New Books in Japanese Studies

Amy Chavez talks with Robert Whiting about his recently released book Gamblers, Fraudsters, Dreamers & Spies: The Outsiders who Shaped Modern Japan (Tuttle, 2024). Bob talks about several colorful characters who populated Tokyo in the 60s and 70s, including strong women such like Australian bar hostess Maggie, who became famous for using scissors to cut off the neckties of customers, and a female yakuza gangster who carried a revolver in her purse. And if you think Japan doesn’t have a drug problem, think again. Whiting talks about North Korean drug-smuggling and its contribution to a surging number of meth users in the country. Lastly, while most tourists to Japan can’t help but be impressed by Japanese taxi drivers who wear white gloves and offer impeccably polite service, things weren’t always so good when hailing a cab in Japan. In fact, drivers used to be rude, dirty and reportedly, the job was so loathsome that Japanese wives were embarrassed to tell people their husbands were taxi drivers! As Whiting tells us, that all changed with the MK Taxi company, started by a Korean determined to put a new face on ride hailing. Listen to our previous BOA podcast 11: Robert Whiting talks Baseball and Tokyo Junkie, or read a review of his memoir Tokyo Junkie: 60 Years of Bright Lights, Back Alleys and Baseball (Stone Bridge Press, 2021) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/japanese-studies

On Feb. 6, 1945, just three days after the U.S. army started to fight the Japanese in the city of Manila, General Douglas MacArthur declared that “Manila had fallen.” In truth, the battle would take another month, as U.S. forces fought their way through block after block. By the end of the battle, which featured some of the most intense urban fighting faced by the U.S. army, Manila was in ruins, the old walled city of Intramuros was flattened, and 100,000 Filipino civilians were dead.  Nicholas Evan Sarantakes writes a comprehensive history of the fighting in The Battle of Manila: Poisoned Victory in the Pacific War (Oxford UP, 2025) Nicholas Evan Sarantakes is an associate professor in the strategy and policy department at the U.S. Naval War College. He is the author of four books, including Dropping the Torch: Jimmy Carter, the Olympic Boycott, and the Cold War (Cambridge University Press: 2010) You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Battle of Manila. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/japanese-studies

Hiromi Ito author of The Thorn Puller (originally published in Japanese as Toge-nuki Jizo: Shin Sugamo Jizo engi) came to national attention in Japan in the 1980s for her groundbreaking poetry about pregnancy, childbirth, and female sexuality. After relocating to the U.S. in the 1990s, she began to write about the immigrant experience and biculturalism. In recent years, she has focused on the ways that dying and death shape human experience. Jeffrey Angles is a writer, translator and professor of Japanese at Western Michigan University. He is the first non-native poet writing in Japanese to win the Yomiuri Prize for Literature, a highly coveted prize for poetry. His translation of the modernist classic The Book of the Dead by Shinobu Orikuchi won both the Miyoshi Award and the Scaglione Prize for translation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/japanese-studies

Pedro Thiago Ramos Bassoe, Assistant Professor of Japanese at Purdue University and author of Supernatural Japan, explores Izumi Kyōka’s role in shaping modern Japanese fantastic fiction. He traces landscapes, kusazōshi influences, hidden Western sources like Mérimée and Maupassant, and explains his 'global fantastic' framing. The conversation also covers integrating images into analysis and future research on Japanese fantastic writers.

In this episode of the New Books Network, I sat down with the contributors of Psychoanalytic Explorations into the Primal Relationship in Japan and India (Routledge, 2025) to discuss the profound psychic textures of the East. Moving away from the traditional Eurocentric focus on the Oedipal complex, this volume investigates the "primal relationship"—the foundational bond between mother and infant—and how it is uniquely structured within the cultural contexts of Japan and India. The authors challenge the universality of Western clinical models, proposing instead that the maternal matrix in these societies offers a different roadmap for understanding the self, intimacy, and dependency. Osamu Kitayama is a Training and Supervising Analyst at the Japan Psychoanalytic Society, Professor Emeritus at Kyushu University, and President of Hakuoh University. He served as President of the Japan Psychoanalytic Society from 2016–2019 and con tinues to work with patients in private practice. He has authored numerous articles on culturally oriented psychoanalysis and books.Jhuma Basak is a Training and Supervising Analyst at the Indian Psychoanalytical Society. She has published on culture and gender. Over the past 20 years, she has pre sented at IPA Congresses along with the first Keynote from Asia-Pacific, 4th IPA-region at the 53rd IPA Congress (International Journal of Psychoanalysis). A past Co-chair of COWAP Asia-Pacific, she co-edited Psychoanalytic and Socio-Cultural Perspectives on Women in India: Violence, Safety and Survival (2021).Ashis Roy, PhD, is a psychoanalyst (IPS Kolkata/IPA London) and faculty member at the China-American Psychoanalytic Alliance (CAPA). With an extensive background in clinical training and institutional building at Ambedkar University Delhi, his work emphasizes the dialogue between clinical practice and Asian cultural dynamics. He is a host for the New Books Network and the author of the recently released book, Intimate Hindu-Muslim Relationships: A Psychoanalytic Exploration of the Self and the Other (2024). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/japanese-studies

