New Books in Japanese Studies

Icy, unpredictable, and treacherous, the dangers of the Yalu River were heightened in the twentieth century when it became the longest non-maritime border of the Japanese Empire. Border of Water and Ice: The Yalu River and Japan’s Empire in Korea and Manchuria (Cornell University Press, 2024) focuses on this river at this critical juncture, analyzing how imperial Japan attempted to harness and control this fluid border. By honing in on both human and nonhuman actors — including water, ice, timber cutters, smugglers, and anti-Japanese guerrillas — Joseph Seeley shows how the Yalu determined how borders were drawn, how imperial power was exerted, and how local resistance was enacted.Using primary sources in Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and English, Border of Water and Ice is an important reminder of the importance of the nonhuman world. Employing the concept of “liquid geographies” to highlight the fluid motion of peoples, goods, and sediment across the Yalu borderland, the book shows readers how the water and ice of the river determined when and how Japanese authorities exerted their power, as well as how important the seasons were to resistance efforts.This book will appeal to readers with an interest in environmental history, transnational history, the history of borders and borderlands, and those seeking a vivid portrayal of how ordinary reed-cutters, engineers, and smugglers experienced and navigated the intricate dynamics of imperial power, resistance, and the changing seasons along the riverbanks.In addition to being available in both hardcover and paperback formats, Border of Water and Ice is also available as an ebook here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/japanese-studies

In recent years, manga and anime have attracted increasing scholarly interest beyond the realm of Japanese studies. This Companion takes a unique approach, committed to exploring both the similarities and differences between these two distinct but interrelated media forms. Firmly based in Japanese sources, The Cambridge Companion to Manga and Anime (Cambridge UP, 2024) offers a lively and accessible introduction, exploring the local contexts of manga and anime production, distribution, and reception in Japan, as well as the global influence and impact of these versatile media. Chapters explore common characteristics such as visuals, voice, serial narrative and characters, whilst also highlighting distinct challenges and histories. The volume provides both a basis for further research in this burgeoning field and a source of inspiration for those new to the topic.Listeners are also invited to observe an author roundtable on Feb.19, 2025. Please RSVP here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/japanese-studies

Finland, a minor player on the international arena and burdened with the tag of ‘Finlandization’ during much of the post-WWII period, has won surprisingly positive visibility and a strong nation brand in the far-off Japan in the 2000’s. How has such a transformation of a small state’s reputation been possible?In this episode, Dr. Laura Ipatti, Postdoctoral Researcher at the unit of Contemporary History, University of Turku, tackles this question by introducing the findings of her Doctoral Dissertation, titled From Finlandization to Finland Boom. Finland’s Public Diplomacy in Japan, 1962–2003. In her study, Ipatti looks at the actors, means and motives that have participated in ‘making Finland known’ in the economic and cultural powerhouse of post-WWII Japan.After the lost war against the Soviet Union, Finland was obliged to conclude an agreement of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance with Moscow but, against the odds, stayed a liberal democracy and a market economy that chose neutrality as a foreign policy line. To showcase the willingness and trustworthiness of the Finnish leaders and the society alike to Western cooperation, the Finnish government started an intense image campaigning to secure an access to the Western markets and political dialogue. These efforts at influencing foreign perceptions of Finland targeted even Japan, a member of the US-led bloc in the Cold War.Today, the legacy of this campaigning is still visible, for example in the Japanese fashion trend called ‘Finland Boom’. But will Finland's appearance at the upcoming Expo 2025 in Osaka this spring build on the old ideals, too?The episode is hosted by Dr. Outi Luova, Centre for East Asian Studies, University of Turku, FinlandLaura Ipatti: From Finlandization to Finland Boom. Finland’s Public Diplomacy in Japan, 1962–2003. University of Turku, Dec 2024. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/japanese-studies

