Hailed by the British Admiralty, Theodore Roosevelt, and Kaiser Wilhelm II, the international bestseller also was endorsed by the Japanese Naval Ministry, who took it as a clarion call to enhance their own sea power. That power, of course, was eventually used against the United States. Sadao Asada opens his book with a discussion of Mahan�s sea power doctrine and demonstrates how Mahan�s ideas led the Imperial Japanese Navy to view itself as a hypothetical enemy of the Americans. Drawing on previously unused Japanese records from the three naval conferences of the 1920s�the Washington Conference of 1921-22, the Geneva Conference of 1927, and the London Conference of 1930�the author examines the strategic dilemma facing the Japanese navy during the 1920s and 1930s against the background of advancing weapon technology and increasing doubt about the relevance of battleships. He also analyzes the decisions that led to war with the United States�namely, the 1936 withdrawal from naval treaties, the conclusion of the Tripartite Pact in September 1940, and the armed advance into south Indochina in July 1941�in the context of bureaucratic struggles between the army and navy to gain supremacy. He concludes that the "ghost" of Mahan hung over the Japanese naval leaders as they prepared for war against the United State and made decisions based on miscalculations about American and Japanese strengths and American intentions.

    When he died, Pyle's popularity and readership was worldwide, with his column appearing in 400 daily and 300 weekly newspapers. Written by award-winning author and historian Ray E. Boomhower, The Soldier's Friend: A Life of Ernie Pyle, a biography aimed at young readers, explores the reporter's legendary career from his days growing up in the small town of Dana, Indiana, to his life as a roving correspondent with the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain, to his growing fame as a columnist detailing the rigors of combat faced by the average G.I. during World War II. The book also features numerous illustrations, samples of Pyle's World War II columns, a detailed bibliography of World War II sources, and an index.

    Focusing on a phenomenon commonly called "women's language," in modern Japanese society, Miyako Inoue considers the history and social effects of this language form. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a contemporary Tokyo corporation to study the everyday linguistic experience of white-collar females office workers and on historical research from the late nineteenth century to 1930, she calls into question the claim that "women's language" is a Japanese cultural tradition of ancient origin and offers a critical geneaology showing the extent to which this language form is, in fact, a cultural construct linked with Japan's national and capitalist modernity. Her theoretically sophisticated, empirically grounded, interdisciplinary work brilliantly illuminates the relationship between culture and language, the nature of power and subject formation in modernity, and how the complex nexus of gender, language, and political economy are experienced in everyday life.

    It was considered to have been one of Japan's most secret weapons - indeed the Allies remained unaware of its existence until it surrendered in late August 1945. At more than 400 ft long, weighing 5,700 tons, carrying a crew of 200 and possessing a range of over 50,000 miles, the I-400 carried three Seiran attack floatplanes in a hangar built on to its deck ahead of the massive conning tower. The Imperial Japanese Navy tasked the I-400 with a secret mission to attack American cities and to destroy the Panama Canal. This book is the result of many years of meticulous research. The authors have traced and interviewed three of the original six pilots slated to fly the Seirans on their hazardous missions. They have revealed - for the first time - the story their aircraft being painted in fake US markings for their final mission.The book contains hundreds of astonishing photographs, many previously unpublished, showing the I-400 from both outside and inside as well as its hangars and aircraft.

    Ironically, the earthquake brought down many “modern” structures built on the advice of foreign architects and engineers, while leaving certain traditional, wooden ones standing. This book, the first English-language history of modern Japanese earthquakes and earthquake science, considers the cultural and political ramifications of this and other catastrophic events on Japan’s relationship with the West, with modern science, and with itself. Gregory Clancey argues that seismicity was both the Achilles’ heel of Japan's nation-building project—revealing the state’s western-style infrastructure to be surprisingly fragile—and a new focus for nativizing discourses which credited traditional Japanese architecture with unique abilities to ride out seismic waves. Tracing his subject from the Meiji Restoration to the Great Kant Earthquake of 1923 (which destroyed Tokyo), Clancey shows earthquakes to have been a continual though mercurial agent in Japan’s self-fashioning; a catastrophic undercurrent to Japanese modernity. This innovative and absorbing study not only moves earthquakes nearer the center of modern Japan change—both materially and symbolically—but shows how fundamentally Japan shaped the global art, science, and culture of natural disaster.

    The scholarship is superb, the writing flows beautifully, and the images from the magazines are wonderfully evocative. --Jan Bardsley, University of North Carolina at Chapel HillThis important book contributes to our gendered understanding of Japanese modernity. Frederick has insightfully discerned what we need to know in order to situate the rich materials available to researchers in reprint editions of women's magazines. Because so many significant literary works made their initial appearance in women's magazines, Frederick's book allows students and scholars to appreciate as never before the context in which certain works were first read. --Sally A. Hastings, Purdue UniversityBy the early 1920s, ladies magazines (fujin zasshi) had become a distinct category in Japanese publishing. Women's periodicals increasingly influenced intellectual discourse, the literary establishment, and daily life. Turning Pages makes sense of this phenomenon through a detailed analysis of major interwar women's magazines, especially the literary journal Ladies' Review, the popular domestic periodical Housewife's Friend, and the politically radical magazine Women's Arts. Through a close examination of their literature, articles, advertising, and art, the book explores the magazines as both windows onto and actors in this vibrant period of Japanese history.Turning Pages considers the central place of representations of women for women in the culture of interwar-era Japan and our understanding of Japanese modernity. Taking a holistic approach to the texts and using tools of historical, literary, and cultural analysis, the author examines the triangular relationship among the consumers, the producers, and the texts themselves.

