Modern Japan Through Its Weddings

"A fascinating backstage look at the wedding industry, one which the author views as a window on contemporary values. While the book is written to rigorous academic standards, its lucid and witty style makes it appealing to the general reader."--John H. Boyle, "Eastern Economic Review." (Anthropology)

This thoroughly updated second edition of Modern Japan provides a concise and fascinating introduction to the social, cultural and political history of modern Japan. Ranging from the Tokugawa period to the present day, the book charts the country's evolution into a modernized, economic and political world power. Dealing with a broad and stimulating range of topics in an engaging style that will appeal to university students and the general reader, this book weaves social and political developments and balances a micro with a macro approach, introducing details about everyday lives that shed light on the bigger picture of major historical changes. Its systematic attention to gender issues, minorities and popular culture distinguishes this history and contributes to a sense of the complexity and diversity of modern Japanese society. Completely up-to-date and including many new images and a timeline that charts important events, this highly accessible and comprehensive textbook is an essential resource for students, scholars and teachers of Japanese history, politics culture and society.

Examines what is called the Ceremonial Occasions industry in Japan, in particular the commercialized production of contemporary weddings there. Based on anthropological fieldwork conducted in a wedding parlour.

The issue of how Japanese society operates, and in particular why it has `succeeded', has generated a wide variety of explanatory models, including the Confucian ethic, classlessness, group consciousness, and `uniqueness' in areas as diverse as body images and language patterns. In Ideology and Practice in Modern Japan the contributors examine these models and the ways in which they have sometimes been used to create a sense of `Japaneseness', that obscures the fact that Japan is actually an extremely complex and heterogenous society. In particular, `practice' at the micro-level of society is explored to illuminate or express a broader ideology. The contributors investigate a wide variety of subjects - from attitudes to death to the role of education, from film making to gender segregation - to see what can be said about the phenomenon in particular, what it tells us about Japan in general, and what conclusions can be drawn for our understanding of society in the broadest sense.

What are people’s life experiences in present-day Japan? This timely volume addresses fundamental questions vital to understanding Japan in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Its chapters collectively reveal a questioning of middle-class ideals once considered the essence of Japaneseness. In the postwar model household a man was expected to obtain a job at a major firm that offered life-long employment; his counterpart, the “professional” housewife, managed the domestic sphere and the children, who were educated in a system that provided a path to mainstream success. In the past twenty years, however, Japanese society has seen a sharp increase in precarious forms of employment, higher divorce rates, and a widening gap between haves and have-nots. Contributors draw on rich, nuanced fieldwork data collected during the 2000s to examine work, schooling, family and marital relations, child rearing, entertainment, lifestyle choices, community support, consumption and waste, material culture, well-being, aging, death and memorial rites, and sexuality. The voices in these pages vary widely: They include schoolchildren, teenagers, career women, unmarried women, young mothers, people with disabilities, small business owners, organic farmers, retirees, and the elderly.

The Japanese koseki system is the legal and social structure keeping record of all Japanese citizens. Determined by the Civil Code and the Koseki Law, for activists challenging it, the koseki is also an ideological structure, which has produced patriarchal control through single-surname households. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Tokyo, this book engages with issues of gender hierarchy and structural inequality in Japanese society. Studying several decades of feminist activism and critique of the koseki system, it analyses the strategies of activists who have creatively circumvented koseki rules in order to maintain their natal names in marriage. It examines the case studies of members of the fūfubessei (separate surname movement) and the movement to end discrimination against children born out of wedlock, and in so doing this book illuminates the contradictions in current family law and koseki practice that have animated a generation of feminists in Japan. Demonstrating the effect of the koeski on family, gender, and national identity, this book will be useful for students and scholars of Cultural Anthropology, Gender Studies, and Japanese Studies in general.

In two volumes, the SAGE Handbook of Social Anthropology provides the definitive overview of contemporary research in the discipline. It explains the what, where, and how of current and anticipated work in Social Anthropology. With 80 authors, contributing more than 60 chapters, this is the most comprehensive and up-to-date statement of research in Social Anthropology available and the essential point of departure for future projects. The Handbook is divided into four sections: -Part I: Interfaces examines Social Anthropology′s disciplinary connections, from Art and Literature to Politics and Economics, from Linguistics to Biomedicine, from History to Media Studies. -Part II: Places examines place, region, culture, and history, from regional, area studies to a globalized world -Part III: Methods examines issues of method; from archives to war zones, from development projects to art objects, and from ethics to comparison -Part IV: Futures anticipates anthropologies to come: in the Brain Sciences; in post-Development; in the Body and Health; and in new Technologies and Materialities Edited by the leading figures in social anthropology, the Handbook includes a substantive introduction by Richard Fardon, a think piece by Jean and John Comaroff, and a concluding last word on futures by Marilyn Strathern. The authors - each at the leading edge of the discipline - contribute in-depth chapters on both the foundational ideas and the latest research. Comprehensive and detailed, this magisterial Handbook overviews the last 25 years of the social anthropological imagination. It will speak to scholars in Social Anthropology and its many related disciplines.