[...]... prior to the examination of the qualities of Japanese culture The formulation of the Japanese necessarily precedes that of Japanese culture To put it technically, the definition of the Japanese is the independent variable; that of Japanese culture the dependent The criteria for judging who the Japanese are can range from citizenship, ‘biological pedigree’, language competence and cultural literacy, to subjective... 2001 2002 The heyday of Nihonjinron (theories on the Japanese) and the rise of cultural nationalism The US returns Okinawa to Japan, which becomes the nation’s 47th prefecture Narita International Airport opens The decade of the so-called ‘bubble economy’ The peak of the postwar economic boom The Equal Opportunity Law comes into effect The so-called ‘lost decade’ The Japanese economy enters into stagnation... someone to be classified as Japanese Overview In a nutshell, there are two rival frameworks governing the way the relationship between the Japanese and Japanese culture is defined: the deductive approach in which Japanese culture is defined a priori and the Japanese are those who embody it; and the inductive approach which assumes that there are a variety of Japanese who generate various kinds of culture, ... and theory formation in studies of modern Japanese culture; (2) the two dominant forces – the state and the market – that shape the realm of Japanese culture; and (3) how various demographic groups consume Japanese culture in response to these two constraints In short, this volume considers both the conceptual and theoretical issues of Japan’s modern culture and the substantive configurations of its... reflects the controversy to the extent that each contributor chose their preferred style in referring to Japan’s historical figures and citing Japanese authors We exercised no editorial control over this matter, though the contributor’s name order at the beginning of each chapter follows the given name–surname sequence to avoid confusion in citations When uncertain, readers are requested to refer to the. .. contribute to the expansion of Japan’s civil society and seikatsu culture. 18 11 12 Yoshio Sugimoto Superimposed on these cultural spheres are the influences of the state and the market, the two dominant forces that shape the cultural orientations of the Japanese The government machinery actively intervenes in the cultural realm to promote national cohesion, while the business world uses the market’s... demonstrated by the recent inroads of Japanese animation (see chapter 19) and food culture (chapter 16) into the global sphere Nonetheless, on the whole, Hollywood, CNN and McDonalds globally define what is beautiful, newsworthy and tasty English is the lingua franca that the Japanese have to learn In tracing the historical transformations of Japanese housing in chapter 15, Ann Waswo shows how the culture of... itself in the ‘name order debate’: which way should the Japanese order their surnames and given names in Western languages? Since the early Meiji years and until recently, most Japanese have followed the Western system of placing their given name first and their surname second when identifying themselves in Western languages, although the convention in the Japanese language is the other way around – the surname... in 2002, the government regards the foundation of a nation based on highly marketable cultural commodities as its strategy to enhance the nation’s position in the international hierarchy The paradigm conflict in the formulation of Japanese culture, discussed at the beginning of this overview, reflects the emerging division of the state into two views of how Japanese culture should be defined.19 The first... the workaholic Japanese loyal to their companies, willing to live in small condominiums and keen to let their children study madly hard to gain admission to prestigious universities On top of these, there is a new layer of images in which the elements of Japaneseness are absent and Japan is described as almost ‘non -Japanese Conspicuous since the 1990s, this trend Overview is visible in the novels of . Connolly The Cambridge Companion to Modern American Culture Edited by Christopher Bigsby The Cambridge Companion to Modern Chinese Culture Edited by Kam Louie The Cambridge Companion to Modern Japanese. Australia. Cambridge Companions to Culture The Cambridge Companion to Modern German Culture Edited by Eva Kolinsky and Wilfried Van Der Will The Cambridge Companion to Modern Russian Culture Edited. Cambridge Companion to Modern French Culture Edited by Nicholas Hewitt The Cambridge Companion to Modern Latin American Culture Edited by John King The Cambridge Companion to Modern Irish Culture Edited