Anyone have any good sources or books involving Japanese culture? Moreso, "current" culture than anything else.
We read the book The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa for our novel and our research essay is 6 pages on this prompt:
How accurately does Ogawa's novel portray social norms between different socioeconomic classes in the Japanese culture? The focus of your research essay, then, will be to provide insight into Japanese society. The novel's plot, characters, and their relationships are to be used as supporting evidence to the factual information you find on Japanese social norms, especially in reference to the culture's class system.
When I say current, it can be really from 1975 (when the professor in the novel had his accident and lost his memory) - now... the narrator (Housekeeper) was telling the story in 1994.
I'm going to focus, I think, on the way children are raised. There was a young boy in the novel (Housekeeper's son) so I was going to use his character. He was raised by a single mother, he was often "not embraced" growing up, etc, etc. I'd like to focus the paper on how children are raised in Japanese culture and what is the social norm.
But I'm not really finding many sources I could use towards this... any kind of articles, books, whatever, would be a big help
I don't know much about Japanese culture.