But the prolific author shocked the world in 1970 when he attempted a coup d’état that ended in his suicide by ritual disembowelment. In this radically new analysis of Mishima’s extraordinary life, Damian Flanagan deviates from the stereotypical depiction of a right-wing nationalist and aesthete, presenting the author instead as a man in thrall to the modern world while also plagued by hidden neuroses and childhood trauma that pushed him toward his explosive final act.             Flanagan argues that Mishima was a man obsessed with the concepts of time and “emperor,” and reveals how these were at the heart of his literature and life. Untangling the distortions in the writer’s memoirs, Flanagan traces the evolution of Mishima’s attempts to master and transform his sexuality and artistic persona. While often perceived as a solitary protest figure, Mishima, Flanagan shows, was very much in tune with postwar culture—he took up bodybuilding and became a model and actor in the 1950s, adopted the themes of contemporary political scandals in his work, courted English translators, and became influenced by the student protests and hippie subculture of the late 1960s. A groundbreaking reevaluation of the author, this succinct biography paints a revealing portrait of Mishima’s life and work.

    Each story contains a shushin, or moral that will teach your child about respecting and helping others. Through imaginative, enchanting tales, More Japanese Children's Favorite Stories brings all the flavor and wonder of Japan to a new generation of English-speaking readers. This 60th Anniversary Tuttle edition is proof that good stories never wear out.Florence Sakade, a pioneer of English-language publishing in Japan, has compiled so many enchanting stories that readers will have a difficult time deciding which is their favorite. The lively illustrations by Yoshio Hayashi are a visual treat that readers of all ages will enjoy! His dazzling watercolors bring to life the fascinating tales of magic mortar, rolling rice cakes, and red elves, among many others. They paint a wonderful portrait of the Japanese countryside, with its steep mountains and verdant hills. This treasure trove of Japanese stories shines on every page, and is sure to captivate your family as it has so many others over the years. The Children's Favorite Stories series was created to share the folktales and legends most beloved by children in the East with young readers of all backgrounds in the West. Other multicultural children's books in this series include: Asian Children's Favorite Stories, Indian Children's Favorite Stories, Indonesian Children's Favorite Stories, Japanese Children's Favorite Stories, Singapore Children's Favorite Stories, Filipino Favorite Children's Stories, Favorite Children's Stories from China & Tibet, Chinese Children's Favorite Stories, Korean Children's Favorite Stories, Balinese Children's Favorite Stories, and Vietnamese Children's Favorite Stories.

    Mighty Ontake is like that. The mountain's inexhaustible treasury of riches is like some endless storybook with its pages uncut. As one follows the rambling plot along, one is always looking forward to reading more. Every page yields things never found in other books. Ontake is that kind of mountain."One Hundred Mountains is that kind of book. "Nowhere in the world do people hold mountains in so much regard as in Japan," observed the author, Kyūya Fukada, in the afterword to his most famous work. "Mountains have played a part in Japanese history since the country's beginnings, and they manifest themselves in every form of art. For mountains have always formed the bedrock of the Japanese soul."In One Hundred Mountains, Fukada pays tribute to his favorite summits. Published in 1964, the book became an instant classic. Consisting of one hundred short essays, each celebrating one notable mountain and its place in Japan's traditions, the book is an elegantly written eulogy to the landscape, literature, and history that define a people. More recently, Japan's national broadcasting company has turned it into a memorable TV series.Fukada himself was bemused by his book's success: "In the end, the one hundred mountains represent my personal choice and I make no claims for them beyond that." Yet, half a century after he set down those words, his mountains have become a cultural institution. Marked on every hiking map and enshrined in scores of spin-off books, his One Hundred Mountains are today firmly embedded in the mountain traditions they grew out of.Now available in English for the first time, One Hundred Mountains of Japan will serve as a vade mecum to the Japanese mountains for a new cohort of hikers and mountaineers. It will also open up novel territories for students of Japan's literature, folklore, religions, and mountaineering history--in short, for mountain-lovers everywhere.

    Explore the code of the Samurai and discover the virtues that governed their lives. Loyalty, Respect, Honor and Compassion are just a few of the virtues laid out in Bushido, The Way of the Warrior. In Japanese Spirituality you will learn the virtues of Bushido, discover the religion suited perfectly for the Samurai ethic and uncover the mysterious Tea Ceremony. Japanese Spirituality contains the following books as well as illustrations, pictures interactive table of contents and more.Bushido, Inazo Nitobe:Nitobé eloquently explains the persistence of feudal Japan's morals, ethics, and etiquette into modern times. He takes a far-reaching approach, drawing examples from indigenous traditions — Buddhism, Shintoism, Confucianism, and the philosophies of samurai and sages — as well as from ancient and modern Western thinkers. Religion of the Samurai, Kaiten Nukariya:Zen was uniquely suited to the Samurai of Japan. The high moral principles of Buddhism, when adopted and adapted by the Japanese warriors who became the Samurai, created an austere philosophy of singular beauty and depth. Its characteristic requirements of strict control over body and mind was exemplified by ancient warrior monks whose serene countenance, even in the face of certain death, made them much admired even by their foes. The Book of Tea, Kakuzo Okakura:Japanese scholar, writer and art curator Kakuzo Okakura (1862-1913), who spent years writing about Japanese art and culture, was one of the principal founders of the first Japanese fine arts academy. He traveled to Boston in the early 1900's, where he became the first head of the Asian Arts Division at the Museum of Fine Arts. He was friends with influential figures of the day, including art collector Isabella Stewart Gardner, poet Ezra Pound, and philosopher Martin Heidegger. Religion in Japan, George A. Cobbold:Religion in Japan: Shintoism-Buddhism- Christianity was written by the Reverend George Augustus Cobbold (1857-? ). "It may well be questioned whether, in the course of a like period of time, any country has ever undergone greater transitions, or made more rapid strides along the path of civilization than has Japan during the last quarter of a century. A group of numerous islands, situated on the high-road and thoroughfare of maritime traffic across the Pacific, between the Eastern and Western hemispheres, and in area considerably exceeding Great Britain and Ireland, -Japan, until thirty years ago, was a terra incognita to the rest of the world; exceeding even China in its conservatism and exclusiveness. "

