Suchergebnisse

Kami, Buddhas, and ancestors --Embodying moral order : acting bodies and the power of ritual --Emplacing moral order : ritual and everyday environments --Constructing Kamakura in everyday life and city festivals --The Sakae festival --Reconsidering ritual.

Perfectly Japanese: Making Families in an Era of Upheaval. Mary Isaacs White. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. 255 pp.

The Price of Death: The Funeral Industry in Contemporary Japan. Hikaru Suzuki. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. 266 pp.

Introduction: differentiation and uncertainty / Satsuki Kawano, Glenda S. Roberts, and Susan Orpett Long -- Work and life in challenging times: a Kansai family across the generations / Glenda S. Roberts -- Masculinity and aging in a straitened Japan: the view from twenty years later / Gordon Mathews -- Working women of the bubble generation / Sawa Kurotani -- "Making an ant's forehead of difference": organic agriculture as a lifestyle alternative in Japan / Nancy Rosenberger -- Shelf lives and the labors of loss: food, livelihoods, and Japan's convenience stores / Gavin Hamilton Whitelaw -- Single women in marriage and employment markets / Lynne Nakano -- The aging of the Japanese family: meanings of grandchildren in old age / Susan Orpett Long -- Barrier-free brothels: sex volunteers, prostitutes, and people with disabilities / Karen Nakamura -- Recreating connections: nonprofit organizations' attempts to foster networking among mothers of preschoolers / Satsuki Kawano -- The divination arts in girl culture / Laura Miller -- Education after the "lost decade(s)": stability or stagnation? / Peter Cave -- Lightweight cars and women drivers: the de/construction of gender metaphors in recessionary Japan / Joshua Hotaka Roth -- The story of a seventy-three-year-old woman living alone: her thoughts on death rites -- Satsuki Kawano

What are people's life experiences in present-day Japan? This timely volume addresses fundamental questions vital to understanding Japan in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Its chapters collectively reveal a questioning of middle-class ideals once considered the essence of Japaneseness. In the postwar model household a man was expected to obtain a job at a major firm that offered life-long employment; his counterpart, the "professional" housewife, managed the domestic sphere and the children, who were educated in a system that provided a path to mainstream success. In the past twenty years, however, Japanese society has seen a sharp increase in precarious forms of employment, higher divorce rates, and a widening gap between haves and have-nots. Contributors draw on rich, nuanced fieldwork data collected during the 2000s to examine work, schooling, family and marital relations, child rearing, entertainment, lifestyle choices, community support, consumption and waste, material culture, well-being, aging, death and memorial rites, and sexuality. The voices in these pages vary widely: They include schoolchildren, teenagers, career women, unmarried women, young mothers, people with disabilities, small business owners, organic farmers, retirees, and the elderly. -- from back cover