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    Barbara Jefferson, a young American teaching in Tokyo in the 1960s, is set on a life-changing quest when her Japanese surrogate mother, Michi, dies, leaving her a tansu of homemade plum wines wrapped in rice paper. Within the papers Barbara discovers writings in Japanese calligraphy that comprise a startling personal narrative. With the help of her translator, Seiji Okada, Barbara begins to unravel the mysteries of Michi's life, a story that begins in the early twentieth century and continues through World War II and its aftermath.
     As Barbara and Seiji translate the plum wine papers they form an intimate bond, with Michi a ghostly third in what becomes an increasingly uneasy triangle. Barbara is deeply affected by the revelation that Michi and Seiji are hibakusha, survivors of the atomic bombing in Hiroshima, and even harder for her to understand are the devastating psychological effects wrought by war. Plum Wine examines human relationships, cultural differences, and the irreparable consequences of war in a story that is both original and timeless.

How Pop artists confronted the legacies of modern Empire of Japan and post-1945 American imperialism from the 1960s to the present.

Looking at a pivotal period spanning the 1960s to the present, Hiroko Ikegami explores how artists in Japan, Okinawa, and the United States have adopted Pop strategies to critique legacies of imperialism. 

Ikegami focuses on locales—Tokyo, Okinawa, Minidoka, and New York—that were deeply impacted by the complex relationship between the Japanese and American empires and considers artists across different situations and generations. The book begins with Tokyo Pop artists and graphic designers, including Shinohara Ushio and Tanaami Keiichi, who critically parodied American Pop during the long 1960s. It then turns to Okinawa, where Tom Max probed Okinawans’ convoluted reality regarding the American Occupation and the Vietnam War. Artists in the second half of the volume confronted legacies of the Asia-Pacific War as a historical condition of the present. Roger Shimomura, the third-generation Japanese American who had been incarcerated in the Minidoka camp as a child, dealt with the subject by appropriating motifs of ukiyo-e woodblock prints. Takashi Murakami, now a global art star, created otaku-inspired art and capitalized on his country’s experience of the atomic bombs in promoting his “Superflat” enterprise. The book concludes with a new generation of artists protesting repercussions of empire in the twenty-first century. This is the first study to treat artists of post-1945 Japan, Okinawa, and the US diaspora in a single volume as mutually independent yet interrelated, using Pop’s criticality as a connecting thread.

Published twenty years ago, the original Preschool in Three Cultures was a landmark in the study of education: a profoundly enlightening exploration of the different ways preschoolers are taught in China, Japan, and the United States. Here, lead author Joseph Tobin—along with new collaborators Yeh Hsueh and Mayumi Karasawa—revisits his original research to discover how two decades of globalization and sweeping social transformation have affected the way these three cultures educate and care for their youngest pupils. Putting their subjects’ responses into historical perspective, Tobin, Hsueh, and Karasawa analyze the pressures put on schools to evolve and to stay the same, discuss how the teachers adapt to these demands, and examine the patterns and processes of continuity and change in each country.

Featuring nearly one hundred stills from the videotapes, Preschool in Three Cultures Revisited artfully and insightfully illustrates the surprising, illuminating, and at times entertaining experiences of four-year-olds—and their teachers—on both sides of the Pacific.

As shown by China’s relationship to Japan, and Japan’s relationship to South Korea, even growing regional economic interdependencies are not enough to overcome bitter memories grounded in earlier wars, invasions, and periods of colonial domination. Although efforts to ease historical animosity have been made, few have proven to be successful in Northeast Asia. In previous research scholars anticipated an improvement in relations through thick economic interdependence or increased societal contact. In economic terms, however, Japan and China already trade heavily: Japan has emerged as China’s largest trading partner and China as second largest to Japan. Societal contact is already intense, as millions of Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese visit one another’s countries annually as students, tourists, and on business trips. But these developments have not alleviated international distrust and negative perception, or resolved disagreement on what constitutes “adequate reparation” regarding the countries’ painful history.

Noticing clashes of strong nationalisms around the world in areas like Northeast Asia, numerous studies have suggested that more peaceful relations are likely only if countries submerge or paper over existing national identities by promoting universalism. Pride, Not Prejudice argues, to the contrary, that affirmation of national identities may be a more effective way to build international cooperation. If each national population reflects on the values of their national identity, trust and positive perception can increase between countries. This idea is consistent with the theoretical foundation that those who have a clear, secure, and content sense of self, in turn, can be more open, evenhanded, and less defensive toward others. In addition, this reduced defensiveness also enhances guilt admission by past “inflictors” of conflict and colonialism. Eunbin Chung borrows the social psychological theory of self-affirmation and applies it to an international context to argue that affirmation of a national identity, or reflecting on what it means to be part of one’s country, can increase trust, guilt recognition, and positive perception between countries.

Programmed Viewership examines the concept of “program” in Japanese cinema as an organizing framework that links marketing and promotion, exhibition and distribution, and viewing practices in public and domestic spaces. Rea Amit defines “program” as the ideological infrastructure or platform that perpetuates habitual and ritualistic patterns in film production and reception. Amit takes a holistic approach to understanding more than a century of Japanese cinema through the analysis of material film ephemera, cinema theatre, film content, and viewership. This framework positions programming, rather than provenance, as the decisive factor that confers a film’s cultural and institutional identity. While earlier scholarship has gestured toward loosening the tie between cinematic identity and its nation of origin, Programmed Viewership extends this insight by emphasizing that production constitutes only one dimension of a broader programmatic system.