In
Engaging the Other: “Japan and Its Alter-Egos”, 1550-1850 Ronald P. Toby examines new discourses of identity and difference in early modern Japan, a discourse catalyzed by the “Iberian irruption,” the appearance of Portuguese and other new, radical others in the sixteenth century. The encounter with peoples and countries unimagined in earlier discourse provoked an identity crisis, a paradigm shift from a view of the world as comprising only “three countries” (
sangoku), i.e., Japan, China and India, to a world of “myriad countries” (
bankoku) and peoples. To understand the new radical alterities forced Japanese to establish new parameters of difference from familiar, proximate others, i.e., China, Korea and Ryukyu, Toby examines their articulation in literature, visual and performing arts, law, and customs..
Edited by Robert Pekkanen
This work collects decades of the best published scholarship in English on the unequivocally most successful political party in Japanese history: the Liberal Democratic Party (the LDP). Governing Japan for almost the entirety of the post-war period, the LDP also has a claim to be the most successful political party in any post-war democracy. Seminal articles in this collection explore the key aspects of the LDP: the party’s evolution since its founding in 1955; key facets of the LDP’s internal organization including factions and koenkai; the LDP in policy-making, including its relationship with the bureaucracy and interest groups, as well as its policy-making committee apparatus; and, party leadership, including the premierships of Junichiro Koizumi and Shinzo Abe.
Series:
Karen M. Gerhart
Women, Rites, and Ritual Objects in Premodern Japan, edited by Karen M. Gerhart, is a multidisciplinary examination of rituals featuring women, in which significant attention is paid to objects produced for and utilized in these rites as a lens through which larger cultural concerns, such as gender politics, the female body, and the materiality of the ritual objects, are explored. The ten chapters encounter women, rites, and ritual objects in many new and interactive ways and constitute a pioneering attempt to combine ritual and gendered analysis with the study of objects.
Contributors include: Anna Andreeva, Monica Bethe, Patricia Fister, Sherry Fowler, Karen M. Gerhart, Hank Glassman, Naoko Gunji, Elizabeth Morrissey, Chari Pradel, Barbara Ruch, Elizabeth Self.
Contributors include: Anna Andreeva, Monica Bethe, Patricia Fister, Sherry Fowler, Karen M. Gerhart, Hank Glassman, Naoko Gunji, Elizabeth Morrissey, Chari Pradel, Barbara Ruch, Elizabeth Self.
Series:
Ronald S. Green and Chanju Mun
Gyōnen’s Transmission of the Buddha Dharma in Three Countries is the first English translation of this work and a new assessment of it. Gyōnen (1240-1321) has been recognized for establishing a methodology for the study of Buddhism that would come to dominate Japan. The three countries Gyōnen considers are India, China and Japan. Ronald S. Green and Chanju Mun describe Gyōnen’s innovative doctrinal classification system (
panjiao) for the first time and compare it to other
panjiao systems. They argue that Gyōnen’s arrangement and what he chose to exclude served political purposes in the Kamakura period, and thus engage current scholarship on the construction of Japanese Buddhism.
Man’yōshū (Book 19)
A New English Translation Containing the Original Text, Kana Transliteration, Romanization, Glossing and Commentary
Alexander Vovin
Book nineteen of the
Man’yōshū (‘Anthology of Myriad Leaves’) continues Alexander Vovin’s new English translation of this 20-volume work originally compiled between c.759 and 785 AD. It is the earliest Japanese poetic anthology in existence and thus the most important compendium of Japanese culture of the Asuka and Nara periods. Book nineteen is the eighth volume of the
Man’yōshū to be published to date (following books fifteen (2009), five (2011), fourteen (2012), twenty (2013), seventeen (2016), eighteen (2016) and one (2017). Each volume of the Vovin translation contains the original text,
kana transliteration, romanization, glossing and commentary.