With poetry and commentary, From the Bottom: Anti-Japanese Verses offers a much-needed challenge to the culture elite and policy wonks of a sun-marked country, where its red and white colors still fly as if they were an emblem of squeezing blood from bone. Unearthing what is buried beneath the seemly topography of the island nation, the book renders Japan's postwar history as an enormous inanity that has just come full circle, from nuclear to nuclear, from Hiroshima to Fukushima. Often with scathing mockery and derision, the work gives expression to the tension between tribal elite politics...