by Anne Allison
Duke University Press, 2013. 246 pages
The March 11, 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and subsequent nuclear disaster in Northern Japan illuminated and deepened a sense of vulnerability for people across the nation that, as Anne Allison argues in Precarious Japan, significantly predated this “triple disaster.” Author of three other major books on the cultural …
Fukushima: from the coasts of India’s Tamil Nadu to the halls of the German Bundestag, the word now stands for danger and deception, contamination and vulnerability. Every day brings new distress. Cesium-137 clings tenaciously to the soil and buildings of northeastern Japan. Radioactive fish promenade across the Pacific. Over 40% of children examined by the Fukushima Prefecture Health Management Survey …
A Disability of the Soul:
An Ethnography of Schizophrenia and Mental Illness in Contemporary Japan
by Karen Nakamura
Cornell University Press, 2013
US $24.95, Paperback + DVD
It takes a strong heart and an open mind to study something like schizophrenia. No doubt many anthropologists have taken on this courageous task, many to be eventually rewarded with pieces of …
[This article is being cross-posted at the blogs of the Foundation for Psychocultural Research (FPR) and the FPR-UCLA Center for Culture, Brain, Development and Mental Health (CBDMH). Thanks to the FPR’s Constance Cummings for sharing this post with Somatosphere].
Science writer Karen A. Frenkel interviews anthropologist Karen Nakamura for the FPR.
Karen Nakamura is Associate Professor of Anthropology and …
The March 11, 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami caused the deaths of approximately 16,000 persons, left more than 6,000 injured and 2,713 missing, destroyed or partially damaged nearly one million buildings, and produced at least $14.5 billion in damages. The earthquake also caused a triple meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant on Japan’s eastern coast. After reading the …
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| Cover of the DVD for PsychoDoctor. |
The latest issue of Transcultural Psychiatry includes two articles which address mental health and psychiatry in Japan.
In “Widening the Psychiatric Gaze: Reflections on PsychoDoctor, Depression, and Recent Transitions in Japanese Mental Health Car,” Ken Vickery examines Japan’s status as something of an outlier among post-industrial states in terms of …