Japan Forum最新文献

{"title":"Nonencounters ‘in the wake’: re-inscribing a Black Transpacific in Tanin no kao and La Muerte de Artemio Cruz","authors":"A. Mendoza","doi":"10.1080/09555803.2021.2018020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09555803.2021.2018020","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article draws from Black critical theory and critical race studies to explore how the relationship between the wound, the body, and the role of trauma in literary text can be reposed as a relationship to racial inscription in two novels, Abe Kōbō’s Tanin no kao (The face of Another, 1964) and Carlos Fuentes’s La Muerte de Artemio Cruz (The Death of Artemio Cruz, 1962). In these terms, the article explores the function of injury in these literary texts as it relates to their representations, or fictionalizations, of Blackness. The article deploys a critical approach to transpacific literary comparison that does not draw from naturalized connections – termed a framework of ‘nonencounter’ – to discuss how the questions of race and Blackness in both novels re-inscribes the particular histories of colonialism and the transpacific entanglements of antiblackness that shaped dominant discourses on the national subject and cultural identity in Mexico and Japan. 1","PeriodicalId":44495,"journal":{"name":"Japan Forum","volume":"35 1","pages":"249 - 270"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-12-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48662197","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":"Toei’s Truck Guys series (1975–79): masculine identity and fantasies of utopia","authors":"Sachiko Shikoda","doi":"10.1080/09555803.2021.2013299","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09555803.2021.2013299","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The Toei Studio-produced Truck Guys/Torakku yarō (1975–79) is a popular domestic genre film series. Consisting of ten films, it is an action-comedy, loosely structured around a buddy-road film genre framework. While rarely canonised within critical or academic discourses, the series’ lasting popularity is still evidenced by its commercial ‘long-tail’. The aim of this article is primarily to shed light on this critically overlooked series, locating it within specific national and cultural contexts, in particular toward the end of the Japanese studio system. Specifically, this article examines how Toei attempted to revitalise the popular cycles of their genre films facing a decline in both mainstream commercial film production and cinema audiences, highlighting a fiercely pragmatic mode of filmmaking in the 1960s and 1970s where serialisation played an important role. By exploring the films from both textual and contextual perspectives, the article will also attempt to highlight and confirm the significance of intra-serial intertextuality, with particular reference to the first and the final instalments of the series: No One Can Stop Me (1975) and Hometown Express Service (1979). Addressing a practice of popular genre filmmaking in Japan also begins to fill a critical gap in Japanese film studies","PeriodicalId":44495,"journal":{"name":"Japan Forum","volume":"35 1","pages":"10 - 31"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-12-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44436881","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":"Premodern warriors as spirited young citizens: Iwaya Sazanami and the semiosphere of Meiji youth literature","authors":"Aafke van Ewijk","doi":"10.1080/09555803.2021.2008471","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09555803.2021.2008471","url":null,"abstract":"Youth literature of the Meiji period (1868–1912) has been portrayed as moralistic and unable to overcome premodern literary styles and tropes. However, in this article I show how this literature was transformative and functioned as an arena within which literary writers and the government contended for the minds of young Japanese citizens. I reexamine the early development of the genre of youth literature in Japan through the lens of Juri Lotman’s theory of cultural memory. In Lotman’s spatial model of culture, or semiosphere, foreign concepts travel from the periphery to the centre of a given cultural (sub)sphere through an amalgamation with established texts, in a process of ‘creative memory’. This process, I argue, is reflected in the serialized adaptations of premodern warrior legends by the pioneering author Iwaya Sazanami (1870–1933), in which he explores the conventions of nineteenth-century youth literature from the West. Recognizing the new genre’s deep connection to citizenship, he shaped his protagonists into exemplary boys who display wanpaku (spirited) dispositions, in opposition to the moralism and ‘narrow-minded nationalism’ imparted at home and in schools. As a mediator between premodern and modern concepts and modes of text production, Meiji youth literature thus offered adults a way to develop modern identities.","PeriodicalId":44495,"journal":{"name":"Japan Forum","volume":"35 1","pages":"344 - 366"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-12-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49031885","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":"The Japanese: A History in Twenty Lives","authors":"T. Lockley","doi":"10.1080/09555803.2021.2002390","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09555803.2021.2002390","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44495,"journal":{"name":"Japan