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 of a century of Japanese theorizing about Jews, an important part of which has been antisemitic. In recent years, books blaming Jews for everything from the designs on Japanese currency to the 1995 Kobe earthquake have appeared, and some have sold millions of copies. What explains this virtual obsession with Jews in Japan--a country that has no...

When Commodore Perry arrived in Japan to open the country to Western trade in 1853, he found a medieval amalgam of sword-bearing samurai, castle towns, Confucian academies, peasant villages, rice paddies, upstart merchants, bath houses, and Kabuki. Fifteen years later, Japan was on its way to becoming the only non-Western nation in the nineteenth century with a modern centralized bureaucratic state and industrial economy. This book is a study of the Meiji Restoration that changed the face of Japan. Prominent historian Albert M. Craig tells its story through that of the domain of Choshu--whose...

Unhappy Soldier chronicles the writings of Hino Ashihei, Japan's most popular World War II writer. Ashihei rose to national celebrity status during the Pacific War for his accounts of campaigns in China and Southeast Asia, works that identified and sympathized with the common soldier. Despite being linked to the nationalistic ideology of the wartime state and purged during the Occupation, Ashihei proved to be an enduring literary and cultural phenomenon, reinventing himself with new, postwar writing that confronted the sunny patriotism of his wartime work. David Rosenfeld's book--the first...

In 1942, Hugh Borton, then a 39-year-old assistant professor of Japanese history, was called to serve in the State Department. Here he rose rapidly to become one of the principal architects of United States policy toward post-war Japan. Drawn from Borton's personal papers, this work provides a fresh and intimate picture of the man who played a pivotal role in defining the meaning of unconditional surrender for Japan, retaining the Emperor, and designing Japan's post-war constitution. It sheds new light on the development of the United States' post-war Japanese policy and the often-fractious...

In 1942, Hugh Borton, then a 39-year-old assistant professor of Japanese history, was called to serve in the State Department. Here he rose rapidly to become one of the principal architects of United States policy toward post-war Japan. Drawn from Borton's personal papers, this work provides a fresh and intimate picture of the man who played a pivotal role in defining the meaning of unconditional surrender for Japan, retaining the Emperor, and designing Japan's post-war constitution. It sheds new light on the development of the United States' post-war Japanese policy and the often-fractious...

Although Japanese universities have relied on information technology to resolve numerous problems, their high expectations are undermined by lags in implementing that technology. This innovative edited volume argues that lags in IT implementation in Japanese education are created by contradictory and challenging responses of the social environment. If this dialectic can be visualized as having hands, the right avidly promotes IT, while the left hand simultaneously blocks it. The result, of course, is an impasse. The issues central to this stalemate are significant because they point beyond...

In his book, Murakami Haruki, Dr. Michael Seats offers an important philosophical intervention in the discussion of the relationship between Murakami's fiction and contemporary Japanese culture. Breaking through conventional analysis, Seats demonstrates how Murakami's first and later trilogies utilize the structure of the simulacrum, a second-order representation, to develop a complex critique of contemporary Japanese culture. By outlining the critical-fictional contours of the 'Murakami Phenomenon, ' the discussion confronts the vexing question of Japanese modernity and subjectivity within...

This collection takes a unique country-by-country approach to examine Japan's relations with individual Asian countries and sub-regions. As Japan's activism increases under the Koizumi administration, Japan in a Dynamic Asia provides a timely, updated understanding of Japan's rapidly changing foreign policies in the contexts of the new regional power balance and security concerns.

This collection takes a unique country-by-country approach to examine Japan's relations with individual Asian countries and sub-regions. As Japan's activism increases under the Koizumi administration, Japan in a Dynamic Asia provides a timely, updated understanding of Japan's rapidly changing foreign policies in the contexts of the new regional power balance and security concerns.

Japan and Germany under the U.S. Occupation explores the reconstruction of education in both countries after World War II. In Japan large-scale reforms were undertaken swiftly after the nation's surrender, whereas in the U.S. Zone of Germany most of the traditional aspects of education were maintained. Masako Shibata argues that differences in the role of the university and in the pattern of elite formation, traceable back to the beginnings of Meiji Japan and the Kaiserreich created the conditions for the diverging approaches of the Japanese and German leaders to the adoption of foreign...