Bad Girls Of Japan

Are bad girls casualties of patriarchy, a necessary evil, or visionary pioneers? The authors in this volume propose shifts in our perceptions of bad girls by providing new ways to understand them through the case of Japan. By tracing the concept of the bad girl as a product of specific cultural assumptions and historical settings, Bad Girls of Japan maps new roads and old detours in revealing a disorderly politics of gender. Bad Girls of Japan explores deviancy in richly diverse media: mountain witches, murderers, performance artists, cartoonists, schoolgirls and shoppers gone wild are all part of the terrain.

Film poster art and design from Japan is renowned as being among the most striking and dynamic in the world, with kanji logograms adding an extra dimension of graphic integration for the Western eye. TOKYO CINEGRAPHIX is a new high-quality book series which aims to represent some of the very best film posters created in Japan, both for indigenous films and also for foreign imports. Each volume includes 100 full-colour, full-page reproductions. TOKYO CINEGRAPHIX TWO focuses solely on Japanese cinema, and its infamous "bad girl" or "pinky violence" blend of sex and crime - from murdered strippers to female assassins, yakuza molls, delinquent highschool girls, sword-wielding female gamblers, killer prostitutes, female prisoners, girl gangs and tattooed she-bikers.

"Bad Youth draws from official sources as well as press accounts, novels, songs, and films. Throughout, Ambaras demonstrates that juvenile protection remained contested terrain marked by complex negotiations among reformers, young people, and the adults in their lives, for whom the promises and perils of modernity could assume starkly different meanings."--BOOK JACKET.

What if there were a land where people lived longer than anywhere else on earth, the obesity rate was the lowest in the developed world, and women in their forties still looked like they were in their twenties? Wouldn't you want to know their extraordinary secret? Japanese-born Naomi Moriyama reveals the secret to her own high-energy, successful lifestyle–and the key to the enduring health and beauty of Japanese women–in this exciting new book. The Japanese have the pleasure of eating one of the most delicious, nutritious, and naturally satisfying cuisines in the world without denial, without guilt…and, yes, without getting fat or looking old. As a young girl living in Tokyo, Naomi Moriyama grew up in the food utopia of the world, where fresh, simple, wholesome fare is prized as one of the greatest joys of life. She also spent much time basking in that other great center of Japanese food culture: her mother Chizuko's Tokyo kitchen. Now she brings the traditional secrets of her mother's kitchen to you in a book that embodies the perfect marriage of nature and culinary wisdom–Japanese home-style cooking. If you think you've eaten Japanese food, you haven't tasted anything yet. Japanese home-style cooking isn't just about sushi and raw fish but good, old-fashioned everyday-Japanese-mom's cooking that's stood the test of time–and waistlines–for decades. Reflected in this unique way of cooking are the age-old traditional values of family and the abiding Japanese love of simplicity, nature, and good health. It's the kind of food that millions of Japanese women like Naomi eat every day to stay healthy, slim, and youthful while pursuing an energetic, successful, on-the-go lifestyle. Even better, it's fast, it's easy, and you can start with something as simple as introducing brown rice to your diet. You'll begin feeling the benefits that keep Japanese women among the youngest-looking in the world after your very next meal! If you're tired of counting calories, counting carbs, and counting on being disappointed with diets that don't work and don't satisfy, it's time to discover one of the best-kept and most delicious secrets for a healthier, slimmer, and long-living lifestyle. It's time to discover the Japanese fountain of youth….

Girl Reading Girl provides the first overview of the cultural significance of girls and reading in modern and contemporary Japan with emphasis on the processes involved when girls read about other girls. The collection examines the reading practices of real life girls from differing social backgrounds throughout the twentieth century while a number of chapters also consider how fictional girls read attention is given to the diverse cultural representations of the girl, or shôjo, who are the objects of the reading desires of Japan’s real life and fictional girls. These representations appear in various genres, including prose fiction, such as Yoshiya Nobuko’s Flower Stories and Takemoto Nobara’s Kamikaze Girls, and manga, such as Yoshida Akimi’s The Cherry Orchard. This volume presents the work of pioneering women scholars in the field of girl studies including translations of a ground-breaking essay by Honda Masuko on reading girls and Kawasaki Kenko’s response to prejudicial masculine critiques of best-selling novelist, Yoshimoto Banana. Other topics range from the reception of Anne of Green Gables in Japan to girls who write and read male homoerotic narratives.

This book traces the history of 'girls' aesthetics,' where adult Japanese women create art works about 'girls' that resist motherhood, from the modern to the contemporary period and their manifestation in Japanese women's theatrical and dance performance and visual arts including manga, film, and installation arts.

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 challenged. With a psychosocial framework that draws insights from feminism, sociology, international studies, and political psychology, the authors pinpoint the motivations of the nativist right and reflect on the change of conditions that is necessary to end cultures of impunity for perpetrators of sexual abuse in Japan. Evaluating the value of the #MeToo model of activism, the authors offer insights that will encourage victims to come out of the shadows, pursue justice, and help transform Japan’s sense of identity both at home and abroad. Ueno, a female Japanese educator and O’Mochain, a non-Japanese male academic, examine the nature of sexual abuse problems both in educational contexts and in society at large through the use of surveys, interviews, and engagement with an eclectic range of academic literature. They identify the groups within society who offer the least support for women who pursue justice against perpetrators of sexual abuse. They also ask if far-right ideological extremists are fixated with proving that so called “comfort women” are higaisha-buru or “fake victims.” Japan would have much to gain on the international stage were it to fully acknowledge historical crimes of sexual violence, yet it continues to refuse to do so. O’Mochain and Ueno shed light on this puzzling refusal through recourse to the concepts of ‘international status anxiety’ and ‘male hysteria.’ An insightful read for scholars of Japanese society, especially those concerned about its treatment of women.

From Rococo to Edwardian fashions, Japanese street style has reinvented many western dress styles, reinterpreting and altering their meanings and messages in a different cultural and historical context. This wide ranging and original study reveals the complex exchange of styles and what they represent in Japan and beyond, contesting common perceptions of gender in Japanese dress and the notion that non-western fashions simply imitate western styles. Through case studies focussing on fashion image consumption in style tribes such as Kamikaze Girls, Lolita, Edwardian, Ivy Style, Victorian, Romantic and Kawaii, this ground-breaking book investigates the complexities of dress and gender and demonstrates the flexible nature of contemporary fashion and style exchange in a global context. Japanese Fashion Cultures will appeal to students and scholars of fashion, cultural studies, gender studies, media studies and related fields.