Sounding Out Japan (Sensory Studies)

Stevens, Carolyn S.

Kohn, Tamara

Chenhall, Richard

Reference

Routledge

The Beatles in Japan (Media, Culture and Social Change in Asia)

Humor & Entertainment

Pop Culture

The popular perception of Japanese society is that it possesses a homogeneity and cultural conformity unlike anything to be found in the West. In fact Japan has its own underclass living outside the mainstream in economic circumstances that are radically different to the more usual perception of a wealthy and sucessful society. Carolyn S. Stevens has produced a new study that intimately explores the lives of Japan's social outcasts as well as those volunteers who seek to help them and as a consequence become socially marginalized themselves.

On the Margins of Japanese Society: Volunteers and the Welfare of the Urban Underclass (Nissan Institute/Routledge Japanese Studies)

Business & Money

Job Hunting & Careers

Advertising Exposure, Memory and Choice

On the Margins of Japanese Society: Volunteers and the Welfare of the Urban Underclass

Following their first tour to Japan in 1966, the Beatles would become an important part of Japan’s postwar cultural development and its deepening relationship with the West. By the 1960s Japan’s dramatic rise in prosperity and the self-confidence of the country’s ‘economic miracle’ period were yet to come; it was not, at this stage, considered a fully-fledged partner of the West. All these potential developments were consolidating around the time of the 1966 tour. The Beatles' concerts in Tokyo contributed to the construction of a new Japanese national identity and introduced Japan as a new potential market to UK and US music producers, broadening the country’s transnational cultural links. This book explores the Beatles’ engagement with Japan within the larger context of the country’s increased global connection and large-scale economic, social and cultural change. It describes the great impact of the Beatles’ contentious 1966 tour, which took place amid public displays of both euphoric ‘Beatlemania’ and angry protests, and discusses the lasting impression of this tour on Japanese culture and identity to the present day. The Beatles’ relationship with Japan did not end after their departure; this book also examines the Beatles’ subsequent contacts with Japan, including John Lennon’s marriage and artistic partnership with Yoko Ono, and Paul McCartney’s later Japanese tours and the warm reception the ex Beatles and their musical legacy have received over the years.

So many ethnographies describe local worlds with a deep attention to what is seen and what people say, but with a limited understanding of the broader sonic environments that enrich and inform everyday life. This book takes the reader on 'a sensory ethnographic tour' in Japan. Through a focus on sounds, real and imagined, the volume employs a critical ear to engage with a range of sonically enriched encounters that include crosswalk melodies in streetscapes, announcements and jingles at train stations, water features in gardens, dosimeters in nuclear affected zones, sounds of training in music and martial arts halls, celebrations under the cherry trees. The authors use different analytic frames to understand the communicative and symbolic aspects of sounds, and to sense the layers of historical meaning, embodied action and affect associated with sonic environments. Supported by a companion website that contains sound files and images from the authors' sensory experiences in the field, Chenhall, Kohn and Stevens describe the many ways sounds seep into everyday experiences. 'Sounding Out Japan' is, they argue, about attending to the everyday with an alert and imaginative 'ethnographic ear'.

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Books by Stevens, Carolyn S.