Japan

Japan
Author: Lafcadio Hearn
Publisher:
Total Pages: 568
Release: 1904
Genre: Bookbinding
ISBN:

Lafcadio Hearn's Japan

Lafcadio Hearn's Japan
Author: Lafcadio Hearn
Publisher: Tuttle Publishing
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2011-04-11
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 1462900100

This collection of writings from Lafcaido Hern paints a rare and fascinating picture of pre-modern Japan Over a century after his death, author, translator, and educator Lafcaido Hearn remains one of the best-known Westerners ever to make Japan his home. Almost more Japanese than the Japanese--"to think with their thoughts" was his aim--his prolific writings on things Japanese were instrumental in introducing Japanese culture to the West. In this masterful anthology, Donald Richie shows that Hearn was first and foremost a reliable and enthusiastic observer, who faithfully recorded a detailed account of the people, customs, and culture of late nineteen-century Japan. Opening and closing with excerpts from Hearn's final books, Richie's astute selection from among "over 4,000 printed pages" not including correspondence and other writing, also reveals Hearn's later, more sober and reflective attitudes to the things that he observed and wrote about. Part One, "The Land," chronicles Hearn's early years when he wrote primarily about the appearance of his adopted home. Part Two, "The People," records the author's later years when he came to terms with the Japanese themselves. In this anthology, Richie, more gifted in capturing the essence of a person on the page than any other foreign writer living in Japan, has picked out the best of Hearn's evocations. Select writings include: The Chief City of the Province of the Gods Three Popular Ballads In the Cave of the Children's Ghosts Bits of Life and Death A Street Singer Kimiko On A Bridge

Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation

Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation
Author: Lafcadio Hearn
Publisher: Good Press
Total Pages: 314
Release: 2019-11-22
Genre: Fiction
ISBN:

Japan: an Attempt at Interpretation is a book by Lafcadio Hearn. It presents a comparative analysis of Japan, its people and traditions, from a scholar who spent decades in the country, demystifying it for western audiences.

Japan: An Attempt At An Interpretation

Japan: An Attempt At An Interpretation
Author: Lafcadio Hearn
Publisher: Lulu.com
Total Pages: 362
Release: 2015-07-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 1329329627

"A THOUSAND books have been written about Japan; but among these, - setting aside artistic publications and works of a purely special character, - the really precious volumes will be found to number scarcely a score. This fact is due to the immense difficulty of perceiving and comprehending what underlies the surface of Japanese life. No work fully interpreting that life, - no work picturing Japan within and without, historically and socially, psychologically and ethically, - can be written for at least another fifty years. So vast and intricate the subject that the united labour of a generation of scholars could not exhaust it, and so difficult that the number of scholars willing to devote their time to it must always be small...."

Japan

Japan
Author: Lafcadio Hearn
Publisher:
Total Pages: 568
Release: 1904
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN:

The belief that the dead need affection, that to neglect them is a cruelty, that their happiness depends upon duty, is a belief that has almost cast out the primitive fear of their displeasure. They are not thought of as dead; they are believed to remain among those who loved them.... From their shrine they observe and hear what happens in the house; they share the family joys and sorrows; they delight in the voices and the warmth of the life about them. -from "The Religion of the Home" In 1889, Westerner Lafcadio Hearn arrived in Japan on a journalistic assignment, and he fell so in love with the nation and its people that he never left. His love letters to his adopted country, including 1894's Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan and 1896's Kokoro: Hints and Echoes of Japanese Inner Life (both available from Cosimo Classics) helped fire global interest in Japanese culture as it was opening to the West in the 1890s, and in 1904, he published this engaging and highly entertaining series of essays. An early Western attempt to decipher the "outward strangeness" of all things in Japan, and to place the nation and its people in a larger historical context, this is a lyrical work, singing with respect and love. Bohemian and writer PATRICK LAFCADIO HEARN (1850-1904) was born in Greece, raised in Ireland, and worked as newspaper reporter in the United States before decamping to Japan. He also wrote In Ghostly Japan (1899).

