Studies of the East Asian Institute – serie

Ideology played a momentous role in modern Japanese history. Not only did the elite of imperial Japan (1890-1945) work hard to influence the people to "yield as the grasses before the wind," but historians of modern Japan later identified these efforts as one of the underlying pathologies of World War II. Available for the first time in paperback, this study examines how this ideology evolved. Carol Gluck argues that the process of formulating and communicating new national values was less consistent than is usually supposed. By immersing the reader in the talk and thought of the late Meiji period, Professor Gluck recreates the diversity of ideological discourse experienced by Japanese of the time. The result is a new interpretation of the views of politics and the nation in imperial Japan.

Dazai Osamu (1909-1948) is one of Japan's most famous literary suicides, known as the earliest postwar manifestation of the genuinely alienated writer in Japan. In this first deconstructive reading of a modern Japanese novelist, Alan Wolfe draws on contemporary Western literary and cultural theories and on a knowledge of Dazai's work in the context of Japanese literary history to provide a fresh view of major texts by this important literary figure. In the process, Wolfe revises Japanese as well as Western scholarship on Dazai and discovers new connections among suicide, autobiography, alienation, and modernization. As shown here, Dazai's writings resist narrative and historical closure; while he may be said to serve the Japanese literary establishment as both romantic decadent and representative scapegoat, his texts reveal a deconstructive edge through which his posthumous status as a monument of negativity is already perceived and undone.Wolfe maintains that cultural modernization pits a Western concept of the individual as realized self and coherent subject against an Eastern absent self--and that a felt need to overcome this tension inspires the autobiographical fiction so prevalent in Japanese novels. Suicidal Narrative in Modern Japan shows that Dazai's texts also resist readings that would resolve the gaps (East/West, self/other, modern/premodern) still prevalent in Japanese intellectual life. Originally published in 1990. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

In an absorbing account of a frontier family's rise to local eminence, from its pioneer days in eighteenth-century Taiwan through its attainment of gentry status there a century later, Johanna Meskill presents not just a family history but a social history of late imperial China as well. Originally published in 1987. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The Japan Teachers' Union, which represents 500,000 elementary and lower secondary school teachers, is an important interest group in Japanese politics. It is especially significant as a radical group operating both within and outside the political system and in direct conflict with conservative government policies in education and other areas of domestic and foreign policy. Donald R. Thurston's descriptive and analytic study of this most controversial labor union reveals a great deal about Japan's educational and political systems, and about the teaching profession in Japan and its relations with government and the community. It will therefore be of great interest both to political scientists and to those interested in comparative education. The purpose of this broad cross-sectional case study of the Japan Teachers' Union was to find out how much influence it has had on its own members and on the formulation and implementation of educational policies. The conclusion is that the union is much more influential at the local level where educational policies are implemented, and changed in the process of implementation, than at the national level where policy is formulated.It also shows that the Japan Teachers' Union has changed teachers' attitudes towards their roles, and that although the JTU is attached to the left-wing Japan Socialist Party, it is much more autonomous than has been thought. Originally published in 1973. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

This book offers an in-depth investigation into the writings of one of modern Japan's most gifted poet-scholars, Nishiwaki Junzaburo (1894-1982), who has been compared to T. S. Eliot, R. M. Rilke, and Paul Valery. Exploring both his poetry and theoretical writings, Hosea Hirata describes how Nishiwaki, who wrote his first poems in English and French, shaped a highly influential poetic modernism in Japan while elevating the artistic status of translation. This volume includes Nishiwaki's highly original essays on the nature of poetry, his first two collections of Japanese poems, and a poem meditating on the annihilation of symbolism. The author maintains that in Japan the language of modernism was that of translation. When Nishiwaki finally began to write poems in Japanese, a new poetic language was born in his country: a translatory language. Hirata elaborates this birth of new poetry via translation by referring to the theories of translation and of differance articulated by Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida.The author reconsiders the view that translated texts are secondary to the originals, where the truth supposedly resides; instead he presents translation as an essential textual movement, ecriture, toward the paradise of pure language and Poetry. Originally published in 1993. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The Japan Teachers' Union, which represents 500,000 elementary and lower secondary school teachers, is an important interest group in Japanese politics. It is especially significant as a radical group operating both within and outside the political system and in direct conflict with conservative government policies in education and other areas of domestic and foreign policy. Donald R. Thurston's descriptive and analytic study of this most controversial labor union reveals a great deal about Japan's educational and political systems, and about the teaching profession in Japan and its relations with government and the community. It will therefore be of great interest both to political scientists and to those interested in comparative education. The purpose of this broad cross-sectional case study of the Japan Teachers' Union was to find out how much influence it has had on its own members and on the formulation and implementation of educational policies. The conclusion is that the union is much more influential at the local level where educational policies are implemented, and changed in the process of implementation, than at the national level where policy is formulated.It also shows that the Japan Teachers' Union has changed teachers' attitudes towards their roles, and that although the JTU is attached to the left-wing Japan Socialist Party, it is much more autonomous than has been thought. Originally published in 1973. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.