A study of Japan's traditional Confucian schools, this book contributes to an understanding of education in the Meiji period and is of relevance to the reform of Japan's public education system. The establishment of a national education system soon after the Meiji Restoration of 1868 is recognized as a significant factor in Japan's modernization."

Demonstrates the close relation between Japan’s changing international status and the thought process behind this by focusing on the public discussion on China and China politics during the interwar years 1895-1904. Winner of the JaDe Prize 2010 awarded by the German Foundation for the Promotion of Japanese-German Culture and Science Relations

Sino-Japanese Reflections offers ten richly detailed case studies that examine various forms of cultural and literary interaction between Japanese and Chinese intellectuals from the late Ming to the early twentieth century. The authors consider efforts by early modern scholars on each side of the Yellow Sea to understand the language and culture of the other, to draw upon received texts and forms, and to contribute to shared literary practices. Whereas literary and cultural flow within the Sinosphere is sometimes imagined to be an entirely unidirectional process of textual dissemination from China to the periphery, the contributions to this volume reveal a more complex picture: highlighting how literary and cultural engagement was always an opportunity for creative adaptation and negotiation. Examining materials such as Chinese translations of Japanese vernacular poetry, Japanese engagements with Chinese supernatural stories, adaptations of Japanese historical tales into vernacular Chinese, Sinitic poetry composed in Japan, and Japanese Sinology, the volume brings together recent work by literary scholars and intellectual historians of multiple generations, all of whom have a strong comparative interest in Sino-Japanese studies.

This book charts the history of Confucianism in Japan to offer new perspectives on the sociology of Confucianiam across East Asia.

Japan was the first non-Western nation to compete with the Western powers at their own game. The country’s rise to a major player on the stage of Western music has been equally spectacular. The connection between these two developments, however, has never been explored. How did making music make Japan modern? How did Japan make music that originated in Europe its own? And what happened to Japan’s traditional music in the process? Music and the Making of Modern Japan answers these questions. Discussing musical modernization in the context of globalization and nation-building, Margaret Mehl argues that, far from being a side-show, music was part of the action on centre stage. Making music became an important vehicle for empowering the people of Japan to join in the shaping of the modern world. In only fifty years, from the 1870s to the early 1920s, Japanese people laid the foundations for the country’s post-war rise as a musical as well as an economic power. Meanwhile, new types of popular song, fuelled by the growing global record industry, successfully blended inspiration from the West with musical characteristics perceived as Japanese. Music and the Making of Modern Japan represents a fresh contribution to historical research on making music as a major cultural, social, and political force.

Confucian Academies in East Asia is a first comprehensive look at the history and legacy of these unique institutions in China, Taiwan, Japan, Vietnam, and both Koreas.

The author contributes to a more nuanced understanding of juku, or cram schools, which are not only important in Japan but increasingly so in other parts of the world as well.

This volume contains some of the most recent findings in the field of Japanese women's history in Japan, Australia, the United States and the UK, and introduces new approaches to studying Japanese women's history.

A survey of Confucian thought, both Chinese and Japanese, with a new theory that links early Taoist philosophy and modern rational thought.

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