One of Japan’s most renowned intellectuals, Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801) is perhaps best known for his notion of mono no aware, a detailed description of the workings of emotions as the precondition for the poetic act. As a poet and a theoretician of poetry, Norinaga had a keen eye for etymologies and other archaeological practices aimed at recovering the depth and richness of the Japanese language. This volume contains his major works on the Yamato region—the heartland of Japanese culture—including one of his most famous poetic diaries, The Sedge Hat Diary (Sugagasa no Nikki), translated into English here for the first time. Written in 1772 while Norinaga journeyed through Yamato and the Yoshino area, The Sedge Hat Diary was composed in the style of Heian prose and is interspersed with fifty-five poems. It offers important insights into Norinaga the poet, the scholar of ancient texts, the devout believer in Shinto deities, and the archaeologist searching for traces of ancient capitals, palaces, shrines, and imperial tombs of the pre-Nara period. In this piece Norinaga presents Yoshino as a "common poetic space" that readers must inhabit to develop the "common sense" that makes them live ethically in the poet’s ideal society. Norinaga’s ideal society is deeply imbued with the knowledge of poetry and the understanding of emotions as evidenced in the translation of Norinaga’s twenty-six songs on aware (pathos) also included here. The rest of the volume offers translations of several essays by the poet that shed further light on the places he visited in Yoshino and on the main topic of his scholarly interests: the sound of the uta (songs) from his beloved Yamato. An introductory essay on Norinaga’s poetics serves as a guide through the dense arguments he developed both practically in his poems and theoretically in his essays.

Essays on Japan is a compilation of Professor Michael F. Marra’s essays written in the past ten years on the topics of Japanese literature, Japanese aesthetics, and the space between the two subjects.

Japanese Hermeneutics provides a forum for the most current international debates on the role played by interpretative models in the articulation of cultural discourses on Japan. It presents the thinking of esteemed Western philosophers, aestheticians, and art and literary historians, and introduces to English-reading audiences some of Japan's most distinguished scholars, whose work has received limited or no exposure in the United States. In the first part, Hermeneutics and Japan, contributors examine the difficulties inherent in articulating otherness without falling into the trap of essentialization and while relying on Western epistemology for explanation and interpretation. In the second part, Japan's Aesthetic Hermeneutics, they explore the role of aesthetics in shaping discourses on art and nature in Japan. The essays in the final section of the book, Japan's Literary Hermeneutics, rethink the notion of Japanese literature in light of recent findings on the ideological implications of canon formations and transformations within Japan's prominent literary circles.

Mono no Aware and Gender as Affect in Japanese Aesthetics and American Pragmatism argues that gender is best understood as a felt sense of the organization of the human body. Through Japanese aesthetics and American pragmatism, this book argues that re-understanding gender as an affect, or a feeling, can expand the ways that gender is understood, enacted, and theorized in experience.

This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note that the online publication date for this handbook is the date that the first article in the title was published online.

The present volume is a collection of papers presented at the international conference “Linguistic Awareness and Dissolution of Diglossia” held in July 2011 at Heidelberg University. The aim is to reevaluate and compare the processes of dissolution of diglossia in East Asian and in European languages, especially in Japanese, Chinese and in Slavic languages in the framework of the asymmetries in the emergence of modern written languages. Specialists from China, Japan, Great Britain, Germany and the U.S. contributed to the volume by introducing their research focusing on aspects of the dissolution of diglossic situations and the role of translation in the process. The first group of texts focuses on the linguistic concept of diglossia and the different processes of its dissolution, while the second investigates the perception of linguistic varieties in historical and transcultural perspectives. The third and final group analyses the changing cultural role and function of translations and their effect on newly developing literary languages.

With Japanese Philosophy: A Sourcebook, readers of English can now access in a single volume the richness and diversity of Japanese philosophy as it has developed throughout history. Leading scholars in the field have translated selections from the writings of more than a hundred philosophical thinkers from all eras and schools of thought, many of them available in English for the first time. The Sourcebook editors have set out to represent the entire Japanese philosophical tradition—not only the broad spectrum of academic philosophy dating from the introduction of Western philosophy in the latter part of the nineteenth century, but also the philosophical ideas of major Japanese traditions of Buddhism, Confucianism, and Shinto. The philosophical significance of each tradition is laid out in an extensive overview, and each selection is accompanied by a brief biographical sketch of its author and helpful information on placing the work in its proper context. The bulk of the supporting material, which comprises nearly a quarter of the volume, is given to original interpretive essays on topics not explicitly covered in other chapters: cultural identity, samurai thought, women philosophers, aesthetics, bioethics. An introductory chapter provides a historical overview of Japanese philosophy and a discussion of the Japanese debate over defining the idea of philosophy, both of which help explain the rationale behind the design of the Sourcebook. An exhaustive glossary of technical terminology, a chronology of authors, and a thematic index are appended. Specialists will find information related to original sources and sinographs for Japanese names and terms in a comprehensive bibliography and general index. Handsomely presented and clearly organized for ease of use, Japanese Philosophy: A Sourcebook will be a cornerstone in Japanese studies for decades to come. It will be an essential reference for anyone interested in traditional or contemporary Japanese culture and the way it has shaped and been shaped by its great thinkers over the centuries.