Book Announcement: Pilgrims Until We Die: Unending Pilgrimage in Shikoku

Posted on December 26, 2021 by Paula

Pilgrims Until We Die:
Unending Pilgrimage in Shikoku
Ian Reader and John Shultz

The Shikoku pilgrimage, a 1400 kilometre, eighty-eight temple circuit around Japan’s fourth largest island, takes around forty days by foot, or one week by car. Historically, Buddhist ascetics walked it without ceasing, creating a tradition of unending pilgrimage that continues in the present era, both by pilgrims on foot and by others in cars. Some spend decades walking the pilgrimage, while others drive it repeatedly, completing hundreds of pilgrimage circuits. Most are retired and make the pilgrimage the centre of their post-work lives. Others who work full-time spend their holidays and weekends as pilgrims. Some have only done the pilgrimage a few times but already imagine themselves as unending pilgrims and intend to do it “until we die”.

They talk happily of being addicted and having Shikokuby?, ‘Shikoku illness’, portraying this ‘illness’ and addiction as blessings. Featuring extensive fieldwork and interviews, this study of Japan’s most famous Buddhist pilgrimage presents new theoretical perspectives on pilgrimage in general, along with rich ethnographic examples of pilgrimage practices in contemporary Japan. Pilgrims Until We Die counteracts normative portrayals of pilgrimage as a transient activity, defined by a temporary leave of absence from home to visit sacred places outside the parameters of everyday life, showing that many participants view pilgrimage as a way of creating a sense of home and permanence on the road. Examining how obsession, devotion, and a sense of addiction aided by modern developments and economic factors have created a culture of recurrent pilgrimage, Pilgrims Until We Die challenges standard understandings of pilgrimage.

For more information: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/pilgrims-until-we-die-9780197573594

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Book Announcement: Rethinking Locality in Japan

Posted on December 19, 2021 by Paula

Rethinking Locality in Japan
Edited By Sonja Ganseforth, Hanno Jentzsch

This book inquires what is meant when we say “local” and what “local” means in the Japanese context.

Through the window of locality, it enhances an understanding of broader political and socio-economic shifts in Japan. This includes demographic change, electoral and administrative reform, rural decline and revitalization, welfare reform, as well as the growing metabolic rift in energy and food production. Chapters throughout this edited volume discuss the different and often contested ways in which locality in Japan has been reconstituted, from historical and contemporary instances of administrative restructuring, to more subtle social processes of making – and unmaking – local places. Contributions from multiple disciplinary perspectives are included to investigate the tensions between overlapping and often incongruent dimensions of locality. Framed by a theoretical discussion of socio-spatial thinking, such issues surrounding the construction and renegotiation of local places are not only relevant for Japan specialists, but also connected with topical scholarly debates further afield.

Accordingly, Rethinking Locality in Japan will appeal to students and scholars from Japanese studies and human geography to anthropology, history, sociology and political science.

For more information: https://www.routledge.com/Rethinking-Locality-in-Japan/Ganseforth-Jentzsch/p/book/9780367469481

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Book Announcement: Green with Milk and Sugar: When Japan Filled America’s Tea Cups

Posted on December 12, 2021 by Paula

Green with Milk and Sugar
When Japan Filled America’s Tea Cups

Robert Hellyer

Today, Americans are some of the world’s biggest consumers of black teas; in Japan, green tea, especially sencha, is preferred. These national partialities, Robert Hellyer reveals, are deeply entwined. Tracing the trans-Pacific tea trade from the eighteenth century onward, Green with Milk and Sugar shows how interconnections between Japan and the United States have influenced the daily habits of people in both countries.

Hellyer explores the forgotten American penchant for Japanese green tea and how it shaped Japanese tastes. In the nineteenth century, Americans favored green teas, which were imported from China until Japan developed an export industry centered on the United States. The influx of Japanese imports democratized green tea: Americans of all classes, particularly Midwesterners, made it their daily beverage—which they drank hot, often with milk and sugar. In the 1920s, socioeconomic trends and racial prejudices pushed Americans toward black teas from Ceylon and India. Facing a glut, Japanese merchants aggressively marketed sencha on their home and imperial markets, transforming it into an icon of Japanese culture.

