Customer Reviews

Japan After Japan: Social and Cultural Life from the Recessionary 1990s to the Present (Asia-Pacific: Culture, Politics, and Society)

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Variety is the spice of life. That simple (if cliched) principle accounts for both the strength and the weakness of a book like "Japan After Japan"--a collection of assorted articles on a wide variety of subjects by a mob of scholars all expert in Japanese history per se but otherwise rather different in tone, approach, and specialization. In some ways then the book feels disjointed and discontinuous despite the overall theme (Japan in the 1990's), the consistently high academic caliber, and the generally common leftist political orientation of the contributors--no matter what the topic at hand, you can be pretty sure that any form of capitalism is always already something negative to be resisted, any sense of national identity whatsoever is always already a mere half-step away from full-blown virulent militarism, and so on. But these diffuse and very overarching commonalities aside, anything goes. No topic is out. Juvenile crime and Pokemon, you name it. The quality also varies greatly, from a fascinating and thought-provoking account of the Aichi Expo and the citizen opposition groups who intervened in its conceptualization and realization to a clunky, jargon-infested, ideologically kneejerk Marxist analysis of globalization's effect on the Japanese nation state.

But then only in a book like this can you find all this together like a box of chocolates, allowing you to sample a bit of each before moving on to the next. The very fact that the disorganized range of the book resists some kind of premature conclusion and closure ("The 90's in Japan mean only so-and-so and nothing else") is refreshing. The articles altogether also give the patient reader a pretty solid sense of some of what's going on in the field of Japanese History and/or Cultural Studies for better or worse, all without having to root through obscure academic journals or commit to a dozen-plus different monographs. No matter what your own interests and proclivities, this is a key book for any consideration of what in retrospect is a particularly dramatic decade in Japan's history--although, okay, not quite so dramatic as the book's cover would seem to suggest with its "I Am Legend" rendition of Ginza in Tokyo.

Articles included in this book:
1. Introduction by the editors, Harry Harootunian and Tomiko Yoda
2. "A Roadmap to Millennial Japan" by Tomiko Yoda
3. "The University and the 'Global Economy': The Cases of the United States and Japan" by Masao Miyoshi
4. "The University, Disciplines, National Identity: Why Is There No Film Studies in Japan?" by Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto
5. "Japan's Long Postwar: The Trick of Memory and the Ruse of History" by Harry Harootunian
6. "National Subjectivity and the Uses of Atonement in the Age of Recession" by J. Victor Koschmann
7. "'Give Me Japan and Nothing Else!': Postcoloniality, Identity, and the Traces of Colonialism" by Leo Ching
8. "'You Asians': On the Historical Role of the West and Asia Binary" by Naoki Sakai
9. "Revenge and Recapitation in Recessionary Japan" by Marilyn Ivy
10. "The 'Wild Child' of 1990s Japan" by Andrea G. Arai
11. "The Rise and Fall of Maternal Society: Gender, Labor, and Capital in Contemporary Japan" by Tomiko Yoda
12. "Representation, Reality Culture, and Global Capitalism in Japan" by Eric Cazdyn
13. "Monsieur le Capital and Madame la Terre Do Their Ghost-Dance: Globalization and the Nation-State" by Yutaka Nagahara
14. "New-Age Fetishes, Monsters, and Friends: Pokemon Capitalism at the Millennium" by Anne Allison
15. "Otaku Movement" by Thomas LaMarre
16. "A Drifting World Fair: Cultural Politics of Environment in the Local/Global Context of Contemporary Japan" by Yoshimi Shunya
17. "Angelus Novus in Millennial Japan" by Sabu Kohso