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The Cambridge Companion to Modern Japanese Culture, edited by Yoshio Sugimoto, is a compendium of nineteen essays by scholars based in Australia, Japan, the United States, England, and Austria. Part of Cambridge University Press's expanding series of modern culture "companions," the book is a welcome supplement to Sugimoto's own widely used Introduction to Japanese Culture, which has been in print since 1997 and is now in its third edition (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). The contributors collectively speak to Sugimoto's argument, articulated in his opening essay, "'Japanese culture': An overview," that "[a]n unacknowledged paradigm shift appears to be underway in contemporary Japanese culture, with public discourse suddenly focusing upon internal divisions and variations in the population" (p. 1). Each of the individual chapters "reflects. . . the 'multicultural model' of Japanese society, and highlights the ways in which Japanese culture is diversified and stratified along class, regional, generational and gender lines, among others" (p. 3).
Harumi Befu's "Concepts of Japan, Japanese culture and the Japanese" builds on Sugimoto's overview in providing a theoretical framework for the Companion as a whole. Under the headings "Stratified Japan," "Othernesses of Japan," "Essentialism," "De-territorialization/re-territorialization," and "Koreans and Chinese in Japan," Befu makes the point that "'Japan,' 'Japanese culture,' and...