Project MUSE®: The Journal of Japanese Studies - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/268
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in The Journal of Japanese Studies.daily12026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 30 (2004) through current issueLatest Articles: The Journal of Japanese StudiesTWOProject MUSE®The Journal of Japanese Studies1549-47210095-6848Latest articles in The Journal of Japanese Studies. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Palace of Time: Temporal Symbolism at the Partly Reconstructed Imperial Palace in Nara, Japan
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983022
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Twelve centuries after their abandonment, contemporary reincarnations of monumental buildings in the imperial palace enclosure in Nara have been gradually appearing on the original site since the mid-1990s. As reconstructed palace buildings have emerged, the once little-noticed archaeological site has gained significant public attention, visitor interest, and strategic importance for national and local decision-makers and stakeholders. This article analyzes the gradual reappearance and painstaking reconstruction of key structures in the Heijō Palace area (Heijōkyū), arguing that the symbolic significance of the reconstructed site finds expression in three distinct temporal configurations.The Nara case offers a
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/268/image/coversmallPalace of Time: Temporal Symbolism at the Partly Reconstructed Imperial Palace in Nara, Japan2026-02-19text/htmlen-USPalace of Time: Temporal Symbolism at the Partly Reconstructed Imperial Palace in Nara, Japan2026-02-192026TWOProject MUSE®1526142026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002026-02-19Shores of (Dis)Intimacy: Sakata Kiyoko and Translations of Littoral Experience
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983023
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On the cover of its first publication in 1970, Zainichi Korean poet Kim Si-jong's (1929–) long narrative poem Niigata includes a line that reads, "Cliffs of the steep latitude / Pull up anchors of my testimony!"1 Recurring throughout the poem as "ridgelines / of the greatly wrinkled 38th parallel north,"2 the latitude is a specific reference to the line that once formed the de facto border demarcating North and South Korea before the establishment of the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). Despite the fact that the dividing lines and areas have shifted over time, the 38th parallel continues to call to mind military confrontation and geopolitical negotiation on the peninsula. Bringing in "anchors" (ikari) to evoke
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/268/image/coversmallShores of (Dis)Intimacy: Sakata Kiyoko and Translations of Littoral Experience2026-02-19text/htmlen-USShores of (Dis)Intimacy: Sakata Kiyoko and Translations of Littoral Experience2026-02-192026TWOProject MUSE®1191432026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002026-02-19Making Room to Grow: Rōnin and Rural Development in Early Modern Japan
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983024
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In the later years of his life, the geographer and travel writer Furukawa Koshōken was asked by shogunal official Toda Ujinori to produce a chorographic study of the area around Edo (now Tokyo). Accompanied by Kashiwara Yoshiemon and Murota Tomezaburō, the then 67-year-old Koshōken set off to travel the area and conduct his studies in 1793. Afterwards, he presented his findings to Ujinori and published them as a ten-volume work called Shishin chimeiroku.1 In these volumes, Koshōken describes the topographical, geographical, and cultural characteristics of the area, as well as adding some historical background and personal observations. When discussing the histories of rural place names, Koshōken states that
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/268/image/coversmallMaking Room to Grow: Rōnin and Rural Development in Early Modern Japan2026-02-19text/htmlen-USMaking Room to Grow: Rōnin and Rural Development in Early Modern Japan2026-02-192026TWOProject MUSE®1440852026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002026-02-19Relapse into Barbarism? Explaining the Port Arthur Massacre, November 1894
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983025
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November 21, 1894, was a freezing day in Port Arthur, with strong winds that made all present shiver to their bones.1 Many inhabitants of this south-Manchurian harbor had already fled, unwilling to live under the occupying Japanese Army that advanced into China far faster than expected. Some, however, decided to remain. This was not an easy decision. Terror reigned in the Chinese city well before the Japanese came, as the local Qing garrison, defeated, starved and unruly, lost control over its soldiers. Frightened Chinese troops "were wandering about in mobs," a British observer recalled, "taking pot-shots at electric light lamps and destroying everything in the most wanton way." They even chased the staff away
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/268/image/coversmallRelapse into Barbarism? Explaining the Port Arthur Massacre, November 18942026-02-19text/htmlen-USRelapse into Barbarism? Explaining the Port Arthur Massacre, November 18942026-02-192026TWOProject MUSE®1949142026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002026-02-19World Federalism in the Early Postwar Thought of Kagawa Toyohiko
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983026
