Over the last 70 years, Japanese Studies scholarship has gone through several dominant paradigms, from 'demystifying the Japanese', to analysis of Japanese economic strength, to discussion of global interest in Japanese popular culture. This book assesses this literature, considering future directions for research into the 2020s and beyond.

Introduction: envisioning new frontiers in Japanese Studies Part 1: Rethinking Japanese area studies in the 21st century 1. Rethinking the Maria Luz Incident: methodological cosmopolitanism and Meiji Japan 2. Exporting theory 'made in Japan': the case of contents tourism 3. Japanese language education and Japanese Studies as intercultural learning 4. Japanese Studies in China and Sino-Japanese Relations, 1945-2018 5. Japanese Studies in Indonesia Part 2: Coping with an aging society 6. Discover tomorrow: Tokyo's 'barrier-free' Olympic legacy and the urban aging population 7. Foreign care workers in aging Japan: Filipino carers of the elderly in long-term care facilities 8. Immigrants caring for other immigrants: the case of the Kaagapay Oita Filipino Association Part 3: Migration and mobility 9. Invisible migrants from Sakhalin in the 1960s: a new page in Japanese migration studies 10. Japanese women in Korea in the postwar: between repatriation and returning home 11. Challenging the 'global' in the global periphery: performances and negotiations of academic and personal identities among JET-alumni Japan scholars based in Japan 12. Dream vs. reality: the lives of Bangladeshi language students in Japan 13. Sending them over the seas: Japanese judges crossing legal boundaries through lived experiences in Australia 14. 'Life could not be better since I left Japan!': transnational mobility of Japanese individuals to Europe and the post-Fordist quest for subjective well-being outside Japan Part 4: The environment 15. Japan's environmental injustice paradigm and transnational activism 16. 'Community power': renewable energy policy and production in post-Fukushima Japan