Yokohama Street Life

Author : Tom Gill
Publisher : Lexington Books
Page : 163 pages
File Size : 43,9 Mb
Release : 2015-03-06
Category : History
ISBN : 9781498511995

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Yokohama Street Life by Tom Gill Pdf

Yokohama Street Life: The Precarious Career of a Japanese Day Laborer is a one-man ethnography, tracing the career of a single Japanese day laborer called Kimitsu, from his wartime childhood in the southern island of Kyushu through a brief military career to a lifetime spent working on the docks and construction sites of Tokyo, Osaka and Yokohama. Kimitsu emerges as a unique voice from the Japanese ghetto, a self-educated philosopher whose thoughts on life in the slums, on post-war Japanese society and on more abstract intellectual concerns are conveyed in a series of conversations with British anthropologist Tom Gill, whose friendship with Kimitsu spans more than two decades. For Kimitsu, as for many of his fellow day laborers at the bottom of Japanese society, offers none of the comforting distractions of marriage, family life, or a long-term career in a settled workplace. It leads him through existential philosophy towards Buddhist mysticism as he fills the time between days of hard manual labor with visits to second-hand bookshops in search of enlightenment. The book also portrays Kimitsu’s living environment, a Yokohama slum district called Kotobuki. Kotobuki is a ‘doya-gai’—a slum inhabited mainly by men, somewhat similar to the skid row districts that used to be common in American cities. Traditionally these men have earned a basic living by working as day laborers, but the decline in employment opportunities has forced many of them into welfare dependence or homelessness. Kimitsu’s life and thought are framed by an account of the changing way of life in Kotobuki, a place that has gradually been transformed from a casual laboring market to a large, shambolical welfare center. In Kotobuki the national Japanese issues of an aging workforce and economic decline set in much earlier than elsewhere, leading to a dramatic illustration of the challenges facing the Japanese welfare state.

Author : Simon Partner
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Page : 196 pages
File Size : 42,9 Mb
Release : 2017-12-19
Category : History
ISBN : 9780231544467

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The Merchant's Tale by Simon Partner Pdf

In April 1859, at age fifty, Shinohara Chūemon left his old life behind. Chūemon, a well-off farmer in his home village, departed for the new port city of Yokohama, where he remained for the next fourteen years. There, as a merchant trading with foreigners in the aftermath of Japan’s 1853 “opening” to the West, he witnessed the collapse of the Tokugawa shogunate, the civil war that followed, and the Meiji Restoration’s reforms. The Merchant’s Tale looks through Chūemon’s eyes at the upheavals of this period. In a narrative history rich in colorful detail, Simon Partner uses the story of an ordinary merchant farmer and its Yokohama setting as a vantage point onto sweeping social transformation and its unwitting agents. Chūemon, like most newcomers to Yokohama, came in search of economic opportunity. His story sheds light on vital issues in Japan’s modern history, including the legacies of the Meiji Restoration; the East Asian treaty port system; and the importance of everyday life—food, clothing, medicine, and hygiene—for national identity. Centered on an individual, The Merchant’s Tale is also the story of a place. Created under pressure from aggressive foreign powers, Yokohama was the scene of gunboat diplomacy, a connection to global markets, the birthplace of new lifestyles, and the beachhead of Japan’s modernization. Partner’s history of a vibrant meeting place humanizes the story of Japan’s revolutionary 1860s and their profound consequences for Japanese society and culture.

