English publications
English publications
Here you can find book publications by our staff members in English:
Christian Tagsold (2025): Turning Gardens in Japan into Japanese Gardens. Nation, Nature, Heritage, and Modernity since the 1890s. Amerstadam University Press.
In the mid nineteenth century, as Japan rapidly modernized, garden building declined in popularity. Only in the late nineteenth century did a new class of political and business leaders revive interest in horticulture, seeking garden designs that broke away from established patterns. As a result, these innovative gardens were largely overlooked by early Japanese garden historians and excluded from the canon they sought to establish.
In recent years, both scholars and the public have begun to reexamine and appreciate these gardens and their creators. Now recognized as part of Japan’s national heritage, these sites are being integrated into the history of Japanese horticulture. Christian Tagsold’s book examines this rediscovery, unraveling the complex dynamics of nature, heritage, nationhood, and modernity in Japan through the lens of these gardens.
Buch auf der Verlagshompage.
(open access)
Andrea Germer & Ulrike Wöhr (Eds.) (2025): Handbook of Feminisms in Japan. Japan Documents.
The Handbook of Feminisms in Japan seeks to give a broad and, even without prior knowledge of Japan, easily accessible introduction to a range of feminisms in this non-Western context. With a useful comparative framework, it aims to advance transnational and international perspectives on feminisms around the world. It identifies discourses, theoretical positions and areas of feminist activity or intervention that readily correspond with those of feminisms in other countries, presenting chapters on topics such as radical feminism, maternalism, anarchism, literature, religion and pornography, but it also includes entries on specific historical and socio-cultural configurations, such as Japan’s women’s liberation movement, Ūman Ribu. Building on a growing body of erudite scholarship in Japanese, English and other languages,each chapter succinctly traces historical developments of particular discourses or movements and situates them in the local political and societal context while also making reference to the wider Asian and global contexts. The authors identify the central actors and discuss the theoretical implications and political dimensions of particular feminisms or aspects of feminism in Japan. The discussion in each chapter is based on relevant primary and secondary sources, thus introducing the reader to material for further reading and research.
Das Buch auf der Verlagshompage
Timo Thelen (2022): Revitalization and Internal Colonialism in Rural Japan. London: Routledge.
This book explores the decline of rural and peripheral areas in Japan, which results from an aging population, outmigration of the younger generations, and the economic decline of the primary sector. Based on extensive original research, the book examines in detail the case of the Noto peninsula. Allowing the locals to tell their stories, describe their problems, and come up with possible solutions, the book demonstrates the serious impact of rural decline on their daily life and work and highlights the struggle to sustain rural living in the globalized age. It argues that some recent innovations in global media, economy, technology, and ideology offer scope for reversing the decline, as some central government initiatives do, but that these are not always noticed, appreciated, and made use of by local people. The book also discusses the nature of the links between the peripheries and the centres – regional, national, and global – and how these often take the form of "internal colonialism."
Meier-Gräwe, Uta, Motozawa, Miyoko, Schad-Seifert, Annette (2019): Family Life in Japan and Germany. Challenges for a Gender-Sensitive Family Policy. Wiesbaden: Springer VS.
This volume addresses the family situation in Japan and Germany. Gender-segregated labor markets and precarious employment patterns bear detrimental consequences for the socioeconomic capacity to maintain family households and to have children. By applying a gender-sensitive approach, this volume's focus is on the impact of family law, family policy , and family support measures. Scholars from Japan and Germany examine differences and characteristics of social security legislation, intergenerational support systems, single-parent families, inequality among households and poverty situations, local domestic and care service provision, female labor market participation, parental leave systems, organization of child care, domestic violence, historical developments of housework as an institution, and labor market policies.
Tagsold, Christian (2017): Spaces in Translation. Japanese Gardens and the West. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
One may visit famous gardens in Tokyo, Kyoto, or Osaka—or one may visit Japanese-styled gardens in New York, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Berlin, London, Paris, São Paulo, or Singapore. We often view these gardens as representative of the essence of Japanese culture. Christian Tagsold argues, however, that the idea of the Japanese garden has less do to with Japan's history and traditions, and more to do with its interactions with the West.
