Osamu Soda, Philosophy of Agricultural Science: A Japanese Perspective (Hardcover)

Shigeru Nakayama and Kunio Goto (eds), A Social History of Science and Technology in Contemporary Japan, volume 3, 1960-1969

This title is the third volume of a comprehensive, four-volume survey documenting the miraculous growth of Japanese science and technology from postwar devastation to attaining leading global status. Volume 3 deals with the high growth period from 1960 to 1969. The team of more than fifty Japanese experts labored for ten years in assembling the unique materials into a monumental work of careful scholarship. The study won the prestigious Mainichi Publications Award in 1995. Hardcover.

Kimiko Kimoto, Gender and Japanese Management (Paperback)

Using data from surveys conducted in a department store and a supermarket, this ground-breaking study discusses the forces shaping job segregation by gender. Kimiko Kimoto shows that the portrayal of women as necessarily disadvantaged participants in the labour market serves only to prevent one from seeing how gender norms and relations actually develop in workplaces. She lucidly demonstrates the reasons for women's difficulties in moving beyond the lower levels of management.

Kimiko Kimoto, Gender and Japanese Management (Hardcover)

Junsuke Hara and Kazuo Seiyama, Inequality amid Affluence: Social Stratification in Japan (Paperback)

The two leading sociologists of social stratification in Japan argue that most Japanese have attained a level of income in which they no longer suffer from poverty and starvation, a situation in which Japan has achieved an equalization of 'basic wealth.' However, at the same time, there has been no progress towards the equalization of 'upper wealth.' There is inequality in many areas including income, assets, academic background, occupation, gender and lifestyles.

Junsuke Hara and Kazuo Seiyama, Inequality amid Affluence: Social Stratification in Japan (Hardcover)

J. S. Eades, Roger Goodman and Yumiko Hada (eds), The 'Big Bang' in Japanese Higher Education: The 2004 Reforms and the Dynamics of Change

On 1 April 2004, Japanese higher education experienced a 'big bang', a set of reforms that have been described as the most significant institutional changes for over a century. One of the main aims is to make Japanese universities more competitive internationally, by eliminating the differences between national, public and private schools, and by giving them greater autonomy from the state in day-to-day administration and decision-making. At the same time, these institutions are facing an increasing demographic crisis, as they compete for a declining number of potential students, thanks to the falling Japanese birthrate. The chapters of this book examine these changes and the background to them from a variety of perspectives, including those of the government, the teachers and the students. Issues examined include the history of Japanese universities, their relation with the state, university management, internationalization, the struggle to attract students, the problems of language teaching, the impact of information technology, and efforts to upgrade the level of research.

Review in the Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies

Koichi Hasegawa, Constructing Civil Society in Japan: Voices of Environmental Movements (Paperback)

Based on four epoch-making case studies, this book offers an overview of contemporary Japan's changing attitudes and policies regarding environmental issues.

Beginning in the 1970s, the author traces the way the rapid growth of environmental politics and actions contributed to the development of a vibrant civil society. It is argued that recent environmental movements in Japan have created a new, more active public sphere, one that provides a guideline for a sustainable society. This book represents an important contribution to the growing field of environmental sociology.

Koichi Hasegawa, Constructing Civil Society in Japan: Voices of Environmental Movements (Hardcover)

Susumu Shimazono, From Salvation to Spirituality: Popular Religious Movements in Modern Japan (Paperback)

One of Japan's foremost sociologists of religion, Susumu Shimazono deals with the development of popular religious and spiritual movements in Japan in the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. At present, it is estimated that more than ten percent of Japan's total population are members of the so-called New Religions. Whilst Buddhist and Shintoist influences remain pronounced, there are many other features common to modern Japan's popular religious thinking. Through a careful study of these features, the author examines classical concepts and theories of religious studies, proposes alternative approaches, and reconsiders religion in modernity in the context of Japanese cultural heritage.

