Modern Japan

Evaluation of speakers with foreign-accented speech in Japan: the effect of accent produced by English native speakers

“…Japan's mono-racial society has tended to admire western culture and westerners since it was opened to the west after the Meiji restoration in 1868 (Tipton 2008;Willcock 2008). Despite a sense of national pride and cultural superiority long evident through terms such as 'wakon yosai' (Japanese sprit and Western technology) in the nineteenth century (Sugimoto 2003…”

“…) and establishment of the Japan Foundation in the early 1970s to promote Japanese language and culture abroad (Tipton 2008), inside Japan ordinary Japanese citizens have not really expected foreigners to speak Japanese when they first meet on the street. The concept of Nihonjinron (theories of Japanese) claiming that Japanese language and culture are unique (Gottlieb 2005;Suzuki 1978) upholds that only those who are born to parents of Japanese blood, grow up in Japanese society and speak Japanese from childhood can ever really understand the language and how it works in Japanese society (Carroll 2001).…”

Regimes and Industrialization

“…While not all such policies have been successful in achieving their aims, and oftentimes have had unintended, negative consequences on development, more broadly, several studies document how industrial policies have been successfully applied in various historical and geographic contexts (see, e.g., Nunn 2019 p.7). In the nineteenth century, the Japanese state constructed proto-factories to diffuse relevant knowledge to private firms (Tipton 2008;53-54). During the Great Leap Forward, the Chinese government requisitioned pots and pans from citizens to produce steel out of scrap metals in "backyard furnaces" (Chan 2001).…”

The ‘Beauty’ of Male Circumcision in Japan: Gender, Sexuality and the Male Body in a Medical Practice

“…The gender regime has translated into Japanese men who have been almost totally estranged from the home and women who have had limited access to paid work and been largely confined to the domesticity of housework. During the 1990s, despite working outside the home, married women were still largely responsible for childrearing and housework: ‘Japanese men spent only twenty minutes a day on housework even when their wives worked’ (Tipton, 2008: 227); and most recent surveys suggest that whilst Japanese wives who work full time spend ‘30 hours a week doing the housework, their husbands contribute an unprincely three hours of effort’ ( The Economist , 2011). However, the increasing number of women entering tertiary education and paid employment have triggered changes in the gender regime and social imagery highlights a ‘“ gender panic ” in twentieth-century Japan’ (Kinsella, 2012: 72, emphasis in the original).…”