Description
Book SynopsisAssembling Japan focuses on Japan’s modernization as a long-term process that is reliant on changing technology and that has led to the nation’s full engagement with the global system. This process forms a complex field of tensions, full of interesting dynamisms and synergies that can be best understood through the book’s methodology: anthropological analysis combined with historical contextualization.
The approaches in this collection are manifold. Some chapters examine the themes of modernity, technology and Japan’s global experience though popular culture, from reggae to football, from television to film. Other topics include coffee, travel, economics, cultural politics and technological innovation in the field of robotics. All of the contributions aim to show how these global interactions have occurred and continue to take place in twenty-first-century Japan.
Table of ContentsContents: Griseldis Kirsch/Dolores P. Martinez: Japan as an Assemblage – Merry White: Cafe Society in Japan: Global Coffee and Urban Space – Christine R. Yano: «A Japanese in Every Jet»: Globalism and Gendered Service in the Jet Age – Joy Hendry: Rewrapping the Message: Museums, Healing and Communicative Power – Wolfram Manzenreiter/John Horne: Football in the Community: Global Culture, Local Needs and Diversity in Japan – Griseldis Kirsch: Relocating Japan? Japan, China and the West in Japanese Television Dramas – Bruce White: Japanese Reggae and the Def Tech Phenomenon: Global Paths to Intra-cultural Pluralism – Heung-wah Wong/Hoi-yan Yau: The More I Shop at Yaohan, the More I Become a
Heung Gong Yahn (Hongkongese): Japan and the Formation of a Hong Kong Identity – Dolores P. Martinez: Global Technologies, Local Interventions: Or Musings on Japanese Film – Hirofumi Katsuno: Branding Humanoid Japan – Griseldis Kirsch/Wolfram Manzenreiter/John Horne/Merry White/Hirofumi Katsuno/Dolores P. Martinez: Afterword: Reassembling after 3/11.
