce its defenses, but his criticisms and warnings about possible coastal invasions ultimately led to his arrest and exile. Frog in the Well is the first full-length biography of Kazan in English, and, in telling his life's story, renowned scholar Donald Keene paints a fascinating portrait of the social and intellectual milieus of the late Tokugawa period. Richly illustrated with Kazan's paintings, Frog in the Well illuminates a life that is emblematic of the cultural crises affecting Japan in the years before revolution.

In May 1936, Abe Sada committed the most notorious crime in twentieth-century Japan-the murder and emasculation of her lover. What made her do it? And why was she found guilty of murder yet sentenced to only six years in prison? Why have this woman and her crime remained so famous for so long, and what does her fame have to say about attitudes toward sex and sexuality in modern Japan?Despite Abe Sada's notoriety and the depictions of her in film and fiction (notably in the classic In the Realm of the Senses), until now, there have been no books written in English that examine her life and the forces that pushed her to commit the crime. Along with a detailed account of Sada's personal history, the events leading up to the murder, and its aftermath, this book contains transcripts of the police interrogations after her arrest-one of the few existing first-person records of a woman who worked in the Japanese sex industry during the 1920s and 1930s-as well as a memoir by the judge and police records. Geisha, Harlot, Strangler, Star steps beyond the simplistic view of Abe Sada as a sexual deviate or hysterical woman to reveal a survivor of rape, a career as a geisha and a prostitute, and a prison sentence for murder. Sada endured discrimination and hounding by paparazzi until her disappearance in 1970. Her story illustrates a historical collision of social and sexual values-those of the samurai class and imported from Victorian Europe against those of urban and rural Japanese peasants.

Brings the imagination of women's writing from the Meiji period to English-language readers. Along with traditional prose selections, this anthology features short stories, plays, poetry, speeches, essays, and personal journal entries. It includes an introduction to each reading; and an index listing historical, social, and literary concepts.

Brings the imagination of women's writing from the Meiji period to English-language readers. Along with traditional prose selections, this anthology features short stories, plays, poetry, speeches, essays, and personal journal entries. It includes an introduction to each reading; and an index listing historical, social, and literary concepts.

Yoshimi provides a wealth of documentation and testimony to prove the existence of some 2,000 "comfort stations" where as many as 200,000 women of varying nationalities, euphemistically known as "comfort women," were imprisoned and forced to engage in sexual activity with Japanese military personnel.