Forum","volume":"34 1","pages":"125 - 127"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-11-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49075590","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":"The Reconceptualisation of the Industrial Revolution and Why It Matters for Japanese Studies","authors":"P. Francks","doi":"10.1080/09555803.2021.2002388","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09555803.2021.2002388","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44495,"journal":{"name":"Japan Forum","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-11-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44494717","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":"Human security and Japanese refugee policy: explaining the ‘flux’","authors":"A. Dasgupta","doi":"10.1080/09555803.2021.1990985","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09555803.2021.1990985","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Japan is one of the richest democracies of Asia, a pillar of the international liberal order in the region, and a strongly pacifist nation with the only anti-war constitution in the world. It is also one of three major countries which have elected to incorporate human security principles as intrinsic components of foreign policy. However, its implementation of human security principles in some areas, especially refugee policy, belies its rhetorical commitments; it boasts the lowest number of refugees among all industrialised nations. What explains this discrepancy? Through a comparative study of the Indochinese and the Rohingya refugee crises, this study aims to offer a corrective and a supplement to Sarah Tanke’s work (2021) by arguing that despite Japanese officials’ championing of a human security narrative in the international arena, the gap between declaration and implementation, especially regarding the human security of displaced persons in the Asia-Pacific region and beyond, points to their instrumental use of such a narrative to avoid international censure and free ride on the international asylum regime. It further investigates the domestic political, social and psychological factors modulating this behaviour, and argues for a broader role for international pressure in order to bring about policy change.","PeriodicalId":44495,"journal":{"name":"Japan Forum","volume":"35 1","pages":"152 - 171"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-10-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43100555","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":"Overcoming political distrust: the role of ‘self-restraint’ in Japan’s public health response to COVID-19","authors":"James Wright","doi":"10.1080/09555803.2021.1986565","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09555803.2021.1986565","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Political trust has long been presented as a key social determinant of pandemic resilience in public health by facilitating public cooperation with government instructions. During the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, countries where citizens had relatively low levels of trust in government tended to see higher numbers of infections and deaths. Yet Japan’s public health response to COVID-19 complicates a straightforward relationship between political trust and successful pandemic response, presenting something of a paradox. Trust in government, very low by international comparison, was compounded by a lack of state authority to enforce its public health recommendations. Nevertheless, it appears that initially, most people followed government advice, particularly politicians’ calls for jishuku (‘self-restraint’). This paper explores the Japanese government’s response to COVID-19 and places the concept of jishuku in historical context, arguing that it represents a complex dynamic that includes expectations about the solidaristic behavior of imagined fellow citizens, stigmatization and social coercion, and government appeals to ethnonationalist identity that together may have helped overcome low trust in government. ‘Compliance’ itself is complicated in this picture, with compliance with individual measures dependent on the dynamic tension between a variety of different factors beyond political trust alone.","PeriodicalId":44495,"journal":{"name":"Japan Forum","volume":"33 1","pages":"453 - 475"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43178535","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":"Intimate Japan: Ethnographies of Closeness and Conflict","authors":"Fusako Innami","doi":"10.1080/09555803.2021.1979082","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09555803.2021.1979082","url":null,"abstract":"This volume provides a much-needed academic investigation and close case study analysis of intimacy in contemporary Japan, mostly since 2000. Through media coverage and historical construction, intimacy in Japan is often presented in an exotic or unnecessarily sexualized way. As Alexy notes in the introduction, Intimate Japan engages and challenges readers who think they know Japan. Intimacy is private; however, it is also public and social, permeating relationship building, friendships, marriages and families. Considering these social aspects of intimacy, the volume focuses on its actions, practices, and patterns – ‘the doing of intimacy’ (p. 6). Alexy’s