Widely recognized as a social problem in Japan, kodokushi (solitary death) stereotypically
happens when old people living alone, detached from kin and neighbors, die alone without …

This article examines the Japanese cat café boom, which peaked in 2009 yet remains a
significant retail phenomenon throughout Japan, and in particular Tokyo. How do humans …

Domestic Buddhist altars have long provided symbolically and materially rich media for
venerating the dead in Japan. However, as Japanese household structures and funerary …

This paper argues that Japan and notions of Japaneseness are becoming “postfamilial” in
breaking from earlier models and roles, and that one aspect of Japan's post-familial shift can …

Collaborations between entertainment industries and artificial intelligence researchers in
Japan have since the mid-1990s produced a growing interest in modeling affect and …

Across the globe, human experiences of death, dying, and grief are now shaped by digital
technologies and, increasingly, by robotic technologies. This article explores how practices …

Japanese Studies has provided a fertile space for non-Eurocentric analysis for a number of
reasons. It has been embroiled in the long-running internal debate over the so-called …

Sensory anthropology has quickly become a dynamic and expansive field of contem porary
scholarship, with ethnographers increasingly interested in diverse sensory cosmologies as …

This book takes the reader on a sensory ethnographic tour in Japan and describes the many
ways sounds seep into everyday experiences. So many ethnographies describe local …

This paper examines the Japanese word kawaii. Japanese women frequently use kawaii to
express positive feelings towards objects or people. Scholars suggest that Japanese women …