Showing papers in "Journal of Japanese Studies in 2005"

Where Tradition Meets Change: Japan's Agricultural Politics in Transition

Abstract: Japanese agricultural politics is transiting from an old to a new model, one that reflects broader changes in Japan's political economy. Those changes include a rebalancing of electoral power away from rural interests, the emergence of forces working for political and economic reform, the buttressing of executive power at the expense of the customary policymaking apparatus, and the ascendancy of a prime minister whose policy agenda is antithetical to the very foundations on which traditional power structures have rested. So far, however, the impact on farm policy has been modest. Vestiges of the old system continue to complicate the outlook for agricultural reform.

Criminals or Victims? The Politics of Illegal Foreigners in Japan

Abstract: Public opinion over illegal foreigners in Japan is highly contested. Some political leaders construct negative images of illegal foreigners as criminals, while activists portray them as victims. These activists provide an alternative source of information about the conditions of illegal foreigners and are an important counterweight to official Japan's more prejudiced activities. Consequently, Japanese attitudes toward illegal foreigners during the 1990s were mixed, with an increasing association of illegal foreigners and criminality and a rise in the perception of them as victims deprived of basic rights. Renewed efforts from state actors have further incited xenophobic attitudes toward illegal foreigners.

Corporate Financing and Governance in Japan: The Road to the Future, and: Cross Shareholdings in Japan: A New Unified Perspective of the Economic System (review)

Abstract: policy assignment for deflation is monetary policy. That is the reason that Paul Krugman and others propose a nonorthodox policy of inflationary targeting. Incidentally, I found it difficult to promote this policy for Japan in the past because a considerable number of Japanese economists, either out of ignorance or perhaps because of the past intellectual defensive campaigning of the Bank of Japan, maintained that deflation was not curable by monetary policy. Katz seems to fall in the same tradition. His book hardly mentions the effect of the real rate of interest or deflationary expectations. Figures 4.11a and 4.11b of Japanese Phoenix surprise the reader. Figure 4.11a shows that the share of total household income declined very rapidly after 1992. This is primarily because interest rate income fell dramatically because of the low nominal interest rate. This could support again the case for stronger antideflationary policies because the decline in interest income was induced by the zero interest necessitated by deflation. Figure 4.11b allegedly shows that the share of real wages after price-level adjustments declined dramatically as well. In my opinion, the graph at least exaggerates the movement. In any case, the exact methods of adjustment should be presented in the legend because the figure is different from the conventional reading of statistics. Despite these technical details, the merit of Katz’s contribution remains. His overall message is well taken and may prove to be true. It gives more confidence to the Japanese discouraged by the performance of their economy. By inspiring confidence, it may enhance economic activities so that the prophecy of this book may realize its self-fulfilling role. Japanese Phoenix is a poignantly flattering title, particularly to the ears of the Japanese, but they must do much hard work before they can achieve any commendable results.

Discovering the Japanese Alps: Meiji Mountaineering and the Quest for Geographical Enlightenment

Abstract: The landscape known today as the Japanese Alps is a cultural artifact of the mid-Meiji era. During the decade between the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese Wars, as imperial competition thrust mountains into new prominence across the globe, central Honshu's ranges came into focus for the first time. The visionaries who produced the Japanese Alps for the Japanese public during these years, notably Shiga Shigetaka and Kojima Usui, simultaneously imbued the alpine landscape with an exalted purpose. Synthesizing science and aesthetics with practical advice, their writings helped shape a new sensibility toward mountains: one where climbing was yoked to what might be called geographical enlightenment.

The Bloodstained Doll: Violence and the Gift in Wartime Japan

Abstract: During 1936-45, women throughout the Japanese Empire made countless female figures and sent them in imonbukuro (comfort bags) to military personnel. Incorporating elements of amulets, Bodhisattva images, hitogata (an cient protective figures), and Western-style dolls, these masukotto (mascots) or imon ningy? (comfort dolls) took on shifting ideological and ritual functions. Ini tially, they helped domesticate colonial landscapes and bind conventional sol diers to the female-coded mythic Japanese homeland. Late in the war, when taken by tokk?tai (Special Attack Corps, or "kamikaze") pilots on fatal missions, the dolls had increasingly conjugal and sacrificial associations, foreshadowing their ambiguous deployments in postwar memorial, display, and political projects.

Progress and Love Marriage: Rereading Tanizaki Jun'ichiro's Chijin no ai

Abstract: This article examines Tanizaki Jun'ichirō's Chijin no ai (A fool's love, 1924–25) and its conversation with the prominent cultural discourses of its time. I focus particularly on the ideas presented by writers such as Hiratsuka Raichō and Kuriyagawa Hakuson regarding "love marriage" (ren'ai kekkon), a practice idealized as both a marker for an advanced nation and a site enabling individuals to "progress" and heighten their characters (jinkaku). The novel parodically rewrites and actively reexamines these discourses in relation to contemporary values such as self-cultivation (shūyō) and cultural knowledge (kyōkō), asking what "progress" means within the rapidly changing social landscape of the 1920s.

