Japan's Postwar Economic Recovery and Anglo-Japanese Relations, 1948-62

Japan's Postwar Economic Recovery and Anglo-Japanese Relations, 1948-62
Author:
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2003
Genre:
ISBN: 9781280054129

The origins of Japan's 'miraculous' economic growth in the 1960s has been a topic that continues to interest academic inquiry. The initial focus upon internal factors has been supplemented by greater emphasis on the role played by the United States and the western allies in promoting Japan's economic welfare. This book provides the British perspective on Japan's post-war economic recovery. It refutes the accepted view that Britain's policy towards Japan was driven by fears that the latter's economic recovery through greater trade relations with Southeast Asia would encroach upon Britain's sphere of influence. Through a close examination of Britain's sterling and trade policies towards Japan, the book illustrates the complex, often contradictory, yet daring British vision of Asia as a whole in the immediate post-war world.

Japan's Postwar Economic Recovery and Anglo-Japanese Relations, 1948-62

Japan's Postwar Economic Recovery and Anglo-Japanese Relations, 1948-62
Author: Noriko Yokoi
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 234
Release: 2003
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780415297219

The origins of Japan's 'miraculous' economic growth in the 1960s has been a topic that continues to interest academic inquiry. The initial focus upon internal factors has been supplemented by greater emphasis on the role played by the United States and the western allies in promoting Japan's economic welfare. This book provides the British perspective on Japan's post-war economic recovery. It refutes the accepted view that Britain's policy towards Japan was driven by fears that the latter's economic recovery through greater trade relations with Southeast Asia would encroach upon Britain's sphere of influence. Through a close examination of Britain's sterling and trade policies towards Japan, the book illustrates the complex, often contradictory, yet daring British vision of Asia as a whole in the immediate post-war world.

Historical Dictionary of Postwar Japan

Historical Dictionary of Postwar Japan
Author: William D. Hoover
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 653
Release: 2018-12-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 153811156X

Japan is a mix of the old and the new, traditional and modern, and old fashion and innovative. It has traveled the road to a modern destination without totally losing sight of its traditions and values. Although some in Japan lament the passing of old ways, Japan has held on to a reasonable amount of its traditions and values. This is easier to find in its arts and crafts and its literature and films as well as in its social habits. This book will introduce the broad sweep of people, events, and trends, including the successes and failures, of postwar Japan. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of Postwar Japan contains a chronology, an introduction, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 500 cross-referenced entries on important personalities, politics, economy, foreign relations, religion, and culture. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Japan.

The Post-war Roots of Japanese Political Malaise

The Post-war Roots of Japanese Political Malaise
Author: Dagfinn Gatu
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2015-06-12
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1317526481

Writings on post-war Japanese politics have tended to take for granted the dominance of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) as inevitable, without questioning how this came about. This book analyses the nature of Japanese party politics over the first four decades following the Second World War, assessing how the chief contenders – the conservative LDP and the socialists JSP (Japan Socialist Party) – competed in terms of their strengths and weaknesses relative to the other. Throughout, it addresses the questions: How effectively were the parties’ strengths harnessed? How did they alter over time? To what extent was the winning formula challenged? Did the loser have access to strengths with a major potential, and, if so, why did these remain underdeveloped? It extends widely to include discussion of the political system, the social and economic environment in which parties operated, internal party matters, especially factions, personal support groups, special interest groups, and the role of government bureaucracy. It shows why the Liberal Democratic Party was dominant, why the Japan Socialist Party remained out of power, and how successive prime ministers conducted policymaking in ways which often resulted in the bureaucracy taking the lead. Overall, the book shows how precedents for the political system and for policymaking were set in this important period, precedents which continue, and which have contributed significantly to the present conservative stance on many key issues.

Suicide in Twentieth-Century Japan

Suicide in Twentieth-Century Japan
Author: Francesca Di Marco
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 269
Release: 2016-01-29
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317384288

Japan’s suicide phenomenon has fascinated both the media and academics, although many questions and paradoxes embedded in the debate on suicide have remained unaddressed in the existing literature, including the assumption that Japan is a "Suicide Nation". This tendency causes common misconceptions about the suicide phenomenon and its features. Aiming to redress the situation, this book explores how the idea of suicide in Japan was shaped, reinterpreted and reinvented from the 1900s to the 1980s. Providing a timely contribution to the underexplored history of suicide, it also adds to the current heated debates on the contemporary way we organize our thoughts on life and death, health and wealth, on the value of the individual, and on gender. The book explores the genealogy and development of modern suicide in Japan by examining the ways in which beliefs about the nation’s character, historical views of suicide, and the cultural legitimation of voluntary death acted to influence even the scientific conceptualization of suicide in Japan. It thus unveils the way in which the language on suicide was transformed throughout the century according to the fluctuating relationship between suicide and the discourse on national identity, and pathological and cultural narratives. In doing so, it proposes a new path to understanding the norms and mechanisms of the process of the conceptualization of suicide itself. Filling in a critical gap in three particular fields of historical study: the history of suicide, the history of death, and the cultural history of twentieth century Japan, it will be of great interest to students and scholars of Japanese Studies and Japanese History.

