Introduction to Japanese Society

What Hacker News says

1. patio11Nov 2016
   If you would (sensibly) like to dispute Japan's tranquil monoculturalism on a message board thread or elsewhere, a better approach to take is "Japan is often described as a monocultural country but it is not." This is true, novel, and gives you the opportunity to drop e.g. a citation for Sugitomo's An Introduction to Japanese Society, which is a really excellent academic text, or Making Common Sense of Japan, which is sadly out of print but a fantastic book qua book. (30 second example: Japan has large ethnic minorities like e.g. Koreans whose experience is often materially different than that of people who are ethnically Japanese; the discourse of Japanese monoculturalism margainalizes their experience and, for bonus points, makes their lives materially worse. Japan has religious minorities; you might sensibly predict life is difficult for them; you might sensibly predict this implies that e.g. no Japanese PMs come from religious minorities; you got one of those two predictions correct.)

   I'd politely double down on encouraging you to not attempt to win this argument by saying "Japan actually is a monoculture and that culture's core is racism." People will believe you. This is materially less true than the not-a-monoculture argument and, separate from the truth of it, it is internally and externally a dangerous thing to have be believed.

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2. gknoyNov 2014
   From reading previous things of patio11's, this has not yet surprised me much -- but I am blown away by the depths of details he's included here. I've only finished the section on the salaryman relationship, and it's phenomenal reading.

   Edit: the link to "An Introduction to Japanese Society" seems to be broken. Try this if you're interested:

   http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Japanese-Society-Yoshio-S...

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3. patio11Mar 2010
   Does this article mean that my assumptions are out of date?

   That sort of implies that Japanese were once lockstep conformists. I could take issue with that, at length, but instead I'll refer you to Sugimoto's textbook "An Introduction To Japanese Society".

   P.S. One of my favorite Japanese engineers swears blind that the iPod is just a Walkman with a Game Boy in it. I think that is almost as unfair as "Japan just improves on technologies that were invented by white people."

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4. azernikJan 2015
   Depends on a) the quality of the e-book adaptation's typesetting and markup, and b) the size and quality of the device. The textbook publisher needs to invest a little (though possibly not as much as conventional typesetting) and the student needs to shell out on a full 10-inch screen (which need to be used on several books for the investment to amortize out correctly).

   Layout/markup: for well-done academic volumes (using Google Play and Sugimoto's "An Introduction to Japanese Society" as my reference piece) things like footnotes are actually a better experience than print - you tap a blue-highlighted superscript, and you get a model that pops up inline for you to read and then swipe away. No looking up the number at the bottom or (even worse) in the endnotes. Tables are all linkable and back buttons work, etc. On the other hand, a straight import of the original text and graphics without any semantic markup can be truly painful to use.

   Device quality: this matters more for things like academic volumes with charts/figures (as you mentioned) and graphic novels. If you have content that needs to be viewed on a single screen, and it's organized to fit on 10-inch-diagonal paper page (or larger), it's going to suffer a lot on a 7 inch tablet. especially on small form factors. If you try to read a book with tables and charts built for a full-size hardcover on a 7-inch tablet, it will go badly (I have tried this). On a ten-inch tablet with a screen closer to the hardcover size it's actually quite pleasant.

   These two issues interact a bit with the layout/markup issue; for example, I've seen linguistics books that try to give the same text in three versions (foreign language, individual-word translation, and idiomatic translation) as three-line clusters, like so:

       mah     nishma`?
       what    hear.PASS
       How are you doing?
   

   The typesetter didn't know how to make these reflow correctly using e-book markup (which may not be possible given the tools available?), which means that the line breaks are hardcoded, and the ends of long lines will be unviewable past the edge of the screen on 7-inch tablets. On a 10-inch tablet this works quite well.

   Doing the things college students do with textbooks (flipping back and forth between a pset and the material, for example) requires a bit of familiarity with the software but it's very doable and I think very pleasant once you get used to it. It is a barrier to entry, though, and I think e-book UIs need to make it easier to learn. This might just be my personal experience, but I find full-text search, even with a tablet screen, much faster than index lookup in print.

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