Journal articles on the topic 'Romances, Japanese'

My country “is now wholly given over to a d—d mob of scribbling women,” goes one of the most frequently quoted gender-related adages. Japanologists might be tempted to attribute this uncourtly utterance to a learned nobleman of Heian Japan (794–1185) embittered by the outpouring of vernacular narratives from women's writing brushes that were eclipsing male endeavors to emulate Chinese classics, or to an exasperated modern Japanese novelist in reference to the neo-Heian phenomenon, namely, the renaissance of women's literature in postwar Japan. Actually it was Nathaniel Hawthorne (1855:141) who made the now infamous sexist remark in chagrin at American women who were churning out best-sellers in force. Thereafter, this phenomenon abated for a full century, but since the 1960s, Western women writers have made a glorious resurgence, marked by unprecedented degrees of output and worldwide market domination in a genre known as the romance fiction. The title of the first romance series and the name of its publisher, Harlequin, has become something like a generic term with multiple signification.

In the title of a 1903 American Journal of Sociology essay, Ernest W. Clement announces a new phenomenon: “The New Woman in Japan.” By this title, he quickly explains, he does not mean to satirically compare this Japanese sociological development to the American “parody of man” usually associated with the phrase, because “such a creature as that called the ‘new woman’ in the Occident has not yet appeared to any great extent among the Japanese.” Although sometimes in Japan “the process of the new woman's evolution may be disfigured by some accident” producing “a sickening sort of person,” Clement's interest is not in particular aberrations, but rather in “the abstract, legal new woman” created by recent changes in Japan's civil code. In this abstraction Clement sees improvement on previous Japanese laws that “relegat[ed] woman to an abnormally inferior position.” Clement thus assures readers that, although Japan's modernization hinges upon its women's legal and cultural status, female advancement in Japan will not approach the “abnormal” excesses of the United States. Quoting Alice Mabel Bacon's influential book Japanese Girls and Women to stress this point, Clement explains that Japanese men are adopting many Western habits and opinions, but they still “shrink aghast, in many cases, at the thought that their women may ever become the forward, self-assertive, half-masculine women of the West.” Yet still, many of these Japanese men express “a growing dissatisfaction with the smallness and narrowness of the lives of their wives and daughters — a growing belief that better educated women make better homes.”

AbstractThis study aims to explain the history of the Medanese novels chronologically, starting from the development of the Medanese novels in the Dutch colonialism period to the old order, and the impact of Medanese novels to people in Medan. The sources of data are Medanese novels published from 1930 to 1965. Method used in this study was historic method studied through four stages as follows: (1) heuristic (to collect sources); (2) verification of data (to test validity of data); (3) interpretation; (4) historiography (writing). The data were analyzed by diachronic approach as a method in the length of time, but limited in space. The results of this study indicated that development of Medanese novels in Dutch colony time (from 1912 to 1942) experienced speedily progressing. Medanese novels were on its peak in 1930, until the term flood of romance emerged which was marked by the number of romances published. Medanese novels could compete against novels published by Balai Pustaka, a publisher previously established by the government of the Dutch colonialism. However, at time of the Japanese occupation (from 1942 to 1945), the Medanese novels experienced decreasing, even lost from distribution, and from early independence (from 1945 to 1950) to old order (from 1950 to 1966), the Medanese novels raised again, but the existence was unlike the previous. Moreover, the Medanese novels writing had impacts on social life in Medan, such as politic, education, social, and culture. Keywords: Medanese novels, history, literature, Medan AbstrakPenelitian ini bertujuan untuk menjelaskan sejarah perkembangan roman Medan secara kronologis, yang dimulai dari perkembangan roman Medan pada masa kolonial Belanda hingga orde lama, serta dampak penulisan roman Medan bagi masyarakat kota Medan. Sumber data penelitian ini adalah roman Medan terbitan tahun 1930—1965. Metode yang digunakan dalam penelitian ini, yaitu metode sejarah yang dikaji melalui empat tahapan, meliputi (1) heuristik (pengumpulan sumber); (2) verifikasi data (menguji keabsahan sumber); (3) interpretasi (penafsiran); (4) historiografi (penulisan). Adapun analisis data menggunakan pendekatan diakronis yang merupakan suatu pendekatan yang memanjang dalam waktu, tetapi secara ruang terbatas. Hasil dari penelitian ini menunjukkan bahwa perkembangan roman Medan pada masa kolonial Belanda (1912—1942) mengalami kemajuan yang begitu pesat. Roman Medan berada di puncak kejayaannya pada tahun 1930 hingga muncul istilah banjir roman yang ditandai dengan banyaknya roman yang terbit. Secara kuantitas roman Medan mampu bersaing dengan roman terbitan Balai Pustaka yang merupakan penerbit buku yang telah didirikan terlebih dahulu oleh pemerintah Belanda. Akan tetapi, pada masa pendudukan Jepang (1942—1945) roman Medan mengalami kemunduran bahkan hilang dari peredaran, dan pada masa awal kemerdekaan (1945—1950) hingga masa Orde Lama (1950—1966), roman Medan bangkit kembali, tetapi eksistensinya tidak seperti dahulu. Selain itu, penulisan roman Medan ini memiliki dampak terhadap kehidupan masyarakat Medan di antaranya dalam bidang politik, pendidikan, sosial, dan budaya. Kata kunci: roman Medan, sejarah, karya sastra, Medan

Abstract Mary McNeil Fenollosa’s 1906 novel The Dragon Painter and its 1919 filmic adaptation sit at the intersection of American literary, art, and film history. Simultaneously personal and political, each is a product of its time and place. Together, they tell a story about changing (and unchanging) attitudes that were constituents of the complex and often contradictory history of the reception of Japanese culture and people in the United States. The novel draws on stereotypes of Japan as a primitive country of innately artistic people that at the time of its publication had been made familiar through art and literature. The silent film, produced in Hollywood, by and co-starring Sessue Hayakawa and his wife Tsuru Aoki, expanded and complicated the modes of visualizing Japan by featuring a Japanese couple in starring roles. This article addresses the relationship between the novel, an allegory of Japanese cultural loss and renewal, and the film, a romance inflected with American concerns about race, drawing particular attention to gender and Japanism in their reception and interpretation.

