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by Taneo Ishikawa (Author)
With poetry and commentary, From the Bottom: Anti-Japanese Verses offers a much-needed challenge to the culture elite and policy wonks of a sun-marked country, where its red and white colors still fly as if they were an emblem of squeezing blood from bone.Unearthing what is buried beneath the seemly topography of the island nation, the book renders Japan's postwar history as an enormous inanity that has just come full circle, from nuclear to nuclear, from Hiroshima to Fukushima. Often with scathing mockery and derision, the work gives expression to the tension between tribal elite politics and underclass perspectives.This book of poetry opens with the introduction providing a necessary context in the form of historical accounts of Japanese poetry, from its ancient peninsular origin to its post-war transformation, and more recent singsong babbling after the 9/11 tragedy and the 3/11 disasters.Taneo Ishikawa, Ph.D. (2000) in humanities, Florida State University, fights with a ghostly development of Japanese humanities. He calls for the de-Japanification of much re-Japanized Japanese studies, in particular, in culture and history, including religion and archeology. The author insists that Japan's legacy of heliocentric self-identification is a culture of farmer-fighters, with a settler's history from peninsular to insular, unfolding on the unsustainable logic of self-sacrifice and self-aggrandizement. The major three malefactors were Buddha, Samurai, and Emperor, who together played on the legacy of stealing, cheating, and lying. This past history, the author believes, should be denounced by all means and with much rancor. He lives in Osaka, Japan.
