Native and Newcomer: Making and Remaking a Japanese City

by Jennifer E. Robertson

This expertly crafted ethnography examines the ways in which native and new citizens of Kodaira, a Tokyo suburb, have both remade the past and imagined the future of their city in a quest for an “authentic” Japanese community.

256 pages, Paperback

First published April 8, 1991

About the author

Jennifer Ellen Robertson is Professor of Anthropology and the History of Art at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is a former director and member of the Center for Japanese Studies, and an associate in the Science, Society and Technology Program and Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies.

Robertson is the originator and general editor of Colonialisms, a book series from the University of California Press that explores the historical realities, current significance, and future ramifications of imperialist practices with origins and boundaries outside of "the West." She is also a co-editor of Critical Asian Studies (http://criticalasianstudies.org/). Her six books and dozens of articles and chapters address a wide spectrum of subjects ranging from the 17th century to the present, including nativist and social rectification movements, agrarianism, sex and gender systems and ideologies, mass and popular culture, nostalgia and internationalization, urbanism, the place of Japan in American Anthropology, sexuality and suicide, theater and performance, votive and folk art, imperialism and colonialism, and eugenics and bioethics.