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The social activist and Christian socialist Kagawa Toyohiko (1888–1960) promoted the idea of a world federation to reintegrate Japan into the international community in the decade following World War II. Weeks after the war's end, Kagawa began vociferously supporting the idea of a new international system based on a world federation—a world state with authority and jurisdiction over disputes between countries. He believed that, if created, a world federation could prevent nuclear war between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., a possibility that had become a reality with the onset of the Cold War in 1947.1 Kagawa viewed Japan's adoption of the "peace constitution" in 1946 as a milestone, making it the world's first
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/268/image/coversmallWorld Federalism in the Early Postwar Thought of Kagawa Toyohiko2026-02-19text/htmlen-USWorld Federalism in the Early Postwar Thought of Kagawa Toyohiko2026-02-192026TWOProject MUSE®1326872026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002026-02-19Tackling "Examination Hell" in Japan, 1920 to 1945: Children's Well-being, Fair Competition, and the Needs of the State
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983027
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For much of the post-1945 period in Japan, "examination hell" and attempts to relieve it have been perennial, well-publicized concerns, focused on high school and university entrance exams. Agonizing about the harms of "exam hell" and endeavors to tackle them go back much further, however, to debates about secondary school entrance exams from the 1910s onward. In this article, we analyze this earlier history, arguing that it adds a new dimension to understanding of the developing ideological contentions that engaged Japan in the decades culminating in the Asia-Pacific War, as well as illuminating recurring dilemmas about the trade-offs that educational assessment systems involve. Furthermore, the resonances with
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/268/image/coversmallTackling "Examination Hell" in Japan, 1920 to 1945: Children's Well-being, Fair Competition, and the Needs of the State2026-02-19text/htmlen-USTackling "Examination Hell" in Japan, 1920 to 1945: Children's Well-being, Fair Competition, and the Needs of the State2026-02-192026TWOProject MUSE®1678682026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002026-02-19Navigating Narratives: Tsurayuki's Tosa Diary as History and Fiction by Gustav Heldt (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983028
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As I was working on my own book on Eiga monogatari in the 2010s, colleagues and editors would mention that monographs focusing on single works were no longer in vogue. I still tend to agree with this observation, yet Heldt's Navigating Narratives brilliantly illustrates what a close reading of a single text can accomplish. That is not to say that Heldt examines solely Tosa nikki; in fact, he treats "a diverse array of vernacular and Literary Sinitic texts, primarily from the eighth to eleventh centuries, including monogatari tales, historical chronicles, testaments, men's diaries, administrative codes, women's memories, popular anecdotes, religious texts, poetic treatises, biographies, and prefaces to anthologies"
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/268/image/coversmallNavigating Narratives: Tsurayuki's Tosa Diary as History and Fiction by Gustav Heldt (review)2026-02-19text/htmlen-USNavigating Narratives: Tsurayuki's Tosa Diary as History and Fiction by Gustav Heldt (review)2026-02-192026TWOProject MUSE®171522026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002026-02-19The Historical Writing of the Mongol Invasions in Japan by Judith Vitale (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983029
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The Mongol invasions of Japan in 1274 and 1281 were significant moments in Japanese history for obvious reasons. Violent incursions at the hands of powerful foreign Others are usually traumatic for the natives. However, the Mongols failed to subdue the Japanese, which, for the latter, signified that they had defeated the former. Judith Vitale analyzes how the triumphant narrative surrounding the Mongol invasions that emerged among Japanese elites in subsequent eras, chiefly during the Edo and Meiji periods, functioned ideologically, such that the "past" became the site for their own "cultural production" (p. 264). Vitale clearly and convincingly shows how the historiographical significance of these
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/268/image/coversmallThe Historical Writing of the Mongol Invasions in Japan by Judith Vitale (review)2026-02-19text/htmlen-USThe Historical Writing of the Mongol Invasions in Japan by Judith Vitale (review)2026-02-192026TWOProject MUSE®123042026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002026-02-19Graphic Narratives from Early Modern Japan: The World of Kusazōshi ed. by Laura Moretti and Satō Yukiko (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983031
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Laura Moretti and Satō Yukiko have brought together an impressive group of essays on a wide range of early modern Japanese graphic narratives. The book will be a fundamental resource for the study of Edo-period graphic fiction. This collaboration between Western and Japanese scholars has encouraged the members to engage with each other and to ask fundamental questions about how to approach these popular narratives. A passion for the material is evident in every essay, each of which comes with extensive lists of sources, primary and secondary. The detail in each chapter is impressive but also daunting. The book expects readers to be keen explorers of the huge corpus of material.The popular commercial graphic
