Environmental Resources on Japan

Deep Listening: A Composer's Sound Practice offers an exciting guide to ways of listening and sounding. This book provides unique insights and perspectives for artists, students, teachers, mediators and anyone interested in how consciousness may be effected by profound attention to the sonic environment. Deep Listeningr is a practice created by composer Pauline Oliveros in order to enhance her own as well as other's listening skills. She teaches this practice worldwide in workshops, retreats and in her ground breaking Deep Listening classes at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Mills College. Deep Listening practice is accessible to anyone with an interest in listening. Undergraduates with no musical training benefit from the practices and successfully engage in creative sound projects. Many report life changing effects from participating in the Deep Listening classes and retreats. Oliveros is recognized as a pioneer in electronic music and a leader in contemporary music as composer, performer, educator and author. Her works are performed internationally and her improvisational performances are documented extensively on recordings, in the literature and on the worldwide web.

Recounts a foundational shift in the field of robotics, from artificial intelligence to artificial empathy, and foreshadows an inflection point in human evolution.

An ethnography and sociocultural history of governmental and academic discourses of human-robot relations in Japan. Explores how actual robots--humanoids, androids, animaloids--are "imagineered" in ways that reinforce the conventional sex/gender system and political-economic status quo.

"Fanning the Flames examines the worlds of fans in the exuberant and commercialized popular culture of contemporary Japan.The works collected here profile denizens of all-night rap clubs; surno stable patrons; passionate fan clubs of a professional baseball team; enthusiasts of traditional "rakugo storytelling, etc.

From Kung Fu to Hip Hop looks at the revolutionary potential of popular culture in the sociohistorical context of globalization. Author M. T. Kato examines Bruce Lee s movies, the countercultural aesthetics of Jimi Hendrix, and the autonomy of the hip hop nation to reveal the emerging revolutionary paradigm in popular culture.

International scholars show that hip hop has been adapted to a diversity of local linguistic & cultural scenes while retaining a consistent rhetoric of opposition & resistance to institutionalized oppression.

In this lively ethnography Ian Condry interprets Japan's vibrant hip-hop scene, explaining how a music and culture that originated halfway around the world is appropriated and remade in Tokyo clubs and recording studios.

A book about the various forms of Japanese popular culture: pop song, jazz, enka (a popular ballad genre of music), karaoke, comics, animated cartoons, video games, television dramas, films and "idols" -- teenage singers and actors. As pop culture not only entertains but is also a reflection of society, the book is also about Japan itself -- its similarities and differences with the rest of the world, and how Japan is changing. The book features 32 pages of manga plus 50 additional photos, illustrations, and shorter comic samples.

'Japanamerica' addresses the United States' experience with anime and the Japanese pop phenomenon. The book highlights the shared conflicts as American and Japanese pop cultures dramatically intersect.