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Introduction D uring the Cold W ar period Japan and Australia were sometimes referred to as the northern and southern ‘anchors’ of the American alliance system in the Asia-Pacific. These two important ‘spokes’ in the so-called American ‘hub-and-spoke’ regional alliance system therefore found themselves in a condition of indirect alignment – or, to use Victor Cha’s term, ‘quasi-alliance’ ( Cha, 1999 ). This implies that while the two countries participated in no direct defence relationship, by dint of their
This chapter explores the treatment of alcoholism in post-World War II Japan, focusing on drug treatment, rehabilitation programmes and self-help groups. It looks at hospital-centred medical approaches as well as patients’ and their families’ initiatives in dealing with alcohol-related problems, such as Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), and Japanese-style treatments such as Danshukai and Naikan. Alcoholism does not appear to have drawn much government and medical attention until the second half of the
2 The 1968 social uprising and subversive advertising design in Japan: the work of Ishioka Eiko and Suzuki Hachirō The economic miracle of the 1960s gave a boost to the commercial advertising and graphic design industry, leading to what can be considered the first golden age of graphic design and advertising in postwar Japan.1 At the beginning of the decade, advertisements were heavily influenced by the International Style of the 1950s. However, the atmosphere changed after the 1965 exhibition of Belle Époque posters curated by the collector Katsumie Masaru
This book tells the story of critical avant-garde design in Japan, which emerged during the tumultuous 1960s and continues to inspire contemporary designers today. The postwar avant-garde milieu gave rise to a ground-breaking popular visual language and garnered tremendous attention across the fields of product design, graphic design, fashion design, and architecture. It created conceptually challenging artefacts and made decisions that radically altered the course of Japanese design history. The avant-garde works that were created in the sphere of popular culture communicated a form of visual and material protest inspired by the ideologies and critical theories of the 1960s and 1970s, which were concerned with feminism, body politics, the politics of identity, and, later, ecological, anti-consumerist, and anti-institutional critiques as well as an emphasis on otherness. These designers were driven by passion, anger, and a desire to critique and change society and introduce the avant-garde political thinking of the 1960s and subversive visual and material practices into the heart of consumer culture starting from the 1980s. Their creations thus combined two seemingly contradictory concepts: luxury and the avant-garde. By presenting the new arena of avant-garde Japanese design that is operating as a critical sociopolitical agent and involves an encounter between popular culture, postmodern aesthetics, critical theory, and new economic rules, the book carries the common discourse on Japanese design beyond aesthetic concerns and especially beyond ‘beautiful’ or ‘sublime’, revealing the radical aesthetic of the designed objects that forms an interface leading to critical social protest.
Introduction Japanese peripheral rural communities have been undergoing a dramatic demographic and socio-economic decline, with many facing the concrete threat of disappearing over the next decades. This condition is the outcome of decades of out-migration, lack of local employment opportunities and cuts in essential public services, a situation
Introduction A fter the preceding two chapters provided an overview of EU–Japan security relations from the European and a Japanese perspective, this chapter will introduce the first example of an operational security cooperation, which was not confined to government-to-government cooperation but involved military-to-military cooperation in the field, namely, in the counter-piracy mission off the coast of Somalia. While neither the Japanese government nor the European Union considered the counter-piracy mission
This book explores the transformation of the Japanese state in response to a variety of challenges by focusing on two case studies: Information and Communications Technology (ICT) regulation and anti-monopoly regulation after the 1980s, which experienced a disjuncture and significant transformation during the period, with particularistic approaches embracing competition. The case studies set up the state as the key locus of power, in contrast to pluralist and rational choice schools, which regard the state as insignificant. The analytical framework is drawn from key theories of governance and the state including the concepts of the core executive and the regulatory state. The book explores the extent to which there is asymmetric dominance on the part of Japan’s core executive through an examination of recent developments in the Japanese regulatory tradition since the 1980s. It concludes that the transformation of the Japanese state in the two case studies can be characterised as Japanese regulatory state development, with a view that the state at a macro level is the key locus of power. This book explores the transformation of the state and governance in a Japanese context and presents itself as an example of the new governance school addressing the state, its transformation, and the governance of the political arena in Japanese politics and beyond, setting out a challenge to the established body of pluralist and rational choice literature on Japanese politics.
7 Work and activity in mental hospitals in modern Japan, c. 1868–2000 Akira Hashimoto Historians have argued that the modernisation of Japan has not been a simple case of Westernisation, but that in the process of forming a nation state equal to Western countries, modernisation has been intertwined with Japanese nationalism.1 What is more, the Western concept of modernity itself has been questioned.2 Yet, broadly speaking, the course of Japanese modernisation can be mapped in terms of two major sociopolitical changes, both of which were influenced by Western
7 Crystallising the ‘Nordic turn’ in Japan and patriarchal decline in China Introduction Peng and Wong explained that ‘exceptionalism’ or ‘welfare laggardness’ within the East Asian model of welfare regimes was blamed on shared Confucian heritages and legacies of patriarchal fatherhood, which held back welfare state development: respect for education, filial piety, deference to authority, patriarchy, and above all the centrality of the family and kinship ties in social organisation – constrained the development of more western conceptions of the welfare state
8 Patient work and family care at Iwakura, Japan, c. 1799–1970 Osamu Nakamura Iwakura is a village located seven kilometres northeast of Kyoto, the ancient capital of Japan. It has a famous legend. During the reign of Emperor Go-Sanjo (reigned 1068–72), a princess who was afflicted with a mental condition was cured after praying to the image of Buddha at Daiunji-Temple in Iwakura and drinking water from the temple well.1 This is a well-known story that highlights the connection between Iwakura and mental illness. It was not uncommon for those suffering from a