The aim of this series is to publish original, high-quality work by both new and established scholars on all aspects of contemporary Japan.
By Florian Coulmas
May 19, 2023
This book thus offers a fresh view on Japanese society focussing on the role of comportment for group cohesiveness. It explores the stereotype that Japan is the world’s most polite country, examining how proper conduct is acquired and expressed, and how the apparent conflict with some of the ...
By Masahiro Iwasaki
April 14, 2023
Are we seeing the presidentialization of politics in Japan? Certainly many recent prime ministers have demonstrated powerful leadership, notably Junichiro Koizumi and Shinzo Abe. While the phenomenon of presidentialization has been much discussed for years, the Japanese case has not received much ...
By Ikuho Amano
December 30, 2022
This book is an interdisciplinary study of Japan during the socially euphoric years of the Bubble Economy in the 1980s. Shedding light on consumer experiences, this study explores the socio-cultural landscape of Japan, the nation that boasted the second largest economy in the late twentieth ...
By Robert O'Mochain, Yuki Ueno
September 09, 2022
Bringing together two voices, practice and theory, in a collaboration that emerges from lived experience and structured reflection upon that experience, O’Mochain and Ueno show how entrenched discursive forces exert immense influence in Japanese society and how they might be most effectively ...
By K. Yoshida
May 30, 2022
This book offers a reassessment of how "matter" – in the context of art history, criticism, and architecture – pursued a radical definition of "multiplicity", against the dominant and hierarchical tendencies underwriting post-fascist Japan. Through theoretical analysis of works by artists and ...
Edited
By Carola Hommerich, Naoki Sudo, Toru Kikkawa
April 29, 2022
Based on extensive survey data, this book examines how the population of Japan has experienced and processed three decades of rapid social change from the highly egalitarian high growth economy of the 1980s to the economically stagnating and demographically shrinking gap society of the 2010s. It ...
By Katsuyuki Hidaka
February 18, 2022
How and why does a catastrophic disaster change public discourse and social narratives? This is the first book to comprehensively investigate how Japanese newspapers, TV, documentary films, independent journalists, scientists, and intellectuals from the humanities and social sciences have ...
By Nadejda Gadjeva
January 24, 2022
To address the issue of the lack of integration and common policy among Japan’s cultural promotion actors and institutions, Gadjeva explores an integrated approach for Japanese public diplomacy through public-private partnerships. She examines the potential of the Japan Foundation as a central ...
By Jiaxin Zhong
November 26, 2021
After Japan's defeat in August 1945, some Japanese children were abandoned in China and raised by Chinese foster parents. They were unable to return to Japan even during the mass repatriation carried out by the Japanese government in the 1950s. Most of them returned to Japan in the 1980s. They are ...
By Taeyoung Kim
October 27, 2021
Using a qualitative, interview-based approach, Kim investigates how conflicting identities and social marginalization affect the mental health of members of the ethnic Korean minority living in Japan. So-called “Zainichi” Koreans living in Japan have a higher suicide rate than native Japanese, or ...
By Satoshi Higuchi
April 20, 2021
“I regard Higuchi’s book as particularly valuable because it highlights dimensions of somaesthetics that have not been sufficiently explored. I refer not only to the various traditional Japanese somatic disciplines whose somaesthetics aspects Higuchi reveals, but also to central topics far beyond ...
By Jeffrey J. Hall
April 07, 2021
Japan’s nationalist right have used the internet to organize offline activism in increasingly visible ways. Hall investigates the role of internet-mediated activism in Japan’s ongoing historical and territorial disputes. He explores the emergence of two right-wing activist organizations, Nihon ...
