Wherever Japanese literature, poetry or Zen are studied, his oeuvre carries weight. Every new student of haiku quickly learns that Basho was the greatest of the Old Japanese Masters.Yet despite his stature, Bashos complete haiku have not been collected into a single volume. Until now.To render the writers full body of work into English, Jane Reichhold, an American haiku poet and translator, dedicated over ten years of work. In Basho: The Complete Haiku, she accomplishes the feat with distinction. Dividing his creative output into seven periods of development, Reichhold frames each period with a decisive biographical sketch of the poets travels, creative influences and personal triumphs and defeats. Scrupulously annotated notes accompany each poem; and a glossary and two indexes fill out the volume.Reichhold notes that, Basho was a genius with words. He obsessively sought out the right word for each phrase of the succinct seventeen-syllable haiku, seeking the very essence of experience and expression. With equal dedication, Reichhold sought the ideal translations. As a result, Basho: The Complete Haiku is likely to become the essential work on this brilliant poet and will stand as the most authoritative book on the subject for many years to come. Original sumi-e ink drawings by artist Shiro Tsujimura complement the haiku throughout the book.

    What is the value of things made by an anonymous craftsman working in a set tradition for a lifetime? What is the value of handwork? Why should even the roughly lacquered rice bowl of a Japanese farmer be thought beautiful? The late Soetsu Yanagi was the first to fully explore the traditional Japanese appreciation for objects born, not made.Mr. Yanagi sees folk art as a manifestation of the essential world from which art, philosophy, and religion arise and in which the barriers between them disappear. The implications of the author's ideas are both far-reaching and practical.Soetsu Yanagi is often mentioned in books on Japanese art, but this is the first translation in any Western language of a selection of his major writings. The late Bernard Leach, renowned British potter and friend of Mr. Yanagi for fifty years, has clearly transmitted the insights of one of Japan's most important thinkers. The seventy-six plates illustrate objects that underscore the universality of his concepts. The author's profound view of the creative process and his plea for a new artistic freedom within tradition are especially timely now when the importance of craft and the handmade object is being rediscovered.

    The first volume in a five-volume work in the form of a slightly fictionalized biography describing the development of Soka Gakkai, the worldwide religion based on Nichiren Shoshu Buddhism.

    He was active in literature, engineering, calligraphy, and architecture and is represented in this work in terms of his major effort--the introduction of esoteric Buddhism from China, which resulted in the formation of the Shingou sect still active in Japan. Eight of his works are presented here.

    Contains many eyewitness accounts, photographs, and illustrations.

    

    

    Illustrated with actual photographs from the author's collection in the American Museum of Natural History.

    Born in China during the last days of the empire, the author served as an American diplomat in the midst of the Chinese-Japanese conflict, acted as political adviser to General “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell during World War II, dealt with Chou En-lai and Mao Tse-tung, and from the American Embassy at Moscow observed the end of the war against Japan and the beginning of what he had foretold—the Communist conquest of China and the emergence in the Far East of a balance of power unfavorable to the United States. Two major themes interweave through this narrative. One is the collapse of traditional China and the fusion therefrom of a new, a Communist, China. A second theme is the American intrusion into East Asia, at first to trade with, enlighten, and baptize the Chinese, “open” Japan, “liberate” the Philippines, and assume the role of an imperial power in the Far East.