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Interviews with scholars of Japan about their new books.
John talks to Bruce Rutledge, founder of Chin Music Press, about running an independent Asia-focused press, the origins of the company in Tokyo, and t…
Since its debut in 1984, Dragon Ball has become one of the most popular, influential, and lucrative media franchises in the world. In Next Time on Dra…
Offering a new global perspective on modern Indian history, Asianism and the Fall of Empire: India's Road to Freedom (University of California Press, …
Amy Chavez talks to Don Weiss, currently mid-way through the Shikoku Pilgrimage — Japan's 1,300 km Buddhist route that has been walked for almost as…
Public Housing in Japan: The Dōjunkai Apartments One Hundred Years On (Brill, 2026) is the first comprehensive English-language examination of the Dōj…
M. G. Sheftall has lived in Japan since 1987. He has a PhD in international relations and modern Japanese history from Waseda University in Tokyo. S…
The Land of Happiness: How the Japanese Department Store Visualized Modern Life (MIT Press, 2026) explores the far-reaching influence of the Japanes…
What happens when performance defies social and political boundaries? Performing Transgression: Crowds and Bodies in Heian Japan (Harvard University P…
How have Buddhist teachings come to be in modern and contemporary Japan and how are they taught? This pioneering work seeks to answer these questions …
Most people only know one of the Ryukyu Islands: the island of Okinawa, home to sandy beaches and one of the U.S.’s most important bases in Asia. Ther…
Once dominant and institutionalised, the Yakuza, one of Japan's best known criminal organisations, is now shrinking under the combined pressure of…
In his latest book, Pink Tsunami: The Hello Kitty Kawaii Wave that has Swept the World (Headpress 2026), Alan Brender delves into Hello Kitty the mark…
The connections between Hong Kong and Japan began far earlier than many realise. Yet only recently has Hong Kong’s historic Japanese community receive…
In The Narrowing Sea: Fukuoka, Pusan, and the Rise and Fall of an Imperial Region (U California Press, 2025), Hannah Shepherd examines the shared hist…
Meanings of Antiquity: Myth Interpretation in Premodern Japan (Harvard UP, 2023) is the first dedicated study of how the oldest Japanese myths, record…
Jeremy Yellen’s The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere: When Total Empire Met Total War (Cornell University Press, 2019) is a challenging transnat…
In October 1943, the Gripsholm—a Swedish ocean liner—and the Teia Maru—a Japanese troop ship—sat in Mormugao, a port in Portuguese India. There, the t…
I was born in Harbin, Manchuria, (later China), in 1938. At the outbreak of the Second World War my mother, sister and I, along with other non-combata…
The 1960s in Japan have long been understood as a period of radical political engagement. But as political movements from Old Left Communism to New Le…
As detailed in The Japanese Garden: Ella Christie and Cowden (Birlinn, 2026) by Lucy Stewart, at the turn of the twentieth century, Scottish adventure…