Kategoria BISAC: History >> Asia - Japan

The history of German medicine has undergone intense scrutiny because of its indelible connection to Nazi crimes. What is less well known is that Meiji Japan adopted German medicine as its official model in 1869. In Doctors of Empire, Hoi-eun Kim recounts the story of the almost 1,200 Japanese medical students who rushed to German universities to learn cutting-edge knowledge from the world leaders in medicine, and of the dozen German physicians who were invited to Japan to transform the country's medical institutions and education.

Shifting fluently between German, English,...

Entering service during the Sino-Japanese War, the Nakajima B5N (code-named "Kate") excelled and went on to achieve surprising and dramatic successes in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. It also contributed to the sinking of the U.S. aircraft carriers USS Lexington at the Battle of the Coral Sea, USS Yorktown at the Battle of Midway, and USS Hornet at the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands. Its replacement, the Nakajima B6N "Jill," while a marked improvement over its illustrious predecessor, was never able to achieve its full potential in combat due to advances in...

This fascinating publication showcases the Saint Louis Art Museum's collection of Japanese military prints and related materials--one of the largest collections of such works in the world. The 1,400 objects in the collection are mostly color woodblock prints, but the holdings also include paintings, lithographs, photographs, stereographs, books, magazines, maps, game boards, textiles, ceramics, toys, sketchbooks, and commemorative materials. This extraordinary body of visual works chronicles Japan's rise as a modern nation from the beginning of the Meiji Restoration in 1868 through the...

Inspired by an early love of Japanese aesthetics, tech entrepreneur and avid art collector Larry Ellison has assembled an impressive collection of Japanese art spanning some eleven hundred years of history. The current selection, which introduces the collection to the public for the first time, is organized into four areas: sculpture, painting, lacquer, and metalwork.

Highlights include a remarkable wood figure of Shotoku...

The city of Kyoto has undergone radical shifts in its significance as a political and cultural center, as a hub of the national bureaucracy, as a symbolic and religious center, and as a site for the production and display of art. However, the field of Japanese history and culture lacks a book that considers Kyoto on its own terms as a historic city with a changing identity.

Examining cultural production in the city of Kyoto in two periods of political transition, this book promises to be a major step forward in advancing our knowledge of Kyoto s history and culture. Its chapters focus...

The Princess Nun tells the story of Bunchi (1619-1697), daughter of Emperor Go-Mizunoo and founder of Enshōji. Bunchi advocated strict adherence to monastic precepts while devoting herself to the posthumous welfare of her family. As the first full-length biographical study of a premodern Japanese nun, this book incorporates issues of gender and social status into its discussion of Bunchi's ascetic practice and religious reforms to rewrite the history of Buddhist reform and Tokugawa religion.

Gina Cogan's approach moves beyond the dichotomy of oppression and liberation...

Yanagita Kunio (1875-1962) was a public intellectual who played a pivotal role in shaping modern Japan's cultural identity. A self-taught folk scholar and elite bureaucrat, he promoted folk studies in Japan. So extensive was his role that he has been compared with the fabled Grimm Brothers of Germany and the great British folklorist James G. Frazer (1854-1941), author of The Golden Bough. This monograph is only the second book-length English-language examination of Yanagita, and it is the first analysis that moves beyond a biographical account of his pioneering work in folk...

The past several decades have seen widespread reform of labor markets across advanced industrial countries, but most of the existing research on job security, wage bargaining, and social protection is based on the experience of the United States and Western Europe. In Inequality in the Workplace, Jiyeoun Song focuses on South Korea and Japan, which have advanced labor market reform and confronted the rapid rise of a split in labor markets between protected regular workers and underprotected and underpaid nonregular workers. The two countries have implemented very different...

The bitter six-month struggle for control of Guadalcanal in the South Pacific during World War II matched the US Marine Corps against the Imperial Japanese Army in a campaign that would test both sides to the limit. In this book the realities of prolonged warfare in an unforgiving environment are documented in photographs, specially commissioned artwork, official reports, and first-hand accounts, offering a glimpse of infantry combat in World War II's Pacific Theater.

The toughness of American Marines was sorely tested by Japanese troops willing to lay down their lives in Banzai...

When he died from tuberculosis at the age of thirty-one, Kajii Motojiro had written only twenty short stories. Yet his life and work, it is argued here, sheds light on a significant moment in Japanese history and, ultimately, adds to our understanding of how modern Japanese identity developed. By the time Kajii began to write in the mid-1920s there was heated debate among his peers over "legitimate" forms of literary expression: Japanese Romantics questioned the value of a western-inspired version of modernity; others were influenced by Marxist proletarian literature or modernist...