Consuming Japan

Author : Andrew C. McKevitt
Publisher : UNC Press Books
Page : 289 pages
File Size : 44,8 Mb
Release : 2017-08-31
Category : History
ISBN : 9781469634487

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Consuming Japan by Andrew C. McKevitt Pdf

This insightful book explores the intense and ultimately fleeting moment in 1980s America when the future looked Japanese. Would Japan's remarkable post–World War II economic success enable the East Asian nation to overtake the United States? Or could Japan's globe-trotting corporations serve as a model for battered U.S. industries, pointing the way to a future of globalized commerce and culture? While popular films and literature recycled old anti-Asian imagery and crafted new ways of imagining the "yellow peril," and formal U.S.-Japan relations remained locked in a holding pattern of Cold War complacency, a remarkable shift was happening in countless local places throughout the United States: Japanese goods were remaking American consumer life and injecting contemporary globalization into U.S. commerce and culture. What impact did the flood of billions of Japanese things have on the ways Americans produced, consumed, and thought about their place in the world? From autoworkers to anime fans, Consuming Japan introduces new unorthodox actors into foreign-relations history, demonstrating how the flow of all things Japanese contributed to the globalizing of America in the late twentieth century.

Author : Katarzyna J. Cwiertka,Ewa Machotka
Publisher : Consumption and Sustainability in Asia
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 47,8 Mb
Release : 2018-02-14
Category : Consumer behavior
ISBN : 9462980632

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Consuming Life in Post-Bubble Japan by Katarzyna J. Cwiertka,Ewa Machotka Pdf

The bursting of the economic bubble in the 1990s shook the very foundation of the post-war economic 'miracle' and marked the beginning of a gradual shift in the environmental consciousness of the Japanese. Yet, it by no means removed consumption from the pivotal position it occupied within Japanese society. Consuming Life in Post-Bubble Japan argues that consumption in Japan today is no longer simply a component of everyday economic activities, but rather a reflection of a society guided by the 'logic of late capitalism'. The volume pins down the contradictory nature of the setting in which consuming occurs in Japan today: the veneration of material comfort and convenience on the one hand, and the new rhetoric of recycling and energy conservation on the other. Theoretical insights developed as part of an art-historical enquiry, such as notions of socially engaged art and its critique, offer a new paradigm for investigating this dilemma. By combining case studies analysing the production and consumption of contemporary art with ethnographic material related to ordinary commodities and shopping, this volume provides a novel, transdisciplinary approach to exploring how a 'society of consumers' operates in post-bubble Japan and how contemporary life is a 'consuming project'.

Author : Eiko Maruko Siniawer
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 411 pages
File Size : 40,5 Mb
Release : 2018-10-15
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 9781501725852

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Waste by Eiko Maruko Siniawer Pdf

In Waste, Eiko Maruko Siniawer innovatively explores the many ways in which the Japanese have thought about waste—in terms of time, stuff, money, possessions, and resources—from the immediate aftermath of World War II to the present. She shows how questions about waste were deeply embedded in the decisions of everyday life, reflecting the priorities and aspirations of the historical moment, and revealing people’s ever-changing concerns and hopes. Over the course of the long postwar, Japanese society understood waste variously as backward and retrogressive, an impediment to progress, a pervasive outgrowth of mass consumption, incontrovertible proof of societal excess, the embodiment of resources squandered, and a hazard to the environment. Siniawer also shows how an encouragement of waste consciousness served as a civilizing and modernizing imperative, a moral good, an instrument for advancement, a path to self-satisfaction, an environmental commitment, an expression of identity, and more. From the late 1950s onward, a defining element of Japan’s postwar experience emerged: the tension between the desire for the privileges of middle-class lifestyles made possible by affluence and dissatisfaction with the logics, costs, and consequences of that very prosperity. This tension complicated the persistent search for what might be called well-being, a good life, or a life well lived. Waste is an elegant history of how people lived—how they made sense of, gave meaning to, and found value in the acts of the everyday.

Author : Chris Bunting
Publisher : Tuttle Publishing
Page : 288 pages
File Size : 49,7 Mb
Release : 2014-01-14
Category : Travel
ISBN : 9781462906277

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Drinking Japan by Chris Bunting Pdf

Drinking Japan the first practical Japan travel guide in English, to depict Japan's bars and alcoholic beverages. Author Chris Bunting goes to tremendous lengths to present Japan's best bars and alcoholic drinks. You will be prepared for your trip with detailed profiles of Japans finest sake, sochu, awamori, beers, wines and Japanese whiskies. This book tells you where to find each one, which brands are best and which to avoid. A trip to Japan is not complete without experiencing its famous night life. From bright lights of Ginza to the quiet street corners of Kyoto. Drinking Japan provides reviews of 122 bars in Tokyo, Yokohama, Osaka, Kyoto, Kobe, and Hiroshima extending further afield. More than 120 of the country's best bars are featured in richly illustrated reviews, with menu tips, directions and language help. If you are drinking in Japan, most likely it is going to be a thrilling night. Japan is home to some of the world's most extraordinary alcoholic beverages as well as the most appealing bar scenes. This book will prepare you and your friends with the tips and tricks you need when navigating through cool Japan bar scenes and night life.

