Little information remains about the personal life of the artisan Kojiro Shimizu. His personality and interests, his passions and motivations — all are shrouded in mystery. What we know is that he worked in Kyoto in the late 19th and early 20th century and ...
The open valley basins of Gifu Prefecture at the very center of Honshu, where the town of Sekigahara lies, were easily co-opted as theaters of war. It's no coincidence, given the martial history of the region, that the town of Seki was once known ...
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's WWII anniversary statement glosses over unpalatable facts and attempts to interpret them in a favorable way for Japan.
Between two sips of coffee, Waseda University professor James M. Vardaman comes clean to me about his decades of addiction. "I'm hooked on that rush," he says. "The adrenaline high I get when selling a publishing idea." Hailing from America, the acclaimed author has published five ...
Those who write about history do so at their peril. The difficulties are manifest: how to contribute anything meaningful, to be divergent but remain credible and to research the past without losing sight of the present. Japan and the Shackles of the Past, by R. Taggart ...
Although many Westerners think of Japan as a highly unified, hierarchical nation, it often more closely resembles a squabbling confederation of loosely affiliated gangs.
Best known for his translations of "The Tale of Genji" and the fiction of Yasunari Kawabata, for which the author won a Nobel Prize, Edward G. Seidensticker was also an accomplished essayist and historian. Low City, High City, by ...
History is littered with grand projects and dashed expectations that are no less intriguing than its moments of triumph and heroism. A large portrait in oils of a splendidly attired, mid-ranking samurai posing regally in a Roman palace in the early 1600s bears witness ...
The Jomon Period of Japanese history is so shrouded in the mists of time that any bid to fathom its secrets stretches even the usual bounds of prehistoric archeology. Yet as amateurs and experts alike have continued unearthing examples of Jomon pottery and stone ...
In July 2006, Shinzo Abe published a book titled "Utsukushii Kuni e" ("Toward a Beautiful Country"), but what does he mean by "beautiful country"?
As G.G. Rowley notes in the preface to her lovingly researched, elegantly written study of Imperial concubine Nakanoin Nakako, the history of her subject's period, the late 16th and early 17th centuries, "has traditionally been written as the history of men."
Japan's conservative rulers will need a more capacious sense of history if they are to succeed in building new bridges with the country's Asian neighbors.
