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.
Introduction: envisioning new frontiers in Japanese Studies, Akihiro Ogawa and Philip Seaton
Part 1: Rethinking Japanese area studies in the 21st century
1. Rethinking the Maria Luz Incident: methodological cosmopolitanism and Meiji Japan, Bill Mihalopoulos
2. Exporting theory ‘made in Japan’: the case of contents tourism, Philip Seaton
3. Japanese language education and Japanese Studies as intercultural learning, Jun Ohashi and Hiroko Ohashi
4. Japanese Studies in China and Sino-Japanese Relations, 1945-2018, Yi Zou
5. Japanese Studies in Indonesia, Himawan Pratama and Antonius R. Pujo Purnomo
Part 2: Coping with an aging society
6. Discover tomorrow: Tokyo’s ‘barrier-free’ Olympic legacy and the urban aging population, Deirdre A.L. Sneep
7. Foreign care workers in aging Japan: Filipino carers of the elderly in long-term care facilities, Katrina Navallo
8. Immigrants caring for other immigrants: the case of the Kaagapay Oita Filipino Association, Melvin Jabar
Part 3: Migration and mobility
9. Invisible migrants from Sakhalin in the 1960s: a new page in Japanese migration studies, Svetlana Paichadze
10. Japanese women in Korea in the postwar: between repatriation and returning home, Mooam Hyun
11. Challenging the ‘global’ in the global periphery: performances and negotiations of academic and personal identities among JET-alumni Japan scholars based in Japan, Sachiko Horiguchi
12. Dream vs. reality: the lives of Bangladeshi language students in Japan, Siddiqur Rahman
13. Sending them over the seas: Japanese judges crossing legal boundaries through lived experiences in Australia, Stacey Steele
14. ‘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, Susanne Klien
Part 4: The environment
15. Japan’s environmental injustice paradigm and transnational activism, Simon Avenell
16. ‘Community power’: renewable energy policy and production in post-Fukushima Japan, Akihiro Ogawa
Biography
Akihiro Ogawa is Professor of Japanese Studies at the University of Melbourne’s Asia Institute, Australia. His major research interest is in contemporary Japanese society, focusing on civil society.
Philip Seaton is a Professor in the Institute of Japan Studies, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Japan. His main research areas are Japanese memories of the Asia-Pacific War and tourism induced by popular culture.