Author : Nicolás Obregón
Publisher : Macmillan + ORM
Page : 532 pages
File Size : 47,7 Mb
Release : 2017-03-07
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9781250110497

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Blue Light Yokohama by Nicolás Obregón Pdf

Newly reinstated to the Homicide Division and transferred to a precinct in Tokyo, Inspector Iwata is facing superiors who don’t want him there and is assigned a recalcitrant partner, Noriko Sakai, who’d rather work with anyone else. After the previous detective working the case killed himself, Iwata and Sakai are assigned to investigate the slaughter of an entire family, a brutal murder with no clear motive or killer. At the crime scene, they find puzzling ritualistic details. Black smudges. A strange incense smell. And a symbol—a large black sun. Iwata doesn’t know what the symbol means but he knows what the killer means by it: I am here. I am not finished. As Iwata investigates, it becomes clear that these murders by the Black Sun Killer are not the first, nor the last attached to that symbol. As he tries to track down the history of black sun symbol, puzzle out the motive for the crime, and connect this to other murders, Iwata finds himself racing another clock—the superiors who are trying to have him removed for good. Haunted by his own past, his inability to sleep, and a song, ‘Blue Light Yokohama,’ Iwata is at the center of a compelling, brilliantly moody, layered novel.

Author : Douglas Brooke Wheelton Sladen
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 368 pages
File Size : 46,6 Mb
Release : 1894
Category : Japan
ISBN : UOM:39015040757562

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The Japs at Home by Douglas Brooke Wheelton Sladen Pdf

Author : James L. Huffman
Publisher : University of Hawaii Press
Page : 365 pages
File Size : 44,8 Mb
Release : 2018-04-30
Category : History
ISBN : 9780824872915

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Down and Out in Late Meiji Japan by James L. Huffman Pdf

A sweeping work of original scholarship, Down and Out in Late Meiji Japan examines the daily lives of Japan’s hinmin (poor people), particularly urban slum-dwellers, in the late 1800s and early 1900s. James Huffman draws on newspaper articles, official surveys, and reminiscences to recreate for readers life as experienced by the poor themselves—something not attempted before in scholarship on this era. He begins by explaining the causes behind the fast-increasing numbers of poor neighborhoods in major cities after the late 1880s and goes on to describe in fascinating detail what those neighborhoods looked like and what their inhabitants did for a living: collecting night soil, weaving textiles, making match boxes and other piecework, pulling rickshaws, building the structures that made Japan “modern,” and supplying much of the era’s entertainment, including sex. He also explores what hinmin did outside of work: what they ate, where they did their wash, how they stretched their meager budgets by using pawn brokers, and how they dealt with illness and other disasters and grappled with the painful necessity of sending children to work rather than to school. Huffman argues that despite the tremendous challenge of day-to-day living, hinmin confronted life as energetic agents, embracing it as avidly as members of the more affluent classes. Reading sources carefully, and often against the grain, he reveals that many of the poor found meaning in their work, took an active and even influential part in their cities’ politics, and nursed ambitions for a better life. And nearly all took part in the pleasures and festivities that urban neighborhoods offered. Later chapters examine poverty outside the cities and the large-scale emigration of indigent farmers to Hawai‘i’s sugar plantations, beginning in 1885. In his conclusion, Huffman looks at late-Meiji hardship in light of twenty-first-century poverty and the global income disparity that has captured the public’s attention in recent years.

Author : Joseph M. Felser
Publisher : Hampton Roads Publishing
Page : 264 pages
File Size : 46,9 Mb
Release : 2005-01-05
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN : 9781612831961

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The Way Back to Paradise by Joseph M. Felser Pdf

Paradise is not the state of being in harmony, but the process of harmonizing. It is not a garden of bliss, but the bliss of gardening. Paradise is about mending the self, restoring the balance, getting back into tune, bringing all our discarded and forgotten parts into the whole. That means paying attention to and honoring synchronicities, precognitive dreams, telepathic communications, visions--and all manner of experiences of psychic sensitivity. Philosophy professor Joe Felser realized that what he calls the "decrepit, decaying cultural ideologies," in exclusively favoring reason and logic, were excluding the equally real world of magic and psychic activities. He began to investigate, and the closer he looked, the more he found. But he wasn't ready to abandon the world of reason and logic. Instead, he wanted to see if he could find a way to blend the two. He did. The result is this book. In The Way Back to Paradise, Felser takes you through his day, showing what everyday life looks like when you live that blend. His stories, both magical and reasonable, point the way toward a new kind of paradise, one suited to the 21st century.

