Ian Buruma's Behind the Mask
Ian Buruma was born in the Netherlands in 1951. He went to school in both Holland and Japan, and he has spent a great deal of time in Japan. Ian Buruma is an author, journalist and a professor at Bard College in New York. He sometimes writes for the New York Review of Books, the New York Times Magazine, the New Republic, the New Yorker, and the Guardian.
The book, Behind the Mask, was a very interesting one. This book is filled with lots of Japans history that most people know nothing about. Much of the content in Behind the Mask is focused on sexuality and violence. The book has thirteen chapters each dealing with a different topic. It starts out with a kind of mythology about the origins of Japan. It is then followed by chapters on mothers in Japan and marriage. Some of the other topics focus on women, geisha, and yakuza.
Behind the Mask is a great book explaining a great deal of the sexuality related to the culture and religion of Japan. To the Japanese, sex is a part of nature; it is not considered a sin. The worst thing that can happen to an individual in Japan is to be socially shamed or dishonored. The Japanese do believe in a sort of “pollution” though. They fear being unclean, death, and blood, among other things. Purification is a big deal in Japan.
Ian Buruma, the author, not only explains in great detail much of the history and practices of the Japanese, but he also writes much about significant people and places dealing with the topic. There were many significant people who contributed a great deal to the practices in Japan. He also describes many of the important places where certain events occurred. He explains what the kabuki theaters looked like and also the famous strip clubs.
The Washington Post Book World writes, “A fascinating exploration of Japanese culture: the fantasy life of the Japanese. It fishes its insights from the rich and muddy river of popular culture that the Foreign Ministry has always tried to screen from foreign view. Through skillfully chosen subjects – sex, gender, the mother – we find a comprehensible (if sometimes surprising) fantasy persona behind the inscrutable mask…fascinating, imaginative, highly polished, entertaining.
General Richard Sherman’s march to the sea has just finished. After successful capturing Atlanta, Georgia, General Sherman directed his Union army to Savannah, Georgia. Along the way, northerners wreaked havoc on Southern cotton mills and destroy train tracks while completely uprooting 20 percent of Georgian plantations. This effectively halted the Confederate’s means of transportation and economic structure subsequently w...
Overall Yuki Tanaka was able to show just how the Japanese and every country around the world can hide things that they do not want to be known either because they are ashamed of what they have done or the fact that they just do not care to acknowledge they had committed a brutal crime against women, even to those that were not even born during this time. His arguments throughout the book convinced to a great level that during a war things can be changed, showing the ugliness of dehumanization. No country is innocent when it comes to war. He gets one thinking of how everyone can know about the Holocaust a racism against at ethnicity but not of the racism, sexism against women.
As stated in Industry and Economy During the Civil War, “The North 's larger number of tracks and better ability to construct and move parts gave it a distinct advantage over the South” (Arrington). Having the trains to help move the troops and supplies aided in saving time and strength for the Union army as they moved in to occupy the Confederacy territory. The Union contained approximately 70 percent of the nation’s railroads (Strengths and Weaknesses of the Union and Confederacy Double-Bubble Map). The substantial percentage of railroad tracks was not the only advantage the Union had over the Confederates. They also had trading ships and a large naval force (Strengths and Weaknesses of the Union and Confederacy Double-Bubble Map). However, the Confederacy wasn’t completely unprepared for the war, they had numerous powerful leaders on their side to help protect their land. There were numerous former officers of the United States Army that fought for the South giving them experienced fighters to help with their strategy and they also had numerous well-trained soldiers that were excellent at shooting ("Mr. Dowling The Civil War: Strengths and Weaknesses"). The strengths of having a railroad, navy, and trading ships was a great advantage to the Union, however, the Confederacy had few to none of these except for leaders with
Throughout history artists have used art as a means to reflect the on goings of the society surrounding them. Many times, novels serve as primary sources in the future for students to reflect on past history. Students can successfully use novels as a source of understanding past events. Different sentiments and points of views within novels serve as the information one may use to reflect on these events. Natsume Soseki’s novel Kokoro successfully encapsulates much of what has been discussed in class, parallels with the events in Japan at the time the novel takes place, and serves as a social commentary to describe these events in Japan at the time of the Mejeii Restoration and beyond. Therefore, Kokoro successfully serves as a primary source students may use to enable them to understand institutions like conflicting views Whites by the Japanese, the role of women, and the population’s analysis of the Emperor.
