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"'Designing Japan: A Future Built on Aesthetics' presents renowned designer Kenya Hara's vision of how his industry can support Japan in crafting a future founded on a unique philosophy of beauty as well as crowd-sourced wisdom from around the world. The book spans history from the beginnings of professional Japanese design in the sixteenth century to the impact of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake, but Hara's focus is the future. A master collaborator,...
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"Toward the end of the Tokugawa shogunate, Mutsu Munemitsu was ousted from his home Kishū-han as a result of his father's defeat in a power struggle. To avenge this, Mutsu bolstered his talent to become a man of "genius and learning in equal measure." He joined the Kobe Naval Training Center founded by Katsu Kaishū and, later, Kaientai, a trading and shipping company and private navy founded and managed by Sakamoto Ryōma before the Meiji Restoration...
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A creator in the medium of textiles, the author is known in Japan for her essays on color, nature, and the work of weaving and dyeing. This book collects some of the author's writings together with photographs of her art and the natural world that inspires it. From winter snows to spring blossoms, from the foothills of Japan's Southern Alps to the back streets of Gion, Kyoto, the author initiates the reader into areas of Japanese culture where the...
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In 2018, Japan marked the 150th anniversary of the collapse of the Tokugawa shogunate and the establishment of a new government under Emperor Meiji. This was not simply a transfer of political authority. Instead, it signaled revolutionary transformation in Japan, including the abolition of the domains and the formation of a modern nation-state in the years that followed. A period of radical social change was ushered in, with the abolition of the class...
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"The People and Culture of Japan features conversations between Donald Keene, a preeminent scholar of Japanese literature, and Shiba Ryotaro, the author who continued to contemplate the human condition through his original and distinctive lens of history. These talks-which mainly explore the foundations of Japanese culture-took place in Japanese on three occasions in 1971, in the historic cities of Nara, Kyoto, and Osaka. Drawing on their profound...
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"Securing the generous support of the politicians and industrialists who propelled Japan's modernization, Ogawa Jihei VII created many outstanding gardens at the end of the nineteenth and the first few decades of the twentieth century. Expressing a Japanese aesthetic even while incorporating modern techniques, his methodology reveals the nature of modernization as Japan experienced it. With a keen eye for architecture, the author takes a long-awaited...
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"The revolutionary discovery of induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells, completely changed the world, particularly in the field of medical science. This groundbreaking achievement was made by Dr. Yamanaka Shinya of Kyoto University and won him the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 2012. The road that led him to this accomplishment, however, was not an easy one; during his early days as a training orthopedic surgeon, Yamanaka was not...
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"Wasan--a unique form of Japanese mathematics--was developed during the Edo period (1603-1868), a time when the entire country was isolated from the rest of the world. Mathematics was enjoyed as a form of entertainment by adults and children alike and by people of all social classes. Jinkōki, an extraordinary mathematics textbook, was used at private elementary schools called terakoya and became a bestseller that could be found in every household....
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"Thirty years have passed since Japan emerged on the global stage as the second largest economy quickly moving upwards. More than twenty years have passed since the bubble burst, wiping away inflated dreams of Japan as Number One. The Cold War ended and China has overtaken Japan as Number Two. The digital revolution has come and IoT is changing everything. And yet Japan remains near the top as the third richest economy in the world despite the fallout...
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"Video games are often thought to draw children out of nature and into isolated, closed spaces. In The Lure of Pokémon: Video Games and the Savage Mind, however, Nakazawa Shinichi shows how the Pokémon series of video games, far from standing in opposition to nature, actually seeks to represent the true, hidden essence of the natural world. From humble beginnings as a video game launched in the mid-90s, Pokémon has become a global entertainment...
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Exploring the life of Komura Jutaro, a defining force in the fate of Japan as a developing power, this critical biography casts the history of Japanese modernization in a captivating light. The book does not intend to uncover or delve deeper into new historical facts in the scope of modern history. Rather, its chief aim is to lay out a historical picture that situates the relative importance of objective facts in proper balance.
"Exploring the life...
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"Since ancient times, the Japanese have lived with superstitions of strange presences and phenomena known as "yōkai, " creating a culture by turns infused with unease, fear, and divinity. Tsukimono spirit possessions. Fearsome kappa, oni, and tengu. Yamauba crones. Ghostly yūrei. Otherworldly ijin ... Where did they come from? Why do they remain so popular? Written by Japan's premier scholar of yōkai and strange tales, this book is both an introduction...
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"Nakano Kōji opens the door to the treasury of Japanese classics by introducing six writers who are his personal favorites. The writers under his lens span seven centuries, ranging from the twelfth century to the nineteenth. Three are poets; three wrote timeless prose. The hermit-monk Ryōkan, a poet who loved nothing more than bouncing balls with neighborhood children or just sitting sprawled in his hut listening to the sound of rain, teaches...
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"In this penetrating biography of Shibusawa Eiichi (1840-1931), one of Japan's foremost entrepreneurs, Shimada Masakazu traces Shibusawa's youth, when he witnessed the decay of Japan's feudal society and experienced the benefits of modernization at first hand in Europe; his service in the Ministry of Finance of the new Meiji government in its early years; and his venture into business and involvement in literally hundreds of companies as he set about...