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
Heather Blair, “Real and Imagined: The Peak of Gold in Heian Japan” (Harvard U Asia Center, 2015)
In her recent monograph, Real and Imagined: The Peak of Gold in Heian Japan (Harvard University Asia Center, 2015), Heather Blair explores the religious and…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Federico Marcon, “The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan” (U of Chicago, 2015)
Federico Marcon‘s new book opens a fascinating window into the history of Japan’s relationship to its natural environment. The Knowledge of Nature and the…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Paul A. Christensen, “Japan, Alcoholism, and Masculinity: Suffering Sobriety in Tokyo” (Lexington Books, 2014)
Paul A. Christensen‘s new book is a thoughtful ethnography of drinking, drunkenness, and male sociability in modern urban Japan. Focusing on two major alcohol…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Parks M. Coble, “China’s War Reporters: The Legacy of Resistance against Japan” (Harvard UP, 2015)
Parks M. Coble‘s new book is a wonderful study of memory, war, and history that takes the Sino-Japanese War of 1937-1945 and its aftermath as its focus…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
John K. Nelson, “Experimental Buddhism: Innovation and Activism in Contemporary Japan” (U of Hawaii Press, 2013)
In his recent book, Experimental Buddhism: Innovation and Activism in Contemporary Japan (University of Hawaii Press, 2013), John K. Nelson delves into the…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Emily Anderson, “Christianity and Imperialism in Modern Japan: Empire for God” (Bloomsbury, 2014)
When one thinks of the connection of religion and imperialism in Japan, one automatically thinks first of Shintoism and second of Buddhism. Christianity does…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Charlotte Eubanks, “Miracles of Book and Body: Buddhist Textual Culture and Medieval Japan (U of California Press, 2011)
In Miracles of Book and Body: Buddhist Textual Culture and Medieval Japan (University of California Press, 2011), Charlotte Eubanks examines the relationship…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Joseph D. Hankins, “Working Skin: Making Leather, Making a Multicultural Japan” (U of California Press, 2014)
Joseph D. Hankins‘s marvelous new ethnography of the contemporary Buraku people looks at the labor involved in “identifying, dismantling, and reproducing” the…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Clark Chilson, “Secrecy’s Power: Covert Shin Buddhists in Japan and Contradictions of Concealment” (University of Hawaii Press, 2014)
Clark Chilson‘s new book, Secrecy’s Power: Covert Shin Buddhists in Japan and Contradictions of Concealment (University of Hawai’i Press, 2014) examines secret…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Robert Stolz, “Bad Water: Nature, Pollution, and Politics in Japan, 1870-1950” (Duke UP, 2014)
Robert Stolz‘s new book explores the emergence of an environmental turn in modern Japan. Bad Water: Nature, Pollution; Politics in Japan, 1870-1950 (Duke…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Jolyon Thomas, “Drawing on Tradition: Manga, Anime, and Religion in Contemporary Japan” (University Of Hawai’i Press, 2012)
The worlds of cinema and illustrated fiction are replete with exciting data for the historian of religion. Drawing on Tradition: Manga, Anime, and Religion in…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Hideaki Fujiki, “Making Personas: Transnational Film Stardom in Modern Japan” (Harvard University Asia Center, 2013)
Stardom has a history. Hideaki Fujiki‘s new book traces that history through a story of the transformations of Japanese film stars in the early twentieth…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Gregory Smits, “Seismic Japan” (University of Hawaii Press, 2013)
In two recent books, Gregory Smits offers a history of earthquakes and seismology in Japan that creates a wonderful dialogue between history and the sciences…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Anne Allison, “Precarious Japan” (Duke University Press, 2013)
“[All] I want to eat is a rice ball.” This was the last entry in the diary of a 52-year-old man who starved to death in an apartment he had occupied for 20…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Michael Wert, “Meiji Restoration Losers: Memory and Tokugawa Supporters in Modern Japan” (Harvard Asia Center, 2013)
Michael Wert‘s new book considers the construction of memory around the “losers” of the Meiji Restoration, individuals and groups whose reputations suffered…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Miriam Kingsberg, “Moral Nation: Modern Japan and Narcotics in Global History” (University of California Press, 2013)
