Escaping Japan : Reflections on Estrangement and Exile in the Twenty-First Century.

Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- List of figures -- List of contributors -- Preface -- Acknowledgements -- 1 Introduction: escaping Japan inside and outside -- 2 Maid cafés: affect, life and escape in Akihabara -- 3 The burden of sobriety: alcoholism and masculinity in Japan -- 4 Robot dreams: play, escape and masculine-romanticism in Japanese techno-culture -- 5 The globalization of melancholic affect: escaping soft power through the literature of Murakami Haruki -- 6 Escaping through words: memory and oblivion in the Japanese urban landscape -- 7 'Escaping' the Hokkaido homelands: Ainu heteroglossia and the performance of Ainu urban Indigeneity in the Kanto region -- 8 Kyoko's assemblage: escaping 'futsū no Nihonjin' in Hokkaido -- 9 'Escape' to a place of familiarity: transforming Japanese tourist imaginings of Taiwan -- 10 Fleeing from constraints: Japanese retirement migrants in Malaysia -- 11 After words -- Index.

The idea that Japan is a socially homogenous, uniform society has been increasingly challenged in recent years. This book takes the resulting view further by highlighting how Japan, far from singular or monolithic, is socially and culturally complex.

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Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2024. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.