Author : Brian Moeran,Lise Skov
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 314 pages
File Size : 48,9 Mb
Release : 2013-12-16
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781136782800

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Women, Media and Consumption in Japan by Brian Moeran,Lise Skov Pdf

First book of its kind to examine images of women in Japanese consumerism. Explores a variety of media targeted at women - in particular magazines, but also television, popular literature and consumer trends. Covers visual and print media.

Author : Meghan Warner Mettler
Publisher : U of Nebraska Press
Page : 300 pages
File Size : 43,9 Mb
Release : 2018-06
Category : History
ISBN : 9781496206862

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How to Reach Japan by Subway by Meghan Warner Mettler Pdf

Japan's official surrender to the United States in 1945 brought to an end one of the most bitter and brutal military conflicts of the twentieth century. U.S. government officials then faced the task of transforming Japan from enemy to ally, not only in top-level diplomatic relations but also in the minds of the American public. Only ten years after World War II, this transformation became a success as middle-class American consumers across the country were embracing Japanese architecture, films, hobbies, philosophy, and religion. Cultural institutions on both sides of the Pacific along with American tastemakers promoted a new image of Japan in keeping with State Department goals. Focusing on traditions instead of modern realities, Americans came to view Japan as a nation that was sophisticated and beautiful yet locked harmlessly in a timeless "Oriental" past. What ultimately led many Americans to embrace Japanese culture was a desire to appear affluent and properly "tasteful" in the status-conscious suburbs of the 1950s. In How to Reach Japan by Subway, Meghan Warner Mettler studies the shibui phenomenon, in which middle-class American consumers embraced Japanese culture while still exoticizing this new aesthetic. By examining shibui through the popularity of samurai movies, ikebana flower arrangement, bonsai cultivation, home and garden design, and Zen Buddhism, Mettler provides a new context and perspective for understanding how Americans encountered a foreign nation in their everyday lives.

Author : Noboru Toyoshima
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 483 pages
File Size : 45,6 Mb
Release : 2011
Category : Popular culture
ISBN : 4657115111

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Consuming Japan by Noboru Toyoshima Pdf

Author : Katsuyuki Hidaka
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 329 pages
File Size : 43,8 Mb
Release : 2016-12-01
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781134988778

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Japanese Media at the Beginning of the 21st Century by Katsuyuki Hidaka Pdf

Hailed by Japanese critics as a milestone in the study of contemporary Japanese media, this book explores the contemporary ‘boom’ in Japanese media representations of the recent past. Recent years have seen the production of an unprecedented number of films, animation, manga, and television programmes representing a deeply nostalgic longing for the Japanese heyday of high economic growth in the 1960s and occasionally the 1970s known in Japan as the Shōwa ‘30s and ‘40s. Hidaka provides a comprehensive account of an under researched contemporary Japanese media phenomenon by exploring why this nostalgia has been sparked at this particular historical juncture and how that period is represented in the Japanese media today. The book accomplishes this through a detailed textual and narrative analysis of representative films and television programmes, in relation to their social and cultural context. While these nostalgic media renderings are seen by many critics as innocuous, this study demonstrates that they do not show a simple yearning for the period, but reflects a growing discontent with Japanese post-war society. In this regard, this book concludes that the current nostalgia wave is a critical reaction to the recent past as it seeks to revise historiography through a processes of introspection within popular conceptions of the meta narrative of ‘nostalgia’. Winner of the Japan Communication Association 2015 Outstanding Book Award.

Author : Gitte Marianne Hansen
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 225 pages
File Size : 47,5 Mb
Release : 2015-12-22
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781317444398

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Femininity, Self-harm and Eating Disorders in Japan by Gitte Marianne Hansen Pdf

From the 1980s onwards, the incidence of eating disorders and self-harm has increased among Japanese women, who report receiving mixed messages about how to be women. Mirroring this, women’s self-directed violence has increasingly been thematised in diverse Japanese narrative and visual culture. This book examines the relationship between normative femininity and women’s self-directed violence in contemporary Japanese culture. To theoretically define the complexities that constitute normativity, the book develops the concept of ‘contradictive femininity’ and shows how in Japanese culture, women’s paradoxical roles are thematised through three character construction techniques, broadly derived from the doppelgänger motif. It then demonstrates how eating disorders and self-harm are included in normative femininity and suggests that such self-directed violence can be interpreted as coping strategies to overcome feelings of fragmentation related to contradictive femininity. Looking at novels, artwork, manga, anime, TV dramas and news stories, the book analyses both globally well known Japanese culture such as Murakami Haruki’s literary works and Miyazaki Hayao’s animation, as well as culture unavailable to non-Japanese readers. The aim of juxtaposing such diverse narrative and visual culture is to map common storylines and thematisation techniques about normative femininity, self-harm and eating disorders. Furthermore, it shows how women’s private struggles with their own bodies have become public discourse available for consumption as entertainment and lifestyle products. Highly interdisciplinary, it will be of huge interest to students and scholars of Japanese studies, Japanese culture and society and gender and women's studies, as well as to academics and consumers of Japanese literature, manga and animation.

