Love in Modern Japan: Its Estrangement from Self, Sex and Society (Anthropology of Asia) 1st Edition, Kindle Edition
by Sonia Ryang (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
2.0 out of 5 stars 1 rating
Part of: Anthropology of Asia (18 books)
About the Author
Sonia Ryang is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and the Stanley Family and Korea Foundation Scholar of Korean Studies at University of Iowa. Her previous publications include Koreans in Japan: Critical Voices from the Margin (Routledge, 2000) and Japan and National Anthropology: A Critique (Routledge, 2004).--This text refers to the paperback edition.
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Jeff
2.0 out of 5 stars Not about love...Reviewed in Japan on November 10, 2013
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The book's title is misleading.
Sonia Ryang is a specialist of Korea, Koreans living in Japan, etc.
This book (which is not academically rigorous, rather an essay conveying author's subjective views) serves principally the personal fight of Ryang against anti-korean discrimination in Japan, and for recognition of damage to countries colonized by imperial Japan... love as a subject is only a pretext.
Ryang also stresses her view of Japanese state as manipulating (even now) its population, along the whole book.
What is particularly disturbing is to use these fights in her attempt to describe love in Japan.
However, the only good point (once you remove the anti-antikorean and state-conspirationist interpretations of love) is that this essay exposes the evolution of love and sex relations along Japan's history.
The disturbingly biased parts are only when she comes to contemporary era, and puts in all (nowadays') Japanese lovers heads antikorean images and state manipulation, as if it was even remotely pertinent (at least when it comes to love emotions).
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Love in Modern Japan: Its Estrangement from Self, Sex and Society
by Sonia Ryang
3.67 · Rating details · 30 ratings · 7 reviews
This compelling and controversial book places the concept of love in both a social and historical context. Taking an approach in which state formation and vicissitude of power are explicitly taken into account in the discussion of intimacy and love, the author demonstrates that love as idealization and love as sexuality must be kept analytically separate. Chapters include discussions on sexualized rituals and fertility festivals, the murder case of Abe Sada, pure love in Miko and Mako's tragedy and the 1990s phenomenon of 'enjokosai' or aid-date. Combining ethnographic, theoretical and archival research, this text will appeal to scholars of Japanese anthropology, feminist anthropology and gender studies alike. (less)
Lara Danielle
Feb 11, 2016Lara Danielle rated it it was amazing
This is such a great read. There is so much to love about this book; I don't even know where to begin gushing about it. For one, I loved how Sonia Ryang discussed love not merely in terms of the usual agape, eros, philia, storge, and the likes; rather, she has reconfigured love conceptually and historically in the Japanese context by sequestering the discussions into four categories of love: Sacred Sex, Sovereign Love (in which love was used a political technology by the state), Pure Love, and Body and Soul.
Despite its title, this book also tells us so much about the concept of love (mostly about the tangle of love and sex, romance and lust, and mind and body) and the different marriage and sexual practices in premodern Japan, and how they have been reconfigured and, if I may, hybridized during the Meiji Restoration/Westernization/Modernization period. We also see here how some of the practices have survived in the modern period, but are not even mentioned in Western literatures as Ryang also mentioned. One of the reasons is that Japan rendered some of their practices as taboo because they wanted to be seen as a civilized country that is equal with the Western countries.
There are so much more in here. And yep, I'd recommend this to fellow Japan scholars. (less)
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Edwin Pietersma
Aug 12, 2021Edwin Pietersma rated it liked it
This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. This is a book that you can say and feel a lot about, almost more than the whole book itself. I believe her argument, in principle, is quite strong: that the estrangement between sex and love as found in Japan prior to the development of nation-states, has gone through various stages in the last few hundred years: being employed as a weapon of political technology or bio-power (in the sense of Foucault) and that this is one of the reasoning behind the phenomena that is love today and in history: ...more
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CL Chu
Nov 25, 2021CL Chu rated it really liked it
A soft-psychoanalytical, Foucault & Agamben inflected cultural studies of heterosexual love in Japan focusing on three moments: the mythic premodern, the violent empire-building (and dismantling), and postwar repression. The overreliance on text - and sometimes conflating text as media and the people receiving & acting on the message - and a fast & loose theorization of difficult (often traumatic) themes are both the lure and the limitation of the book (at least the book offers cultural archityp ...more
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Alex
Feb 23, 2016Alex rated it really liked it
There's a lot going on in here, though it is primarily an application of Foucault's governmentality and biopower to sex and love in Japan, as it has evolved historically. Essentially, she holds that the state, via its post-war sexual purity education, eugenics programs, comfort stations, and war-time exceptionalism, employs love strategically (biopower) for economic and political ends.
Her emphasis on the state's influence in defining love and sex was new to me. I sense that the relationship is weaker than she purports, but conceiving of love as a political technology is a pretty sexy idea and applying it to Japan's history of love seems a good fit. (less)
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Liz Maas
May 06, 2013Liz Maas rated it really liked it
I'm not Japanese but I think this was a great starting point for research I was doing on the commodification culture of explicit sex, sexual services, and companionship in host club culture by going back to the time before host clubs became more prominent to get an idea of the cultural climate and treatment of love and intimacy. It was very informative. (less)
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Lindu Pindu
Apr 28, 2009Lindu Pindu rated it it was amazing
Though the author's goal is to link love and political exploitation of it, it ends up being much more than that; it looks at love in Japan throughout the ages, in a structured and positively engaging read. (less)
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Geku
Oct 23, 2011Geku rated it really liked it
Shelves: non-fiction, japan-japanese, read-in-2011
I would happily recommend this to anyone interested in contemporary Japanese culture and society.
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