BiblioVault - Books about Japan

Daily Life and Demographics in Ancient Japan

William Wayne Farris

University of Michigan Press, 2009

For centuries, scholars have wondered what daily life was like for the common people of Japan, especially for long bygone eras such as the ancient age (700–1150). Using the discipline of historical demography, William Wayne Farris shows that for most of this era, Japan’s overall population hardly grew at all, hovering around six million for almost five hundred years.

The reasons for the stable population were complex. Most importantly, Japan was caught up in an East Asian pandemic that killed both aristocrat and commoner in countless numbers every generation. These epidemics of smallpox, measles, mumps, and dysentery decimated the adult population, resulting in wide-ranging social and economic turmoil. Famine recurred about once every three years, leaving large proportions of the populace malnourished or dead. Ecological degradation of central Japan led to an increased incidence of drought and soil erosion. And war led soldiers to murder innocent bystanders in droves.

Under these harsh conditions, agriculture suffered from high rates of field abandonment and poor technological development. Both farming and industry shifted increasingly to labor-saving technologies. With workers at a premium, wages rose. Traders shifted from the use of money to barter. Cities disappeared. The family was an amorphous entity, with women holding high status in a labor-short economy. Broken families and an appallingly high rate of infant mortality were also part of kinship patterns. The average family lived in a cold, drafty dwelling susceptible to fire, wore clothing made of scratchy hemp, consumed meals just barely adequate in the best of times, and suffered from a lack of sanitary conditions that increased the likelihood of disease outbreak. While life was harsh for almost all people from 700 to 1150, these experiences represented investments in human capital that would bear fruit during the medieval epoch (1150–1600).

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Dancing with the Dead

Memory, Performance, and Everyday Life in Postwar Okinawa

Christopher T. Nelson

Duke University Press, 2008

Challenging conventional understandings of time and memory, Christopher T. Nelson examines how contemporary Okinawans have contested, appropriated, and transformed the burdens and possibilities of the past. Nelson explores the work of a circle of Okinawan storytellers, ethnographers, musicians, and dancers deeply engaged with the legacies of a brutal Japanese colonial era, the almost unimaginable devastation of the Pacific War, and a long American military occupation that still casts its shadow over the islands. The ethnographic research that Nelson conducted in Okinawa in the late 1990s—and his broader effort to understand Okinawans’ critical and creative struggles—was inspired by his first visit to the islands in 1985 as a lieutenant in the U.S. Marine Corps.
Nelson analyzes the practices of specific performers, showing how memories are recalled, bodies remade, and actions rethought as Okinawans work through fragments of the past in order to reconstruct the fabric of everyday life. Artists such as the popular Okinawan actor and storyteller Fujiki Hayato weave together genres including Japanese stand-up comedy, Okinawan celebratory rituals, and ethnographic studies of war memory, encouraging their audiences to imagine other ways to live in the modern world. Nelson looks at the efforts of performers and activists to wrest the Okinawan past from romantic representations of idyllic rural life in the Japanese media and reactionary appropriations of traditional values by conservative politicians. In his consideration of eisā, the traditional dance for the dead, Nelson finds a practice that reaches beyond the expected boundaries of mourning and commemoration, as the living and the dead come together to create a moment in which a new world might be built from the ruins of the old.

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The Desperate Diplomat

Saburo Kurusu's Memoir of the Weeks before Pearl Harbor

Edited by J. Garry Clifford and Masako R. Okura

University of Missouri Press, 2014

On December 7, 1941, the course of U.S. history changed forever with the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Three weeks prior, Japanese Special Envoy to the United States Saburo Kurusu visited Washington in an attempt to further peace talks between Japan and America and spare his country the loss he knew would occur if a war began. But as he reported, “Working for peace is not as simple as starting a war.” For more than seventy years, many have unfairly viewed Kurusu and his visit as part of the Pearl Harbor plot. Editors J. Garry Clifford and Masako R. Okura seek to dispel this myth with their edition of Kurusu’s memoir, The Desperate Diplomat.

Kurusu published his personal memoir in 1952, in Japanese, describing his efforts to prevent war between the two nations, his total lack of knowledge regarding the Pearl Harbor attack, and what “might have been” had he been successful in his endeavor for peace, while offering an exclusive perspective on the Japanese reaction to the attack. However, the information contained in his memoir was unavailable to most of the world, save those fluent in Japanese, because it had never been published in another language. With the discovery of Kurusu’s own English memoir, his story can finally be told to a wider audience.

