Reflections on Tsuda Umeko

Reflections on Tsuda Umeko
Author: 大庭みな子
Publisher:
Total Pages: 261
Release: 2021
Genre: Women college presidents
ISBN: 9784866582047

This book explores how the passionate Tsuda Umeko metamorphosed into one of Japan's foremost educators, by following the thoughts of Umeko herself as she recorded them in her letters

Strangers in the Ethnic Homeland

Strangers in the Ethnic Homeland
Author: Takeyuki Tsuda
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 464
Release: 2003
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780231128384

With an immigrant population currently estimated at roughly 280,000, Japanese Brazilians are now the second largest group of foreigners in Japan. Although they are of Japanese descent, most were born in Brazil and are culturally Brazilian. As a result, they have become Japan's newest ethnic minority. Drawing upon close to two years of multisite fieldwork in Brazil and Japan, Takeyuki Tsuda has written a comprehensive ethnography that examines the ethnic experiences and reactions of both Japanese Brazilian immigrants and their native Japanese hosts.

The English Book and Its Marginalia

The English Book and Its Marginalia
Author: Asako Nakai
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 222
Release: 2022-06-08
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9004488278

This book is about books that recount the story of encountering another book. There are various versions of the story told and retold from the heyday of imperialism up to the present day (Homi Bhabha calls it the trope of ‘the discovery of the English book’); by considering each of these versions carefully, we may also give an alternative account of twentieth-century ‘English literature’ as the site of an intercultural discourse. This project is very much inspired by debate on postcolonial theory, namely, the debate between Said and Bhabha. Part I is devoted to the discussion of Conrad, especially of Heart of Darkness, and investigates how the novella has continually been reproduced to the extent that it represents ‘the English Book’ of colonial/postcolonial literatures. The chapter on Hugh Clifford (Ch.3) is virtually the first intensive critique of his novels, such as Saleh (1908), with a particular focus on their intertextual relations with Conrad’s texts. Part II examines how the story of the English Book is repeated and revised in the texts of the following authors: Joyce Cary, Isak Dinesen, V. S. Naipaul, Kaiko Takeshi, and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o.

On Subject and Theme

On Subject and Theme
Author: Ruqaiya Hasan
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 469
Release: 1995
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027236216

The ten papers in this volume focus on Subject and Theme. Theme began its life as a semantic notion in the work of Vilém Mathesius, while Subject has traditionally been seen as just a syntactic entity. More recently two related perspectives on these concepts have attracted linguists' attention: the formal criteria for their recognition and the relations between the two concepts. Using the systemic functional model as their point of departure, the papers in the present volume consider the two notions in a wider context by relating them to the interpersonal and textual metafunctions of language. By contrast with the current linguistic approaches, the primary focus here is neither simply on formal recognition criteria nor on the relation of these elements to each other; instead, the notions of Subject and Theme are examined from the point of view of their function in the economy of discourse, with studies of their significance in English and French, as well as in a range of non-Indo-European languages. Definitions of the concepts are offered on the basis of their discourse functions, which are also important in selecting the formal recognition criteria and in understanding their mutually supportive role vis à vis each other. Most of the papers in the volume are a selection from presentations made at the 19th International Systemic Functional Congress at Macquarie University.

Before the Nation

Before the Nation
Author: Susan L Burns
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 295
Release: 2003-12-02
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0822384906

Exploring the emergence and evolution of theories of nationhood that continue to be evoked in present-day Japan, Susan L. Burns provides a close examination of the late-eighteenth-century intellectual movement kokugaku, which means "the study of our country.” Departing from earlier studies of kokugaku that focused on intellectuals whose work has been valorized by modern scholars, Burns seeks to recover the multiple ways "Japan" as social and cultural identity began to be imagined before modernity. Central to Burns's analysis is Motoori Norinaga’s Kojikiden, arguably the most important intellectual work of Japan's early modern period. Burns situates the Kojikiden as one in a series of attempts to analyze and interpret the mythohistories dating from the early eighth century, the Kojiki and Nihon shoki. Norinaga saw these texts as keys to an original, authentic, and idyllic Japan that existed before being tainted by "flawed" foreign influences, notably Confucianism and Buddhism. Hailed in the nineteenth century as the begetter of a new national consciousness, Norinaga's Kojikiden was later condemned by some as a source of Japan's twentieth-century descent into militarism, war, and defeat. Burns looks in depth at three kokugaku writers—Ueda Akinari, Fujitani Mitsue, and Tachibana Moribe—who contested Norinaga's interpretations and produced competing readings of the mythohistories that offered new theories of community as the basis for Japanese social and cultural identity. Though relegated to the footnotes by a later generation of scholars, these writers were quite influential in their day, and by recovering their arguments, Burns reveals kokugaku as a complex debate—involving history, language, and subjectivity—with repercussions extending well into the modern era.

