Japan

Shortly before releasing deadly sarin gas on the Tokyo subway in March 1995, the Aum Shinrikyo religious cult published a vicious 95-page antisemitic tract that declared war on its Jewish archenemy. The gassing of the Tokyo subway was the culmination...

In the decades between the two World Wars, Japan made a dramatic entry into the modern age, expanding its capital industries and urbanizing so quickly as to rival many long-standing Western industrial societies. How the Japanese made sense of the sudden...

Presented here in a new and complete translation is the Japanese classic Okagami, an historical talc that mirrors a man's life and the times in which he lived. Dating from the late eleventh or early twelfth century, it focuses on Fujiwara Michinaga, the...

Students of the late Tokugawa and Meiji periods have long recognized the critical role of rural elites (the gono) in Japan's economic transformation, but the largely impressionistic and episodic scholarship on this pivotal class has created an image of...

In 2001, Prime Minister Koizumi Jun'ichiro launched a crusade to privatize Japan's postal services. The plan was hailed as a necessary structural reform, but many bemoaned the loss of traditional institutions and the conservative values they represented...

Towering over the Kanto Plain, the sacred mountain Oyama (literally, "Big Mountain") has loomed large over the religious landscape of early modern Japan.By the Edo period (1600-1868), the revered peak had undergone a transformation from secluded...

This study of Japan's transformation by the economic crises of the 1930s focuses on efforts to overcome the effects of the Great Depression in rural areas, particularly the activities of local activists and policymakers in Tokyo. The author argues that...

Early modern Japan was a military-bureaucratic state governed by patriarchal and patrilineal principles and laws. During this time, however, women had considerable power to directly affect social structure, political practice, and economic production...

For decades after World War II, Japan chose to focus on soft power and economic diplomacy alongside a close alliance with the United States, eschewing a potential leadership role in regional and global security. Since the end of the Cold War, and...

Since the late 1980s, Brazilians of Japanese descent have been "return" migrating to Japan as unskilled foreign workers. With an immigrant population currently estimated at roughly 280,000, Japanese Brazilians are now the second largest group of...

In recent years Japan's cuisine, or washoku, has been eclipsing that of France as the world's most desirable food. UNESCO recognized washoku as an intangible cultural treasure in 2013 and Tokyo boasts more Michelin-starred restaurants than Paris and New...

Originally published as Le commerce exterieur du Japon des origines au XVIe siecle in 1988, this new edition of the landmark French study chronicles Japan's transformation from an importer of continental luxury items, raw materials, and techniques to an...

This book examines the struggles of those suffering from Minimata disease, eponymous with the Japanese city in which a Chisso factory released methylmercury into the Shiranui Sea, leading to widespread poisonings. Yuki Miyamoto explores Minimata...

Given that engineering significantly affects modern society, ensuring its reliability is essential. How then should society implement engineering ethics to ensure its reliability? Can we expect engineering ethics to be nurtured naturally in the practice...

In the 1930s, a cohort of professional human scientists coalesced around a common and particular understanding of objectivity as the foundation of legitimate knowledge, and of fieldwork as the pathway to objectivity. Into the Field is the first...

In Waste, Eiko Maruko Siniawer innovatively explores the many ways in which the Japanese have thought about waste-in terms of time, stuff, money, possessions, and resources-from the immediate aftermath of World War II to the present. She shows how...

Based on over two years of participant-observation in labor brokerage firms, factories, schools, churches, and people's homes in Japan and Brazil, Sarah LeBaron von Baeyer presents an ethnographic portrait of what it means in practice to "live...

What happens when a group of people see things that others do not and begin acting accordingly? The Augmented Reality of Pokemon GO: Chronotopes, Moral Panic, and Other Complexities explores this question by examining what happened after Pokemon GO, a...

This book is the English translation of a recent biography of Sakata Michita, one of Japan's leading, yet unassuming, politicians in the postwar era, who was even considered a serious contender for the premiership. While he did not become prime minister...

Heritage Politics: Shuri Castle and Okinawa's Incorporation into Modern Japan, 1879-2000 is a study of Okinawa's incorporation into a subordinate position in the Japanese nation-state, and the role that cultural heritage, especially Okinawa's iconic...

