Kyoto's Renaissance


Book Description

"Drawing on a significant archive of primary sources and critical writings, 'Kyoto’s Renaissance' is the first volume in English to take an in-depth look at Kyoto’s modern transformation – how it came to reinvent itself after its ‘collapse’ at the time of the Meiji Restoration of 1868 and relocation of the imperial court to Tokyo. Following a contextualised introduction, which also includes a scholarly appraisal of recent and contemporary studies on the city - in both English and Japanese – nine chapters focus on the most notable historical elements that sustain Kyoto as a quintessentially modern ‘ancient capital’ today. The topics examined are the Emperor System, Festivals and Pageants, Buddhism, the Reorganization of Urban Space, Celebrating Heian, Kyoto’s Forest Policy, Industrialization, Nihonga and trends in Modern Pottery. 'Kyoto’s Renaissance' represents current Japanese scholarship at its best and will be welcomed both as an informed reference book on today’s city and as a benchmark reference for further wide-ranging research."--taken from publisher web site.




Kyoto Revisited


Book Description

There is a charm to Kyoto. Surrounded by lush green hills, the city feels alive with nature, history, culture—and tourists. At once ancient capital, modern city, and home to numerous cultural heritage sites, Kyoto looms large in the promotion of Japanese culture at home and abroad. In the wake of years of economic recession followed by the national promotion of “cool Japan” in popular culture and tourism of the twenty-first century, anthropologist Jennifer Prough sets out to examine how the city’s history and culture have been mobilized to create heritage experiences for today’s tourists. The heart of her book, Kyoto Revisited, centers on what it means to produce these for visitors, why seeing and feeling culture and tradition appeal to both domestic and international travelers, and the challenges faced by a heritage tourism city. As Prough’s study suggests, heritage has multiple meanings. It is created as interested parties—state and local, public and private—tell different stories about the past, which are marketed in response to tourists’ desire for face-to-face engagement in an experience economy. Her work examines several prominent features of Kyoto tourism, including promotion plans, heritage neighborhood renovation, the role of the seasons and traditional aesthetics in citywide events, the appeal of sites commemorating the Meiji restoration, and the trend of walking in the heritage district in a rented kimono. Throughout Prough brings together scholarship from Japanese studies, heritage studies, and the anthropology of tourism to highlight the interplay between the romantic desire for heritage tourism and the emphasis on “personal experience” (taiken) in the visitor industry today. Experience has long been an integral part of tourism—even as what counts as experience has shifted across time and place (from taking a photo to staying with locals to trying one’s hand at a traditional craft)—yet these touristic desires take on a new tinge in the experience economy. Kyoto Revisited demonstrates not only how the past has been used to construct the city’s identity and shape understandings of Japan for travelers, but also how these speak to broader trends in our contemporary moment.




Japan's Renaissance


Book Description

First published in 1981, Japan's Renaissance is a detailed and exhaustively researched account of the regime of Japan's second shogunate, and also an agile comparative analysis of the political economy of the period with other Renaissance systems. The book argues that the development of shogunal power in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Japan was similar to the evolution of monarchic power in France and England during the same period. Contrary to the received wisdom that the government of the Ashikaga shoguns was the low point of premodern Japan, this book demonstrates that it was the incubator for many developments and the administrative technology which reached their maturity in the Tokugawa period. Applying the ideas of political economy to medieval Japanese history makes this book an essential companion for all Japan and East Asia specialists, students of comparative feudalism and monarchical development, as well as educated generalists who are interested in premodern Japan. The book is illustrated with antique maps and Japanese paintings of the period which add to the reader's understanding of this dramatic age in Japan's history.




Designing Nature


Book Description

Exhibition of paintings, lacquerwork, ceramics, textiles, calligraphy, and other media all in the Rinpa style from 1600 to the present day.




Making Japanese Heritage


Book Description

This book examines the making of heritage in contemporary Japan, investigating the ways in which particular objects, practices and institutions come to be seen as forms of heritage which are ascribed public recognition and political significance.




Ryoma


Book Description

Set in Meivi Restoration Era (mid-19th century Japan) during the last years of Tokugawa Shogunate, this is the first English language literary biography of samurai Sakamoto Ryoma, a founder of modern Japan.




Ennobling Japan's Savage Northeast


Book Description

"Ennobling Japan’s Savage Northeast is the first comprehensive account in English of the discursive life of the Tōhoku region in postwar Japan from 1945 through 2011. The Northeast became the subject of world attention with the March 2011 triple disaster of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown. But Tōhoku’s history and significance to emic understandings of Japanese self and nationhood remain poorly understood. When Japan embarked on its quest to modernize in the mid-nineteenth century, historical prejudice, contemporary politics, and economic calculation together led the state to marginalize Tōhoku, creating a “backward” region in both fact and image. After 1945, a group of mostly local intellectuals attempted to overcome this image and rehabilitate the Northeast as a source of new national values. This early postwar Tōhoku recuperation movement has proved to be a critical source for the new Kyoto school’s neoconservative valorization of native Japanese identity, fueling that group’s antimodern, anti-Western discourse since the 1980s.Nathan Hopson unravels the contested postwar meanings of Tōhoku to reveal the complex and contradictory ways in which that region has been incorporated into Japan’s shifting self-images since World War II."