Japanese Psycholinguistics

Japanese Psycholinguistics
Author: Joseph F. Kess
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 370
Release: 1994-01-01
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027237506

This classified and annotated research bibliography is meant to serve as an introduction to the rich field of Japanese psycholinguistics, by providing an exhaustive inventory of what has been done in or about Japanese in a psycholinguistic sense. Thus, this volume captures the tradition of psycholinguistic research currently being pursued in Japan, its history and development over the past thirty years, and its current directions and research themes, as well as international research in modern psycholinguistics which targets the Japanese language as the focal point of empirical procedures or deductive analysis in psychology, linguistics, psycholinguistics, and cognitive science. The bibliography supports a broad view of psycholinguistics, acknowledging that psycholinguistic research in how natural language is learned, produced, comprehended, stored, and recalled now reaches beyond its traditional roots in the two disciplines of psychology and linguistics. The interested scholar will thus find entries from the traditional core of psycholinguistic research on natural language, as well as entries from related areas which have either influence or been influenced by psycholinguistic work on Japanese. Every article, text, and edited volume listed in the bibliography is available through normal library channels, and is thus accessible to the scholar interested in what psycholinguistic research has been done in or on the Japanese language, in Japan and internationally. The annotations for each entry have been especially written for this bibliographic inventory, and with the linguist, psychologist, and psycholinguist specifically in mind. The authors' intention is to maximize the usefulness of such an inventory by preparing annotations for the interested reader who wishes to know not only what the article contains but where it fits in the research tradition.

Diasporic Homecomings

Diasporic Homecomings
Author: Takeyuki Tsuda
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 530
Release: 2009-07-22
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0804772061

In recent decades, increasing numbers of diasporic peoples have returned to their ethnic homelands, whether because of economic pressures, a desire to rediscover ancestral roots, or the homeland government's preferential immigration and nationality policies. Although the returnees may initially be welcomed back, their homecomings often prove to be ambivalent or negative experiences. Despite their ethnic affinity to the host populace, they are frequently excluded as cultural foreigners and relegated to low-status jobs shunned by the host society's populace. Diasporic Homecomings, the first book to provide a comparative overview of the major ethnic return groups in Europe and East Asia, reveals how the sociocultural characteristics and national origins of the migrants influence their levels of marginalization in their ethnic homelands, forcing many of them to redefine the meanings of home and homeland.

Languages and Identities in a Transitional Japan

Languages and Identities in a Transitional Japan
Author: Ikuko Nakane
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2015-08-20
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317961897

This book explores the transition from the era of internationalization into the era of globalization of Japan by focusing on language and identity as its central themes. By taking an interdisciplinary approach covering education, cultural studies, linguistics and policy-making, the chapters in this book raise certain questions of what constitutes contemporary Japanese culture, Japanese identity and multilingualism and what they mean to local people, including those who do not reside in Japan but are engaged with Japan in some way within the global community. Topics include the role of technology in the spread of Japanese language and culture, hybrid language use in an urban context, the Japanese language as a lingua franca in China, and the identity construction of heritage Japanese language speakers in Australia. The authors do not limit themselves to examining only the Japanese language or the Japanese national/cultural identity, but also explore multilingual practices and multiple/fluid identities in "a transitional Japan." Overall, the book responds to the basic need for better accounts of language and identity of Japan, particularly in the context of increased migration and mobility.