Robo Sapiens Japanicus

Author : Jennifer Robertson
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520283198
Total Pages : 278 pages
Book Rating : 4.90/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Robo Sapiens Japanicus written by Jennifer Robertson and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Japan is arguably the first postindustrial society to embrace the prospect of human-robot coexistence. Over the past decade, Japanese humanoid robots designed for use in homes, hospitals, offices, and schools have become celebrated in mass and social media throughout the world. In Robo sapiens japanicus, Jennifer Robertson casts a critical eye on press releases and public relations videos that misrepresent robots as being as versatile and agile as their science fiction counterparts. An ethnography and sociocultural history of governmental and academic discourse of human-robot relations in Japan, this book explores how actual robots—humanoids, androids, and animaloids—are “imagineered” in ways that reinforce the conventional sex/gender system and political-economic status quo. In addition, Robertson interrogates the notion of human exceptionalism as she considers whether “civil rights” should be granted to robots. Similarly, she juxtaposes how robots and robotic exoskeletons reinforce a conception of the “normal” body with a deconstruction of the much-invoked Theory of the Uncanny Valley.

Author : Jennifer Robertson
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 052095906X
Total Pages : 280 pages
Book Rating : 4.64/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Robo sapiens japanicus written by Jennifer Robertson and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2017-11-10 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Japan is arguably the first postindustrial society to embrace the prospect of human-robot coexistence. Over the past decade, Japanese humanoid robots designed for use in homes, hospitals, offices, and schools have become celebrated in mass and social media throughout the world. In Robo sapiens japanicus, Jennifer Robertson casts a critical eye on press releases and public relations videos that misrepresent robots as being as versatile and agile as their science fiction counterparts. An ethnography and sociocultural history of governmental and academic discourse of human-robot relations in Japan, this book explores how actual robots—humanoids, androids, and animaloids—are “imagineered” in ways that reinforce the conventional sex/gender system and political-economic status quo. In addition, Robertson interrogates the notion of human exceptionalism as she considers whether “civil rights” should be granted to robots. Similarly, she juxtaposes how robots and robotic exoskeletons reinforce a conception of the “normal” body with a deconstruction of the much-invoked Theory of the Uncanny Valley.

Author : Toranosuke Shimada
Publisher : Seven Seas Entertainment
ISBN 13 : 1685792901
Total Pages : 308 pages
Book Rating : 4.09/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Robo Sapiens: Tales of Tomorrow (Omnibus) written by Toranosuke Shimada and published by Seven Seas Entertainment. This book was released on 2021-11-23 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the future, robots are more than machines. Autonomous "cyber-persons" with A.I. brains are part of society, interacting with humans while developing their own culture. In fact, they may be surpassing humans, as biological homo sapiens have begun to die out and give way to robo sapiens. But are humans truly disappearing, or are robots the newest form of humanity? This millennia-spanning, speculative science fiction manga of interconnected stories, both human and robotic, was awarded the Division Grand Prize at the 2020 Japan Media Arts Festival.

Author : Jennifer Robertson
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520211510
Total Pages : 294 pages
Book Rating : 4.13/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Takarazuka written by Jennifer Robertson and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1998-07-21 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The all-female Takarazuka Revue is world-famous today for its rococo musical productions, including gender-bending love stories, This text explores how the Revue illuminates discourses of sexual politics, nationalism, imperialism and popular culture in 20th-century Japan.

Author : Katarzyna J. Cwiertka
Publisher : University of Hawaii Press
ISBN 13 : 0824881222
Total Pages : 209 pages
Book Rating : 4.21/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Branding Japanese Food written by Katarzyna J. Cwiertka and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2020-02-29 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Branding Japanese Food is the first book in English on the use of food for the purpose of place branding in Japan. At the center of the narrative is the 2013 inscription of “Washoku, traditional dietary cultures of the Japanese, notably for the celebration of New Year” on UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. The authors challenge the very definition of washoku as it was presented in the UNESCO nomination, and expose the multitude of contradictions and falsehoods used in the promotion of Japanese cuisine as part of the nation-branding agenda. Cwiertka and Yasuhara argue further that the manipulation of historical facts in the case of washoku is actually a continuation of similar practices employed for centuries in the branding of foods as iconic markers of tourist attractions. They draw parallels with gastronomic meibutsu (famous products) and edible omiyage (souvenirs), which since the early modern period have been persistently marketed through questionable connections with historical personages and events. Today, meibutsu and omiyage play a central role in the travel experience in Japan and comprise a major category in the practices of gift exchange. Few seem to mind that the stories surrounding these foods are hardly ever factual, despite the fact that the stories, rather than the food itself, constitute the primary attraction. The practice itself is derived from the intellectual exercise of evoking specific associations and sentiments by referring to imaginary landscapes, known as utamakura or meisho. At first restricted to poetry, this exercise was expanded to the visual arts, and by the early modern period familiarity with specific locations and the culinary associations they evoked had become a fixed component of public collective knowledge. The construction of the myths of meibutsu, omiyage, and washoku as described in this book not only enriches the understanding of Japanese culinary culture, but also highlights the dangers of tweaking history for branding purposes, and the even greater danger posed by historians remaining silent in the face of this irreversible reshaping of the past into a consumable product for public enjoyment.

