Western feminists have viewed women's magazines as socializing agencies which shape women's perspectives of being female. It has been argued that the ideologically biased and limited content of women's magazines are obstacles for the achievement for gender equality and that more positive images of women are needed. Others argue that women's magazines serve to teach women how to be successful in male-oriented society. This thesis examines the visual and written messages regarding femininity found in women's magazines for young single working women in both Japan and North America. By using both quantitative and qualitative content analyses, the socio-cultural context of the role of women's magazines were compared. Results showed that women in both cultures are given limited positions in the world of women's magazines, although significant cultural differences were also observed. In advertisements, North American women's magazines tend to show both traditionally feminine (sexy and elegant) women and "new" and "active" women. The presence of predominantly macho-type male figures suggested the persisting subordination of women to men. Japanese women's images are narrowly defined, leaving only a few characteristics, such as pretty and cute, for women to choose. An examination of Caucasian female models in Japanese advertisements revealed that their presence could serve to establish Japanese cultural boundaries of femininity. Through the magazine's article content, North American women's magazines tend to have a variety of articles which encourage women to have it all or to become "superwomen." Japanese women's magazines clearly differentiated their content by the career orientedness of their targeted readership and most of the articles in the mainstream magazines are marriage-related. The overall findings suggest that North American women's magazines serve as "survival guides" for women to succeed in male-oriented society by learning both masculinity and femininity. In contrast, the main purpose of Japanese women's magazines apparently is to provide a cultural text for readers to gain femininity as a cultural resource to be successful as women in their society.

Note: / Scholars are in agreement that the kabuki theatre did not attain its first flowering as a complex dramatic art until the Genroku period (16881704). The Genroku period is also the earliest for which detailed study of the plays has been possible, due to the large number of playbooks that have survived. For these reasons, Genroku kabuki has long been an object of scholarly attention among Japanese theatre historians. This scholarship, however, has for the most part been shaped by the same ideological concerns that underlie other forms of Japanese intellectual discourse in the modern period. In the Meiji period (1868-1912), for example, efforts were made to find in kabuki a Japanese equivalent to the Western theatre; while in the postwar era, in light of the critique of feudalism following the national defeat, the trend has been to see kabuki as an example of popular culture, one with roots in older indigenous cultural traditions and which not only enjoyed a special relationship with the urban commoner class, but which functioned as a form of resistance to feudal authority.[...] / Ne au debut du dix-septieme siecle, Ie theAtre kabuki n'a connu sa premiere floraison comme art dramatique complexe que pendant I'epoque Genroku(1688-1704). Grace a la survivance de nombreux textes-scenarios, l'epoque Genroku est aussi la premiere periode dans l'histoire du kabuki dont l'analyse detaillee est possible. Pour ces raisons, le Genroku kabuki est depuis toujours un objet d'etude prefere parmis les specialistes de l'histoire du theAtre au Japon. Mais ces etudes, quoiqu'elles soient souvent basees sur des recherches historiques considerables, ont ete, pour la plupart, determinees par les mames projets ideologiques qui ont soutenu les autres formes du discours intellectuel dans le Japon moderne.[...]

This thesis discusses changing priorities in urban infrastructure in Japanese cities especially due to emerging pressures such as ' internationalization', the shift to ''knowledge-intensive industries', and the search for a higher urban 'quality of life'. Case studies are presented of four major projects under way in metropolitan Nagoya during the early 1990s, which the author visited as part of field studies under taken in 1994. These are: 1) The Chubu International Airport, a national infrastructure project; 2) The Aichi Cultural Center and the International Design Center Nagoya, address the issue of 'culture" and are regional infrastructure projects; 3) The Shidami Human Science City, which was designated in the 'City's New Basic Plan' as a priority project to upgrade the city's economic infrastructure. The research findings suggest that in the 1990s, Nagoya was indeed moving towards a new urban development strategy based around these major infrastructure projects.