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/268/image/coversmallGraphic Narratives from Early Modern Japan: The World of Kusazōshi ed. by Laura Moretti and Satō Yukiko (review)2026-02-19text/htmlen-USGraphic Narratives from Early Modern Japan: The World of Kusazōshi ed. by Laura Moretti and Satō Yukiko (review)2026-02-192026TWOProject MUSE®178542026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002026-02-19Strange Tales from Edo: Rewriting Chinese Fiction in Early Modern Japan by William D. Fleming (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983032
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Strange tales by early modern Japanese literati did not appear out of thin air, as much as the stories they told might have favored the uncanny. As William D. Fleming's Strange Tales from Edo: Rewriting Chinese Fiction in Early Modern Japan brilliantly demonstrates, the production of such tales of the supernatural hinged on certain material conditions, economic factors, and political climates that encompassed a wide range of arenas, including international and domestic book trade, manuscript and print cultures, and shogunal politics.Fleming's study benefits greatly from the exceptionally polymathic abilities of the author, who undertakes computational analyses of bibliographic data and close readings of literary
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/268/image/coversmallStrange Tales from Edo: Rewriting Chinese Fiction in Early Modern Japan by William D. Fleming (review)2026-02-19text/htmlen-USStrange Tales from Edo: Rewriting Chinese Fiction in Early Modern Japan by William D. Fleming (review)2026-02-192026TWOProject MUSE®152292026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002026-02-19Koume's World: The Life and Work of a Samurai Woman before and after the Meiji Restoration by Simon Partner (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983033
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Koume's World: The Life and Work of a Samurai Woman Before and After the Meiji Restoration is Simon Partner's fourth exercise in the writing of microhistory. Following Toshié: A Story of Village Life in Twentieth-Century Japan (2004), The Mayor of Aihara: A Japanese Villager and His Community, 1865–1925 (2009), and The Merchant's Tale: Yokohama and the Transformation of Japan (2017), Partner once again invites readers to accompany him on his exploration of human experience through the records of an individual. In this elegantly composed biography, Partner provides a nuanced analysis of the life of Kawai Koume (1804–89). Seeing her life "as an allegory for the culture as a whole" (p. 227, citing Jill Lepore), he
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/268/image/coversmallKoume's World: The Life and Work of a Samurai Woman before and after the Meiji Restoration by Simon Partner (review)2026-02-19text/htmlen-USKoume's World: The Life and Work of a Samurai Woman before and after the Meiji Restoration by Simon Partner (review)2026-02-192026TWOProject MUSE®129472026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002026-02-19Reopening the Opening of Japan: Transnational Approaches to Modern Japan and the Wider World ed. by Lewis Bremner, Manimporok Dotulong, and Sho Konishi (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983034
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Some of the most challenging and exciting tensions that animate our undergraduate Japanese history courses revolve around periodizing and conceptualizing Japan's so-called Opening to the so-called West. We emphasize the many continuities running from the late Tokugawa (1603–1868) period through the Meiji era (1868–1912) while also underlining the significance and novelty of Japan's proactive engagement with Euro-American modernity. We aim to empower students to simultaneously hold both parts of binary framings like continuity and rupture or endogeneity and acculturation, while we ourselves often struggle. Directly responding to this dilemma, Reopening the Opening of Japan aims to provide new, illuminating
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/268/image/coversmallReopening the Opening of Japan: Transnational Approaches to Modern Japan and the Wider World ed. by Lewis Bremner, Manimporok Dotulong, and Sho Konishi (review)2026-02-19text/htmlen-USReopening the Opening of Japan: Transnational Approaches to Modern Japan and the Wider World ed. by Lewis Bremner, Manimporok Dotulong, and Sho Konishi (review)2026-02-192026TWOProject MUSE®191252026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002026-02-19The Civil Code Controversy in Meiji Japan: The Struggle to Modernize the Nation by Michal A. Piegzik (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983035
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In The Civil Code Controversy in Meiji Japan, Michal A. Piegzik revisits the codification of private law in Japan, focusing on the controversy surrounding the effort to establish a new legal framework during the period from 1869 to 1892. Drawing on a demanding array of primary sources, Piegzik traces a significant and complex development in Japanese legal history that has hitherto received little attention in Western scholarship. By focusing on the difficulties and difference in opinions in the formation of Japan's modern legal framework, he contributes both to recent works challenging the longtime dominant modernization narratives in Japan's legal history and to the critique of the assumption that Japan's judicial
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/268/image/coversmallThe Civil Code Controversy in Meiji Japan: The Struggle to Modernize the Nation by Michal A. Piegzik (review)2026-02-19text/htmlen-USThe Civil Code Controversy in Meiji Japan: The Struggle to Modernize the Nation by Michal A. Piegzik (review)2026-02-192026TWOProject MUSE®163842026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002026-02-19Beauty Matters: Modern Japanese Literature and the Question of Aesthetics, 1890–1930 by Anri Yasuda (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983036
