Cultural Imprints draws on literary works, artifacts, performing arts, and documents that were created by or about the samurai to examine individual "imprints," traces holding specifically grounded historical meanings that persist through time. The contributors to this interdisciplinary volume assess those imprints for what they can suggest about how thinkers, writers, artists, performers, and samurai themselves viewed warfare and its lingering impact at various points during the "samurai age," the long period from the establishment of the first shogunate in the twelfth century through the fall of the Tokugawa in 1868. The range of methodologies and materials discussed in Cultural Imprints challenges a uniform notion of warrior activity and sensibilities, breaking down an ahistorical, monolithic image of the samurai that developed late in the samurai age and that persists today. Highlighting the memory of warfare and its centrality in the cultural realm, Cultural Imprints demonstrates the warrior's far-reaching, enduring, and varied cultural influence across centuries of Japanese history. Contributors: Monica Bethe, William Fleming, Andrew Goble, Thomas Hare, Luke Roberts, Marimi Tateno, Alison Tokita, Elizabeth Oyler, Katherine Saltzman-Li

This book studies the three concepts of translation, education and innovation from a Nordic and international perspective on Japanese and Korean societies. It presents findings from pioneering research into cultural translation, Japanese and Korean linguistics, urban development, traditional arts, and related fields. Across recent decades, Northern European scholars have shown increasing interest in East Asia. Even though they are situated on opposite sides of the Eurasia landmass, the Nordic nations have a great deal in common with Japan and Korea, including vibrant cultural traditions, strong educational systems, and productive social democratic economies. Taking a cross-cultural and interdisciplinary approach, and in addition to the examination of the three key concepts, the book explores several additional intersecting themes, including sustainability, nature, humour, aesthetics, cultural survival and social change, discourse and representation. This book offers a collection of original interdisciplinary research from the 25th anniversary conference of the Nordic Association for Japanese and Korean Studies (2013). Its 21 chapters are divided into five parts according to interdisciplinary themes: Translational Issues in Literature, Analyses of Korean and Japanese Languages, Language Education, Innovation and New Perspectives on Culture, and The Arts in Innovative Societies.

Since the 1990s there has been a dramatic increase in cultural flows and connections between the countries in the East Asian region. Nowhere is this more apparent than when looking at popular culture where uneven but multilateral exchanges of Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese, Hong Kong and Chinese products have led to the construction of an ‘East Asian Popular Culture’. This is both influenced by, and in turn influences, the national cultures, and generates transnational co-production and reinvention. As East Asian popular culture becomes a global force, it is increasingly important for us to understand the characteristics of contemporary East Asian popular culture, and in particular its transnational nature. In this handbook, the contributors theorize East Asian experiences and reconsider Western theories on cultural globalization to provide a cutting-edge overview of this global phenomenon. The Routledge Handbook of East Asian Popular Culture will be of great interest to students and scholars of a wide range of disciplines, including: Cultural Studies, Media Studies, Communication Studies, Anthropology, Sociology and Asian Studies in general.

The Routledge Handbook of East Asian Gender Studies presents up-to-date theoretical and conceptual developments in key areas of the field, taking a multi-disciplinary and comparative approach. Featuring contributions by leading scholars of Gender Studies to provide a cutting-edge overview of the field, this handbook includes examples from China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong and covers the following themes: theorising gender relations; women’s and feminist movements; work, care and migration; family and intergenerational relationships; cultural representation; masculinity; and state, militarism and gender. This handbook is essential reading for scholars and students of Gender and Women’s Studies, as well as East Asian societies, social policy and culture.

These timely essays highlight regional cross-fertilization in music, film, new media, and popular culture in Northeast Asia, including analysis of gender and labor issues amid differing regulatory frameworks and public policy concerning cultural production and piracy.

Asian Cultural Studies or Cultural Studies in Asia is a new and burgeoning field, and the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Journal is at its cutting edge. Committed to bringing Asian Cultural Studies scholarship to the international English speaking world and constantly challenging existing conceptions of cultural studies, the journal has emerged as the leading publication in Cultural Studies in Asia. The Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Reader brings together the best of the ground breaking papers published in the journal and includes a new introduction by the editors, Chen Kuan-Hsing and Chua Beng Huat. Essays are grouped in thematic sections, including issues which are important across the region, such as State violence and social movements and work produced by IACS sub-groups, such as feminism, queer studies, cinema studies and popular culture studies. The Reader provides useful alternative case studies and challenging perspectives, which will be invaluable for both students and scholars in media and cultural studies.

This book investigates economic, political, and cultural conditions that have led to transnational flows of culture in Asia. Coverage also looks at the consequences of an increasingly interconnected Asian regional culture as well as policy makers and cultural industries' response to it. The book features essays written by researchers from different countries in Asia and beyond with diverse disciplinary backgrounds. The volume also contains engaging examples and cases with comparative perspectives. The contributors provide readers with grounded analysis in the organizational and economic logics of Asian creative industries, national cultural policies that promote or hinder cultural flows, and the media convergence and online consumers' surging demand for Asianized cultural products. Such insights are of crucial importance for a better understanding of the dynamics of transnational cultural flows in contemporary Asia. In addition, the essays aim to “de-westernize” the study of cultural and creative industries, which draws predominantly on cases in the United States and Europe. The contributors focus instead on regional dynamics of the development of these industries. The popularity of J-Pop and K-Pop in East and Southeast Asia (and beyond) is now well known, but less is known about how this happened. This volume offers readers theoretical tools that will help them to make better sense of those exciting phenomena and other rising cultural flows within Asia and their relevance to the global cultural economy.