From My Grandmother's Bedside: Sketches of Postwar Tokyo

Amazon.com

Japan is not what you would call a direct culture. Refined through centuries of close living, honed over the years to a subtle edge, Japanese communication tends toward the gentle allusion and the discreet sign as opposed to the blunt, brash, in-your-face openness that often characterizes American interchanges. So it's appropriate that Norma Field's portrait of postwar Japan emerges indirectly from her personal tale of family duty. It's the summer of 1995, and Norma Field, the product of a Japanese mother and occupation GI father, has returned to Japan to care for her grandmother, who has suffered her second stroke. As Field concentrates on learning to read the signals of her grandmother's stroke-impaired face--the almost imperceptible difference between the nod "yes" and the nod "no"--she digresses in a series of short vignettes. Field reminisces about her childhood (taking loyalty oaths in the American Embassy, sharing the warm futon with her aunts and grandmother in the Eight-Mat Room), ponders death with dignity versus putting feeding tubes up her grandmother's nose, sees anew the photography of Domon Ken in an exhibit commemorating the 50th anniversary of the end of the war, and observes visiting American businessmen misunderstanding Japanese hospitality. Neatly compartmentalized like a lacquered bento box lunch, the whole is much more than a sum of the beautifully crafted parts. Thoughtful and moving, Field's untraditional memoir provides insights into both American and Japanese histories and cultures. Delve into her observations on the long flight to Narita and your whole visit will be enhanced by Field's appreciation of the personal Japan that lies beneath the surface.

Book Description

From My Grandmother's Bedside is an experiment in genre, a moving and evocative reflection on contemporary Japan, human desire, family relations, life, and death. Norma Field, the daughter of a Japanese woman and an American G.I., and author of the acclaimed In the Realm of a Dying Emperor, returned to Japan in 1995 to tend to her slowly dying grandmother, who had been rendered speechless by multiple strokes. What she finds--both in the memories of her childhood in her grandmother's household and in the altered face of postmodern Japan--forms the substance of her narrative that transcends both memoir and essay to reveal, through crafted fragments, a refraction of the whole of Japan.
Having spent her childhood in Japan and her adulthood in the United States, Field speaks from the position of one who straddles two worlds. Her testimony is highly personal, her voice is intimate, her observations are keen and clear. She juxtaposes details from daily life--conversations overheard on the subway; arguments between her mother and aunts; the struggle to feed, bathe, and care for her grandmother--with observations on the political and social changes that have transformed Japan. She shows how the belated coming to terms with the war and continuing avoidance of the same are intimately related to the look and feel of Japanese society today. She gently folds back the complicated layers of blame and responsibility for the war, touching in the process on subjects as diverse as the effects of the atomic bomb, comfort women, biracial/bicultural families, the farewells of Kamikaze pilots, and the dehumanizing effects of Japan's postwar economic boom. A recurrent theme is the observation of the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war.
From My Grandmother's Bedside is also a contemplation of the many facets of language: the kinds of language with which her grandmother's illness has been negotiated, the wordless language her grandmother speaks, her own relationship to these languages. Through it all runs the realization that the personal and the political are perpetually entangled, that past and present converge and overlap.

Customer Reviews:

Postwar Tokyo????.......2007-07-09

I purchased this book because "Sketches of Postwar Tokyo" was of interest. I was very disappointed because my idea of "Postwar Tokyo" is Tokyo shortly after the war. If I wrote a book "Sketches of Postwar U.S.", it would be the United States from 1945 until 1950. It's quite a stretch to talk about Japan 50 years later and call it postwar! The book also contained some inaccuracies. I lived in Japan for 13 years and therefore know something about the country.

Provactive, Beautiful, and my Thesis Topic.......2001-11-15

This fragmented narrative draws connections between the personal and political narratives of individuals and nations. It is by far one of the best books I've read.

