ABSTRACT
Over the last 70 years, Japanese Studies scholarship has gone through several dominant paradigms, from ‘demystifying the Japanese’, to analysis of Japanese economic strength, to discussion of global interest in Japanese popular culture. This book assesses this literature, considering future directions for research into the 2020s and beyond.
Shifting the geographical emphasis of Japanese Studies away from the West to the Asia-Pacific region, this book identifies topic areas in which research focusing on Japan will play an important role in global debates in the coming years. This includes the evolution of area studies, coping with aging populations, the various patterns of migration and environmental breakdown. With chapters from an international team of contributors, including significant representation from the Asia-Pacific region, this book enacts Yoshio Sugimoto’s notion of ‘cosmopolitan methodology’ to discuss Japan in an interdisciplinary and transnational context and provides overviews of how Japanese Studies is evolving in other Asian countries such as China and Indonesia.
New Frontiers in Japanese Studies
is a thought-provoking volume and will be of great interest to students and scholars of Japanese and Asian Studies.
The Introduction and Chapter 1 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at https://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part I|70 pages
Rethinking Japanese area studies in the twenty-first century
part II|40 pages
Coping with an ageing society
chapter 6|13 pages
Discover tomorrow
chapter 7|12 pages
Foreign care workers in ageing Japan
chapter 8|13 pages
Immigrants caring for other immigrants
part III|78 pages
Migration and mobility
chapter 9|14 pages
Invisible migrants from Sakhalin in the 1960s
chapter 11|12 pages
Challenging the ‘global’ in the global periphery
chapter 13|12 pages
Sending them over the seas
chapter 14|13 pages
‘Life could not be better since I left Japan!’
part IV|26 pages
The environment