Author : Yoshio Sugimoto
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 415 pages
File Size : 42,8 Mb
Release : 2020-11-12
Category : History
ISBN : 9781108724746

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An Introduction to Japanese Society by Yoshio Sugimoto Pdf

Taking a sociological approach, this text provides a sophisticated, highly readable introduction to Japanese society.

Author : Joy Hendry
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 316 pages
File Size : 52,8 Mb
Release : 2019-07-09
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781351179898

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Understanding Japanese Society by Joy Hendry Pdf

In this welcome brand new fifth edition of the bestselling textbook Understanding Japanese Society, Joy Hendry takes the reader into the heart of Japanese life. Providing a clear and accessible introduction to Japanese ways of thinking, which does not require any previous knowledge of the country, this book explores Japanese society through the worlds of home, work, play, religion and ritual, covering a full range of life experiences, from childhood to old age. It also examines the diversity of people living in Japan, the effects of a growing number of new immigrants, and role of the longest-standing Japanese prime-minister Shinzo Abe. Fully updated, revised and expanded, the fifth edition contains new material on: the continued effects of the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disasters of 2011 local examples of care for nature and the environment new perspectives on the role of women Japan’s place in the context of globalisation . Each chapter in this new edition also includes an exciting insert from scholars in the field, based on new and emerging research. This book will be invaluable to all students studying Japan. It will also enlighten those travellers and business people wishing to gain an understanding of Japanese people.

Author : Geoffrey C. Gunn
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 325 pages
File Size : 49,6 Mb
Release : 2018-10-15
Category : History
ISBN : 9781498590143

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Overcoming Ptolemy by Geoffrey C. Gunn Pdf

Studies on global metageography are enjoying a revival, and in no way is this better referenced than against the geo-world system bequeathed by Claudius Ptolemy almost two thousand years ago. This is all the more important when we consider the longevity of the Ptolemaic construct through and beyond the European age of discovery allowing as well for its eventual revision or refinement. Innovations in navigational science, cartographic representations, and textual description are all called upon to illustrate this theme. With its focus upon the macro-region termed India Extra Gangem, literally the space between India and China, the book unfolds a fourfold agenda. First, it explains the Ptolemaic world system back to classical points of reference as well as to its reception in late medieval Europe from Arabic sources. Second, it tracks the erosion of the Ptolemaic template especially in the light of new empirical data entering Europe from early travel accounts as well as the first voyages of discovery. Third, through selected examples, as with India, Southeast Asia, and China, it seeks to expose textual and cartographic adjustments to the classical models flowing from the scientific revolution.Fourth, through an examination of Jesuit astronomical observations conducted at various points in Asia, it demonstrates how Eurasia was actually measured and sized with respect to its true longitudinal coordinates such had deluded Columbus and even succeeding generations. In short, this work problematizes the creation of geographical knowledge, raises awareness as to the making of region in Asia over long historical time—the Ptolemaic world-in-motion—and, as a more latent agenda, sounds an alert as to the perils of overdetermination in the setting of modern boundaries whether upon land or sea.

Author : Nan Kim
Publisher : Lexington Books
Page : 285 pages
File Size : 52,8 Mb
Release : 2016-10-31
Category : History
ISBN : 9780739184721

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Memory, Reconciliation, and Reunions in South Korea by Nan Kim Pdf

Winner of the 2019 Scott Bill Memorial Prize for Outstanding First Book in Peace History Memory, Reconciliation, and Reunions in South Korea: Crossing the Divide explores the history and tells the story of the emotionally charged meetings that took place among family members who, after having lost all contact for over fifty years on opposite sides of the Korean divide, were temporarily reunited in a series of events beginning in 2000. During an unprecedented period of reconciliation between North and South Korea, those nationally televised reunions would prove to be the largest meetings held theretofore among civilians from the two states since the inter-Korean border was sealed following the end of active hostilities in 1953. Drawing on field research during the reunions as they happened, oral histories with family members who participated, interviews among government officials involved in the events’ negotiation and planning, and observations of breakthrough developments at the turn of the millennium, this book narrates a grounded history of these pivotal events. The book further explores the implications of such intimate family encounters for the larger political and cultural processes of moving from a disposition of enmity to one of recognition and engagement through attempts at achieving sustained reconciliation amid the complex legacies of civil war and the global Cold War on the Korean Peninsula.

