DECIPHERING THE RISING SUN, by Roger Dingman. Naval Institute Press, 2010, 250 pp.,$29.95 (hardcover) Creating a language-learning program may not sound like the kind of material to set the readers’ pulse racing, but author Roger Dingman has a unique and compelling story to tell. ...

IMPRESSIONS OF JAPANESE ARCHITECTURE, by Ralph Adams Cram. Tuttle Publishing, 152 pp., $31.75 (paper) Kicking his heels while waiting for a design commission to materialize, English architect Ralph Adams Cram might easily have frittered away his time getting pickled at the bar of the ...

THE UNDAUNTED WOMEN OF NANKING: The Wartime Diaries of Minnie Vautrin and Tsen Shui-fang, edited by Hua-ling Hu and Lian-hong Zhang. Southern Illinois University Press, 2010, 227 pp., $29.95 (hardcover) The history of missionary work in Asia and the Pacific region has not always ...

MATERIALS AND MEANING IN CONTEMPORARY JAPANESE ARCHITECTURE: Tradition and Today, by Dana Buntrock. Routledge, 2010, 275 pp., $165 (hardcover), $62.95 (paperback) If Europeans are overawed by the architecture of the past, convinced that nothing as accomplished can ever be built again, this is where ...

The world’s first gardens may well have been made of coral, natural clusters of underwater beauty that could be glimpsed through the transparent water. Perfectly tone-coordinated, balanced and formed, they were refined by nature to a degree that may have suggested the divine. Those ...

Inquiring as to the whereabouts of English-language bookstores in Fukuoka, the person at the Rainbow Plaza information center’s desk straightaway handed me a printout of English listings, maps and directions. This, I began to realize, is a well organized city. Despite the riches they ...

VISIONS OF JAPANESE MODERNITY: Articulations of Cinema, Nation and Spectatorship, 1895-1925, by Aaron Gerow. University of California Press, 2010, 344 pp., $24.95 (paper) Japanese cinema was different from the very start. In the days of the silent movie, recitators called benshi, took it upon ...

Traditionally, gardens patronage in Japan came from two sources: the nobility and the coffers of well-endowed temples. The wealthy and privileged commissioned landscaped gardens for their estates; head abbots employed the services of ishi-tate-so (rock-setting priests) to create gardens that would complement religious architecture ...

DEMYSTIFYING PEARL HARBOR: A New Perspective From Japan, by Iguchi Takeo. I-House Press, 2010, 343 pp., ¥3,000 (hardcover) Reviewed by Stephen Mansfield It is extraordinary the lengths to which some people will go to reorganize history to suit their own ends. There are still ...

Despite the environmental mistakes of the postwar decades, the violation of a once pristine landscape, a recent trip to Amami Oshima, gave very real cause for hope. Some regions have always, it seems, been in good shape. Flying over the island’s green, volcanic hills, ...

IN PURSUIT OF UNIVERSALISM: Yorozu Tetsugoro and Japanese Modern Art, by Alicia Volk. University of California Press, 308 pp., $15 (paper) Pulse waves from the art world of the early 20th Century may have been felt far and wide, but the movements, practitioners and ...

For many Japanese film buffs, the name Kishiwada is synonymous with Miike Takashi’s 1997 movie “Young Thugs, Innocent Blood” — an example of a cinematic genre described by film auteur Donald Richie as “anarchic and set in the brutal and amoral present.” However, as ...