Clifford and Okura have used both the Japanese and English memoirs and added an introduction and annotations to Kurusu’s story, making The Desperate Diplomat an essential look at an event that remains controversial in the history of both nations. Anyone who takes interest in the history of Pearl Harbor cannot afford to omit this previously unavailable information from their library.

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Directory of World Cinema

Japan

Edited by John Berra

Intellect Books, 2010

From the revered classics of Akira Kurosawa to the modern marvels of Takeshi Kitano, the films that have emerged from Japan represent a national cinema that has gained worldwide admiration and appreciation. The Directory of World Cinema: Japan provides an insight into the cinema of Japan through reviews of significant titles and case studies of leading directors, alongside explorations of the cultural and industrial origins of key genres.

As the inaugural volume of an ambitious new series from Intellect documenting world cinema, the directory aims to play a part in moving intelligent, scholarly criticism beyond the academy by building a forum for the study of film that relies on a disciplined theoretical base. It takes the form of an A–Z collection of reviews, longer essays, and research resources, accompanied by fifty full-color film stills highlighting significant films and players. The cinematic lineage of samurai warriors, yakuza enforcers, and atomic monsters take their place alongside the politically charged works of the Japanese New Wave, making this a truly comprehensive volume.

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Discourses of the Vanishing

Modernity, Phantasm, Japan

Marilyn Ivy

University of Chicago Press, 1995

Japan today is haunted by the ghosts its spectacular modernity has generated. Deep anxieties about the potential loss of national identity and continuity disturb many in Japan, despite widespread insistence that it has remained culturally intact. In this provocative conjoining of ethnography, history, and cultural criticism, Marilyn Ivy discloses these anxieties—and the attempts to contain them—as she tracks what she calls the vanishing: marginalized events, sites, and cultural practices suspended at moments of impending disappearance.

Ivy shows how a fascination with cultural margins accompanied the emergence of Japan as a modern nation-state. This fascination culminated in the early twentieth-century establishment of Japanese folklore studies and its attempts to record the spectral, sometimes violent, narratives of those margins. She then traces the obsession with the vanishing through a range of contemporary reconfigurations: efforts by remote communities to promote themselves as nostalgic sites of authenticity, storytelling practices as signs of premodern presence, mass travel campaigns, recallings of the dead by blind mediums, and itinerant, kabuki-inspired populist theater.

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Discrimination in Modern Japan

Case Studies in Identity Politics

J. Mark Ramseyer

University of Chicago Press, 2023

An informative rethinking of how Japanese society discriminates against its Korean, Okinawan, and Burakumin populations.

In this book, J. Mark Ramseyer, a noted authority on Japan looks at discrimination against groups in Japanese society, focusing on the Korean, Okinawan, and Burakumin groups. Ramseyer asks why they experience discrimination in Japan, an unusually homogeneous society. Is it because of some prejudice on the part of the majority that prevents their integration into mainstream Japanese society? Or is it because some of the dynamics within the group create incentives for the group to stay together and to be on the fringes of society?

Ramseyer argues that the real explanation is the latter, and each of these three groups has been victimized by its own leadership. Precisely because the groups are dysfunctional, members of the group cannot control members who would appoint themselves group leaders. The result has been the capture of leadership positions by people who manipulate the group to their own private advantage and to the detriment of the group as a whole.

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Distant Islands

The Japanese American Community in New York City, 1876-1930s

Daniel H. Inouye

University Press of Colorado, 2018

Distant Islands is a modern narrative history of the Japanese American community in New York City between America's centennial year and the Great Depression of the 1930s. Often overshadowed in historical literature by the Japanese diaspora on the West Coast, this community, which dates back to the 1870s, has its own fascinating history.

The New York Japanese American community was a composite of several micro communities divided along status, class, geographic, and religious lines. Using a wealth of primary sources—oral histories, memoirs, newspapers, government documents, photographs, and more—Daniel H. Inouye tells the stories of the business and professional elites, mid-sized merchants, small business owners, working-class families, menial laborers, and students that made up these communities. The book presents new knowledge about the history of Japanese immigrants in the United States and makes a novel and persuasive argument about the primacy of class and status stratification and relatively weak ethnic cohesion and solidarity in New York City, compared to the pervading understanding of nikkei on the West Coast. While a few prior studies have identified social stratification in other nikkei communities, this book presents the first full exploration of the subject and additionally draws parallels to divisions in German American communities.

