Shows / New Books in Japanese Studies
New Books in Japanese Studies
This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: newbooksnetwork.com Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/…
Episodes
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Russell Thomas, "Tofu: A Culinary History" (Reaktion Books, 2024)
To the untrained eye there’s nothing as unexciting as tofu, normally regarded as a tasteless, beige, congealed mass of crushed, boiled soybeans. However, tofu…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Ryan Moran, "Selling the Future: Community, Hope, and Crisis in the Early History of Japanese Life Insurance" (Cornell UP, 2024)
Ryan Moran’s Selling the Future: Community, Hope, and Crisis in the Early History of Japanese Life Insurance (Cornell UP, 2023) is a history of the life…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Margaret Mehl, "Music and the Making of Modern Japan: Joining the Global Concert" (Open Book, 2024)
Margaret Mehl’s Music and the Making of Modern Japan: Joining the Global Concert (Open Book 2024) examines the ways in which Western classical (or “art”) music…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Mimi Okabe, "Manga, Murder and Mystery: The Boy Detectives of Japan’s Lost Generation" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
Little is known about the boy detective in Japanese detective fiction despite his popularity. Who is he, and what mysteries does he unveil about cultural…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Ronald Drabkin, "Beverly Hills Spy: The Double-Agent War Hero Who Helped Japan Attack Pearl Harbor" (William Morrow, 2024)
Frederick Rutland—”Rutland of Jutland”—was a war hero, renowned World War I aviator…and a Japanese spy. In the years leading up to Pearl Harbor, Rutland shared…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Christopher Smith, "Samurai with Telephones: Anachronism in Japanese Literature" (U Michigan Press, 2024)
What is going on when a graphic novel has a twelfth-century samurai pick up a telephone to make a call, or a play has an ancient aristocrat teaching in a…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Helena F. S. Lopes, "Neutrality and Collaboration in South China: Macau during the Second World War" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
The South China enclave of Macau was the first and last European colonial settlement in East Asia and a territory at the crossroads of different empires. In…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Satoru Hashimoto, "Afterlives of Letters: The Transnational Origins of Modern Literature in China, Japan, and Korea" (Columbia UP, 2023)
When East Asia opened itself to the world in the nineteenth century, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean intellectuals had shared notions of literature because of…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Zach Fredman, "The Tormented Alliance: American Servicemen and the Occupation of China, 1941–1949" (UNC Press, 2022)
The Tormented Alliance: American Servicemen and the Occupation of China, 1941–1949 (UNC Press, 2022) explores the wartime partnership between China and the…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
James Villanueva, "Awaiting MacArthur's Return: World War II Guerrilla Resistance against the Japanese in the Philippines" (UP of Kansas, 2022)
Over the course of World War II, guerrillas from across the Philippines opposed Imperial Japan's occupation of the archipelago. Although the guerrillas never…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Jeffrey Ding, "Technology and the Rise of Great Powers: How Diffusion Shapes Economic Competition" (Princeton UP, 2024)
When scholars and policymakers consider how technological advances affect the rise and fall of great powers, they draw on theories that center the moment of…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
The Relations of Estonia and Japan from the 19th Century to early-21st Century
Is there much to say about historical ties between two countries that are 8000 kilometres apart from each other? Actually, yes. In this episode Ene Selart…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
James M. Scott, "Black Snow: Curtis Lemay, the Firebombing of Tokyo, and the Road to the Atomic Bomb" (Norton, 2024)
In our interview about Black Snow: Curtis LeMay, the Firebombing of Tokyo, and the Road to the Atomic Bomb (W. W. Norton & Company, 2022), James M. Scott…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Fabio Rambelli, "Spirits and Animism in Contemporary Japan" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019)
In Japan, a country popularly perceived as highly secularized and technologically advanced, ontological assumptions about spirits (tama or tamashii) seem to be…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Kate McDonald on Asian Mobility History as Labor History
Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks to Kate McDonald, Associate Professor of History at University of California, Santa Barbara, about her fascinating…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Christina Yi et al., "Passing, Posing, Persuasion: Cultural Production and Coloniality in Japan's East Asian Empire" (U Hawaii Press, 2023)
Passing, Posing, Persuasion: Cultural Production and Coloniality in Japan's East Asian Empire (U Hawaii Press, 2023) interrogates the intersections between…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Justin B. Stein, "Alternate Currents: Reiki’s Circulation in the Twentieth-Century North Pacific" (U Hawaii Press, 2023)
In the second half of the twentieth century, Reiki went from an obscure therapy practiced by a few thousand Japanese and Japanese Americans to a global…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Steven K. Bailey, "Target Hong Kong: A True Story of U.S. Navy Pilots at War" (Osprey, 2024)
In January 1945, the final year of the Pacific War, Japanese-held Hong Kong became the site of coordinated attacks by the U.S. Navy on Japanese warships and…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Yanagawa Seigan and Kōran, "The Same Moon Shines on All: The Lives and Selected Poems of Yanagawa Seigan and Kōran" (Columbia UP, 2024)
Yanagawa Seigan (1789–1858) and his wife Kōran (1804–79) were two of the great poets of nineteenth-century Japan. They practiced the art of traditional Sinitic…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Laura Moretti and Satō Yukiko, "Graphic Narratives from Early Modern Japan: The World of Kusazōshi" (Brill, 2024)
Part of a formidable publishing industry, cheap yet eye-catching graphic narratives consistently charmed early modern Japanese readers for around two hundred…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Diana P. Parsell, "Eliza Scidmore: The Trailblazing Journalist Behind Washington's Cherry Trees" (Oxford UP, 2023)
Eliza Scidmore (1856-1928) was a journalist, a world traveler, a writer, an amateur photographer, the first female board member of the National Geographic…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Viren Murthy, "Pan-Asianism and the Legacy of the Chinese Revolution" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
Recent proposals to revive the ancient Silk Road for the contemporary era and ongoing Western interest in China’s growth and development have led to increased…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Anri Yasuda, "Beauty Matters: Modern Japanese Literature and the Question of Aesthetics, 1890-1930" (Columbia UP, 2024)
The notion of beauty is inherently elusive: aesthetic judgments are at once subjective and felt to be universally valid. In Beauty Matters: Modern Japanese…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Wendy Matsumura, "Waiting for the Cool Moon: Anti-Imperialist Struggles in the Heart of Japan's Empire" (Duke UP, 2024)
In Waiting for the Cool Moon: Anti-Imperialist Struggles in the Heart of Japan's Empire (Duke UP, 2024) Wendy Matsumura interrogates the erasure of colonial…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Judith Vitale et al., "Drugs and the Politics of Consumption in Japan" (Brill, 2023)
In early modern Japan, upper status groups coveted pills and powders made of exotic foreign ingredients such as mummy and rhinoceros horn. By the early…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Jorge Almazán et al., "Emergent Tokyo:: Designing the Spontaneous City" (Oro Editions, 2024)
If ancient Kyoto stands for orderly elegance, then Tokyo, within the world’s most populated metropolitan area, calls to mind–– jam-packed chaos. But in…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Sidney Xu Lu, "The Making of Japanese Settler Colonialism" (Cambridge UP, 2019)
Sidney Lu’s The Making of Japanese Settler Colonialism: Malthusianism and Trans-Pacific Migration, 1868-1961 (Cambridge 2019) places the concept of “Malthusian…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Aaron Fischman, "A Baseball Gaijin: Chasing a Dream to Japan and Back" (Sports Publishing, 2024)
Like many American boys, Tony Barnette yearned to one day make it to “The Show,” playing baseball professionally. The Arizona State pitcher was drafted in 2006…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Thersa Matsuura, "The Book of Japanese Folklore: An Encyclopedia of the Spirits, Monsters, and Yokai of Japanese Myth" (Adams Media, 2024)
Discover everything you’ve ever wondered about the legendary spirits, creatures, and figures of Japanese folklore including how they have found their way into…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Gary J. Bass, "Judgement at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia" (Knopf, 2023)
