Nihon Kindaishi

Music is a frequently neglected aspect of Japanese culture. It is in fact a highly problematic area, as the Japanese actively introduced Western music into their modern education system in the Meiji period (1868-1911), creating westernized melodies and instrumental instruction for Japanese children from kindergarten upwards. As a result, most Japanese now have a far greater familiarity with Western (or westernized) music than with traditional Japanese music. Traditional or classical Japanese music has become somewhat ghettoized, often known and practised only by small groups of people in social structures which have survived since the pre-modern era. Such marginalization of Japanese music is one of the less recognized costs of Japan's modernization. On the other hand, music in its westernized and modernized forms has an extremely important place in Japanese culture and society, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, for example, being so widely known and performed that it is arguably part of contemporary Japanese popular and mass culture. Japan has become a world leader in the mass production of Western musical instruments and in innovative methodologies of music education (Yamaha and Suzuki). More recently, the Japanese craze of karaoke as a musical entertainment and as musical hardware has made an impact on the leisure and popular culture of many countries in Asia, Europe and the Americas. This is the first book to cover in detail all genres including court music, Buddhist chant, theatre music, chamber ensemble music and folk music, as well as contemporary music and the connections between music and society in various periods. The book is a collaborative effort, involving both Japanese and English speaking authors, and was conceived by the editors to form a balanced approach that comprehensively treats the full range of Japanese musical culture.

This book looks into the accentual history of the Japanese and the Ryukyuan languages. Applying the comparative method, the author has reconstructed the accentual history of the Japonic languages. The reconstruction is based on modern dialects of Japanese and Ryukyuan, and also on historical materials.

This volume will be the first full-length exploration in any language of the details of the history of the Japanese language written by experts in the different subfields of linguistics. Overall, while including factual and background information, the volume will focus on presenting original research of lasting value. This includes presenting the latest research on better studied topics, such as segmental phonology, accent or focus constructions, as well as both introducing areas of study which have traditionally been underrepresented, such as syntax or kanbun materials, and showing how they contribute to a fuller understanding of all of the history of Japanese. Chapter titles Introduction Part I: Individual Periods of the Japanese Language Section 1: Prehistory and Reconstruction Chapter 1: Comparison with other languages (John Whitman, NINJAL) Chapter 2: Reconstruction based on external sources: Ainu, Chinese dynastic histories, and Korean chronicles (Alexander Vovin, University of Hawai'i at Manoa) Chapter 3: Reconstruction from the standpoint of Ryukyuan (Thomas Pellard, CNRS) Chapter 4: (Morpho)phonological reconstruction (Teruhiro Hayata) Chapter 5: Morpho(phono)logical reconstruction (Bjarke Frellesvig, University of Oxford) Chapter 6: Towards the accentual reconstruction of Japanese (Akiko Matsumori, NINJAL) Section II: Old Japanese Chapter 7: Word order and alignment (Yuko Yanagida, University of Tsukuba) Chapter 8: What mokkan can tell us about Old and pre-Old Japanese (Takashi Inukai, Aichi Prefectural University) Chapter 9: Eastern Old Japanese (Kerri Russell) Section III: Early Middle Japanese Chapter 10: Morphosyntax (Yoshiyuki Takayama, Fukui University) Chapter 11: Varieties of kakarimusubi in Early Middle Japanese (Charles Quinn, The Ohio State University) Chapter 12: Linguistic variation (Takuya Okimori) Section IV: Late Middle Japanese Chapter 13: The morphosyntax of Late Middle Japanese (Hirofumi Aoki, Kyushu University) Chapter 14: Late Middle Japanese phonology, based on Korean materials (Sven Osterkamp, Bochum University) Chapter 15: Phonology, based on Christian materials (Masayuki Toyoshima) Section V: Modern Japan Chapter 16: The social context of materials on Early Modern Japanese (Michinao Morohoshi, Kokugakuin University) Chapter 17: Meiji language, including what sound recordings can tell us (Yasuyuki Shimizu) Chapter 18: Syntactic influence of European languages on Japanese (Satoshi Kinsui, Osaka University) Part II: Materials and Writing Section VI: Writing Chapter 19: Old and Early Middle Japanese writing (James Unger, The Ohio State University) Chapter 20: The continued use of kanji in writing Japanese (Shinji Konno, Seisen University) Chapter 21: History of indigenous innovations in kanji and kanji usage [particularly: kokuji and wasei kango] (Yoshihiko Inui) Chapter 22: From hentai kanbun to sorobun (Tsutomu Yada) Section VII: Kanbun-based Materials Chapter 23: Kunten texts of Buddhist provenance (Masayuki Tsukimoto, Tokyo University) Chapter 24: Kunten Texts of Secular Chinese Provenance (Teiji Kosukegawa) Chapter 25: Vernacularized written Chinese (waka kanbun) (Shingo Yamamoto, Shirayuri Women's University) Chapter 26: Early modern kanbun and kanbun kundoku (Fumitoshi Saito, Nagoya University) Chapter 27: A comparison of glossing traditions in Japan and Korea (John Whitman, NINJAL) Chapter 28: Influence of kanbun-kundoku on Japanese (Valerio Alberizzi, Waseda University) Part III: Broader Changes over Time Section VIII: Lexis/Pragmatics Chapter 29: History of basic vocabulary (John Bentley, University of Northern Illinois) Chapter 30: History of Sino-Japanese vocabulary (Seiya Abe and Akihiro Okajima) Chapter 31: The history of mimetics in Japanese (Masahiro Ono, Meiji University) Chapter 32: The history of honorifics and polite language (Yukiko Moriyama, Doshisha University) Chapter 33: History of demonstratives and pronouns (Tomoko Okazaki) Chapter 34: History of yakuwarigo (Satoshi Kinsui, Osaka University) Chapter 35: 'Subject-Object Merger' and 'Subject-Object Opposition' as the speaker's stance: 'Subjective Construal' as 'a fashion of speaking' for Japanese speakers (Yoshihiko Ikegami, University of Tokyo) Section IX: Phonology Chapter 36: Syllable structure, phonological typology, and outstanding issues in the chronology of sound changes (Bjarke Frellesvig, Sven Osterkamp and John Whitman Chapter 37: Sino-Japanese (Marc Miyake) Chapter 38: Development of accent, based on historical sources, Heian period onwards: The formation of Ibuki-jima accent (Makoto Yanaike, Keio University) Chapter 39: The Ramsey hypothesis (Elisabeth De Boer) Section X: Syntax Chapter 40: Generative diachronic syntax of Japanese (John Whitman, NINJAL) Chapter 41: On the merger of the conclusive/adnominal distinction (Satoshi Kinsui, Osaka University) Chapter 42: Development of case marking (Takashi Nomura, University of Tokyo) Chapter 43: Loss of Wh movement (Akira Watanabe, University of Tokyo) Chapter 44: Development of delimiter/semantic particles (Tomohide Kinuhata) Chapter 45: Electronic corpora as a tool for investigating syntactic change (Yasuhiro Kondo, Aoyama Gakuin/NINJAL) Part IV: The History of Research on Japan Chapter 46: Early Japanese dictionaries (Shoju Ikeda, Hokkaido University) Chapter 47: The great dictionary of Japanese: Vocabulario ... (Toru Maruyama, Nanzan University) Chapter 48: Pre-Meiji research on Japanese (Toru Kuginuki) Chapter 49: Meiji period research on Japanese (Isao Santo)

