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. 

chapter |18 pages

Introduction

Envisioning new frontiers in Japanese Studies

part I|70 pages

Rethinking Japanese area studies in the twenty-first century

chapter 1|12 pages

Rethinking the Maria Luz Incident

Methodological cosmopolitanism and Meiji Japan

chapter 2|13 pages

Exporting theory ‘made in Japan’

The case of contents tourism

part II|40 pages

Coping with an ageing society

chapter 6|13 pages

Discover tomorrow

Tokyo’s ‘barrier-free’ Olympic legacy and the urban ageing population

chapter 7|12 pages

Foreign care workers in ageing Japan

Filipino carers of the elderly in long-term care facilities

chapter 8|13 pages

Immigrants caring for other immigrants

The case of the Kaagapay Oita Filipino Association

part III|78 pages

Migration and mobility

chapter 9|14 pages

Invisible migrants from Sakhalin in the 1960s

A new page in Japanese migration studies

chapter 10|13 pages

Japanese women in Korea in the postwar

Between repatriation and returning home

chapter 11|12 pages

Challenging the ‘global’ in the global periphery

Performances and negotiations of academic and personal identities among JET-alumni Japan scholars based in Japan

chapter 12|12 pages

Dream vs reality

The lives of Bangladeshi language students in Japan

chapter 13|12 pages

Sending them over the seas

Japanese judges crossing legal boundaries through lived experiences in Australia

chapter 14|13 pages

‘Life could not be better since I left Japan!’

Transnational mobility of Japanese individuals to Europe and the post-Fordist quest for subjective well-being outside Japan

part IV|26 pages

The environment

chapter 16|12 pages

‘Community power’

Renewable energy policy and production in post-Fukushima Japan