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Summary
Provides a wealth of information about leisure activities in Japan including sports, travel, theater, music, games, and gambling.
The Culture of Japan as Seen through Its Leisure brings together scholars of various disciplines from around the globe to discuss different forms of leisure activities in past and present Japan, thus enriching our knowledge of Japanese culture. Arranged in five sections, the volume focuses on everyday activities such as leisure, sports, travel and nature, theater and music, playing games, and gambling. The editors place the treated leisure activities into a historical frame of reference and relate them to the well-known classification scheme of games by Roger Caillois.
"This bookopens up an important and very understudied field and does so in ways that are often in themselves somewhat entertaining, as befits its subject matter. It also provides a good guide to the literature in both Japanese and English." -- John Clammer, Sophia University, Tokyo
"The Culture of Japan as Seen through Its Leisure provides a wealth of information about a wide variety of leisure pursuits in Japan, typically grounded in their historical development, and at times relates these pursuits to Japanese society more generally." -- Joy Hendry, Oxford Brookes University
Sepp Linhart is Professor of Japanese Studies and Sabine Fruhstuck is Assistant Professor of Japanese Studies at the Institute for Japanese Studies at the University of Vienna.
Table of Contents
Preface
1. Introduction: The Japanese at Play: A Little-Known Dimension of Japan
Sepp Linhart
Part One: Everyday Activities as Leisure
2. Respite from Everyday Life: Kôtô-ku (Tokyo) in Recollections
Peter Ackermann
3. How Cooking Became a Hobby: Changes in Attitude Toward Cooking in Early Twentieth-Century Japan
Katarzyna Cwiertka
4. Then Science Took Over: Sex, Leisure, and Medicine at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century
Sabine Frühstück
Part Two: Sports
5. Budô : Invented Tradition in the Martial Arts
Inoue Shun
6. Blood and Guts in Japanese Professional Baseball
William W. Kelly
7. Contemporary Japanese Athletics: Window on the Cultural Roots of Nationalism-Internationalism
T. J. Pempel
8. Golf, Organization, and "Body Projects": Japanese Business Executives in Singapore
Eyal Ben-Ari
Part Three: Travel and Nature
9. Pilgrimage in the Edo Period: Forerunner of Modern Domestic Tourism? The Example of the Pilgrimage to Mount Tateyama
Susanne Formanek
10. Work and Play in the Japanese Countryside
Nelson H. H. Graburn
11. Cherry Blossoms and Their Viewing: A Window onto Japanese Culture
Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney
12. Leisure Parks in Japan
Angelika Hamilton-Oehrl
Part Four: Theater and Music
13. From Pleasure to Leisure: Attempts at Decommercialization of Japanese Popular Theater
Annegret Bergmann
14. Takarazuka and Kobayashi Ichizô's Idea of Kokumingeki
Roland Domenig
15. The Politics and Pursuit of Leisure in Wartime Japan
Jennifer Robertson
16. The Disappearance of the Jazu-Kissa : Some Considerations about Japanese "Jazz-Cafés" and Jazz-Listeners
Eckhart Derschmidt
Part Five: Playing Games and Gambling
17. From Kendô to Jan-ken : The Deterioration of a Game from Exoticism into Ordinariness
Sepp Linhart
18. Gambling and Changing Japanese Attitudes Toward It
Nagashima Nobuhiro
19. Time, Space, and Money: Cultural Dimensions of the Pachinko Game