Misery beneath the Miracle in East Asia (Cornell University Press, 2024) challenges prevailing views of the East Asian economic miracle. Existing scholarship has overlooked the severity, persistence, and harmful consequences of the social-welfare crises affecting the region. Dr. Arvid J. Lukauskas and Dr. Yumiko Shimabukuro fill this gap and put a major asterisk on East Asia's economic record.Combining big-picture analysis, abundant data, a dynamic interdisciplinary framework, and powerful human stories, they shed light on the social ills that governments have failed to address adequately, including low wages, child abuse, elderly poverty, and substandard housing. One of the major forces behind the multidimensional welfare crises is the region's productivist welfare strategy, which prioritizes economic growth while abandoning a robust social safety net, leaving the most vulnerable segments of society largely unprotected.Misery beneath the Miracle in East Asia brings the region into debates over the dangers of seeking growth at all costs that are currently embroiling the United States and other advanced industrialized countries.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/japanese-studies

Cinepoems, tape recorder poems, protest performance poems, music video poems, internet sign language poems, and augmented reality poems: these poems might exist at the margins of conventional poetic practice, but they take center stage in Expanding Verse: Japanese Poetry at the Edge of Media (University of California Press, 2024) by Andrew Campana. Expanding Verse explores the role of experimental poetic practice in Japan from the 1920s to the present, investigating how such poems engaged in the media cultures in which they were made and how poetry allowed poets to rethinking what media was.Expanding Media is expansive, engaging, and a delight to read, even if you don’t (yet) know what a cinepoem is. This book engages with the fields of literary, media, and disability studies, all while serving as an accessible introduction to the outer edge of contemporary Japanese literature. Expanding Media should appeal to readers interested in Japanese literature, poetry more broadly, and media studies, as well as those looking for a book that will send them down rabbit holes searching for "augmented reality roses" and "pop star lobster princess."  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/japanese-studies

As Wall Street swooned and boomed through the last decade, our livelihoods have—now more than ever—come to rely upon the good sense and risk appetites of a few standout investors. And amidst the BlackRocks, Vanguards, and Berkshire Hathaways stands arguably the most iconoclastic of them all: SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son.In Gambling Man: The Wild Ride of Japan’s Masayoshi Son (Atria, 2024), the first Western biography of Son, the self-professed unicorn hunter, we go behind the scenes of the world’s most monied halls of power in New York, Tokyo, Silicon Valley, Saudi Arabia, and beyond to see how Son’s firm SoftBank has defied conventional wisdom and imposing odds to push global tech and commerce into the future.From the dizzying highs of Uber, DoorDash, and Slack to the epic lows of WeWork and tech-infused dogwalking app Wag Son and SoftBank have been at the center of cutting-edge capitalism’s absolute peaks and valleys. In the process, Son, son of a pachinko kingpin who grew up in a slum in Japan, has been a hero, a villain, and even a meme-ified hero to the internet tech- and finance-bro set all at once.Based on in-depth research and eye-opening interviews, Gambling Man is an unforgettable character study and alarming true story of twenty-first-century commerce that will stick with you long after you turn the final page.Lionel Barber is the former editor of the Financial Times. As editor, he interviewed many of the world’s leaders in business and politics, including US Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Barber has co-written several books and has lectured widely on foreign policy, transatlantic relations, and economics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/japanese-studies

In this podcast, the host, Lara Momesso, introduces a book she co-edited with Dr Polina Ivanova (University of Bremen) titled Refugees and Asylum Seekers in East Asia: Perspective from Japan and Taiwan (Palgrave MacMillan, 2024), and she interviews one of the authors of the book, Dr Shu-fen Lin, at National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University. In this chat, Shu-fen Lin explores the life story of a Vietnamese refugee, Father Nguyễn Văn Hùng, who escaped Vietnam via boat in the late 1970s and arrived in Japan, and then went to Australia and, eventually, Taiwan. The story of Father Nguyễn Văn Hùng intersects with the immigration and refugee policies of Japan, Australia and Taiwan, his fight for justice in Taiwan as well as Vietnam, and his future ambitions and goals.For those who are interested to know more about this conversation, here you can find the link of the book and here the link of the specific chapter. The book is available open access, so feel free to share it with your network! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/japanese-studies

