Joy Hendry's collection demonstrates the value of an anthropological approach to understanding a particular society by taking the reader through her own discovery of the field, explaining her practice of it in Oxford and Japan, and then offering a selection of the results and findings she obtained. Her work starts with a study of marriage made in a small rural community, continues with education and the rearing of children, and later turns to consider polite language, especially amongst women. This lead into a study of "wrapping" and cultural display, for example of gardens and theme parks, which became a comparative venture, putting Japan in a global context. Finally the book sums up change through the period of Hendry's research.

An Anthropologist in Japan is a highly personal narrative which provides unique insights into many elements of Japanese life.

In Through Japanese Eyes, based on her thirty-year research at a senior center in upstate New York, anthropologist Yohko Tsuji describes old age in America from a cross-cultural perspective. Comparing aging in America and in her native Japan, she discovers that notable differences in the panhuman experience of aging are rooted in cultural differences between these two countries, and that Americans have strongly negative attitudes toward aging because it represents the antithesis of cherished American values, especially independence. Tsuji reveals that American culture, despite its seeming lack of guidance for those aging, plays a pivotal role in elders’ lives, simultaneously assisting and constraining them. Furthermore, the author’s lengthy period of research illustrates major changes in her interlocutors’ lives, incorporating their declines and death, and significant shifts in the culture of aging in American society as Tsuji herself gets to know American culture and grows into senescence herself. Through Japanese Eyes offers an ethnography of aging in America from a cross-cultural perspective based on a lengthy period of research. It illustrates how older Americans cope with the gap between the ideal (e.g., independence) and the real (e.g., needing assistance) of growing older, and the changes the author observed over thirty years of research.

What makes for a meaningful life? In the Japanese context, the concept of ikigai provides a clue. Translated as "that which makes one's life worth living," ikigai has also come to mean that which gives a person happiness. In Japan, where the demographic cohort of elderly citizens is growing, and new modes of living and relationships are revising traditional multigenerational family structures, the elderly experience of ikigai is considered a public health concern. Without a relevant model for meaningful and joyful older age, the increasing older population of Japan must create new cultural forms that center the ikigai that comes from old age. In Making Meaningful Lives, Iza Kavedžija provides a rich anthropological account of the lives and concerns of older Japanese women and men. Grounded in years of ethnographic fieldwork at two community centers in Osaka, Kavedžija offers an intimate narrative analysis of the existential concerns of her active, independent subjects. Alone and in groups, the elderly residents of these communities make sense of their lives and shifting ikigai with humor, conversation, and storytelling. They are as much providers as recipients of care, challenging common images of the elderly as frail and dependent, while illustrating a more complex argument: maintaining independence nevertheless requires cultivating multiple dependences on others. Making Meaningful Lives argues that an anthropology of the elderly is uniquely suited to examine the competing values of dependence and independence, sociality and isolation, intimacy and freedom, that people must balance throughout all of life's stages.

This book is an unprecedented collection of 29 original essays by some of the world’s most distinguished scholars of Japan. Covers a broad range of issues, including the colonial roots of anthropology in the Japanese academy; eugenics and nation building; majority and minority cultures; genders and sexualities; and fashion and food cultures Resists stale and misleading stereotypes, by presenting new perspectives on Japanese culture and society Makes Japanese society accessible to readers unfamiliar with the country

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"Rohten has demonstrated that traditional anthropological method and theory can be adjusted to the analysis of complex organizations. The book provides a holistic perspective of a Japanese bank and its more than 3,000 employees. Methodologically, Rohlen analyzed this bank in much the same fashion as he would have carried out the study of a small community. Eleven months of participant observation within the bank and among its employees after work provided the major source of data. . . Possibly the most important finding of the study is that despite surface similarities with banks throughout the world, the Japanese have evolved an institution which is radically different. This bank, like many modern Japanese businesses, is organized to secure a common livelihood and way of life for its employees . . . more than the best cultural analysis of a Japanese business, for the book also contributes to the fields of Japanese cultural change and modernization process essential reading."--American Anthropologist "The account is adorned with an unusually rich selection of illustration from the speeches of firm officers, company records and documents, and of course extensive observations from employees . . . As a case study of a single Japanese organization, For Harmony and Strength is a superb effort that penetrates deeper than any other book in the English language."--Contemporary Sociology "A first-rate contribution to the literature in applied anthropology and comparative and cross-cultural management for the insights it provides on management of white-collar employees in Japan."--Industrial and Labor Relations Review "A well-written, thoroughly researched study of the internal life of a single Japanese organization . . Unlike most previous writers, Aohlen deals with the separate recruitment, work, and leisure patterns of the bank's women employees. As an anthropologist he has particular sensitivity to the ritual meanings of bank songs, ceremonies, and extensive training activities . . . one of the best analyses to date of how Japanese organization works."--Library Journal "What emerges from Rohlen's convincing and penetrating analysis is a picture of a thoroughly 'Japanese' business organization deeply imbued with Japanese cultural values .. . . in its sensitivity to cultural meanings and in its analytical coherence in the presentation of data, this book is a model of scholarship matched by few ethnographies. It will be consulted by those specializing in Japan, those interested in organizational behavior, and those interested in seeing 'the meanings of fundamental matters, ' for a long time to come.''--Journal of Asian Studies