Miriam Kingsberg‘s fascinating new book offers both a political and social history of modern Japan and a global history of narcotics in the modern world. Moral…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
David Spafford, “A Sense of Place: The Political Landscape in Late Medieval Japan” (Harvard University Asia Center, 2013)
So many history books take for granted that a story about the past needs to focus on change (gradual or dramatic, transformative or subtle) as its motivating…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Darryl E. Flaherty, “Public Law, Private Practice: Politics, Profit, and the Legal Profession in Nineteenth-Century Japan” (Harvard Asia Center, 2013)
In global narratives of modern legal history, Asia tends to fall short relative to Europe and the US. According to these narratives, while individuals in the…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Aaron S. Moore, “Constructing East Asia: Technology, Ideology, and Empire in Japan’s Wartime Era, 1931-1945” (Stanford UP, 2013)
We tend to understand the modernization of Japan as a story of its rise as a techno-superpower. In East Asia: Technology, Ideology, and Empire in Japan’s…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Louise Young, “Beyond the Metropolis: Second Cities and Modern Life in Interwar Japan” (University of California Press, 2013)
During the interwar period (1918-1937), the city began to take its modern shape in Japan. At the same time, development in the Japanese provinces became a…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Fabian Drixler, “Mabiki: Infanticide and Population Growth in Eastern Japan, 1660-1950” (University of California Press, 2013)
The book opens on a scene in the mountains of Gumna, Japan. A midwife kneels next to a mother who has just given birth, and she proceeds to strangle the…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Mark Byington, ed., “Early Korea: The Rediscovery of Kaya in History and Archaeology” (University of Hawaii Press, 2012)
Early Korea is a resource like no other: in an ongoing series of volumes produced by the Early Korea Project at the Korea Institute of Harvard University, the…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Maki Fukuoka, “The Premise of Fidelity: Science, Visuality, and Representing the Real in 19th-Century Japan” (Stanford UP, 2012)
Zograscope. Say it with me: zograscope. ZooooOOOOOoooograscope. There are many optical wonders in Maki Fukuoka’s new book The Premise of Fidelity: Science…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
William Marotti, “Money, Trains, and Guillotines: Art and Revolution in 1960s Japan” (Duke UP, 2013)
Japanese artist Akasegawa Genpei was prosecuted in the 1960s for producing work that imitated money. His single-sided, monochrome prints of the 1,000 yen note…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Ian Condry, “The Soul of Anime” (Duke UP, 2013)
You may come for the Astro Boy or Afro Samurai, but you’ll stay for the innovative ways that Ian Condry‘s new book brings together analyses of transmedia…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Jonathan E. Abel, “Redacted: The Archives of Censorship in Transwar Japan” (University of California Press, 2012)
There is much to love about Jonathan Abel‘s new book. Redacted: The Archives of Censorship in Transwar Japan (University of California Press, 2012) brilliantly…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Gennifer Weisenfeld, “Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923” (University of California Press, 2012)
Gennifer Weisenfeld‘s gorgeous and thoughtful new book explores the visual culture that emerged in the wake of the Kanto earthquake of 1923. Imaging Disaster…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Barbara R. Ambros, “Bones of Contention: Animals and Religion in Contemporary Japan” (University of Hawai’i Press, 2012)
It opens with a parakeet named Homer, and it closes with a dog named Hachiko. In the intervening pages, Barbara Ambros explores the deaths, afterlives, and…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Barak Kushner, “Slurp!: A Social and Culinary History of Ramen – Japan’s Favorite Noodle Soup” (Global Oriental, 2012)
I bet you’ve never heard of the “Smash the Baltic Fleet Memorial Togo Marshmallow.” I hadn’t either, before reading Barak Kushner‘s lively and illuminating new…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Jason Josephson, “The Invention of Religion in Japan” (University of Chicago Press, 2012)
In 1853, the Japanese were required to consider what the word religion meant when western powers compelled the Tokugawa government to ensure freedom of…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Amy Stanley, “Selling Women: Prostitution, Markets, and the Household in Early Modern Japan” (University of California Press, 2012)
