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When Emperor Meiji began his rule in 1867, Japan was a splintered empire dominated by the shogun and the daimyos, cut off from the outside world, staunchly anti-foreign, and committed to the traditions of the past. Before long, the shogun surrendered to the emperor, a new constitution was adopted, and Japan emerged as a modern, industrialized state.
Despite the length of his reign, little has been written about the strangely obscured figure of Meiji...
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In the tenth century, Japan was both physically and culturally isolated from the rest of the world. The Pillow Book recaptures this lost world with the diary of a young court lady. Sei Shōnagon was a contemporary of Murasaki Shikibu, who wrote the well-known novel The Tale of Genji. Unlike the latter's fictionalized view of the Heian-era court, Shōnagon's journal provides a lively miscellany of anecdotes, observations, and gossip, intended to be...
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Derived from the journals of an empress's tutor and companion, this unique book offers rare glimpses of court life in eleventh-century Japan. Lady Murasaki recounts episodes of drama and intrigue among courtiers as well as the elaborate rituals related to the birth of a prince. Her observations, expressed with great subtlety, offer penetrating and timeless insights into human nature.
Murasaki Shikibu (circa AD 973-1025) served among the gifted poets...
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“The Birch Bark Books of Simon Pokagon” is a collection of articles and legends written for and about the Potawatomi tribe by Simon Pokagon. Before Chicago was one of the largest and most prosperous cities in the nation, it was home to the Anishinaabe peoples, including the Potawatomi to whom Simon Pokagon belonged. Angered with the erasure of his people and the whitewashing of the history of violence against America's indigenous tribes, Pokagon...
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Autobiography of Ma-Ka-Tai-Me-She-Kia-Kiak (1833) is the autobiography of Sauk chief Black Hawk. Dictated to government interpreter Antoine LeClair following nearly a year in captivity, Black Hawk's Autobiography captures his youth among the Sauk in the American Midwest, his union with British forces during the War of 1812, and his eventual rebellion against white settlers during the 1832 Black Hawk War. Revered by generations for his bravery and...
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The Influence of Sea Power Upon History (1890) is a work of naval history and strategy by Alfred Thayer Mahan. Drawing on decades of experience as a naval officer, researcher, and university lecturer, Mahan develops his theory of sea power in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in this popular and important text. Despite a lack of primary sources, The Influence of Sea Power would prove essential to the expansion of European and American imperialism...
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“The Collected Writings of Sui Sin Far” (2021) is a collection of fiction and nonfiction by Sui Sin Far. Inspired by her experience living among Chinese Americans in San Francisco and Seattle, Sui Sin Far was one of the first authors of Chinese descent to publish her writing in the United States. From her beloved recurring character Mrs. Spring Fragrance to such stories of prejudice and perseverance as A Chinese Ishmael and "In the Land of the...
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At the far north of Asia lies Japan, the mysterious land Marco Polo called Zipangu. When Europeans first visited Japan in the early 1500s it was the large island of Kyushu where they made landfall and began meeting both ordinary fishermen and farmers as well as the samurai and their lords. Kyushu was the gateway into Japan.
Yet Kyushu was more than just an entry point for Europeans. It was the stepping stone for the prehistoric immigrants to Japan...
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From the 1920s to the eve of the Pacific War in 1941, more than 50,000 young second-generation Japanese Americans (Nisei) embarked on transpacific journeys to the Japanese Empire, putting an ocean between themselves and pervasive anti-Asian racism in the American West. Born U.S. citizens but treated as unwelcome aliens, this contingent of Japanese Americans-one in four U.S.-born Nisei-came in search of better lives but instead encountered a world...
10) Memoirs of a kamikaze: a World War II pilot's inspiring story of survival, honor and reconciliation
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An incredible, untold story of survival and acceptance that sheds light on one of the darkest chapters in Japanese history. This book tells the story of Kazuo Odachi who, in 1943, when he was just 16 years-old joined the Imperial Japanese Navy to become a pilot. A year later, he was unknowingly assigned to the Kamikaze Special Attack Corps, a group of airmen whose mission was to sacrifice their lives by crashing planes into enemy ships. Their callsign...
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In the early eighteenth century, the noblewoman Ōgimachi Machiko composed a memoir of Yanagisawa Yoshiyasu, the powerful samurai for whom she had served as a concubine for twenty years. Machiko assisted Yoshiyasu in his ascent to the rank of chief adjutant to the Tokugawa shogun. She kept him in good graces with the imperial court, enabled him to study poetry with aristocratic teachers and have his compositions read by the retired emperor, and gave...
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In A History of Modern Japan, cultural historian Christopher Harding delves into the untold stories of Japan's recent history-from a pop star's nuclear power protest song in 2011, to Japanese feminists who fought for an equal political voice in the 1890s.
Though highly successful, and typically portrayed as a unified effort, Japan's rebuilding throughout the 20th century faced a lot of domestic criticism. This story-led account gives a voice to those...
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