Author : James R Simpson,Tadashi Yoshida,Akira Miyazaki,Ryohei Kada
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 264 pages
File Size : 48,5 Mb
Release : 2019-09-05
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9781000314021

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Technological Change In Japan's Beef Industry by James R Simpson,Tadashi Yoshida,Akira Miyazaki,Ryohei Kada Pdf

The Japanese Cattle industry has been undergoing major changes for the past three decades. During the 1950's and 1960's mechanized power rapidly. The process of beef industry structure change accelerated in the 1970's as medium scale feedlots came into being, regional packing plants were established, and the beef marketing system matured. Economic forces, both within and external to the industry. A major objective of this book is to test the authors’ hypothesis that beef production by Japan's cattle industry could become competitive with imported beef.

Author : Toru Mitsui
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Page : 227 pages
File Size : 47,8 Mb
Release : 2020-07-09
Category : Music
ISBN : 9781501363870

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Popular Music in Japan by Toru Mitsui Pdf

Popular music in Japan has been under the overwhelming influence of American, Latin American and European popular music remarkably since 1945, when Japan was defeated in World War II. Beginning with gunka and enka at the turn of the century, tracing the birth of hit songs in the record industry in the years preceding the War, and ranging to the adoption of Western genres after the War--the rise of Japanese folk and rock, domestic exoticism as a new trend and J-Pop--Popular Music in Japan is a comprehensive discussion of the evolution of popular music in Japan. In eight revised and updated essays written in English by renowned Japanese scholar Toru Mitsui, this book tells the story of popular music in Japan since the late 19th century when Japan began positively embracing the West.

Author : Kosaku Yoshino
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 289 pages
File Size : 54,9 Mb
Release : 2019-07-23
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781136829567

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Consuming Ethnicity and Nationalism by Kosaku Yoshino Pdf

This book is unique in applying a consumption approach to the study of ethnicity and nationalism, thereby challenging the usual 'top down' approach to nation-formation. Contributors from a variety of disciplines examine the on-going consumption of minority and national cultures by looking at different forms of consumption, including a national lottery, theme parks, museums, cross-cultural handbooks, popular song and audio-visual media. Chapters span diverse parts of Asia '- from Korea, Japan and China to Malaysia and Sri Lanka '- imparting to the volume a rare comparative quality. It should appeal to anyone interested in Asian Studies, as well as in the sociology and anthropology of culture, nationalism and globalisation.

Author : Kenton O'Hara,Barry Brown
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
Page : 332 pages
File Size : 44,5 Mb
Release : 2006-01-09
Category : Computers
ISBN : 1402040318

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Consuming Music Together by Kenton O'Hara,Barry Brown Pdf

Listening to, buying and sharing music is an immensely important part of everyday life. Yet recent technological developments are increasingly changing how we use and consume music. This book collects together the most recent studies of music consumption, and new developments in music technology. It combines the perspectives of both social scientists and technology designers, uncovering how new music technologies are actually being used, along with discussions of new music technologies still in development. With a specific focus on the social nature of music, the book breaks new ground in bringing together discussions of both the social and technological aspects of music use. Chapters cover topics such as the use of the iPod, music technologies which encourage social interaction in public places, and music sharing on the internet. A valuable collection for anyone concerned with the future of music technology, this book will be of particular interest to those designing new music technologies, those working in the music industry, along with students of music and new technology.

Author : Fran Lloyd
Publisher : Reaktion Books
Page : 232 pages
File Size : 54,7 Mb
Release : 2002
Category : Art
ISBN : 1861891474

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Consuming Bodies by Fran Lloyd Pdf

Fran Lloyd focuses on the resurgence in the imaging of sex and consumerism in contemporary Japanese art and the connections they establish with the wider historical, social and political conditions within Japanese culture.

Author : Brian Moeran,Lise Skov
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 330 pages
File Size : 48,5 Mb
Release : 2013-12-16
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781136782732

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Women, Media and Consumption in Japan by Brian Moeran,Lise Skov Pdf

First book of its kind to examine images of women in Japanese consumerism. Explores a variety of media targeted at women - in particular magazines, but also television, popular literature and consumer trends. Covers visual and print media.