As Japan moved from the devastation of 1945 to the economic security that survived even the boom and bust of the 1980s and 1990s, its literature came to embrace new subjects and styles and to reflect on the nation's changing relationship to other Asian countries and to the West. This volume will help instructors introduce students to novels, short stories, and manga that confront postwar Japanese experiences, including the suffering caused by the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the echoes of Japan's colonialism and imperialism, new ways of thinking about Japanese identity and about minorities such as the zainichi Koreans, changes in family structures, and environmental disasters. Essays provide context for understanding the particularity of postwar Japanese literature, its place in world literature, and its connections to the Japanese past.

Playing in the Shadows considers the literature engendered by postwar Japanese authors’ robust cultural exchanges with African Americans and African American literature. The Allied Occupation brought an influx of African American soldiers and culture to Japan, which catalyzed the writing of black characters into postwar Japanese literature. This same influx fostered the creation of organizations such as the Kokujin kenkyū no kai (The Japanese Association for Negro Studies) and literary endeavors such as the Kokujin bungaku zenshū (The Complete Anthology of Black Literature). This rich milieu sparked Japanese authors’—Nakagami Kenji and Ōe Kenzaburō are two notable examples—interest in reading, interpreting, critiquing, and, ultimately, incorporating the tropes and techniques of African American literature and jazz performance into their own literary works. Such incorporation leads to literary works that are “black” not by virtue of their representations of black characters, but due to their investment in the possibility of technically and intertextually black Japanese literature. Will Bridges argues that these “fictions of race” provide visions of the way that postwar Japanese authors reimagine the ascription of race to bodies—be they bodies of literature, the body politic, or the human body itself.

The Routledge Handbook of Modern Japanese Literature provides a comprehensive overview of how we study Japanese literature today. Rather than taking a purely chronological approach to the content, the chapters survey the state of the field through a number of pressing issues and themes, examining the ways in which it is possible to read modern Japanese literature and situate it in relation to critical theory. The Handbook examines various modes of literary production (such as fiction, poetry, and critical essays) as distinct forms of expression that nonetheless are closely interrelated. Attention is drawn to the idea of the bunjin as a ‘person of letters’ and a more realistic assessment is provided of how writers have engaged with ideas – not labelled a ‘novelist’ or ‘poet’, but a ‘writer’ who may at one time or another choose to write in various forms. The book provides an overview of major authors and genres by situating them within broader themes that have defined the way writers have produced literature in modern Japan, as well as how those works have been read and understood by different readers in different time periods. The Routledge Handbook of Modern Japanese Literature draws from an international array of established experts in the field as well as promising young researchers. It represents a wide variety of critical approaches, giving the study a broad range of perspectives. This handbook will be of interest to students and scholars of Asian Studies, Literature, Sociology, Critical Theory, and History.

A Transdisciplinary Approach to Chinese and Japanese Language Teaching illustrates how the transdisciplinary approach to second language acquisition (SLA) centers around collaboration to provide a learning-conducive environment with rich semiotic resources for second/foreign language learners. The volume consists of 14 chapters from leading experts in SLA and Chinese and Japanese language educators from Canada, China, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America. As a first work of its kind, the contributions feature both theoretical interpretations of transdisciplinary concepts that can apply to Chinese/Japanese as a second language learning and case studies showcasing how college-level Chinese and Japanese language educators design and implement pedagogical projects in collaboration with partners across languages, disciplines, communities, and borders by adopting a transdisciplinary perspective to analyze students’ learning outcomes. This book will benefit researchers, administrators, educators, and teacher educators in higher education with an interest in world language education and interdisciplinary and project-based teaching.

Focusing on the post war reconstruction of the education systems in Japan and Germany under U.S. military occupation after World War II, this book offers a comparative historical investigation of education reform policies in these two war ravaged and ideologically compromised countries. While in Japan large-scale reforms were undertaken swiftly after the end of the war, the U.S. zone in Germany maintained most of the traditional aspects of the German education system. Why did Japan so readily accept ideas and values developed in the allied countries while Germany resisted? Masako Shibata explores this question, arguing that the role of the university and the pattern of elite formation, which can be traced back to the period of the formation of Meiji Japan and the Kaiserreich, created the conditions for differing reactions from educational leaders in each country; this had a decisive impact on the proposed reforms. By examining these reactions through a sociological, cultural, and historical frame, an explanation emerges. Japan and Germany under the U.S. Occupation will prove to be a valuable resource both to scholars of history and education reform.

