Assembling Japan focuses on Japan's modernization as a long-term process that is reliant on
changing technology and that has led to the nation's full engagement with the global system.
This process forms a complex field of tensions full of interesting dynamisms and synergies
that can be best understood through the book's methodology: anthropological analysis combined
with historical contextualization. The approaches in this collection are manifold. Some
chapters examine the themes of modernity technology and Japan's global experience though
popular culture from reggae to football from television to film. Other topics include coffee
travel economics cultural politics and technological innovation in the field of robotics. All
of the contributions aim to show how these global interactions have occurred and continue to
take place in twenty-first-century Japan.
