1st Edition

Japanese Encounters The Structure and Dynamics of Cultural Frames

By Eyal Ben-Ari Copyright 2018
    206 Pages
    by Routledge

    206 Pages
    by Routledge

    This book explores the multiplicity of special times and spaces in Japan within which people get together to decide, celebrate or play, in gatherings such as organizational meetings, community festivities, preschool games or drinking bouts. It analyzes these gatherings in relation to the theoretical model of sociocultural frames, examining how such occasions are put together, their unfolding stages, interactive encounters, and relations between participants and the wider social and cultural contexts. It considers the cognitive, emotional and behavioural dimensions, the scope for manipulation and the effects, intentional and unintentional, on participants and the connections to the ways in which in society and culture change. Overall, besides describing specific rites and ceremonies in Japan, the book provides great insights into the process whereby the interactions, feelings and action of individuals and groups shape popular culture.

     Chapter One – Introduction,

    Chapter Two – From Mothering to Othering: Organization and Nap Time in a Japanese Preschool





    Chapter Three – The Gambaru Complex: Learning to Overcome Obstacles through Individual and Collective Action





    Chapter Four – Teachers' Meetings: Information, Quality Control and Decisions





    Chapter Five – A Sports Day in Suburban Japan: Leisure, artificial Communities and the Creation of Locality





    Chapter Six – Posing, Posturing and Photographic Presences: A Rite of Passage in a Japanese Commuter Village





    Chapter Seven – Sake and Spare Time: Management and Imbibement in Japanese Business Firms





    Chapter Eight – "Not-Precisely-Work": Golf, Entertainment and Drinking Among Japanese Business Executives in Singapore





    Chapter Nine – Coincident Events of Remembrance, Coexisting Spaces of Memory: The Annual Memorial Rites at Yasukuni Shrine.





    Chapter Ten – Public Events and Japanese the Self-Defense Forces: Aesthetics, Ritual Density and the Normalization of Military Violence





    Chapter Eleven – Power, Play and Transformation

    Biography

    Eyal Ben-Ari is Chairman of the Center for Society, Security and Peace in Memory of Dan Shomron at Kinneret Academic College, Israel