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Zen and the Tantric Teachings in Premodern Japan
When a Zen teacher tells you to point at your mind, which part of your body do you point at?
According to the Japanese master Chikotsu Daie (1229–1312), you should point at the fistful of meat that is your heart. Esoteric Zen demonstrates that far from an outlier, Daie's understanding reflects the medieval Buddhist mainstream, in which tantric teachings and Zen were closely entwined movements that often developed within the same circles of thinkers and texts. ,br/> Drawing on newly discovered manuscript materials, it shows how medieval practitioners constructed a unique form of Zen by drawing on tantric doctrinal discourses.
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The introduction of writing enables new forms of literature, but these can be invisible in works that survive as manuscripts. Through looking at inscriptions of poetry on garbage and as graffiti, we can glimpse how literature spread along with writing.
This study uses these lesser-studied sources, including inscriptions on pottery, architecture, and especially wooden tablets known as mokkan, to uncover how poetry, and literature more broadly, was used, shared and thrown away in early Japan. Through looking at these disposable and informal sources, we explore the development of early Japanese literature, and even propose parallels to similar developments in other societies across space and time.
Japanese Visual Culture is an academic series devoted to the visual culture of the Japanese archipelago of every era. It includes studies on the history of painting, prints, calligraphy, sculpture, architecture and applied arts, but also extends to the performing arts, cinema, manga and anime. Despite the recent trend away from monographs on individual artists or object-based studies, the Japanese Visual Culture series recognizes the still-crucial need for research on Japanese artists or previously neglected categories of art to help build the foundation for the further development of the field. It also actively seeks interdisciplinary or theoretical approaches to archaeology, religion, literature, and the social sciences. Though all volumes are published in English, the series encourages submission by scholars based in Europe.
The series is attractively designed and allows for copious illustrative material, using the latest technology for high-quality colour reproduction. The books rely on Brill’s well-established distribution networks to research libraries in Europe, North America, and East Asia, especially Japan. While the primary readership will be specialists and students of Japanese art history and related fields, we expect the attractively designed format will attract wider audiences.
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Japanese youth, like everywhere else, are trying to build their future despite the crises that are shaking their world, the latest being the triple disaster of Fukushima. Often considered to be more focused on a personal or even hedonistic life, they surprised the media when a student movement took the floor to criticize the Abe government's security and Self-Defense Forces bills in 2015. The so-called SEALDs movement (Student Emergency Action for Liberal Democracy) was formed some time after the Indigenous or Occupy Wall Street movements, but it shares similar concerns.
Understanding the SEALDs' experience from the perspective of John Dewey's philosophy allows us to highlight once again the dangers that digital technology poses to individuals, the collective and their values.
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Education, the production of knowledge, identity formation, and ideological hegemony are inextricably linked in early modern and modern Korea. This study examines the production and consumption of knowledge by a multitude of actors and across languages, texts, and disciplines to analyze the formulation, contestation, and negotiation of knowledge. The production and dissemination of knowledge become sites for contestation and struggle—sometimes overlapping, at other times competing—resulting in a shift from a focus on state power and its control over knowledge and discourse to an analysis of local processes of knowledge production and the roles local actors play in them. Contributors are Daniel Pieper, W. Scott Wells, Yong-Jin Hahn, Furukawa Noriko, Lim Sang Seok, Kokubu Mari, Mark Caprio, Deborah Solomon, and Yoonmi Lee.
In 1870, a prominent samurai from Tōhoku sells his castle to become an agrarian colonist in Hokkaidō. Decades later, a man also from northeast Japan stows away on a boat to Canada and establishes a salmon roe business. By 1930, an investigative journalist travels to Brazil and writes a book that wins the first-ever Akutagawa Prize. In the 1940s, residents from the same area proclaim that they should lead Imperial Japan in colonizing all of Asia.

Across decades and oceans, these fractured narratives seem disparate, but show how mobility is central to the history of Japan’s Tōhoku region, a place often stereotyped as a site of rural stasis and traditional immobility, thereby collapsing boundaries between local, national, and global studies of Japan.

This book examines how multiple mobilities converge in Japan’s supposed hinterland. Drawing on research from three continents, this monograph demonstrates that Tohoku’s regional identity is inextricably intertwined with Pacific migrations.
The Lives of Modern Japanese Silk Mill Workers in Their Own Words
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At a time when concern with the exploitation of young women in the assembly plants of developing countries is still a major social issue for gender and development specialists, Discovering Women's Voices. The Lives of Modern Japanese Silk Mill Workers in Their Own Words, offers a vivid account of the lives of women who formed modern Japan’s ‘reserve army’ for textile mills.

By analyzing works songs and oral testimonies of former silk-reeling operatives about their lives in the factory and in their native countryside, it challenges the long-standing assumption describing their history as merely exploitative, convincingly showing that factory life could appear as a window of opportunity or at least a lesser evil to workers born in rural underprivileged families.