Discourses of the Vanishing

Discourses of the Vanishing
Author: Marilyn Ivy
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 285
Release: 2010-02-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0226388344

Japan today is haunted by the ghosts its spectacular modernity has generated. Deep anxieties about the potential loss of national identity and continuity disturb many in Japan, despite widespread insistence that it has remained culturally intact. In this provocative conjoining of ethnography, history, and cultural criticism, Marilyn Ivy discloses these anxieties—and the attempts to contain them—as she tracks what she calls the vanishing: marginalized events, sites, and cultural practices suspended at moments of impending disappearance. Ivy shows how a fascination with cultural margins accompanied the emergence of Japan as a modern nation-state. This fascination culminated in the early twentieth-century establishment of Japanese folklore studies and its attempts to record the spectral, sometimes violent, narratives of those margins. She then traces the obsession with the vanishing through a range of contemporary reconfigurations: efforts by remote communities to promote themselves as nostalgic sites of authenticity, storytelling practices as signs of premodern presence, mass travel campaigns, recallings of the dead by blind mediums, and itinerant, kabuki-inspired populist theater.

Multiculturalism in the New Japan

Multiculturalism in the New Japan
Author: Nelson H. H. Graburn
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 266
Release: 2008
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9781845452261

"...a valuable addition to the increasing literature on Japanese multiculturalism which has challenged the long-held homogeneous Japan thesis...A particular contribution of this ... book is to illuminate the ground-level process where hybridities emerge and group boundaries are redrawn in a particular local context...I greatly enjoyed reading [this book] from beginning to end. My undergraduate students who encountered it in their subject reading list also enjoyed it. I would recommend it highly for both undergraduate and graduate students studying Japanese society." - Japan Studies "This book importantly seeks out the meanings behind the nooks and crannies in which peoples from different cultures are juxtaposed within Japan. However the real work of living side by side, of respecting individual and cultural differences, of embracing diversity...remains a vital challenge to both Japan, as well as to scholars who stand poised to connect the dots of this critical and evolving picture. I recommend this volume as one further step toward that undertaking." - Asia Pacific World "...a very readable volume offering through its focus on the local a vivid picture of multiculturalism in Japan. All articles are ethnographically grounded and it is here, and not in systematic and theoretically exhaustive treatment of the subject of multiculturalism." - Zeitschrift für Ethnologie Like other industrial nations, Japan is experiencing its own forms of, and problems with, internationalization and multiculturalism. This volume focuses on several aspects of this process and examines the immigrant minorities as well as their Japanese recipient communities. Multiculturalism is considered broadly, and includes topics often neglected in other works, such as: religious pluralism, domestic and international tourism, political regionalism and decentralization, sports, business styles in the post-Bubble era, and the education of immigrant minorities.

Storybook Worlds Made Real

Storybook Worlds Made Real
Author: Kathy Merlock Jackson
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 293
Release: 2022-04-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 147664585X

Memorable children's narratives immerse readers in imaginary worlds that bring them into the story. Some of these places have been constructed in the real world--like Pinocchio's Tuscany or Anne of Green Gables' Prince Edward Island--where visitors relive their favorite childhood tales. Theme parks like Walt Disney World and Harry Potter World use technology to engineer enchanting environments that reconnect visitors with beloved fictional settings and characters in new ways. This collection of new essays explores the imagined places we loved as kids, with a focus on the meaning of setting and its power to shape the way we view the world.

Asia on Tour

Asia on Tour
Author: Tim Winter
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 457
Release: 2008-09-24
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1134044348

With the vast majority of academic theory on tourism based onWestern tourists, Asia on Tour illustrates why the rapid growth of travel for leisure and recreation in Asia demands a reappraisal of how tourism is analyzed and understood. Examining domestic and intra-regional tourism, the book reveals how improvements in infrastructures, ever increa

Home Away from Home

Home Away from Home
Author: Sawa Kurotani
Publisher:
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2005
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN:

An ethnography about "Japan outside of Japan"--specifically, how Japanese families on corporate reassignment in the United States recreate their homeland within domestic spaces.

Thinking Like a Man

Thinking Like a Man
Author: Bettina Gramlich-Oka
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 335
Release: 2006-05-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 9047410009

This book, which deals with the life and ideas of the poet and philosopher Tadano Makuzu (1763-1825), presents insights into gender discourses of the late Tokugawa period (1600-1868), and thereby opens a way to break away from conventional intellectual history.

Scenic Spots

Scenic Spots
Author: Pál Nyíri
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Total Pages: 153
Release: 2011-04-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0295800496

Twenty years ago, commercial tourism in the People’s Republic of China hardly existed. Today, China has a burgeoning tourist industry, characterized by a unique style with deep roots in traditional Chinese culture. Scenic Spots is an engaging exploration of why Chinese tourists pursue certain kinds of experiences, what they make of them, and how their experiences and interpretations are shaped by the state. Working from within a Chinese cultural framework, Pál Nyíri argues that China’s brand of tourism is distinct from the traditions of both Western bourgeois tourism, which values authenticity, and Soviet tourism, with its emphasis on rugged and selfless experience. In China, tourism development is guided by the state, and “scenic spots” (jingdian) and theme parks are used to demonstrate China’s heroic past and as tools of patriotic education and modernization – or as forms of “indoctritainment.” The tourist site is perceived as a product, and, as such, it is bounded, approved, rated, and consumed. In a style both straightforward and provocative, Nyíri argues that the uniformity and undisguised commercialism of Chinese tourist sites are a direct result of the state’s ultimate authority to determine the meaning of landscape and to control culture. Scenic Spots serves as a lens through which to explore mechanisms of cultural control and resistance in a highly commercialized sphere of everyday life in contemporary China.