Vanishing Japan

Author : Léna Mauger
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 1510708286
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.80/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Vanished written by Léna Mauger and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2016-09-20 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Every year, nearly one hundred thousand Japanese vanish without a trace. Known as the johatsu, or the “evaporated,” they are often driven by shame and hopelessness, leaving behind lost jobs, disappointed families, and mounting debts. In The Vanished, journalist Léna Mauger and photographer Stéphane Remael uncover the human faces behind the phenomenon through reportage, photographs, and interviews with those who left, those who stayed behind, and those who help orchestrate the disappearances. Their quest to learn the stories of the johatsu weaves its way through: A Tokyo neighborhood so notorious for its petty criminal activities that it was literally erased from the maps Reprogramming camps for subpar bureaucrats and businessmen to become “better” employees The charmless citadel of Toyota City, with its iron grip on its employees The “suicide” cliffs of Tojinbo, patrolled by a man fighting to save the desperate The desolation of Fukushima in the aftermath of the tsunami And yet, as exotic and foreign as their stories might appear to an outsider’s eyes, the human experience shared by the interviewees remains powerfully universal.

Author : Marilyn Ivy
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226388344
Total Pages : 285 pages
Book Rating : 4.42/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Discourses of the Vanishing written by Marilyn Ivy and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-02-15 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Japan today is haunted by the ghosts its spectacular modernity has generated. Deep anxieties about the potential loss of national identity and continuity disturb many in Japan, despite widespread insistence that it has remained culturally intact. In this provocative conjoining of ethnography, history, and cultural criticism, Marilyn Ivy discloses these anxieties—and the attempts to contain them—as she tracks what she calls the vanishing: marginalized events, sites, and cultural practices suspended at moments of impending disappearance. Ivy shows how a fascination with cultural margins accompanied the emergence of Japan as a modern nation-state. This fascination culminated in the early twentieth-century establishment of Japanese folklore studies and its attempts to record the spectral, sometimes violent, narratives of those margins. She then traces the obsession with the vanishing through a range of contemporary reconfigurations: efforts by remote communities to promote themselves as nostalgic sites of authenticity, storytelling practices as signs of premodern presence, mass travel campaigns, recallings of the dead by blind mediums, and itinerant, kabuki-inspired populist theater.

Author : Alan Booth
Publisher : Vertical Inc
ISBN 13 : 1568366159
Total Pages : 421 pages
Book Rating : 4.59/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Looking for the Lost written by Alan Booth and published by Vertical Inc. This book was released on 2021-04-21 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A VIBRANT, MEDITATIVE WALK IN SEARCH OF THE SOUL OF JAPAN Traveling by foot through mountains and villages, Alan Booth found a Japan far removed from the stereotypes familiar to Westerners. Whether retracing the footsteps of ancient warriors or detailing the encroachments of suburban sprawl, he unerringly finds the telling detail, the unexpected transformation, the everyday drama that brings this remote world to life on the page. Looking for the Lost is full of personalities, from friendly gangsters to mischievous children to the author himself, an expatriate who found in Japan both his true home and dogged exile. Wry, witty, sometimes angry, always eloquent, Booth is a uniquely perceptive guide. Looking for the Lost is a technicolor journey into the heart of a nation. Perhaps even more significant, it is the self-portrait of one man, Alan Booth, exquisitely painted in the twilight of his own life.

Author : Elizabeth Kiritani
Publisher : Tuttle Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1462904270
Total Pages : 216 pages
Book Rating : 4.73/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Vanishing Japan written by Elizabeth Kiritani and published by Tuttle Publishing. This book was released on 2012-01-17 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This classic text of Japanese culture contains a wealth of information about traditional Japan and Japanese customs. Pawnshops and handmade paper, shoe shiners and Shinto jugglers, money rakes and mosquito netting—all these were once a familiar part of daily life in Japan. Many elements of that daily life, like the Obon dances and oreiboko apprenticeships, have no counterpart in any other culture: they are purely unique to Japan. But with the tremendous changes of the modern age, most traces of traditional life in Japan are fast disappearing, soon to be gone forever. Still, there are a few holdouts, especially in Japan's shitamachi, or working-class neighborhoods, where many of the survivors of Japanese crafts, art forms, and festivals are making their last stand. Vanishing Japan is a must-read for tourists, historians, architects, or artists who are interested in Japanese culture.

Author : Hiromi Kawakami
Publisher : Catapult
ISBN 13 : 1640090193
Total Pages : 207 pages
Book Rating : 4.94/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Manazuru written by Hiromi Kawakami and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2017-11-01 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Startlingly restless and immaculately compact, Manazuru paints the portrait of a woman on the brink of her own memories and future. Twelve years have passed since Kei’s husband, Rei, disappeared and she was left alone with her three–year–old daughter. Her new relationship with a married man—the antithesis of Rei—has brought her life to a numbing stasis, and her relationships with her mother and daughter have spilled into routine, day after day. Kei begins making repeated trips to the seaside town of Manazuru, a place that jogs her memory to a moment in time she can never quite locate. Her time there by the water encompasses years of unsteady footing and a developing urgency to find something. Through a poetic style embracing the surreal and grotesque, a quiet tenderness emerges from these dark moments. Manazuru is a meditation on memory—a profound, precisely delineated exploration of the relationships between lovers and family members.

