And to round out the last entry with some academic nerdiness...

[akujunkan]

...here's a meme created by and ganked from the lovely theosakakoneko:

100 Books for Understanding Contemporary Japan

So, The Nippon Foundation has assembled a team of scholars and produced a list of 100 Books for Understanding Contemporary Japan, which is linked here. (PS: Would it have killed them to list the authors while putting in those obnoxious links to the Amazon "rewards" program?) I've bolded the one's I've read cover-to-cover, underlined the ones I haven't yet completed, and italicised the ones I own but haven't started yet.


Politics / International Relations

* The Autobiography of Yukichi Fukuzawa
* Broadcasting Politics in Japan: NHK and Television News
* Constructing Civil Society in Japan: Voices of Environmental Movements
* Cultural Norms and National Security: Police and Military in Postwar Japan
* A Discourse By Three Drunkards on Government
* Governing Japan: Divided Politics in a Major Economy
* The Iwakura Mission in America and Europe: A New Assessment
* Japan Remodeled: How Government and Industry are Reforming Japanese Capitalism
* Japan Rising: The Resurgence of Japanese Power and Purpose Incidentally, I reviewed this book here.

* Japanese Foreign Policy at the Crossroads
* Japan’s Love-Hate Relationship with the West
* Japan’s Quest for a Permanent Security Council Seat
* The Logic of Japanese Politics
* Machiavelli’s Children: Leaders and Their Legacies in Italy and Japan
* Media and Politics in Japan
* Network Power: Japan and Asia
* Regime Shift: Comparative Dynamics of the Japanese Political Economy
* Securing Japan: Tokyo’s Grand Strategy and the Future of East Asia This is Samuel's book, no? I've been waiting for ages to read it. Unfortunately, the Rits library does not have a book recall system. You can reserve a book, but only once, and only for two weeks, although books are due back in 200 days after they've been signed out. < /rant>

* Thought and Behavior in Modern Japanese Politics
* The Turbulent Decade: Confronting the Refugee Crises of the 1990s
* The U.S.-Japan Alliance: Past, Present, and Future
* U.S.-Japan Relations in a Changing World

Economics / Business

* An Anti-classical Political-Economic Analysis: A Vision for the Next Century
* British Factory–Japanese Factory: The Origins of National Diversity in Industrial Relations
* The Economics of Work in Japan
* The Evolution of a Manufacturing System at Toyota
* Four Practical Revolutions in Management
* Japan, China, and the Growth of the Asian International Economy, 1850-1949
* Japan in the 21st Century: Environment, Economy, and Society
* The Japanese Company
* The Japanese Economic System and its Historical Origins
* The Japanese Firm: The Sources of Competitive Strength
* Japan’s Financial Crisis: Institutional Rigidity and Reluctant Change
* Japan’s Lost Decade
* Lectures on Modern Japanese Economic History, 1926-1994
* Manufacturing Ideology: Scientific Management in Twentieth-Century Japan
* MITI and the Japanese Miracle: The Growth of Industrial Policy, 1925-1975
* Native Sources of Japanese Industrialization, 1750-1920
* Stock Market Capitalism: Welfare Capitalism: Japan and Germany
* The Sun also Sets: The Limits to Japan’s Economic Power
* 21st-Century Japanese Management: New Systems, Lasting Values

Society / Culture

* The Anatomy of Dependence Fuck Doi. No, seriously, fuck him.
* Bushido: The Soul of Japan
* Edo Culture: Daily Life and Diversions in Urban Japan, 1600-1868
* Family and Social Policy in Japan: Anthropological Approaches
* Gender and Development: The Japanese Experience in Comparative Perspective
* Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture Has Invaded the U.S.
* Japanese Science: From the Inside
* Japanese Society
* Japan’s High Schools
* Loving the Machine: The Art and Science of Japanese Robots
* Neighborhood Tokyo
* Race for the Exits: The Unraveling of Japan’s System of Social Protection
* Science, Technology and Society in Contemporary Japan
* Tokugawa Religion: The Cultural Roots of Modern Japan
* Tsukiji: The Fish Market at the Center of the World

Literature / Arts

* Anime: From Akira to Howl’s Moving Castle
* The Cape and Other Stories from the Japanese Ghetto
* The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature
* Contemporary Japanese Film
* Contemporary Japanese Literature: An Anthology of Fiction, Film, and Other Writing Since 1945
* Dreamland Japan: Writings on Modern Manga It's kind of a shame Schodt is taken as an expert, because he gets a lot of things wrong.

* Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times
* Five Modern Japanese Novelists
* In Praise of Shadows
* Japanese Women Writers: Twentieth Century Short Fiction
* Kabuki: Baroque Fusion of the Arts
* Kabuki Heroes on the Osaka Stage, 1780-1830
* Kafu the Scribbler: The Life and Writings of Nagai Kafu, 1879-1959
* Kokoro
* The Life of an Amorous Woman and Other Writings Haven't read this, but I did read a translation of Ihara's Comrade Loves of the Samurai (reviewed here) that was so effing bad it put me off all translations of his works forever.

* Manga: Sixty Years of Japanese Comics
* The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches
* The Midnight Eye Guide to New Japanese Film
* Oe and Beyond: Fiction in Contemporary Japan
* Origins of Modern Japanese Literature
* A Personal Matter
* The Pleasures of Japanese Literature
* I Haven’t Dreamed of Flying for a While
* Tale of Genji
* The Tales of the Heike
* The Wild Goose

History

* The Abacus and the Sword: The Japanese Penetration of Korea, 1895-1910
* The Atomic Bomb: Voices from Hiroshima and Nagasaki
* The Conquest of Ainu Lands: Ecology and Culture in Japanese Expansion
* A Diary of Darkness: The Wartime Diary of Kiyosawa Kiyoshi
* Emperor of Japan: Meiji and his World, 1852-1912
* From Mahan to Pearl Harbor: The Imperial Japanese Navy and the United States
* The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895-1945
* Japanese Imperialism, 1894-1945
* The Making of Modern Japan
* Modern Japan
* Postwar Japan as History
* Sakamoto Ryoma and the Meiji Restoration
* Samurai and Silk: A Japanese and American Heritage
* State and Diplomacy in Early Modern Japan: Asia in the Development of the Tokugawa Bakufu
* Victors’ Justice: The Tokyo War Crimes Trial
* Visions of Ryukyu: Identity and Ideology in Early-Modern Thought and Politics
* War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War
* From Marco Polo Bridge to Pearl Harbor: Who Was Responsible?

I was really surprised to find that Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan, Embracing Defeat, and Japan's Reluctant Realism didn't make the list.

That will be all.

Comments

[theosakakoneko.livejournal.com]

Same with the Hirohito one. I think they seem to have a view like "if it's history and written more than 4 years ago, it's NG". All the history-type ones seem sooo new. So therefore I don't have any of them. >< ANY D:

That book system seems DUMB AS HELL. Will they at least tell you when the person who has it out is due to return it?

What kind of library lets you take any book for 200 days?!??

[akujunkan.livejournal.com]

I know. It's as if they're saying that nothing written about Japan prior to the 21^st century has had any influence on how scholars and laypeople view the country...which is just wrong. Your observation, combined with the Amazon links makes me think this is as much about marketing as anything else. (If I had the time, I think a comparison of Foundation members and the list's authors and institutions might prove interesting.)

The book system is as dumb as hell, and really counterproductive. As grad students are allowed to have 100 books out at a time, what it means is that everyone races to sign out every. Single. Book. They might possibly. Need. Just to make sure they'll hae it if/when they need it. Which means that there are almost no good books available for anyone.

(FWIW, AU let students take books out for roughly the same period, but if they were recalled you *had* to turn them in within the week, so it worked much better.)

[bran420-7.livejournal.com]

Ow. My head hurts. Our school only gives you, like, four weeks, but no late fees that I can tell, since a girl who GRADUATED still has a book on Women's Plays of 2003 that I checked out. Grr....

[akujunkan.livejournal.com]

Well, Rits doesn't do late fees either. If you turn a book in three days late, you have to wait three days until you can sign out more books again. Which doesn't *sound* like it sucks as much as AU's dollar/book/day, until you realise that if you miss that one chance to sign out the book you want, you're gonna have to wait 200 days for another crack at it...

[wombatdeamor.livejournal.com]

I avert this possible problem by not reading anything for any class ever. Now you know the secrets to my success. Use them as you will.

[akujunkan.livejournal.com]

Damn. But what do you do with all your time? Seriously, it occurred to me yesterday that I hadn't eaten dinner, breakfast, or lunch because of all the reading I was doing.


And as we all know, I have no problems putting away the foodings.

[wombatdeamor.livejournal.com]

I eat foodses and read stuff that's kinda relevent, if Playboy is considered relevant, and drink beer, and fall asleep. That is how I study.