Street Performers and Society in Urban Japan, 1600-1900

Street Performers and Society in Urban Japan, 1600-1900
Author: Gerald Groemer
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 434
Release: 2016-01-13
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317409906

This book presents a thoroughly researched and meticulously documented study of the emergence, development, and demise of music, theatre, recitation, and dance witnessed by the populace on thoroughfares, plazas, and makeshift outdoor performance spaces in Edo/Tokyo. For some three hundred years this city was the centre of such arts, both sacred and secular. This study outlines the nature of the performances, explores the social relations which lay behind them, and reveals vast complexity: an obligation of gift-giving on the part of observers; performers who were often economic migrants fallen on hard times; relations of performance to social class; a class system much more finely gradated than the official four caste system; and institutions of professional organization and registration, enforced by government, with penalties for unregistered performers. The book discusses how performing, witnessing, and rewarding performance were closely bound up with economy, society and government, how the interaction between various groups related to socio-economic advancement, how the system of street performance reinforced social control, and how the balance between different groups shifted over time.

China and Japan in the Russian Imagination, 1685-1922

China and Japan in the Russian Imagination, 1685-1922
Author: Susanna Soojung Lim
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 239
Release: 2013
Genre: History
ISBN: 0415629217

Throughout the centuries, as Russia strove to build itself into an imperial power equal to those in the West, China and Japan came to occupy a special place in Russians' view of the orient. Never colonised by Russia or the West, China and Japan were linked not only to the greatest of Russian imperial fantasies, but also, conversely, to a deep sense of insecurity regarding Russia's place in the world, a sense of insecurity which deepened as China and Japan began to modernise in the later nineteenth century. Drawing on a wide range of works by Russian writers and thinkers, Lim sets out how Russian perceptions of China and Japan were formed from Muscovy's first contacts with China in the late seventeenth century, through to the aftermath of Russia's defeat by Japan in the early twentieth century.

Martial Arts and the Body Politic in Meiji Japan

Martial Arts and the Body Politic in Meiji Japan
Author: Denis Gainty
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 206
Release: 2013-08-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 1135069905

In 1895, the newly formed Greater Japan Martial Virtue Association (Dainippon Butokukai) held its first annual Martial Virtue Festival (butokusai) in the ancient capital of Kyoto. The Festival marked the arrival of a new iteration of modern Japan, as the Butokukai’s efforts to define and popularise Japanese martial arts became an important medium through which the bodies of millions of Japanese citizens would experience, draw on, and even shape the Japanese nation and state. This book shows how the notion and practice of Japanese martial arts in the late Meiji period brought Japanese bodies, Japanese nationalisms, and the Japanese state into sustained contact and dynamic engagement with one another. Using a range of disciplinary approaches, Denis Gainty shows how the metaphor of a national body and the cultural and historical meanings of martial arts were celebrated and appropriated by modern Japanese at all levels of society, allowing them to participate powerfully in shaping the modern Japanese nation and state. While recent works have cast modern Japanese and their bodies as subject to state domination and elite control, this book argues that having a body – being a body, and through that body experiencing and shaping social, political, and even cosmic realities – is an important and underexamined aspect of the late Meiji period. Martial Arts and the Body Politic in Meiji Japan is an important contribution to debates in Japanese and Asian social sciences, theories of the body and its role in modern historiography, and related questions of power and agency by suggesting a new and dramatic role for human bodies in the shaping of modern states and societies. As such, it will be valuable to students and scholars of Japanese studies, Japanese history, modern nations and nationalisms, and sport and leisure studies, as well as those interested in the body more broadly.

A Vietnamese Royal Exile in Japan

A Vietnamese Royal Exile in Japan
Author: Tran My-Van
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 338
Release: 2013-09-05
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1134432771

Prince Cuong De, viewed by the French as a pretender to the Vietnamese throne, was an important and interesting figure in the history of Vietnam’s struggle for independence. He was highly regarded by many non-communist Vietnamese nationalists, but has been virtually ‘written out’ of Vietnamese history. Based on extensive original research, including interviews and important documents from the French national archives, this book traces the life of Cuong De as a royal exile in Japan, exploring his links to key Japanese leaders and how he campaigned for his cause and was supported in Japan, Vietnam and elsewhere. The author shows how Cuong De had great hopes that imperial Japan would advance the cause of Vietnamese independence from France, especially during the Japanese occupation of Vietnam in 1941-5. But these hopes were disappointed as Japan's Indochina policy gave primacy to Japan's own economic and strategic self-interest. This book provides many fascinating insights into the development of Vietnamese nationalism and the long, harsh struggle for independence, from the perspective of an interesting and undeservedly neglected figure.