With prose that is as elegant as the argument is clear, Amy Stanley‘s new book tells a social, cultural, and economic history of Tokugawa Japan through the…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Par Cassel, “Grounds of Judgment: Extraterritoriality and Imperial Power in Nineteenth-Century China and Japan” (Oxford UP, 2012)
Extraterritoriality was not grafted whole onto East Asian societies: it developed over time and in a relationship with local precedents, institutions, and…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Marnie Anderson, “A Place in Public: Women’s Rights in Meiji Japan” (Harvard University Asia Center, 2010)
In the late nineteenth century the Japanese elite embarked on an aggressive, ambitious program of modernization known in the West as the “Meiji Restoration.”…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Miryam Sas, “Experimental Arts in Postwar Japan: Moments of Encounter, Engagement, and Imagined Return” (Harvard University Asia Center, 2011)
Miryam Sas’ Experimental Arts in Postwar Japan: Moments of Encounter, Engagement, and Imagined Return (Harvard University Asia Center, 2011) is an…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Ethan Segal, “Coins, Trade, and the State: Economic Growth in Early Medieval Japan” (Harvard University Asia Center, 2011)
What did money mean to the people of medieval Japan? In Coins, Trade, and the State: Economic Growth in Early Medieval Japan (Harvard University Asia Center…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Merry White, “Coffee Life in Japan” (University of California Press, 2012)
Merry (Corky) White‘s new book Coffee Life in Japan (University of California Press, 2012) opens with a memory of stripping naked and being painted blue in an…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Luke S. Roberts, “Performing the Great Peace: Political Space and Open Secrets in Tokugawa Japan” (University of Hawai’i Press, 2012)
Luke Roberts‘ Performing the Great Peace: Political Space and Open Secrets in Tokugawa Japan (University of Hawai’i Press, 2012) is a gracefully-written study…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
E. Taylor Atkins, "Primitive Selves: Koreana in the Japanese Colonial Gaze, 1910-1945" (U California Press, 2010)
Taylor Atkins' recent book is both an important contribution to East Asian Studies and an absolute delight to read. Primitive Selves: Koreana in the Japanese…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Robert K. Fitts, “Banzai Babe Ruth: Baseball, Espionage, and Assassination during the 1934 Tour of Japan” (University of Nebraska Press, 2012)
There are three Americans in the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame. One is Horace Wilson, the professor of English who brought his students outside for a game in…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Dennis Frost, “Seeing Stars: Sports Celebrity, Identity, and Body Culture in Modern Japan” (Harvard UP, 2011)
In the celebrity firmament that circles around us, sports stars are among the brightest lights. Kobe, Tiger, Messi, Márta, Sachin, and Serena can be…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Eric Rath, “Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Japan” (University of California Press, 2010)
Cuisine in early modern Japan was experienced and negotiated through literature and ritual, and the uneaten or inedible was often as important as what was…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Lori Meeks, “Hokkeji and the Reemergence of Female Monastic Orders in Premodern Japan” (University of Hawaii Press, 2010)
Scholars have long been fascinated by the Kamakura era (1185-1333) of Japanese history, a period that saw the emergence of many distinctively Japanese forms of…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Michael Auslin, “Pacific Cosmopolitans: A Cultural History of U.S.-Japan Relations” (Harvard UP, 2011)
How have the United States and Japan managed to remain such strong allies, despite having fought one another in a savage war less than 70 years ago? In Michael…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Michael Auslin, "Pacific Cosmopolitans: A Cultural History of U.S.-Japan Relations" (Harvard UP, 2011)
How have the United States and Japan managed to remain such strong allies, despite having fought one another in a savage war less than 70 years ago? In Michael…
- New Books in Japanese Studies
Yuma Totani, “The Tokyo War Crimes Trials: The Pursuit of Justice in the Wake of World War II” (Harvard UP, 2008)
Most everyone has heard of the Nuremberg Trials. Popular books have been written about them. Hollywood made movies about them. Some of us can even name a few…