Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
120
result(s) for
"Partner, Simon"
Sort by:
Assembled in Japan
Assembled in Japan investigates one of the great success
stories of the twentieth century: the rise of the Japanese
electronics industry. Contrary to mainstream interpretation, Simon
Partner discovers that behind the meteoric rise of Sony,
Matsushita, Toshiba, and other electrical goods companies was
neither the iron hand of Japan's Ministry of International Trade
and Industry nor a government-sponsored export-led growth policy,
but rather an explosion of domestic consumer demand that began in
the 1950s. This powerful consumer boom differed fundamentally from
the one under way at the same time in the United States in that it
began from widespread poverty and comparatively miserable living
conditions. Beginning with a discussion of the prewar origins of
the consumer engine that was to take off under the American
Occupation, Partner quickly turns his sights on the business
leaders, inventors, laborers, and ordinary citizens who
participated in the broadly successful effort to create new markets
for expensive, unfamiliar new products. Throughout, the author
relates these pressure-cooker years in Japan to the key themes of
twentieth-century experience worldwide: the role of technology in
promoting social change, the rise of mass consumer societies, and
the construction of gender in advanced industrial economies.
eBook
Art and Gender in an Age of Revolution
This essay examines the social, cultural, and economic life of Kawai Koume (1804–1889), a bushi housewife and artist living in the Wakayama castle town of Kishu domain in the final years of the Tokugawa era and the early years of Meiji. Using a diary that Koume kept over a period of at least fifty years, the essay examines the ways in which Koume’s art was integrated with her daily life as household manager, and it explores the transformations of those relationships after the Meiji Restoration. While acknowledging the reality of class and gender ideologies and their effects on daily life, the essay focuses on Koume’s determination to contribute meaningfully to her family’s social, cultural, and economic life. And in the wake of a decade of disruption and transformation following the Meiji Restoration, it points to the unsung heroism of many women in forging new paths to economic recovery and self-sufficiency.
Journal Article
Toshié : a story of village life in twentieth-century Japan
Sakaue Toshié was born on August 14, 1925, into a family of tenant farmers and day laborers in the hamlet of Kosugi. The world she entered was one of hard labor, poverty, dirt, disease, and frequent early death. By the 1970s, that rural world had changed almost beyond recognition. Toshié is the story of that extraordinary transformation as witnessed and experienced by Toshié herself. A sweeping social history of the Japanese countryside in its twentieth-century transition from \"peasant\" to \"consumer\" society, the book is also a richly textured account of the life of one village woman and her community caught up in the inexorable march of historical events. Through the lens of Toshié's life, Simon Partner shows us the realities of rural Japanese life during the 1930s depression; daily existence under the wartime regime of \"spiritual mobilization\"; the land reform and its consequences during occupation; and the rapid emergence of a consumer culture against the background of agricultural mechanization during the 1950s and 1960s. In some ways representative and in other ways unique, Toshié's narrative raises questions about conventional frameworks of twentieth-century Japanese history, and about the place of individual agency and choice in an era often seen as dominated by the impersonal forces of modernity: technology, state power, and capitalism.
eBook
Assembled in Japan : electrical goods and the making of the Japanese consumer
Assembled in Japan investigates one of the great success stories of the twentieth century: the rise of the Japanese electronics industry. Contrary to mainstream interpretation, Simon Partner discovers that behind the meteoric rise of Sony, Matsushita, Toshiba, and other electrical goods companies was neither the iron hand of Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry nor a government-sponsored export-led growth policy, but rather an explosion of domestic consumer demand that began in the 1950s. This powerful consumer boom differed fundamentally from the one under way at the same time in the United States in that it began from widespread poverty and comparatively miserable living conditions. Beginning with a discussion of the prewar origins of the consumer engine that was to take off under the American Occupation, Partner quickly turns his sights on the business leaders, inventors, laborers, and ordinary citizens who participated in the broadly successful effort to create new markets for expensive, unfamiliar new products. Throughout, the author relates these pressure-cooker years in Japan to the key themes of twentieth-century experience worldwide: the role of technology in promoting social change, the rise of mass consumer societies, and the construction of gender in advanced industrial economies. Assembled in Japan investigates one of the great success stories of the twentieth century: the rise of the Japanese electronics industry. Contrary to mainstream interpretation, Simon Partner discovers that behind the meteoric rise of Sony, Matsushi.
eBook