This memoir chronicles his extraordinary life and intellectual pursuits.

    Her Japanese translation of L. M. Montgomery's beloved children's classic Anne of Green Gables, Akage no An (Red-haired Anne), was the catalyst for the book's massive and enduring popularity in Japan. A book that has since spawned countless interpretations, from manga to a long-running television series, and has remained on Japanese curriculum for half a century. For the first time, the bestselling biography of Hanako Muraoka written by her granddaughter, Eri Muraoka, and translated by the award-winning Cathy Hirano (The Life-changing Magic of Tidying Up), is available in English. A young girl born into an impoverished farming family in Yamanashi Prefecture, when Hanako Muraoka is given the opportunity to attend the illustrious girls' school Toyo Eiwa Jogakuin, she falls in love with the English language, and with translating poetry. This love of the written word leads to a career as a children's writer, but her burgeoning literary life is cut tragically short with the death of her son and the bankruptcy of her husband's printing company. When the Second World War brings an end to her stint reading children's stories over the radio—for which she is known across Japan as "Aunty Radio"—she turns to her first love: translation. It was the story of a young girl in a pastoral setting with a love of poetry that spoke most powerfully to Muraoka's heart. Amidst the wail of air raid sirens, she began translating her copy of Anne of Green Gables into Japanese around 1943, completing the majority of the work during the Second World War. In 1952, despite the crumbling of the Japanese publishing industry and the censorship enforced by the occupation, a publisher took a chance on an unknown translator, and the rest is history. From rural Japan to mid-century Tokyo, Anne's Cradle tells the complex and captivating story of a woman who came of age in conservative twentieth-century Japan, and risked everything to bring the best of children's literature to her people, and cultivated a literary career that led generations of Japanese readers to fall in love with a plucky redhead from Prince Edward Island.

    But this popular image only brushes the surface of the samurai tradition. The Samurai Swordsman: Master of War brings to life the history behind the courageous and highly disciplined fighting men of early Japan.Authoritative military history expert Stephen Turnbull shows how the samurai evolved from the primitive fighters of the 7th century into an invincible military caste with a fearsome reputation. Many aspects of the samurai and their military significance are covered, including the cultural reasons why the elite mounted archers originally emerged in Japan; their wars against pirate invaders; how samurai masters taught the next generation; the women samurai and their accomplishments; and much more. Illustrated with full-color historical images that show the samurai tradition in fascinating detail, The Samurai Swordsman is an invaluable guide to an enduring legacy.

    Foregrounding these voluminous records, Totani disputes the notion that the trial was an exercise in "victors' justice" in which the legal process was egregiously compromised for political and ideological reasons; rather, the author details the achievements of the Allied prosecution teams in documenting war crimes and establishing the responsibility of the accused parties to show how the IMTFE represented a sound application of the legal principles established at Nuremberg.This study deepens our knowledge of the historical intricacies surrounding the Tokyo trial and advances our understanding of the Japanese conduct of war and occupation during World War II, the range of postwar debates on war guilt, and the relevance of the IMTFE to the continuing development of international humanitarian law.

    To witness the amazing parallel development of the railways in Japan, happening at much the same time as America was connecting its vast hinterland to the East and West coasts, is an eye-opening realization. Early Japanese Railways, tells the fascinating story of the rise of Japanese rail amidst a period of rapid modernization during Japan's Meiji era. Leaving behind centuries of stagnation and isolation, Japan would emerge into the 20th century as a leading modern industrialized state. The development of the railways was a significant factor in the cultural and technological development of Japan during this pivotal period. Free's rare photographic and historical materials concerning Japan's early railways, including a print showing the miniature steam engine brought to Japan by Admiral Perry aboard his "Black Ships" to demonstrate American superiority, combine to form a richly detailed account that will appeal to students of Japanese history and railway buffs alike. This one-of-a-kind book, Early Japanese Railways 1853–1914, illuminates for non-Japanese-speaking readers the early history of Japanese railroads and in the process the fascinating story of Japan's prewar industrial modernization. Anyone interested in train history or model trains will find this book a fascinating read.

    The author draws upon his extensive collection of Japanese wartime publications to reconstruct the government-controlled media's narrative of the war's goals and progress - thus providing a close-up look at how the war was shown to Japanese on the home front. Many of these visual and written sources are rare in Japan and were previously unavailable in the West. Strikingly, the narrative remains consistent and convincing from victory to retreat, and even as defeat looms large. Earhart's nuanced reading of Japan's wartime media depicts a nation waging war against the world and a government terrorizing its own people. At once informed, scholarly, and readily accessible, this lavishly illustrated volume offers an accurate representation of the official Japanese narrative of the war in contemporary terms. The images are fresh and compelling, revealing a forgotten world by turns familiar and alien, beautiful and stark, poignant and terrifying.

