This widely used undergraduate text is now available in a new edition. Thoroughly updated, the fourth edition includes expanded sections on numerous topics, among which are samurai values, Zen Buddhism, the tea ceremony, Confucianism in the Tokugawa period, the story of the forty-seven ronin, Mito scholarship in the early nineteenth century, and mass culture and comics in contemporary times.

    The Good Man of Nanking is a crucial document for understanding one of World War II's most horrific incidents of genocide, one which the Japanese have steadfastly refused to acknowledge.  It is also the moving and awe-inspiring record of one man's conscience, courage, and generosity in the face of appalling human brutality.Until the recent emergence of John Rabe's diaries, few people knew abouth the unassuming hero who has been called the Oskar Schindler of China.  In November 1937, as Japanese troops overran the Chinese capital of Nanking and began a campaign of torture, rape, and murder against its citizens, one man-a German who had lived in China for thirty years and who was a loyal follower of Adolph Hitler-put himself at risk and in order to save the lives of 200,000 poor Chinese, 600 of whom he sheltered in his own home.

    Unrivaled in their creativity and the sheer number of choices, the clubs featured in this book offer their clientele every fantasy imaginable. Subway groping, visits to the nurse's office, and comic book character encounters are just the beginning of the immense list of possibilities that are played out in colorful playrooms for adults where no detail is overlooked. Sinclair's photographs capture it all, while an introduction by sociologist James Farrer provides a brief history of commercial sex in Japan and places the images in the context of contemporary Japanese culture.

    In the deciding battle of the Russo-Japanese War, the Japanese lost only three destroyers but the Russians lost twenty-two ships and thousands of sailors. It was the first modern naval battle, employing all the new technology of destruction. The old imperial navy was woefully unprepared. The defeat at Tsushima was the last and greatest of many indignities suffered by the Russian fleet, which had traveled halfway around the world to reach the battle, dogged every mile by bad luck and misadventure. Their legendary admiral, dubbed "Mad Dog," led them on an extraordinary eighteen-thousand-mile journey from the Baltic Sea, around Europe, Africa, and Asia, to the Sea of Japan. They were burdened by the Tsar's incompetent leadership and the old, slow ships that he insisted be included to bulk up the fleet. Moreover, they were under constant fear of attack, and there were no friendly ports to supply coal, food, and fresh water. The level of self-sufficiency attained by this navy was not seen again until the Second World War. The battle of Tsushima is among the top five naval battles in history, equal in scope and drama to those of Lepanto, Trafalgar, Jutland, and Midway, yet despite its importance it has been long neglected in the West. With a novelist's eye and a historian's authority, Constantine Pleshakov tells of the Russian squadron's long, difficult journey and fast, horrible defeat.

    Hunted in turn by American troops, the Philippine police, hostile islanders, and successive Japanese search parties, Onoda had skillfully outmaneuvered all his pursuers, convinced that World War II was still being fought and that one day his fellow soldiers would return victorious. This account of those years is an epic tale of the will to survive that offers a rare glimpse of man's invincible spirit, resourcefulness, and ingenuity. A hero to his people, Onoda wrote down his experiences soon after his return to civilization. This book was translated into English the following year and has enjoyed an approving audience ever since.

    973 c. 1020), author of The Tale of Genji, is an intimate picture of her life as tutor and companion to the young Empress Shoshi. Told in a series of vignettes, it offers revealing glimpses of the Japanese imperial palace the auspicious birth of a prince, rivalries between the Emperor's consorts, with sharp criticism of Murasaki's fellow ladies-in-waiting and drunken courtiers, and telling remarks about the timid Empress and her powerful father, Michinaga. The Diary is also a work of great subtlety and intense personal reflection, as Murasaki makes penetrating insights into human psychology her pragmatic observations always balanced by an exquisite and pensive melancholy.In his illuminating introduction, Richard Bowing discusses what is known of Murasaki's life, and the religion, ceremonies, costumes, architecture and politics of her time, to explain the cultural background to her vivid evocation of court life. This edition also includes an explanation of Japanese names and dates, appendices and updated further reading.Translated and introduced by RICHARD BOWRING

    The book, which takes into account Japanese and Asian documents and scholarship in addition to American and European sources, chronicles events in the Pacific from 1853 to 1951. During those years, the leaders of Japan, believing in the superiority of their nation and culture, sought to dominate East Asia and the Pacific Basin. That period also saw Japan and America becoming entangled in each other's national affairs, starting when Commodore Perry's ships ended Japan's isolation policy, and continuing into the occupation by the U. S. Army following the war. Author Hoyt shows conflicting personalities and historical context that led to the rise of Japanese militarism and wars with China and Russia. Japan's War examines the decisions that led to the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the escalating climate of violence that resulted in the Rape of Nanking and the Bataan Death March.

