The Japan Society Review

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 […]

The Meiji Restoration in 19th century Japan not only overthrew the Shogun’s rule but rewrote the nation’s religious map. That propelled the emperor into a deity whose absolute authority was crafted by the founders of the new regime for political purposes. This is the basic theme in Yasuhisa Ebisawa’s best-selling novel.

By Simon Olding, with a foreword by Emmanuel Cooper, Crafts Study Centre, University of the Creative Arts, and the Leach Pottery, St Ives, 2010, 135 pages, 76 plates of Leach’s etchings, ISBN 978-0-954374-8-9. Review by Sir Hugh Cortazzi. This book was launched at Daiwa House in London on 23 November 2010 with an explanatory talk […]

Originally called Quakebook on Twitter, 2:46 is a collection of stories about the tsunami and earthquake, which exploded onto the book scene in March of 2011. This was a result of one individual’s simple question to Twitter users: “What can we do?” Whilst many people the world over sat and watched the unfolding disaster on TV and newspapers not knowing how to help, 2:46 got crowdsourcing.

The 1920s were a crucial period in modern Japanese history, when new and revolutionary western ideologies, like communism and fascism, entered Japan and found adherents there. Anti-Semitism was one of those western ideologies to arrive at that time. It offered a simplistic explanation of the perplexing turmoil of the world. It appealed to conservatives alarmed about communist subversion and to those attracted by conspiracy theories.