introduction effectively problematizes the topic under analysis, establishing clear definitions of the terms surrounding intimacy. The chapters by Kawahara, Sandberg and Dales and Yamamoto delve into the currently relevant topics of young people’s intimate expectations and experiences, unmarried women’s narratives about contraception in Tokyo, and women’s emotional and bodily connections outside marriage, respectively. Alexy’s chapter relates these topics to how intimacy is performed, embodied, and practiced in Japan—through silence, atmosphere, and verbal communication and articulation. Turning to different aspects of intimacy, Kuwajima’s chapter on domestic violence changes the volume’s mood by illuminating a recovery process through which victims write their experiences and redefine intimacy to return to intimate life. Chapters by Cook, Miles, Dale, and Goldfarb discuss, respectively, irregular employment in relation to gender roles, the pressure young Japanese men feel to commit to love relationships, ‘x-gender’ identity—which is neither female nor male—as formed through negotiation or interpersonal relationships, and intimate kinship in foster care and adoption. The chapters by Yamaura and Tahhan broaden the volume’s scope beyond Japan: they discuss an imagined intimacy created through brokers that mediate marriages between Japanese men and Chinese women and examine the embodied practices of intimacy via co-sleeping and child-rearing in Japanese Australian families, in which different understandings and interpretations of bodily practices merge, respectively. The concluding chapter, Reflections on Fieldwork, presents contributors’ selfreflection on their ethnographic research methods. While the individual chapters illuminate how ethnographers (like storytellers) convey and analyse accounts narrated by participants, these storytellers narrate themselves in the final chapter,","PeriodicalId":44495,"journal":{"name":"Japan Forum","volume":"33 1","pages":"780 - 781"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-09-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47160300","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":"Shidehara Kijūrō and the Japanese Constitution's war-abolishing Article 9","authors":"Klaus Schlichtmann","doi":"10.1080/09555803.2021.1958902","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09555803.2021.1958902","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The origin and purpose of Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution seem shrouded in secrecy. This paper places Article 9 in the context of the UN Charter and peace constitutions which were emerging globally that aimed to limit state sovereignty in favor of international organization and the renunciation of war in the aftermath of WWII (Schlichtmann 2009b). It is a provision the Japanese people have upheld for more than seventy years. With the gradual return of block confrontation during the 1990s and the revival of the ‘balance of power’ concept, however, Japan came under pressure to change its Constitution and participate in military defense alliances. This has led to a noticeable shift in policy. Although Shidehara Kijūrō (1872–1951) had been well-known and respected for his peace diplomacy as foreign minister during the interwar period, it soon became expedient to deny him any direct involvement in the drafting of Article 9 when he was Prime Minister after the war.","PeriodicalId":44495,"journal":{"name":"Japan Forum","volume":"35 1","pages":"127 - 151"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-09-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48944480","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":"Re-staging postwar Japanese photography: Ōtsuji Kiyoji, APN and straight photography","authors":"D. Abbe","doi":"10.1080/09555803.2021.1923554","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09555803.2021.1923554","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In both English and Japanese-language scholarship, Domon Ken’s ‘realism photography’ grounds the history of photography in postwar Japan. Domon proclaimed that photographs should deal directly with social phenomena, and that photography should never mix with other media. This essay introduces an alternative to Domon’s realism, through a series of abstract, studio-based photographs that were published in the pages of the popular magazine Asahi Graph between 1953 and 1954. The photographer Ōtsuji Kiyoji (1923–2001) produced this series (collectively known as the APN photographs) in collaboration with other artists, while simultaneously criticizing Domon’s dogma in print. This essay argues that Domon’s ‘realism photography’ should be reconceived as a form of straight photography, a tradition of modernist purism couched in a moral language that also reflects heterosexual anxiety over the stability of identity. The APN photographs themselves play with the conventions of realistic representation, and the critical nature of Ōtsuji’s writing remains unexplored in scholarship to date. Shifting attention towards Ōtsuji loosens the hold of realism on postwar photography in Japan, and also brings the conditions of prewar photography into view.","PeriodicalId":44495,"journal":{"name":"Japan Forum","volume":"34 1","pages":"355 - 382"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-09-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42121215","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}