The English Renaissance and the Far East


Book Description

The English Renaissance and the Far East: Cross-Cultural Encounters is an original and timely examination of cultural encounters between Britain, China, and Japan. It challenges accepted, Anglocentric models of East-West relations and offers a radical reconceptualization of the English Renaissance, suggesting it was not so different from current developments in an increasingly Sinocentric world, and that as China, in particular, returns to a global center-stage that it last occupied pre-1800, a curious and overlooked synergy exists between the early modern and the present. Prompted by the current eastward tilt in global power, in particular towards China, Adele Lee examines cultural interactions between Britain and the Far East in both the early modern and postmodern periods. She explores how key encounters with and representations of the Far East are described in early modern writing, and demonstrates how work of that period, particularly Shakespeare, has a special power today to facilitate encounters between Britain and East Asia. Readers will find the past illuminating the present and vice versa in a book that has at its heart resonances between Renaissance and present-day cultural exchanges, and which takes a cyclical, “long-view” of history to offer a new, innovative approach to a subject of contemporary importance.




Histories of Philosophy and Thought in the Japanese Language


Book Description

Dieses bibliographische Handbuch gibt einen umfassenden Überblick über die Geschichtsschreibung der Philosophie und des Denkens in japanischer Sprache anhand einer umfangreichen und thematisch geordneten Sammlung einschlägiger Literatur. Mit über tausend Einträgen zeigt die Bibliographie nicht nur, wie umfangreich und komplex die japanische Tradition der Philosophie- und Geistesgeschichtsschreibung ist, sondern auch, wie sie strukturiert und analysiert werden kann, um sie einem vergleichenden und interkulturellen Ansatz für die Philosophiegeschichtsschreibung weltweit zugänglich zu machen. Die Literatur ist nach thematischen Schwerpunkten wie geografischen Regionen und Kontinenten, Nationen und Völkern, religiösen Traditionen und philosophischen Lehren wie Buddhismus, Islam, Shintoismus oder Konfuzianismus sowie nach Disziplinen wie Ethik, Ästhetik oder politischem Denken kategorisiert und organisiert. Die Bibliographie wird von einer Einleitung begleitet, in der die Forschungsmethode sowie quantitative und qualitative Ansätze zur Analyse des Materials dargelegt werden, gefolgt von einem chronologischen Überblick über die Geschichtsschreibung der Philosophie und des Denkens in japanischer Sprache sowie über die japanische Tradition, "Weltgeschichten der Philosophie" zu schreiben. Als erster Schritt in Richtung einer "Geschichte der Geschichtsschreibung der Philosophie" in außereuropäischen Sprachen liefert der Leitfaden nützliche Werkzeuge für eine interkulturell orientierte Wissenschaft, die auf eine nicht-eurozentrische und diversifizierte Geschichtsschreibung der Philosophie in globaler Perspektive abzielt. *** This bibliographical guide gives a comprehensive overview of the historiography of philosophy and thought in the Japanese language through an extensive and thematically organized collection of relevant literature. Comprising over one thousand entries, the bibliography shows not only how extensive and complex the Japanese tradition of philosophical and intellectual historiography is, but also how it might be structured and analyzed to make it accessible to a comparative and intercultural approach to the historiography of philosophy worldwide. The literature is categorized and organized according to thematic focus areas such as geographical regions and continents, nations and peoples, religious traditions and philosophical teachings such as Buddhism, Islam, Shinto, or Confucianism, as well as disciplines such as ethics, aesthetics, or political thought. The bibliography is accompanied by an introduction outlining the research method as well as quantitative and qualitative approaches to analyzing the material, followed by a chronological overview of the historiography of philosophy and thought in the Japanese language as well as of the Japanese tradition of writing “world histories of philosophy”. As a first step towards a “history of the historiography of philosophy” in non-European languages, the guide provides useful tools for interculturally oriented scholarship aimed at a non-Eurocentric and diversified historiography of philosophy in a global perspective.




Critical Perspectives on Classicism in Japanese Painting


Book Description

In the West, classical art - inextricably linked to concerns of a ruling or dominant class - commonly refers to art with traditional themes and styles that resurrect a past golden era. Although art of the early Edo period (1600-1868) encompasses a spectrum of themes and styles, references to the past are so common that many Japanese art historians have variously described this period as a classical revival, era of classicism, or a renaissance. How did seventeenth-century artists and patrons imagine the past? Why did they so often select styles and themes from the court culture of the Heian period (794-1185)? Were references to the past something new, or were artists and patrons in previous periods equally interested in manners that came to be seen as classical? How did classical manners relate to other styles and themes found in Edo art? In considering such questions, the contributors to this volume hold that classicism has been an amorphous, changing concept in Japan - just as in the West. Troublesome in its ambiguity and implications, it cannot be separated from the political and ideological interests of those who have employed it over the years. The modern writers who firs