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In his review of the Japanese Ministry of Education's Fine Arts Exhibition of 1912, novelist Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916) criticized the conservatism characterizing the government-sponsored art exhibition, which he believed did not reward artistic individuality and generally lacked spontaneity or inventiveness. Sōseki stressed that modern artists must avoid the slavish creation of what others desired and instead strive for their own articulation of beauty, declaring quite famously that, "Art begins and ends with the expression of the Self."1 Catalyzed by the introduction of European modernism to Japan, Sōseki's call for artistic self-expression typified a critical turning point in early twentieth-century Japanese
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/268/image/coversmallBeauty Matters: Modern Japanese Literature and the Question of Aesthetics, 1890–1930 by Anri Yasuda (review)2026-02-19text/htmlen-USBeauty Matters: Modern Japanese Literature and the Question of Aesthetics, 1890–1930 by Anri Yasuda (review)2026-02-192026TWOProject MUSE®182852026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002026-02-19Film and Fashion in Japan, 1923–39: Consuming the 'West' by Lois J. E. Barnett (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983037
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This interdisciplinary work examines film and adjacent print media to explore the consumption of and desire for Western clothing and fashion objects in Japan from 1923 to 1939. The book posits that Japanese cinema at this time was "a site of complex commercial imagery, with these images inciting consumption via a variety of sensory-immersive processes" (p. 234), and thus examines films (both lost and extant), magazines, and advertisements, to consider their interactions with the spectator/consumer. Informed by film studies theory and fashion studies approaches, as well as discourses from a number of fields within Japan studies, the work discusses different sites of Western fashion, such as the Modern Girl (moga)
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/268/image/coversmallFilm and Fashion in Japan, 1923–39: Consuming the 'West' by Lois J. E. Barnett (review)2026-02-19text/htmlen-USFilm and Fashion in Japan, 1923–39: Consuming the 'West' by Lois J. E. Barnett (review)2026-02-192026TWOProject MUSE®168822026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002026-02-19Reading the Kimono in Twentieth-Century Japanese Literature and Film by Michiko Suzuki (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983038
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Michiko Suzuki's Reading the Kimono in Twentieth-Century Japanese Literature and Film sets out to read the garments between the lines of one canonical text (Tanizaki Jun'ichirō's The Makioka Sisters) and several more texts by Tsuboi Sakae, Kōda Aya, and Miyao Tomiko, women authors much lesser known in English. Across seven chapters and an unnumbered short conclusion, Suzuki analyzes what kimono1 do and mean for characters and readers in these twentieth-century works.Suzuki encapsulates the endeavor thus: "Depictions of material objects in modern Japanese literature have been largely ignored, despite the fact that they can shape individual identities and frame relationships between characters. They also serve as an
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/268/image/coversmallReading the Kimono in Twentieth-Century Japanese Literature and Film by Michiko Suzuki (review)2026-02-19text/htmlen-USReading the Kimono in Twentieth-Century Japanese Literature and Film by Michiko Suzuki (review)2026-02-192026TWOProject MUSE®131042026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002026-02-19The Sound of History: Towards the Use of Historic Audio Media in Japanese Studies ed. by Tomohide Ito, Shiro Yukawa, and Reinhard Zöllner (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983039
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The Sound of History: Towards the Use of Historic Audio Media in Japanese Studies is a collection of essays that introduces the readers to the technical as well as intellectual possibilities presented by the phonograph records that were produced in Japan during the first half of the twentieth century. Based on the papers that were presented in a series of online workshops ("SP Records as Historical Documents in Japanese Studies") hosted by the Department of Japanese and Korean Studies at the University of Bonn between 2020 and 2021, this book offers its readers a unique introduction to a body of historical source materials that remains both under-utilized and not entirely well-understood within the broader
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/268/image/coversmallThe Sound of History: Towards the Use of Historic Audio Media in Japanese Studies ed. by Tomohide Ito, Shiro Yukawa, and Reinhard Zöllner (review)2026-02-19text/htmlen-USThe Sound of History: Towards the Use of Historic Audio Media in Japanese Studies ed. by Tomohide Ito, Shiro Yukawa, and Reinhard Zöllner (review)2026-02-192026TWOProject MUSE®184782026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002026-02-19Border of Water and Ice: The Yalu River and Japan's Empire in Korea and Manchuria by Joseph A. Seeley (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983040
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Joseph A. Seeley's Border of Water and Ice: The Yalu River and Japan's Empire in Korea and Manchuria makes a distinctive and timely contribution to connecting the growing environmental history literature on Manchuria, the Japanese empire, and Asian rivers. Where landmark studies—such as Victor Seow's Carbon Technocracy, Ruth Rogaski's Knowing Manchuria, and the late Aaron S. Moore's more development-focused works on hydroelectric dams—have illuminated the impacts of Japanese empire-building on technopolitical regimes, environmental epistemologies, and large-scale infrastructure development, Seeley's intervention lies in his attention to seasonality and the process of border creation itself.1 Rather than taking