Reassessing Amakudari: What Do We Know and How Do We Know It?

Abstract: For decades, scholars and journalists inside and outside Japan have per ceived the practice of amakudari as an important and distinctive feature of Japanese political economy. But they have often disagreed over the ques tions of how it affects or is affected by larger forces. Observers have seen former bureaucrats as, variously, agents of ministerial influence or monitor ing in their postretirement organizations, pipelines for large and small firms back to their regulating agencies, and recipients of rewards for regulatory favors granted. But it has been difficult to compare the accuracy and ex planatory power of these various interpretations. Now, with the publication of several major new English-language empirical analyses of amakudari and informal regulation in Japan, it appears to be a good time to review and reappraise the evidence and arguments concerning it.1 The two books considered in this review employ different data sets,

Mad Scientists and Their Prey: Bioethics, Murder, and Fiction in Interwar Japan

Abstract: This essay focuses on "mad scientist murders," a subgenre within the larger stream of Japanese detective fiction during the 1920s and 1930s. Through an overview of the popular sentiment toward science during this period and a discussion of works by Kozakai Fuboku, Yumeno Kyūsaku, Oguri Mushitarō, and Unno Jūza, I explore the ways these authors used the motif of the "mad scientist" and his uncompromising attitude toward his work to criticize the widespread overconfidence in the possibilities of science and to highlight the potential incompatibility between science and ethics.

Literacy and Literature in Osaka, 1890-1940

Abstract: Studying Japanese regional literatures and their audiences provides a broader perspective on modern Japanese literature and its readerships. This essay defines the region under discussion, Osaka, from 1890 to 1940 and illustrates the failures of its public school system in promoting literacy. The discussion of the various genres developed in Osaka to appeal to a mass audience demonstrates the vital role literature played in advancing literacy. In conclusion, the essay argues that the popular literature created in response to Osaka's unique readership came to influence the mass media of the rest of the country.

The Production of Literature and the Effaced Realm of the Political

Abstract: The understanding of literature in Japan underwent an epistemological shift in the mid-1880s, when literature came into being as an ontological category as modern fiction found its identity around the themes ninjō, fūzoku, and setai (emotions, social customs, and manners). By historically contextualizing these three components of modern fiction, first introduced by Tsubouchi Shōyō's Shōsetsu shinzui (1885-86), I argue that they were posited in opposition to what constituted the political at that historical juncture. I do so by analyzing Shōyō's criticism of Takizawa Bakin, which signifies his rejection of the political discourse and ultimately of the Freedom and People's Rights Movement.

Identity and Ritual in a Japanese Diving Village: The Making and Becoming of Person and Place (review)

Abstract: they do to cosmetics franchise termination disputes. Instead, they refuse to enforce negotiated terms in a wide variety of other areas. Take landlord-tenant and employment-termination disputes. If tenants refuse to leave an apartment at the end of their lease, courts may bar landlords from evicting them. Unsure that they can retrieve a unit when they want it, developers seldom offer large apartments for rent. Rather, they rent units so small that typical families will outgrow them and offer the larger units only as condominiums. If they hope to renovate a building in a few years, they simply keep vacant apartments off the market. Much the same phenomenon occurs in labor disputes. Japanese firms (whether large or small) do not hire their employees on lifetime employment contracts (the elaborate English-language literature to the contrary notwithstanding). Instead, they typically hire them on “at-will” contracts: they retain the right to discharge them for any reason, at any time. Suppose, though, that a Japanese firm tries to lay off workers during a business downturn. Unless it can show that without the layoffs it will fail, the courts may refuse to let it discharge anyone. Potentially unable to reduce their work force when times are bad, firms refuse to expand their work force when times are good—and impose on their employees the interminable overtime for which Japan has become so famous. For understanding modern Japanese business practice, Visser ‘T Hooft picked a important topic: franchise practice. To study it, he picked a valuable approach: sociological analysis. Yet despite these aspirations, he remains firmly embedded in the textual legal tradition from which he began and has not brought to those traditional materials the analysis that would have enabled him to make the most of those materials. In the end, he takes court rhetoric and jurisprudential articles more seriously than he ought and understands social science less rigorously than perhaps the subject demands.

