This volume makes available a wide variety of cultural perspectives on education and on economic and social progress. Contributors focus on three main questions, the answers to which are vital for understanding the needs of both national policy and personal fulfilment in widely differing cultures. The contributors examine the concept of the self that underlies the idea of virtue which facilitates learning in Japan, the Confucian-style bonding between generations in Chinese society and the authority of the traditional teacher with the modern Quaranic School. They study phenomena as diverse as...

Assembling 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...