Before Japan was 'opened up' in the 1850s, contact with Russia as well as other western maritime nations was extremely limited. Yet from the early eighteenth century onwards, as a result of their expanding commercial interests in East Asia and the North Pacific, Russians had begun to encounter Japanese and were increasingly eager to establish diplomatic and trading relations with Japan. This book presents rare narratives written by Russians, including official envoys, scholars and, later, tourists, who visited Japan between 1792 and 1913. The introduction and notes set these narratives in the context of the history of Russo-Japanese relations and the genre of European travel writing, showing how the Russian writers combined ethnographic interests with the assertion of Russian and European values, simultaneously inscribing power relations and negotiating cultural difference.

During the period of the Tokugawa shogunate’s seclusion policy from about 1630 onwards there was very little European interaction with the Japanese except through the restricted Dutch presence at Nagasaki. During this period, however, Russians exploring Siberia and the Russian Far East came into contact with Japan, and further exploration and information collecting was encouraged by the Russian government, culminating in the first official Russian Embassy to Japan in 1792. This book examines the Russian discourse on Japan in the period, tracing the gradual accumulation of knowledge, and the development of Russian views, sometimes distorted, about Japan. The book includes key historical documents, some translated into English for the first time. The book is a prequel to the author’s previous book, Russian Views of Japan, 1792–1913: An Anthology of Early Travel Writing.

Throughout the centuries, as Russia strove to build itself into an imperial power equal to those in the West, China and Japan came to occupy a special place in Russians' view of the orient. Never colonised by Russia or the West, China and Japan were linked not only to the greatest of Russian imperial fantasies, but also, conversely, to a deep sense of insecurity regarding Russia's place in the world, a sense of insecurity which deepened as China and Japan began to modernise in the later nineteenth century. Drawing on a wide range of works by Russian writers and thinkers, Lim sets out how Russian perceptions of China and Japan were formed from Muscovy's first contacts with China in the late seventeenth century, through to the aftermath of Russia's defeat by Japan in the early twentieth century.

The transcripts of the three Kyoto School roundtable discussions of the theme of ‘the standpoint of world history and Japan’ may now be judged to form the key source text of responsible Pacific War revisionism. Published in the pages of Chuo Koron, the influential magazine of enlightened elite Japanese opinion during the twelve months after Pearl Harbor, these subversive discussions involved four of the finest minds of the second generation of the Kyoto School of philosophy. Tainted by controversy and shrouded in conspiratorial mystery, these transcripts were never republished in Japan after the war, and they have never been translated into English except in selective and often highly biased form. David Williams has now produced the first objective, balanced and close interpretative reading of these three discussions in their entirety since 1943. This version of the wartime Kyoto School transcripts is neither a translation nor a paraphrase but a fuller rendering in reader-friendly English that is convincingly faithful to the spirit of the original texts. The result is a masterpiece of interpretation and inter-cultural understanding between the Confucian East and the liberal West. Seventy years after Tojo came to power, these documents of the Japanese resistance to his wartime government and policies exercise a unique claim on students of Japanese history and thought today because of their unrivalled revelatory potential within the vast literature on the Pacific War. The Philosophy of Japanese Wartime Resistance may therefore stand as the most trenchant analysis of the political, philosophic and legal foundations of the place of the Pacific War in modern Japanese history yet to appear in any language.

Writings on post-war Japanese politics have tended to take for granted the dominance of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) as inevitable, without questioning how this came about. This book analyses the nature of Japanese party politics over the first four decades following the Second World War, assessing how the chief contenders – the conservative LDP and the socialists JSP (Japan Socialist Party) – competed in terms of their strengths and weaknesses relative to the other. Throughout, it addresses the questions: How effectively were the parties’ strengths harnessed? How did they alter over time? To what extent was the winning formula challenged? Did the loser have access to strengths with a major potential, and, if so, why did these remain underdeveloped? It extends widely to include discussion of the political system, the social and economic environment in which parties operated, internal party matters, especially factions, personal support groups, special interest groups, and the role of government bureaucracy. It shows why the Liberal Democratic Party was dominant, why the Japan Socialist Party remained out of power, and how successive prime ministers conducted policymaking in ways which often resulted in the bureaucracy taking the lead. Overall, the book shows how precedents for the political system and for policymaking were set in this important period, precedents which continue, and which have contributed significantly to the present conservative stance on many key issues.