Japan

03 Oct 1994 12:01

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Yet Another Utterly Inadequate Placeholder.

See also: the Ainu; the East Asian Economic Miracle

Recommended:
• Mikiso Hane, Peasants, Rebels and Outcastes: The Underside of Modern Japan
• Ivan Morris, The World of the Shining Prince
• Noel Perrin, Giving Up the Gun: Japan's Reversion to the Sword, 1543--1879
• Shigeto Tsuru, Japan's Capitalism
• Arthur Waley, The No Plays of Japan

To read:
• Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture
• Marry E. Berry, The Culture of Civil War in Kyoto [In the 16th century]
• Ian Buruma, Inventing Japan, 1853--1964 [Review in the Times Literary Supplement]
• Ken Taro Greenfeld, Speed Tribes: Days and Nights with Japan's Next Generation
• Helen Hardacre, Marketing the Meancing Fetus in Japan
• Sheldon Harris, Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare 1932--45, and the American Cover-Up
• Eiko Ikegami
  • Bonds of Civility: Aesthetic Networks and the Political Origins of Japanese Culture [This sounds very cool: "ncovers a complex history of social life in which aesthetic images became central to Japan's cultural identities. The people of premodern Japan built on earlier aesthetic traditions in part for their own sake, but also to find space for self-expression in the increasingly rigid and tightly controlled Tokugawa political system. In so doing, they incorporated the world of the beautiful within their social life which led to new modes of civility. They explored horizontal and voluntary ways of associating while immersing themselves in aesthetic group activities. Combining sociological insights in organizations with prodigious scholarship on cultural history, this book explores such wide-ranging topics as networks of performing arts, tea ceremony and haiku, the politics of kimono aesthetics, the rise of commercial publishing, the popularization of etiquette and manners, the vogue for androgyny in kabuki performance, and the rise of tacit modes of communication."]
  • The Taming of the Samurai: Honorific Individualism and the Making of Modern Japan
• Muriel Jolivet and Anne-Marie Glasheen, Japan: The Childless Society?
• James R. Lincoln and Michael L. Gerlach, Japan's Network Economy: Structure, Peristence, and Change [Blurb]
• Jeffrey P. Mass, Antiquity and Anachronism in Japanese History
• David Matsumoto, Unmasking Japan: Myths and Realities about the Emotions of the Japanese
• An American Scientist in Early Meiji Japan: The Autobiographical Notes of Thomas C. Mendenhall
• Miyoshi, As We Saw Them [1st Japanese embassy to USA]
• Ivan Morris, The Nobility of Failure: Tragic Heroes in the History of Japan
• Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms, and Nationalisms: The Militarization of Aesthetics in Japanese History [Blurb]
• Irena Powell, Writers and Society in Modern Japan
• Masayoshi Shibatani, The Languages of Japan [Blurb]
• Yoshi Sugimoto, An Introduction to Japanese Society [Blurb]
• Ueda, Electric Geisha
• S. Wardell, Rising Sons and Daughters
• Robert K. Wilcox, Japan's Secret War: Japan's Race Against Time to Build Its Own Atomic Bomb
• Shoji Yamada, Shots in the Dark: Japan, Zen, and the West [blurb]