|
Journal Name: The Journal of Japanese Studies: Summer 2002, Vol. 28, No. 2
Articles:
American Pressure for Financial Internationalization in Japan on the Eve of the Great Depression
MARK METZLER
Abstract:
The Hamaguchi cabinet's restoration of the gold standard in January 1930 meant Japan's coming into conformity, after many delays, with the monetary "global standard" of the day; this liberal achievement turned into one of the worst economic policy disasters in Japan's modern history. American gaiatsu emanating from Wall Street's J. P. Morgan and Co. was central to this decision. A close look at this interaction reveals Japan's financial embeddedness in the newly American-centered international economic order of the 1920s. The collapse of that order formed the context of the subsequent nationalist reaction.
The Resolution of Karaoke Disputes: The Calculus of Institutions and Social Capital
MARK D. WEST
Abstract:
Commentators often assert that low levels of litigation in Japan are the result of either (a) social norms or (b) institutional and structural factors such as high litigation costs. This article examines another cause of nonlitigiousness: an alternative dispute resolution system that handles many cases that might otherwise become lawsuits. While the system applies to all pollution disputes, I examine a particular subset in detail: karaoke noise-related complaints. Relying on interviews and quantitative analyses in the karaoke context, I argue that an examination of both institutional factors and social capital (and their interaction) provides a significantly richer and more accurate account of Japanese dispute resolution patterns than one set of factors alone.
Class and Gender in a Meiji Family Romance: Kikuchi Yuho's Chikyodai
KEN K. ITO
Abstract:
Kikuchi Yuho's Chikyodai (1903), which narrates a young woman's attempt to invade an aristocratic family, reveals the interplay of Meiji ideologies of gender and social aspiration. The essay examines this novel's "family romance" against Meiji family ideology and the narrative properties of melodramatic fiction, a form marked by both apparent moral certitude and ideological contradiction. Comparisons with the English domestic melodrama that served as a source reveal how Chikyodai's motif of switched identities disturbs the stability of class and family affiliations. The novel's ambivalent ideology is connected to its status as a katei shosetsu, a genre of Meiji fiction aimed at women.
Waking the Dead: Fujiwara Teika's Sotoba kuyo Poems
EDWARD KAMENS
Abstract:
Shui guso poems 2770-79 appear as a group composed by Teika for inscription on a set of memorial placards (sotoba) offered in the name of ten earlier waka poets, and the poems make a series of readily recognizable allusive gestures to foundation poems (honka) by or closely associated with these poets. Teika transforms the tropes of the foundation poems and rearranges their elements as cleansed Shakkyoka prayers for the repose of the dead. This essay explores the issues of interpretation raised by performative waka compositions such as these and interrogates the meaning of honkadori poetics. A transcription and translation of Teika's sotoba kuyo poems is included.
Volume 28, Number 2 (Summer 2002)
©2002 Society for Japanese Studies
(This journal is available online at: http://depts.washington.edu/jjs/)
Posted with permission from the publisher.
| 