In its diversity of perspectives, The Unfinished Atomic Bomb: Shadows and Reflections is testament to the ways in which contemplations of the A-bomb are endlessly shifting, rarely fixed on the same point or perspective. The compilation of this book is...

An insightful study in disaster anthropology, this book takes as its focus the fishing town of Otsuchi in Japan's Iwate Prefecture, one of the worst damaged areas in the mammoth 2011 tsunami. Here, 1281 of the pre-tsunami population of 15000 were killed...

Since 1987, the Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) Program has recruited thousands of young college graduates from more than sixty countries, including the United States, to work in Japan for up to five years. Now, thirty years after the program's...

Stepping Up to the Cold War Challenge: The Norwegian-American Lutheran Experience in 1950s Japan describes the events that led to the Evangelical Lutheran Church (ELC), an American Christian denomination, to respond to General MacArthur's call for...

Shinzo Abe returned to office as Prime Minister of Japan 2012, leading the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) for a second time. This book examines how Abe has sought a restoration of Japanese primacy at three levels: political, through the restoration of...

This book is a collection of interwoven historical narratives that present an intriguing and little known account of the Ogasawara (Bonin) archipelago and its inhabitants. The narratives begin in the seventeenth century and weave their way through...

Yokohama Street Life: The Precarious Career of a Japanese Day Laborer is a one-man ethnography, tracing the career of a single Japanese day laborer called Kimitsu, from his wartime childhood in the southern island of Kyushu through a brief military...

Experiences of Japanese American Women during and after World War II: Living in Internment Camps and Rebuilding Life Afterwards examines the experiences of Japanese American women who were in internment camps during World War II and after. Precious...

Japan's contemporary struggle with low fertility rates is a well-known issue, as are the country's efforts to bolster their population in order to address attendant socioeconomic challenges. However, though this anxiety about and discourse around...

When Europeans first landed in Japan they encountered people they perceived as white-skinned and highly civilized, but these impressions did not endure. Gradually the Europeans' positive impressions faded away and Japanese were seen as yellow-skinned and...

Japan: From Prehistory to Modern Times has a heavy emphasis upon the premodern period of Japanese history. No attempt has been made to provide the usual kind of textbook completeness. Hall's fascination with Japanese history lies within the manner in...

In Legends of the Samurai, Hiroaki Sato confronts both the history and the legend of the samurai, untangling the two to present an authentic picture of these legendary warriors. Through his masterful translations of original samurai tales, laws, dicta,...

This important study of Japan in premodern times, embracing a span of nearly thirteen centuries, is directed toward the illumination of some important elements of continuity in Japanese history. It is an effort to explain through the detailed analysis of...

This unique book compiles some 120 remarkable letters from Japanese citizens to General Douglas MacArthur during the postwar occupation of Japan (1945-1952). Painstakingly culled from a vast collection, these letters evoke the unfiltered voices of people...

Mito, an ordinary provincial capital on the outskirts of the Tokyo commuter belt, was once the headquarters of Mito Domain, one of the most consequential places in all of Japan. As one of just three senior branches of the Tokugawa family, which ruled...

Employing a wide range of primary source materials, Modern Japan: A History in Documents provides a colorful narrative of Japan's development since 1600. A variety of diary entries, letters, legal documents, and poems brings to life the early modern...

Fourteenth-century Japan witnessed a fundamental political and intellectual conflict about the nature of power and society, a conflict that was expressed through the rituals and institutions of two rival courts. Rather than understanding the collapse of...

While the loss of sight-whether in early modern Japan or now-may be understood as a disability, blind people in the Tokugawa period (1600-1868) could thrive because of disability. The blind of the era were prominent across a wide range of professions,...

While the loss of sight-whether in early modern Japan or now-may be understood as a disability, blind people in the Tokugawa period (1600-1868) could thrive because of disability. The blind of the era were prominent across a wide range of professions,...

This volume is based upon personal observations and recollections of the author extending over six different periods of residence in Japan between 1859 and 1877. It examines how the focus of the West towards Japan changed, as Japan became a dominant...