This study investigates the translation strategy on culture specific items existed in One Piece: Romance Dawn.This study has two objectives. The first objective was to find out the CSIs in One Piece: Romance Dawn. The second objective was to find out translation strategies applied in translating the CSIs.This study was considered qualitative and a primary research. The CSIs were listed from the comic and analyzed. The result was nine CSIs found in One Piece: Romance Dawn that refers to Japanese culture.Five CSIs were written in its original Japanese word, one CSI was translated into Indonesian word, while three CSIs were shown in pictures.

Abstract This article provides an analysis of representations of sexual minorities in Japanese TV series. It outlines how homosexual and queer desire is depicted and how stereotypes and tropes are used in the construction of queer characters in this media format. The article also illuminates the ways in which TV series differentiate between depictions of same-sex romance and opposite-sex romance. The corpus of analysed TV series spans a period of twenty-five years. Thus, the analysis also sheds light on changes in the representation of sexual minorities over time. Examples from recent TV series point to a more positive and sometimes didactic approach towards the topic of homosexuality in Japanese mainstream media.

Warera no Jidai no Fuukoroa - Koodo Shihon Shugi Zenshi's short story by Murakami Haruki tells the romance of Japanese teenagers in the 60s (Showa era). This study uses a sociological approach to literature to analyze the meaning of the story through a picture of the society of the 60s told in a short story. The results showed that in the Showa period gender equality was still difficult to realize because people's thinking still supported patriarchal domination. Besides, the portrayal of the romance story is the author's criticism of the fragility of society in that era.

Japanese and Western women travelers to Thailand were interviewed to determine factors associated with travel and risk of sexually transmitted HIV infection. Self-administered questionnaires ( n = 179) were collected at beach resort areas during July and August of 1995. Four travel attitude profiles were determined by a Principle Components Analysis. Japanese travelers reported attitudes consistent with “Relaxation/Romance,” and Western travelers attitudes consistent with “Sexual Adventure.” Both groups indicated that they would develop a sexual relationship with another traveler, as opposed to a local Thai. Japanese respondents were less likely to report carrying condoms, report the intention to use condoms, or report knowledge about AIDS in Thailand. They also reported less comfort with the open distribution of condoms and AIDS prevention information. Differing HIV risk beliefs and behaviors indicate that cultural factors should be taken into account when designing intervention messages and materials for any group.

The present article intend to analyze the memories of the Japanese immigrant in Brazil parting from the romance Nihonjin, of Oscar Nakasato. For this, will be used the tools of Paul Ricoeur’s theory of memory, specially the relation between individual and collective memory, and the abuses of memory. Therefore, the literature will serve as object to be studied with the philosophical tools about memory

This article explores some effects of first language verb-argument structure on second language processing of English as a second language. Speakers of Chinese, Japanese or Korean, three Romance languages and native English speakers provided word-by-word reading times and grammaticality judgement data in a self-paced reading task. Results suggest that reliable differences in parsing are not restricted to cases where verb-argument structure differs crosslinguistically.

This study investigates the acquisition of the unaccusative-unergative distinction in L2 Japanese by English learners. The aim is to establish whether learners of Japanese are sensitive to the lexical-semantic characteristics of verbs in similar ways as learners of Romance languages who were found to follow the Split Intransitivity Hierarchy (Sorace, 1993a, 1995a). Two groups of learners participated in the study, one consisting of learners who had not had any previous exposure to Japanese outside the classroom, and the other consisting of learners at the end of a 9-month period of continuous stay in Japan. A control group of native Japanese speakers also took part in the experiment. Subjects were tested on their knowledge of the different behavior of unaccusative and unergative verbs with respect to quantifier floating (Miyagawa, 1989); the native group was also tested on Case drop (Kageyama, 1993). The results show that both the native and the nonnative speakers are conditioned by the Split Intransitivity Hierarchy in their judgments on unergative verbs; however, their judgments on unaccusative verbs do not pattern according to the predictions. It is argued that this difference stems from the ambiguity of the Japanese input on unaccusative verbs, which are characterized by syntactic optionality.

Abstract This essay explores a number of texts of the exophonic, or non-native literary production, respectively in Italian and German, of translingual authors Jhumpa Lahiri and Yoko Tawada. While the paper looks at how their dominant languages, respectively English and Japanese, continue to play a role in these writers’ non-native production, it focuses on the different approaches the two authors adopt to translingualism and the “linguistic family romance” metaphor, which they equally employ in highly imaginative ways in order to address both their condition of rootlessness and their attitudes to the notion of “mother tongue.” The essay argues that while Lahiri seems to remain a writer that does not contaminate languages (she is a writer in English, a writer in Italian, and a translator of Italian literature into English), Tawada brings German and Japanese together and dwells on the space of contamination between them in her production in German (and Japanese).

I will examine representations of heterosexual romance in Japanese pandemic fiction published during COVID-19, so as to scrutinize the employment of pandemic in the discussion of social issues and dynamics between the public and private interests. Ueda Takahiro uses the protagonist’s love dilemma to question the postmodern condition, where the digital attempts to replace everything, disturb the master narratives, and transform our society. Tsukui Itsuki’s story has a rather optimistic view of technological responses to the pandemic. In his work, the protagonist’s romantic pursuit realizes individual development as well as civil society building. Kanehara Hitomi incorporates the element of pandemic in the representations of anti-sociability and precarity of youths in post-bubble Japan. Furthermore, the element of pandemic enriches the depictions of anxieties and issues of contemporary Japanese society from before the emergence of COVID-19: techno-induced postmodern crisis, ideological disputes, and socio-economic stagnation. Keywords: COVID-19, pandemic, heterosexuality, reproduction, space, science fiction, Kanehara Hitomi

