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Interviews with scholars of Japan about their new books.
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…
Andrea Horbinski's Manga's First Century: How Creators and Fans Made Japanese Comics, 1905-1989 (U California Press, 2025) centers the fans and creato…
The past, present and future of ethical production in fashion In Dyeing with the Earth, Charlotte Linton explores the intersection of small-scale tra…
Ozu and the Ethics of Indeterminacy (Duke University Press, 2026) re-examines cinema studies through the work of Japanese filmmaker Yasujirō Ozu, empl…
Climate Change Litigation in Japan: Cases, Challenges, and Opportunities for Environmental Law (Brill, 2026) provides the details of Japanese climate …
This episode of the Books on Asia podcast introduces new fiction and non-fiction on Japan to be published this year, 2026, along with two upcoming boo…
Translator Ted Goossen talks about everything from first landing in Japan in 1968 to the differences between translating Haruki Murakami and Hiromi Ka…
How did the movement of people, goods, and ships reshape connections between Latin America and Asia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuri…
Marty Friedman is a multi-platinum recording artist and government-appointed Ambassador to Japan Heritage. He has written three books in Japanese and …