Whether watching Studio Ghibli adaptations of British children's books, visiting Harry Potter sites in Britain or eating at Alice in Wonderland-themed restaurants in Tokyo, the Japanese have a close and multifaceted relationship with British children's literature. In British Children's Literature in Japanese Culture: Wonderlands and Looking-Glasses (Bloomsbury, 2023), Catherine Butler considers its many manifestations in print, on the screen, in tourist locations and throughout Japanese popular culture. Taking stock of the influence of literary works such as Gulliver's Travels, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, The Tale of Peter Rabbit, Tom's Midnight Garden, and the Harry Potter series, this lively account draws on literary criticism, translation, film and tourist studies to explore how British children's books have been selected, translated, understood, adapted and reworked into Japanese commercial, touristic and imaginative culture. Using theoretically informed case studies this book will consider both individual texts and their wider cultural contexts, translations and adaptations (such as the numerous adaptations of British children's books by Studio Ghibli and others), the dissemination of distinctive tropes such as magical schools into Japanese children's literature and popular culture, and the ways in which British children's books and their settings have become part of way that Japanese people understand Britain itself. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/japanese-studies

The system of prostitution imposed and enforced by the Japanese military during its wartime occupation of several countries in East and Southeast Asia is today well-known and uniformly condemned. Transnational activist movements have sought to recognize and redress survivors of this World War II-era system, euphemistically known as "comfort women," for decades, with a major wave beginning in the 1990s. However, Indonesian survivors, and even the system's history in Indonesia to begin with, have largely been sidelined, even within the country itself.In Systemic Silencing: Activism, Memory, and Sexual Violence in Indonesia (U Wisconsin Press, 2023), Katharine E. McGregor not only untangles the history of the system during the war, but also unpacks the context surrounding the slow and faltering efforts to address it. With careful attention to the historical, social, and political conditions surrounding sexual violence in Indonesia, supported by exhaustive research and archival diligence, she uncovers a critical piece of Indonesian history and the ongoing efforts to bring it to the public eye. Critically, she establishes that the transnational part of activism surrounding victims of the system is both necessary and fraught, a complexity of geopolitics and international relationships on one hand and a question of personal networks, linguistic differences, and cultural challenges on the other. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/japanese-studies

Signed on September 2, 1945 aboard the American battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay by Japanese and Allied leaders, the instrument of surrender formally ended the war in the Pacific and brought to a close one of the most cataclysmic engagements in history, one that had cost the lives of millions. VJ―Victory over Japan―Day had taken place two weeks or so earlier, in the wake of the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the entrance of the Soviet Union into the war. In the end, the surrender itself fulfilled the commitment that Franklin Roosevelt had made that it be "unconditional," as had been the case with Nazi Germany in May, 1945. Though readily accepted as war policy at the time, after Roosevelt's death in April 1945, popular support for unconditional surrender wavered, particularly when the bloody campaigns on Iwo Jima and Okinawa made clear the cost of military victory against Japan. The ending of the war in Europe spurred calls in Congress, particularly among anti-New Deal Republicans, to shift the American economy to peacetime and bring home troops. Even after the atomic bombs had been dropped, Japan continued to seek a negotiated surrender, further complicating the debate. Though this was the last time Americans would impose surrender unconditionally, questions surrounding it continued at home through the 1950s and 1960s, when liberal and conservative views reversed, and particularly in Vietnam and the definition of "peace with honor." It remained controversial through the ceremonies surrounding the 50th anniversary and the Gulf War, when the subject revived.In Unconditional: The Japanese Surrender in World War II (Oxford UP, 2020), which publishes in time for the 75th anniversary of the surrender, Bancroft Prize co-winner Marc Gallicchio offers a narrative of the surrender in its historical moment, revealing how and why the event unfolded as it did and the principle figures behind it, including George C. Marshall and Douglas MacArthur, who would effectively become the leader of Japan during the American occupation. It also reveals how the policy underlying it remained controversial at the time and in the decades following, shaping our understanding of World War II.Grant Golub is a PhD candidate in the Department of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His research focuses on the politics of American grand strategy during World War II. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/japanese-studies