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/268/image/coversmallBorder of Water and Ice: The Yalu River and Japan's Empire in Korea and Manchuria by Joseph A. Seeley (review)2026-02-19text/htmlen-USBorder of Water and Ice: The Yalu River and Japan's Empire in Korea and Manchuria by Joseph A. Seeley (review)2026-02-192026TWOProject MUSE®188542026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002026-02-19Women's Performative Writing and Identity Construction in the Japanese Empire by Satoko Kakihara (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983041
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In Women's Performative Writing and Identity Construction in the Japanese Empire, Satoko Kakihara explores the ways that Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese women writers negotiated their identities during Japan's imperial period. Drawing upon fiction and nonfiction written in Japanese and Korean, this ambitious study centers on how modern womanhood was constructed within the realms of education, marriage, family, and work. Using these texts as case studies, Kakihara presents a nuanced discussion of the factors influencing these articulations of identity by highlighting the contradictions between discourses of modernization and colonialism that women faced in the metropole and the colonies.Chapter 1 examines the role
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/268/image/coversmallWomen's Performative Writing and Identity Construction in the Japanese Empire by Satoko Kakihara (review)2026-02-19text/htmlen-USWomen's Performative Writing and Identity Construction in the Japanese Empire by Satoko Kakihara (review)2026-02-192026TWOProject MUSE®162482026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002026-02-19The Geography of Injustice: East Asia's Battle between Memory and History by Barak Kushner (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983042
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It was shortly after the bloody battles over Tarawa and Makin in the Japanese-occupied British Gilbert Islands on November 20–24, 1943, that the United States, Great Britain, and the Republic of China jointly issued the Cairo Declaration to publicize their resolve not only "to bring unrelenting pressure against their brutal enemies by sea, land and air" but also "to fight this war to restrain and punish the aggression of Japan." A little over a year and a half later, the three powers articulated their intent to take actions against Japan afresh by the issuance of the Potsdam Declaration, dated July 26, 1945. They warned that "the prodigious land, sea and air forces … many times reinforced by their armies and air
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/268/image/coversmallThe Geography of Injustice: East Asia's Battle between Memory and History by Barak Kushner (review)2026-02-19text/htmlen-USThe Geography of Injustice: East Asia's Battle between Memory and History by Barak Kushner (review)2026-02-192026TWOProject MUSE®141122026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002026-02-19Hiroshima and the Historians: Debating America's Most Controversial Decision by Kenneth B. Pyle (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983043
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Kenneth B. Pyle's Hiroshima and the Historians is an account of what is "considered the most important—and perhaps most controversial—event in twentieth-century history" and one of America's most enduring historical controversies: the decision to use the atomic bomb in August 1945.1 Pyle identifies three distinct aims at the outset of the book. "First," he writes, "[the book] is a study of the anatomy of the debate among historians. …" The book's second purpose is to evaluate the nature of the historian's craft, and the third goal is to "show the value of historians in a free society" (pp. 2–3). Thus, Pyle situates the debate not only within the familiar terrain of military and diplomatic history but also in
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/268/image/coversmallHiroshima and the Historians: Debating America's Most Controversial Decision by Kenneth B. Pyle (review)2026-02-19text/htmlen-USHiroshima and the Historians: Debating America's Most Controversial Decision by Kenneth B. Pyle (review)2026-02-192026TWOProject MUSE®166502026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002026-02-19Shadows of Nagasaki: Trauma, Religion, and Memory after the Atomic Bombing ed. by Chad R. Diehl (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983044
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All memory is local before global truths are extrapolated from it. "Hiroshima," too, remains a local catastrophe underneath the global memory that came to mark it as the place-time that catapulted us into the nuclear age, demonstrating man's capacity to destroy mankind. Nagasaki's bombing three days after Hiroshima, on August 9, 1945, with an even more powerful plutonium bomb (used in all nuclear weapons since then) bore the global message that nuclear holocaust could and did continue, normalized as an indisputable part of modern life along with the human suffering it unleashed. No doubt our collective obsession with the awesomeness of "firsts" privileges "Hiroshima," while "Nagasaki" is more likely to elicit a
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/268/image/coversmallShadows of Nagasaki: Trauma, Religion, and Memory after the Atomic Bombing ed. by Chad R. Diehl (review)2026-02-19text/htmlen-USShadows of Nagasaki: Trauma, Religion, and Memory after the Atomic Bombing ed. by Chad R. Diehl (review)2026-02-192026TWOProject MUSE®154682026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002026-02-19Dark Heritage in Contemporary Japan: Relics of an Underground Empire by Jung-Sun Han (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983045
