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This paper moves between text and context in order to trace the personal, familial and narrative connections between two women, Nakayama Suzuko (b. c. 1675), wife of a Mito domain official stationed in Edo, and her sister-in-law Kuroda Tosako (1682-1758), wife of an official of Tatebayashi domain. Drawing on four extant texts - two travel accounts and two diary/memoirs - the paper argues that, although marriage and family fundamentally shaped these bushi-class women's lives, these factors did not confine them to the home, but pushed them out into the world to act on behalf of their families as well as for their own enrichment and pleasure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The films of Japanese director Kurosawa Kiyoshi in the late 1990s and early 2000s capture the malaise of the ‘lost decade’ (ushinawareta jû-nen) of the 1990s, a period characterized by the end of an economic boom that propelled Japan through two decades of unprecedented prosperity. Facing the decline of high-growth, the country for the first time in two decades could no longer ignore the things that it had suppressed to realize progress: the failure of Japan's radical movements of the 1960s and early 1970s and their de-evolution into extremism. As the haze of prosperity dissipated in the early 1990s, Japan was again stunned by a violent uprising more than two decades after the collapse of the student movements – the Tokyo subway gassings in 1995, an event that many associated with the radicalism of the 1960s and 1970s. The attacks served as a reminder of the deep-seated social dissatisfactions that existed among the activist generation and the violence that results from extremism. Utilizing trauma theory, this paper will examine the way Japan's radical past is re-experienced in Kurosawa's films in the years following the gassings. Through an analysis of the cinematic style ofCharisma(Karisuma1999),Pulse(Kairô2001), and other cinematic works in light of their narrative references to radicalism, this article will flesh out the layered process through which Kurosawa's films engage the past while coping with the trauma of post-Aum Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Most of the major world powers, including Japan, began experiments in overseas radio broadcasting during the 1920s. For many, such as Britain, the primary motivation was to communicate with their overseas colonies. For others, including Japan, the motivation was to promote cultural awareness, particularly among overseas populations. However, the Japanese occupation of Manchuria (Dongbei) in 1931 changed the course of overseas radio development in Japan. Japan became increasingly isolated, particularly after the League of Nations adopted the Lytton Report on Manchuria and urged Japan to withdraw her troops. Japan withdrew from the League, thus increasing her diplomatic isolation. The Japanese government now turned to overseas radio as a means to present the Japanese case in the absence of a recognized international voice in the League. This paper will trace the development of Japan's overseas broadcasting following this shift in perspective and before the start of the full, undeclared war in China in 1937. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rapid industrialization and modernization of Japan in the first decades of the twentieth century preceded both the creation of 'development studies' as an academic sub-discipline and popular awareness in the West of development issues. Japanese achievements were therefore not analysed at the time according to specific expectations or models of development, as would be the case today, but rather were interpreted in the context of more general Western concepts such as 'civilization', 'modernization', and 'progress'. As Japan was the first non-Western country to adjust its economy and society successfully to modern modes of production, this process of assessing the changes taking place in Japan generated ideas that represented some of the first Western interpretations of non-Western development. This paper excavates some of these by sampling a broad variety of British contemporary source materials, including newsreels and radio broadcasts. It concludes that the process of interpreting Japanese social and economic change between 1900 and 1941 led to the creation of a number of paradigms of non-Western development. Two of the most important of these were the Darwinist-inspired idea of evolutionary development; and revolutionary development, which was posited as the opposite of the concept of natural progress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

1990s Japan appears to be in the grip of a revisionist trend which many people associate with the emergence of neo-nationalism. This paper argues that, while the leading proponents of revisionist history in the 1990s are superficial and intellectually unpersuasive, they nonetheless ought to be taken seriously by Japan scholars. Through a study of the 'Liberal School of History' and the ideas and person of its figurehead, Fujioka Nobukatsu, the logic expounded by revisionists and the alleged historical antecedents for these ideas are identified. The tumultuous context of the 1990s, including the Gulf War, death of Hirohito and the fiftieth anniversary of defeat in 1945, have provided a fertile environment for arguments in favour of a more patriotic history education for Japanese junior and senior high-school students. Conservative and rightist politicians across party lines have developed activist groups in support of Fujioka's programme, and he has received considerable financial backing from the private sector. Analysis of 1990s revisionism reveals a closer affinity with pre-war and wartime nationalism than with any kind of 'new' post-war nationalism. It has revived a Statecentred nationalism that explicitly regards post-war democracy as its ideological enemy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This short essay introduces the special issue, 'Critical approaches to reproduction and population in post-war Japan'. It first explains that the issue came out of the two-year project entitled 'Historicizing the Discourses of Declining Fertility and Ageing Population in East Asia, in which we reappraised Japan's post-war history by identifying the demographic, discursive, social, scientific, and political factors that shaped the post-war population policies and reproductive practices. The essay then elaborates on the two interwoven threads of analysis we incorporated to reach the overall goal of the special issue, namely, to complicate understanding of Japanese post-war reproductive politics. The first thread is the politics of reproduction in modern Japanese history was inherently a politics of population. The second is that the medical and scientific knowledge on reproductive bodies and population statistics constituted a discursive register that allowed issues surrounding reproduction and population to be reformulated as concerns of the state. By locating the stories of everyday reproductive practices within a broader history of population politics embedded in the post-war Japan's sovereignty and statecraft, the special issue clarifies hitherto understudied, yet critical, elements that shaped domestic reproductive experiences and the interpretation of the reproductive bodies in Japan's post-war history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nippon Fujin(The Japanese woman, 1942–1945) was the most prominent wartime women's magazine of Japan that shaped its propagandistic messages in gendered and culturalized forms. Scrutinizing the visual dimension of the magazine, I discern patterns of gendered visual representation that primarily produce highly visible cultural notions and thereby veil, obscure and render invisible assertions of political power over colonized people as well as enemies. Visibility is commonly associated with influence, power and political impact, whereas less visibility – or invisibility – often indicates the positions of those who are politically powerless, socially disadvantaged or culturally oppressed. Contrasting the visual propaganda inNippon Fujinwith visual examples fromNS Frauen-Warte(NS women's outlook), the major Nazi women's magazine of the time, I argue that in the former case there are concepts of ‘visibility’ and ‘invisibility’ at work that do not fit neatly into the paradigmatic assumption of mediated political ‘visibility’ as a pre-condition for public acceptance in a mass culture. To a large degree, it is the ‘invisibility’ or coded visibility of political actors that forms effective strategic elements of visual propaganda. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As a Meiji-period import, the detective novel makes a telling case study in the complexities of Japanese cultural borrowing. This article underlines the hybrid nature of one typical translated detective novel, Kuroiwa Ruikō's Kettō no hate (The consequences of a duel), which is an often loose rendering into Japanese of the French writer Fortuné Hippolyte Du Boisgobey's novel Suites d'un duel . On the one hand, the translation makes overt appeals to Meiji-period readers' hunger for the modern, the novel, and the foreign; on the other, it conspicuously recycles narrative conventions of the dokufu-mono , or 'poisonous woman story', a popular Meiji-period genre whose representations of alluring but ruthless silver-tongued female criminals had deep roots in the old, native tradition of gesaku , or 'frivolous writing'. This melding of the new and the old in Ruikō's translation suggests the necessity of revising our current models for understanding cultural borrowing, which rely too heavily upon the notions of straightforward Japanese imitation or, alternatively, of Western cultural dominance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]