Originally a student of Meiji Japan, Gordon Daniels is widely known for his work on the Pacific War and the Occupation of Japan, with particular regard to the world of communications in film and propaganda as well as Japanese sport. He has also been closely involved with the post-war era of international relations and Japan, as well as studies in Japanese history and historiography. In the 1980s he made significant contributions in reporting on the scope and development of Japanese Studies in Britain. His most recent work has been as joint editor (and contributor) with Chushichi Tsuzuki of Social and Cultural Perspectives - the fifth of the five-volume series on the history of Anglo-Japanese Relations (Palgrave, 2002).

The volume opens with a detailed autobiographical sketch of the author's original 'meeting with Japan', which began in 1961after taking up a post at ANU, Canberra (the result of a successful response to an advert in the Manchester Guardian). After twenty-one years in Australia, Arthur Stockwin moved back to the UK to take the chair of the then recently-established Nissan Institute of Japanese Studies. He was to be in post there also for twenty one years, his retirement coinciding with publication of his Dictionary of the Modern Politics of Japan (Routledge, 2003).

Widely acknowledged as the doyen of twentieth-century Japanese literature, fine art and the performing arts, as well as being renowned for his translations of Zeami and Mori Ogai. Collected Writings of J.Thomas Rimer brings together in whole or in part much of Rimer's prodigious output in these fields over the past forty years, including some of his milestone (fully illustrated) essays on Japanese Art, especially 'Tokyo in Paris/ Paris in Tokyo' (Japan Foundation, 1987).

Special areas: biographies, history, cultural exchange, arts, business and foreign affairs.

This volume of the Collected Writings of Modern Western Scholars on Japan brings together the work of Ben-Ami Shillony on modern history, crisis and culture, Japan and the Jews.

In April 1859, at age fifty, Shinohara Chūemon left his old life behind. Chūemon, a well-off farmer in his home village, departed for the new port city of Yokohama, where he remained for the next fourteen years. There, as a merchant trading with foreigners in the aftermath of Japan’s 1853 “opening” to the West, he witnessed the collapse of the Tokugawa shogunate, the civil war that followed, and the Meiji Restoration’s reforms. The Merchant’s Tale looks through Chūemon’s eyes at the upheavals of this period. In a narrative history rich in colorful detail, Simon Partner uses the story of an ordinary merchant farmer and its Yokohama setting as a vantage point onto sweeping social transformation and its unwitting agents. Chūemon, like most newcomers to Yokohama, came in search of economic opportunity. His story sheds light on vital issues in Japan’s modern history, including the legacies of the Meiji Restoration; the East Asian treaty port system; and the importance of everyday life—food, clothing, medicine, and hygiene—for national identity. Centered on an individual, The Merchant’s Tale is also the story of a place. Created under pressure from aggressive foreign powers, Yokohama was the scene of gunboat diplomacy, a connection to global markets, the birthplace of new lifestyles, and the beachhead of Japan’s modernization. Partner’s history of a vibrant meeting place humanizes the story of Japan’s revolutionary 1860s and their profound consequences for Japanese society and culture.