Japan's obsession with food TV is rooted in its gourmet boom, beginning in the 1980s, when the strong economy encouraged mass consumption of expensive foods and foreign cuisines. Gourmet TV dramas are often based on a popular manga comic and typically reproduce hegemonic gendered food norms, with professional male chefs embodying food authority and expertise often acting as protagonists. In recent years, however, several popular new TV series have introduced a new gender archetype: masculine loners who care deeply about traditional or home-style foods, so-called B-kyū gurume (second-class gourmet) cuisine. This article analyzes four such recent programs and argues that the emerging “gourmet samurai” archetype resonates with audiences because of the recent elevation of B-kyū cuisine and, more fundamentally, the steep decline in the marriage rate, a topic of intense media speculation. The expanding ranks of Japanese singles suggest that many men now face increased responsibilities for choosing or preparing their own meals. The everyman heroes of these shows offer role models to the growing cadres of unmarried men, encouraging them to become manly connoisseurs or cooks of simple, traditional foods and conveying the message that food knowledge and pleasure is as acceptable and satisfying a pursuit as romance, career, or family.

Video games are powerful narrative media that continue to evolve. Romance games in Japan, which began as text-based adventure games and are today known as bishōjo games and otome games, form a powerful textual corpus for literary and media studies. They adopt conventional literary narrative strategies and explore new narrative forms formulated by an interface with computer-generated texts and audiovisual fetishism, thereby challenging the assumptions about the modern textual values of storytelling. The article first examines differences between visual novels that feature female characters for a male audience and romance adventure games that feature male characters for a female audience. Through the comparison, the article investigates how notions of romantic love and relationship have transformed from the modern identity politics based on freedom and the autonomous self to the decentered model of mediation and interaction in the contemporary era.

This essay examines how Catholics at the English Jesuit College at Saint-Omer reflected on Japanese religious politics during the 1620s and 1630s, both through translated mission reports and drama. This analysis expands scholars’ view of English encounters with Japan; it also decenters predominantly Eurocentric approaches to early modern Jesuit education and theater. The essay concludes with a discussion of Shakespeare and George Wilkins's “Pericles,” a quarto playbook of which was possessed by St. Omers and which, through the generic elements of romance it shared with the Japan material, provided further opportunities for the college's Catholics to consider transcontinental religious politics.

This article discusses fan community of the Boys Love (BL) manga among young women in Indonesia. BL manga tells a romance between fellow men. BL manga is a sub genre of shojo manga, the manga for girls and women readers in Japan. BL manga belongs to the genre for female readers because the comic artist is a woman. Both in Japan and outside Japan, the development of BL manga receives much attention from many researchers and observers of Japanese study. Using cultural-study perspective, they examine the phenomenon of BL manga and fujoshi community formed by BL fandom. This study discusses the formation of BL manga fandom community by linking the construction of gender identity using a cultural-study perspective and gender performativity concept by Judith Butler. By using Judith Butler's concept of gender performativity we can see why and how the Indonesian female teens construct their gender identity through fandom of BL manga.

An international study is investigating phonological development in 12 languages: Romance (Canadian French, Granada, Mexican and Chilean Spanish, and European Portuguese); Germanic (German, English, Swedish, and Icelandic); Semitic (Kuwaiti Arabic); Asian (Japanese, Mandarin); South Slavic (Bulgarian, Slovene). Additional phonological assessment materials have been created for Anishinaabemowin (Algonquian, Canada), Brazilian Portuguese, European French, Punjabi, Tagalog, and Greek. The study has two purposes: (a) to investigate crosslinguistic patterns in phonological development; and (b) to develop assessment tools and treatment activities. Equivalent crosslinguistic methodologies include: (a) single word lists for elicitation that reflect major characteristics of each language; (b) data collection and transcription by native speakers; (c) participant samples of 20–30 preschoolers (ages 3 to 6) with typical versus protracted phonological development; and (d) data analysis supported by Phon, a phonological analysis program. The current paper provides an overview of the study and introduces a website that offers free tutorials and materials for speech-language pathologists (SLPs).

Abstract In this article, which is taken almost verbatim from parts of Agreement Beyond Phi (Miyagawa, Shigeru. 2017. Agreement beyond phi. Linguistic Inquiry Monograph 75. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.), I focus on a puzzling observation about subject pro across languages: in languages such as Japanese and those of Romance, the subject pro behaves exactly like a pronoun in being able to freely refer to entities in the discourse with reasonable context, and also to refer sentence internally to a subject, an object, or other phrases. However, in Chinese, the subject pro is extremely limited in its reference potential: it is able to refer to a discourse entity in very narrow contexts, and sentence internally, its antecedent is limited to the subject. I show that the Chinese subject pro demonstrates the principles of Strong Uniformity, by depending on ϕ-feature agreement for sentence-internal reference, and when that option isn’t taken, switches to the Topic feature to refer to a discourse entity.

In the spring of 1879, while the relations between Japan and China was deteriorated by a series of disputes in Korea, Taiwan and the Ryukyu Islands, Wang Tao 王韜 (1828-1897), a Chinese scholar, was invited by a group of prominent Japanese intellectuals, including Kurimoto Joun 栗本鋤雲 (1822-1897), Shigeno Yasutsugu 重野安繹 (1827-1910), Nakamura Masanao 中村正直 (1832-1890), and Oka Senjin 岡千仭 (1833-1914), to travel to Japan, exchanging ideas of reform and discussing the crises of Asian countries with increasing Western invasions. Wang Tao was warmly welcomed as an expert of both Chinese Classics and international affairs. Having the objectives of finding out more about the Meiji Japan and promoting friendship and strategic relations between the two countries, Wang and his hosts inevitably started a discussion on modernization, Westernization and future development of the two neighbouring countries. This was a significant intellectual exchange among Chinese and Japanese men of letters in modern history. During his visit, Wang recorded his journey in Fusang youji 扶桑遊記 (A Travel to Japan). Upon returning to China, Wang presented his diary to Kurimoto Joun and the book was published by Yūbin Hōchi, a leading news printing press in Japan. Although there are research outlining Wang Tao’s travel to Japan, its significance, especially Wang’s vision of the future development of Sino-Japanese relation has not been fully analysed. His travel diary, an important source to reveal Wang’s thought, has only been seen as a record of travel itinerary and personal romance. In fact, his senses of history and knowledge in current affairs have reminded him the threat of an ambitious Japan. He, therefore, endeavoured to rebuild and maintain the link between the two countries from historic, cultural and strategic aspects during his journey. This paper aims to examine how Wang Tao conveyed his messages in inoffensive but effective ways in his travel diary.

