{"title":"Simon Partner","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"koumes-world-book-simon-partner-9780231211857","title":"Koumes World","description":"Kawai Koume (18041889) was an accomplished poet and painter and a wife, mother, and grandmother in a lower-ranking samurai family in a provincial castle town. Through her eyes and words, Simon Partner opens a window on social, economic, and cultural life amid some of the most dramatic periods of Japans transformative nineteenth century.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49753130959121,"sku":"NGR9780231211857","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0231211856.jpg?v=1769248568"},{"product_id":"toshie-book-simon-partner-9780520240971","title":"Toshie","description":"Sakaue Toshie was born on August 14, 1925, into a family of tenant farmers and day laborers in the hamlet of Kosugi. The world she entered was one of hard labor, poverty, dirt, disease, and frequent early death. By the 1970s, that rural world had changed almost beyond recognition. \"Toshie\" is the story of that extraordinary transformation as witnessed and experienced by Toshie herself. A sweeping social history of the Japanese countryside in its twentieth-century transition from 'peasant' to 'consumer' society, the book is also a richly textured account of the life of one village woman and her community caught up in the inexorable march of historical events. Through the lens of Toshie's life, Simon Partner shows us the realities of rural Japanese life during the 1930s depression; daily existence under the wartime regime of 'spiritual mobilization'; the land reform and its consequences during occupation; and the rapid emergence of a consumer culture against the background of agricultural mechanization during the 1950s and 1960s. In some ways representative and in other ways unique, Toshie's narrative raises questions about conventional frameworks of twentieth-century Japanese history, and about the place of individual agency and choice in an era often seen as dominated by the impersonal forces of modernity: technology, state power, and capitalism.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50112191987985,"sku":"CIN0520240979G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":50655834997009,"sku":"CIN0520240979A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51209756934417,"sku":"GOR014199812","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51415928832273,"sku":"CIN0520240979VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52604581609745,"sku":"GOR014559782","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53521281155345,"sku":"NLS9780520240971","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0520240979.jpg?v=1751197295"},{"product_id":"merchant-s-tale-book-simon-partner-9780231182928","title":"The Merchant's Tale","description":"In April 1859, at age fifty, Shinohara Chuemon left his old life behind. Chuemon, a well-off farmer in his home village, departed for the new port city of Yokohama, where he remained for the next fourteen years. There, as a merchant trading with foreigners in the aftermath of Japan's 1853 \"opening\" to the West, he witnessed the collapse of the Tokugawa shogunate, the civil war that followed, and the Meiji Restoration's reforms. The Merchant's Tale looks through Chuemon's eyes at the upheavals of this period, using the story of an ordinary merchant farmer and its Yokohama setting as a vantage point onto sweeping social transformation and its unwitting agents.  In a narrative history rich in colorful detail, Simon Partner focuses on Japan's common people to investigate the relationship between individual motivation and social change. Chuemon, like most newcomers to Yokohama, came in search of economic opportunity. Partner explores how he and other mundane actors in Yokohama's daily life shed light on vital issues in Japan's modern history, including the legacies of the Meiji Restoration; the nature of the East Asian treaty port system; and the importance of regimes of daily life such as food, clothing, medicine, and hygiene in the negotiation of national identity. Though centered on the experiences of an individual, The Merchant's Tale is also the history of a place. Created under pressure from aggressive foreign powers, Yokohama was the scene of gunboat diplomacy, the birthplace of new lifestyles, a connection to global markets, and the beachhead of Japan's technological modernization. Partner's microhistory of a vibrant meeting place humanizes the story of Japan's revolutionary 1860s and their profound consequences for Japanese society and culture.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50308127359249,"sku":"GOR013920592","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50346078208273,"sku":"CIN0231182929G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50346080469265,"sku":"CIN0231182929VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0231182929.jpg?v=1751195315"},{"product_id":"mayor-of-aihara-book-simon-partner-9780520258594","title":"The Mayor of Aihara","description":"Aizawa Kikutaro (1866-1963) was born into the wealthiest family in Hashimoto, a small agricultural village specializing in wheat and silk. By 1925, the village was undergoing rapid commercial development, residents were commuting to factory and office jobs in cities, and, after serving as mayor for almost twenty years, Aizawa was working as a bank manager. Taking the biography of this leading villager as its central focus and incorporating intimate details of life drawn from Aizawa's diary, The Mayor of Aihara chronicles the extraordinary transformation of Hashimoto against the background of Japan's rapid industrialization. By portraying history as it was actually lived by ordinary people, the book offers a rich and compelling perspective on the modernization of Japan.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50356582318353,"sku":"CIN0520258592G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50356586545425,"sku":"CIN0520258592VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53521405968657,"sku":"NLS9780520258594","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0520258592.jpg?v=1751391815"},{"product_id":"assembled-in-japan-book-simon-partner-9780520219397","title":"Assembled in Japan","description":"Investigates one of the great success stories of the twentieth century: the rise of the Japanese electronics industry. This title states that behind the meteoric rise of Sony, Matsushita, Toshiba, and other electrical goods companies was an explosion of domestic consumer demand that began in the 1950s.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":50477597688081,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50477598146833,"sku":"CIN0520219392G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53521390797073,"sku":"NLS9780520219397","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0520219392.jpg?v=1751230243"},{"product_id":"bull-city-survivor-book-simon-partner-9780786474479","title":"Bull City Survivor","description":"Emma Johnston (a pseudonym) is an African American resident of Durham, North Carolina, whose son was brutally murdered in 2007. Combining the voices of Emma and her coauthor Simon Partner, a professor at Duke University, the book recounts the postwar history of one of the South's fastest-growing communities through the eyes of one of its most disadvantaged residents. In the process, the book attempts to shed light on the social and economic conditions that led to the murder of Emma's son, one of 25 to 30 people (many of them African American young men) who fall victim to gun violence each year in Durham.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52126938169617,"sku":"NLS9780786474479","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780786474479.jpg?v=1757481382"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/author-books-by-simon-partner.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}