In December 1948, a panel of 12 judges sentenced 23 Japanese officials for war crimes. Seven, including former Prime Minister Hideki Tojo, were sentenced to…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Peter Wetzler, "Imperial Japan and Defeat in the Second World War: The Collapse of an Empire" (Bloomsbury, 2020)
Informed Western understanding of Imperial Japan still often conjures up images of militarism, blind devotion to leaders, and fanatical pride in the country…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Rebecca Copeland, "Handbook of Modern and Contemporary Japanese Women Writers" (Amsterdam UP, 2023)
The Handbook of Modern and Contemporary Japanese Women Writers (MHM Limited and Amsterdam University Press, 2022) offers a comprehensive overview of women…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Peter Harmsen, "Bernhard Sindberg: The Schindler of Nanjing" (Casemate, 2024)
In December 1937, Bernhard Sindberg arrives at a cement factory outside of Nanjing. He’s one of just two foreigners, and he gets there just weeks before the…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Robert Lyman, "A War of Empires: Japan, India, Burma, and Britain: 1941–45" (Osprey, 2021)
In 1941 and 1942 the British and Indian Armies were brutally defeated and Japan reigned supreme in its newly conquered territories throughout Asia. But change…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Martin Dusinberre, "Mooring the Global Archive: A Japanese Ship and Its Migrant Histories" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
In Mooring the Global Archive: A Japanese Ship and Its Migrant Histories (Cambridge UP, 2023), Martin Dusinberre follows the Yamashiro-maru steamship across…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Wei Wu, "Esoteric Buddhism in China: Engaging Japanese and Tibetan Traditions, 1912–1949" (Columbia UP, 2023)
During the Republican period (1912–1949) and after, many Chinese Buddhists sought inspiration from non-Chinese Buddhist traditions, showing a particular…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Rakugo: An Interview with and Performance by Kanariya Eiraku
Rakugo is a live performance art that has penetrated the borders of Japan and continues to gain popularity overseas. The rakugo stage once dominated by…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Richard M. Jaffe, "Seeking Sakyamuni: South Asia in the Formation of Modern Japanese Buddhism" (U Chicago Press, 2019)
Though fascinated with the land of their tradition’s birth, virtually no Japanese Buddhists visited the Indian subcontinent before the nineteenth century. In…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Reiki and the Subtle Body, with Justin B. Stein
Dr Pierce Salguero sits down with Justin B. Stein, a specialist in modern Japanese religion and the preeminent historian of Reiki. We discuss Justin’s new…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Hiromi Ito, "Tree Spirits Grass Spirits" (Nightboat Books, 2023)
A collected series of intertwined poetic essays written by acclaimed Japanese poet Hiromi Ito--part nature writing, part travelogue, part existential…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Adam Kabat, "The River Imp and the Stinky Jewel and Other Tales: Monster Comics from Edo Japan" (Columbia UP, 2023)
Adam Kabat’s The River Imp and the Stinky Jewel and Other Tales: Monster Comics from Edo Japan (Columbia UP, 2023) is an in-depth introduction to the rich and…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Kyokutei Bakin, "Eight Dogs, Or Hakkenden: Part Two--His Master's Blade" (Cornell UP, 2024)
Glynne Walley, translator of classic Japanese novel Hakkenden, joins us on the podcast again to talk about his second translated volume: Hakkenden, Part 2: His…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Paul Hansen, "Hokkaido Dairy Farm: Cosmopolitics of Otherness and Security on the Frontiers of Japan" (SUNY Press, 2024)
As an ethnography of a Japanese dairy farm while having theoretical values going beyond the specific context, Hokkaido Dairy Farm: Cosmopolitics of Otherness…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Thomas Lockley, "A Gentleman from Japan: The Untold Story of an Incredible Journey from Asia to Queen Elizabeth’s Court" (Hanover Square Press, 2024)
On November 12, 1588, five young Asian men—led by a twenty-one-year-old called Christopher—traveled up the River Thames to meet Queen Elizabeth I…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Thomas D. Conlan, "Kings in All But Name: The Lost History of Ouchi Rule in Japan, 1350-1569" (Oxford UP, 2024)