    Following the Soviet invasion of Manchuria and Japan's surrender in August 1945, their dream turned into a nightmare. Since the late 1980s, popular Japanese conceptions have overlooked the disastrous impact of colonization and resurrected the utopian justification for creating Manchukuo, as the puppet state was known. This re-remembering, Mariko Tamanoi argues, constitutes a source of friction between China and Japan today. Memory Maps tells the compelling story of both the promise of a utopia and the tragic aftermath of its failure. An anthropologist, Tamanoi approaches her investigation of Manchuria's colonization and collapse as a complex history of the present, which in postcolonial studies refers to the examination of popular memory of past colonial relations of power. To mitigate this complexity, she has created four memory maps that draw on the recollections of former Japanese settlers, their children who were left in China and later repatriated, and Chinese who lived under Japanese rule in Manchuria.The first map presents the oral histories of farmers who emigrated from Nagano, Japan, to Manchuria between 1932 and 1945 and returned home after the war. Interviewees were asked to remember the colonization of Manchuria during Japan's age of empire. Hikiage-mono (autobiographies) make up the second map. These are written memories of repatriation from the Soviet invasion to some time between 1946 and 1949. The third memory map is entitled Orphans' Voices. It examines the oral and written memories of the children of Japanese settlers who were left behind at the war's end but returned to Japan after relations between China and Japan were normalized in 1972. The memories of Chinese who lived the age of empire in Manchuria make up the fourth map. This map also includes the memories of Chinese couples who adopted the abandoned children of Japanese settlers as well as the children themselves, who renounced their Japanese nationality and chose to remain in China. In the final chapter, Tamanoi considers theoretical questions of the state and the relationship between place, voice, and nostalgia. She also attempts to integrate the four memory maps in the transnational space covering Japan and China.Both fastidious in dealing with theoretical questions and engagingly written, Memory Maps contributes not only to the empirical study of the Japanese empire and its effects on the daily lives of Japanese and Chinese, but also to postcolonial theory as it applies to the use of memory.

    The late seventh and eighth centuries were a time of momentous change in Japan, much of it brought about by the short-lived Tenmu dynasty. Two new capital cities, a bureaucratic state led by an imperial ruler, and Chinese-style law codes were just a few of the innovations instituted by the new regime. Herman Ooms presents both a wide-ranging and fine-grained examination of the power struggles, symbolic manipulations, new mythological constructs, and historical revisions that both defined and propelled these changes.In addition to a vast amount of research in Japanese sources, the author draws on a wealth of sinological scholarship in English, German, and French to illuminate the politics and symbolics of the time. An important feature of the book is the way it opens up early Japanese history to considerations of continental influences. Rulers and ritual specialists drew on several religious and ritual idioms, including Daoism, Buddhism, yin-yang hermeneutics, and kami worship, to articulate and justify their innovations. In looking at the religious symbols that were deployed in support of the state, Ooms gives special attention to the Daoist dimensions of the new political symbolics as well as to the crucial contributions made by successive generations of immigrants from the Korean peninsula. From the beginning, a liturgical state sought to co-opt factions and clans (uji) as participants in the new polity with the emperor acting as both a symbolic mediator and a silent partner. In contrast to the traditional interpretation of the Kojiki mythology as providing a vertical legitimation of a Sun lineage of rulers, an argument is presented for the importance of a lateral dimension of interdependency as a key structural element in the mythological narrative.An enlightening line of interpretation woven into the author's analysis centers on purity. This eminently politico-ritual value central to Chinese Daoism and Buddhism was used by Tenmu as the emblematic expression of his regime and new political power. The concept of purity was most fully realized in the world of the Saio princess in Ise and was later used by Ise ritualists to defend themselves against Buddhist rivals. At the end of the Tenmu dynasty, it was widely believed that avenging spirits were the principal source of danger and pollution, notions understood here as statements about the bloody political battles that were waged in Tenmu court circles.The Tenmu dynasty began and ended in bloodshed and was marked throughout by instability and upheaval. Constant succession struggles between two branches of the royal line and a few outside lineages generated a host of plots, uprisings, murders, and accusations of black magic. This aspect of the period gets full treatment in fascinatingly detailed narratives, which the author skillfully alternates with his trademark structural analysis.Imperial Politics and Symbolics in Ancient Japan is a boldly imaginative, carefully and extensively researched, and richly textured history that will reward reading by Japan specialists and students in several disciplines as well as by scholars with an interest in the role of religious symbolism in state formation.

    Bird was recommended an open-air life from an early age as a cure for her physical and nervous difficulties. She toured the United States and Canada, New Zealand, Australia and the Sandwich Islands, before travelling to the Far East in order to strengthen herself to marry Dr John Bishop and live in Edinburgh. Created out of the letters Bird wrote home, primarily to her sister, Volume 1 recounts her experiences as a solo woman traveller living among the Japanese in Yokohama and Niigata. It includes descriptions of clothing, food and drink, education, housing, theatre, women's lifestyles, religion, plant life, medicine, shopping and other day-to-day activities, as well as the vicissitudes and excitement of the conditions and process of travelling, including by boat and pack-horse.

    This title examines the narratives of women writers who travelled to Japan from the mid-1850s onwards, when Japan was first opened to the West, and became a highly desirable travel destination for decades thereafter.

    This text renders alternate attendance as a lived experience, for not only the daimyo but also the samurai retainers who accompanied them.