Inventing New Orleans

Inventing New Orleans
Author: Lafcadio Hearn
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2001
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781578063536

A selection of writings from the author who created America's notion of New Orleans as an exotic and mysterious place

America and the Japanese Miracle

America and the Japanese Miracle
Author: Aaron Forsberg
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2003-06-19
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0807860662

In this book, Aaron Forsberg presents an arresting account of Japan's postwar economic resurgence in a world polarized by the Cold War. His fresh interpretation highlights the many connections between Japan's economic revival and changes that occurred in the wider world during the 1950s. Drawing on a wealth of recently released American, British, and Japanese archival records, Forsberg demonstrates that American Cold War strategy and the U.S. commitment to liberal trade played a central role in promoting Japanese economic welfare and in forging the economic relationship between Japan and the United States. The price of economic opportunity and interdependence, however, was a strong undercurrent of mutual frustration, as patterns of conflict and compromise over trade, investment, and relations with China continued to characterize the postwar U.S.-Japanese relationship. Forsberg's emphasis on the dynamic interaction of Cold War strategy, the business environment, and Japanese development challenges "revisionist" interpretations of Japan's success. In exploring the complex origins of the U.S.-led international economy that has outlasted the Cold War, Forsberg refutes the claim that the U.S. government sacrificed American commercial interests in favor of its military partnership with Japan.

Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan; First Series

Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan; First Series
Author: Lafcadio Hearn
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
Total Pages: 405
Release: 2024-02-26
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 3387315147

Reproduction of the original. The publishing house Megali specialises in reproducing historical works in large print to make reading easier for people with impaired vision.

Original Enlightenment and the Transformation of Medieval Japanese Buddhism

Original Enlightenment and the Transformation of Medieval Japanese Buddhism
Author: Jacqueline I. Stone
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Total Pages: 578
Release: 2003-05-31
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9780824827717

Original enlightenment thought (hongaku shiso) dominated Buddhist intellectual circles throughout Japan’s medieval period. Enlightenment, this discourse claims, is neither a goal to be achieved nor a potential to be realized but the true status of all things. Every animate and inanimate object manifests the primordially enlightened Buddha just as it is. Seen in its true aspect, every activity of daily life—eating, sleeping, even one’s deluded thinking—is the Buddha’s conduct. Emerging from within the powerful Tendai School, ideas of original enlightenment were appropriated by a number of Buddhist traditions and influenced nascent theories about the kami (local deities) as well as medieval aesthetics and the literary and performing arts. Scholars and commentators have long recognized the historical importance of original enlightenment thought but differ heatedly over how it is to be understood. Some tout it as the pinnacle of the Buddhist philosophy of absolute non-dualism. Others claim to find in it the paradigmatic expression of a timeless Japanese spirituality. According other readings, it represents a dangerous anti-nomianism that undermined observance of moral precepts, precipitated a decline in Buddhist scholarship, and denied the need for religious discipline. Still others denounce it as an authoritarian ideology that, by sacralizing the given order, has in effect legitimized hierarchy and discriminative social practices. Often the acceptance or rejection of original enlightenment thought is seen as the fault line along which traditional Buddhist institutions are to be differentiated from the new Buddhist movements (Zen, Pure Land, and Nichiren) that arose during Japan’s medieval period. Jacqueline Stone’s groundbreaking study moves beyond the treatment of the original enlightenment doctrine as abstract philosophy to explore its historical dimension. Drawing on a wealth of medieval primary sources and modern Japanese scholarship, it places this discourse in its ritual, institutional, and social contexts, illuminating its importance to the maintenance of traditions of lineage and the secret transmission of knowledge that characterized several medieval Japanese elite culture. It sheds new light on interpretive strategies employed in pre-modern Japanese Buddhist texts, an area that hitherto has received a little attention. Through these and other lines of investigation, Stone problematizes entrenched notions of “corruption” in the medieval Buddhist establishment. Using the examples of Tendai and Nichiren Buddhism and their interactions throughout the medieval period, she calls into question both overly facile distinctions between “old” and “new” Buddhism and the long-standing scholarly assumptions that have perpetuated them. This study marks a significant contribution to ongoing debates over definitions of Buddhism in the Kamakura era (1185–1333), long regarded as a formative period in Japanese religion and culture. Stone argues that “original enlightenment thought” represents a substantial rethinking of Buddhist enlightenment that cuts across the distinction between “old” and “new” institutions and was particularly characteristic of the medieval period.