Recent years have witnessed an explosive growth in the literature published about Japan. Yet it seems that the more that is written about Japan and Japanism – its culture, society, people – the more mysterious it becomes. As well as exploring issues relating to advertising, tourism, women, festivals and the art world, the book depicts how the study of Japanese society contributes to anthropological theory and understanding. The editors use the term ‘unwrapping’ to provide insights into Japanese culture and relate these insights to broader problems and questions prevalent in contemporary anthropological discourse. The issues explored include the contribution of applied anthropology to theory; the relationship between tourism and nostalgia; the interplay of marginality and belonging; the role of advertising in gender relations; status in the art world and the place of Japanese genres of writing within anthropology texts.

'Snapping and Wrapping' represents an original study in Japanese visual culture, pictorial communication, and photographic studies. Vernacular visual culture is highlighted, stressing ordinary people and everyday life to explore photographic expressions of Japanese family life. The theme of “how people looked” is described from two closely related perspectives: how people appeared in their own photographs, and how people looked at specific features of their own lives with analog camera technology. The book includes unexamined material based on a qualitative study involving personal fieldwork undertaken between 1993 and 2009. The metaphor of “wrapping culture” (Hendry) is suggested for ways of interpreting relationships of personal family photographs in conjunction with acknowledged cultural influences and values of Japanese culture. Across an introduction and six chapters, the book covers a series of research topics evoked by efforts to recover, repair, and return millions of photographs to survivors following the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake. Memory, privacy and kinds of information control are reviewed as parts of strategies of sharing pictures, “presence” and the use of photographs for interpersonal interaction and communication. Throughout the monograph, emphasis is placed on understanding details of analog personal photography for potential comparisons to the intensely popular digitalization of photographic recordings and, in turn, facilitate making informed speculations for future photographic practice. This book will be of interest to upper-level students, graduate students and scholars in the fields of media and culture, Asian Studies (especially Japanese visual culture), as well as those working on sensitive relationships of family, memory and representation.

Wrapping Culture examines problems of intercultural communication and the possibilities for misinterpretation of the familiar in an unfamiliar context. Starting with an examination of Japanese gift-wrapping, Joy Hendry demonstrates how our expectations are often influenced by cultural factors which may blind us to an appreciation of underlying intent. She extends this approach to the study of polite language as the wrapping of thoughts and intentions, garments as body wrappings, constructions and gardens as wrapping of space. Hendry shows how this extends even to the ways in which people may be wrapped in seating arrangements, or meetings and drinking customs may be constrained by temporal versions of wrapping. Throughout the book, Hendry considers ways in which groups of people use such symbolic forms to impress and manipulate one another, and points out a Western tendency to underestimate such nonverbal communication, or reject it as mere decoration. She presents ideas that should be valid in any intercultural encounter and demonstrates that Japanese culture, so often thought of as a special case, can supply a model through which we can formulate general theories about human behavior.

Peter Francis Kornicki and Ian James McMullen have put together a remarkable collection of essays on different aspects of religion in Japan by an international team of contributors. The essays in this 1996 book cover a wide range of subjects, from the new religions of post-war Japan to beliefs about fox-possession in the Heian period, and from French missionaries in Okinawa in the mid-nineteenth century to the Ainu bear festival in Hokkaido. Other chapters examine the religious life of Minamoto no Yoritomo, the founder of the first shogunate in the late twelfth century, and the role of pilgrimage in Japanese religion. The essays offer fresh insights into the rich religious traditions of Japan, many of which have been previously neglected in the English-language writing on Japan.

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.

Mini-set E: Sociology & Anthropology re-issues 10 volumes originally published between 1931 and 1995 and covers topics such as japanese whaling, marriage in japan, and the japanese health care system. For institutional purchases for e-book sets please contact [email protected] (customers in the UK, Europe and Rest of World)

Examines what is called the Ceremonial Occasions industry in Japan, in particular the commercialized production of contemporary weddings there. Based on anthropological fieldwork conducted in a wedding parlour.