Hard Times in the Hometown: A History of Community Survival in Modern Japan
... Mermaid Legend touches on a controversial topic of its time. The construction of nuclear power plants in rural areas during the 1980s brought hopes of revitalisation for economically declining municipalities, although local anti-nuclear movements opposed and warned of the risks of radiation for humans and the environment (Dusinberre, 2012). Moreover, between the 1950s and 1970s, Japan experienced four major pollution diseases resulting from industrial sewage water and emissions; among these, the two outbreaks of Minamata disease affected fisherfolk in particular, polluted their coastal fishing grounds, and raised the public awareness for environmental issues caused by rapid industrialisation and irresponsible companies (Ui, 1994). ...
This essay draws on ecofeminist theory to investigate cultural images of Japanese ama
divers (professional free-diving women) in the twentieth century and their relationship with
Nature through the examination of Japanese horror movies, with a particular focus on
Toshiharu Ikeda’s Mermaid Legend (1984). Japanese folklore traditions lack an obvious
equivalent to the Western mermaid. With no clear counterpart for this seductive and
potentially dangerous female of the ocean, I argue that ama divers serve as the ‘real
mermaids’ of Japan: mysterious and increasingly exoticised figures who were interpreted
in similar veins to the mythical mermaid throughout the twentieth century. Much like
mermaids, they are imagined in both foreign and Japanese media texts from the 1950s/60s
as female ‘Others’ that are closely linked to the seas. They are envisioned as sexualised
and ‘conquerable’—echoing anthropocentric fantasies of dominating and defeating a
much-feminised construction of ‘Nature’. The 1984 horror movie Mermaid Legend,
however, stands out in opposition, refreshingly subverting this trope through its innovative
and violent story of ecofeminist vengeance. The movie centres on an ama diver allied with
Nature, who seeks revenge for her own violation as well as that of the oceanic environment
which is menaced by the construction of a nuclear power plant. By telling this story,
Mermaid Legend provides a strong ecofeminist message thoroughly unique for a media
text of its time—and invites us to reconsider these ‘real mermaids’ in contemporary times
in the context of Gothic Nature. Published in: Gothic Nature. 2, pp. 175-201.
Available from: https://gothicnaturejournal.com/.
... These works, detailing the multitude aspects of life and social setting in rural villages on the one hand, while also describing the history of change that has taken place in postwar rural Japan on the other, provided the foundation for much of the place-based research that followed. More contemporary works with a similar theme, objective, and approach include Partner's (2004) Toshie: A Story of Village Life in Twentieth-Century Japan, Bernstein's (2005) Isami's House, Guo, et al.'s (2005) Tsugaru: Regional Identity on Japan's Northern Periphery, Thompson and Traphagen's (2006) Wearing Cultural Styles, Kalland's (2010) Shingu: A Study of a Japanese Fishing Community, Dusinberre's (2012) Hard Times in the Hometown, and Wood's (2012) Ogata-Mura: Sowing Dissent and Reclaiming Identity in a Japanese Farming Village. In addition to describing places these works present anthropological insights and sociological analysis of the villages and families of a particular locale and chronicle the changes regional and local Japan has undergone through its transition from a highgrowth economy to responding to the forces of globalization, while also adapting to an aging and depopulating rural society. ...
This comprehensive edited collection provides key contributions in the field, mapping out fundamental topics and analysing current trends through an international lens. My chapter presents a history of the local newspaper in Japan. Edited by Agnes Gulyas and David Baines.
Offering a collection of invited contributions from scholars across the world, the volume is structured in seven parts, each exploring an aspect of local media and journalism that provides the framework to bring together and consolidate the latest research and theorisations from the field, and fresh understandings of local media from a comparative perspective and within a global context. This volume reaches across national, cultural, technological and socio-economic boundaries to bring new understandings to the dominant foci of research in the field and highlights interconnection and thematic links. Addressing the significant changes local media and journalism have undergone in the last decade, this volume explores the history, politics, ethics and contents of local media, as well as delving deeper into the business and practices that affect not only the journalists and media-makers involved, but consumers as well.
For students and researchers in the fields of journalism studies, journalism education, cultural studies and media and communications programmes, this is the comprehensive guide to local media and journalism.
... These works, detailing the multitude aspects of life and social setting in rural villages on the one hand, while also describing the history of change that has taken place in postwar rural Japan on the other, provided the foundation for much of the place-based research that followed. More contemporary works with a similar theme, objective, and approach include Partner's (2004) Toshie: A Story of Village Life in Twentieth-Century Japan, Bernstein's (2005) Isami's House, Guo, et al.'s (2005) Tsugaru: Regional Identity on Japan's Northern Periphery, Thompson and Traphagen's (2006) Wearing Cultural Styles, Kalland's (2010) Shingu: A Study of a Japanese Fishing Community, Dusinberre's (2012) Hard Times in the Hometown, and Wood's (2012) Ogata-Mura: Sowing Dissent and Reclaiming Identity in a Japanese Farming Village. In addition to describing places these works present anthropological insights and sociological analysis of the villages and families of a particular locale and chronicle the changes regional and local Japan has undergone through its transition from a highgrowth economy to responding to the forces of globalization, while also adapting to an aging and depopulating rural society. ...
