This book describes the resulting cultural debates and competing discourses that surround the key concepts in the work-life of Japanese professors.

The tea ceremony persists as one of the most evocative symbols of Japan. Originally a pastime of elite warriors in premodern society, it was later recast as an emblem of the modern Japanese state, only to be transformed again into its current incarnation, largely the hobby of middle-class housewives. How does the cultural practice of a few come to represent a nation as a whole? Although few non-Japanese scholars have peered behind the walls of a tea room, sociologist Kristin Surak came to know the inner workings of the tea world over the course of ten years of tea training. Here she offers the first comprehensive analysis of the practice that includes new material on its historical changes, a detailed excavation of its institutional organization, and a careful examination of what she terms "nation-work"—the labor that connects the national meanings of a cultural practice and the actual experience and enactment of it. She concludes by placing tea ceremony in comparative perspective, drawing on other expressions of nation-work, such as gymnastics and music, in Europe and Asia. Taking readers on a rare journey into the elusive world of tea ceremony, Surak offers an insightful account of the fundamental processes of modernity—the work of making nations.

This book illuminates the characteristics of the Japanese economy comprehensively and analyses how and why they have been changing. The contributors to this fifteen-paper volume are internationally-known and leading researchers of the Japanese economy. Following the overview chapter, the book covers such areas as the Japanese firm, the labour market, consumption and saving patterns, financial markets, macroeconomic policies and international economic relations.

It is hardly possible to overrate the Pacific Basin in its economic and political importance. Currently, it is one of the economic regions with the highest dynamic growth throughout the world. Economically this region is sometimes considered to be the future centre of the world econom- often with reference to well-known authors such as Arnold Toynbee and Herman Kahn who predicted the inevitable approach of a Pacific century. The economic development of the Pacific Basin has proceeded far already following Japan's ascent into the position of an economic superpower. Considering the concentration of East and South-East Asian dynamic developing countries the Pacific Basin has meanwhile developed into a regional centre of economic activities. Furthermore the ambitions and in terests of three nuclear powers - the USA, the Soviet Union and China - collide in this region. Obviously these countries increasingly perceive and take into account the political and strategic importance of this region.

Few subjects have been so cursorily treated as the first Japanese unions. Yet their history contains much to intrigue the student of human events: The American Federation of Labor organizer who founded the Japanese labor movement; the Japanese Activists who spent years in AMerica studying unionism a major railway strike that won the hearts of the people of Japan; a major Japanese union newspaper with most of its copy in Japanese but always a few pages in English. These and other puzzling events can be understood only in the context of the development of Japan’s labor movement between 1868 and 1900. Stephen E. Marsland effectively brings together primary and secondary sources to demonstrate how social, political, economic, technological, and historical factors shaped the philosophical outlook and the organizational structure of the labor movement in Japan. He shows that Japanese workers and their leaders tended to choose the “shop” form of unionism rather than the prevalent forms in the industrialized Western nations. The shop from, the author contends, was the structural forerunner of the present-day “enterprise” unions that multiplied so typically in post World War II Japan. THe marriage of Western economic centres with Japanese social structure and philosophy forged a uniquely Japanese unionism that has remained strong and vibrant to this day, sustained by the traditions created by the early Japanese labor movements and its leaders. The Birth of the Japanese Labor Movement will be of interest to Japanese studies specialists, particularly in history and the social sciences, and scholars in the fields of industrial relations and labor history.

In this groundbreaking study of a subject intricately tied up with the controversies of Japanese wartime politics and propaganda, Maki Kaneko reexamines the iconic male figures created by artists of yōga (Western-style painting) between 1930 and 1950. Particular attention is given to prominent yōga painters such as Fujita Tsuguharu, Yasui Sōtarō, Matsumoto Shunsuke, and Yamashita Kiyoshi—all of whom achieved fame for their images of men either during or after the Asia-Pacific War. By closely investigating the representation of male figures together with the contemporary politics of gender, race, and the body, this profusely illustrated volume offers new insight into artists’ activities in late Imperial Japan. Rather than adhering to the previously held model of unilateral control governing the Japanese Empire’s visual regime, the author proposes a more complex analysis of the role of Japanese male artists and how art functioned during an era of international turmoil.