Japan ForumPub Date : 2022-08-10DOI: 10.1080/09555803.2022.2108485
A. Bukh
{"title":"Soviet union’s Japan: Nihonjinron in the era of late socialism","authors":"A. Bukh","doi":"10.1080/09555803.2022.2108485","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09555803.2022.2108485","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44495,"journal":{"name":"Japan Forum","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-08-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47477160","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Japan ForumPub Date : 2022-07-19DOI: 10.1080/09555803.2022.2098362
S. Mehl
{"title":"There are no tricks in translation: wordplay and similarity in the writings of Tawada Yōko","authors":"S. Mehl","doi":"10.1080/09555803.2022.2098362","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09555803.2022.2098362","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Tawada Yōko publishes in both Japanese and German: while much scholarship on Tawada has examined difference in her work by focusing on topics such as migration, foreignness, and exophonic authorship (writing in a language other than one’s first language), the present essay considers her writing as an exploration of similarities. I examine similarities at three scales: word-to-word, text-to-text, and oeuvre-to-oeuvre. One of the salient formal traits of Tawada’s work is its incorporation of wordplay based on coincidental resemblances between words in unrelated languages (e.g., German and Japanese). Tawada’s work on wordplay adapts Sigmund Freud’s ideas about the interpretation – or translation, in his occasional metaphor – of dreams and thus embraces a capacious understanding of translation. But – here is the intertextual comparison – when Tawada translates her own work, as when she rewrites her novel Yuki no renshūsei in German as Etüden im Schnee, sometimes a wordplay that is central to one version is omitted in the other, with important consequences for interpretation. Finally, Tawada’s polyglot oeuvre, taken in the aggregate, is characterized as a strategic continuation of a tradition of polyglot authorship – a claim that is, I argue, further underscored by themes in Tawada’s recent fictions.","PeriodicalId":44495,"journal":{"name":"Japan Forum","volume":"35 1","pages":"375 - 392"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46932653","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Japan ForumPub Date : 2022-06-27DOI: 10.1080/09555803.2022.2088826
T. Screech
{"title":"Antiquarians of Nineteenth-century Japan: The Archaeology of Things in the Late Tokugawa and Early Meiji Periods","authors":"T. Screech","doi":"10.1080/09555803.2022.2088826","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09555803.2022.2088826","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44495,"journal":{"name":"Japan Forum","volume":"35 1","pages":"120 - 122"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-06-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41524905","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Japan ForumPub Date : 2022-06-16DOI: 10.1080/09555803.2022.2083213
N. Söderman
{"title":"Unifying state and nation: modern myths and narratives of Japanese nationalism in times of social change","authors":"N. Söderman","doi":"10.1080/09555803.2022.2083213","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09555803.2022.2083213","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Kokutai (national polity) was notoriously the ideological organising principle of imperial Japanese society in the early twentieth century, but the end of WWII saw it replaced by a more nation-oriented view of the relationship between the state and the people. This change led to an interpretation of the nation that prioritises ethnic nationalism, although its key text, the Postwar Constitution seems to invite a more civic interpretation. This paper argues that the change and this inconsistency should be analysed in terms of two modern myths – the myth of kokutai and the myth of homogeneous ethnos. The key to the influence of these myths lies in their symbolic representation in the 1889 Meiji and 1947 Postwar Constitutions, and how their historically contingent interpretation formalised relations between the people and the state. These interpretations produced contesting narrative articulations of the myths, among which first statist and later ethnic nationalist narratives emerged dominant, but in both cases remained in tension with other narratives.","PeriodicalId":44495,"journal":{"name":"Japan Forum","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-06-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48144339","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Japan ForumPub Date : 2022-06-13DOI: 10.1080/09555803.2022.2084141
Steven Ivings
{"title":"Review of Averting the Great Divergence by Peter Vries","authors":"Steven Ivings","doi":"10.1080/09555803.2022.2084141","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09555803.2022.2084141","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44495,"journal":{"name":"Japan Forum","volume":"34 1","pages":"675 - 677"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-06-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46024958","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Japan ForumPub Date : 2022-05-30DOI: 10.1080/09555803.2022.2079706
Giulia Garbagni
