Stories of Life in Japan for “off the beaten path” foreigners of various extractions, their interactions with Japanese people, and Japanese interactions with them. Over the last few decades, majestic and historical Japan has seen a steady rise of visitors and of those a considerable portion seek work. One of the main popular employment options came in the form of Language Instruction, the dominant of such being English, drawing instructors from nearly every corner of the globe to travel abroad and teach. Some find alternate means to grind and find a better way of life, while others fail miserably. BLURRED IMAGES Japan is a collection of abbreviated tales not for the faint of heart and not likely to be the colorful testimonials found on tourist brochures...

While the loss of sight—whether in early modern Japan or now—may be understood as a disability, blind people in the Tokugawa period (1600–1868) could thrive because of disability. The blind of the era were prominent across a wide range of professions, and through a strong guild structure were able to exert contractual monopolies over certain trades. Blind in Early Modern Japan illustrates the breadth and depth of those occupations, the power and respect that accrued to the guild members, and the lasting legacy of the Tokugawa guilds into the current moment. The book illustrates why disability must be assessed within a particular society’s social, political, and medical context, and also the importance of bringing medical history into conversation with cultural history. A Euro-American-centric disability studies perspective that focuses on disability and oppression, the author contends, risks overlooking the unique situation in a non-Western society like Japan in which disability was constructed to enhance blind people’s power. He explores what it meant to be blind in Japan at that time, and what it says about current frameworks for understanding disability.

A principal challenge for both biological and machine vision systems is to integrate and organize the diversity of cues received from the environment into the coherent global representations we experience and require to make good decisions and take effective actions. Early psychological investigations date back more than 100 years to the seminal work of the Gestalt school. Yet in the last 50 years, neuroscientific and computational approaches to understanding perceptual organization have become equally important, and a full understanding requires integration of all three approaches. This highly interdisciplinary Research Topic welcomes contributions spanning Computer Science, Psychology, and Neuroscience, with the aim of presenting a single, unified collection that will encourage integration and cross-fertilization across disciplines.

Today’s convergent media environment offers unprecedented opportunities for sourcing and disseminating previously obscure popular culture material from Japan. However, this presents concerns regarding copyright, ratings and exposure to potentially illegal content which are serious problems for those teaching and researching about Japan. Despite young people’s enthusiasm for Japanese popular culture, these concerns spark debate about whether it can be judged harmful for youth audiences and could therefore herald the end of ‘cool Japan’. This collection brings together Japan specialists in order to identify key challenges in using Japanese popular culture materials in research and teaching. It addresses issues such as the availability of unofficially translated and distributed Japanese material; the emphasis on adult-themes, violence, sexual scenes and under-age characters; and the discrepancies in legislation and ratings systems across the world. Considering how these issues affect researchers, teachers, students and fans in the US, Canada, Australia, China, Japan and elsewhere in Asia, the contributors discuss the different ways in which academic and fan practices are challenged by local regulations. Illustrating from personal experience the sometimes fraught nature of teaching about ‘cool Japan’, they suggest ways in which Japanese Studies as a discipline needs to develop clearer guidelines for teaching and research, especially for new scholars entering the field. As the first collection to identify some of the real problems faced by teachers and researchers of Japanese popular culture as well as the students over whom they have a duty of care, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Japanese Studies and Cultural Studies.

While scholarly works on this topic have to date mainly concentrated on Japan's influences in economic and political terms, this volume examines Japanese influences in Asia from a broader perspective. The text takes into account human factors, such as the presence of Japanese people as workers, managers and visitors in Asian societies and the flow of Japanese goods in terms on their impact on popular culture. In addition, the book examines the feelings within other Asian nations such as India and Malaysia to the Japanese presence, looking at Japanese the people’s aspirations, expectations and at times disappointments. Written by Asian and Western scholars from variety of academic perspectives, the essays in this volume analyze the topic at both macro- and micro-levels. They examine the variegated and highly differing influences and presences of Japan as seen from a number of view points, from street perspectives and the world of popular culture, to global political issues, to questions of regional investment and the cultural and economic aspirations of Chinese students in Japan.

A retrospective on the career of Japanese photographer Shomei Tomatsu, whose work has chronicled the changing face of Japan from the 1950s until the present. Included are essays on all aspects of the life & career of the artist, as well as excerpts from Tomatsu's own writings.

In the Japanese language the word ‘ie’ denotes both the materiality of homes and family relations within. The traditional family and family house - often portrayed in ideal terms as key foundations of Japanese culture and society - have been subject to significant changes in recent years. This book comprehensively addresses various aspects of family life and dwelling spaces, exploring how homes, household patterns and kin relations are reacting to contemporary social, economic and urban transformations, and the degree to which traditional patterns of both houses and households are changing. The book contextualises the shift from the hegemonic post-war image of standard family life, to the nuclear family and to a situation now where Japanese homes are more likely to include unmarried singles; childless couples; divorcees; unmarried adult children and elderly relatives either living alone or in nursing homes. It discusses how these new patterns are both reinforcing and challenging typical understandings of Japanese family life.

The two-volume set LNCS 8935 and 8936 constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Multimedia Modeling, MMM 2015, held in Sydney, Australia, in January 2015. The 49 revised regular papers, 24 poster presentations, were carefully reviewed and selected from 189 submissions. For the three special session, a total of 18 papers were accepted for MMM 2015. The three special sessions are Personal (Big) Data Modeling for Information Access and Retrieval, Social Geo-Media Analytics and Retrieval and Image or video processing, semantic analysis and understanding. In addition, 9 demonstrations and 9 video showcase papers were accepted for MMM 2015. The accepted contributions included in these two volumes represent the state-of-the-art in multimedia modeling research and cover a diverse range of topics including: Image and Video Processing, Multimedia encoding and streaming, applications of multimedia modelling and 3D and augmented reality.