A groundbreaking examination of artists portrayals of Tokyo from the mid-nineteenth century to the present."

In the 1960s and 1970s, the United States and Japan went through massive welfare expansions that sparked debates about citizenship. At the heart of these disputes stood African Americans and Koreans. Reinventing Citizenship offers a comparative study of African American welfare activism in Los Angeles and Koreans’ campaigns for welfare rights in Kawasaki. In working-class and poor neighborhoods in both locations, African Americans and Koreans sought not only to be recognized as citizens but also to become legitimate constituting members of communities. Local activists in Los Angeles and Kawasaki ardently challenged the welfare institutions. By creating opposition movements and voicing alternative visions of citizenship, African American leaders, Tsuchiya argues, turned Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty into a battle for equality. Koreans countered the city’s and the nation’s exclusionary policies and asserted their welfare rights. Tsuchiya’s work exemplifies transnational antiracist networking, showing how black religious leaders traveled to Japan to meet Christian Korean activists and to provide counsel for their own struggles. Reinventing Citizenship reveals how race and citizenship transform as they cross countries and continents. By documenting the interconnected histories of African Americans and Koreans in Japan, Tsuchiya enables us to rethink present ideas of community and belonging.

Single-family houses are becoming increasingly outdated. They offer no response to demographic change or to the fact that there are fewer and fewer life-long relationships. They are often too inflexible for new family models or ways of cohabitation. This publication presents projects in recent years in Japan, which respond to the need for new forms of housing. The architects are developing solutions that allow residents to live together but still maintain enough distance and privacy. The presented apartment types and their layout allow for a variety of life models. Particularly interesting here is the use of spaces that provide a gradual transition from public to private space—an approach to building that, according to experts, could revolutionize western residential architecture. The publication portrays these new forms of building and living based on prominent Japanese examples that include Shigeru Ban, Sou Foujimoto, and Akihisa Hirata.

Struggling Upward reconsiders the rise and maturation of the modern novel in Japan by connecting the genre to new discourses on ambition and social mobility. Collectively called risshin shusse, these discourses accompanied the spread of industrial capitalism and the emergence of a new nation-state in the archipelago. Drawing primarily on historicist strategies of literary criticism, the book situates the Meiji novel in relation to a range of texts from different culturally demarcated zones: the visual arts, scandal journalism, self-help books, and materials on immigration to the colonies, among others. Timothy J. Van Compernolle connects these Japanese materials to topics of broad theoretical interest within literary and cultural studies, including imperialism, gender, modernity, novel studies, print media, and the public sphere. As the first monograph to link the novel to risshin shusse, Struggling Upward argues that social mobility is the privileged lens through which Meiji novelists explored abstract concepts of national belonging, social hierarchy, and the new space of an industrializing nation.

The hugely popular Japanese artist Takehisa Yumeji (1884–1934) is an emblematic figure of Japan’s rapidly changing cultural milieu in the early twentieth century. His graphic works include leftist and antiwar illustrations in socialist bulletins, wrenching portrayals of Tokyo after the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923, and fashionable images of beautiful women—referred to as “Yumeji-style beauties”—in books and magazines that targeted a new demographic of young female consumers. Yumeji also played a key role in the reinvention of the woodblock medium. As his art and designs proliferated in Japan’s mass media, Yumeji became a recognizable brand. In the first full-length English-language study of Yumeji’s work, Nozomi Naoi examines the artist’s role in shaping modern Japanese identity. Addressing his output from the start of his career in 1905 to the 1920s, when his productivity peaked, Yumeji Modern introduces for the first time in English translation a substantial body of Yumeji’s texts, including diary entries, poetry, essays, and commentary, alongside his illustrations. Naoi situates Yumeji’s graphic art within the emerging media landscape from 1900s through the 1910s, when novel forms of reprographic communication helped create new spaces of visual culture and image circulation. Yumeji’s legacy and his present-day following speak to the broader, ongoing implications of his work with respect to commercial art, visual culture, and print media.

This volume examines the visual culture of Japan’s transition to modernity, from 1868 to the first decades of the twentieth century. Through this important moment in Japanese history, contributors reflect on Japan’s transcultural artistic imagination vis-a-vis the discernment, negotiation, assimilation, and assemblage of diverse aesthetic concepts and visual pursuits. The collected chapters show how new cultural notions were partially modified and integrated to become the artistic methods of modern Japan, based on the hybridization of major ideologies, visualities, technologies, productions, formulations, and modes of representation. The book presents case studies of creative transformation demonstrating how new concepts and methods were perceived and altered to match views and theories prevalent in Meiji Japan, and by what means different practitioners negotiated between their existing skills and the knowledge generated from incoming ideas to create innovative modes of practice and representation that reflected the specificity of modern Japanese artistic circumstances. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, Japanese studies, Asian studies, and Japanese history, as well as those who use approaches and methods related to globalization, cross-cultural studies, transcultural exchange, and interdisciplinary studies.