In the sixteenth century, members of the Ouchi family were kings in all but name in much of Japan. Immensely wealthy, they controlled sea lanes stretching to…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Ben Rothenberg, "Naomi Osaka: Her Journey to Finding Her Power and Her Voice" (Dutton, 2024)
In July 2021, Naomi Osaka—world number 1 women’s tennis player—lit the Olympic Cauldron at the Tokyo Olympic Games. The half-Japanese, half-American, Black…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Jinying Li, "Anime's Knowledge Cultures: Geek, Otaku, Zhai" (U Minnesota Press, 2024)
With comics franchises getting turned into multi-billion dollar revenue opportunities and consumer technology companies dominating daily headlines — the…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Fynn Holm, "The Gods of the Sea: Whales and Coastal Communities in Northeast Japan, c.1600-2019" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
Japan is often imagined as a nation with a long history of whaling. In The Gods of the Sea: Whales and Coastal Communities in Northeast Japan, c.1600-2019…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Peter Harmsen, "Bernhard Sindberg: The Schindler of Nanjing" (Casemate, 2024)
In December 1937, the Chinese capital, Nanjing, falls and the Japanese army unleash an orgy of torture, murder, and rape. Over the course of six weeks…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Peter Harmsen, "Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze" (Casemate, 2015)
Peter Harmsen's book Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze (Casemate, 2015) describes one of the great forgotten battles of the 20th century. At its height…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Simon Partner, "Koume's World: The Life and Work of a Samurai Woman Before and After the Meiji Restoration" (Columbia UP, 2023)
In 1864, on a midsummer’s day, Kawai Koume, a 60-year old matriarch of a samurai family in Wakayama, makes a note in her diary, which she had dutifully written…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Max Ward, "Thought Crime: Ideology and State Power in Interwar Japan" (Duke UP, 2019)
Max Ward’s Thought Crime: Ideology and State Power in Interwar Japan (Duke University Press, 2019) analyzes the trajectory and transformations of the…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Ricky W. Law, "Transnational Nazism: Ideology and Culture in German Japanese Relations, 1919-1936" (Cambridge UP, 2019)
In his new book, Transnational Nazism: Ideology and Culture in German Japanese Relations, 1919-1936 (Cambridge University Press, 2019), associate professor of…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Gwyn McClelland, "Dangerous Memory in Nagasaki: Prayers, Protests and Catholic Survivor Narratives" (Routledge, 2019)
On 9th August 1945, the US dropped the second atomic bomb on Nagasaki. Of the dead, approximately 8500 were Catholic Christians, representing over sixty…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Joshua Paul Dale, "Irresistible: How Cuteness Wired our Brains and Conquered the World" (Profile Books, 2023)
Why are some things cute, and others not? What happens to our brains when we see something cute? And how did cuteness go global, from Hello Kitty to Disney…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Paul D. Barclay, "Kondo the Barbarian: A Japanese Adventurer and Indigenous Taiwan's Bloodiest Uprising" (Eastbridge Books, 2023)
Kondo the Barbarian: A Japanese Adventurer and Indigenous Taiwan's Bloodiest Uprising (Eastbridge Books, 2023) is a gripping and revealing account of the…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Sujin Lee, "Wombs of Empire: Population Discourses and Biopolitics in Modern Japan" (Stanford UP, 2023)
In 2007, Japan’s health minister referred to women ages 15-50 as “birthing machines.” The context was a speech about Japan’s declining birthrate and projected…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Amanda Kennell, "Alice in Japanese Wonderlands: Translation, Adaptation, Mediation" (U Hawaii Press, 2023)
Since the first translations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books appeared in Japan in 1899, Alice has found her way into nearly every facet of Japanese life and…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Grammar, Identity, and Ideology in Early 20th-Century Japan
Have you ever felt that the grammar of Asian languages does not fit with the framework that we use to describe them? In the late 19th century, Asian…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Scott D. Seligman, "Murder in Manchuria: The True Story of a Jewish Virtuoso, Russian Fascists, a French Diplomat, and a Japanese Spy in Occupied China" (U Nebraska Press, 2023)
On an August night in 1933 Harbin in then-Japanese controlled Manchuria–Semyon Kaspe, French citizen, famed concert musician, and Russian Jew, is abducted…