Women's games refers to a category of games developed and marketed exclusively for the consumption of women and girls in the Japanese gaming industry. Essentially gender-specific games comparable to the `games for girls' proposed by the girls' game movement in the USA, Japanese women's games are significant for their history, influence and function as a site for female gamers to play out various female identities and romantic fantasies within diverse generic structures. This article will first review previous research and literature on women and gaming, analyze the key issues raised in the discourse concerning femininity and electronic games, outline the history and development of women's games, explain how multiple factors contributed to the appeal of women's games by analyzing the games Angelique and Harukanaru Tokino Nakade3 and, lastly, discuss the meaning and significance of women's games in the larger context of women and gaming. The 1994 game Angelique succeeded in establishing a loyal and close-knit fan base by actively utilizing popular female culture such as shoujo manga (girls' comics) and the fan base for voice actors. Angelique also set up the specifics and conventions of women's games: a focus on romance, easy controls and utilizing other multimedia. In 2004, Harukanaru Tokino Nakade3 deconstructed the genre and gender conventions of women's games and shoujo manga, while developing a new type of feminine identity and narrative. Women's games indicate that genderspecific games can be more than educational tools to familiarize girls with technology or perpetuate stereotypes; they can be a significant extension of female culture into the realm of gaming, and contribute to the development of women's culture and the diversification of the gaming industry.

There is a popular conception among many Zeitgeist watchers, especially in places like the US, Western Europe and Australia, of the urbanized East as existing somehow further into the future. As William Gibson once stated: `The future is here; it just isn't equally distributed yet.' This kind of cultural fetishism extends to not only technolust, but the practices that new gadgets and electronics encourage. The specific phenomenon explored in this article is that of virtual girlfriends and boyfriends: whether in the form of avatars or automated SMS text messages. This particularly Japanese `craze', if we can call it that, fascinates and appals people who still hold P2P romance IRL in high-esteem. It seems like an insult to the intrinsically human and humanist discourse of courtship; and indeed it is. How does this perspective change, however, if we consider `love' as a technology? That is, as both a code with its own algorithmic parameters, and a discourse that also challenges the hyper-rational assumptions of the `merely machinic'. Extending the argument articulated in my book, Love and Other Technologies, this article asks how the emergence of virtual dating and other techno-inflected treatments of romance are working to undo our jealously held notions of intimacy and identity. It concludes that all sex can be considered cybersex, given the communication flows that occur both before, during and after the act. For, as we continue to enframe the discourse of intimacy via new and mobile media, we find it increasingly difficult to deny that intensified inter-subjectivity is always already a matter of technics. Indeed, what Heidegger says of modern technology can effectively be applied to modern love: that it embodies an `unreasonable demand' of nature (and thus has the capacity to reveal something essential about the posthuman condition).

To improve and plan regional suicide prevention programmes that utilise more cost-effective governmental financial support compared with previous programmes, the present study determined the effects of the amount of financial support provided for regional suicide prevention programmes, such as the Emergency Fund to Enhance Community-Based Suicide Countermeasures (EFECBSC), on the trends of suicide mortalities caused by six major suicide motives between 2009 and 2018, using forward multiple regression analysis. The ranking order of motives for male suicide was health, economy, family, employment, romance and school (in that order), whereas the ranking order for females was health, family, economy, romance, employment and school. Male suicide mortality caused by economy-related motives was significantly/inversely related to prefectural intervention programmes, whereas mortality caused by health-related motives was also significantly/inversely related to prefectural intervention programmes, but significantly/positively related to prefectural personal consultation support programmes. Contrary to males, female suicide mortality caused by health-related motives was significantly/inversely related to the municipal development programmes of leaders/listeners, whereas mortality caused by family- and school-related motives was significantly/positively related to prefectural and municipal telephone consultation support programmes, respectively. Contrary to our expectations, school-aged female suicide mortality caused by school-related motives was significantly/positively related to prefectural personal consultation support, enlightenment and municipal telephone consultation support programmes. These results indicate that Japanese regional suicide prevention programmes probably affect the suppression of male suicide mortality. However, these programmes are possibly ineffective, or at least partially, have an adverse effect, in regard to the suicide mortalities of female and school-aged populations. Therefore, we should work to improve regional suicide prevention programmes, making them more cost-effective and targeted towards female and school-aged populations in the future.

This paper offers new data to support findings about Topic extraction from adverbial clauses. Since such clauses are strong islands, they should not allow extraction of any kind, but we show here that if the appropriate conditions are met, Topics of the CLLD kind in Romance can move out of them. We propose that two conditions must be met for such movement to be possible: the first is that the adverbial clause must have undergone topicalisation in the first place; the second is that the adverbial clause is inherently topical from a semantic viewpoint. Contrast with other language families (Germanic, Quechua and Japanese) is provided and the semantic implications of the proposal are briefly discussed.Keywords: topicalisation; Clitic Left Dislocation; syntactic islands; adverbial clausesEste artículo ofrece nuevos datos sobre la extracción de Tópicos desde oraciones subordinadas adverbiales. Dado que dichas oraciones son islas fuertes, no deberían permitir extracción de ningún tipo, pero mostramos que si se dan las condiciones apropiadas, los Tópicos del tipo CLLD en lenguas románicas pueden desplazarse fuera de ellas. Proponemos que se deben cumplir dos condiciones para que ese movimiento sea posible: la primera es que la propia subordinada adverbial se haya topicalizado en primer lugar; la segunda es que la subordinada adverbial sea inherentemente un Tópico desde el punto de vista semántico. Proporcionamos también algunos contrastes con otras familias lingüísticas (germánica, quechua y japonés) y se discuten brevemente las implicaciones semánticas de la propuesta.Palabras clave: topicalización; dislocación a la izquierda con clítico; islas sintácticas; oraciones adverbiales

