Spanning the earliest attempts to brew beer to the recent popularity of local craft brews, Brewed in Japan presents the first English-language exploration of beer's steady rise to become the "beverage of the masses." Alexander underscores the highly receptive nature of Japanese consumers, who adopted and domesticated beer in just a few generations, despite its entirely foreign origins. He also sheds light on the various social, cultural, and financial influences that combined to make beer Japan's leading alcoholic beverage by the 1960s. Japan's beer market is now among the most complex on earth, and it continues to evolve. Visit the author's website at www.brewedinjapan.com.

Although Japan's beer industry dates back nearly 145 years, to date there has been no English-language source documenting its origins, growth, and evolution. Spanning the earliest attempts to brew beer to the recent popularity of local craft brews, Brewed in Japan charts beer's steady rise to become the "beverage of the masses." Alexander sheds light on the advent of Western-style taverns and beer gardens, the control of beer production by Japan's Ministry of Finance during the Second World War, the rapid rise in women's beer consumption postwar, and the continued dominance of long-surviving firms like Asahi, Kirin, and Sapporo. Brewed in Japan underscores the highly receptive nature of Japanese consumers, who adopted and domesticated beer in just a few generations, despite its entirely foreign origins. Featuring an array of Japanese sources, this book further illustrates how post-war marketing campaigns and shifting consumer preferences made beer Japan's leading alcoholic beverage by the 1960s. Alexander's historical study of Japan's beer industry will be of interest to historians of modern Japanese history and cultural studies, as well as to historians of business, food studies, and the beverage industry in general.

-The first English-language guide to Japanese craft beer. -Information on 219 present and forthcoming Japanese breweries. -Completely independent, in-depth analysis of 104 Japanese craft breweries and their beers. -Listing and evaluation of 136 brewpubs, bars, tap rooms, and stores where one can drink or purchase Japanese craft beer. -50 pages of essays on the development of and culture surrounding beer in Japan. -Guide to Japanese craft beer festivals.

Co-founded 40 years ago, by a young engineer named Akio Morita, Sony is now one of the most powerful and respected multinational corporations in the world, and Morita is its outspoken chairman. This autobiography charts the growth of the company, from the initial attempts to make a tape recorder to the sales of Walkman.

Colonel Sanders, Elvis, Mickey Mouse, and Jack Daniels have been enthusiastically embraced by Japanese consumers in recent decades. But rather than simply imitate or borrow from the West, the Japanese reinterpret and transform Western products and practices to suit their culture. This entertaining and enlightening book shows how in the process of domesticating foreign goods and customs, the Japanese have created a culture in which once-exotic practices (such as ballroom dancing) have become familiar, and once- familiar practices (such as public bathing) have become exotic. Written by scholars from anthropology, sociology, and the humanities, the book ranges from analyses of Tokyo Disneyland and the Japanese passion for the Argentinean tango to discussions of Japanese haute couture and the search for an authentic nouvelle cuisine japonaise. These topics are approached from a variety of perspectives, with explorations of the interrelations of culture, ideology, and national identity and analyses of the roles that gender, class, generational, and regional differences play in the patterning of Japanese consumption. The result is a fascinating look at a dynamic society that is at once like and unlike our own.

For centuries the accommodation between Japan and Christianity has been an uneasy one. Compared with others of its Asian neighbors, the churches in Japan have never counted more than a small minority of believers more or less resigned to patterns of ritual and belief transplanted from the West. But there is another side to the story, one little known and rarely told: the rise of indigenous movements aimed at a Christianity that is at once made in Japan and faithful to the scriptures and apostolic tradition. Christianity Made in Japan draws on extensive field research to give an intriguing and sympathetic look behind the scenes and into the lives of the leaders and followers of several indigenous movements in Japan. Focusing on the "native" response rather than Western missionary efforts and intentions, it presents varieties of new interpretations of the Christian tradition. It gives voice to the unheard perceptions and views of many Japanese Christians, while raising questions vital to the self-understanding of Christianity as a truly "world religion." This ground-breaking study makes a largely unknown religious world accessible to outsiders for the first time. Students and scholars alike will find it a valuable addition to the literature on Japanese religions and society and on the development of Christianity outside the West. By offering an alternative approach to the study and understanding of Christianity as a world religion and the complicated process of cross-cultural diffusion, it represents a landmark that will define future research in the field.

This fascinating book—part ethnography, part memoir—traces Japan’s vibrant café society over one hundred and thirty years. Merry White traces Japan’s coffee craze from the turn of the twentieth century, when Japan helped to launch the Brazilian coffee industry, to the present day, as uniquely Japanese ways with coffee surface in Europe and America. White’s book takes up themes as diverse as gender, privacy, perfectionism, and urbanism. She shows how coffee and coffee spaces have been central to the formation of Japanese notions about the uses of public space, social change, modernity, and pleasure. White describes how the café in Japan, from its start in 1888, has been a place to encounter new ideas and experiments in thought, behavior, sexuality , dress, and taste. It is where a person can be socially, artistically, or philosophically engaged or politically vocal. It is also, importantly, an urban oasis, where one can be private in public.