Susumu Shimazono, From Salvation to Spirituality: Popular Religious Movements in Modern Japan (Hardcover)

Robert Stuart Yoder, Youth Deviance in Japan: Class Reproduction of Non-Conformity (Paperback)

Based on fieldwork spanning two decades, this book presents a rare longitudinal study of deviance and crime among youths in Kanagawa-ken, with a focus upon two groups of young people - a working class group and a middle-class group. The author, a long-term resident in Japan, has managed to keep in touch with his subjects for twenty years and offers vivid descriptions of nonconformity among Japanese youngsters and an in-depth analysis of the way in which youth deviance is reproduced along class lines.

Robert Stuart Yoder, Youth Deviance In Japan: Class Reproduction of Non-Conformity (Hardcover)

Masami Nomura and Yoshihiko Kamii (eds), Japanese Companies: Theories and Realities (Paperback)

This book challenges Masahiko Aoki's influential J-firm theory, which explains the behavior of Japanese firms in terms of game theory. Demonstrating the theory's methodological and empirical shortcomings, the authors, a group of Japanese economists, offer an alternative theoretical framework for understanding Japanese business culture and present a series of empirical studies of Japanese companies, which focus on skill formation, information sharing, subcontracting and the role of labor unions.

Masami Nomura and Yoshihiko Kamii (eds), Japanese Companies: Theories and Realities (Hardcover)

Takami Kuwayama, Native Anthropology: The Japanese Challenge to Western Academic Hegemony (Paperback)

In terms of the academic world system, Japan exists on the periphery. The Japanese are anthropological natives in the sense that although they have long been objects of Western representation, their voices have seldom been heard by those at the center. The frequent neglect of Japanese scholarship on Japan by Japanologists in the Anglophone community attests to this point. The central objective of this book, then, is to reveal the global power dynamics involved in the structure of anthropological knowledge.

Takami Kuwayama, Native Anthropology: The Japanese Challenge to Western Academic Hegemony (Hardcover)

Chizuko Ueno, Nationalism and Gender (Paperback)

This title is Chizuko Ueno's first English-language book. One of Japan's foremost feminist theorists here employs her typically lucid, hard-hitting style to confront head on the various actors in the debate surrounding the issue of 'comfort women'. While skillfully dismantling the neo-nationalist argument of the 'historical revisionists,' Ueno is no less biting in her treatment of her traditional political and intellectual allies - left-wing historians and feminist supporters of the 'comfort women' - a fact that has made the book highly controversial in Japan.

Chizuko Ueno, Nationalism and Gender (Hardcover)

John Clammer, Japan and Its Others (Paperback)
The book explores Japan's relationship with Asia and the world, examines contemporary Japanese thinking about Japan's 'others' and how this impacts on local discourses about uniqueness, modernity, internal minorities and 'postmodern' conceptions of Japanese culture, religion and psychic makeup.

JAPAN AND ITS OTHERS attempts to take local knowledge seriously, pursue the 'centrality of the emotions' as a viable avenue for understanding Japanese society and enrich the scope of cultural studies and sociology of Japanese capitalism by presenting a comparative and non-Western perspective.

Review in the Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies

Tadao Umesao, An Ecological View of History: Japanese Civilization in the World Context (Paperback)

This is the first English version of the author's classic published first in Japanese in 1957, with a full description of his ecological theory of civilizations of Eurasia. Dividing the Eurasian continent into three major ecological zones, consisting of Western Europe, Japan, and the region in between, he shows how the first two are basically simiar and demonstrates fundamental differences between Japan and China.

In 1998, when an influential monthly, BUNGEI SHUNJU, solicited the ten most impactful books in the twentieth century from more than 170 intellectuals in Japan, this book won the third highest voting among 67 books that were nominated.

Edited by Harmi Befu and translated by Beth Cary.

Tadao Umesao, An Ecological View of History: Japanese Civilization in the World Context (Hardcover)

Kenji Hashimoto, Class Structure in Contemporary Japan (Paperback)

Based on data collected in 1995 for the Social Stratification and Mobility Project, this book posits four major classes in Japanese society - capitalist, working, new and old middle. It investigates the characteristics and mobility patterns of each class in terms of income, work, social network, leisure activity, gender relations and voting behavior.