<p></p>
Jung-Sun Han's compact, stimulating, and ambitious book forges links with the growing body of studies on heritage, memory, public history, and social movements. The collapse of Cold War geopolitical dynamics prompted many nations to re-examine past legacies, while Japan faced additional challenges in a narrow span of time: Emperor Hirohito's death in 1989 and the end of sustained economic growth in the early 1990s. The book examines both the controversial legacies of Japan's wartime underground facilities (chikagō) and the advocates who campaign for these sites to gain recognition. The facilities, either planned or completed, such as factories and warehouses for the Japanese military, testify to the course of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/268/image/coversmallDark Heritage in Contemporary Japan: Relics of an Underground Empire by Jung-Sun Han (review)2026-02-19text/htmlen-USDark Heritage in Contemporary Japan: Relics of an Underground Empire by Jung-Sun Han (review)2026-02-192026TWOProject MUSE®167032026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002026-02-19Predicting Disasters: Earthquakes, Scientists, and Uncertainty in Modern Japan by Kerry Smith (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983046
<p></p>
Since 3.11, the disaster accompanying the Great East Japan Earthquake of March 2011, more and more people living in or visiting Japan must have experienced the alarming peep on their mobiles notifying them of an imminent possibility of a natural disaster. In our global environment today, mired in the consequences of climate change, the notification in many cases is meteorological in nature—like flooding and landslides caused by a formidable typhoon and/or an intense downpour of rain commonly known as the "guerrilla-like violent rain" (gerira gōu). In parallel, since 3.11, information on imminent seismological disasters is increasingly observed in the notification mix. What historical bases were at play in this
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/268/image/coversmallPredicting Disasters: Earthquakes, Scientists, and Uncertainty in Modern Japan by Kerry Smith (review)2026-02-19text/htmlen-USPredicting Disasters: Earthquakes, Scientists, and Uncertainty in Modern Japan by Kerry Smith (review)2026-02-192026TWOProject MUSE®171242026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002026-02-19Oceanic Japan: The Archipelago in Pacific and Global History ed. by Stefan Huebner et al. (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983047
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A 420-page scholarly tome may not be a traditional "beach read," but beaches, islands, archipelagos, and saltwater are all prominent themes in this fascinating new volume. Oceanic Japan is an ambitious work, the culmination of multi-year efforts by four editors and over two dozen other contributors to "flip the map" on conventional representations of Japanese history. The book's archipelago of individual essays is connected by a current of ocean-mindedness and a desire to escape the terracentrism that has pervaded previous scholarship. Whereas past studies of Japanese history have largely treated oceans as something both "indispensable and invisible" (p. 378), Oceanic Japan seeks to "move beyond terracentric
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/268/image/coversmallOceanic Japan: The Archipelago in Pacific and Global History ed. by Stefan Huebner et al. (review)2026-02-19text/htmlen-USOceanic Japan: The Archipelago in Pacific and Global History ed. by Stefan Huebner et al. (review)2026-02-192026TWOProject MUSE®177872026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002026-02-19Eco-Disasters in Japanese Cinema ed. by Rachel DiNitto (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983048
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In her introduction to Eco-Disasters in Japanese Cinema, Rachel DiNitto (who serves as the volume's editor) highlights the fact that although "Japanese cinema is known for its spectacular scenes of disaster" there has been surprisingly little sustained academic attention paid to the place of environmental disaster in Japanese film studies, and that "Eco-Disasters in Japanese Cinema is the first volume dedicated to a multi-genre exploration of environmental themes in Japanese cinema" (p. 1). In this regard, the volume resembles 2017's Ecocriticism in Japan (edited by Hisaaki Wake, Keijiro Suga, and Yuki Masami) as a "first of its kind" collection of essays hoping to expand the field of Japanese studies into more
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/268/image/coversmallEco-Disasters in Japanese Cinema ed. by Rachel DiNitto (review)2026-02-19text/htmlen-USEco-Disasters in Japanese Cinema ed. by Rachel DiNitto (review)2026-02-192026TWOProject MUSE®163912026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002026-02-19Building a New Economy: Japan's Digital and Green Transformation by D. Hugh Whittaker (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983049
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Many critics have attributed Japan's slow adaptation to international market norms introduced by Anglophone countries as a primary cause of its long-term economic stagnation since the 1990s and its recent struggles with digitalization and the green transition. However, since the 2007–09 Global Financial Crisis, negative aspects of neoliberalism and financial capitalism have increasingly come to the fore, causing serious social divisions in many major economies (including the United States). These problems have been compounded by geopolitical tensions, including the U.S.-China rivalry, the Russia-Ukraine War, and upheavals in the Middle East. In the context of the fragmentation of the global political economy, it is