Author : Yoichi Funabashi
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 131750335X
Total Pages : 424 pages
Book Rating : 4.54/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Examining Japan's Lost Decades written by Yoichi Funabashi and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-04-10 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines five features of Japan’s ‘Lost Decades’: the speed of the economic decline in Japan compared to Japan’s earlier global prowess; a rapidly declining population; considerable political instability and failed reform attempts; shifting balances of power in the region and changing relations with Asian neighbouring nations; and the lingering legacy of World War Two. Addressing the question of why the decades were lost, this book offers 15 new perspectives ranging from economics to ideology and beyond. Investigating problems such as the risk-averse behaviour of Japan’s bureaucracy and the absence of strong political leadership, the authors analyse how the delay of ‘loss-cutting policies’ led to the 1997 financial crisis and a state of political gridlock where policymakers could not decide on firm strategies that would benefit national interests. To discuss the rebuilding of Japan, the authors argue that it is first essential to critically examine Japan’s ‘Lost Decades’ and this book offers a comprehensive overview of Japan’s recent 20 years of crisis. The book reveals that the ‘Lost Decades’ is not an issue unique to the Japanese context but has global relevance, and its study can provide important insights into challenges being faced in other mature economies. With chapters written by some of the world’s leading Japan specialists and chapters focusing on a variety of disciplines, this book will be of interest to students and scholars in the areas of Japan studies, Politics, International Relations, Security Studies, Government Policy and History.

Author : Devendra Banhart
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781926968377
Total Pages : 40 pages
Book Rating : 4.79/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Vanishing Wave written by Devendra Banhart and published by . This book was released on 2019-09 with total page 40 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following his travels to Japan shortly after the Tohoku earthquake, artist/musician Devendra Banhart produced a series of evocative drawings responding to the natural disaster and its effects on the people of Japan. Exhibitions of these drawings were shown in Tokyo and Kyoto with the purpose to raise funds to support, the Mother's Radiation Lab Fukushima, the Tohoku Youth Orchestra, and the Foster Care for Children in Fukushima. Vanishing Wave is the collection of these ink drawings accompanied by personal texts by Devendra Banhart, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Ryu Takahashi and Yusuke Nagai. A testament to the tide-like characteristics of memory, grief, and pain.

Author : Lesley Downer
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780747264262
Total Pages : 434 pages
Book Rating : 4.60/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Geisha written by Lesley Downer and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ever since Westerners arrived in Japan, we have been intrigued by geisha. This fascination has spawned a wealth of fictional creations from Madame Butterfly to Arthur Golden's Memoirs of a Geisha. The reality of the geisha's existence has rarely been described. Contrary to popular opinion, geisha are not prostitutes but literally arts people. Their accomplishments might include singing, dancing or playing a musical instrument but, above all, they are masters of the art of conversation, soothing worries of highly paid businessmen who can afford their attentions. The real secret history of the geisha is explored here.

Author : Lesley Chan Downer
Publisher : Eland Publishing
ISBN 13 : 9781780602301
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.08/5 ( download)

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Download or read book On the Narrow Road to the Deep North written by Lesley Chan Downer and published by Eland Publishing. This book was released on 2024-11-30 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After eight years working in Japan, immersing herself in its language and literature, Lesley Chan Downer set off in the footsteps of Matsuo Basho, Japan's most cherished poet, to explore the country's remote northern provinces. Basho's pilgrimage to find the landscapes that had inspired the great medieval poets gave birth to Japan's most famous travel book, rich in strange imagery and sometimes comic encounters along the road. In this intriguing cross-threading of journeys, perceptions and exquisite haiku, Lesley creates her own funny, loving and honest portrayal of contemporary Japan. As she walks, she finds at one and the same time a drab post-industrial landscape of concrete and cable, but also a land still full of the old enchantments. Nights in thatched highland villages and sake-drenched poetry sessions encourage her to see for herself if any of the legendary hermit-priests still survive in the sacred mountains of the north.

Author : Yoko Ogawa
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 1101911816
Total Pages : 289 pages
Book Rating : 4.15/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Memory Police written by Yoko Ogawa and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2020-07-28 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist for the International Booker Prize and the National Book Award A haunting Orwellian novel about the terrors of state surveillance, from the acclaimed author of The Housekeeper and the Professor. On an unnamed island, objects are disappearing: first hats, then ribbons, birds, roses. . . . Most of the inhabitants are oblivious to these changes, while those few able to recall the lost objects live in fear of the draconian Memory Police, who are committed to ensuring that what has disappeared remains forgotten. When a young writer discovers that her editor is in danger, she concocts a plan to hide him beneath her f loorboards, and together they cling to her writing as the last way of preserving the past. Powerful and provocative, The Memory Police is a stunning novel about the trauma of loss. ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR THE NEW YORK TIMES * THE WASHINGTON POST * TIME * CHICAGO TRIBUNE * THE GUARDIAN * ESQUIRE * THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS * FINANCIAL TIMES * LIBRARY JOURNAL * THE A.V. CLUB * KIRKUS REVIEWS * LITERARY HUB American Book Award winner