New Books in Japanese Studies

In Darwin, Dharma, and the Divine. Evolutionary Theory and Religion in Modern Japan (University of Hawaii Press, 2017), G. Clinton Godart (Associate Professor at Tohoku University’s Department of Global Japanese Studies) brings to life more than a century of ideas by examining how and why Japanese intellectuals, religious thinkers of... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/japanese-studies

Oleg Benesch and Ran Zwigenberg’s coauthored Japan’s Castles: Citadels of Modernity in War and Peace (Cambridge University Press, 2019) uses the fate of castles after the Meiji coup of 1868 as a case study to explore aspects of Japan’s modern history including historical memory, cultural heritage, and state-civil society and national-regional... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/japanese-studies

Jolyon Baraka Thomas’s Faking Liberties: Religious Freedom in American-Occupied Japan (University of Chicago Press, 2019) challenges the commonsensical notion that the Japanese empire granted its subjects no religious freedom—that, despite the legal provision in the Meiji Constitution of 1890 affirming freedom of worship, “State Shinto” was the law of the... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/japanese-studies

Being Japan’s largest and most influential new religious organization, Soka Gakkai (Society for the Creation of Value) and Soka Gakkai International (SGI) claims to have 12 million members in 192 countries around the world. Founded in the 1930s by a group of teachers focused on educational reform, Soka Gakkai has... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/japanese-studies

Max Ward’s Thought Crime: Ideology and State Power in Interwar Japan (Duke University Press, 2019) analyzes the trajectory and transformations of the implementation of Japan’s 1925 Peace Preservation Law from its conception until the early years of the 1940s. The law, which began as a state effort to tamp down... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/japanese-studies

In Playing War: Children and the Paradoxes of Modern Militarism in Japan (University of California Press, 2017), Sabine Frühstück shows how children and childhood have been used in twentieth century Japan as technologies to moralize war, and later, in the twenty-first century, to sentimentalize peace. Through examining Japanese children’s war... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/japanese-studies

Danny Orbach’s Curse on This Country: The Rebellious Army of Imperial Japan (Cornell University Press, 2017) provides new insights into the origins of the insubordination that plagued and characterized the Imperial Japanese Army in the 1930s. Orbach identifies the causes of insubordination in both the political culture of the military... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/japanese-studies

Bringing Whales Ashore: Oceans and the Environment of Early Modern Japan (University of Washington Press, 2018) is more than a history of whaling in Japan. Jakobina K. Arch weaves together a wealth of diverse materials to demonstrate and explore the social, cultural, economic, intellectual, and religious impacts of whales on... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/japanese-studies

Jennifer Dixon’s Dark Pasts: Changing the State’s Story in Turkey and Japan (Cornell University Press, 2018), investigates the Japanese and Turkish states’ narratives of their “dark pasts,” the Nanjing Massacre (1937-38) and Armenian Genocide (1915-17), respectively. The official version of history initially advocated by both states was similar in its adherence... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/japanese-studies

Electrified Voices: How the Telephone, Phonograph, and Radio Shaped Modern Japan, 1868-1945 (Columbia UP, 2018) explores the soundscapes of modernity in Japan. In this book, Kerim Yasar argues that modern technologies of sound reproduction and transmission have had profound—and often underappreciated—social, economic, and political effects. Observing that the “materialities of... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/japanese-studies