Enter the world of the stylish Japanese house, where every object in sight is a work of art. Japan Style introduces 20 special residences. With more than 200 color photographs, this book showcases Japanese design in the stunning beauty of old homes and reveals how they are cared for by their owners. Traditional Japanese homes, with superbly crafted fine wood, great workmanship and seasonal interior arrangements, have an aesthetic of infinite simplicity. Unlike Japanese inns and historical buildings, the Japanese architecture featured in this book is on private property not open to public viewing. Japan Style offers a rare glimpse into the intimate world of everyday Japanese culture and fascinating insight into the traditional architecture of Japan.

An authoritative and wide-ranging visual essay on the aesthetics of Japan, now in a beautiful paperback edition. Japan Style, written by one of the world's most respected scholars of Japanese art and culture, defines what 'Japan style' is. It explores specific achievements in Japanese art and architecture, but also offers an in-depth analysis of the whole of Japanese culture, its vision of the world and of humankind. 'Japan style' is something recognizable to everyone: a beautifully arranged flower, an elegant piece of calligraphy or a simple rock garden, but it is also something that is very difficult to define. The book is divided into three main sections. In the first one ('Irregular Beauty'), the author delineates the different aspects of Japanese culture and draws interesting connections between art, architecture, religion, philosophy and mythology. For example, he explains the aesthetics of the tea ceremony and its relationship to Zen philosophy as well as other subjects such as the function of the void in mythology, Buddhism and the arts. The second part of the book ('A Feeling of Nature') follows a chronological path from ancient times to the present explaining more specifically how to interpret the different forms of Japanese art (literature, painting, sculpture, etc.). The third part of the book ('Art Masters') contains short monographs on Japanese masters in the history of Japanese art and culture: Zeami Moto, the creator of No theatre; Hokusai, the master of woodblock printing; Yasunai Kawabata and Mishima Yukio, the writers; and the graphic designer, Tanaka Ikko. Calza's groundbreaking and insightful text is accompanied by 150 colour images of a great variety of examples from Japanese art and culture.

The story of how Japan adopted and ultimately revived traditional American fashion Look closely at any typically "American" article of clothing these days, and you may be surprised to see a Japanese label inside. From high-end denim to oxford button-downs, Japanese designers have taken the classic American look—known as ametora, or "American traditional"—and turned it into a huge business for companies like Uniqlo, Kamakura Shirts, Evisu, and Kapital. This phenomenon is part of a long dialogue between Japanese and American fashion; in fact, many of the basic items and traditions of the modern American wardrobe are alive and well today thanks to the stewardship of Japanese consumers and fashion cognoscenti, who ritualized and preserved these American styles during periods when they were out of vogue in their native land. In Ametora, cultural historian W. David Marx traces the Japanese assimilation of American fashion over the past hundred and fifty years, showing how Japanese trendsetters and entrepreneurs mimicked, adapted, imported, and ultimately perfected American style, dramatically reshaping not only Japan's culture but also our own in the process.

A Chicago Style Manual-type guide for anyone working on English-language publications about Japan. Primarily for nonspecialists, it also contains advice and lists of resources for translators and researchers.

This innovative and interdisciplinary book on style shifting in Japanese brings together a wide range of perspectives and methodologies—including discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, cognitive linguistics, and functional linguistics—to look at a variety of types of style shifting in both spoken and written Japanese discourse. Though diverse in approach, the contributions all reflect the belief that language use is inextricably linked to both context and language structure in mutually constitutive relationships. Topics covered include shifting between "polite" and "plain" styles, the emergence of a "semi-polite" style, speakers' strategic use of gendered styles or regional dialects, shifting between different deictic expressions, and prosodic shifting. This careful and detailed examination advances our understanding of the complex phenomenon of style shifting not only in Japanese, but also more generally, and will be of interest to researchers and students in fields such as linguistics, linguistic anthropology, communication studies, and second language acquisition and teaching.

With essays, this book looks at how the world of fashion has been transformed by contemporary Japanese visual culture.--[book cover].

JAPAN STYLE Contemporary Japanese Ceramics. Featuring the works of Kato Takahiko, Hashimoto Machiko, and Tanoue Shinya. This exhibition features works by three contemporary Japanese ceramic artists who have drawn inspiration from not only the diverse ceramic traditions of their country, but have managed to unfold the unique story behind their own passions and values in life. It is this birth of contemporary creativity that enables the artist to draw inspiration from beauty and create powerful works of form and function. Among the 18 objects in this presentation, you will find works associated with Japan's most ancient kilns which have been producing functional stoneware vessels for daily use for nearly a millennium and for the celebrated tea ceremony for 400 years. You will discover tea cups and bowls, flower vases, serving plates, and even an owl, which combine ancient materials and techniques with new forms and styles.