Why are cities centers of power? A sociological analysis of urban politics In this brilliant, very original survey of the politics and meanings of urban landscapes, leading sociologist Göran Therborn offers a tour of the world’s major capital cities, showing how they have been shaped by national, popular, and global forces. Their stories begin with the emergence of various kinds of nation-state, each with its own special capital city problematic. In turn, radical shifts of power have impacted on these cities’ development, in popular urban reforms or movements of protest and resistance; in the rise and fall of fascism and military dictatorships; and the coming and going of Communism. Therborn also analyzes global moments of urban formation, of historical globalized nationalism, as well as the cities of current global image capitalism and their variations of skyscraping, gating, and displays of novelty. Through a global, historical lens, and with a thematic range extending from the mutations of modernist architecture to the contemporary return of urban revolutions, Therborn questions received assumptions about the source, manifestations, and reach of urban power, combining perspectives on politics, sociology, urban planning, architecture, and urban iconography. He argues that, at a time when they seem to be moving apart, there is a strong link between the city and the nation-state, and that the current globalization of cities is largely driven by the global aspirations of politicians as well as those of national and local capital. With its unique systematic overview, from Washington, D.C. and revolutionary Paris to the flamboyant twenty- first-century capital Astana in Kazakhstan, its wealth of urban observations from all the populated continents, and its sharp and multi-faceted analyses, Cities of Power forces us to rethink our urban future, as well as our historically shaped present.

These days one can hardly say anything about art without confronting the freighted status of the photograph. Many critics have written about the idea of photography by other means or art after photography. And many famous artistsamong them Gerhard Richter, Gillian Wearing and Thomas Struth--have stretched the idea of the truth-value of the photograph by claiming to make actual photographs in other materials, such as paint or video. Saltzman is interested in how photography has functioned to secure identity in the modern period and the implications of that history for us today. While Saltzman s purpose is to look at contemporary adaptations of photography, the story she tells begins even earlier than the invention of the photograph. It starts with the story of Martin Guerre (nee Daguerre) and the idea of what the image may have held as a guarantor of identity in the early modern period. In this way Saltzman establishes a broad, deep historical frame before delving into the art of the present. Each chapter covers a different medium ranging from video, graphic novels, and literature to film. Along the way, she takes on figures of unstable identity fugitive subjects to wit, the mysterious Martin Guerre, Blade Runners, replicants, Henriette Barthes, and W.G. Sebald s characters. She also confronts a range of contemporary critics, artists, and knotty debates about veracity, uncertainty and identity that began to circulate in the nineteenth century with the invention of photography."

This text rethinks the contours of Japanese history, culture and nationality. Challenging the mythology of a historically unitary, even monolithic Japan, it offers a different perspective on culture and identity in modern Japan.

Each one of us has a perception of reality that is shaped by a number of factors, such as our senses, our experiences, our beliefs, our emotions, and our perspectives. This book draws from personal experiences, culture, technology, genes, philosophy, and attempts to reveal a path that systematically unveils the tools to understanding ourselves better and as a result unlock the potential deep within us. If we believe that the world is a dangerous place, we may be more likely to interpret events in a negative way. Conversely, if we believe that the world is a friendly place, we may be more likely to interpret events in a positive way. By creating an awareness of how these perceptions of reality are influential and understanding how our minds work, we can become more objective in our thinking and make better informed decisions. Technology growth has fueled our communications by helping us stay in touch with friends and family anywhere in the world, collaborate with colleagues & clients located anywhere in the world, provided accessibility to almost unlimited information and knowledge at the click of a few buttons, improved quality of life for people with disabilities, wearables to monitor our health and fitness. Despite all these life enriching experiences, there is a deep sense of anxiety, fear, and tension that is tied to newer innovations like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and many other products. Embark on this unique transformational journey with author Rajeev Nalawadi to analyze from an engineer's perspective the concepts of I, Me, Mine, You in our lives. When we see ourselves as "I", we are seeing ourselves as separate from the world around us. When we see ourselves as "me", we are seeing ourselves as a collection of thoughts, feelings, and experiences. When we see ourselves as "mine", we are seeing ourselves as attached to things and people in the material world. When we see ourselves as "you", we are seeing ourselves as connected to all other beings in the universe. How can we transform ourselves to chart life’s journey to lead a more fulfilling life amidst the wave of breakneck speed innovations about to be introduced. Tapping into the field of all possibilities is within reach for all of us, it just needs to be explored the right way. Rather than being overwhelmed by the blast of technological innovations headed our way, we can use some techniques to manage our life’s transformations in a way that can instill peace, and calmness.