Of all the three great sects of Zen in Japan, the Soto school is perhaps the best-known and most inclusive, admitting to its ranks lay people and women in addition to monks. It’s one of the most widely practiced forms of Buddhism in Japan, where there are reportedly nearly fourteen thousand temples dedicated to it. Soto is also very popular in North America; in 1966 the Soto Zen Buddhist Association was founded by Japanese and American teachers, a response to a great and growing interest outside Japan in the practices of this school.
Category Archive: Non-Fiction
This political biography of the current Indonesian President Joko Widodo, known as Jokowi, explains why his style is so successful and what his major undertakings as president have been. The stated aim of Jokowi and the New Indonesia by Darmawan Prasodjo with assistance from Tim Hannigan, is to give a full picture of the man and his presidency in English. The book is based on an Indonesian language version, but has been extended to give context to readers not familiar with Indonesia’s past.
The Mediterranean, the body of water that now divides and buffers Europe from the “over there” of Africa and the Middle East, used (many centuries ago) to unite a region. The “Mare Nostrum” of the Romans was a conduit for internal commercial and cultural communication. And for several centuries prior to becoming a Roman lake, the Mediterranean served to knit together a civilizational way of life, legacies upon which “the West”, broadly-speaking, was based.
On 27 July 1905, the United States Secretary of War met with the Prime Minister of Japan. Both men spoke for industrializing countries with recent military victories in Asia. The potential for conflict loomed, distant but real. Happily, the two statesmen found a solution. In the Taft-Katsura Memorandum, the US recognized Japan’s suzerainty over Korea while Japan promised the same for the US-occupied Philippines. Of course, neither man foresaw how Japan’s trajectory to the summit of realpolitik would culminate in the devastation of 1945. To understand that path, Hiroshi Kawaguchi and Sumiyo Ishii’s recently translated book A History of Economic Thought in Japan: 1600-1945 offers a valuable supplement to traditional military and political history.
At this time of shifting geopolitical relationships—“decoupling” between China and the US, rapprochement between China and Russia—it is unsurprising that the cultural and intellectual as well as political history of these relationships has attracted increasing attention. Recent volumes on Sino-Soviet “internationalist” interaction is now joined by Arise, Africa! Roar, China!, Gao Yunxiang’s recent study of “the close relationships between a trio of famous twentieth-century African Americans and two little-known Chinese” from, roughly, the 1930s through the advent of the Cold War.
This large-format book of wonderful photographs by Jon Kolkin, an American doctor and artist who has spent many years in Asia practicing both his avocations, takes readers away from the purely visual impact of the subject matter to something beyond.
“World War II in the Asia Pacific created the modern world,” writes Peter Harmsen in the beginning of Volume 3 of his War in the Far East, which examines the final twenty months of the War in the region and its immediate aftermath. The United States emerged from the war as the leading world power, and the defeat of Japan led to a renewal of civil war in China, the coming to power of the Chinese communist regime, and ultimately China’s emergence as the world’s other superpower. And China’s rise, Harmsen contends, is “the defining event of the 21st century.”