Author : Nobuko Adachi
Publisher : Lexington Books
Page : 211 pages
File Size : 47,8 Mb
Release : 2017-02-16
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781498544856

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Ethnic Capital in a Japanese Brazilian Commune by Nobuko Adachi Pdf

This is a book about the power ethnic capital and how it drives both the economics of, and the quest for identity in, a Japanese Brazilian commune. Adachi tells readers what this small diaspora community can teach us about how life “in the trenches” looks to those on the outskirts of the exploding transnational world economy. This book explores the various strategies locals use to compete with others with whom they are linked locally, nationally, and globally. Through the story of Kubo daily life, Adachi offers insights into important aspects of social and linguistic theory, as well as explicating how cross-border relations become more and more intertwined. In a sense, Kubo’s story, with its struggles to maintain its identity—even its survival—in an increasingly globalized world, encapsulates many of the problems now faced by smaller communities around the world, be they diasporic or regionally entrenched, or ethnically, racially, or religiously composed. Adachi explores the motivations for racial and ethnic boundary-making based primarily on values and principles rather than purely physiological features by focusing on Kubo and its marketing of supposedly traditional Japanese cultural values, in spite of the commune being located in the interior of Brazil. To do this she incorporates notions from linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics, including problems of language maintenance, the relationships between language and symbolic power, and the intricacies of language and gender. Doing so helps theorize the tensions between hybridity and purity entailed in the complexities of identity dynamics.

Author : Peter Dale Scott
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 303 pages
File Size : 43,9 Mb
Release : 2018-08-15
Category : History
ISBN : 9781498576673

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Poetry and Terror by Peter Dale Scott Pdf

A study at many levels of Scott’s long poem Coming to Jakarta, a book-length response to a midlife crisis triggered in part by the author’s initial inability to share his knowledge and horror about American involvement in the great Indonesian massacre of 1965. Interviews with Ng supply fuller information about the poem’s discussions of: a) how this psychological trauma led to an explorations of violence in American society and then, after a key recognition, in the poet himself; b) the poem's look at east-west relations through the lens of the yin-yang, spiritual-secular doubleness of the human condition; c) how the process of writing the poem led to the recovery of memories too threatening at first to be retained by his normal presentational self, and d) the mystery of right action, guided by the Bhagavad Gita and the maxim in the Gospel of Thomas that "If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you.” Led by the interviews to greater self-awareness, Scott then analyses his poem as also an elegy, not just for the dead in Indonesia, but “for the passing of the Sixties era, when so many of us imagined that a Movement might achieve major changes for a better America.” Subsequent chapters develop how human doubleness can lead to an inner tension between the needs of politics and the needs of poetry, and how some poetry can serve as a non-violent higher politics, contributing to the evolution of human culture and thus our “second nature.” The book also reproduces a Scott prose essay, inspired by the poem, on the U.S. involvement in and support for the 1965 massacre. It then discusses how this essay was translated into Indonesian and officially banned by the Indonesian dictatorship, and how ultimately it and the poem helped inspire the ground-breaking films of Josh Oppenheimer that have led to the first official discussions in Indonesia of what happened in 1965.