Distant Islands is a unique and nuanced historical account of an American ethnic community that reveals the common humanity of pioneering Japanese New Yorkers despite diverse socioeconomic backgrounds and life stories. It will be of interest to general readers, students, and scholars interested in Asian American studies, immigration and ethnic studies, sociology, and history.

Winner- Honorable Mention, 2018 Immigration and Ethnic History Society First Book Award

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Double Eagle and Rising Sun

The Russians and Japanese at Portsmouth in 1905

Raymond A. Esthus

Duke University Press, 1988

The Russo-Japanese War and the peace conference that followed it at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, marked a turning point affecting not only the history of participants but the future of East Asia and the world.
The 1905 Portsmouth Conference, mediated by President Theodore Roosevelt, for which he received the Nobel Peace Prize, brought to an end a war in which Japan won spectacular victories on land and sea. Although the peace settlement fell far short of public expectations in Japan, she gained supremacy in Korea and a sphere of influence in South Manchuria as a consequence of the treaty. Nevertheless, the treaty reflected the military stalemate in Manchuria. Roosevelt wanted a balance of power to emerge from the war, and his hope was realized in the peace process.
Raymond Esthus, drawing on the records of six nations, provides a detailed and panoramic account of the 1905 conference from the perspectives of both the Russians and the Japanese participants, depicting the powerful personalities of Roosevelt and the Russian Sergei Witte, as well as Tsar Nicholas II and the Foreign Minister Komura Jutaro. It is a story of verbal duels, tests of will, and moments of high personal courage. If there was no clear-cut victor at the conference, Roosevelt emerged as a worldwide hero of the cause of peace.

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Double Visions, Double Fictions

The Doppelgänger in Japanese Film and Literature

Baryon Tensor Posadas

University of Minnesota Press, 2018

A fresh take on the dopplegänger and its place in Japanese film and literature—past and present

Since its earliest known use in German Romanticism in the late 1700s, the word Doppelgänger (double-walker) can be found throughout a vast array of literature, culture, and media. This motif of doubling can also be seen traversing historical and cultural boundaries. Double Visions, Double Fictions analyzes the myriad manifestations of the doppelgänger in Japanese literary and cinematic texts at two historical junctures: the interwar period of the 1920s and 1930s and the present day.

According to author Baryon Tensor Posadas, the doppelgänger marks the intersection of the historical impact of psychoanalytic theory, the genre of detective fiction in Japan, early Japanese cinema, and the cultural production of Japanese colonialism. He examines the doppelgänger’s appearance in the works of Edogawa Rampo, Tanizaki Jun’ichiro, and Akutagawa Ryunosuke, as well as the films of Tsukamoto Shin’ya and Kurosawa Kiyoshi, not only as a recurrent motif but also as a critical practice of concepts. Following these explorations, Posadas asks: What were the social, political, and material conditions that mobilized the desire for the doppelgänger? And how does the dopplegänger capture social transformations taking place at these historical moments?

Double Visions, Double Fictions ultimately reveals how the doppelgänger motif provides a fascinating new backdrop for understanding the enmeshment of past and present.

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Dr. David Murray

Superintendent of Education in the Empire of Japan, 1873-1879

Duke, Benjamin

Rutgers University Press, 2018

This is the first biography in English of an uncommon American, Dr. David Murray, a professor of mathematics at Rutgers College, who was appointed by the Japanese government as Superintendent of Education in the Empire of Japan in 1873. The founding of the Gakusei—the first public school system launched in Japan—marks the beginning of modern education in Japan, accommodating all children of elementary school age. Murray’s unwavering commitment to its success renders him an educational pioneer in Japan in the modern world.

Benjamin Duke has compiled this comprehensive biography of David Murray to showcase Murray’s work, both in assisting around 100 samurai students in their studies at Rutgers, and in his unprecedented role in early Japanese-American relations. This fascinating story uncovers a little-known link between Rutgers University and Japan, and it is the only book to conclude that Rutgers made a greater contribution to the development of modern education in the early Meiji Era than any other non-Japanese college or university in the world.

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Drawing the Sea Near

Satoumi and Coral Reef Conservation in Okinawa

C. Anne Claus

University of Minnesota Press, 2020

How Japanese coastal residents and transnational conservationists collaborated to foster relationships between humans and sea life

Drawing the Sea Near opens a new window to our understanding of transnational conservation by investigating projects in Okinawa shaped by a “conservation-near” approach—which draws on the senses, the body, and memory to collapse the distance between people and their surroundings and to foster collaboration and equity between coastal residents and transnational conservation organizations. This approach contrasts with the traditional Western “conservation-far” model premised on the separation of humans from the environment.