Featuring lively stories of the people involved in the tea trade—including samurai turned tea farmers and Hellyer’s own ancestors—Green with Milk and Sugar offers not only a social and commodity history of tea in the United States and Japan but also new insights into how national customs have profound if often hidden international dimensions.

For more information: https://cup.columbia.edu/book/green-with-milk-and-sugar/9780231199100

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Book Announcement: Gazing at the Moon: Buddhist Poems of Solitude

Posted on December 5, 2021 by Paula

Gazing at the Moon:
Buddhist Poems of Solitude

Saigyō
Translated by Meredith McKinney

Clear and clearer
with the moon the heart
swells widening
out toward
what distant end I know not

A fresh translation of the classical Buddhist poetry of Saigyō, whose aesthetics of nature, love, and sorrow came to epitomize the Japanese poetic tradition.

Saigyō, the Buddhist name of Fujiwara no Norikiyo (1118–1190), is one of Japan’s most famous and beloved poets. He was a recluse monk who spent much of his life wandering and seeking after the Buddhist way. Combining his love of poetry with his spiritual evolution, he produced beautiful, lyrical lines infused with a Buddhist perception of the world.

Gazing at the Moon presents over one hundred of Saigyō’s tanka—traditional 31-syllable poems—newly rendered into English by renowned translator Meredith McKinney. This selection of poems conveys Saigyō’s story of Buddhist awakening, reclusion, seeking, enlightenment, and death, embodying the Japanese aesthetic ideal of mono no aware—to be moved by sorrow in witnessing the ephemeral world.

For more information: https://www.shambhala.com/gazing-at-the-moon.html

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Book Announcement: Okada Toshiki & Japanese Theatre

Posted on November 28, 2021 by Paula

Okada Toshiki & Japanese Theatre
Edited by Peter Eckersall, Barbara Geilhorn, Andreas Regelsberger and Cody Poulton

Playwright, novelist and theatre director Okada Toshiki is one of the most important voices of the current generation of Japanese contemporary theatre makers. He founded his globally influential theatre company chelfitsch in 1997. Using a unique style and a distinctive language, his plays address issues such as social inequity, life in Japan after the 3/11 Earthquake, and posthuman society. Okada is a theatrical visionary showing undercurrents in everyday moments and the strangeness of being alive in our time.

In Okada Toshiki and Japanese Theatre, Okada’s work and its importance to the development of contemporary performance in Japan and around the world is explored. Gathered here for the first time in English is a comprehensive selection of essays, interviews and translations of three of Okada’s plays by leading scholars and translators. Okada’s writing on theatre is also included, accompanied by an extensive array of images from his performances.

For more information: https://thecpr.org.uk/product/okada-toshiki-japanese-theatre/

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Book Announcement: Touching the Unreachable Writing, Skinship, Modern Japan

Posted on November 21, 2021 by Paula

Touching the Unreachable: Writing, Skinship, Modern Japan
Fusako Innami

Fusako Innami offers the first comprehensive study of touch and skinship—relationality with the other through the skin—in modern Japanese writing. The concept of the unreachable—that is, the lack of characters’ complete ability to touch what they try to reach for—provides a critical intervention on the issue of intimacy. Touch has been philosophically addressed in France, but literature is an effective—or possibly the most productive—venue for exploring touch in Japan, as literary texts depict what the characters may be concerned with but may not necessarily say out loud. Such a moment of capturing the gap between the felt and the said—the interaction between the body and language—can be effectively analyzed by paying attention to layers of verbalization, or indeed translation, by characters’ utterances, authors’ depictions, and readers’ interpretations. Each of the writers discussed in this book—starting with Nobel prize winner Kawabata Yasunari, Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, Yoshiyuki Junnosuke, and Matsuura Rieko—presents a particular obsession with objects or relationality to the other constructed via the desire for touch.

In Touching the Unreachable, phenomenological and psychoanalytical approaches are cross-culturally interrogated in engaging with literary touch to constantly challenge what may seem like the limit of transferability regarding concepts, words, and practices. The book thereby not only bridges cultural gaps beyond geographic and linguistic constraints, but also aims to decentralize a Eurocentric hegemony in its production and use of theories and brings Japanese cultural and literary analyses into further productive and stimulating intellectual dialogues. Through close readings of the authors’ treatment of touch, Innami develops a theoretical framework with which to examine intersensorial bodies interacting with objects and the environment through touch.

