In days gone by, fearsome armies of warriors did battle in Japan. The warriors fought with swords, spears, and bows and arrows. They were highly skilled, brave, and brutal. They lived and died by the rules of a strict warrior code. They were the samurai—those who serve.

This book is an introduction the Japanese history, culture, and society from 1185 - the beginning of the Kamakura period - through the end of the Edo period in 1868.

The Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa, who died at the age of 88, has been internationally acclaimed as a giant of world cinema. Rashomon, which won both the Venice Film Festival's grand prize and an Academy Award for best foreign-language film, helped ignite Western interest in the Japanese cinema. Seven Samurai and Yojimbo remain enormously popular both in Japan and abroad. In this newly revised and expanded edition of his study of Kurosawa's films, Stephen Prince provides two new chapters that examine Kurosawa's remaining films, placing him in the context of cinema history. Prince also discusses how Kurosawa furnished a template for some well-known Hollywood directors, including Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and George Lucas. Providing a new and comprehensive look at this master filmmaker, The Warrior's Camera probes the complex visual structure of Kurosawa's work. The book shows how Kurosawa attempted to symbolize on film a course of national development for post-war Japan, and it traces the ways that he tied his social visions to a dynamic system of visual and narrative forms. The author analyzes Kurosawa's entire career and places the films in context by drawing on the director's autobiography--a fascinating work that presents Kurosawa as a Kurosawa character and the story of his life as the kind of spiritual odyssey witnessed so often in his films. After examining the development of Kurosawa's visual style in his early work, The Warrior's Camera explains how he used this style in subsequent films to forge a politically committed model of filmmaking. It then demonstrates how the collapse of Kurosawa's efforts to participate as a filmmaker in the tasks of social reconstruction led to the very different cinematic style evident in his most recent films, works of pessimism that view the world as resistant to change.

“In a government, military matters are the essential thing,” said Japan’s “Heavenly Warrior,” the Emperor Temmu, in 684. Heavenly Warriors traces in detail the evolutionary development of weaponry, horsemanship, military organization, and tactics from Japan’s early conflicts with Korea up to the full-blown system of the samurai. Enhanced by illustrations and maps, and with a new preface by the author, this book will be indispensable for students of military history and Japanese political history.

The short-lived Kenmu regime (1333-1336) of Japanese Emperor Go-Daigo is often seen as an inevitably doomed, revanchist attempt to shore up the old aristocratic order. But far from resisting change, Goble here forcefully argues, the flamboyant Go-Daigo and his associates sought to overcome the old order and renegotiate its structure and ethos.

Anand is a middle-class boy who experiences a strange phenomenon. Whenever he sleeps at night, he goes back 1500 years in time and wakes up in the ‘past’ as Narasimha, the son of Vimshati Veera Deva—the last warrior of the Vimshati clan. Whenever he sleeps in the ‘past’ as Narasimha, he wakes up in the ‘present’ as Anand. In the ‘past’, as he struggles to become the finest warrior in history, he learns that he was dissolved in the ruins of history whereas his father’s legacy is still preserved in the ‘present’. Through the pointlessness of his training and a complicated romantic life, he learns about a war which would wipe out the entire kingdom in the ‘past’. His desperation to stay alive makes him take certain decisions which would affect his life in ways beyond imagination.

It is for the first time that a complete critical edition of the Satapathabrahmana of the Kanva School of the Sukla Yajurveda alongwith its English translation is published.. This edition has taked into accout the readings available in a few more manuscripts, besides those in the published edition in Telugu script, which were not available to Prof. Caland who brought out a critical edition of its first seven Kandas.