Suchergebnisse

"This book examines young women in Japan, focusing in particular on their transitions to adulthood, their conceptions of adulthood and relations with Japanese society more generally. Drawing on detailed primary research including a year-long observation of high schools and subsequent interviews over a 12-year period, it traces the experiences of a group of working-class women from their last year of high-schooling in 1989 through to 2001 as they approached their thirties. It considers important aspects of the transition to adulthood including employment, marriage, divorce, childbirth and custody. It shows how the role and identities of young women changed over the course of the 1990s, exploring the impact of changes within Japanese society and global forces, and explains fully the implications for ordinary young people and their everyday lives. It considers to what extent young women's perceptions of themselves and society are shifting, and how far this can be explained by external constraints and their own experiences and decisions."--Jacket

"This book is the first in a unique series drawn from an interdisciplinary, longitudinal project entitled 'Thirty Years of Talk.' For almost 30 years, Okano has recorded ethnographic Interviews and collected data on working class women in Kobe, Japan, for a study of growing up, and published two books, School to Work in Japan: An Ethnographic Study, and Young women in Japan: Transitions to Adulthood. This most recent study introduces linguistic approaches to this work. It sketches the transitions in these women's lives and how their identities and discourse change in specific sociocultural contexts as they shift through different stages of their personal and public lives. It is a ground-breaking, 'real time' panel study that follows the same individuals at regular intervals over three decades. in this volume, the authors examine the changes in the discourse of one particular woman, Kanako, as her social identity shifts from high-school girl to mother and fisherman's wife, and as her relationship with the researcher develops. They identify changes in linguistic strategies as she negotiates gender/sexuality norms, stylistic features related to the construction of rapport, the use of discourse markers as she becomes more mature, and the researcher's information-seeking strategies"--

"Japanese Studies has provided a fertile space for non-Eurocentric analysis for a number of reasons. It has been embroiled in the long-running internal debate over the so-called Nihonjinron, revolving around the extent to which the effective interpretation of Japanese society and culture requires non-Western, Japan-specific emic concepts and theories. This book takes this question further and explores how we can understand Japanese society and culture by combining Euro-American concepts and theories with those that originate in Japan. Because Japan is the only liberal democracy to have achieved a high level of capitalism outside the Western cultural framework, Japanese Studies has long provided a forum for deliberations about the extent to which the Western conception of modernity is universally applicable. Furthermore, because of Japan's military, economic and cultural dominance in Asia at different points in the last century, Japanese Studies has had to deal with the issues of Japanocentrism as well as Eurocentrism, a duality requiring complex and nuanced analysis. This book identifies variations amongst Japanese Studies academic communities in the Asia-Pacific and examines the extent to which relatively autonomous scholarship, intellectual approach or theories exist in the region. It also evaluates how studies on Japan in the region contribute to global Japanese Studies and explores their potential for formulating concrete strategies to unsettle Eurocentric dominance of the discipline."--Provided by publisher