Average customer rating:

beautiful and INSPIRING collection of drawings
Cultural and Aesthetic Delight

Sketches from Japan
Francis D. K. Ching
Manufacturer: Wiley
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Criticism | Architecture | Professional & Technical | Subjects | Books

General | Architecture | Professional & Technical | Subjects | Books

Drawing | Instructional & How-To | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books
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ASIN: 047136360X

Amazon.com

Sketches from Japan is the charming record of an eminent architect's visit to Tokyo and Kyoto. Each day Francis Ching would walk downtown, past temples and through residential districts, recording his visual impressions with a fine pen. He delights in the juxtapositions of old and new, hard-edged and organic, plain and richly textured, that are nowhere more striking than in a modern Japanese city. His freehand line drawings capture the essence of springtime Japan--more successfully than photographs, perhaps, through the isolation of elements and elimination of details inherent in the sketching process. The dark wood of an ancient gateway is emphasized by drawing the surrounding trees only in profile; the shaggy outline of a thatch roof suggests its straw surface as clearly as a completed study. The artist places each drawing in context with a few articulate sentences; he includes some gentle lessons on drawing and geometry, but the text is not didactic. The intimacy of many of the scenes--small interiors, architectural details, people strolling down narrow streets--is enhanced by the informality of the pen-and-ink medium. The monochromatic line treatment is in keeping with traditional Japanese sumi-ink drawings. The book also continues a tradition set by 18th-century haiku poets and artists such as Buson and Taiga, who recorded their journeys in combinations of diary and sketchbook. Sketches from Japan is a small-scale gem, and we can learn as much from it as from many more elaborate photographic studies and coffee-table books. --John Stevenson

Book Description

"Drawing stimulates the mind to think and can make visible those aspects which cannot be seen by the naked eye or captured on film by a camera." - From the Introduction to Sketches from Japan
The art of the travel sketchbook from one of the world's most talented graphic communicators.
Following in the footsteps of such creative geniuses as Leonardo da Vinci and Le Corbusier, designers and artists often keep visual notebooks of the new worlds they encounter in their travels. Sketches from Japan provides an intimate look at how one of today's most accomplished visual communicators, Francis D. K. Ching, documented a month's stay in Japan. Accomplished architects and novice artists alike will be inspired by the sheer beauty of Ching's ink drawings and by the journey that they represent.
Francis D. K. Ching (Seattle, WA) is a registered architect and a professor at the University of Washington. He is the author of six highly successful architecture books, all of which focus on the basic processes and forms of architectural design.

Customer Reviews:

beautiful and INSPIRING collection of drawings.......2005-11-02

Every fan of drawing, everyone who has ever traveled with a sketchbook will enjoy this little collection of his travel sketches from Japan, and this will delight those already acquainted with the ravishing beauty of Francis Ching's architectural drawings. Ching's other books are analytical drawings, showing architectural detail and forms with a controlled, disciplined line that architects know as the Ching style - contour drawings with a hierarchy of line emphasizing the outlines of figures. Ching's freehand sketches are a remarkably free riff on the drawing approach seen in his other work, as if he finally took his tie off and improvised a solo.

These are predominantly contour drawings. Tone is used for contrast of focus, or emphasis of a figure to its ground, but tone is rarely used to define a volume. The control of line is extraordinary, and the variety of marks interesting. But the power of the drawings often comes from his orchestration of many contrasting textures, shapes, and details.

Ching has remarkable control of representing a detail and describing its place as a part of a whole: there is always clarity in the disorder, even showing the exuberant chaos of telephone and power lines criss scrossing over the busy street. One can almost feel the mist, smell the sounds and hear the bustling noise on the street. The crowds of people are convincing, and he has no fear of quickly sketching a whole cluster of motorcycles. Looking at Ching's drawings feels like taking lessons in vitality, in visual selection, and in how a talented draughtsman really requires an editing, selective eye.

The drawings are unfortunately interrupted by a graphic drawing analysis of the Centennial Hall of the Tokyo Institute of Technology. There's nothing particularly wrong with the analysis but it is nowhere near as compelling as the drawings, and also this sort of formal drawing analysis is covered well in Ching's other works. This analysis breaks the tone of the rest of the books, and it's a relief when the analysis ends and the exploration of Japan's urban life begins again.

Cultural and Aesthetic Delight.......2000-07-31

There is a long tradition among artists and writers of maintaining a journal to record observations and impressions. Many writers use journals to write informally, often spontaneously, to describe real or imagined people, places, and events. Artists and naturalists as well fill sketchbooks with both words and images to help focus their observations. Frank Ching, the author of this sketchbook, not only records the optical reality of what is seen; he uses these drawings as a means of gaining understanding, insight, and perhaps even inspiration. His drawings stimulate the mind to think and can even make visible aspects that cannot be seen by the naked eye, or captured on film by a camera.

