In the early 1950s fisherfolk and other villagers around Minamata Bay on the western coast of Kyushu, Japan, began to suffer from mysterious and often fatal symptoms of what came to be known as Minamata disease. It was not until 1968 that the government acknowledged its cause--organic mercury poisoning from effluent released by Chisso Corporation, a chemical manufacturer and the largest employer in the Japanese city for which the disease was named. For decades the company denied responsibility and was joined by the Japanese government in its attempt to cover up the problem despite lawsuits...

*For the bibliography mentioned in the book, click here. A Thousand Miles of Dreams is an evocative and intimate biography of two Chinese sisters who took very different paths in their quests to be independent women. Ling Shuhao arrived in Cleveland in 1925 to study medicine in the middle of a U.S. crackdown on Chinese immigrant communities, and her effort to assimilate began. She became an American named Amy, while her sister Ling Shuhua burst onto the Beijing literary scene as a writer of short fiction. Shuhua's tumultuous affair with Virginia Woolf's nephew during his years in China...

Ranging from Geneva to Pyongyang, this remarkable book takes readers on an odyssey through one of the most extraordinary forgotten tragedies of the Cold War: the "return" of over 90,000 people, most of them ethnic Koreans, from Japan to North Korea from 1959 onward. Presented to the world as a humanitarian venture and conducted under the supervision of the International Red Cross, the scheme was actually the result of political intrigues involving the governments of Japan, North Korea, the Soviet Union, and the United States. The great majority of the Koreans who journeyed to North Korea in...

Takeyama Michio, the author of Harp of Burma, was thirty-seven in 1941, the year of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Husband, father of children born during the war, and teacher at Japan's elite school of higher education in Tokyo, he experienced the war on its home front. His essays provide us with a personal record of the bombing of Tokyo, the shortage of food, the inability to get accurate information about the war, the frictions between civilians and military and between his elite students and other civilians, the mobilization of students into factory jobs and the military, and the...

Spanning decades of research, this compelling social history tells the stories of ordinary people in modern Japan. Tatsuichi Horikiri spent a lifetime searching out old items of clothing ranging from everyday kimono, work clothes, uniforms, and futons to actor s costumes, diapers, hats, aprons, and bags. Simultaneously he collected oral history accounts to shed light on those who used these items. Horikiri reveals not only the difficult and sometimes desperate lives of these people, most from the lower strata in early twentieth-century Japan, he illuminates their hopes, aspirations, and human...

This clear and accessible text provides a comprehensive survey of women s history in China from the Neolithic period through the end of the Qing dynasty in the early twentieth century. Rather than providing an exhaustive chronicle of this vast subject, Bret Hinsch pinpoints the themes that characterized distinct periods in Chinese women s history and delves into the perception of female identity in each era. Moving beyond the traditional focus on the late imperial era, Hinsch explores how gender relations have developed and changed since ancient times. His chronological look at the most...

From Comfort Woman: "We began the day with breakfast, after which we swept and cleaned our rooms. Then we went to the bathroom downstairs to wash the only dress we had and to bathe. The bathroom did not even have a door, so the soldiers watched us. We were all naked, and they laughed at us, especially me and the other young girl who did not have any pubic hair. "At two, the soldiers came. My work began, and I lay down as one by one the soldiers raped me. Every day, anywhere from twelve to over twenty soldiers assaulted me. There were times when there were as many as thirty; they came to the...

This landmark book documents little-known wartime Japanese atrocities during World War II. Yuki Tanaka's case studies, still remarkably original and significant, include cannibalism; the slaughter and starvation of prisoners of war; the rape, enforced prostitution, and murder of noncombatants; and biological warfare experiments. The author describes how desperate Japanese soldiers consumed the flesh of their own comrades killed in fighting as well as that of Australians, Pakistanis, and Indians. He traces the fate of sixty-five shipwrecked Australian nurses and British soldiers who were shot...