Unconditional Democracy

The difficult mission of a regime change: Toshio Nishi gives an account of how America converted the Japanese mindset from war to peace following World War II.

Balancing historical and contemporary cases, this comparative text examines the crucial question of what promotes or prevents the successful founding of democratic systems. The country case studies are placed in context by a substantial introduction surveying theories of democracy and democratic transition and by a conclusion assessing the cases and suggesting common patterns in the establishment of successful democracies. }Balancing historical and contemporary cases, this comparative text examines the crucial question of what promotes or prevents the successful founding of democratic systems. Underscoring lessons learned from successful regime change and assessing current efforts to establish democracies whose ultimate fate is yet uncertain, this book will enable students to evaluate the chances of success for societies making the transition from an authoritarian or communist regime. The case studies are placed in context by a substantial introduction surveying theories of democracy and democratic transition and a conclusion comparing the cases and suggesting common patterns in the establishment of successful democracies. Created for upper-level students, this book can be used as a primary text to be supplemented by theoretical readings or as a source of additional case studies. Extensive notes provide a wealth of suggestions for further reading and research.

Emphasizing the political discourse and conflict that have surrounded Japanese education, this book focuses on the three main issues of central versus local control, elitism versus equality, and nationalism versus universalism.

Why equality cannot be conditional on a shared human “nature” but has to be for all For centuries, ringing declarations about all men being created equal appealed to a shared human nature as the reason to consider ourselves equals. But appeals to natural equality invited gradations of natural difference, and the ambiguity at the heart of “nature” enabled generations to write of people as equal by nature while barely noticing the exclusion of those marked as inferior by their gender, race, or class. Despite what we commonly tell ourselves, these exclusions and gradations continue today. In Unconditional Equals, political philosopher Anne Phillips challenges attempts to justify equality by reference to a shared human nature, arguing that justification turns into conditions and ends up as exclusion. Rejecting the logic of justification, she calls instead for a genuinely unconditional equality. Drawing on political, feminist, and postcolonial theory, Unconditional Equals argues that we should understand equality not as something grounded in shared characteristics but as something people enact when they refuse to be considered inferiors. At a time when the supposedly shared belief in human equality is so patently not shared, the book makes a powerful case for seeing equality as a commitment we make to ourselves and others, and a claim we make on others when they deny us our status as equals.

This book is about education and American imperialism from the War of 1898 to the War on Terror. Very little coordinated or sustained research has been devoted to the broader contours of America, education, and empire. And third, this volume seeks to inspire new directions in the study of American educational history.

Wavelets have emerged as an important tool in analyzing functions containing discontinuities and sharp spikes. They were developed independently in the fields of mathematics, quantum physics, electrical engineering, and seismic geology. Interchanges between these fields during the last ten years have led to many new wavelet applications such as image compression, turbulence, human vision, radar, earthquake prediction, and pure mathematics applications such as solving partial differential equations. This book develops a theory of wavelet bases and wavelet frames for function spaces on various types of domains. Starting with the usual spaces on Euclidean spaces and their periodic counterparts, the exposition moves on to so-called thick domains (including Lipschitz domains and snowflake domains). Specifically, wavelet expansions and extensions to corresponding spaces on Euclidean $n$-spaces are developed. Finally, spaces on smooth and cellular domains and related manifolds are treated. Although the presentation relies on the recent theory of function spaces, basic notation and classical results are repeated in order to make the text self-contained. This book is addressed to two types of readers: researchers in the theory of function spaces who are interested in wavelets as new effective building blocks for functions and scientists who wish to use wavelet bases in classical function spaces for various applications. Adapted to the second type of reader, the preface contains a guide on where to find basic definitions and key assertions.

Examines the role that Japanese girls’ magazine culture played during the twentieth century in the creation and use of the notion of shōjo, the cultural identity of adolescent Japanese girls. Hiromi Tsuchiya Dollase examines the role that magazines have played in the creation and development of the concept of shōjo, the modern cultural identity of adolescent Japanese girls. Cloaking their ideas in the pages of girls’ magazines, writers could effectively express their desires for freedom from and resistance against oppressive cultural conventions, and their shōjo characters’ “immature” qualities and social marginality gave them the power to express their thoughts without worrying about the reaction of authorities. Dollase details the transformation of Japanese girls’ fiction from the 1900s to the 1980s by discussing the adaptation of Western stories, including Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, in the Meiji period; the emergence of young female writers in the 1910s and the flourishing girls’ fiction era of the 1920s and 1930s; the changes wrought by state interference during the war; and the new era of empowered postwar fiction. The book highlights seminal author Yoshiya Nobuko’s dreamy fantasies and Kitagawa Chiyo’s social realism, Morita Tama’s autobiographical feminism, the contributions of Nobel Prize–winning author Kawabata Yasunari, and the humorous modern fiction of Himuro Saeko and Tanabe Seiko. Using girls’ perspectives, these authors addressed social topics such as education, same-sex love, feminism, and socialism. The age of shōjo, which began at the turn of the twentieth century, continues to nurture new generations of writers and entice audiences beyond age, gender, and nationality. Hiromi Tsuchiya Dollase is Associate Professor of Japanese at Vassar College.