    This book offers a glimpse of a vanished world that is fresh and visually rewarding to modern eyes.

    Now, with Classical Japanese Reader and Essential Dictionary, he completes his two-volume textbook for learning classical, or literary, Japanese--the primary written language in Japan from the seventh to the mid-twentieth century. The text contains carefully selected readings that address a wide array of grammatical concerns and that steadily progress from easy to difficult. The selections encompass a wide range of historical periods and styles, including essays, fiction, and poetry from such noted works as The Tale of Genji, The Tales of Ise, The Pillow Book, The Tales of the Heike, and Essays in Idleness, and such authors as Ihara Saikaku, Matsuo Basho, Ueda Akinari, Motoori Norinaga, and Fukuzawa Yukichi. Each reading is accompanied by a short English introduction, a vocabulary list, and extensive grammatical notes, and ends with a comprehensive grammatical annotation.The classical Japanese-English dictionary composes the last third of the book and features approximately 2,500 key words, highlighting those used most frequently. The first of its kind, this volume is a vital tool for students, scholars, and translators of classical Japanese.

    Funerals, burials, and other mortuary rites had developed over the centuries with the aim of building continuity in the face of loss. As Japanese coped with the economic, political, and social changes that radically remade their lives in the decades after the Meiji Restoration (1868), they clung to local customs and Buddhist rituals such as sutra readings and incense offerings that for generations had given meaning to death. Yet death, as this highly original study shows, was not impervious to nationalism, capitalism, and the other isms that constituted and still constitute modernity. As Japan changed, so did its handling of the inevitable.Following an overview of the early development of funerary rituals in Japan, Andrew Bernstein demonstrates how diverse premodern practices from different regions and social strata were homogenized with those generated by middle-class city dwellers to create the form of funerary practice dominant today. He describes the controversy over cremation, explaining how and why it became the accepted manner of disposing of the dead. He also explores the conflict-filled process of remaking burial practices, which gave rise, in part, to the suburban soul parks now prevalent throughout Japan; the (largely failed) attempt by nativists to replace Buddhist death rites with Shinto ones; and the rise and fall of the funeral procession. In the process, Bernstein shows how today's traditional funeral is in fact an early twentieth-century invention and traces the social and political factors that led to this development. These include a government wanting to separate itself from religion even while propagating State Shinto, the appearance of a new middle class, and new forms of transportation.As these and other developments created new contexts for old rituals, Japanese faced the problem of how to fit them all together. What to do with the dead? is thus a question tied to a still broader one that haunts all societies experiencing rapid change: What to do with the past? Modern Passings is an impressive and far-reaching exploration of Japan's efforts to solve this puzzle, one that is at the heart of the modern experience.

    The activities of advertisers, and the new entertainment culture and patterns of consumption that they promoted, helped to define a new urban aesthetic emerging in the 1920s.This book examines some of the responses of Japanese authors to the transformation of Tokyo in the early decades of the twentieth century. In particular, it explores the themes and formal strategies of the modernist literature that flourished in the 1920s, focusing on the work of Hagiwara Kyojiro (1899-1938) and Hayashi Fumiko (1903-1951). William Gardner shows how modernist works offer new constructions of individual subjectivity amid the social and technological changes that provided the ground for the appearance of mass media. Hagiwara's conception of the poem and poet as an electric-radio advertising tower provides an emblem for the aesthetic tensions and multiple discourses of technology, media, urbanism, commerce, and propaganda that were circulating through the urban environment at the time; while Hayashi's work, with its references to popular songs, plays, and movies, suggests an understanding of everyday life as the interface between individual subjectivity and a highly mediated environment.

    In the aftermath of defeat, war memory developed as an integral part of particular and divergent approaches to postwar democracy. In the last six decades, the demands placed upon postwar democracy have shifted considerably--from social protest through high economic growth to Japan's relations in Asia--and the meanings of the war shifted with them.This book unravels the political dynamics that governed the place of war memory in public life. Far from reconciling with the victims of Japanese imperialism, successive conservative administrations have left the memory of the war to representatives of special interests and citizen movements, all of whom used war memory to further their own interests.Franziska Seraphim traces the activism of five prominent civic organizations to examine the ways in which diverse organized memories have secured legitimate niches within the public sphere. The history of these domestic conflicts--over the commemoration of the war dead, the manipulation of national symbols, the teaching of history, or the articulation of relations with China and Korea--is crucial to the current discourse about apology and reconciliation in East Asia, and provides essential context for the global debate on war memory.