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This paper examines the fundamental changes which are currently taking place in Japanese higher education. These changes are seeing the development of what has been dubbed the 'third generation' of Japanese universities which can no longer rely on student fees and government support to survive and need to find other ways to generate income. The paper shows how the different responses of Japanese universities to these new challenges is leading to an increasingly diversified higher education sector with major implications for the future of teaching, research and administration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The east bank of Tokyo's main river, the Sumida, was lined on its northern stretch at Mukōjima by an embankment and by a series of temples, shrines and gardens that had been in the Edo period and continued into the Meiji era to be a favoured place for escape from the city and its physical and social constraints. In 1889, a large textile mill was founded at the embankment's northern end, and in the years that followed the area was largely industrialised. This paper traces this process of industrialisation and its culmination in the death of the cherry trees that lined the embankment as a result of flood and fire. It uses a variety of accounts to examine this process of marginalisation of a cultural landscape. In so doing, it reflects on some of the contradictory impacts of the process of urban modernisation and highlights the construction of a new riverside park and promenade in Mukōjima that incorporated the contradictory but classically modernist impulse to preserve the old while showcasing the new. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Faced with the demands of the rapidly ageing population, the Japanese government introduced Long-Term Care Insurance (LTCI) in 2000, which has led to a substantial debate over the effects of marketization on the quality of care and the universal availability of care. Eight years later, even as they note that there are problems with LTCI, many agree that LTCI has produced some positive results worthy of attention; most importantly it has helped establish a 'national consensus' that the care of the elderly is no longer just a family obligation. Particularly noteworthy is the fact that various types of private senior housing have become much more affordable and popular and can, in the author's opinion, play an important role in the socialization of care in the Japanese cultural context. Using a concrete example of a relatively well-functioning private senior home in the outskirts of Tokyo, the present paper will examine how care can be organized in a private regime with emphasis on the possible effect of marketization. To give my analysis a comparative and feminist perspective, I will draw on the international and Norwegian feminist discourse on the ethics of care in dependency work - an ethics that attempts to relativize hitherto undisputed concepts in public management such as equality and rationality by taking into account the necessarily specific nature of care, which resists generalization and standardization. The essay will try at the same time to assess the potential of and the challenges for LTCI in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the use of Edo as a trope for Japanese post-modernity in the 1980s and 1990s and its transformation at the turn of the millenium in order to better situate Japanese visual artist and theorist Murakami Takashi's 2000-1 exhibition, 'Superflat'. Is Murakami's 'Superflat' — which links contemporary anirne and anime-influenced art to the works of Edo-period artists Kano Sansetsu and Katsushika Hokusai — merely another expression of the Edo boom of the 1980s and 1990s? Or does it present a different use of Edo from that which came before? In order to address this question, this article looks at the works of Ötsuka Eiji, Okada Toshio and Karatani Köjin, a group of writers to whose works theorist Azuma Hiroki links Murakami's genealogical endeavors, and takes up Azuma's critique of these writers and Murakami himself. Finally, turning to Nan Yoshitomo's and Murakami's works themselves, seen through the lens of Azuma's arguments in his recent The Animalizing Postrnodern, this article argues that their art — and in turn the Superflat itself — is guided by a logic of compositing that is far more informed by contemporary modes of digital imaging than by the mode of appropriation and quasi-historization that characterized the use of Edo in Japan's postmodern 1980s and 1990s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]