Gift-Giving in Japan: Cash, Connections, Cosmologies (review)

Abstract: skilled immigrant laborers from the Asian mainland show their faulty knowledge of both spoken Japanese and the body language of the market. All in all, this book deserves a wide readership and will no doubt get it. Its careful listings of supplementary sources of information, such as videos and websites (including Bestor’s own), contribute to making it particularly attractive for teaching. Returning now, finally, to instructions for potential visitors to Tsukiji: do not put it off for too long, if you want to see the market in the form portrayed in the book. As Tokyo keeps growing and renewing itself, and reaching into the sky, one could perhaps not expect that a mere fish market, even if it is Tsukiji, might be allowed to occupy such a centrally located piece of urban land in the long run. In ten years or so, its successor is supposed to be in operation on another, more distant site. Yet Bestor clearly expects that much in the institutions and practices of the most famous fish market in the world will prove resilient even after a move, and so that trip may also be worth making.

Amakudari: The Hidden Fabric of Japan's Economy (review)

Abstract: the ramifications and limitations of the administrative law approach finally adopted. Chapter six adds the impact of the collapsing bubble economy on the yakuza’s fortunes and traces the changing relationships between organized crime, politicians, and the police. Notable sections in this chapter include the analysis of yakuza responses to the Bōtaihō, not only in patterns of attempted revenue diversification and the internal structures of the major yakuza syndicates but in how the intersection of economic and legal pressures helped to bring regional variations in crime patterns and law enforcement responses even more to the surface. Chapter seven turns more explicitly, albeit relatively briefly, to the volume’s second theme: the relationship between the yakuza, law, and the state. The chapter reiterates arguments calling attention to the diversity of Japanese organized crime as well as the dynamic nature of relations with the police. The chapter also adds a call for a more nuanced approach to the police, one that incorporates the impact of divisions between the National Police Agency and the metropolitan departments as well as between the criminal and security branches, and offers a brief overview of these divisions from the occupation period forward. As noted, the literature on this subject is extensive and its insights would be better placed much earlier in the volume; moreover, the literature receives fairly limited coverage even in the final chapter. The chapter’s primary contribution lies in reiterating the theme of unintended effects and in seeking to link the Bōtaihō to the broader theoretical debate over the nature of Japanese legal culture. The aforementioned criticisms aside, The Japanese Mafia is an exceptional piece of scholarship in an area that has needed such a work for a long time. The book will appeal to academics from across the disciplines and to policymakers and practitioners interested in the challenges posed by organized crime.

Tanegashima: The Arrival of Europe in Japan (review)

Abstract: 5. See, for example, John Frederick Lewis’s The Hhareem (1849), as reproduced in Jill Beaulieu and Mary Roberts, eds., Orientalism’s Interlocuters: Painting, Architecture, Photography (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), plate 5. Ironically, this particular image is in a private collection in Japan. serve as a useful launching point for renewed discussion of relations between the Asian and Ottoman (or Muslim) “worlds.” Indeed, many of these writings are not necessarily limited to Ottomanism, for to talk of a World of Islam requires wider Muslim and global referents. Any discussion of the nature of cross-cultural contacts needs to take into account the filters coming into play in the formation of images. Perhaps the very mediated nature of such transmissions is inadvertently presented in one of the plates of this book, where a woodblock print is accepted for what it purports to be: a scene of Turkish customs and manners in the late nineteenth century. This is half true. While made in Japan, the image is composed of elements copied from the series of harem scenes set in mid-nineteenth-century Cairo by John Frederick Lewis.5 And although it is Turkish, in as far as Egypt was then a nominal part of the Ottoman Empire with a Turkic ruling class, the canvas is as much a function of European imagination as Cairene architecture and family life. It would certainly be interesting to know more about the ancestry of the Japanese version and just what Japanese or Turks striving for entry to the European Union might make of “the Orient” today, their assumed commonalities, and differences.

Doing Fieldwork in Japan (review)

Abstract: Imagine yourself suddenly set down surrounded by all your gear, alone on a tropical beach close to a native village, while the launch or dinghy which has brought you sails away out of sight. . . .Imagine further that you are a beginner, without previous experience, with nothing to guide you and no one to help you. For the white man is temporarily absent, or else unable or unwilling to waste any of his time on you. This exactly describes my first initiation into field work on the south coast of New Guinea. I well remember the long visits I paid to the villages during the first weeks; the feeling of hopelessness and despair after many obstinate but futile attempts had entirely failed to bring me into real touch with the natives, or supply me with any real material. I had periods of despondency, when I buried myself in the reading of novels, as a man might take to drink in a fit of tropical depression and boredom.1

Zen and Philosophy: An Intellectual Biography of Nishida Kitaro (review)