The first Japanese gardens in the West appeared at the world's fairs in Vienna in 1873 and Philadelphia in 1876 and others soon appeared in museums, garden expositions, the estates of the wealthy, and public parks. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Japanese garden, described as mystical and attuned to nature, had usurped the popularity of the Chinese garden, so prevalent in the eighteenth century. While Japan sponsored the creation of some gardens in a series of acts of cultural diplomacy, the Japanese style was interpreted and promulgated by Europeans and Americans as well. But the fashion for Japanese gardens would decline in inverse relation to the rise of Japanese militarism in the 1930s, their rehabilitation coming in the years following World War II, with the rise of the Zen meditation garden style that has come to dominate the Japanese garden in the West.
Tagsold has visited over eighty gardens in ten countries with an eye to questioning how these places signify Japan in non-Japanese geographical and cultural contexts. He ponders their history, the reasons for their popularity, and their connections to geopolitical events, explores their shifting aesthetic, and analyzes those elements which convince visitors that these gardens are "authentic." He concludes that a constant process of cultural translation between Japanese and Western experts and commentators marked these spaces as expressions of otherness, creating an idea of the Orient and its distinction from the West.
Link to University of Pennsylvania Press
Germer, Andrea; Mackie, Vera; Woehr, Ulrike (Ed.) (2014): Gender, Nation and State in Modern Japan. London: Routledge.
Gender, Nation and State in Modern Japan makes a unique contribution to the international literature on the formation of modern nation–states in its focus on the gendering of the modern Japanese nation-state from the late nineteenth century to the present. References to gender relations are deeply embedded in the historical concepts of nation and nationalism, and in the related symbols, metaphors and arguments. Moreover, the development of the binary opposition between masculinity and femininity and the development of the modern nation-state are processes which occurred simultaneously. They were the product of a shift from a stratified, hereditary class society to a functionally-differentiated social body. This volume includes the work of an international group of scholars from Japan, the United States, Australia and Germany, which in many cases appears in English for the first time. It provides an interdisciplinary perspective on the formation of the modern Japanese nation–state, including comparative perspectives from research on the formation of the modern nation–state in Europe, thus bringing research on Japan into a transnational dialogue. This volume will be of interest in the fields of modern Japanese history, gender studies, political science and comparative studies of nationalism.
Niehaus, Andreas; Tagsold, Christian (Hg.) (2012): Sport, Memory and Nationhood in Japan: Remembering the Glory Days. London: Routledge.
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 memoire (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 were introduced into Japan in order to modernize the country and develop a culture of consciousness about bodies resembling that of the Western world. Japan's modernization has been a process of embracing Western thought and culture while at the same time attempting to establish what distinguishes Japan from the West.
In this context, sports functioned as sites of contested identities and memories. The Olympics, baseball and soccer have produced memories in Japan, but so too have martial arts, which by their very name signify an attempt to create traditions beyond Western sports. Because modern sports form bodies of modern citizens and, at the same time, offer countless opportunities for competition with other nations, they provide an excellent ground for testing and contesting national identifications. By revealing some of the key realms of memory in the Japanese field of sports, this book shows how memories and counter-memories of (sport) moments, places, and heroes constitute an inventory for identity. This book was originally published as a special issue of Sport in Society.
Schad-Seifert, Annette; Shimada, Shingo (Hg.) (2010): Demographic Change in Japan and the EU. Düsseldorf: Düsseldorf University Press.
This volume contains selected papers of the 2008 annual conference of the German Association for Social Science Research on Japan (Vereinigung für sozialwissenschaftliche Japanforschung e.V. VSJF). The academic meeting has addressed the issue of demographic change in Japan in comparison to the social developments of ageing in Germany and other member states of the European Union. The conference was organized by the Institute for Modern Japanese Studies at Heinrich-Heine-University of Duesseldorf and took place at the Mutter Haus in Kaiserswerth (an ancient part of Duesseldorf).
Speakers from Germany, England, Japan and the Netherlands presented their papers in four sessions on the topics Demographic Trends and Social Analysis, Family and Welfare Policies, Ageing Society and the Organization of Households and Demographic Change and the Economy. Central to all transnational and national studies on demographic change is the question of how societies can be reconstructed and be made adaptive to these changes in order to survive as solidarity communities. The authors of this volume attend to this question by discussing on recent trends of social and economic restructuring and giving insight into new research developments such as in the area of households and housing, family care work, medical insurance, robot technology or the employment sector.