{"title":"Japan at the Crossroads: Conflict and Compromise after Anpo","authors":"Giulia Garbagni","doi":"10.1080/09555803.2022.2079706","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09555803.2022.2079706","url":null,"abstract":"In Japan at the Crossroads, Nick Kapur brilliantly succeeds in the ambitious goal of providing a sweeping overview of the politics, foreign policy, intellectual life, civil society, media and culture of postAnpo Japan, painting a picture of the country in the early 1960s that is at the same time rich in detail and broad in scope. Kapur’s choice of pairing a diplomatic/political history approach in the first part of the book with an intellectual/ cultural history one in the latter half is all the more refreshing as it is unusual in standard histories of postwar Japan. The book is also a work of remarkable (if unintentional) contemporary relevance, tackling a central question that echoes a present-day conundrum in Western democracies (notwithstanding evident differences with the context of 1960 Japan): how can a newly elected leader steer their country in a moment of national crisis, reconciling deep ideological divisions across society in the aftermath of shocking episodes of unrest, and replace an administration with little to no regard for democratic principles and processes? The protagonist of Kapur’s book is not Joe Biden in postTrump America, but Ikeda Hayato, the unassuming bureaucrat who against all odds became the tenth Prime Minister of postwar Japan in July 1960 and who oversaw its economic boom. As Kapur masterfully summarizes in the introduction, Ikeda proved himself to be up to the difficult task of pacifying a country fractured by the nation-wide opposition to the renewal of the Japan-US Security Treaty (Anpo), which had been rammed through the Diet by his heavy-handed predecessor, Kishi Nobusuke. Ikeda’s solution was – much like Biden’s ‘foreign policy for the middle class’ – that of strengthening Japan’s international alliances while pursuing a ‘low profile’, domestic-focused economic agenda. While some Ikeda biographers in Japan have cynically pointed to his unfamiliarity with foreign policy matters and his fortune of being the right man in the right place at the right time as the reasons behind the choice and success of this strategy (Nakamura 1995), Kapur presents Ikeda’s key achievements in domestic and foreign policy – his famous ‘income-doubling plan’ and the establishment of a more equal ‘consultative relationship’ with the US respectively – as the legacies of a statesman with competence and vision, not just luck and good timing. In doing so, he contributes to an emerging drive in Anglophone scholarship on Japanese diplomatic and political history that re-evaluates the leadership skills and individual initiative of Japanese premiers usually perceived as technocratic","PeriodicalId":44495,"journal":{"name":"Japan Forum","volume":"34 1","pages":"541 - 544"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-05-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49291013","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Japan ForumPub Date : 2022-05-27DOI: 10.1080/09555803.2022.2098363
W. Marotti
{"title":"Introduction to special issue on imagination and the real","authors":"W. Marotti","doi":"10.1080/09555803.2022.2098363","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09555803.2022.2098363","url":null,"abstract":"I am grateful to the editors for the opportunity to introduce this special issue, ‘Imagination and the Real’, highlighting work emerging from UCLA’s recent graduates. The fact that this collection is featured in the Japan Forum of course allows these authors to address a community of scholars from a variety of fields and points of interest, all invested in their scholarly practices with the conviction that events, lifeways, creations, practices, and transformations within this archipelago merit our careful considerations, and can yield compelling, broad and diverse forms of knowledge about social realities then and now. This is a readership that frequently takes a necessarily interdisciplinary approach to such investigations in their own work, or at the very least is open to readings beyond narrow disciplinary bounds. Japan Forum speaks in this way to the Japan-focused scholarly communities represented by BAJS, EAJS, and other groups representing a kind of meta-field of work all connected in and through ‘Japan’. This meta-field has gone through numerous transformations over the years, reflecting on the nature and organization of our work in dialog with other scholarly practices, as well as in consideration of our eventful times. In particular, our work and its stakes have long moved past the reductive formulations of cultural uniqueness mobilized by imperial and nationalist pedagogies, or by the backhanded tutelary constructions of Modernization Theory and its explanations of ‘success’ through cultural endowments. Our fields of inquiry can recognize that the importance of our investigations is rather more than the detailing of the singular history of some substantialized entity, Japan, the proper noun reducing all acts and events within its borders to ‘its’ incommensurable and special life story. Our investigations each necessarily manifest a critical project, organized by a reflexive relation to the subjects of our investigations.","PeriodicalId":44495,"journal":{"name":"Japan Forum","volume":"34 1","pages":"279 - 289"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-05-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46703637","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Japan ForumPub Date : 2022-05-25DOI: 10.1080/09555803.2022.2077408
Thomas Rowland Booth
{"title":"A Bowl for a Coin: A Commodity History of Japanese Tea","authors":"Thomas Rowland Booth","doi":"10.1080/09555803.2022.2077408","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09555803.2022.2077408","url":null,"abstract":"Claiming to be ‘the first book in any language to describe and analyse the history of all Japanese teas’, William Wayne Farris’ latest monograph A Bowl for a Coin provides a wide-ranging commodity history of Japanese tea. Moving away from the study of tea ceremony, Farris endeavours to uncover the methods of farming, processing, and distributing tea from its initial entry into the archipelago in the eighth century through to the present day. The author uses tea as a lens to highlight broader historical trends in medicine, agricultural development, Japan’s ‘industrious revolution’, and the birth of a consumer society. Chapter One, covering the years 750 to 1300, introduces Japanese tea not as the appetising beverage that we know it as today, but instead as a bitter, brown concoction ground on a druggist’s mortar and prescribed as medicine for a variety of ailments. Imported from the continent, early tea had a Sinitic cultural prestige and was often exchanged between court aristocrats as gifts. The farming of tea was small scale and almost exclusively the domain of Buddhist monasteries. Chapter Two, spanning the years 1300 to 1600, is the period the tea industry first began to ‘lift off.’ The most important change was the development of stone tea grinders and bamboo whisks, which transformed tea from an unappetising medicine to a sweet, green, powdered beverage. From the late thirteenth century tea evolved from an exclusive and specialist gift item to a commodity that was traded, taxed, and enjoyed by aristocrats and commoners alike. By the late medieval period new tea strains were imported, agricultural fields were expanded and regional tea ‘brands’ were becoming established. Chapter Three, comprising the years 1600 to 1868, marks the ‘high point’ of Japanese tea. New methods of tea farming diversified production and saw tea cultivation from the northern reaches of Honshu to the southern tip of Kyushu. Trade boomed, and markets facilitated the emergence of a nascent consumer society of not only the social elite, but also commoners, and even an incipient international clientele. This tea culture was depicted by poets, playwrights, and artists of the age. By the nineteenth century tea was a lucrative industry, as shown by disputes between workers and businesses. Chapter Four, covering Japanese tea in the modern period, explores how burgeoning domestic and international demand for Japanese tea caused production to expand from a mountain-based, labour-intensive industry in the 1860s to one that was marshalled by botanical knowledge and mechanisation in the 1920s. The purported health benefits of imbibing tea, in","PeriodicalId":44495,"journal":{"name":"Japan Forum","volume":"34 1","pages":"538 - 540"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-05-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43344334","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Japan ForumPub Date : 2022-04-25DOI: 10.1080/09555803.2022.2061571
Lieven Sommen
{"title":"Four phases of mediatization and the significance of the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Department of Information: 1905–1922","authors":"Lieven Sommen","doi":"10.1080/09555803.2022.2061571","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09555803.2022.2061571","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In August 1921, the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs officially created the ‘Department of Information’ (Gaimushō Jōhōbu, DOI), to better perform MOFA’s propaganda and information management going forward. This was deemed necessary because the Ministry since the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895) had failed to create comprehensive and coherent propaganda strategies. This article argues that the DOI was a significant addition to the structure of MOFA, by examining the period from the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905) until the Washington Naval Conference (1921–1922) via the research concept of ‘mediatization’. The department allowed MOFA’s propaganda-making capabilities to reach a higher plateau going forward, and for the first time gave it a tool to perform propaganda in a centralized and professionalized way.","PeriodicalId":44495,"journal":{"name":"Japan Forum","volume":"35 1","pages":"195 - 217"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-04-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48441528","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Incidence and Predictors of Opportunistic Infections Among Adult HIV Infected Patients on Anti-Retroviral Therapy at Dessie Comprehensive Specialized Hospital, Ethiopia: A Retrospective Follow-Up Study.","authors":"Kirubel Dagnaw Tegegne, Nigus Cherie, Fentaw Tadesse, Lehulu Tilahun, Mesfine Wudu Kassaw, Gebeyaw Biset","doi":"10.2147/HIV.S346182","DOIUrl":"10.2147/HIV.S346182","url":null,"abstract":"<p><strong>Background: </strong>Opportunistic infections are the major causes for morbidity and mortality due to HIV infections. Despite advances in HIV diagnosis and management, the incidence of opportunistic infections remains high. This study aimed to assess the incidence and predictors of opportunistic infections among persons living with HIV/AIDS in Ethiopia.</p><p><strong>Methods: </strong>A retrospective follow-up study was conducted on 354 samples of adults living with HIV on antiretroviral therapy at Dessie Comprehensive Specialized Hospital. Simple random sampling technique was used to select study participants. The data collection format was taken from national antiretroviral intake and follow-up forms. Epi-data Version 4.6.1 and STATA Version 16 software were used for data entry and data analysis respectively. The Cox-proportional hazards regression model was fitted. Kaplan-Meier survival curve was used to estimate opportunistic infections-free survival time. Both bi-variable and multivariable Cox-proportional hazard regression analysis were done to identify predictors of opportunistic infections.</p><p><strong>Results: </strong>Of the total 354 peoples living with HIV, 114 (32.2%) developed OI, with an incidence rate of 13.5 per 100 person-year (95% CI: 10.8-15.6). Advanced World Health Organization clinical disease stage (IV) (AHR: 2.1 (95% CI: 1.16, 3.8)), being bedridden (AHR: 1.66 (95% CI: 1.04, 2.65)), poor adherence (AHR: 1.7 (95% CI: 1.1-2.63), and low CD4 count (AHR: 1.92 95% CI: 1.14-3.22) were significant predictors of OIs.</p><p><strong>Conclusion: </strong>Opportunistic infection among HIV/AIDS continues to be a significant public health concern in Ethiopian health care setting. Our results indicate that the incidence of OI is high. Besides, Stage IV HIV status, being bedridden, low CD4 count and poor adherence independently predicts an increased incidence/decreased survival time of OIs among PLWHIV. Early care-seeking and initiation of HAART and continuous follow-up of patients to take their drug timely are essential to curb the incidence of opportunistic infections and improve overall health. Further research on this area is highly recommended.</p>","PeriodicalId":44495,"journal":{"name":"Japan Forum","volume":"28 1","pages":"195-206"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-04-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9034843/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81535323","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}