In the late sixteenth century, thriving private maritime trade brought forth maritime trouble to the late Ming state. In times of rampant “Japanese” piracy and Hideyoshi’s invasion of Korea, Chinese literati composed unofficial histories and vernacular fiction on China’s foreign relations. Among them, Yan Congjian 嚴從簡 wrote Shuyu zhouzi lu 殊域周咨錄 (Records of Surrounding Strange Realms) (1574), He Qiaoyuan 何喬遠 compiled Wang Xiangji 王享記 (Records of the Emperors’ Tributes) (1597–1620), Luo Yuejiong 羅曰褧 penned Xianbin lu 咸賓錄 (Records of Tributary Guests) (1597), and Luo Maodeng 羅懋登 composed a vernacular novel Sanbao taijian xiyangji tongsu yanyi 三寶太監西洋記通俗演義 (Vernacular Romance of Eunuch Sanbao’s Voyages on the Indian Ocean) (1598). This article examines how the imminent maritime realities reminded the late Ming authors of one cross-border war and two genocides in Java and Sanfoqi during Yuan and early and mid-Ming times. These transgressions that violated Chinese official tributary order became memorable and made Sino-Java relations a definite point of comparison for the late Ming maritime piracy problems. This article argues that the cultural memory of Sino-Java military and diplomatic exchange enabled the authors to lament and condemn the executed pirates Wang Zhi and Chen Zuyi. The four authors imbue their narratives with personal anxieties and nationalistic sentiments. While the historical narratives tend to moralize and idealize China’s tributary world order, the vernacular fiction paints a more realistic picture of the late Ming state by involving heterogeneous voices of the “other.” Collectively, the four narratives represent various images of the Ming Empire, revealing the authors’ deep apprehension of the Mings’ identity, their political criticism of the state, and their divergent and even self-conflicted views toward maritime commerce, immigrants, and people of different races.

To explore impact of enhancing social advancement of females in Japan, this study determined the effects of the dual-income household rate on suicide mortalities disaggregated by attributes of gender, age, and motives between 2009 and 2017 in Japan. This study analysed impact of dual-income household rate, other household-related factors (savings, liabilities and yearly incomes per household, minors and elderly rate per household), and social/employment factors (complete unemployment rate, employment rate, temporary male and female employment rates and certification rate of long-term care insurance) on suicide mortalities disaggregated by attributes of gender, age, and motives using hierarchical linear-regression model. Dual-income household rate was significantly/negatively related to suicide mortality of the working-age female population, but significantly/positively related to that of the elderly female population. Suicide mortalities of the working-age male population and the elderly male population were significantly/positively related to dual-income household rate. Male suicide mortalities caused by family-, health-, economy- and employment-related motives were significantly/positively related to dual-income household rate; however, the dual-income household rate was significantly/positively related to female suicide mortalities caused by family-, health-, economy- and school-related motives, but significantly/negatively related to suicide mortalities caused by romance-related motives. Dual-income households suppress social-isolation and develop economical/psychological independence of females, leading to reduced suicide mortality in working-age females. However, elderly and school-age populations, who are supported by the working-age female, suffer from isolation. Working-age males also suffer from inability to adapt from the traditional concept of work–life and work–family balances to the novel work–family balance concept adapted to dual-income households. These results suggest occurrence of new social/family problems in the 21st century due to vulnerability of traditional Japanese culture and life–working–family balance concepts as well as novel sociofamilial disturbances induced by declining birth rate and ageing population in Japan.

Revela-se, nas últimas décadas do século XX, a incidência de séries animadas protagonizadas por heróis primordiais, afinados à mitologia pagã e às Novelas de Cavalaria. Nessa direção, o presente estudo ocupa-se em rastrear, a partir de uma perspectiva crítica, descritiva e historicista, as propostas veiculadas pelo cinema gráfico entre 1980 e 2000 e suas articulações com a literatura, o cinema e os quadrinhos. Não está em cogitação, assim, a análise minuciosa de uma obra, mas o delineamento de um panorama histórico que permita visualizar as perspectivas de representação de heróis tradicionais ao longo de vinte anos. Para tanto, recorre-se à crítica especializada, às teorias da narrativa e aos estudos sobre desenho animado e indústria cultural. Em linhas gerais, a pesquisa apontou para um quadro curioso, se comparado às décadas anteriores, marcado, predominantemente, pelo hibridismo. Assim, diversos estúdios lançavam mão de uma teia de signos típicos de circuitos específicos, como o universo da mitologia, o substrato medieval, a literatura arturiana, a fantasia futurista, o faroeste norte-americano e as fontes lendárias dos samurais. Palavras-chave: Desenho animado. Literatura. Estética. Leitor. Herói. THE CONSTRUCTION OF HEROES IN CARTOONS: THE PERIOD OF HYBRID NARRATIVES (1980 – 2000) Abstract: The last decades of the 20th century saw the incidence of animated series featuring primordial heroes, attuned to pagan mythology and to chivalric romance. From a critical, descriptive and historical perspective, this paper aims to track the initiatives conveyed in animated movies between 1980 and 2000 and their correlation with literature, cinema and comic books. The paper offers a historical outline, which provides an overview of perspectives that traditional heroes were represented within a twenty-year time span. In order to do so, it relies on specialized criticism, narrative theory, and on studies about animation and cultural industry. Overall, it points towards an interesting scenario if compared to earlier decades, which were mostly marked by the presence of hybridity. Thus, diverse studios employed a network of signs from specific contexts, such as mythology, medievalism, Arthurian literature, science fiction, American western, and Japanese samurai epics. Keywords: Animated Cartoon. Literature. Aesthetics. Reader. Hero.

