Despite Japan's importance in the modern world, much about Japan remains unknown outside the country. This series provides informative, original, detailed studies on a variety of aspects of modern Japan.
It has established itself as an authoritative available source of scholarship on all aspects of Japan. Publishing policy is directed by some of the most respected names in Japanese studies.
Edited
By Sébastien Lechevalier
April 21, 2016
In the 1980s the performance of Japan’s economy was an international success story, and led many economists to suggest that the 1990s would be a Japanese decade. Today, however, the dominant view is that Japan is inescapably on a downward slope. Rather than focusing on the evolution of ...
By Helene Bowen Raddeker
February 29, 2016
Kanno Suga and Kaneko Fumika were both found guilty on different occasions in 1911 and 1926 of conspiring to assassinate the Japanese emperor. Kanno was executed and Kaneko hanged herself whilst in prison, but both women maintained their defiance of the state even in the face of death.Through ...
By Robert Matthew
September 08, 2015
After the Meiji Restoration of 1868 Japan modernized rapidly, transforming itself perhaps more quickly than any other country in history. However, the change was not without its conflicts, many of them still unresolved as the pleasures of modern society vie with a respect for the traditional ...
By Sawako Shirahase
July 31, 2015
Japan was the first Asian country to become a mature industrial society, and throughout the 1970s and the 1980s, was viewed as an ‘all-middle-class society’. However since the 1990s there have been growing doubts as to the real degree of social equality in Japan, particularly in the context of ...
By Lam Peng-Er
June 08, 2015
An important comparative study of Japanese politics that reveals that green issues have yet to displace the traditional urban politics of post-industrial Japan. This is unlike the rise of green parties and politics in Europe. Unlike Europe, it seems that political values in Japan are still ...
By Penny Francks
May 27, 2015
This fully revised and updated third edition of Japanese Economic Development looks at Japan's economic history from the nineteenth century through to World War II, recasting analysis of Japan’s economic past in the light fresh theoretical perspectives in the study of economic history and ...
By Huiyan Fu
February 27, 2015
Like many industrialised nations, the current employment trend in Japan centres on diversification of the labour market with an increased use of temporary labour. Among a wide range of non-regular labour arrangements, haken are a newly legalised category of non-regular workers who are typically ...
By Ian Neary
February 27, 2015
Written by an internationally recognized specialist on Buraku studies, this book casts new light on majority-minority relations and the struggle for Buraku liberation. Ian Neary focuses on the Burakumin activist, left-wing politician, family company manager and arguably the most important Buraku ...
Edited
By Christoph Brumann, Evelyn Schulz
February 27, 2015
Urban Spaces in Japan explores the workings of power, money and the public interest in the planning and design of Japanese space. Through a set of vivid case studies of well-known Japanese cities including Tokyo, Kobe, and Kyoto, this book examines the potential of civil society in contemporary ...
By Margaret Sleeboom
December 22, 2014
The descriptions Chinese and Japanese people attribute to themselves and to each other differ vastly and stand in stark contrast to Western perceptions that usually identify a 'similar disposition' between the two nations. Academic Nationals in China and Japan explores human categories, how ...
By Caroline Rose
December 01, 2014
The first book-length study to examine the re-writing of school textbooks by the Japanese Education Ministry in an attempt to play down atrocities in China during World War II. The famous textbook crisis in 1982 was at the centre of a diplomatic storm extending through the 1980s as Sino-Japanese ...
By Brian J. McVeigh
December 01, 2014
Brian J. McVeigh uses a unique anthropological approach to step outside flawed stereotypes of Japanese society and really engage in the current debate over the role of bureaucracy in Japanese politics.To many in the West, Japan appears as a paradox: a rational, high-tech economic superpower and yet...