This edition includes country reports, statistics, and background essays on the Pacific Rim, the Pacific Islands, and Japan. It also features articles from newspapers and magazines from around the world, and an annotated list of World Wide Web sites, guiding students to additional resources.

Includes country reports, statistics, and background essays on the Pacific Rim, the Pacific Islands, and Japan. This book features a wide selection of articles from newspapers and magazines from around the world, and an annotated list of World Wide Web sites that guides students to additional resources.

In the 1930s the history of Japanese photography evolved in two very different directions: one toward documentary photography, the other favoring an experimental, or avant-garde, approach strongly influenced by Western Surrealism. This book explores these two strains of modern Japanese photography through the work of two remarkable figures: Hiroshi Hamaya and Kansuke Yamamoto. Hiroshi Hamaya (1915-1999) was born and raised in Tokyo and, after an initial period of creative experimentation, turned his attention to recording traditional life and culture on the coast of the Sea of Japan. In 1940 he began photographing the New Year's rituals in a remote village, which was published as Yukiguni (Snow country). He went on to record cultural changes in China, political protests in Japan, and landscapes around the world. Kansuke Yamamoto (1914-1987) became fascinated by the innovative approaches in art and literature exemplified by such Western artists as Man Ray, Ren Magritte, and Yves Tanguy. He promoted Surrealist and avant-garde ideas in Japan through his poetry, paintings, sculptures, and photographs. Along with essays by the book's coeditors, Judith Keller and Amanda Maddox, are essays by Kotaro Iizawa, Ryuichi Kaneko, and Jonathan M. Reynolds, life chronologies, and a selection of poems by Yamamoto translated by John Solt. This book, which features more than one hundred images, accompanies an exhibition of the same name on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum from March 26 to August 25, 2013.

Our GLOBAL STUDIES Series provides students with comprehensive background and current information shaping regional cultures and countries of the world today. Each volume features country report essays and maps as well as relevant articles from world-wide publications. Visit our website for more information and a complete listing of titles: www.mhcls.com/globalstudies/

“…a new, startlingly clear-sighted vision of the often misunderstood Japanese.” ' Publishers Weekly (starred review) “…An astute, accessible, and absorbingly original appreciation of a nation whose true colors have been exaggerated or misrepresented…”' Kirkus Reviews (featured review) “…an excellent primer on post-cold war Japan.”' Time “…Smith has a discerning eye for the conflicted nature of ordinary Japanese.”' Business Week Patrick Smith has produced a landmark book – timely, authoritative and completely engrossing – that shows how Japan is engaged in a fundamental and far-reaching redefinition of itself. At the same time, Smith says, Westerners must also take a hard look at long-held myths and assumptions about Japan's historical, political, social and psychological development. In the tradition of Hedrick Smith's The Russians, Japan: A Reinterpretation is destined to become a classic work on a powerful, yet still enigmatic country and its people.

Japanese Studies has provided a fertile space for non-Eurocentric analysis for a number of reasons. It has been embroiled in the long-running internal debate over the so-called Nihonjinron, revolving around the extent to which the effective interpretation of Japanese society and culture requires non-Western, Japan-specific emic concepts and theories. This book takes this question further and explores how we can understand Japanese society and culture by combining Euro-American concepts and theories with those that originate in Japan. Because Japan is the only liberal democracy to have achieved a high level of capitalism outside the Western cultural framework, Japanese Studies has long provided a forum for deliberations about the extent to which the Western conception of modernity is universally applicable. Furthermore, because of Japan’s military, economic and cultural dominance in Asia at different points in the last century, Japanese Studies has had to deal with the issues of Japanocentrism as well as Eurocentrism, a duality requiring complex and nuanced analysis. This book identifies variations amongst Japanese Studies academic communities in the Asia-Pacific and examines the extent to which relatively autonomous scholarship, intellectual approach or theories exist in the region. It also evaluates how studies on Japan in the region contribute to global Japanese Studies and explores their potential for formulating concrete strategies to unsettle Eurocentric dominance of the discipline.