Author : Nariaki Nakazato
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 303 pages
File Size : 48,9 Mb
Release : 2016-04-27
Category : History
ISBN : 9781498528368

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Neonationalist Mythology in Postwar Japan by Nariaki Nakazato Pdf

Radhabinod Pal was an Indian jurist who achieved international fame as the judge representing India at the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal and dissented from the majority opinion, holding that all Japanese “Class A” war criminals were not guilty of any of the charges brought against them. In postwar Japanese politics, right-wing polemicists have repeatedly utilized his dissenting judgment in their political propaganda aimed at refuting the Tokyo trial’s majority judgment and justifying Japan’s aggression, gradually elevating this controversial lawyer from India to a national symbol of historical revisionism. Many questions have been raised about how to appropriately assess Pal’s dissenting judgment and Pal himself. Were the arguments in Pal’s judgment sound? Why did he submit such a bold dissenting opinion? What was the political context? More fundamentally, why and how did the Allies ever nominate such a lawyer as a judge for a tribunal of such great political importance? How should his dissent be situated within the context of modern Asian history and the development of international criminal justice? What social and political circumstances in Japan thrust him into such a prominent position? Many of these questions remain unanswered, while some have been misinterpreted. This book proposes answers to many of them and presents a critique of the persistent revisionist denial of war responsibility in the Japanese postwar right-wing movement.

Author : David Chapman
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 247 pages
File Size : 43,9 Mb
Release : 2016-02-23
Category : History
ISBN : 9781498516648

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The Bonin Islanders, 1830 to the Present by David Chapman Pdf

This book is a collection of interwoven historical narratives that present an intriguing and little known account of the Ogasawara (Bonin) archipelago and its inhabitants. The narratives begin in the seventeenth century and weave their way through various events connected to the ambitions, hopes, and machinations of individuals, communities, and nations. At the center of these narratives are the Bonin Islanders, originally an eclectic mix of Pacific Islanders, Americans, British, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, and African settlers that first landed on the islands in 1830. The islands were British sovereign territory from 1827 to 1876, when the Japanese asserted possession of the islands based on a seventeenth century expedition and a myth of a samurai discoverer. As part of gaining sovereign control, the Japanese government made all island inhabitants register as Japanese subjects of the national family register. The islanders were not literate in Japanese and had little experience of Japanese culture and limited knowledge of Japanese society, but by 1881 all were forced or coerced into becoming Japanese subjects. By the 1930s the islands were embroiled in the Pacific War. All inhabitants were evacuated to the Japanese mainland until 1946 when only the descendants of the original settlers were allowed to return. In the postwar period the islands fell under U.S. Navy administration until they were reverted to full Japanese sovereignty in 1968. Many descendants of these original settlers still live on the islands with family names such as Washington, Gonzales, Gilley, Savory, and Webb. This book explores the social and cultural history of these islands and its inhabitants and provides a critical approach to understanding the many complex narratives that make up the Bonin story.

Author : Yi Tae-Jin,Eugene Y. Park,Kirk W. Larsen
Publisher : Lexington Books
Page : 285 pages
File Size : 54,7 Mb
Release : 2017-10-10
Category : History
ISBN : 9781498566414

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Peace in the East by Yi Tae-Jin,Eugene Y. Park,Kirk W. Larsen Pdf

On October 26, 1909, the Korean patriot An Chunggŭn assassinated the Japanese statesman Itō Hirobumi in Harbin, China. More than a century later, the ramifications of An’s daring act continue to reverberate across East Asia and beyond. This volume explores the abiding significance of An, his life, and his written work, most notably On Peace in the East (Tongyang p’yŏnghwaron), from a variety of perspectives, especially historical, legal, literary, philosophical, and political. The ways in which An has been understood and interpreted by contemporaries, by later generations, and by scholars and thinkers even today shed light on a range of significant issues including the intellectual and philosophical underpinnings for both imperial expansion and resistance to it; the ongoing debate concerning whether violence, or even terrorism, is ever justified; and the possibilities for international cooperation in today’s East Asia as a regional collective. Students and scholars of East Asia will find much to engage with and learn from in this volume.