The growth rate of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in the Asia-Pacific region greatly surpasses the world average. When the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is better realized, then the world’s largest free trade zone will be firmly established. It seems that this region has a very rosy outlook indeed; however, this region also faces a large number of serious problems such as: atomic energy in Japan, conflicts about East Asian regional integration, the decline of the Japanese Official Development Assistance (ODA), and the TPP’s possible impact on the Japanese universal health insurance system. We now face a possible Sino-Japanese military conflict concerning the Senkaku Islands (or Diaoyutai Islands). In short, the Asia-Pacific region has both a rosy future and the potential influence from unstable and dangerous elements at work within the region at present. The main purpose of this book is to analyze historical development, whilst looking at the contemporary situation of Japan from interdisciplinary perspectives. This book asks three major questions: (1) Is this really globalization? (2) What are Japan’s relations with other Asian countries? (3) Do U.S.-Japan relations still matter? Fourteen leading scholars in their fields answer these questions from interdisciplinary perspectives.

Asian Americans are the fastest growing minority population in the country. Moreover, they provide a wonderful lens on the experiences of immigrants and minorities in the United States more generally, both historically and today. In this timely new text, Pawan Dhingra and Robyn Magalit Rodriguez critically examine key sociological topics through the experiences of Asian Americans, including social hierarchies (of race, gender, and sexuality), work, education, family, culture, identity, media, pan-ethnicity, social movements, and politics. With vivid examples and lucid discussion of a broad range of theories, the authors demonstrate the contributions of the discipline of sociology to understanding Asian Americans, and vice versa. In addition, this text takes students beyond the boundaries of the United States to cultivate a comparative and global understanding of the Asian experience, as it has become increasingly transnational and diasporic. Bridging sociology and the growing interdisciplinary field of Asian American studies, and uniquely placing them in dialogue with one another, this engaging text will be welcome in undergraduate and graduate sociology courses such as race and ethnic relations, immigration, and social stratification, as well as on ethnic studies courses more broadly.

In this book, Yuko Kawai departs from the common conception of Japan as an ethnically homogenous nation. A Transnational Critique of Japaneseness: Cultural Nationalism, Racism, and Multiculturalism in Japan investigates the construction of Japaneseness from a transnational perspective, examining ways to make Japanese nationhood more inclusive. Kawai analyzes a variety of communicational practices during the first two decades of the twenty-first century while situating Japaneseness in its longer historical transformation from the late nineteenth century. Kawai focuses on governmental and popular ideas of Japaneseness in light of local, global, historical, and contemporary contexts as well as in relation to a diverse array of Others in both Asia and the West.

In the wake of the disaster of 1945—as Japan was forced to remake itself from “empire” to “nation” in the face of an uncertain global situation—literature and literary criticism emerged as highly contested sites. Today, this remarkable period holds rich potential for opening new dialogue between scholars in Japan and North America as we rethink the historical and contemporary significance of such ongoing questions as the meaning of the American occupation both inside and outside of Japan, the shifting semiotics of “literature” and “politics,” and the origins of what would become crucial ideological weapons of the cultural Cold War. The volume consists of three interrelated sections: “Foregrounding the Cold War,” “Structures of Concealment: ‘Cultural Anxieties,’” and “Continuity and Discontinuity: Subjective Rupture and Dislocation.” One way or another, the essays address the process through which new “Japan” was created in the postwar present, which signified an attempt to criticize and reevaluate the past. Examining postwar discourse from various angles, the essays highlight the manner in which anxieties of the future were projected onto the construction of the past, which manifest in varying disavowals and structures of concealment.

In its diversity of perspectives, The Unfinished Atomic Bomb: Shadows and Reflections is testament to the ways in which contemplations of the A-bomb are endlessly shifting, rarely fixed on the same point or perspective. The compilation of this book is significant in this regard, offering Japanese, American, Australian, and European perspectives. In doing so, the essays here represent a complex series of interpretations of the bombing of Hiroshima, and its implications both for history, and for the present day. From Kuznick’s extensive biographical account of the Hiroshima bomb pilot, Paul Tibbets, and contentious questions about the moral and strategic efficacy of dropping the A-bomb and how that has resonated through time, to Jacobs’ reflections on the different ways in which Hiroshima and its memorialization are experienced today, each chapter considers how this moment in time emerges, persistently, in public and cultural consciousness. The discussions here are often difficult, sometimes controversial, and at times oppositional, reflecting the characteristics of A-bomb scholarship more broadly. The aim is to explore the various ways in which Hiroshima is remembered, but also to consider the ongoing legacy and impact of atomic warfare, the reverberations of which remain powerfully felt.

This collection draws from scholars across different languages to address and assess the scholarly achievements of Tawada Yōko. Yōko, born in Japan (1960) and based in Germany, writes and presents in both German and Japanese. The contributors of this volume recognize her as one of the most important contemporary international writers. Her published books alone number more than fifty volumes, with roughly the same number in German and Japanese. Tawada’s writing unfolds at the intersections of borders, whether of language, identity, nationality, or gender. Her characters are all travelers of some sort, often foreigners and outsiders, caught in surreal in-between spaces, such as between language and culture, or between species, subjectivities, and identities. Sometimes they exist in the spaces between gendered and national identities; sometimes they are found caught between reality and the surreal, perhaps madness. Tawada has been one of the most prescient and provocative thinkers on the complexities of travelling and living in the contemporary world, and thus has always been obsessed with passports and trouble at borders. This current volume was conceived to augment the first edited volume of Tawada’s work, Yōko Tawada: Voices from Everywhere, which appeared from Lexington Books in 2007. That volume represented the first extensive English language coverage of Tawada’s writing. In the meantime, there is increased scholarly interest in Tawada’s artistic activity, and it is time for more sustained critical examinations of her output. This collection gathers and analyzes essays that approach the complex international themes found in many of Tawada’s works.

Beyond Zen: D. T. Suzuki and the Modern Transformation of Buddhism is an accessible collection of multidisciplinary essays, which offer a genuinely new appraisal of the great Zen scholar-practitioner, D. T. Suzuki (1870–1966). Suzuki’s writings and lectures continue to exert a profound influence on how Zen, Buddhism more broadly, and indeed Japanese culture as a whole, are understood in the United States, Europe, and across the globe. With the publication of Beyond Zen, we have at last in a single volume a comprehensive assessment of Suzuki that locates him and his legacy in the context of the turbulent age in which he lived. Now is the perfect moment for reflection and stocktaking. The fiftieth anniversary of Suzuki’s death passed just a few years ago, the copyright on his literary output has expired, and his selected works have recently been published by a major American university press. The work comprises twelve essays by some of the best Zen scholars in the world, Anglophone and Japanese, seasoned and young. They take a fresh look at Suzuki, his life and legacy, and their themes range broadly. Readers will find here explorations of Suzuki as he engaged with Zen and Mahāyāna Buddhism; nationalism and international relations; war and peace; religion, literature, and the media; the individual and society; and family, friends, and animals. Beyond Zen is structured chronologically to reveal the development in Suzuki’s thought during his long and eventful life. All in all, this collection offers a compelling, provocative, and multidimensional reappraisal of an extraordinary man and his times.