One of the seven chapters in the Land, History and Culture section, outlining the trends and tensions in notions of region and locale in Japanese history and social science.
Provincializing Empire explores the global history of Japanese expansion through a regional lens. It rethinks the nation-centered geography and chronology of empire by uncovering the pivotal role of expeditionary merchants from Ōmi (present-day Shiga Prefecture) and their modern successors. Tracing their lives from the early modern era, and writing them into the global histories of empire, diaspora, and capitalism, Jun Uchida offers an innovative analysis of expansion through a story previously untold: how the nation’s provincials built on their traditions to create a transpacific diaspora that stretched from Seoul to Vancouver, while helping shape the modern world of transoceanic exchange.
The triple-disasters on and after 3.11 triggered devastation of a messy, intimate, personal kind that confounds centrally organized, large-scale renewal. In time, a whole substrate of human suffering became effectively ignored and interred by the armada of cranes, backhoes, dump trucks, and bulldozers that descended on Japan’s battered coastline to restore ‘normalcy’. Japan’s focus on economic rather than emotional reconstruction—not atypical for any industrialized state—was in many ways very much in character for a country shaped by sociocultural logics of massive-scale development/public works (known as doboku). Nevertheless, Tōhoku’s recovery obscures the poorly-sutured wounds of hard-hit communities.
This article considers the contours of radiance in post-3.11 Japan through a comparison of the bottom-up, impromptu ‘worlding’ processes that sustain recovering Fukushima communities and the top-down apparatuses of efficiency and rationalization mobilized in the post-tsunami reconstruction. The latter included a massive ‘decontamination’ (josen) effort that comprised by far the largest radiation response effort in history, though highly uneven and likewise misleading. Through ethnographic research, the article juxtaposes the official project and rhetoric of renewal with geographies of trauma, anxiety, and endurance in communities to interpret the complex aftermath of the disasters.
Japan's Meiji oligarchs put a premium on technologies that projected "civilization" and "modernity" and operated under the assumption that industrial technologies could be operationalized reasonably promptly. Their faith flew in the face of production experience. The case of metallurgical coke manufacturing offers an example of what happened when imported technological systems dead-ended on the fctory floor. Examining the production records of a Meiji-era chemical start-up, this article brings to focus the scope and scale of the creative labor needed to make imported technologies work on the ground. In so doing, it showcases innovative forces that formed the fabric of Japan's early industrialization as a corrective to the much-criticized but resilient notion that the country's industrial takeoff was enabled largely by technology transfer and local appropriation. By highlighting the creativity involved in designing coal inputs, this article opens new perspectives on the history of coals in East Asia.
This dissertation explores as sites of meaning-making the ritual activities of embassies dispatched by the Okinawan kingdom of Lūchū to the court of the Tokugawa shoguns in Edo (Tokyo) on seventeen occasions between 1644 to 1850. Through a combination of ritual elements from Ming/Qing, samurai, and Lūchūan court ceremonial traditions, these embassies served to ritually enact the kingdom’s situational political/cultural position within the region as a distinct Confucian kingdom both recognized as a sovereign kingdom and loyal tributary by the Ming and Qing imperial courts and claimed as belonging to or being under the banners of the Shimazu samurai house, lords of Kagoshima domain in southern Japan. This was accomplished chiefly in processions performed by the embassies in the streets and waterways of Japan, formal audiences with the Tokugawa shoguns, and receptions prepared for the embassies by local authorities, as well as through a number of other aspects of the embassies’ journeys and activities while in Japan.Remarkable consistency is seen in the ritual forms practiced by both the Lūchūan embassies and by those receiving them. By parading in the same fashion as in previous embassies, wearing the same costumes, employing the same banners and ritual accoutrements, exchanging the same categories and volumes of gifts, and otherwise adhering to precedent and concepts of ritual propriety, Lūchūan embassies and their samurai counterparts ritually maintained relationships of a consistent character. Most of these ritual elements were not Tokugawa period innovations but were already standard elements of Lūchūan court ritual or Lūchūan-Japanese ceremonial interactions prior to the 1609 Shimazu invasion of kingdom. The continuity across this 1609 turning point shows that the form and style of these Lūchūan embassies was not designed and imposed by either the Shimazu or the Tokugawa for politically strategic reasons as part of a new 17th century form of foreign relations, but rather was in meaningful ways a continuation of established modes of ritual diplomatic interactions. Examination of these ritual forms also reveals that while the Tokugawa regime appropriated or adapted the logic and rhetoric of the so-called “Sinocentric world order” or “tribute system”, using embassies from Lūchū and Joseon Korea to form discourses or conceptions of a shogun-centric tributary world order, the ritual forms employed were based heavily on samurai customs, thus incorporating Lūchū and Joseon into a shogun-centered order which was also grounded in samurai networks and hierarchies of warrior houses linked to one another by individual or familial fealty.