    At the time, he received a fan letter (more specifically, an audio cassette tape with a recorded message) from a blind girl, who sounded like she was living three years into the future."I was involved in a car accident and lost my eyesight ... During the moments of despair, I heard ‘Melody’, Mr. Seno's music, on radio ... I realized that I could still find hope in my life …"Masayuki first thought it was a prank, but he played along with it via the mail exchange between two antiquated cylindrical mailboxes in respective timelines. Future events that the girl said would happen were realized one after another, and he eventually was convinced that she told the truth.Can Masayuki really compose such a masterpiece titled 'Melody', to give the girl energy to live in the future?This work was first published in Japan in 2005 and translated in 2014 for The BBB: Breakthrough Bandwagon Books.

    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 experimentation; still others tried to create a distinctly Japanese fictional style that concentrated on first-person perspective, the so-called "I-novel." There was a general sense that Japan needed to reinvent itself, but writers and artists were at odds over what form this reinvention should take. Throughout his career, Kajii drew from these various camps but belonged to none of them, making his work an invaluable indicator of a culture in crisis and transition.The Youth of Things is the first full-length book devoted to Kajii Motojirō. It brings together English translations of nearly all his completed stories with an analysis of his literature in the context of several major themes that locate him in 1920s Japan. In particular, Dodd links the writer's work with the physical body: Kajii's subjective literary presence was grounded first and foremost in his TB-stricken physical body, hence one cannot be studied without the other. His concerns with health and mortality drove him to play a central role in constructing a language for modern literature and to offer new insights into ideas that intrigued so many other Taishō intellectuals and writers. In addition, Kajii's early years as a writer were strongly influenced by the cosmopolitan humanism of the White Birch (Shirakaba) school, but by the time his final work was published in the early 1930s, an environment of greater cultural introspection was beginning to take root, encapsulated in the expression "return to Japan" (nihon kaiki). Only a few years separate these two moments in time, but they represent a profound shift in the aspirations and expectations of a whole generation of writers. Through a study of Kajii's writing, this book offers some sense of the demise of one cultural moment and the creation of another.

    In other words, nothing like the catastrophe at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station was possible--no tsunami of 45 feet could swamp a nuclear power station and knock out its emergency systems. No blackout could last for days. No triple meltdown could occur. Nothing like this could ever happen. Until it did--over the course of a week in March 2011.In this volume and in gripping detail, the Independent Investigation Commission on the Fukushima Nuclear Accident, a civilian-led group, presents a thorough and powerful account of what happened within hours and days after this nuclear disaster, the second worst in history. It documents the findings of a working group of more than thirty people, including natural scientists and engineers, social scientists and researchers, business people, lawyers, and journalists, who researched this crisis involving multiple simultaneous dangers. They conducted over 300 investigative interviews to collect testimony from relevant individuals. The responsibility of this committee was to act as an external ombudsman, summarizing its conclusions in the form of an original report, published in Japanese in February 2012. This has now been substantially rewritten and revised for this English-language edition.The work reveals the truth behind the tragic saga of the multiple catastrophic accidents at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station.It serves as a valuable and essential historical reference, which will help to inform and guide future nuclear safety and policy in both Japan and internationally.

    Rich in social detail and profound in its psychology, it follows the political and sentimental evolution of the protagonist Kanno Shōzō from a humiliating recantation of his socialist creed to a problematic participation in Japan's war against China. Nogami Yaeko (1885-1985) was Japan's longest-lived woman writer and has an assured place in the history of Japanese fiction. Winner of the prestigious Nomiuri prize, The Labyrinth was immediately recognized as a major critical contribution to the understanding of Japanese political and intellectual history.

    A picture book written by Tanikawa Shuntarou and illustrated by Matsumoto Taiyou on what happens when Kanai Kun stops coming to school

    What do they have in common, besides being Japanese? They all wrote " zuihitsu" -- a uniquely Japanese literary genre encompassing features of the nonfiction or personal essay and miscellaneous musings. For sheer range of subject matter and breadth of perspective, the "zuihitsu" is unrivaled in the Japanese literary tradition, which may explain why few examples have been translated into English. Springing from a variety of social, artistic, political, and professional discourses, "zuihitsu" is an undeniably important literary form practiced by all types of people who reveal much about themselves, their identities, and the times in which they lived. "Zuihitsu" also contain a good deal of humor, which is often underrepresented in translations of "serious" Japanese writing.This anthology presents a representative selection of more than one hundred "zuihitsu" from a range of historical periods written by close to fifty authors -- from well-known figures, such as Matsuo Basho, Natsume Soseki, and Koda Aya, to such writers as Tachibana Nankei and Dekune Tatsuro, whose names appear here for the first time in English.Writers speak on the experience of coming down with a cold, the aesthetics of tea, the physiology and psychology of laughter, the demands of old age, standards of morality, childrearing, the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, sleeplessness, undergoing surgery, and training a parrot to say "thank you." Varying in length from paragraphs to pages, these works also provide moving descriptions of snowy landscapes, foggy London, Ueno Park's famous cherry blossoms, and the appeal of rainy vistas, and relate the joys and troubles of everyone from desperate samurai to filial children and ailing cats.