Frank Ching made most of the drawings in this sketchbook in or around O-okayama, a town southwest of downtown Tokyo, where the Tokyo Institute of Technology is located. The subject matter ranges from street scenes to traditional construction details, from temples and their sacred precincts to stimulating juxtapositions of old and new. He has successfully captured the sights, sounds and even smells of vibrant metropolis Tokyo, enabling the reader to feel the humid heat of the day or the cool rainy mist that fell as he drew. In addition, there are scenes sketched during the author's brief excursion to Kyoto and the mountain village of Takayama

All the drawings were executed in a pure contour-line technique with a fountain pen and black ink. There is a crispness and finality to an inkline that is both daunting and exciting. The process not only fostered the careful observation of details; it also required seeing how they fit into the larger framework and pattern of shapes, and noting which details could be omitted. The shape and extent of the white spaces are as important to a composition as what is delineated.

Book Description

This Elibron Classics edition is a facsimile reprint of a 1880 edition by David Douglas, Edinburgh.

Notes and Sketches from the Wild Coasts of Nipon, with Chapters on Cruising after Pirates in Chinese Waters: Volume 33 (Ganesha - Japan in English: Key Nineteenth-Century Sources on Japan)

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Notes and Sketches from the Wild Coasts of Nipon, with Chapters on Cruising after Pirates in Chinese Waters: Volume 33 (Ganesha - Japan in English: Key Nineteenth-Century Sources on Japan)
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An historical sketch of nishiki and kinran brocades;: With a catalog on one hundred and twenty rare specimens dating from 1400 to 1812 A.D.,
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Notes and sketches from the wild coasts of Nipon;: With chapters on cruising after pirates in Chinese waters,

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Light and darkness in the city.......2002-03-21

This book started as a commission from the Los Angeles Public Library for Marissa Roth to take photographs of Los Angeles' downtown. In this completed form, it combines her photographs with D.J. Waldie's words in a clear-eyed and/yet loving paean to the city.

Roth presents startlingly beautiful, stark black and white photographs of underground parking garages and murals, freeway underpasses and Chinatown neon, barbershops and street scenes. Waldie's passages are elegant and sparely poetic, from explanations of why downtown streets are 36 degrees off the true grid which rules most US cities (including much of the rest of this one) to the legend of La Llorona, with detours into the Church of Our City of The Angels and musings on the nature of downtown(s).

Throughout the book, there is an awareness in both images and text of the special quality of the light that shines over Los Angeles and the shadows it casts. It's an aspect of life here that I have not seen addressed elsewhere, which I find surprising as it ensures that L.A. can not be mistaken for any other city, especially on an autumn afternoon when the sun is low.

Altogether, the combination of beauty and information makes this book a wonderful addition to any collection of books on Los Angeles, American cities, or photography.

Book Description

Arcana has two famous families of science: the precise and methodical Flasks and their sneaky neighbors the von Offels who have stolen credit for every scientific breakthrough the Flasks have ever made. And it's about to happen again. Ethan Flask is a popular sixth-grade science teacher. The mysterious, ghostly Professor von Offel is supposed to be reviewing him for a prestigious teaching award. What he really wants is for Flask to unwittingly help him become fully corporeal again.

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Wacky, inane humor that is a laugh a page , sensational

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Manufacturer: Warner Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Comic Strips | Comics & Graphic Novels | Subjects | Books

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ASIN: 0446360791

Customer Reviews:

Wacky, inane humor that is a laugh a page , sensational.......1999-04-09

A walk into the insane mind of the world's creative Bizarre-brained cartoonist that thinks " THE MORBID the MERRIER!!" is a tune whistled by his ink-pen that drools out the most expressions on faces in a dot than most can achieve with a nine inch roller. WARNING: this book can be habit-forming and should be taken in small doses!

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Mad Blasts
Time Warner Electronic Publishing , and Mad Magazine
Manufacturer: Warner Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Comic Strips | Comics & Graphic Novels | Subjects | Books

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ASIN: 0446352969

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Mad Blasts
unknown
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Binding: Mass Market Paperback
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Archie's Mad House (Sabrina the witch in Past Blast, No. 63 ,Sept.1968)

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Archie's Mad House (Sabrina the witch in Past Blast, No. 63 ,Sept.1968)
ARCHIE COMIC PUBLICATIONS INC
Manufacturer: ARCHIE COMIC PUBLICATIONS INC
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Comic Strips | Comics & Graphic Novels | Subjects | Books
ASIN: B000MQPU52

Product Description

Sabrina the witch in Past Blast

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