A collection of journals written by Japanese men and women who journeyed to America, Europe, and China between 1860 and 1920. The diaries faithfully record personal views of the countries and their cultures and sentiments that range from delight to disillusionment.

This is a collection of journals written by Japanese men and women--from samurai and other government officials to novelists and poets--who journeyed to America, Europe, and China between 1860 and 1920. The diaries faithfully record personal views of the countries and their cultures and sentiments that range from delight to disillusionment. At once an intimate account of the travellers' lives and a testimony to the greater struggles and advances of their cultures, Donald Keene's eloquent translation and commentary invites the reader to partake in the world as each person experienced it.

Keiko Shiba, a noted researcher in early modern Japanese history, has spent years collecting hundreds of travel diaries written by women during the reign of the Tokugawa shogunate (17th through mid-19th centuries). The fruit of her research, originally published in Japanese, is now available in an English translation by Motoko Ezaki, with notes provided for general English readers. Shiba intersperses her narration abundantly with excerpts from the actual travel diaries; the book therefore is an invaluable source that offers us direct access to the individual voices of a large number of Tokugawa women, who energetically composed prose and poetry while traveling, sometimes in collaboration with their male companions. This work also sheds new light on women's literary activities in early modern Japan, which are still noticeably understudied compared to other genres of Japanese literary history.

This book is an eyewitness report of what happened in Japan and Korea during the Occupation years from December 1945 to May 1948. It is also meant to be some other things. It is the story of that extraordinary figure General Douglas MacArthur, and the men around him. It is the story of the way American foreign polity operated in one segment of the globe and of the plot and counterplot that went on behind the Japanese throne in the years of war and of the subsequent conspiracy to thwart the Allied purposes. It is the story of the common people in two Oriental lands. It is, finally, the record of the author's education, and not a few readers will find it controversial. But it is an absorbing book nonetheless, and the years that have passed since its first publication have not diminished its value as the chronicle of a highly observant reporter. It is indeed an intriguing panorama that Gayn presents, and whether the reader agrees with him in all of his observations, he can hardly accuse him of being unexciting.

Literature, like food, is, in Terry Eagleton’s words, "endlessly interpretable," and food, like literature, "looks like an object but is actually a relationship." So how much do we, and should we, read into the way food is represented in literature? Reading Food explores this and other questions in an unusual and fascinating tour of twentieth-century Japanese literature. Tomoko Aoyama analyzes a wide range of diverse writings that focus on food, eating, and cooking and considers how factors such as industrialization, urbanization, nationalism, and gender construction have affected people’s relationships to food, nature, and culture, and to each other. The examples she offers are taken from novels (shosetsu) and other literary texts and include well known writers (such as Tanizaki Jun’ichiro, Hayashi Fumiko, Okamoto Kanoko, Kaiko Takeshi, and Yoshimoto Banana) as well as those who are less widely known (Murai Gensai, Nagatsuka Takashi, Sumii Sue, and Numa Shozo). Food is everywhere in Japanese literature, and early chapters illustrate historical changes and variations in the treatment of food and eating. Examples are drawn from Meiji literary diaries, children’s stories, peasant and proletarian literature, and women’s writing before and after World War II. The author then turns to the theme of cannibalism in serious and popular novels. Key issues include ethical questions about survival, colonization, and cultural identity. The quest for gastronomic gratification is a dominant theme in "gourmet novels." Like cannibalism, the gastronomic journey as a literary theme is deeply implicated with cultural identity. The final chapter deals specifically with contemporary novels by women, some of which celebrate the inclusiveness of eating (and writing), while others grapple with the fear of eating. Such dread or disgust can be seen as a warning against what the complacent "gourmet boom" of the 1980s and 1990s concealed: the dangers of a market economy, environmental destruction, and continuing gender biases. Reading Food in Modern Japanese Literature will tempt any reader with an interest in food, literature, and culture. Moreover, it provides appetizing hints for further savoring, digesting, and incorporating textual food.

“We tried to live with 120 percent intensity, rather than waiting for death. We read and read, trying to understand why we had to die in our early twenties. We felt the clock ticking away towards our death, every sound of the clock shortening our lives.” So wrote Irokawa Daikichi, one of the many kamikaze pilots, or tokkotai, who faced almost certain death in the futile military operations conducted by Japan at the end of World War II. This moving history presents diaries and correspondence left by members of the tokkotai and other Japanese student soldiers who perished during the war. Outside of Japan, these kamikaze pilots were considered unbridled fanatics and chauvinists who willingly sacrificed their lives for the emperor. But the writings explored here by Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney clearly and eloquently speak otherwise. A significant number of the kamikaze were university students who were drafted and forced to volunteer for this desperate military operation. Such young men were the intellectual elite of modern Japan: steeped in the classics and major works of philosophy, they took Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am” as their motto. And in their diaries and correspondence, as Ohnuki-Tierney shows, these student soldiers wrote long and often heartbreaking soliloquies in which they poured out their anguish and fear, expressed profound ambivalence toward the war, and articulated thoughtful opposition to their nation’s imperialism. A salutary correction to the many caricatures of the kamikaze, this poignant work will be essential to anyone interested in the history of Japan and World War II.