This paper takes a well-known observation as its starting point, that is, languages vary with respect to headedness, with the standard head-initial and head-final types well attested. Is there a connection between headedness and the size of a lexical class? Although this question seems quite straightforward, there are formidable methodological and theoretical challenges in addressing it. Building on initial results by several researchers, we refine our methodology and consider the proportion of nouns to simplex verbs (as opposed to light verb constructions) in a varied sample of 33 languages to evaluate the connection between headedness and the size of a lexical class. We demonstrate a robust correlation between this proportion and headedness. While the proportion of nouns in a lexicon is relatively stable, head-final/object-verb (OV)-type languages (e.g., Japanese or Hungarian) have a relatively small number of simplex verbs, whereas head-initial/verb-initial languages (e.g., Irish or Zapotec) have a considerably larger percentage of such verbs. The difference between the head-final and head-initial type is statistically significant. We, then, consider a subset of languages characterized as subject-verb-object (SVO) and show that this group is not uniform. Those SVO languages that have strong head-initial characteristics (as shown by the order of constituents in a set of phrases and word order alternations) are characterized by a relatively large proportion of lexical verbs. SVO languages that have strong head-final traits (e.g., Mandarin Chinese) pattern with head-final languages, and a small subset of SVO languages are genuinely in the middle (e.g., English, Russian). We offer a tentative explanation for this headedness asymmetry, couched in terms of informativity and parsing principles, and discuss additional evidence in support of our account. All told, the fewer simplex verbs in head-final/OV-type languages is an adaptation in response to their particular pattern of headedness. The object-verb/verb-object (OV/VO) difference with respect to noun/verb ratios also reveals itself in SVO languages; some languages, Chinese and Latin among them, show a strongly OV ratio, whereas others, such as Romance or Bantu, are VO-like in their noun/verb ratios. The proportion of nouns to verbs thus emerges as a new linguistic characteristic that is correlated with headedness.

In what follows, I first briefly review Perlmutter (1968, 1970), in which it is argued that aspectual verbs are ambiguous between control and raising. I suggest that while the argument for the raising analysis is solid, the arguments supporting the control analysis of aspectual verbs are less so. As an alternative hypothesis to consider, I introduce the structural ambiguity hypothesis. In Section 3, I review three recent analyses of control and raising. Although there are important differences among them, they all share the basic assumption that the control/raising distinction is due to differences in selectional restrictions that the lexical items impose. Under such an assumption, the lexical ambiguity hypothesis is the only available option. In Section 4, I present evidence for the structural ambiguity hypothesis from studies concerning aspectual verbs in languages from four distinct families, German (Wurmbrand 2001), Japanese (Fukuda 2006), Romance languages (Cinque 2003), and Basque (Arregi Molina-Azaola 2004). These data strongly suggest that across languages aspectual verbs can appear in two different syntactic positions, either below or above vP, or the projection with which an external argument is introduced (Kratzer 1994, 1996, Chomsky 1995). Given these findings, I argue that it is the aspectual verbs' position with respect to vP which creates the control/raising ambiguity. When an aspectual verb appears in a position that is lower than vP, an external argument takes scope over the aspectual verb. Thus, it is interpreted as control. When an aspectual verb appears in a position that is higher than vP, on the other hand, it is the aspectual verb that takes scope over an entire vP, including the external argument. Thus, it is interpreted as raising. In section 5, I extend the scope of this study to include a discussion of want-type verbs in Indonesian, as analyzed in Polinsky & Potsdam (2006). Polinsky & Potsdam argue that the Indonesian want-type verbs must be raising in at least certain cases where they allow a rather peculiar interpretation. Although they assume that there are also control counterparts of the want-type verbs, I argue that applying the proposed analysis to the want-type verbs does away with the need for stipulating two distinct lexical entries for these verbs. Section 6 concludes the paper.

Abstract The 1860 Japanese Embassy to the United States was the first diplomatic encounter between Japanese and American people on American soil, and sparked a whirlwind of national optimism and cultural fantasy that challenged the linked conceptions of race, masculinity, and power. In a time when interracial relationships were prohibited in much of the United States, seventeen-year-old samurai Tateishi Onojirō, nicknamed “Tommy,” and his rising count of love letters made headlines across America. This article argues that, in 1860, representations of the 1860 Japanese Embassy and Tateishi in daily Southern newspapers were used to further complicate the concept of Japanese masculinity and dramatize the differences between the American North and South. The perceived desirability of American women became a source of pride at the same time interracial encounters between American women and the Japanese embassy threatened American racial hierarchies. Examining how interactions between samurai diplomats and transnational actors challenged antebellum hierarchies of race, masculinity, and power expands the significance of the 1860 embassy to the study of gender and interracial romantic relations, the production of regional identity, and the influence of Tokugawa Japan on antebellum American identity formation.

