Zagaku
The majority of this article consists of an unadulterated piece of auto-ethnographic writing depicting a key experience from my anthropological fieldwork. For my PhD research on Japanese policing, I spent two years living in Tokyo and traini…
Tag: Japan
Leaving Gridworld
Provincializing Electricity by Émile St-Pierre (Osaka University) emil.stpierre@gmail.com October 23, 2020 . In the beginning, there was the steam machine. Or so starts one of the ways the Anthropocene story has been told. Much like the biblical Genesi…
Fostering a More-than-human World View
by Paul Hansen (Hokkaido University)hansenanthro@gmail.com September 17, 2018 Growing up a farm boy near Canada’s Rocky Mountains, I was surrounded by, enmeshed in, what I thought of as a world of non-human friends and foes (dogs, cats, and cows; coyot…
Steps to an Ecology of Spirits
Comparing Feelings of More-than-Human, Immaterial Meshworks? by Andrea De Antoni (Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto) deantoni@fc.ritsumei.ac.jp June 20, 2018 “So, do you believe in spirits?” I have been asked this question countless times, by my research p…
Human-Microbe Entanglements
Food Allergies in Japan and the UK by Emma Cook (Hokkaido University) cook@imc.hokudai.ac.jp July 4, 2018 In February 2014, as I was anticipating the start of hay fever season in Japan, I happened to turn the TV channel to a program that mentioned a pa…
Contemplating the Robotic Embrace
Introspection for Affective Anthropology by Daniel White (Free University of Berlin) daniel.white@fu-berlin.de June 20, 2018 The first time I held a robot in my arms I was overcome with a wave of sympathy. Pepper had arrived in our laboratory in a larg…
Introduction: Japan’s Possible Futures – Pivots of Social Transformation
Japan’s Possible Futures: Pivots of Social Transformation SPECIAL COLLECTION Edited by Bruce White Photo by Jeremy Keith ‘Tokyo horizon’ Papers & Thematics Re-thinking Japanese Society Gender Collaboration or Equality? The Past, P…
Gender Equality Policy in Japan: Current Difficulties and Signs of Change
Shunta Mori Introduction In the 1980s and the early 1990s there were three camps competing for representation of women’s roles in Japan: the Neotraditionalists; “New Women”; and Radical Egalitarians. Neotraditionalists promoted the idea that women’s pr…
Emergent Japanese Discourses on Minorities, Immigrants, Race, Culture, and Identity
Introduction Anthropologist Harumi Befu claims that the appreciation of “diversity within diversity” is essential for twenty-first century Japan (Befu 2008, p. xxiv). The immensity of this c…
Globalization, New Religions and the Contemporary Re-Imagining of Japanese Identity
John Clammer (Photo by FreeDigitalPhotos.net coward_lion) Social scientists are wont to announce “crises” in the societies that attract their scholarly attention. While it might be stretching the evidence a little too far to suggest that co…
Facing the World, Facing the Future: How Japan is Working to Represent Itself as a Nation at Sport Mega-Events
Wolfram Manzenreiter, Department of East Asian Studies, University of Vienna Introduction The 2002 FIFA World Cup Korea/Japan was the first to be staged on the world’s most populous continent, Asia, and it was the first to be co-hosted by two nations. …