Assembling Japan ― Modernity, Technology and Global Culture

Assembling Japan focuses on Japan’s modernization as a long-term process that is reliant on changing technology and that has led to the nation’s full engagement with the global system. This process forms a complex field of tensions, full of interesting dynamisms and synergies that can be best understood through the book’s methodology: anthropological analysis combined with historical contextualization.
The approaches in this collection are manifold. Some chapters examine the themes of modernity, technology and Japan’s global experience though popular culture, from reggae to football, from television to film. Other topics include coffee, travel, economics, cultural politics and technological innovation in the field of robotics. All of the contributions aim to show how these global interactions have occurred and continue to take place in twenty-first-century Japan.

Griseldis Kirsch is Lecturer in Contemporary Japanese Culture at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. Her most recent publications include ‘Next-Door-Divas: Japanese Tarento, Television and Consumption’ (2014, in Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema) and Sino-Japanese Relations on Screen: A History, 1989–2005 (2015).
Dolores P. Martinez is Emeritus Reader in Anthropology at SOAS, University of London, and a research associate at the University of Oxford. Her most recent publications include Remaking Kurosawa (2009) and Gender in Japanese Society (2014).
Merry White is Professor of Anthropology at Boston University and a research associate at Harvard University’s E. O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies. Her most recent publications include Coffee Life in Japan (2013) and a cookbook, Cooking for Crowds (2014).