New Interventions in Japanese Studies – serie

A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org.Language, Nation, Race explores the various language reforms at the onset of Japanese modernity, a time when a “national language” (kokugo) was produced to standardize Japanese. Faced with the threat of Western colonialism, Meiji intellectuals proposed various reforms to standardize the Japanese language in order to quickly educate the illiterate masses. This book liberates these language reforms from the predetermined category of the “nation,” for such a notion had yet to exist as a clear telos to which the reforms aspired. Atsuko Ueda draws on, while critically intervening in, the vast scholarship of language reform that engaged with numerous works of postcolonial and cultural studies. She examines the first two decades of the Meiji period, with specific focus on the issue of race, contending that no analysis of imperialism or nationalism is possible without it.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.How might queer theory transform our interpretations of medieval Japanese literature and how might this literature reorient the assumptions, priorities, and critical practices of queer theory? Through a close reading of The Tale of Genji, an eleventh-century text that depicts the lifestyles of aristocrats during the Heian period, A Proximate Remove explores this question by mapping the destabilizing aesthetic, affective, and phenomenological dimensions of experiencing intimacy and loss. The spatiotemporal fissures Reginald Jackson calls "proximate removes" suspend belief in prevailing structures. Beyond issues of sexuality, Genji queers in its reluctance to romanticize or reproduce a flawed social order. An understanding of this hesitation enhances how we engage with premodern texts and how we question contemporary disciplinary stances.

A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org.This is the first book-length study in English of the Japanese-language literary activities of early Japanese migrants to Brazil. It provides a detailed history of Japanese-language bookstores, serialized newspaper fiction, original creative works, and critical apparatuses that existed in Brazil prior to World War II. This case study of the reading and writing of one diasporic population challenges the dominant mode of literary study, in which texts are often explicitly or implicitly understood through a framework of ethno-nationalism. Self-representations by writers in the diaspora reveal flaws in this prevailing framework through what Edward Mack calls “acquired alterity,” in which expectations about the stability of ethnic identity are subverted in surprising ways. Acquired Alterity encourages a reconsideration of the ramifications (and motivations) of cultural analyses of texts and the constructions of peoplehood that are often the true objects of literary knowledge production.

A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org.What role does religion play at the end of life in Japan? Spiritual Ends draws on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with hospice patients, chaplains, and medical workers to provide an intimate portrayal of how spiritual care is provided to the dying in Japan. Timothy O. Benedict uses both local and cross-cultural perspectives to show how hospice caregivers in Japan are appropriating and reinterpreting global ideas about spirituality and the practice of spiritual care. Benedict relates these findings to a longer story of how Japanese religious groups have pursued vocational roles in medical institutions as a means to demonstrate a so-called “healthy” role in society. By paying attention to how care for the kokoro (heart or mind) is key to the practice of spiritual care, this book enriches conventional understandings of religious identity in Japan while offering a valuable East Asian perspective to global conversations on the ways religion, spirituality, and medicine intersect at death.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.Expanding Verse explores experimental poetic practice at key moments of transition in Japan's media landscape from the 1920s to the present. Andrew Campana centers hybrid poetic forms in modern and contemporary Japan—many of which have never been examined in detail before—including the cinepoem, the tape recorder poem, the protest performance poem, the music video poem, the online sign language poem, and the augmented reality poem. Drawing together approaches from literary, media, and disability studies, he contends that poetry actively aimed to disrupt the norms of media in each era. For the poets in Expanding Verse, poetry was not a medium in and of itself but a way to push back against what new media technologies crystallized and perpetuated. Their aim was to challenge dominant conceptions of embodiment and sensation, as well as who counts as a poet and what counts as poetry. Over and over, poetic practice became a way to think about each medium otherwise, and to find new possibilities at the edge of media.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.Japan is a nation saddled with centuries of accumulated stereotypes and loaded assumptions about suicide. Many pronouncements have been made about those who have died by their own hand, without careful attention to the words of the dead themselves. Drawing upon far-ranging creations by famous twentieth- and twenty-first-century Japanese writers and little-known amateurs alike—such as death poems, suicide notes, memorials, suicide maps and manuals, works of literature, photography, film, and manga—Kirsten Cather interrogates how suicide is scripted and to what end. Entering the orbit of suicidal writers and readers with care, she shows that through close readings these works can reveal fundamental beliefs about suicide and, just as crucially, about acts of writing. These are not scripts set in stone but graven images and words nonetheless that serve to mourn the dead, straddling two impulses: to put the dead to rest and to keep them alive forever. These words reach out to us to initiate a dialogue with the dead, one that can reveal why it matters to write into and from the void.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.How does an environmental crisis become the impetus for a kind of caring that is also intense thinking? Care, Kin, Crack-Up examines Japanese literature and activist narratives to show people at their most creative when struggling to engage Gaia: earth, intrusion, life. Faced with Fukushima, how did they trace nuclear enormity along thin lines of immanence and sense? Into incorporeal cracks rather than debilitating crack-ups? Margherita Long opens environmental humanities in new feminist directions using ideas from Indigenous studies, disability studies, science and technology studies, and Deleuze. This book maps new problems, like the gendered politics of the nuclear disaster, to reframe old ones, like Japan's peace constitution, military sexual slavery, and Minamata mercury poisoning.