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/268/image/coversmallBuilding a New Economy: Japan's Digital and Green Transformation by D. Hugh Whittaker (review)2026-02-19text/htmlen-USBuilding a New Economy: Japan's Digital and Green Transformation by D. Hugh Whittaker (review)2026-02-192026TWOProject MUSE®237702026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002026-02-19Japanese Capitalism and Entrepreneurship: A History of Business from the Tokugawa Era to the Present by Pierre-Yves Donzé and Julia S. Yongue (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983050
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The stated objective of Japanese Capitalism and Entrepreneurship is to provide a survey of basic information and issues on the historical evolution of Japanese business and society appropriate for a wide range of students and other readers, catering in particular to a non-Japanese audience. The approach adopted in the book is informed by the long experience of both authors in teaching business and business history at Japanese universities, which allows them to draw on a wide range of scholarship on Japanese and international business history, making use of both English and Japanese language sources. This is particularly important because research on business history has continued to flourish in Japanese
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/268/image/coversmallJapanese Capitalism and Entrepreneurship: A History of Business from the Tokugawa Era to the Present by Pierre-Yves Donzé and Julia S. Yongue (review)2026-02-19text/htmlen-USJapanese Capitalism and Entrepreneurship: A History of Business from the Tokugawa Era to the Present by Pierre-Yves Donzé and Julia S. Yongue (review)2026-02-192026TWOProject MUSE®159422026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002026-02-19Democratizing Luxury: Name Brands, Advertising, and Consumption in Modern Japan by Annika A. Culver (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983051
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In The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), Thorstein Veblen described conspicuous consumption as an irrational, wasteful, and socially corrosive pattern of behavior driven by the desire to signal status rather than to meet real needs.1 When teaching the anthropology of consumption, Mary Douglas would sometimes criticize Veblen's term because of its implicit moralism. As students of consumption, we would paraphrase her retort as the "champagne-and-lobster argument": societies do not collapse because they run out of things to consume; they collapse when the means to distinguish oneself from the hoi polloi were no longer available, or, conversely, when they became available to too many, or worse, the wrong people.
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/268/image/coversmallDemocratizing Luxury: Name Brands, Advertising, and Consumption in Modern Japan by Annika A. Culver (review)2026-02-19text/htmlen-USDemocratizing Luxury: Name Brands, Advertising, and Consumption in Modern Japan by Annika A. Culver (review)2026-02-192026TWOProject MUSE®170222026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002026-02-19The Global Japanese Restaurant: Mobilities, Imaginaries, and Politics ed. by James Farrer and David L. Wank (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983052
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The globalization of Japanese food is a development that has been hard to miss. We watched as sukiyaki, then sushi and ramen became popular, noted the opening of Benihana, Yoshinoya, and Ippudo outlets in American cities and marveled at the addition of "sushi bars" to Chinese restaurants in many small towns. Within the last two decades, centuries-old Japanese restaurants opened branches in North America and Europe: Nodaiwa (eel) in Paris in 1996, Tempura Endo (tempura) in Los Angeles in 2016, and Sarashina Horii (soba) in New York City in 2021; fast-food sushi and ramen shops have appeared all over the world.The Global Japanese Restaurant: Mobilities, Imaginaries and Politics, written by a team of six scholars at
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/268/image/coversmallThe Global Japanese Restaurant: Mobilities, Imaginaries, and Politics ed. by James Farrer and David L. Wank (review)2026-02-19text/htmlen-USThe Global Japanese Restaurant: Mobilities, Imaginaries, and Politics ed. by James Farrer and David L. Wank (review)2026-02-192026TWOProject MUSE®190332026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002026-02-19Push the Button: Interactive Television and Collaborative Journalism in Japan by Elizabeth Rodwell (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983053
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In this well-written and incisively argued study, Elizabeth Rodwell examines how legacy media in Japan responded to the rise of digital technologies in the immediate post-Fukushima period. The 3.11 disasters accelerated the embrace of SNS (social networking services), including platforms such as Line, Facebook, and Twitter. As Rodwell discusses, one catalyst for this was widespread dissatisfaction with mainstream newspapers and television networks, which protected the interests of Japan's nuclear village through "rampant press conformity" and self-censorship (p. 70). The departure point for Rodwell's study, then, is the perceived imminent "collapse" of television's news and entertainment sectors (p. 10) due to "a
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/268/image/coversmallPush the Button: Interactive Television and Collaborative Journalism in Japan by Elizabeth Rodwell (review)2026-02-19text/htmlen-USPush the Button: Interactive Television and Collaborative Journalism in Japan by Elizabeth Rodwell (review)2026-02-192026TWOProject MUSE®193662026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002026-02-19Space and Play in Japanese Videogame Arcades by Jérémie Pelletier-Gagnon (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983054