This title explains the use of Japanese words such as wa, ga and mo looking at the rules and meanings of words in their literary forms.

No book has ever been published on tonal change and neutralization, two closely related topics in tonal phonology. This will be the first book to be devoted to both.The articles collected in this volume analyze a wide range of data concerning tonal change and neutralization, including post-lexical neutralization which represents a new topic in prosodic research. The volume as a whole covers a wide range of tone and pitch-accent languages in Asia, Africa and Europe, with a main focus on Asian languages/dialects many of which are endangered now. In addition to presenting novel data and analyses about individual languages, it provides typological perspectives on tonal change and neutralization.This volume will serve as an indispensable source of data and analyses for a wide range of linguists interested in phonetics, phonology, prosody, historical linguistics, language typology, endangered languages, Japanese linguistics, and Chinese linguistics.

"A grandson’s photo album. Old postcards. English porcelain. A granite headstone. These are just a few of the material objects that help reconstruct the histories of colonial people who lived during Japan’s empire. These objects, along with oral histories and visual imagery, reveal aspects of lives that reliance on the colonial archive alone cannot. They help answer the primary question of Lost Histories: Is it possible to write the history of Japan’s colonial subjects? Kirsten Ziomek contends that it is possible, and in the process she brings us closer to understanding the complexities of their lives.Lost Histories provides a geographically and temporally holistic view of the Japanese empire from the early 1900s to the 1970s. The experiences of the four least-examined groups of Japanese colonial subjects—the Ainu, Taiwan’s indigenous people, Micronesians, and Okinawans—are the centerpiece of the book. By reconstructing individual life histories and following these people as they crossed colonial borders to the metropolis and beyond, Ziomek conveys the dynamic nature of an empire in motion and explains how individuals navigated the vagaries of imperial life."

Popular music in Japan has been under the overwhelming influence of American, Latin American and European popular music remarkably since 1945, when Japan was defeated in World War II. Beginning with gunka and enka at the turn of the century, tracing the birth of hit songs in the record industry in the years preceding the War, and ranging to the adoption of Western genres after the War--the rise of Japanese folk and rock, domestic exoticism as a new trend and J-Pop--Popular Music in Japan is a comprehensive discussion of the evolution of popular music in Japan. In eight revised and updated essays written in English by renowned Japanese scholar Toru Mitsui, this book tells the story of popular music in Japan since the late 19th century when Japan began positively embracing the West.

The cultural practices and cultural meaning of health care in urban Japan.