Andreas Niehaus

• Ghent University

This edited collection explores the historical dimensions, cultural practices, socio-economic mechanisms and political agendas that shape the notion of a national cuisine inside and outside of Japan. Japanese food is often perceived as pure, natural, healthy and timeless, and these words not only fuel a hype surrounding Japanese food and lifestyle...

In December 2013, washoku was added to the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage list of the United Nations, and Japanese cuisine was thereby acknowledged as a social practice that provides the Japanese people with a sense of identity. Starting from this perception of Japanese cuisine, this introduction shows that food not only contributes to a perso...

‘Traditional’ cuisine and food in Japan is regularly linked to questions of identity: to ideas of health and purity, to the creation of a specific Japanese landscape and the uniqueness of Japanese culture and society. Several studies have already rightly argued that the specific ‘Japaneseness’ of the Japanese cuisine was invented only during the pr...

Rogers Brubaker remarks that “as a category of practice, ‘diaspora’ is used to make claims, to articulate projects, to formulate expectations, to mobilize energies, to appeal to loyal- ties.” It is in times of crisis and trauma, we will argue in this paper, that these practices con- struct and intensify an awareness of community, generated by emoti...

This book clarifies and verifies the role sport has as an alternative marker in understanding and mapping memory in Japan, by applying the concept of lieux de mémoire (realms of memory) to sport in Japan. Japanese history and national construction have not been short of sports landmarks since the end of the nineteenth century. Western-style sports...

This paper will analyse the swimming events of the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics in the framework of collective memory. Olympic Games are memorable moments in the history of a nation. As moments they are a unit of time, but they are equally part of an Olympic as well as a national narrative sequence: Each Olympic Games continues the established rituals...

Western sports had been increasingly introduced to Japan by the middle of the nineteenth century. Sport became a symbol of the new, modern times and was adopted by the intellectual elite of Japan as a way to participate in and incorporate the physical culture of modernity. As a result pre-modern Japanese body techniques were considered to be inferi...

Kôdôkan judo was included in the Olympic programme for the first time in the 1964 Tokyo Games. Japanese efforts to have judo staged as an Olympic discipline had failed earlier. When judo was accepted as an Olympic sport during the 58th IOC meeting in 1960 at the Excelsior Hotel in Rome this was symbolically tantamount both to the fundamental rehabi...

"Schwert und Samurai" ist eine Sammlung von historischen Texten aus dem 17. und 18. Jahrhundert zur japanischen Schwertkunst, die erstmals in deutscher Sprache vorliegen. Diesen Texten geht eine umfassende Einleitung zur Entwicklung des japanischen Schwertes und der mit ihm eng verbundenen Geschichte der Samurai voraus. Aus dem Pinsel von Japans w...

Das Geijutsu futaba no hajime ("Das Keimblatt der Kunst") ist ein Lehrtext zur Schwertkunst, verfaßt im Jahre Tenmei 7 (1787) von Kokenken Ryokusui 古萱 軒緑水. Der Text, der deutlich in der Tradition des Tengu geijutsuron ("Diskurs über die Kunst der Bergdämonen") von Issai (Shissai) Chozan (1659-1741) steht, kann der Gattung der budôsho ("Kampfkunst-S...