Although wildly different in subject matter and style, Kawabata’s Beauty and Sadness and Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World both show how Japan has been internationalized as well as how it has remained traditional. Kawabata’s novel is traditional and acceptable, much like the haiku poetry he imitates, but has a thread of rebelliousness and modernity running through the web that binds the characters together. Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World is devastatingly modern, and yet has a similar but opposite undertone of old Japan, or at least a nostalgia for old Japan. In both novels a more international culture has taken root in Japan, and it seems that the characters both embrace and run from the implications of a globalized, hybridized culture.
Much about Kogawa's novel makes it difficult not only to read but also to classify or categorize. First, Obasan blurs the line between nonfiction and fiction. Kogawa draws from actual letters and newspaper accounts, autobiographical details, and historical facts throughout the novel, but she artistically incorporates this material into a clearly fictional work. In addition, Kogawa's narrative operates on multiple levels, from the individual and familial to the communal, national, political, and spiritual. Stylistically, the novel moves easily between the language of documentary reportage and a richly metaphorical language, and between straightforward narrative and stream-ofconsciousness exposition. This astonishing variety in Kogawa's novel can, at times, become bewildering and unsettling to the reader. But as many readers and critics have noted, Kogawa's style and method in Obasan also constitute the novel's unique strength. Kogawa writes in such a way that ambiguity, uncertainty, irony, and paradox do not weaken her story but instead paradoxically become the keys to understanding it.
... was being more successful than being the army man and following the path that his father had planned for him. He was a man of peace and he was surely proud of himself for being more into music than going through the stress of being in wars like his father. Hermstedt died at the age of 67 in Germany and even though he may not be a very recognized composer he surely played a very important part in the clarinet role and into being one of the people who gave it some mechanical improvements. Thanks to the attention he gave this instrument, is why we have such great clarinets today. Even though the clarinet is not as famous as other instruments may be, many players are challenged with the pieces of Spohr and Hermstedt today and people still have a little trouble trying to follow this piece of music because of its complex skills and its different notes and way of playing.
Known for her work as a historian and rather outspoken political activist, Yamakawa Kikue was also the author of her book titled Women of the Mito Domain (p. xix). At the time she was writing this work, Yamakawa was under the surveillance of the Japanese government as the result of her and her husband’s work for the socialist and feminist movements in Japan (p. xx-xxi). But despite the restrictions she was undoubtedly required to abide by in order to produce this book, her work contains an air of commentary on the past and present political, social, and economic issues that had been plaguing the nation (p. xxi). This work is a piece that comments on the significance of women’s roles in history through the example of Yamakawa’s own family and
Christopher Benfey’s work The Great Wave is a narrative driven by a collection of accounts, stories and curious coincidences tying together The Gilded Age of New England in particular with interactions and connections to the Japan of old and new. In the context of The Great Wave, Benfey's own personal journey to Japan at the age of sixteen should be understood. Embarking on this voyage to learn traditional writing, language and Judo, his story can also be seen as a not only a historical continuation, but also a personal precursor to the vignettes he discovers and presents to the reader.
Yukio Mishima was a brilliant Japanese novelist whose work began to thrive in the late nineteen forty's. His novels focused mainly on Eastern religion, homosexual eroticism and fantasies of death. These controversial themes seem to repel some readers (Magill); however, Mishima remained a dedicated literary artist. In his lifetime he wrote multiple volumes of literature, but only about six or seven earned him a great deal of attention from critics and readers in Japan (Yourcenar 24-25). However, he has earned himself the reputation of Japan’s greatest contemporary novelist (Gale, Magill). Every night Mishima dedicated the late hours to writing his novels. Mishima had been nominated for the Nobel Prize twice in his lifetime, but lost first to his friend Kawabata, and later to Miguel Asturias (Stokes 192). Yukio Mishima should be remembered for his great novels, Confessions of a Mask, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, and The Sea of Fertility tetralogy.
Tsunoda, Theodore de Bary, and Donald Keene. Sources of Japanese Tradition. 1 vol. New York: Columbia U P, 1958.
"Any critical reading of a text will be strengthened by a knowledge of how a text is valued by readers in differing contexts."
From the interactive oral presentation on the Japanese vs. Western Social norms, I have learned a tremendous amount on how Mishima incorporated traditional Japanese and western influences in the novel to portray the loss of traditional Japanese culture within the Japanese society.
This book depicts how Japanese behaved both before and after the World War II. In this book, it describes how Japanese military slaves (a.k.a. comfort women) was made, what motivated Japan to do these abuses.