America’s Japan and Japan’s Performing Arts studies the images and myths that have shaped the reception of Japan-related theater, music, and dance in the United States since the 1950s. Soon after World War II, visits by Japanese performing artists to the United States emerged as a significant category of American cultural-exchange initiatives aimed at helping establish and build friendly ties with Japan. Barbara E. Thornbury explores how “Japan” and “Japanese culture” have been constructed, reconstructed, and transformed in response to the hundreds of productions that have taken place over the past sixty years in New York, the main entry point and defining cultural nexus in the United States for the global touring market in the performing arts. The author’s transdisciplinary approach makes the book appealing to those in the performing arts studies, Japanese studies, and cultural studies.

There is a growing awareness that the arts and culture have an important role to play in forming the image that nations hold of themselves. Cross-cultural analysis of the policies in Japan and the VS, countries with very different cultural traditions. Case studies of organizations in art, music, dance and drama examine the elements that contribute to effective arts management and policy making.

To what extent can music be employed to shape one culture's understanding of another? In the American imagination, Japan has represented the "most alien" nation for over 150 years. This perceived difference has inspired fantasies--of both desire and repulsion--through which Japanese culture has profoundly impacted the arts and industry of the U.S. While the influence of Japan on American and European painting, architecture, design, theater, and literature has been celebrated in numerous books and exhibitions, the role of music has been virtually ignored until now. W. Anthony Sheppard's Extreme Exoticism offers a detailed documentation and wide-ranging investigation of music's role in shaping American perceptions of the Japanese, the influence of Japanese music on American composers, and the place of Japanese Americans in American musical life. Presenting numerous American encounters with and representations of Japanese music and Japan, this book reveals how music functions in exotic representation across a variety of genres and media, and how Japanese music has at various times served as a sign of modernist experimentation, a sounding board for defining American music, and a tool for reshaping conceptions of race and gender. From the Tin Pan Alley songs of the Russo-Japanese war period to Weezer's Pinkerton album, music has continued to inscribe Japan as the land of extreme exoticism.

Flowers Cracking Concrete is the first in-depth study of the forty-year career of Eiko & Koma—two artists from Japan who have lived and worked in New York City since the mid-1970s, establishing themselves as innovative and influential modern and postmodern dancers. They continue to choreograph, perform, and give workshops across the United States and around the world. Rosemary Candelario argues that what is remarkable about Eiko & Koma’s dances is not what they signify but rather what they do in the world. Each chapter of the book is a close reading of a specific dance that reveals a choreographic theme or concern. Drawing on interviews, live performance, videos, and reviews, Candelario demonstrates how ideas have kinesthetically and choreographically cycled through Eiko & Koma’s body of work, creating dances deeply engaged with the wider world through an active process of mourning, transforming, and connecting.

A product of twenty-five years of archival and primary research, Sounding Our Way Home: Japanese American Musicking and the Politics of Identity narrates the efforts of three generations of Japanese Americans to reach “home” through musicking. Using ethnomusicology as a lens, Susan Miyo Asai examines the musical choices of a population that, historically, is considered outside the racial and ethnic boundaries of American citizenship. Emphasizing the notion of national identity and belonging, the volume provokes a discussion about the challenges of nation-building in a democratic society. Asai addresses the politics of music, interrogating the ways musicking functions as a performance of social, cultural, and political identification for Japanese Americans in the United States. Musicking is an inherently political act at the intersection of music, identity, and politics, particularly if it involves expressing one’s ethnicity and/or race. Asai further investigates how Japanese American ethnic identification and cultural practices relate to national belonging. Musicking cultivates a narrative of a shared history and aesthetic between performers and listeners. The discourse situates not only Japanese Americans, but all Asians into the Black/white binary of race relations in the United States. Sounding Our Way Home contributes to the ongoing struggle for acceptance and equal representation for people of color in the US. A history of Japanese American musicking across three generations, the book unveils the social and political discrimination that nonwhite immigrants and their offspring continue to face when it comes to finding acceptance in US society and culture.

Addresses the American experience with the Japanese pop culture craze, including anime from Hayao Miyazaki's epics to the burgeoning world of hentai, or violent pornographic anime to Haruki Murakami's fiction.

"Japanese Americans developed complex silences in response to social and religious marginalization. Utilizing case studies and histories of Japanese American arts--gardening, origami, jazz, and monuments. Enfolding Silence employs interdisciplinary analysis to uncover 'non-binary silences' that are mixtures of silences from religion, art, and oppression"--Provided by publisher.