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VYAS Utpal
Department Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University College of Asia Pacific Studies Position Associate Professor |
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| Language | English |
| Publication Date | 2012/01 |
| Type | Book(Whole book) |
| Title | The Japan Foundation in China: an agent of Japan's soft power? chapter in 'Researching Twenty-First Century Japan: New Directions and Approaches for the Electronic Age' |
| Contribution Type | Single Work |
| Publisher | Lexington Books |
| Volume, Issue, Page | pp.11-41 |
| Details | The aim of this project is to bring together fifteen extensively revised, peer-reviewed articles by international scholars covering a diverse range of fields—from cinema to economics to history to the social sciences—addressing issues in contemporary Japan. These fifteen are all contributors to the first ten years of the EJCJS—the Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies. The principal strengths of this volume are its diversity of approaches and its fundamentally interdisciplinary nature: it allows researchers in different fields to contribute to an overall understanding of Japan from the 1950s to the present. This ‘understanding’ is indeed comprehensive: chapters range from economics to politics to theatre, literature, immigration issues, religion, and multiculturalism. The chapters are uniformly precise in their analyses, drawing on many different forms of research, from textual analysis, historical documentation, linguistic analysis, to participant interviews and media studies. The diverse range of subject matter holds together very well, in that the contributors operate within a set of similar central values: the primacy of practical research over theory; the centrality of Japan even in studies which situate that country internationally; clarity of expression over jargon; and the desire to include readers through rhetorical care rather than exclude through esoteric applications of over-specialised terminology or assumptions. The chapters, while academic and informed by current scholarship, are accessible to general readers with interest in contemporary Japan. |
| ISSN | 978-0-7391-7014-4 |