Encounters with Japan and the Japanese - Brossura

Macfarlane, Prof Alan

Brossura

ISBN 10: 1491075414 ISBN 13: 9781491075418

Casa editrice: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013

Riassunto

I knew little of Japan and the Japanese before I was fifty although I had been interested in some curious similarities between the islands of England and Japan historically (primogeniture, early industrialization, centralized feudalism, ascetic religion, tea drinking). When I was invited to Hokkaido University in 1990 as a visiting British Council fellow, I was delighted at the opportunity to visit this fabled land with my wife Sarah; though I distinctly remembering having to find a map to work out exactly where Japan was. When we visited Japan, we met our hosts Professors Kenichi and Toshiko Nakamura. They became close friends and have remained so since. Our friendship and collaboration has been the underpinning of all my work on Japan. They have hosted, guided, corrected and stimulated us during our numerous visits since 1990, and when they came for sabbaticals to Oxford and Cambridge we would hold long informal seminars in the attempt to understand each other’s culture. I found and still find Japan enormously puzzling. In many superficial ways, as mentioned, it is like England. Yet as one goes deeper, the differences become more pronounced. I spent fifteen years in often fruitless attempts to understand it and was only finally able to write my book when I read Lafcadio Hearn. Hearn had fallen in love with Japan, learnt the language, taught in Japanese schools, married a Japanese wife. Yet in the preface to Japan – An Interpretation he wrote: ‘Long ago the best and dearest Japanese friend I ever had said to me... “When you find, in four or five years more, that you cannot understand the Japanese at all then you will begin to know something about them.” After having realised the truth of my friend’s prediction, – after having discovered that I cannot understand the Japanese at all, – I feel better qualified to attempt this essay.’ Entering Japan is a gradual process and my final book, Japan Through the Looking Glass (2007) is the summation of many earlier attempts. The various stages of that journey are quite well illustrated in a number of articles and talks, only some of them published, which I have written since 1993. They are rough and sometimes unchecked, but they do give a sense of how I tried to come to terms with various puzzling features of Japan – economy, social structure, law and custom, work, technology and art.

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L'autore

Alan Macfarlane was born in Shillong, India, in 1941 and educated at the Dragon School, Sedbergh School, Oxford and London Universities. He is the author of over twenty books, including The Origins of English Individualism (1978) and Letters to Lily: On How the World Works (2005). He has worked in England, Nepal, Japan and China as both an historian and anthropologist. He was elected to the British Academy in 1986 and is now Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the University of Cambridge and a Life Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
• Data di pubblicazione: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1491075414
• ISBN 13: 9781491075418
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 256