Annotated Bibliography: The Homogenous Nature Of Modern Japan
606 Words3 Pages
Table of Contents
Introduction 2
Music Education and Children’s Songs: Warabeuta 童歌 5
Folksong: Min'yō 民謡 12
Modern Tradition - Enka演歌 17
Conclusion 21
Bibliography 24
Introduction
The homogenous nature of modern Japan and its sense of national identity remain of great interest to both the Western world and modern Japan itself. Such homogeneity is assumed to be the result of Japan’s ethnic uniformity and class cohesiveness. Despite the popular Japanese belief of monoethnicity though, modern Japan is home to a growing percentage of diverse ethnicities. Moreover, many people outside and inside of Japan describe the nation as a classless society, due to its prevailing middle class. The Japanese saying, ichioku-sō-chūryū一億総中流, which means “100 million completely middle class”, refers to this idea of Japan being a nation of middle class. However, after the burst of Japan’s “bubble economy”バブル景気 in the early 1990s, Japan descended into a recession which came to be known as the “Lost Decade” 失われた10年, during which the middle class decreased in size and stability. Today, Japan’s economic disparity continues to increase, with the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare 厚生労働省 reporting in 2009 that nearly one in six Japanese, or 20 million people, lived in poverty in 2007, putting Japan’s poverty rate at 15.7 percent. If one cannot explain…show more content… Japanese is only technically considered a language-isolate because its genetic affiliation to other languages or language families is not definitively known. Furthermore, most of the uniqueness of the Japanese language owe much to shallow comparisons with European languages; however, Japanese is typical in terms of overall grammatical structure, phonology, and its agglutinative