Gift Giving In Japan

Gift-giving is extremely important in Japanese society, not only at personal and household levels, but at the national and macroeconomic levels as well. This book is the first in English to document the extraordinary scale, complexity, and variation of giving in contemporary Japan. Gift-Giving in Japan is based on eighteen months' fieldwork in the Tokyo metropolitan area, as well as short-term research in other parts of Japan. The core of the study is the experience of family representatives of different ages, classes, genders, occupations, neighborhoods, and religions. The author also interviewed experts, including the author of gift-giving etiquette books, Buddhist and Shinto priests, department store and funeral home employees, and workers at Tokyo's Tsukiji fish market. She participated in neighborhood festivals, election rallies, house-building rites, and other ceremonies of which gift-giving was an integral part. Recent anthropological interest in drawing a strong contrast between commodities and gifts both reflects and reinforces the conception of the gift as part of the giver and the related distinction between the realm of the gift and the realm of the marketplace. The author argues that Japanese practices of giving and receiving challenge assumptions related to this idea of the gift.

Every chapters offers insights into one aspect or other of contemporary Japanese life. Newly included are discussions on such topics as dinner entertainment, skiing cross-culturally, male chauvinism as a manifestation of love in marriage, and domestic violence. Ten chapters have been retained from the first edition because they have achieved the status of classics.

This book deals with tourism, popular culture and everyday life in Japan. It offers some interesting statistics about Japanese life and society, discusses popular kinds of tours in Japan, considers images of Japan found in guidebooks about the country, and discusses the pleasures people get from travel in Japan. The book interprets various aspects of Japanese culture and provides an analysis of popular visitor destinations. It is written in an accessible style and thus will be of interest to tourists considering visiting Japan, Japanophiles, social scientists and humanities scholars with interests in Japan, and students taking courses in tourism, Japanese culture, cultural studies and consumer culture.

Michael Laver examines how the giving of exotic gifts in early modern Japan facilitated Dutch trade by ascribing legitimacy to the shogunal government and by playing into the shogun's desire to create a worldview centered on a Japanese tributary state. The book reveals how formal and informal gift exchange also created a smooth working relationship between the Dutch and the Japanese bureaucracy, allowing the politically charged issue of foreign trade to proceed relatively uninterrupted for over two centuries. Based mainly on Dutch diaries and official Dutch East India Company records, as well as exhaustive secondary research conducted in Dutch, English, and Japanese, this new study fills an important gap in our knowledge of European-Japanese relations. It will also be of great interest to anyone studying the history of material culture and cross-cultural relations in a global context.

This volume includes the full proceedings from the 1997 World Marketing Congress held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The focus of the conference and the enclosed papers is on marketing thought and practices from a global perspective. This volume presents papers on various topics including marketing management, marketing strategy and consumer behavior. Founded in 1971, the Academy of Marketing Science is an international organization dedicated to promoting timely explorations of phenomena related to the science of marketing in theory, research and practice. Among its services to members and the community at large, the Academy offers conferences, congresses and symposia that attract delegates from around the world. Presentations from these events are published in this Proceedings series, which offers a comprehensive archive of volumes reflecting the evolution of the field. Volumes deliver cutting-edge research and insights, complimenting the Academy’s flagship journals, the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science (JAMS) and AMS Review. Volumes are edited by leading scholars and practitioners across a wide range of subject areas in marketing science.

Wrapping Culture examines problems of intercultural communication and the possibilities for misinterpretation of the familiar in an unfamiliar context. Starting with an examination of Japanese gift-wrapping, Joy Hendry demonstrates how our expectations are often influenced by cultural factors which may blind us to an appreciation of underlying intent. She extends this approach to the study of polite language as the wrapping of thoughts and intentions, garments as body wrappings, constructions and gardens as wrapping of space. Hendry shows how this extends even to the ways in which people may be wrapped in seating arrangements, or meetings and drinking customs may be constrained by temporal versions of wrapping. Throughout the book, Hendry considers ways in which groups of people use such symbolic forms to impress and manipulate one another, and points out a Western tendency to underestimate such nonverbal communication, or reject it as mere decoration. She presents ideas that should be valid in any intercultural encounter and demonstrates that Japanese culture, so often thought of as a special case, can supply a model through which we can formulate general theories about human behavior.

This collection of readings is intended to serve as a foundation for those expecting to have commercial interaction with the Japanese. The selections--from sources not limited to mainstream business journals--address various aspects of the cultural environment of Japanese business and discuss communication and interpersonal relationships, the institutional and legal environment, management and marketing, and the Japanese approach to manufacturing. Some specific topics: the influence of Confucianism and Zen on the Japanese organization, gift-giving, the ethnography of dinner entertainment, spiritual education in a Japanese bank, women managers.