How did East and West Germany and Japan reconstitute national identity after World War II? Did all three experience parallel reactions to national trauma and reconstruction?History education shaped how these nations reconceived their national identities. Because the content of history education was controlled by different actors, history education materials framed national identity in very different ways. In Japan, where the curriculum was controlled by bureaucrats bent on maintaining their purported neutrality, materials focused on the empirical building blocks of history (wh.

Critics and cultural historians take Japan's postwar insularity for granted, rarely acknowledging the role of Cold War concerns in the shaping of Japanese society and culture. Nuclear anxiety, polarized ideologies, gendered tropes of nationhood, and new myths of progress, among other developments, profoundly transformed Japanese literature, criticism, and art during this era and fueled the country's desire to recast itself as a democratic nation and culture. By rereading the pivotal events, iconic figures, and crucial texts of Japan's literary and artistic life through the lens of the Cold War, Ann Sherif places this supposedly insular nation at the center of a global battle. Each of her chapters focuses on a major moment, spectacle, or critical debate highlighting Japan's entanglement with cultural Cold War politics. Film director Kurosawa Akira, atomic bomb writer Hara Tamiki, singer and movie star Ishihara Yujiro, and even Godzilla and the Japanese translation of Lady Chatterley's Lover all reveal the trends and controversies that helped Japan carve out a postwar literary canon, a definition of obscenity, an idea of the artist's function in society, and modern modes of expression and knowledge. Sherif's comparative approach not only recontextualizes seemingly anomalous texts and ideas, but binds culture firmly to the domestic and international events that defined the decades following World War II. By integrating the art and criticism of Japan into larger social fabrics, Japan's Cold War offers a truly unique perspective on the critical and creative acts of a country remaking itself in the aftermath of war.

This book examines key aspects of the Asia Pacific War (1931–1945), that was initially waged between Japan and China, before Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor drew in the U.S.-led allied forces from 1941 to 1945. Part I of the book examines three interlocking components, the origins of the war; its impact on combatants and civilians; and its short-term legacy, including the huge changes that took place in the postwar governance of Japan. Part II explores the ongoing impact and legacy of the war for those in postwar Japan, and later generations, particularly through the examination of the ambiguity of state-led reconciliation with Japan’s neighbors, the growth of dynamic civil reconciliation efforts, and the prominent role of the arts in peace movements. Through a people-centered approach it filters historical events through the lens of the war’s impact on individuals, who found themselves players within a larger frame of the social history of Japan and caught up in the international power dynamics of the nuclear age. Featuring studies of contemporary peace activism, this will be a valuable resource to students and scholars of Modern Asian and U.S. History, as well as those interested in postwar memory and reconciliation.

In The Unnamable Archipelago: Wounds of the Postcolonial in Postwar Japanese Literature and Thought, Dennitza Gabrakova discusses how the island imagery in the works by Imafuku Ryūta, Ukai Satoshi, Ōba Minako, Ariyoshi Sawako, Hino Keizō, Ikezawa Natsuki, Shimada Masahiko and Tawada Yōko shapes a critical understanding of Japan on multiple intersections of trauma and sovereignty. The book attempts an engagement with the vocabulary of postcolonial critique, while attending to the complexity of its translation into Japanese.

For students, fans, and scholars alike, this wide-ranging primer on anime employs a panoply of critical approaches Well-known through hit movies like Spirited Away, Akira, and Ghost in the Shell, anime has a long history spanning a wide range of directors, genres, and styles. Christopher Bolton’s Interpreting Anime is a thoughtful, carefully organized introduction to Japanese animation for anyone eager to see why this genre has remained a vital, adaptable art form for decades. Interpreting Anime is easily accessible and structured around individual films and a broad array of critical approaches. Each chapter centers on a different feature-length anime film, juxtaposing it with a particular medium—like literary fiction, classical Japanese theater, and contemporary stage drama—to reveal what is unique about anime’s way of representing the world. This analysis is abetted by a suite of questions provoked by each film, along with Bolton’s incisive responses. Throughout, Interpreting Anime applies multiple frames, such as queer theory, psychoanalysis, and theories of postmodernism, giving readers a thorough understanding of both the cultural underpinnings and critical significance of each film. What emerges from the sweep of Interpreting Anime is Bolton’s original, articulate case for what makes anime unique as a medium: how it at once engages profound social and political realities while also drawing attention to the very challenges of representing reality in animation’s imaginative and compelling visual forms.