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The space is dimly lit and stinks of cigarettes and spilled coffee. Dozens of young adults, almost entirely Japanese men, are seated in front of tables and are tapping away at buttons embedded into the tabletops. A particularly skilled performer draws a bit of a crowd, with viewers gathering at a respectful distance and some inching in closer to see the screen as clearly as possible. It's a weekday afternoon, and something about all this activity feels illicit. The space is lived in, shaping the experience and memories of those gathered—including a noticeably younger visitor. "When I was young, I remember my local game center sold really good hot dogs and ice-cream," says Goichi Suda, a designer of interactive
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/268/image/coversmallSpace and Play in Japanese Videogame Arcades by Jérémie Pelletier-Gagnon (review)2026-02-19text/htmlen-USSpace and Play in Japanese Videogame Arcades by Jérémie Pelletier-Gagnon (review)2026-02-192026TWOProject MUSE®122222026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002026-02-19Spiritual Ends: Religion and the Heart of Dying in Japan by Timothy O. Benedict (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983055
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Is hospice care to "spirituality" what legal and constitutional battles are to "religion" in Japan? Of the many fascinating suppositions in Timothy Benedict's Spiritual Ends, perhaps the most intriguing for the field of Japanese religious studies is that understandings of spirituality for Japanese society are not merely reflected but are actually being "invented" in the Japanese hospice, "one of the key spaces where philosophical questions on the nature of personhood in Japan are being produced and debated" (p. 78). Benedict, who had previously worked as a chaplain at a Presbyterian hospital, approaches terminal care facilities as laboratories for diagnosing understandings and negotiations of the term
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/268/image/coversmallSpiritual Ends: Religion and the Heart of Dying in Japan by Timothy O. Benedict (review)2026-02-19text/htmlen-USSpiritual Ends: Religion and the Heart of Dying in Japan by Timothy O. Benedict (review)2026-02-192026TWOProject MUSE®166502026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002026-02-19Occult Hunting and Supernatural Play in Japan by Laura Miller (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983056
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In the opening paragraph of her new monograph, Laura Miller relates an encounter with three business school professors from Tokyo. Upon learning of her research on "the divination industry, they all laughed out loud!" This is just the sort of reaction Miller is writing against: "divination and other related activities," she argues, "are not a trivial part of Japanese culture. Rather, they provide insights into realms of pleasure, creative exploration, and spiritual development, in addition to being extraordinarily lucrative" (p. 1).The book's opening vignette also reflects the challenge of defining the subject of inquiry. Each of eight relatively brief chapters takes up a distinct but related topic of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/268/image/coversmallOccult Hunting and Supernatural Play in Japan by Laura Miller (review)2026-02-19text/htmlen-USOccult Hunting and Supernatural Play in Japan by Laura Miller (review)2026-02-192026TWOProject MUSE®185582026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002026-02-19Notes on Contributors
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983057
<p></p>
Michelle Liu Carriger is an associate professor of theater and performance studies at UCLA with a PhD from Brown University. Her first book, Theatricality of the Closet: Fashion, Performance and Subjectivity Between Victorian Britain and Meiji Japan (2023) was the winner of the Barnard Hewitt Award from ASTR (American Society for Theatre Research). Other publications examine pedagogy during wildfire and active shooter lockdown, Japanese street fashion, cheerleaders in musicals, Victorian sex scandals, historical reenactment, kimono, and cultural appropriation. A longtime practitioner of chanoyu (Japanese tea ceremony), Carriger will write her next book on the international circulation of the tea ceremony.Peter Cave
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/268/image/coversmallNotes on Contributors2026-02-19text/htmlen-USNotes on Contributors2026-02-192026TWOProject MUSE®213582026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002026-02-19Writing Violence: The Politics of Form in Early Modern Japanese Literature by David C. Atherton (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983058
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What are readers of early modern Japanese fiction to make of the seeming inescapability of established forms—the character types and fixed patterns, the repertoire of modular narrative elements, recycled tropes, and allusions that seem to crowd almost every page? Some critics have taken this apparent literary navel-gazing as evidence of disengagement from the "real world" beyond the text, reflecting a desire for escapism and the inward-facing social context of literary coteries. Others have sought to map form itself, carefully charting the contours of genre and literary history. Still others have focused on discerning the meanings or subtexts that emerge in spite of fixed forms, or in the gaps between them.In this
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/268/image/coversmallWriting Violence: The Politics of Form in Early Modern Japanese Literature by David C. Atherton (review)2026-02-19text/htmlen-USWriting Violence: The Politics of Form in Early Modern Japanese Literature by David C. Atherton (review)2026-02-192026TWOProject MUSE®140132026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002026-02-19