Based on twenty months of participant observation and interviews, this richly detailed, engagingly written ethnography focuses on Okinawa’s coral reefs to explore an unusually inclusive, experiential, and socially just approach to conservation. In doing so, C. Anne Claus challenges orthodox assumptions about nature, wilderness, and the future of environmentalism within transnational organizations. She provides a compelling look at how transnational conservation organizations—in this case a field office of the World Wide Fund for Nature in Okinawa—negotiate institutional expectations for conservation with localized approaches to caring for ocean life.

In pursuing how particular projects off the coast of Japan unfolded, Drawing the Sea Near illuminates the real challenges and possibilities of work within the multifaceted transnational structures of global conservation organizations. Uniquely, it focuses on the conservationists themselves: why and how has their approach to project work changed, and how have they themselves been transformed in the process?

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A Dream of Resistance

The Cinema of Kobayashi Masaki

Prince, Stephen

Rutgers University Press, 2017

Celebrated as one of Japan’s greatest filmmakers, Kobayashi Masaki’s scorching depictions of war and militarism marked him as a uniquely defiant voice in post-war Japanese cinema. A pacifist drafted into Japan’s Imperial Army, Kobayashi survived the war with his principles intact and created a body of work that was uncompromising in its critique of the nation’s military heritage. Yet his renowned political critiques were grounded in spiritual perspectives, integrating motifs and beliefs from both Buddhism and Christianity.

A Dream of Resistance is the first book in English to explore Kobayashi’s entire career, from the early films he made at Shochiku studio, to internationally-acclaimed masterpieces like The Human Condition, Harakiri, and Samurai Rebellion, and on to his final work for NHK Television. Closely examining how Kobayashi’s upbringing and intellectual history shaped the values of his work, Stephen Prince illuminates the political and religious dimensions of Kobayashi’s films, interpreting them as a prayer for peace in troubled times. Prince draws from a wealth of rare archives, including previously untranslated interviews, material that Kobayashi wrote about his films, and even the young director’s wartime diary. The result is an unprecedented portrait of this singular filmmaker.

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Dreams in Double Time

On Race, Freedom, and Bebop

Jonathan Leal

Duke University Press, 2023

In Dreams in Double Time Jonathan Leal examines how the musical revolution of bebop opened up new futures for racialized and minoritized communities. Blending lyrical nonfiction with transdisciplinary critique and moving beyond standard Black/white binary narratives of jazz history, Leal focuses on the stories and experiences of three musicians and writers of color: James Araki, a Nisei multi-instrumentalist, soldier-translator, and literature and folklore scholar; Raúl Salinas, a Chicano poet, jazz critic, and longtime activist who endured the US carceral system for over a decade; and Harold Wing, an Afro-Chinese American drummer, pianist, and songwriter who performed with bebop pioneers before working as a public servant. Leal foregrounds that for these men and their collaborators, bebop was an affectively and intellectually powerful force that helped them build community and dream new social possibilities. Bebop’s complexity and radicality, Leal contends, made it possible for those like Araki, Salinas, and Wing who grappled daily with state-sanctioned violence to challenge a racially supremacist, imperial nation, all while hearing and making the world anew.

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Dyeing with the Earth

Textiles, Tradition, and Sustainability in Contemporary Japan

Charlotte Linton

Duke University Press, 2025

In Dyeing with the Earth, Charlotte Linton explores the intersection of small-scale traditional craft production with contemporary sustainability practices. Focusing on natural textile dyeing on the southern Japanese island of Amami Ōshima, Linton details the complex relationship between preservation practices, resource extraction, and land access in the production of Oshima tsumugi kimono cloth, which uses the indigenous technique of dorozome (or mud-dyeing). As global interest in sustainable fashion grows, textile manufacturers on Amami have expanded from kimono production to dyeing garments and textiles for high-profile designers. While traditional craft may appear at odds with the large-scale global textile industry, Linton reveals how Amamian and global producers face similar social, economic, and environmental pressures. Ethical production in fashion, Linton contends, should focus on understanding local everyday practices that sustain direct relationships between people, place, and environment rather than rely on short-term solutions via new processes or materials. Weaving together ethnography, photography, and illustration, Linton underscores the continued relevance of traditional craft and material cultures amid ongoing climate change and biodiversity loss.

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