Hamlet has always been the most popular of Shakespeare's plays in Japan. This is a collection of critical essays by Japanese authors, looking at a variety of aspects of the play.

Since the late Meiji period, Shakespeare has held a central place in Japanese literary culture. This account explores the conditions of Shakespeare's reception and assimilation. It considers the problems of translation both cultural and linguistic, and includes an extensive illustrated survey of the most significant Shakespearean productions and adaptations, and the contrasting responses of Japanese and Western critics.

Since the late Meiji period, Shakespeare has held a central place in Japanese literary culture. This work considers the cultural and linguistic problems of translation and includes an illustrated survey of the most significant Shakespearean productions and adaptations, and the contrasting responses of Japanese and Western critics.

An anthology of three exciting Japanese adaptations of Shakespeare that engage with issues such as changing family values, racial diversity, the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and terrorism, together with a contextualizing introduction. The anthology makes contemporary Japanese adaptations of Shakespeare by three independent theatre companies available to a wider English language audience. The three texts are concerned with the social issues Japan faces today and Japan's perception of its cultural history. This unique collection is thus both a valuable resource for the fields of Shakespeare and adaptation studies as well as for a better understanding of contemporary Japanese theatre.

This study is a result of three continuous years of fieldwork in a hamlet in rural Japan. The data presented and analyzed here consist of records from participant observation, formal and informal interviews, casual conversation and formal questionnaires, and public and private documents. The subject of this research is group decision making, and the results of this process are, after all, a matter of public record. The major conclusions of this study are outlined in their simplest and most straightforward form. A hamlet is fundamentally a nexus for the organization of productive exchange among member households, the form of exchange through which two or more parties actively combine their resources to produce something of value not available, or as cheaply available, to any of them separately. Defection from productive exchange agreements by hamlet members is reduced by making access to future valuable transactions and corporate property contingent upon the integrity of each current exchange transaction. This method of combining a common interest in production with contingent access to productive resources is termed mutual investment and is the major source of consensus in hamlet decision making. When only cooperate resources are at issue, decisions regularly result in unanimity. When a course of action can be implemented only if hamlet members relinquish control over individually held resources, a division will emerge among the membership. Whether or not a formal vote is taken, the distribution of differing opinion will be known through more informal means of communication. In all cases of division, by the time the course of action to be implemented is formally announced, the minority in opposition will be extremely small. The question then must be resolved whether those in the minority will participate in the implementation or resign as hamlet members. This book is written with two rather disparate audiences in mind: readers interested primarily in exchange and decision-making phenomenon, on the one hand, and readers interested primarily in the unity of experience represented by the Japanese sensibility, on the other.

This groundbreaking collection examines the regional dynamics of state societies, looking at how people use the concepts of urban and rural, traditional and modern, and industrial and agricultural to define their existence and the experience of living in contemporary Japanese society. The book focuses on the Tohoku (Northeast) region, which many Japanese consider rural, agrarian, undeveloped economically, and the epitome of the traditional way of life. While this stereotype overstates the case—the region is home to one of Japan's largest cities—most Japanese contrast Tohoku (everything traditional) with Tokyo (everything modern). However, the contributors show how various regional phenomena—internationalization, lacquerware production, farming, enka (modern Japanese ballads), women's roles, and professional dance —combine the traditional, the modern, and the global. Wearing Cultural Styles in Japan demonstrates that while people use the dichotomies of urban/rural and traditional/modern in order to define their experiences, these categories are no longer useful in analyzing contemporary Japan.

This edited collection of twelve essays from an international range of contemporary Shakespeare scholars explores the supernatural in Shakespeare from a variety of perspectives and approaches.