Western images of Japan tell a seemingly incongruous story of love, sex and marriage – one full of contradictions and conflicting moral codes. We sometimes hear intriguing stories about the unique sexual culture of Japan – from vending machines that dispense soiled schoolgirl panties (Gerster 143), erotic manga (Ito 70; Newitz 2) to automated love hotels (Kersten 387) available for the discreet quickie. These Western portrayals seem to focus primarily on the unusual and quirky side of Japan’s culture constructing this modern Asian culture as simultaneously traditional and seemingly liberated. But what happens, when Japanese love goes global – when exotic others (Westerners) enter the picture? This article is shaped by an understanding of a new world space where cultural products and national images are becoming increasingly globalised, while at the same time more localised and “fragmented into contestatory enclaves of difference, coalition and resistance” (Wilson, 1). It examines ‘the local’, briefly exploring the racial and gender ideologies that pattern relationships between Western and Japanese adults living in Japan focussing on the unique perspective of Western women living and working in provincial Japan. Our research is based on four month’s ethnographic field work carried out within a small provincial Japanese city (which was home to 130 native English speakers, most of whom are employed as English language teachers) and interviews with 12 key participants. Japanese colloquialisms like sebun-irebun (seven eleven), burasagarizoku (arm hangers) and yellow cabs (women as easy to hail as taxis – by foreigners) are used to denote the sexual availability of some Japanese women (Kelskey, Flirting with the Foreign 178). Western women in this study have also invented a colloquialism to allude to sexual availability, with the term ‘zero to hero’ used to describe many Western men who, upon arrival in Japan, find themselves highly sought after by some Japanese women as prospective partners. Western women’s social appeal in the local heterosexual community, on the other hand, is in direct contrast to their male equivalents. A greater social distance exists between Japanese males and Western females, who report finding little genuine opportunity to date local males. Letting the c(h)at out of the bag While living and socialising with English language teachers we became privy to women’s conversation about interracial gender issues within Japan. Western women’s reflections about gender issues within Japan have, so far, been given little or no public voice. This is due, in part, to these women’s cultural and gender isolation while living in Japan, and a general reluctance to publicly voice their opinions, combined with issues about how much it is ‘politically correct’ to say. This reticence can be attributed to a genuine fear of being misconstrued as envious, either of their male colleagues’ newfound social status or Japanese women’s attractiveness. It may also be that, by voicing these observations about interracial gender relationships in Japan, these women will publicly position themselves as powerless and thus lose any voice they do have. Western women who arrive in Japan with expectations of living active (heterosexual) sex lives often find themselves left out in the cold (My Nippon), and while many of their male colleagues are busy pursuing and being pursued by Japanese women their own social interaction with Japanese males is often restricted to awkward conversations with seemingly wary, shy or aloof Japanese men or crude suggestive conversations at the hands of drunken Japanese males. Some women experience their sense of self-esteem, which relies partly on sexual identity and a sense of attractiveness, plummets in these circumstances. Clarissa, a 24-year-old Australian who spent a few months waiting for her partner to join her in Japan, noticed this happening to her. She was interviewed a week after her partner arrived in Japan. I noticed that a while ago I was feeling unattractive because nobody does anything to indicate desire or attractiveness but as soon as they get drunk they can’t get enough of you…. Sober they wouldn’t do anything but when they are drunk … they crack onto you like any Western guy. Participants in the study have proffered thoughtful explanations for this lack of Japanese male/Western female connection, other than in the comparatively uninhibited space of being ‘alcohol affected’. The reasons given include the independent personalities of those Western women who choose to move to Japan, patriarchal attitudes towards women in Japan and a general lack of communication due to cultural or language difficulties. A lot of the women who come over here are very strong and independent and they are feared [by Japanese men] the moment they get off the plane….We didn’t come over here because we are timid and shy and looking for men. Toni (above) also makes clear that her own Western expectations for romantic relationships may exclude her from having relationships with many Japanese males of less than fluent English speaking skills. I’m a talker and I like to talk about ideas and books and I would find it very difficult to have…. a more intense relationship with a person that I couldn’t communicate with on that level. Western notions of romance and marriage, particularly Western women’s expectations concerning sex and romance, involve demonstration of warmth and affection, as well as a meeting of minds or in-depth conversation. Lack of a shared language and different expectations of romantic liaisons and love are some of the factors that can combine to create cross-cultural distance and misunderstanding between Western women and Japanese men. Zero to heroes Japanese women often seek Western men living in this transnational borderland as an alternative to Japanese boyfriends and husbands (Kelskey, Japanese Women's Diaspora). Western women in this study used the term ‘zero to hero’ to depict sought-after Western men, specifically those Western males who misuse this rise in status and behave badly in Japan. These men, as reported, are greatly over-represented in Japan when compared to their respective home communities. Above average-looking European guy, with above average intelligence seeks above average-looking Japanese lady who can cook a little. (Tokyo classifieds) Open discussion about the appeal of Western men to Japanese women seems to elicit critical reactions on either side of the racial and gender divide. For instance online chat discussions about interracial gender issues in Japan evidences the fiercely defensive position many Western men take when confronted with this notion. (see Aldwinckle a, Aldwinkle b, Aldwinkle c). It is clear, therefore, that this phenomenon is not limited to our research location. Women participants in this particular study detailed many examples of ‘zero to heroes’ behaving badly including: overrated opinion of themselves; insulting and degrading behaviour towards women in public – particularly Japanese women; inability to work cooperatively with women superiors in the workplace; sexual liaisons outside of monogamous relationships and in some cases complicated webs of infidelity. You know one guy’s left his wife, his Japanese wife. I didn’t even realize he was married because he had a Japanese girlfriend. I thought he was playing up on his Japanese girlfriend when I saw him with someone else, but he was actually playing up on both his wife and his girlfriend…. I mean the guys are behaving in ways that they wouldn’t get away with in their own countries. So the women from those countries are, of course, appalled (Marie). Japanese women’s desire for the company of Western males seems based on essentialised notions of the Western male as being more gentle, romantic and egalitarian than Japanese males. Analysis by Creighton, along with our own observations, indicates that there is ‘prevalent use of foreigners, particularly white foreigners, or gaijin, in Japanese advertising (135)’, constructing a discourse of the ‘desirable other’. Western images and ideals are also communicated through media texts (particularly Japanese women’s magazines) and promote ideals like individuality, leisure, international sophistication and sexual expression. It is clear from this research and other studies (Kelskey, Japanese Women's Diaspora) that Japanese women (living in Japan) perceive Western men as being more affectionate, kind and egalitarian than Japanese males. However, the notion of a caring and romantic Western male does not seem to be based in the reality of the situation as described by in situ Western females. Here the zero to hero construction of Western masculinity holds sway. Western females in this transnational borderland portray many of their male counterparts as general losers. One participant explained the phenomenon thus: I think that consciously or subconsciously the reason a lot of these men come over here is because they can’t really find a relationship at home. [She explains further] somebody [Western male] told me that I remind them of everything that they are not back in their own country. Gerster describes the attraction Japanese women have for the West (America in particular) as a ‘fatal attraction’ because most of these women will not realize their desire to marry their Western boyfriends or lovers (146-148). These women’s desire for the West (which is accomplishable and articulated through a Western partner) seems doomed from the start and it is questionable as to whether these relationships fulfil the aspirations of many of these women. Nevertheless, some Japanese women and Western men are more aware of this and are relatively explicit about their own desires. Japanese cute girl seeking native speakers [native English speakers] who don’t lie, never betray, are funny and handsome. If you are a man like that, try me. (Tokyo classifieds) American, 33, from California looking for Japanese girl, 20s, for having fun together. No marriage-minded girls please. Japanese ok. (Tokyo classifieds) Conclusion The Japanese national desire to be viewed as progressive and modern is, as with most societies, closely aligned with material commodities, particularly Western commodities. This means that within Japan “Western images probably have more advantage over indigenous ones” (Gerster 165) particularly for Japanese women. The local assumptions and generalisations about the Western men and women living and teaching in this transnational borderland are seemingly constructed by essentialised understandings of Western masculinity and femininity and differentiating these with Japanese notions of masculinity and femininity. However, as Kelsky (Japanese Women's Diaspora) and the participants in this study suggest, those Japanese women (who desire the West) may find their expectations do not match the realities of dating Western males in Japan since many Western men do not seem to live up to this essentialized view of the Western male as a romantic and egalitarian male partner who is ready to commit to marriage. Works Cited Aldwinckle, Dave. ‘Gender Issues in Japan, Part one: The loneliness of the long-distance runner (Publication of Exerts from Postings on Issho Mailing List)’ Arudou Debito/Dave Aldwinckle's Activists’ Page (meaning information for people concerned with social issues who want to help make life better for everyone in Japan). 1998. http://www.debito.org/genderissues.html 21.02 2001. ----. ‘Gender Issues in Japan, Part two: greatest hits and apologia (Publication of Exerts from Postings on Issho Mailing List)’ Arudou Debito/Dave Aldwinckle's Activists’ Page (meaning information for people concerned with social issues who want to help make life better for everyone in Japan). 1998. http://www.debito.org/genderissuestwo.html 21.02 2001. ----. ‘Gender Issues in Japan Part three: my comeuppance (Publication of Exerts from Postings on Issho Mailing List)’ Arudou Debito/Dave Aldwinckle's Activists’ Page (meaning information for people concerned with social issues who want to help make life better for everyone in Japan). 1998. http://www.debito.org/genderissuesthree.... 21.02 2001. Creighton, Millie R. ‘Imaging the Other in Japanese Advertising Campaigns’. Occidentalism: Images of the West. Ed. James G. Carrier. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Gerster, Robin. Legless in Ginza: Orientating Japan. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1999. Ito., Kinko. ‘The World of Japanese Ladies' Comics: From Romantic Fantasy to Lustful Perversion’. Journal of Popular Culture 36.1 (2002): 68--86. ‘Japan Lovers Sex Life in Japan? Really!’. My Nippon E-zine . 2001. http://www.mynippon.com/index.htm. 28.04 2001. Kelsky, Karen. ‘Intimate Ideologies: Transnational Theory and Japan's "Yellow Cabs"’. Public Culture 6 (1994): 465-78. ----. ‘Flirting with the Foreign: Interracial Sex in Japan's "International" Age’. Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imagery. Eds. Rob Wilson and Winmal Dissanayake. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996. 173 - 92. ----. ‘Japanese Women's Diaspora: An Interview’. 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(2002) http://www.metropolis.co.jp/tokyo/curren... 11.10.2002 Links http://www.debito.org/genderissues.html http://www.metropolis.co.jp/tokyo/current/classifieds/13.03_personals.asp http://www.metropolis.co.jp/tokyo/current/classifieds/13.02_personals.asp http://www.elle.co.jp/home/index2.php3 http://wwwsshe.murdoch.edu.au/intersections/ http://www3.tky.3web.ne.jp/~edjacob/hotels.html http://www.dnp.co.jp/museum/nmp/nmp_i/articles/manga/manga2-1.html http://www.debito.org/genderissuesthree.html http://www.sshe.murdoch.edu.au/intersections/ http://www.mynippon.com/index.htm http://www.debito.org/genderissuestwo.html Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Holloway, Donell and Holloway, David. "Zero to hero" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.6 (2002). Dn Month Year < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0211/zerotohero.php>. APA Style Holloway, D. & Holloway, D., (2002, Nov 20). Zero to hero. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 5,(6). Retrieved Month Dn, Year, from http://www.media-culture.org.au/0211/zerotohero.html

