A Career of Japan is the first study of one of the major photographers and personalities of nineteenth-century Japan. Baron Raimund von Stillfried was the most important foreign-born photographer of the Meiji era and one of the first globally active photographers of his generation. Based on extensive new primary sources and unpublished documents from archives around the world, this book examines von Stillfried’s significance as a cultural mediator between Japan and Central Europe. Awarded the 2nd Professor Josef Kreiner Hosei University Award for International Japanese Studies.

Since Japan’s economic recession began in the 1990s, the female workforce has experienced revolutionary changes as greater numbers of women have sought to establish careers. Employment trends indicate that increasingly white-collar professional women are succeeding in breaking through the "glass ceiling", as digital technologies blur and redefine work in spatial, gendered, and ideological terms. This book examines what motivates Japanese women to pursue professional careers in the contemporary neoliberal economy, and how they reconfigure notions of selfhood while doing so. It analyses how professional women contest conventional notions of femininity in contemporary Japan and in turn, negotiate new gender roles and cultural assumptions about women, whilst reorganizing the Japanese workplace and wider socio-economic relationships. Further, the book explores how professional women create new social identities through the mutual conditioning of structure and self, and asks how women come to understand their experiences; how their actions change the gendering of the workforce; and how their lives shape the economic, political, social, and cultural landscapes of this post-industrial nation. Based on extensive fieldwork, Career Women in Contemporary Japan will have broad appeal across a range of disciplines including Japanese culture and society, gender and family studies, women’s studies, anthropology, ethnology and sociology.

Annotation Ten years ago we were publishing much about the economic successes in Japan, their management and HR practices. During the recent economic downturn in Japan we have heard much less. This is a real opportunity to learn what Japanese organizations have been doing to respond to the problems. Some of the papers are real case studies and are based in the automotive, hotel and retail sectors. The authors are based at respected universities in Japan.

_______________ 'Surreal and unsettling' - Observer Cultural Highlight 'Wise, comical and exceptionally relatable' - Zeba Talkhani 'Quietly hilarious and deeply attuned to the uncanny rhythms and deadpan absurdity of the daily grind' - Sharlene Teo _______________ A woman walks into an employment agency and requests a job that requires no reading, no writing – and ideally, very little thinking. She is sent to an office building where she is tasked with watching the hidden-camera feed of an author suspected of storing contraband goods. But observing someone for hours on end isn't so easy. How will she stay awake? When can she take delivery of her favourite brand of tea? And, perhaps more importantly – how did she find herself in this situation in the first place? As she moves from job to job, writing bus adverts for shops that mysteriously disappear, and composing advice for rice cracker wrappers that generate thousands of devoted followers, it becomes increasingly apparent that she's not searching for the easiest job at all, but something altogether more meaningful... _______________ 'An irreverent but thoughtful voice, with light echoes of Haruki Murakami ... the book is uncannily timely ... a novel as smart as is quietly funny' - Financial Times 'Polly Barton's translation skilfully captures the protagonist's dejected, anxious voice and her deadpan humour ... imaginative and unusual' - Times Literary Supplement

In an era of irregular labor, nagging recession, nuclear contamination, and a shrinking population, Japan is facing precarious times. How the Japanese experience insecurity in their daily and social lives is the subject of Precarious Japan. Tacking between the structural conditions of socioeconomic life and the ways people are making do, or not, Anne Allison chronicles the loss of home affecting many Japanese, not only in the literal sense but also in the figurative sense of not belonging. Until the collapse of Japan's economic bubble in 1991, lifelong employment and a secure income were within reach of most Japanese men, enabling them to maintain their families in a comfortable middle-class lifestyle. Now, as fewer and fewer people are able to find full-time work, hope turns to hopelessness and security gives way to a pervasive unease. Yet some Japanese are getting by, partly by reconceiving notions of home, family, and togetherness.

Reworking Japan examines how the past several decades of neoliberal economic restructuring and reforms have challenged Japan's corporate ideologies, gendered relations, and subjectivities of individual employees. With Japan's remarkable economic growth since the 1950s, the lifestyles and life courses of "salarymen" came to embody the "New Middle Class" family ideal. However, the nearly three decades of economic stagnation and reforms since the bursting of the economic bubble in the early 1990s has intensified corporate retrenchment under the banner of neoliberal restructuring and brought new challenges to employees and their previously protected livelihoods. In a sweeping appraisal of recent history, Gagné demonstrates how economic restructuring has reshaped Japanese corporations, workers, and ideals, as well as how Japanese companies and employees have resisted and actively responded to such changes. Gagné explores Japan's fraught and problematic transition from the postwar ideology of "companyism" to the emergent ideology of neoliberalism and the subsequent large-scale economic restructuring. By juxtaposing Japan's economic transformation with an ethnography of work and play, and individual life histories, Gagné goes beyond the abstract to explore the human dimension of the neoliberal reforms that have impacted the nation's corporate governance, socioeconomic class, workers' subjectivities, and family relations. Reworking Japan, with its firsthand analysis of how the supposedly hegemonic neoliberal regime does not completely transform existing cultural frames and social relations, will shake up preconceived ideas about Japanese men and the social effects of neoliberalism.

Since Japan’s economic recession began in the 1990s, the female workforce has experienced revolutionary changes as greater numbers of women have sought to establish careers. Employment trends indicate that increasingly white-collar professional women are succeeding in breaking through the "glass ceiling", as digital technologies blur and redefine work in spatial, gendered, and ideological terms. This book examines what motivates Japanese women to pursue professional careers in the contemporary neoliberal economy, and how they reconfigure notions of selfhood while doing so. It analyses how professional women contest conventional notions of femininity in contemporary Japan and in turn, negotiate new gender roles and cultural assumptions about women, whilst reorganizing the Japanese workplace and wider socio-economic relationships. Further, the book explores how professional women create new social identities through the mutual conditioning of structure and self, and asks how women come to understand their experiences; how their actions change the gendering of the workforce; and how their lives shape the economic, political, social, and cultural landscapes of this post-industrial nation. Based on extensive fieldwork, Career Women in Contemporary Japan will have broad appeal across a range of disciplines including Japanese culture and society, gender and family studies, women’s studies, anthropology, ethnology and sociology.