Author Alexander Wooley explores the enduring legacy of the battleship Yamato, weaving together history, myth, and cultural impact to reveal how a wartime icon became a symbol of Japan’s identity and imagination across generations. The battleship Yamato was conceived as the ultimate expression of Imperial Japan’s naval power—the largest and most heavily armed battleship ever…
The word yakuza has its own history, and it is not what most readers assume. Kabuki theatre and popular fiction gave the word its start, with a stock character called a yakuza-mono: an outlaw or drifter who lived off the gambling tables. The literal meaning is close to “a useless one” or “a bad one”,…
Japan has been aging for decades. The country’s birth rate first fell below the replacement rate in 1974, long before phrases like the “demographic transition” and the “silver economy” became commonplace. Now, with many countries rich and small staring at the prospect of an aging population, what’s happening in Japan may now be a leading…
The rise of Japan as a world power in the early 20th century produced in Great Britain a rethinking of geopolitics and world order. It marked a shift from Eurocentrism to a more global approach to thinking about world politics. Japan’s stunning victory over Russia in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05, Cambridge professor Chika Tonooka…
A prestigious IT company sets six job finalists, all fresh out of university, an unusual task: through a group discussion, they have to decide who among them will get the job. If they manage to do so, the company will extend an offer to the winner. If they fail, everyone goes home empty-handed. The conversation…
She Walks at Night is the eighth Seishi Yokomizo mystery to be published in English since 2019 and features a cast familiar to previous readers of this popular series, which began with The Honjin Murders, published in Japan in 1946. The story brings back the eccentric private detective Kosuke Kindaichi and Inspector Isokawa, his longstanding, trusted…
First published in Japan in 2009, then followed by a second volume in 2023 written in the shadow of a terminal diagnosis, these two books appear here together in English for the first time, translated by Sam Bett. When Ryuichi Sakamoto was asked as a child what he wanted to be when he grew up,…
The young witch Kiki, protagonist of Eiko Kadano’s beloved Kiki’s Delivery Service, is now fourteen years old. After a quick visit at home to see her parents, she’s returning to a life she carefully built for herself in the seaside town of Koriko, where she moved the year before. She now runs the town’s famous…
There is an irresistible temptation to read filmmaker Adachi Masao’s life as if it were itself a movie. A Japanese New Wave filmmaker disappears into Lebanon, becomes associated with the Japanese Red Army, spends decades in exile, is imprisoned, and eventually returns home as one of the most controversial figures in postwar Japanese culture. It…
On 9 August 1945, an American plane dropped a nuclear bomb over Nagasaki at 11:01 am local time. It exploded 47 seconds later, three kilometers northwest of its planned target. There is no consensus on the number of people killed, but immediate death estimates range from 22-75,000—with another 60,000 injured. Author Kyoko Hayashi was one…
Excerpted from Takoyaki Tales by Christopher Green; reprinted with permission from Wilton Square Books. Jeremy rode the 8:19 train to Tokyo station every weekday morning. A long-term resident of Tokyo, he had seen fighting passengers, ill passengers, sneezing, snoring and vomiting passengers. But these were rare exceptions. Most people spent the time in silence, using…
The life of the Japanese poet Chūya Nakahara (generally referred to by his given name, Chūya) followed an archetypal pattern of tragic genius ending in early death. Chūya was born in 1907 and, by his own account, began writing poetry in response to the death of his infant brother, when Chūya was seven. After a…
The unusual word “limerence” in the title of Momo Yamaguchi’s debut novel is never in fact used in the book itself. It is a term coined by a psychologist in the 1970s and which hasn’t yet entered common parlance, requiring it to be defined on the book’s back cover—“the state of being obsessively infatuated with…
When Japan was first opened to widespread Western contact in the late 19th century, visitors saw it as a glimpse into the past. In its arts and crafts, they perceived an unconscious artistic genius lost to those who lived in industrial societies. At some point in the late 20th century, travellers started to see not…
Historians writing of Japanese Americans (also known as Nisei) in the Second World War have produced more books on their fighting in Europe as soldiers of the US Army’s 442nd Regimental Combat Team (RCT) than they have on how the Nisei gathered intelligence and produced propaganda for US civilian agencies and the Army in the…