A number of scholarly works have observed Western and Japanese women travelers who seek romance and adventure with local “beach boys” in the Global South. Despite the important criticism of geopolitical inequality contained in these works, what is missing is how those involved in such commodified sexual relationships make sense of what they do. This essay focuses on how well-heeled Japanese married women, who are concerned with the meaning and effects of aging, pursue a commodified form of sexual intimacy as a means to rediscover their sense of sexual subjectivity. How do they perceive their own involvement in sexual commerce? What kinds of sexual power dynamics do these women and their younger, precarious male partners shape at the intersection of gender, age, and class? How do these women make sense of the apparently masculine act of paying for sex, which requires them to transgress cultural norms of feminine passivity in sexual matters? By posing these questions, this article provides a fine-grained portrayal of a particular kind of feminist agency.

Today, people who are referred to as fujoshi exist in every part of the world. Especially in Japan, many women admit to liking genres such as yaoi and boys' love (BL). In the new millennium, the word fujoshi has traveled beyond fannish circles and has come into general use in Japanese popular media, reflecting the fact that fujoshi are no longer necessarily an underground phenomenon. Here, I trace the origins of the word fujoshi, consider whether reading of male-male romance was established before the word appeared, examine research on fujoshi in Japan, and finally look at why fujoshi have become an object of study.