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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Poetics Of Acculturation: Early Pure Land Buddhism And The Topography Of The Periphery In Orikuchi Shinobu’S The Book Of The Dead, Ikuho Amano
Department of Modern Languages and Literatures: Faculty Publications
Known as the exponent practitioner of kokubungaku (national literature), modernist ethnologist Orikuchi Shinobu (1887–1953) readily utilized archaic Japanese experiences as viable resources for his literary imagination. As the leading disciple of Yanagita Kunio (1875–1962), who is known as the founding father of modern folkloric ethnology in Japan, Orikuchi is often considered a nativist ethnologist whose works tend to be construed as a probing into the origin of the nation. He considered the essence of national literature as “the origins of art itself,” and such a critical vision arguably linked him to interwar fascism.1 Nevertheless, his nativist effort as a literatus …
In Praise Of Iron Grandeur: The Sensibility Of Kōjō Moe And The Reinvention Of Urban Technoscape, Ikuho Amano
In Praise Of Iron Grandeur: The Sensibility Of Kōjō Moe And The Reinvention Of Urban Technoscape, Ikuho Amano
Department of Modern Languages and Literatures: Faculty Publications
Since the late 1980s, sci-fi fans and machinery aficionados in Japan have expressed their fascination with factories, projecting an imagination that sites of industrial facilities are simulacra of futuristic urban technoscape portrayed in Hollywood films. Although factory watching used to be an activity for a limited population, in the past decade organized factory night tours are becoming increasingly popular in Japan. This type of tour has expanded public interest in factories located on coastal industrial zones as a form of popular leisure-time activity. Widely known as kōjō moe (‘factory infatuation’), fans have elevated plants to objects for aesthetic appreciation. This …
Revisiting History Through Crime Fiction: Shiono Nanami’S Scarlet Venice In The Renaissance Trilogy Of Murder, Ikuho Amano
Revisiting History Through Crime Fiction: Shiono Nanami’S Scarlet Venice In The Renaissance Trilogy Of Murder, Ikuho Amano
Department of Modern Languages and Literatures: Faculty Publications
In her Renaissance Trilogy of Murder (1988), Shiono Nanami (塩野七生, 1937- ) rejuvenates the classical genre of historical crime fiction, dismantling a canonical outlook of late Renaissance Italy. As historiographer of Ancient Rome, the Italian Renaissance, and the Mediterranean naval epic, Shiono achieved literary stardom in Japan in the 1980s, and has been internationally known for her pragmatist approaches to history and contemporary politics. Her writing has reassessed established history from the non-Western and non-Christian viewpoints. Most notably, her magnum opus, Rōmajin no monogatari (Res GestaePopuli Romani—Tales of the Romans) (published 1992-2006) tirelessly describes the empire’s politics, beginning …