Eyal Ben-Ari is Chairman of the Center for Society, Security and Peace in Memory of Dan Shomron at Kinneret Academic College, Israel

Chapter One - Introduction,

Chapter Two - From Mothering to Othering: Organization and Nap Time in a Japanese Preschool

Chapter Three - The Gambaru Complex: Learning to Overcome Obstacles through Individual and Collective Action

Chapter Four - Teachers' Meetings: Information, Quality Control and Decisions

Chapter Five - A Sports Day in Suburban Japan: Leisure, artificial Communities and the Creation of Locality

Chapter Six - Posing, Posturing and Photographic Presences: A Rite of Passage in a Japanese Commuter Village

Chapter Seven - Sake and Spare Time: Management and Imbibement in Japanese Business Firms

Chapter Eight - "Not-Precisely-Work": Golf, Entertainment and Drinking Among Japanese Business Executives in Singapore

Chapter Nine - Coincident Events of Remembrance, Coexisting Spaces of Memory: The Annual Memorial Rites at Yasukuni Shrine.

Chapter Ten - Public Events and Japanese the Self-Defense Forces: Aesthetics, Ritual Density and the Normalization of Military Violence

Chapter Eleven - Power, Play and Transformation

This book explores the multiplicity of special times and spaces in Japan within which people get together to decide, celebrate or play, in gatherings such as organizational meetings, community festivities, preschool games or drinking bouts. It analyzes these gatherings in relation to the theoretical model of sociocultural frames, examining how such occasions are put together, their unfolding stages, interactive encounters, and relations between participants and the wider social and cultural contexts. It considers the cognitive, emotional and behavioural dimensions, the scope for manipulation and the effects, intentional and unintentional, on participants and the connections to the ways in which in society and culture change. Overall, besides describing specific rites and ceremonies in Japan, the book provides great insights into the process whereby the interactions, feelings and action of individuals and groups shape popular culture.