Tourism spaces are social constructs, and due to their liminal qualities are places in which individuals have enhanced psycho-social space to explore new ways of living and working. One such space is Niseko, a small agricultural community in northern Japan that has, since the early 2000s, transformed into a ski destination through the development of international tourism. Many Australians have settled in the Niseko area and established tourism-based businesses and holiday homes, transforming local streetscapes. Despite evident socioeconomic and environmental change, Niseko has received little academic attention, particularly in regard to advancing understanding of how Niseko is functioning both as a tourism destination and as a unique social and cultural space in Japan. This research aimed to explore the experiences of tourism business owners to offer insight into how Niseko as a social space may be influencing the lifestyles and identities of tourism business owners who live in Niseko, Japan.
This research is framed by a social constructivist perspective and takes an interpretive approach which valorises subjective and contextual research participant perspectives. The research was premised by the idea of stories being windows to understanding subjective human experience, and Giddens’ (1991) conceptualisation of self as a self-constructed narrative. Accordingly, the research design drew upon a narrative method of inquiry, specifically designed to illuminate the voices of participants to enhance understanding of experiences of living in a tourism space. Responding to the recognised scarcity of emotionally reflexive tourism research, two creative strategies were employed which resulted in the composition of seventeen micro-stories and seventeen interpretive poems, in response to the participant narratives. The creative interpretations of the data sought to unpack and illuminate the key experiences of the participants and thus served the dual purpose of illustrative data and a method of analysis. In addition to the creative strategies as forms of analysis, a thematic narrative analysis of the narrative and creative data was also undertaken.
The research findings revealed Niseko, Japan as functioning as a liminal tourism space which was being shaped by cosmopolitan tourism business owners who relocate there to pursue their ‘second life’ after experiences of living abroad. Five key conclusions were drawn from the findings of this research. These included (1), experiences of living abroad changes both the people and the places they inhabit, (2), liminal tourism spaces are locations in which
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individuals may explore different ways of living and working, (3), lifestyle choices can be understood as part of the narrative of self, (4), narrative methodological approaches have the capacity to generate new connections and knowledge, and, (5) creative research strategies can create, interpret and communicate research data in innovative ways which offer insight into the subjective and multilayered experiences of individuals who construct and shape their lives in tourism spaces.
This thesis builds on the emerging research area which explores the link between tourism and lifestyle migration and offers new insight into how participation in tourism businesses can facilitate lifestyle migration. It reveals how experiences of living overseas can influence individuals to establish alternative lifestyles in tourism spaces, underpinned by the desire to live in a way that is more congruent with their sense of self. This research contributes to understanding how highly mobile, cosmopolitan individuals in tourism spaces relate to place and are influenced by it.
Japan is often imagined as a nation with a long history of whaling. This study argues, however, that many coastal communities in Northeast Japan did not engage in active whale hunting until the end of the Meiji period (1868–1912) as the local fishermen believed that whales were the incarnation of the gods of the seas, who would bring fish towards the shore. These communities profited from the presence of whales and feared the environmental pollution whaling caused to the coast. They fought against Western Japanese whalers who tried to introduce whaling in their region.
The concept of the “cetosphere” is used as a theoretical framework to argue that in many coastal ecosystems before 1900, whales rather than humans were the primary keystone species.
Chapter 1 introduces early modern maritime Japan through the eyes of whalers from Kii Domain in Western Japan. The chapter reconstructs how traveling Kii fishermen left their communities in the seventeenth century and disseminated techniques for proto-industrial fish fertilizer production and whaling across the Japanese archipelago. Chapter 2 shows how the whaling activities of the Kii fishermen were challenged in Northeast Japan, where the locals wrote a petition in 1677 to stop all whaling operations. By analyzing the content of this petition, how the locals perceived the ecological and socio-economic role of whales in the local ecosystem can be reconstructed. Chapter 3 expands on this discussion by focusing on the cultural aspects of whale strandings in Northeast Japan and argues that whales behaved differently across regions during their migration along the Japanese Coast, contributing to a whaling culture in Western Japan and a non-whaling culture in Northeast Japan.
Chapter 4 shows how whaling knowledge was distributed among coastal communities after the end of the Kii Expansion. Climatic and socio-economic changes played a pivotal role in the attempts to introduce proto-industrial whaling in Northeast Japan in the early nineteenth century. The same changes were also responsible for its failure, however. Chapter 5 then discusses the rise of Ayukawa as the first “whaling town” in Northeast Japan. It is argued that the migration of workers and the focus on whale fertilizer were the primary reasons for the eventual success of industrial whaling.
Finally, Chapter 6 analyses the Hachinohe uprising of 1911, when over 1,000 fishermen destroyed the local whaling station operated by whalers from Western Japan. This chapter shows how the different vernacular perspectives on whales and whaling were negotiated and deconstructed in the months leading up to the raid.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any references for this publication.