For more information: https://www.press.umich.edu/11747440/touching_the_unreachable

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Book Announcement: The Tokugawa World

Posted on November 14, 2021 by Paula

The Tokugawa World
Edited By Gary P. Leupp, De-min Tao

With over 60 contributions, The Tokugawa World presents the latest scholarship on early modern Japan from an international team of specialists in a volume that is unmatched in its breadth and scope.

In its early modern period, under the Tokugawa shoguns, Japan was a world apart. For over two centuries the shogun’s subjects were forbidden to travel abroad and few outsiders were admitted. Yet in this period, Japan evolved as a nascent capitalist society that could rapidly adjust to its incorporation into the world system after its forced “opening” in the 1850s. The Tokugawa World demonstrates how Japan’s early modern society took shape and evolved: a world of low and high cultures, comic books and Confucian academies, soba restaurants and imperial music recitals, rigid enforcement of social hierarchy yet also ongoing resistance to class oppression. A world of outcasts, puppeteers, herbal doctors, samurai officials, businesswomen, scientists, scholars, blind lutenists, peasant rebels, tea-masters, sumo wrestlers, and wage workers.

Covering a variety of features of the Tokugawa world including the physical landscape, economy, art and literature, religion and thought, and education and science, this volume is essential reading for all students and scholars of early modern Japan.

For more information: https://www.routledge.com/The-Tokugawa-World/Leupp-Tao/p/book/9781138936850

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Call for Participants: Ise and Japan Study Program

Posted on November 8, 2021 by Paula

Kogakkan University (located in Ise City, Mie Prefecture) will be hosting an eighth year of the “Ise and Japan Study Program.” The program is open to graduate (Master or PhD) or post-graduate researchers (including faculty) who are interested in learning more about Japanese language, history, and culture with a focus on the Ise-Shima region and the Shinto religious tradition.

The application period begins November 8, 2021 and ends December 20, 2021. The program will be held from February 21, 2022 to March 11, 2022. Because of the pandemic and associated travel uncertainties, applicants must be based in Japan (see the application materials for details).

The program covers the cost of food, lodging, and domestic transportation for participants, who will attend lectures and go on field trips to significant archaeological, cultural, and historical sites. The Ise and Japan Study Program is sponsored by Kogakkan University and Ise City, which is home to the Jingu shrine complex. Please see the links below for the application form, details about eligibility, requirements, last year’s schedule, past participants, and so forth.

Website
http://ise-japan.kogakkan-u.ac.jp

Call for Participants
http://ise-japan.kogakkan-u.ac.jp/html/document.php

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Book Announcement: The Comic Storytelling of Western Japan

Posted on November 7, 2021 by Paula

The Comic Storytelling of Western Japan: Satire and Social Mobility in Kamigata Rakugo
M. W. Shores, University of Sydney

Rakugo, a popular form of comic storytelling, has played a major role in Japanese culture and society. Developed during the Edo (1600–1868) and Meiji (1868–1912) periods, it is still popular today, with many contemporary Japanese comedians having originally trained as rakugo artists. Rakugo is divided into two distinct strands, the Tokyo tradition and the Osaka tradition, with the latter having previously been largely overlooked. This pioneering study of the Kamigata (Osaka) rakugo tradition presents the first complete English translation of five classic rakugo stories, and offers a history of comic storytelling in Kamigata (modern Kansai, Kinki) from the seventeenth century to the present day. Considering the art in terms of gender, literature, performance, and society, this volume grounds Kamigata rakugo in its distinct cultural context and sheds light on the ‘other’ rakugo for students and scholars of Japanese culture and history.

For more information: www.cambridge.org/9781108831505

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Emerging Translator Mentorship Program (deadline 11/30)

Posted on November 4, 2021 by Paula

The American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) is offering an Emerging Translator Mentorship Program for 2022, the deadline for which is November 30!

The ALTA Emerging Translator Mentorship Program is designed to establish and facilitate a close working relationship between an experienced translator and an emerging translator on a project selected by the emerging translator. The mentorship duration is approximately nine months. The emerging translator is expected to choose a project that can be completed in that time, and they will only be advised on that particular project.

The following 13 mentorships are available in 2022:

Applications must be submitted online through the submission platform by November 30. The program is open to emerging translators at no cost to them.

Please view the webpage for more information and find answers to common questions at the mentorship FAQ.

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