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"Tokyo (Japan) History In literature."
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Tokyo in transit : Japanese culture on the rails and road
Increased use of mass transportation in the early twentieth century enabled men and women of different social classes to interact in ways they had not before. Using a cultural studies approach that combines historical research and literary analysis, author Alisa Freedman investigates fictional, journalistic, and popular culture depictions of how mass transportation changed prewar Tokyo's social fabric and artistic movements, giving rise to gender roles that have come to characterize modern Japan.
Freedman persuasively argues that, through descriptions of trains and buses, stations, transport workers, and passengers, Japanese authors responded to contradictions in Tokyo's urban modernity and exposed the effects of rapid change on the individual. She shines a light on how prewar transport culture anticipates what is fascinating and frustrating about Tokyo today, providing insight into how people make themselves at home in the city. An approachable and enjoyable book, Tokyo in Transit offers an exciting ride through modern Japanese literature and culture, and includes the first English translation of Kawabata Yasunari's The Corpse Introducer, a 1929 crime novella that presents an important new side of its Nobel Prizewinning author.
eBook
Portraits of Edo and early modern Japan : the Shogun's capital in zuihitsu writings, 1657-1855
This volume presents a series of five portraits of Edo, the central region of urban space today known as Tokyo, from the great fire of 1657 to the devastating earthquake of 1855. This book endeavors to allow Edo, or at least some of the voices that constituted Edo, to do most of the speaking. These voices become audible in the work of five Japanese eye-witness observers, who notated what they saw, heard, felt, tasted, experienced, and remembered. \"An Eastern Stirrup,\" presents a vivid portrait of the great conflagration of 1657 that nearly wiped out the city. \"Tales of Long Long Ago,\" details seventeenth-century warrior-class ways as depicted by a particularly conservative samurai. \"The River of Time,\" describes the city and its flourishing cultural and economic development during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. \"The Spider's Reel\" looks back at both the attainments and calamities of Edo in the 1780s. Finally, \"Disaster Days,\" offers a meticulous account of Edo life among the ruins of the catastrophic 1855 tremor. Read in sequence, these five pieces offer a unique \"insider's perspective\" on the city of Edo and early modern Japan.
Book
Tokyo
Tokyo: Memory, Imagination, and the City is a collection of eight essays that explore Tokyo urban space from the perspective of memory in works of the imagination—novels, short stories, poetry, essays, and films. Written by scholars of Japanese studies based in England, Germany, Japan, and the United States, the book focuses on texts produced in Japan since the 1980s. The closing years of the Shōwa period (1926-1989) were a watershed decade of spatial transformation in Tokyo. It was also a time (in Japan, as elsewhere) when conversations about the nature of memory—historical, cultural, collective, and individual—intensified. The contributors to the volume share the view that works of the imagination are constitutive elements of how cities are experienced and perceived. Each of the essays responds to the growing interest in studies on Tokyo with a literary-cultural orientation.
eBook
Tokyo : a biography : disasters, destruction and renewal : the story of an indomitable city
The history of Tokyo is as eventful as it is long. A concise yet detailed overview of this fascinating, centuries-old city, Tokyo: A Biography is a perfect companion volume for history buffs or Tokyo-bound travelers looking to learn more about their destination. In a whirlwind journey through Tokyo's past from its earliest beginnings up to the present day, this Japanese history book demonstrates how the city's response to everything from natural disasters to regime change has been to reinvent itself time and again. A calamitous fire results in a massive expansion of the city's territory. A debate over the Samurai code creates far-reaching social change. A malleable boy becomes the figurehead for powerful forces who change an ancient feudal society into a modern industrialized power within a generation. Utter destruction wipes the slate clean again so Tokyoites may start all over. And so it goes. Tokyo's story is riveting, and by the end of Tokyo: A Biography, readers see a city almost unrivalled in its uniqueness, a place thatdespite its often tragic historystill shimmers as it prepares to face the future.
eBook
Geisha, Harlot, Strangler, Star
In May 1936, Abe Sada committed the most notorious crime in twentieth-century Japan—the murder and emasculation of her lover. What made her do it? And why was she found guilty of murder yet sentenced to only six years in prison? Why have this woman and her crime remained so famous for so long, and what does her fame have to say about attitudes toward sex and sexuality in modern Japan? Despite Abe Sada’s notoriety and the depictions of her in film and fiction (notably in the classic In the Realm of the Senses), until now, there have been no books written in English that examine her life and the forces that pushed her to commit the crime. Along with a detailed account of Sada’s personal history, the events leading up to the murder, and its aftermath, this book contains transcripts of the police interrogations after her arrest—one of the few existing first-person records of a woman who worked in the Japanese sex industry during the 1920s and 1930s—as well as a memoir by the judge and police records. Geisha, Harlot, Strangler, Star steps beyond the simplistic view of Abe Sada as a sexual deviate or hysterical woman to reveal a survivor of rape, a career as a geisha and a prostitute, and a prison sentence for murder. Sada endured discrimination and hounding by paparazzi until her disappearance in 1970. Her story illustrates a historical collision of social and sexual values—those of the samurai class and imported from Victorian Europe against those of urban and rural Japanese peasants.
eBook
When the Tsunami Came to Shore
Some leading Japan scholars present new research and thinking on the profound relationship between culture and disaster in Japan, focusing on the triple disasters of March 2011, the great quakes of 1995 and 1923, and the atomic bombings of 1945.
eBook
Dwelling in Passing: A Genealogy of Kon Wajirō's 1929 “New Guidebook to Greater Tokyo”
Jean-François Lyotard defines the condition of modern urban as a dwelling in passing, thus calling for the definition of a new dwelling form appropriate to a global urban space of movement undermining any possibility of critical distance. Bringing together novel, literary essay, and guidebook, I here identify a generic urban subject in 1910's and 20's Tokyo emerging from a set of cartographic practices of urban space. In the first chapter, I argue for the importance of a \"cartographic turn\" in order to address the modern urban experience in terms of a global space of movement. In the following chapters, I then draw a genealogy of Kon Wajirō's 1929 New Guidebook to Greater Tokyo that displaces the modern alienated subject and the ideology of the national domus. More specifically, I analyze in Mori Ōgai's Youth, Nagai Kafū's Hiyorigeta and Tayama Katai's The Nearsuburb of Tokyo a set of cartographic practices that make visible in local dwelling places a global urban space of experience. In those three texts, the urban subject emerges in the tension between mappings of the State and Capital by making visible the uneven movement of urban space. In the last chapter, I argue that Kon Wajirō's urban subject is not simply a bystander suspended between movement and the spectacle of movement, but becomes a voyant (seer), entering the national spectacle of speed in a new dwelling form, the barrack-ornament. In conclusion, I argue that urban dwelling, by generating in a local place a total and open image of urban movement, forces us to reconsider the work of State mappings.
Dissertation
Postindustrial East Asian cities : innovation for growth
Post-Industrial East Asian Cities analyzes urban developments and policies responsible for the growth of producer services and creative industries. This study is based on the findings of firm surveys conducted in East Asia and a review of the data and literature on several key regional cities (Beijing, Shanghai, Singapore, Seoul, Bangkok and Tokyo) that are transitioning away from traditional manufacturing activities.
eBook