At the heart of the development of modern Japanese culture, the theatre mirrors the issues and concerns of a society transitioning from the Tokugawa era to the modern period. Modern Japanese Theatre and Performance fills a gap in current Japanese theatre scholarship; the book discusses the role of women in modern theatre, buto dance, experimental theatres that combine traditional theatre with modern forms, and plays by Abe Kobo, Mishima Yukio, and Senda Koreya. With important contributions from both established and emerging scholars, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in theatre, modern performance, or Japanese studies.

Beginning in late Edo, the Japanese faced a rapidly and irreversibly changing world in which industrialization, westernization, and internationalization was exerting pressure upon an entrenched traditional culture. The Japanese themselves felt threatened by Western powers, with their sense of superiority and military might. Yet, the Japanese were more prepared to meet this challenge than was thought at the time, and they used a variety of strategies to address the tension between modernity and tradition. Inexorable Modernity illuminates our understanding of how Japan has dealt with modernity and of what mechanisms, universal and local, we can attribute to the mode of negotiation between tradition and modernity in three major forms of art-theater, the visual arts, and literature. Dr. Hiroshi Nara brings together a thoughtful collection of essays that demonstrate that traditional and modern approaches to life feed off of one other, and tradition, whether real or created, was sought out in order to find a way to live with the burden of modernity. Inexorable Modernity is a valuable and enlightening read for those interested in Asian studies and history.

At the heart of the development of modern Japanese culture, the theatre mirrors the issues and concerns of a society transitioning from the Tokugawa era to the modern period. Modern Japanese Theatre and Performance fills a gap in current Japanese theatre scholarship; the book discusses the role of women in modern theatre, buto dance, experimental theatres that combine traditional theatre with modern forms, and plays by Abe Kobo, Mishima Yukio, and Senda Koreya. With important contributions from both established and emerging scholars, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in theatre, modern performance, or Japanese studies.

Shortly before releasing deadly sarin gas on the Tokyo subway in March 1995, the Aum Shinrikyo religious cult published a vicious 95-page antisemitic tract that declared war on its Jewish archenemy. The gassing of the Tokyo subway was the culmination of a century of Japanese theorizing about Jews, an important part of which has been antisemitic. In recent years, books blaming Jews for everything from the designs on Japanese currency to the 1995 Kobe earthquake have appeared, and some have sold millions of copies. What explains this virtual obsession with Jews in Japan--a country that has no Jews? In this highly original cultural and intellectual history, David G. Goodman and Masanori Miyazawa show that present-day Japanese attitudes toward Jews are the result of a process of accretion that began nearly 200 years ago. Skillfully tracing the historical development of Japanese images of Jews against the background of the development of modern Japanese culture, they describe how these images reflect the great themes of modern Japanese intellectual life. Spanning fields ranging from politics to poetry, the authors demonstrate how Japanese attitudes toward Jews have had real political and cultural consequences, culminating in the 1995 subway gassing and resonating into the twenty-first century.

Beginning in late Edo, the Japanese faced a rapidly and irreversibly changing world in which industrialization, westernization, and internationalization was exerting pressure upon an entrenched traditional culture. The Japanese themselves felt threatened by Western powers, with their sense of superiority and military might. Yet, the Japanese were more prepared to meet this challenge than was thought at the time, and they used a variety of strategies to address the tension between modernity and tradition. Inexorable Modernity illuminates our understanding of how Japan has dealt with modernity and of what mechanisms, universal and local, we can attribute to the mode of negotiation between tradition and modernity in three major forms of art-theater, the visual arts, and literature. Dr. Hiroshi Nara brings together a thoughtful collection of essays that demonstrate that traditional and modern approaches to life feed off of one other, and tradition, whether real or created, was sought out in order to find a way to live with the burden of modernity. Inexorable Modernity is a valuable and enlightening read for those interested in Asian studies and history.

Although he has been touted as Japan's finest prewar playwright, few of Kishida Kunio's works have been translated into English. This volume brings together for the first time representative plays that span the entire course of Kishida's career, including in this expanded edition, a new translation of his maiden work, Autumn in the Tyrols. The plays collected in this anthology are the ones critics have regarded as Kishida's best and that the dramatist himself preferred. An introductory essay by the editor relates Kishida's work to his personal psychology and his historical environment and discusses the controversy that has surrounded him for his collaboration with military authorities during World War II.

Kubo Sakae's Land of Volcanic Ash (Kazanbaichi) is recognized as the major socialist realist drama of pre-war Japan. The play, which describes the struggles of a reform-minded intellectual in the Hokkaido countryside, is based on events surrounding the famine of 1934. It has been described "not only as Kubo Sakae's most representative work, but as the finest realist drama of the pre-war period."

"One of the most thought-provoking studies of [modern theater in Japan].... David Goodman shows a broad range of literary sympathies and skills in his introductions, translations, and commentaries, which I find exemplary.... A real contribution to our understanding of postwar Japan, raising questions, political, moral, and spiritual, that all of us must learn to face as human beings, whatever our national or cultural origins." -Journal of Asian Studies

First published in 1988 and now available in a photo-reprint paperback edition, this book provides an important perspective on the theatre, culture, and politics of Japan in the 1960s. It contains translations of five plays representative of the period, with analytical commentary by a leading authority on postwar Japanese drama. The author's central thesis is that the 1960 demonstrations against the renewal of the U.S.-Japan Mutual Security Treaty was a major turning point in Japanese intellectual life, one characterized by disillusionment with the old left and the legacy of prewar left-wing formulations and by a quest for an alternative to the dominant Hegelian-Marxist system. The book argues that the 1960s were a period of eschatological reflection in which profound questions about ultimate ends were being asked.