In Optical Allusions: Screens, Paintings, and Poetry in Classical Japan (ca. 800-1200), Joseph T. Sorensen illustrates how, on both the theoretical and the practical level, painted screens and other visual art objects helped define some of the essential characteristics of Japanese court poetry. In his examination of the important genre later termed screen poetry, Sorensen employs ekphrasis (the literary description of a visual art object) as a framework to analyze poems composed on or for painted screens. He provides close readings of poems and their social, political, and...

Male homosexual narratives in various genres and media--from "high-brow" literature by distinguished female authors to "pornographic" comic books produced and distributed by amateurs--have attracted the attention of a number of cultural critics in Japan and abroad. This book represents the first extensive critical attempt to examine Japanese women's narratives of male homosexuality/homoeroticism, addressing not only popular culture genres, but also the considerable body of critically acclaimed literary works (with English translations of the original works). The result is an in-depth analysis...

Suzuki Bokushi (1770-1842) was an elite villager in Echigo, a snowy province of Japan. Crossing Boundaries in Tokugawa Society presents a vivid picture of the life and world of this rural commoner, focusing on his interaction with the changing social and cultural environment of the late Tokugawa period (1603-1868). Bokushi's life and texts challenge notions of the rigidity of social boundaries between the urban and the rural, between social statuses, and between cultural and intellectual communities. However, his activities were still restrained by the external environment because of...

In the year 57 C.E., the court of Later Han dynasty presented a gold seal to an emissary from somewhere in what is now Japan. The seal soon vanished from history, only to be unearthed in 1784 in Japan. In the subsequent two-plus centuries, nearly 400 books and articles (mostly by Japanese) have addressed every conceivable issue surrounding this small object of gold. Joshua Fogel places the conferment of the seal in inter-Asian diplomacy of the first century and then traces four waves of historical analysis that the seal has undergone since its discovery, as the standards of historical...

As early as prewar Japan, thinkers of various intellectual proveniences had begun discussing the most important topics of contemporary media and communication studies, such as ways to define the social function of the press, journalism and the formation of public opinion. In Public Opinion - Propaganda - Ideology, light is particularly shed on press scholar Ono Hideo, his disciple the sociologist and propaganda researcher Koyama Eizō, Marxist philosopher Tosaka Jun and sociologist and postwar intellectual Shimizu Ikutarō. Besides introducing the different approaches of the...

This study of a series of artistic representations of the Asia Pacific War experience in a variety of Japanese media is premised on Walter Davis' assertion that traumatic events and experiences must be 'constituted' before they can be assimilated, integrated and understood. Arguing that the contribution of the arts to the constitution, integration and comprehension of traumatic historical events has yet to be sufficiently acknowledged or articulated, the contributors to this volume examine how various Japanese authors and other artists have drawn upon their imaginative powers to create...

In the Edo period, Japan had its first experience of what one might call "intellectual life" in a pregnant sense of the word: a scene that combined serious intellectual pursuits, from poetry writing to the interpretation of the Confucian classics, with intense social interaction. Edo-period Japan was crisscrossed by networks of poets, scholars, artists and collectors who exchanged information, discussed each other's work, cooperated in collaborative projects, and gossiped about each other. Intellectual life in Edo Japan was a seething cauldron of social interaction and competition, sometimes...

The Genpei War of 1180-1185 signaled a crucial shift in Japanese history because it gave birth to the shogunate, or government run by warriors. How was the emergence of this new polity following a contentious civil war explained in literary texts? This book argues that political authority is made visible in the variant texts of the Heike monogatari corpus through rituals that map the ideal social-cosmic order, overwriting untidy historical realities. Artifacts of material culture likewise provide the social and political codes to authenticate warrior power and manage its violence....

Sacred Space in the Modern City offers strikingly new and original perspectives on a number of controversial issues and important questions concerning Japanese pre- and post-war ideology and identity. Meiji shrine is not just 'a' shrine; it is 'the' shrine of twentieth-century Japan. This book is also noteworthy on account of its use of previously untouched archival materials as well as for its broad range of theoretical approaches applied within a multidisciplinary context. The author uses Meiji shrine as a lens with which to investigate the nature of the society that created,...

In Man'yōshū and the Imperial Imagination in Early Japan, Torquil Duthie examines the literary representation of the late seventh-century Yamato court as a realm of "all under heaven." Through close readings of the early volumes of the poetic anthology Man'yōshū (c. eighth century) and the last volumes of the official history Nihon shoki (c. 720), Duthie shows how competing political interests and different styles of representation produced not a unified ideology, but rather a "bundle" of disparate imperial imaginaries collected around the figure of...