Since the end of the 1980s, scholarly work on Japan has attempted to escape the bounds of the previous discourse that continuously described it as changing Japan, a discourse which paradoxically also focused, in the main, on the hierarchical models of this so-called vertical society. While accepting the rapid rate of social change and enduring continuities within Japan, this new wave of work also looked at the micro-level by trying to place people within the framework of the Japanese model.

The four volumes in this Routledge Major Work...

Through her detailed description of a particular place (Kuzaki-cho) at a particular moment in time (the 1980s), D. P. Martinez addresses a variety of issues currently at the fore in the anthropology of Japan: the construction of identity, both for a place and its people; the importance of ritual in a country that describes itself as nonreligious; and the relationship between men and women in a society where gender divisions are still very much in place. Kuzaki is, for the anthropologist, both a microcosm of modernity and an attempt to bring the past into the present. But it must also be...

Through her detailed description of a particular place (Kuzaki-cho) at a particular moment in time (the 1980s), D. P. Martinez addresses a variety of issues currently at the fore in the anthropology of Japan: the construction of identity, both for a place and its people; the importance of ritual in a country that describes itself as nonreligious; and the relationship between men and women in a society where gender divisions are still very much in place. Kuzaki is, for the anthropologist, both a microcosm of modernity and an attempt to bring the past into the present. But it must also be...