The Japan Society Review

Directed by Gen Takahashi In Japan there are two things you should never try to oppose – the Emperor and the police!” Gen Takahashi’s Confessions of a Dog is a powerful, grim indictment of the Japanese police force based on Takahashi’s own experiences of the police and the work of his friend Yu Terasawa, a […] Review by Susan Meehan

By Takashi Oka, Nissan Institute/Routledge Japanese Studies, 2011, 210 pages, £85.00, ISBN-10: 0415587522 and ISBN-13: 978-0415587525. Review by Sean Curtin. Love him or loathe him, but you certainly cannot ignore Ichiro Ozawa, one of Japan’s most enduring and influential politicians of the last few decades. Takashi Ota, veteran journalist and former Ozawa aid, has produced […]

By Ichiro Ozawa [小沢一郎], Kodansha[講談社], May 1993 (23rd printing as of May 2006), 258 pages, 1500 yen, ISBN-10: 4062064820 and ISBN-13: 978-4062064828. Review by Fumiko Halloran. Ichiro Ozawa is a controversial figure with great political skills and strong leadership ability. He once presided over the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) as its powerful Secretary General whose […]

By Kiyofumi Kato [加藤 聖文,], Kodansha [講談社], November 2006, 266 pages, 1600 yen, ISBN-10: 4062583747. Review by Fumiko Halloran. The year 2006 was the 100th anniversary of the establishment of “Mantetsu” [満鉄], or “Minami Manshu Tetsudo Kabushiki-kaisha,” [南満州鉄道株式会社], in English the Southern Manchurian Railways Company, a semi-public corporation that was far more than a railway […]

By Peter Pagnamenta and Momoko Williams, Century, (Random House Group), 2006, 314 pages including notes and acknowledgements, £12.99, ISBN 9781844138203 and ISBN 184413820. Review by Sean Curtin. The central focus of this well written, moving and excellently researched book is the decades-long relationship between a British Army officer, Captain Arthur Hart Synnot, and a Japanese […]

By Toshio Kurihara [栗原 俊雄], Iwanami Shinsho [岩波新書], 2009, 211 pages, 735 yen, ISBN-10: 4004312078. Review by Fumiko Halloran. On 9 August 1945, six days before Japan’s surrender to the Allied forces in World War II, the Soviet Army began a massive attack on Japan’s Kwantung Army [関東軍] in Manchuria [満州国] in northeast China. Some […]

By A. Robert Lee with line compositions in colour by Yuriko Yamamoto, Renaissance Books, Folkestone, 2011, 214 pages including glossary, £16.00, ISBN 978-1-89823-06-3. Review for the Japan Society by Sir Hugh Cortazzi. This is a fun book containing amusing vignettes. Readers who have lived in the Tokyo suburbs and commuted daily on one of the […]

Edited by McKinsey & Company (Executive editors: Clay Chandler, Heang Chhor, and Brian Salsberg), VIZ Media, LLC, San Francisco, 2011, 448 pages including a large number of photographs, US$38.99, ISBN 13:978-1-4215-4086-3 and ISBN10: 1-4215-4086-X. Review by Sir Hugh Cortazzi. This book brings together essays about Japan and its future by almost ninety different authors.

Directed by Sang-il Lee (李相日), 2010, 139 minutes Review by Susan Meehan. It is five years since the release of Sang-il Lee’s hugely enjoyable Hula Girls [read our review on issue 11], a Full Monty-style feel-good film replete with social commentary and the only one of his works I’d seen. I was, naturally, looking […]

Abandoned Japanese in Postwar Manchuria: The Lives of War Orphans and Wives in Two Countries by Yeeshan Chan, Routledge (Japan Anthropology Workshop Series), 2011, 208 pages, £85.00, ISBN: 0415591813. This is a superbly researched work about the lives and experiences of the Japanese women and children who were abandoned in Manchuria at the end of […]