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11%OFFEdward Fowler - San'ya Blues - 9780801485701 - V9780801485701
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San'ya Blues

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Description for San'ya Blues Paperback. Num Pages: 288 pages, 17. BIC Classification: 1FPJ; JFSC; JFSG; JHBL. Category: (P) Professional & Vocational; (UP) Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly; (UU) Undergraduate. Dimension: 229 x 152 x 18. Weight in Grams: 428.

Over the years, Edward Fowler, an American academic, became a familiar presence in San'ya, a run-down neighborhood in northeastern Tokyo. The city's largest day-labor market, notorious for its population of casual laborers, drunks, gamblers, and vagrants, has been home for more than half a century to anywhere from five to fifteen thousand men who cluster in the mornings at a crossroads called Namidabashi (Bridge of Tears) in hopes of getting work. The day-labor market, along with gambling and prostitution, is run by Japan's organized crime syndicates, the yakuza. Working as a day laborer himself, Fowler kept a diary of his ... Read more

Located near a former outcaste neighborhood, on what was once a public execution ground, San'ya shows a hidden face of Japan and contradicts the common assumption of economic and social homogeneity. Fowler argues that differences in ethnicity and class, normally suppressed in mainstream Japanese society, are conspicuous in San'ya and similar communities. San'ya's largely middle-aged, male day-laborer population contains many individuals displaced by Japan's economic success, including migrants from village communities, castoffs from restructuring industries, and foreign workers from Korea and China. The neighborhood and its inhabitants serve as an economic buffer zone—they are the last to feel the effects of a boom and the first to feel a recession. They come alive in this book, telling urgent stories that personify such abstractions as the costs of modernization and the meaning of physical labor in postindustrial society.

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Product Details

Publisher
Cornell University Press United States
Number of pages
288
Format
Paperback
Publication date
1998
Condition
New
Number of Pages
288
Place of Publication
Ithaca, United States
ISBN
9780801485701
SKU
V9780801485701
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 7 to 11 working days
Ref
99-1

About Edward Fowler
Edward Fowler teaches Japanese literature and film at the University of California, Irvine.

Reviews for San'ya Blues
A fascinating glossary.... Haunting photographs.... All readers must agree that San'ya Blues does indeed give a sense of the 'price paid by a great many' for Japan's economic success, as the author intends, and does so with a respect for historic and social differences.... What this highly personalized fieldwork offers us is crucial glimpses into the relationships incorporating the labor ... Read more

Goodreads reviews for San'ya Blues


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