Abstract: 1. Besides the numerous summaries of his life in various accounts of his philosophy, I know of only three other strictly biographical reports: Valdo Humbert Viglielmo, “Nishida Kitarō: The Early Years,” in Donald H. Shively, ed., Tradition and Modernization in Japanese Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), pp. 507– 62; Lothar Knauth, “Life Is Tragic: The Diary of Nishida Kitarō,” Monumenta Nipponica, Vol. 20, Nos. 3– 4 (1976), pp. 335–58; and Nishitani Kenji, “Nishida, My Teacher,” in his book Nishida Kitarō, trans. Yamamoto Seisaku and James W. Heisig (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), pp. 3– 38. Nishida’s grandson has published a two-volume biography in Japanese: Ueda Hisashi, Sofu Nishida Kitarō (Tokyo: Nansōsha, 1978) and Zoku sofu Nishida Kitarō (Tokyo: Nansōsha, 1983). Yusa has previously published a Japanese version of her biography: Denki Nishida Kitarō, Supplementary Vol. 1, Nishida Tetsugaku senshū (Kyoto: Tōeisha, 1998). Zen and Philosophy: An Intellectual Biography of Nishida Kitarō. By Michiko Yusa. University of Hawai‘i Press, Honolulu, 2002. xxvi, 482 pages. $62.00, cloth; $29.95, paper.

Religion and Society in Nineteenth-Century Japan: A Study of the Southern Kanto Region, Using Late Edo and Early Meiji Gazetteers (review)

Abstract: cination with interracial relationships on both sides of the Pacific in which modern media have played a major role. In the United States, films and television programs increasingly feature interracial couples (although those depicting Asian male/white female pairings remain remarkably rare despite the high percentage of white-Asian intermarriage), often presenting them in ways that exploit, perpetuate, and reinforce existing racial and gender stereotypes. Since the 1980s Japanese popular culture has problematized relationships between black men and Japanese women, though in recent years there have been a number of television programs featuring Japanese men married to African women. In both societies, mass media and popular culture promote and display modern icons of hybridity who trespass and transcend traditional racial boundaries. Yet, and perhaps because of these changes and a new consciousness of the complexity of racial diversity generated by it, interracial relationships continue to be viewed through the distorting lens of fantasy and wish fulfillment. The diaries and journals of past observers have been replaced by specialized internet sites and chat rooms devoted to discussions of interracial relations in which the discourse of male and female complaint proliferate; race and gender are transformed into fetishized commodities whose physical attractiveness and “racial” character are scrutinized, discussed, and debated ad infinitum; and the aesthetic and intellectual merits of various racial mixtures are assessed and ranked on the basis of long-standing racial hierarchies. One hopes that Leupp will eventually update the volume to take more fully into account the evolution of interracial relationships from 1900 to the present.

Rebuilding Urban Japan after 1945 (review)

Abstract: 1. See, for example, Jeffrey Eldon Hanes, City as Subject: Seki Hajime and the Reinvention of Modern Osaka (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Gideon Golany et al., eds., Japanese Urban Environment (Oxford: Elsevier Science, 1998); Pradyumna P. Karan and Karen Stapleton, eds., The Japanese City (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997); Barrie Shelton, Learning from the Japanese City: West Meets East in Urban Design (London: E&FN Spon, 1999); André Sorensen, The Making of Urban Japan: Cities and Planning from Edo to the 21st Century (London: Routledge, 2002). Rebuilding Urban Japan after 1945. Edited by Carola Hein, Jeffry M. Diefendorf, and Ishida Yorifusa. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, Hampshire, 2003. xvi, 274 pages. $60.00.

Hiratsuka Raicho and Early Japanese Feminism (review)

Abstract: Fourth, Mertz draws attention to the tradition of book illustration, which was a long-established concomitant of published fiction from the seventeenth century onward and which continued for much of the Meiji period, and he includes a number of these illustrations. The captions, however, leave much to be desired for they frequently represent a modern reading rather than the reading suggested by the original captions or the text. Furthermore, it is surely worth noting that in the illustrations to Shōyō’s translation of Sir Walter Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor the characters are depicted in Japanese dress (pp. 209–10). Mertz has identified some important issues and has alerted us to the significance of works of early Meiji fiction that have long been marginalized or neglected altogether. This book should persuade us that they are worth reading and pondering. It is all the more regrettable, therefore, that Mertz has started out by mapping nineteenth-century fictional literature onto the Procrustean bed of gesaku versus early Meiji fiction.

Personal Recollections by Hugh Patrick: An Interview by Edward J. Lincoln

Abstract: Edward Lincoln: Hugh, you've had a long, distinguished, and not yet completed career in Japan studies. Several years ago you wrote a retrospec tive on your "personal Odyssey" that covered a number of issues about the development of the field of Japanese economic studies.1 We will tread over some of the same ground, but I have questions on other topics that should be of interest to readers of The Journal of Japanese Studies. Let's start with your career history as an economist specializing primarily on Japan.