Today s convergent media environment offers unprecedented opportunities for sourcing and disseminating previously obscure popular culture material from Japan. However, this presents concerns regarding copyright, ratings and exposure to potentially illegal content which are serious problems for those teaching and researching about Japan. Despite young people s enthusiasm for Japanese popular culture, these concerns spark debate about whether it can be judged harmful for youth audiences and could therefore herald the end of cool Japan .

This collection brings together Japan specialists in...

Hailed by Japanese critics as a milestone in the study of contemporary Japanese media, this book explores the contemporary boom in Japanese media representations of the recent past. Recent years have seen the production of an unprecedented number of films, animation, manga, and television programmes representing a deeply nostalgic longing for the Japanese heyday of high economic growth in the 1960s and occasionally the 1970s known in Japan as the Sh wa 30s and 40s.

Hidaka provides a comprehensive account of an under researched contemporary Japanese media phenomenon by exploring why...

This book provides an historical overview of the Japanese Communist Party from its foundation to the present. It outlines the development of the party, explores its stance on key issues and discusses how the party has set a high moral tone, avoiding compromising coalitions with other parties, being intolerant of corruption within its own ranks, and frequently and consistently opposing the ruling Liberal Democratic Party. The book also considers the internal nature of the party, which continues to have a mass membership, and which in recent years has softened its former somewhat rigid...

Japan is heterogeneous and culturally diverse, both historically through ancient waves of immigration and in recent years due its foreign relations and internationalization. However, Japan has socially, culturally, politically and intellectually constructed a distinct and homogeneous identity. More recently, such an identity construction has been rightfully questioned and challenged by Japan s culturally diverse groups.

This book explores the discursive systems of cultural identities that regenerate the illusion of Japan as a homogeneous nation. Contributors from a variety of...

This book is about why and how central and local governments clash over important national policy decisions. Its empirical focus is on the local politics of Japan which has significantly shaped, and been shaped by, larger developments in national politics. The book argues that since the 1990s, changes in the national political arena, fiscal and administrative decentralization, as well as broader socio-economic developments have led to a decoupling of once closely-integrated national and local party systems in Japan. Such decoupling has led to a breakdown of symbiotic relations between the...

This book engages with gender hierarchy and structural inequality in Japanese society and examines the household register, koseki, one of the central structures shaping gender in Japan today.

Japanese Studies has provided a fertile space for non-Eurocentric analysis for a number of reasons. It has been embroiled in the long-running internal debate over the so-called Nihonjinron, revolving around the extent to which the effective interpretation of Japanese society and culture requires non-Western, Japan-specific emic concepts and theories. This book takes this question further and explores how we can understand Japanese society and culture by combining Euro-American concepts and theories with those that originate in Japan. Because Japan is the only liberal democracy to have...

Japanese literature and film have frequently been approached using lenses such as language, genre and ideology. Yet, despite a succession of major social traumas that have marked, and in many ways shaped and defined much of modern Japan, Japanese fiction and cinema have not often been examined psychoanalytically.

In this book, David Stahl conducts in-depth readings and interpretations of a set of Japanese novels and film. By introducing the methodology of trauma/PTSD studies, Stahl seeks to provide a better understanding of the insights of Japanese writers and directors...