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

[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.