Kenji Hashimoto, Class Structure in Contemporary Japan (Hardcover)

Eiji Oguma, A Genealogy of 'Japanese' Self-images (Paperback)
This book is an English translation of Tan'itsu Minzoku Shinwa no Kigen, which won the Suntory Culture Award in 1996. Eiji Oguma examines the ethnic self-identity of the Japanese as represented by a vast and diverse range of authors dating from the mid-Meiji period through to the postwar years.The book presents a counter-argument to the widely held view that the Japanese have believed that they are a homogeneous nation since the Meiji period. Oguma demonstrates that the myth of ethnic homogeneity was not established during the Meiji period, nor during the Pacific War, but only after the end of World War II. The study covers a large range of areas, including archaeology, ancient history, linguistics, anthropology, ethnology, folk law, eugenics and philosophy, to obtain an overview of how a variety of authors dealt with the theme of ethnicity. It also examines how the peoples of the Japanese colonies, Korea and Taiwan, were viewed in the prewar literature on ethnic identity. The book was translated by David Askew.

Comments by the translator

Eiji Oguma, A Genealogy of 'Japanese' Self-images (Hardcover)

Machiko Sato, Farewell to Nippon: Japanese Lifestyle Migrants in Australia
This book presents an ethnographic account of a fresh breed of emigrants who have left Japan to settle in Australia in pursuit of a better quality of life. They differ from 'economic migrants' who went overseas before the 1970s for economic reasons but represent new types of 'lifestyle migrants' who seek to enjoy a more easygoing, carefree life abroad. Based on some 200 interviews, the study attempts to portray the participants' joy and sorrow, felicity and frustration as seen through their own eyes and expressed with their own words and phrases. The Japanese version of the book won the Asia-Pacific Publication Award in 1995.

Review in the Elecronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies

Harumi Befu, Hegemony of Homogeneity: An Anthropological Analysis of Nihonjinron (Paperback)
In spite of rapid changes taking place in Japan, the dominant identity discourse of Japan, Nihonjinron, has not vacated its hegemonic position in the ideological landscape of common people. Japanese intellectuals have been producing and continue to produce a massive and ever increasing literature on the subject with no end in sight. In Hegemony of Homogeneity, Harumi Befu, a bilingual anthropologist who has dedicated his past 40 years working on Japan, dissects, analyzes, and interprets this discourse by consultinghundreds of original sources in Japanese. Nihonjinron discourse is argued, among others, as a civil religion of the Japanese and a creature responding to Japan's changing geopolitical and geoeconomic environment.

Hiroshi Komai, Foreign Migrants in Contemporary Japan (Paperback)
This book overviews the situation of foreign migrants in Japan based on the latest and most comprehensive available data and presents necessary policy recommendations. Hiroshi Komai, a foremost scholar in the foreign residents in Japan, demonstrates the progress of settlement and the formation of ethnic communities. Special attention is given to workers under the economic recession, along with the condition of non-workers such as pseudo-exiles, self-actualization seekers and marriage/family oriented people. The study presents an analysis of deprivation and discrimination against migrants and examines human rights violations in a wide range of areas, including subsistence, residence, liberty and freedom, social life, culture and political participation.

Review in the Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies

Johann Arnason, The Peripheral Centre: Essays on Japanese History and Civilzation (Paperback)

The main theme of this title is the complex relationship between the patterns of Japanese modernity and civilizational legacy on which they continue to draw. The book discusses the East Asian regional context of Japanese civilization, deals with the dynamics of state formation and the attendant cultural transformations in premodern Japan, and suggests ways of comparing the Japanese experience to the West. Presenting Japan as a test case for relating the emerging problematic of multiple modernities to civilizational perspectives, Arnason examines the economic foundations as well as philosophical self-interpretations of Japanese modernity.