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The thesis suggests the toy-like mask of a white man, ‘Hello, Mr. Gaijin,’ as a site of analysis where the culture of racisms is (re)produced in the specific context of contemporary Japan. Sold as a gig gift in Japan, the mask, consisting of two stickers for blue-eyes and a prominent plastic nose, embodies the popularized image of whiteness in Japan, and presents it as a source of fascination as well as ridicule and mockery. Approaching this mask as an analytical text, I ask: How is race manifested in the Japanese culture? C. W. Mills (1997) suggests that there exists a global system that privileges whites and normalizes their beneficial racial position. This trend is certainly omnipresent in contemporary Japan, where one observes the sense of superiority being affixed to the white body in the frequent use of white models in the media (Creighton, 1997). Yet, how is this theory of white supremacy significantly complicated by the particular representations of whiteness seen in the ‘Hello, Mr. Gaijin’ mask? Through mimicry, the power of whiteness is mocked and commodified into a sleazy toy mask. Critically engaging with these primary questions, the thesis situates the analysis of the ‘Hello, Mr. Gaijin’ mask within the particular history of racialization developed in Japan where the culture of whiteness holds its unique complexity and significance in the society. Drawing largely on the idea of ‘the culture of racisms’ that Goldberg (1993) suggests, the thesis argues that the seemingly contradictory sentiment towards whiteness embodied in the mask presents the key to the holistic understanding of Japan’s particular culture of racisms. Specifically, it analyzes three levels of transformation that the mask presents in embodying the particular culture of racisms: the discursive transformation of whites into gaijin; the temporal physical transformation of the user into Mr. Gaijin; the visual and material transformation of whites into the toy-mask. / Thesis (Master, Cultural Studies) -- Queen's University, 2012-08-15 23:36:21.157

The postmodern is characterised by an incredulity towards the universal truths which mark modernity. Kuki Shuzo, like many intellectuals in Japan during the twenties and thirties, anticipates this discourse by attempting to confront the hegemonic claims and universal pretensions of modernity. Using the latest European methodologies, Kuki attempted to define a site of difference--a site that could escape the putative universality of Western modes of dealing with historical development and consciousness--through a particular reading of cultural artefacts, especially Edo poetry and painting. Yet Kuki would ultimately locate this special site within the temporal, spatial, and subjective boundaries of the modern nation implicating the geopolitics of modernity and providing an interesting context to study the complicity of art, ideology, and aesthetics in modern discourse.

This thesis deals with the myth of Maitreya, the next Buddha to come. The myth is traced from its earliest emergence in the Buddhist scriptures, briefly through its metamorphosis in China, with a view to presenting its evolution in Japan. The myth's history in Japan spans thirteen centuries, and as a result it is interesting to explore it in its historical context to see how the myth evolves and changes according to the exigencies of the times. / Buddhism has in many ways been synthesized into the Japanese indigenous Shinto context, with the result that the myth of Maitreya has emerged not simply as a Buddhist figure, but a pan-Japanese phenomenon very much responding to the Japanese ethos of "world-mending". This underlying current has become particularly strong in the twentieth century with the result that Maitreya has become a vehicle for social rectification as well as hope.

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This thesis explores the work of three contemporary Japanese artists - Yasumasa Morimura, Mariko Mori and Takashi Murakami - in relation to cross-cultural exchanges and differences between Japan and the West. In carrying out such an investigation, this study illustrates how these artists play with Japanese and Western cultural forms in the context of postmodern challenges to concepts of essence and authenticity, and in a technologically transformed world shaped by unprecedented global flows of information, people, products and capital. In Morimura's art-making, this play is characterized by appropriations and parodies of Western cultural icons. The idea of identity-as-essence is superseded by a vision of identity-as-performance - a conception of identity as a creative act, taking place within an immanent system of global exchanges. Whilst Morimura's work tends to reify difference, for Mori the opposite is true. Melding arcane scientific and religious ideas, Mori creates technological spectacles with which she fantasizes a vanishing of determinate identities and difference within the encompassing field of a culturally amorphous techno-holism. Murakami's 'superflat' art raises the possibility of resolving this tension between the reification and effacing of difference. In his work, 'Japan' and 'the West' are represented as discrete entities that, at the same time, emerge already entangled, as effects in a preexisting system of global exchanges.