Merry I. White

Unmasking Japan Today: The Impact of Traditional Values on Modern Japanese Society

The Process of Japanese Modernization The Japanese Family-Change and Continuity Changes in the Japanese Family System Popular Culture/Lifestyles of the Japanese Family Emerging Family Problems Education and Youth The Japanese Educational System Japanese Youth Today Women and Labor Force Participation The Changing Status of Women Japanese Women in the Work Force The Graying of Japan Aging as a Socio-Cultural Process The Economics of Aging The Impact of Aging on Family Relations Conclusion: From Modernization to Internationalization References Index.

Learning and working in Japan

Many Americans envy the results of the Japanese educational system. But the question remains: can we copy it, must we make better use of the cultural resources we have, or is it best to use a little of each?

Ramen at Home and on the Road

George Solt, The Untold Story of Ramen: How Political Crisis in Japan Spawned a Global Food Craze, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2013, 240 pp.Frederick Errington, Tatsuro Fujikura and D...

Modern Japanese Cuisine: Food, Power and National Identity (review)

are widely varied and diffi cult to categorize under one particular framework, except that of positioning Japanese popular culture within an increasingly transnational world. While the editors do touch on this aspect in the introduction, an even fuller discussion might have helped make the book more effective as a general textbook. Nevertheless, it should be emphasized that each article on its own is well researched, thoughtful, and thought provoking. The pieces in this volume explore Japanese popular culture more widely and more deeply than those in previous compilations. Both students and scholars will have much to learn from it.

British Food: An Extraordinary Thousand Years of History by Colin Spencer

about food production and fuel dependency and appears in other recent books including Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma and Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (both Pollan and Kingsolver appear in this volume). The delightful difference with this volume comes in the bite-size essays with multiple perspectives that tease the interest of a sustainable agriculture novice and reward the devotee with classic but overlooked essays (such as Leopold). The extensive essays might have been culled for repetitiveness (Pollan, Manning and Barber all focus heavily on fossil fuels and staple grains) and the brevity of the essays will frustrate a curious reader yearning for deeper coverage. Furthermore, the issue of pesticides and genetically modified foods, while mentioned, lacks exploration in this volume. An essay by Angus Wright, for example, might have added a human dimension to industrial agriculture by focusing on migrant farm workers. Despite these minor quibbles, this collection provides great insight into a wide variety of approaches to conservation and agriculture by addressing the unsteady potentialities of their relationship. The essays seek to change mainstream perceptions about farming and wildness by highlighting the interdependence of each on the other and to this end, they succeed artfully.

Divorce in Japan: Family, Gender and the State, 1600–2000Divorce in Japan: Family, Gender and the State, 1600–2000, by FuessHarald. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004. 248 pp.

the ability to be happy even in sad conditions—does not imply the capacity for willed action. Especially in the situation in which part of this strength comes from prayers. Generally, Erdmans’s arguments about the connection between structure and agency are either non sequitur or incomplete. One of the main points of the book is that the Grasinski girls’ life was influenced by “Polishness.” Erdmans writes: “their ethnicity, like their language, is present but not spoken, hidden not absent, private not public .|.|. It is housed in the words they can sing but do not understand, it is in the daily prayers to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Blessed Virgin Mary, in the icons on their wall that tell the symbolic history of Poland that they don’t know” (p. 64). How such a phenomenon, called Polishness, can influence people’s life is difficult to substantiate. Generally, this book, in its own genre, is far from satisfactory since it essentially limits an explanation of what happened to the Grasinski girls to their own interpretation. Dressing accounts of six women with sociological jargon does not make a social science study. Sociology, even in its qualitative rendition, requires a thoughtful usage of the discipline’s apparatus. In our view, this book lacks it.

45.00, cloth. ISBN: 0-8047-4357-6.

globalization, he uses the global communication of the Internet to create this network, the Presidia, to protect, encourage, and offer help and monetary support to food sources that were on the verge of extinction. The whole reason I wanted to read this book was to satisfy the cook in me by discovering what had been happening in this organization called Slow Food. Now I want to go further. If you appreciate good food well beyond the “special sauce,” if you regularly make your own stock, if you are always on the lookout for the local cuisine, not tourist local cuisine, but the real thing, then this book is for you. This is a book and a movement for people who love quality food.