9 x 12, 88 b&w photos, 104 pgs of color drawings & organizational chartsSurely some of the most colorful warplanes ever to see active service, the aircraft of the Imperial Japanese Army Air Force carried the samurai regard for brightly colored armor and equipment into the 20th century. The heraldic traditions of the warriors of ancient Japan found new expression as the emblems for all types of air units in the service of the Emperor. Used by flying training schools, fighter squadrons, bomber groups and, ultimately, suicide formations, all sprang from the Japanese love of symbolism and design. Some were hundreds of years old, others existed for only a few weeks or months. Each one that can be verified from photographs is illustrated here in glorious color. This title's 100 pages of full color drawings show the emblems both by unit and by aircraft type, allowing the enthusiast to rapidly identify exactly which formation a specific aircraft may have belonged to. Numerous photos illustrate the many variations of emblems and the different aircraft types which carried them. Organizational charts give Orders of Battle in different theatres of war, ranging from Manchuria, China and Burma to the Home Islands.

The book offers a fascinating picture of the four emperors of modern Japan, their institution, their personalities and their impact on the history of their country. Leading scholars from Japan and other countries have contributed essays which treat this subject from various angles.

Throughout the Pacific theater of World War II, Allied prisoners were often starved, tortured, beheaded, even cannibalized by Japanese soldiers. Yet, during the Boxer Rebellion in China and the savage Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5, the Western press lauded the Japanese for their kindness to the enemy wounded and imprisoned. "Warriors of the Rising Sun" chronicles the Japanese military's transformation from honorable "knights of Bushido" into men of historic cruelty. Photos.

Japan and China have been rivals for more than a millennium. In more recent times, China was the more powerful until the late nineteenth century, while Japan took the upper hand in the twentieth. Now, China's resurgence has emboldened it even as Japan perceives itself falling behind, exacerbating long-standing historical frictions. June Teufel Dreyer's Middle Kingdom and Empire of the Rising Sun provides a highly accessible overview of one of the world's great civilizational rivalries that ranges from the seventh century to the present. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, the shrinking distances afforded by advances in technology and the intrusion of Western powers brought the two into closer proximity in ways that alternately united and divided them. In the aftermath of multiple wars between them, including a long and brutal conflict in World War II, Japan developed into an economic power but rejected militarism. China's journey toward modernization was hindered by ideological and leadership struggles that lasted until the death of Mao Zedong in 1976. The final part focuses on the issues that dominate China and Japan's current relationship: economic rivalry, memories of World War II, resurgent nationalism, military tensions, Taiwan, the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands, and globalization. Dreyer argues that recent disputes should be seen as manifestations of embedded rivalries rather than as issues whose resolution would provide a lasting solution to deep-standing disputes. For the paperback edition, she has added a new afterword that takes readers up to the present day.

After Gu Rose teleported over, she kicked an iron board, and inexplicably found out that the peerless beauty was actually a man. The more she found herself trapped by an inescapable net, the harder it was to twist her body. It was as if a great conspiracy and prosperity was slowly unfolding right in front of her. She was stuck inside, unable to escape or escape ... The flirtatious man laughed, "Little girl, I'll give you the phoenix coronet and ceremonial robes. Can you be my empress?" Gu Rose: "How can I not be sure?" "Of course not."

Charlemagne never traveled farther east than Italy, but by the mid-tenth century a story had begun to circulate about the friendly alliances that the emperor had forged while visiting Jerusalem and Constantinople. This story gained wide currency throughout the Middle Ages, appearing frequently in chronicles, histories, imperial decrees, and hagiographies-even in stained-glass windows and vernacular verse and prose. In Emperor of the World, Anne A. Latowsky traces the curious history of this myth, revealing how the memory of the Frankish Emperor was manipulated to shape the institutions of kingship and empire in the High Middle Ages. The legend incorporates apocalyptic themes such as the succession of world monarchies at the End of Days and the prophecy of the Last Roman Emperor. Charlemagne's apocryphal journey to the East increasingly resembled the eschatological final journey of the Last Emperor, who was expected to end his reign in Jerusalem after reuniting the Roman Empire prior to the Last Judgment. Instead of relinquishing his imperial dignity and handing the rule of a united Christendom over to God as predicted, this Charlemagne returns to the West to commence his reign. Latowsky finds that the writers who incorporated this legend did so to support, or in certain cases to criticize, the imperial pretentions of the regimes under which they wrote. New versions of the myth would resurface at times of transition and during periods marked by strong assertions of Roman-style imperial authority and conflict with the papacy, most notably during the reigns of Henry IV and Frederick Barbarossa. Latowsky removes Charlemagne's encounters with the East from their long-presumed Crusading context and shows how a story that began as a rhetorical commonplace of imperial praise evolved over the centuries as an expression of Christian Roman universalism.