Author : Anne E. Imamura
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 9780520202634
Total Pages : 376 pages
Book Rating : 4.35/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Re-Imaging Japanese Women written by Anne E. Imamura and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1996-07-31 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Re-Imaging Japanese Women takes a revealing look at women whose voices have only recently begun to be heard in Japanese society: politicians, practitioners of traditional arts, writers, radicals, wives, mothers, bar hostesses, department store and blue-collar workers. This unique collection of essays gives a broad, interdisciplinary view of contemporary Japanese women while challenging readers to see the development of Japanese women's lives against the backdrop of domestic and global change. These essays provide a "second generation" analysis of roles, issues and social change. The collection brings up to date the work begun in Gail Lee Bernstein's Recreating Japanese Women, 1600-1945 (California, 1991), exploring disparities between the current range of images of Japanese women and the reality behind the choices women make.

Author : David Leheny
Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 1501729098
Total Pages : 325 pages
Book Rating : 4.96/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Empire of Hope written by David Leheny and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-11-15 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Empire of Hope asks how emotions become meaningful in political life. In a diverse array of cases from recent Japanese history, David Leheny shows how sentimental portrayals of the nation and its global role reflect a durable story of hopefulness about the country's postwar path. From the medical treatment of conjoined Vietnamese children, victims of Agent Orange, the global promotion of Japanese popular culture, a tragic maritime accident involving a US Navy submarine, to the 2011 tsunami and nuclear disaster, this story has shaped the way in which political figures, writers, officials, and observers have depicted what the nation feels. Expressions of national emotion do several things: they construct the boundaries of the national body, they inform and discipline appropriate expression, and they depoliticize messy problems that threaten to produce divisive questions about winners and losers. Most important, they work because they appear to be natural, simple and expected expressions of how the nation shares feeling, even when they paper over the extraordinary divergence in how the nation's citizens experience each incident. In making its arguments, Empire of Hope challenges how we read the relations between emotion and politics by arguing—unlike those who build from the neuroscientific turn in the social sciences or those developing affect theory in the humanities—that the focus should be on emotional representation rather than on emotion itself.

Author : Anne Allison
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520923448
Total Pages : 252 pages
Book Rating : 4.47/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Permitted and Prohibited Desires written by Anne Allison and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-11-10 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This provocative study of gender and sexuality in contemporary Japan investigates elements of Japanese popular culture including erotic comic books, stories of mother-son incest, lunchboxes—or obentos—that mothers ritualistically prepare for schoolchildren, and children's cartoons. Anne Allison brings recent feminist psychoanalytic and Marxist theory to bear on representations of sexuality, motherhood, and gender in these and other aspects of Japanese culture. Based on five years of fieldwork in a middle-class Tokyo neighborhood, this theoretically informed, accessible ethnographic study provides a provocative analysis of how sexuality, dominance, and desire are reproduced and enacted in late-capitalistic Japan.

Author : Katsuichi Honda
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 9780520210202
Total Pages : 364 pages
Book Rating : 4.04/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Harukor written by Katsuichi Honda and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2000-04-12 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A memoir of Ainu life over five hundred years ago, before Japanese invasions nearly killed off this indigenous society. No written records remain, other than Japanese observations, but the author has relied on surviving oral accounts and extensive study of anthropological and archeological discoveries to construct a representative woman's life story.

Author : Carol Laderman
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520343034
Total Pages : 291 pages
Book Rating : 4.30/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Wives and Midwives written by Carol Laderman and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-11-10 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this widely-praised study, Carol Laderman provides a vivid picture of the daily life of rural Malays as she focuses on their dietary practices and the ritual and medical aspects of childbirth procedures. Apprenticed to a village midwife and a local shaman, she was able to observe a traditional culture adapting to modern practices.