    Written around 1748 as a puppet play, it is now better know in Kabuki performances. In the twentieth century, cinema and television versions have been equally successful. Donald Keene here presents a complete translation of the original text, with notes and an introduction that increase the reader's comprehension and enjoyment of the play. The introduction also elucidates the idea of loyalty. This traditional virtue, as exemplified in Chushingura, has never completely lost its hold on audiences, in spite of twentieth-century changes in Japanese society and moral ideas. Moreover, as Professor Keene points out, the excitement, color and violence expressed in the play may be considered the counterpoint to the austere restraint and understatement which are more commonly thought to be "traditionally" Japanese.

    Voted Best Book of the Year by Japan's foreign press, a collective autobiography based on interviews taped by a provincial doctor.

    Chapters are brief and each major Chinese dynasty, Japanese Shogunate, or other discrete period is treated in a separate chapter. Chapters or groups of chapters on China or Japan alternate. Encounters with the West, beginning in the 16th and expanding greatly in the 19th century, are extensively covered.

    By fully integrating the three key actors in the story - the United States, the Soviet Union, and Japan - Hasegawa for the first time puts the last months of the war into international perspective. From April 1945, when Stalin broke the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact and Harry Truman assumed the presidency, to the final Soviet military actions against Japan, Hasegawa brings to light the real reasons Japan surrendered. From Washington to Moscow to Tokyo and back again, he shows us a high-stakes diplomatic game as Truman and Stalin sought to outmaneuver each other in forcing Japan's surrender, as Stalin dangled mediation offers to Japan while secretly preparing to fight in the Pacific, as Tokyo peace advocates desperately tried to stave off a war party determined to mount a last-ditch defense, and as the Americans struggled to balance their competing interests of ending the war with Japan and preventing the Soviets from expanding into the Pacific. Authoritative and engrossing, Racing the Enemy puts the final days of World War II into a whole new light.

    Saitō Tamaki’s work of popular psychology provoked a national debate about the causes and extent of the condition.Since Hikikomori was published in Japan in 1998, the problem of social withdrawal has increasingly been recognized as an international one, and this translation promises to bring much-needed attention to the issue in the English-speaking world. According to the New York Times, “As a hikikomori ages, the odds that he’ll re-enter the world decline. Indeed, some experts predict that most hikikomori who are withdrawn for a year or more may never fully recover. That means that even if they emerge from their rooms, they either won’t get a full-time job or won’t be involved in a long-term relationship. And some will never leave home. In many cases, their parents are now approaching retirement, and once they die, the fate of the shut-ins—whose social and work skills, if they ever existed, will have atrophied—is an open question.”Drawing on his own clinical experience with hikikomori patients, Saitō creates a working definition of social withdrawal and explains its development. He argues that hikikomori sufferers manifest a specific, interconnected series of symptoms that do not fit neatly with any single, easily identifiable mental condition, such as depression.Rejecting the tendency to moralize or pathologize, Saitō sensitively describes how families and caregivers can support individuals in withdrawal and help them take steps toward recovery. At the same time, his perspective sparked contention over the contributions of cultural characteristics—including family structure, the education system, and gender relations—to the problem of social withdrawal in Japan and abroad.

    This was the work of an elite group known as Unit 731, led by Japan's answer to Joseph Mengele, Dr Shiro Ishii.Under their initiative, thousands of individuals were held captive and infected with virulent strains of anthrax, plague, cholera, and other epidemic and viral diseases. Soon entire Chinese villages were being hit with biological bombs. Even American POWs were targeted. All told, more than 250,000 people were infected, and the vast majority died. Yet, after the war, US occupation forces under General Douglas MacArthur struck a deal with these doctors that shielded them from accountability.Provocative, alarming and utterly compelling, A Plague Upon Humanity draws on important original research to expose one of the most shameful chapters in human history.

    The overwhelming majority of works on empire concentrate on the European maritime powers. Lieven’s comparative approach highlights the important role played by Russia in the expansion of Europe and its rise to global dominance. The book contrasts the nature, strategies, and fate of empire in Russia with that of its major rivals, the Habsburg, Ottoman, and British empires, and considers a broad range of other cases from ancient China and Rome to the present-day United States, Indonesia, India, and the European Union.Many of the dilemmas of empire persist in today’s world, and Lieven throws new light on some of the most intractable current examples, including the crisis in the former Soviet Union, the troubles in Ulster, and ethnic cleansing in the Balkans. This major examination of the imperial experience presents history on the grandest scale, combining formidable erudition with stimulating readability.

    Rather than portray the past two centuries as the inevitable movement from empire to nation-state, Cooper places nationalism within a much wider range of imperial and diasporic imaginations, of rulers and ruled alike, well into the twentieth century. He addresses both the insights and the blind spots of colonial studies in an effort to get beyond the tendency in the field to focus on a generic colonialism located sometime between 1492 and the 1960s and somewhere in the "West." Broad-ranging, cogently argued, and with a historical focus that moves from Africa to South Asia to Europe, these essays, most published here for the first time, propose a fuller engagement in the give-and-take of history, not least in the ways in which concepts usually attributed to Western universalism—including citizenship and equality—were defined and reconfigured by political mobilizations in colonial contexts.