Reginald Jackson’s inspiring new book takes a transdisciplinary approach to rethinking how we read, how we pay attention, and why that matters deeply in shaping how we understand the past, live in the present, and imagine possible futures. Textures of Mourning: Calligraphy, Mortality, and The Tale of Genji Scrolls (University of Michigan Press, 2018) explores the relationship between reading, dying, and mourning across three central texts: the Heian period The Tale of Genji; the twelfth century Illustrated Handscrolls of the Tale of Genji (or, Genji Scrolls); and the twenty-first century Resurrected Genji Scrolls exhibition. The book’s analysis pivots on some key questions, including: “How does the desire to observe dying bodies potentially damage them?”; and “how do these deteriorating bodies in turn alter the texture of linguistic and visual representation?” The book addresses these questions while helping readers understand and appreciate calligraphy as a “kinetic medium” through which we might “chart the shifting contours of mortality’s link to legibility between terrains of written text and painted image.” In tracing Genji’s decompositional aesthetics across the four major parts of the book – Dying, Decomposing, Mourning, Resurrecting – Jackson’s writing simultaneously helps us to understand how mourning can itself be a kind of reading (and how “dwelling with the dead” can be a critical practice) at the same time that his writing becomes itself a form of mourning. As he reminds us in the book, mourning is not simply about experiencing loss: it can also be a resource for thriving. Textures of Mourning demonstrates what that might look like both when studying the medieval past, and when using it as a resource to inform the contemporary present and its many forms of violence. Ranging across art history, Japanese studies, and performance studies, this is a movingly and gorgeously composed book that should serve as a model for what transdisciplinary scholarship can be, and a reminder of the importance of performing and supporting more work that dances across disciplinary boundaries. Carla Nappi is the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. You can learn more about her and her work here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/japanese-studies

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) is among the six largest national space agencies in the world, along with China's CNSA, US's NASA, and Russia's Roscosmos. JAXA's budget is more than $1 billion USD—bigger than France or Germany individually, and more than that of Italy, India, Canada, and the UK combined. And yet, Japan's significant contributions have largely been absent in the history of space exploration, and space exploration largely absent in the history of technology in Japan. The Islands and the Stars: A History of Japan’s Space Programs (Stanford University Press, 2026) corrects this conspicuous oversight. Through meticulous archival research in Japanese and anglophone archives, Dr. Subodhana Wijeyeratne examines the history of Japan's space exploration efforts over nearly a century. Dr. Wijeyeratne traces the evolution of Japan's space program from its early origins in the 1920s, through the postwar period of rapid technological innovation, to the consolidation of its various institutional elements into JAXA in 2003. He situates Japan's space programs within the broader history of the country's postwar recovery, economic growth, and cultural identity, while also considering their place within global trends in space exploration. Through this narrative, Wijeyeratne not only illuminates Japan's centrality to the global history of science and technology, but also offers insights into the future of global space exploration, emphasizing the importance of diverse voices and perspectives in the quest to understand our place in the cosmos. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/japanese-studies

Jie-Hyun Lim, distinguished historian of memory studies and director at Sogang University, explores how nations fashion themselves as victims. He traces victimhood nationalism across Korea, Japan, Poland, Germany, and Israel. Topics include memorial sacralization, Holocaust memory as a global reference, appropriation of suffering, and the politics and limits of forgiveness.

All over the world, masses of people watch, follow, document, and obsess over baseball. Everything remarkable about the impact of baseball derives from the game's history and cultural status as events that draw people together in these ways. Understanding baseball as a cultural phenomenon is therefore less a matter of mastering the vocabulary of the game or merely recollecting its iconic stadiums, players, and stats. While all those details compel insiders and inspire fans, baseball's peculiar and persistent appeal can only be understood by adopting a wider lens. It requires reckoning with the history of structured competition. The classic backyard game of catch between a father and son draws meaning from its associations with the organized sport and its history. The challenge lies less in finding one perfect spot to look, but rather in identifying the many different places where baseball has accumulated significance. Out of the Ballpark: How to Think about Baseball (Oxford University Press, 2026) reconsiders the character, meaning, and delights of the game by exploring both baseball's unusual features and the sport's many resonances with other aspects of modern life. To this end, it abandons several assumptions and mythologies that underlie most approaches to histories of baseball: that it is unique among sports and fundamentally different from other kinds of entertainment; that it is specific to the United States; that it has changed fundamentally in recent years; and that the keys to understanding it lie primarily in examining what happens on the field of play. Instead, David M. Henkin moves across time and space to examine baseball's history since the nineteenth century and beyond US borders. He takes readers inside the structures of clubs and leagues, interprets the sacred scripture of rulebooks, and illuminates some of baseball's rites and rituals that are often associated with honor and manhood. He charts baseball's significance along the routes of American and Japanese imperial expansion and the shifting maps of race and ethnicity in the US. Baseball is found at negotiating tables that pit capital against labor and in pivotal moments in the history of mass media. Here, we are shown how baseball might offer a complex and capacious space for thinking about such things as spectatorship, success, community, order, and contingency in the modern world. David M. Henkin is Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught courses on society and culture in nineteenth-century America for close to three decades. Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/japanese-studies

In her book Japan Reborn: Race and Eugenics from Empire to Cold War (Columbia UP, 2025), historian Kristin Roebuck grapples with the question: Why did Japan embrace “mixed blood” as an authoritarian empire yet turn to xenophobic racial nationalism as a Cold War democracy? Through in-depth and rigorous historical archival research, Roebuck traces the fraught history of sex, reproduction, race and empire building in Japan from the 1930s to 1950s. Through her scholarship, she crucially demonstrates how discourses on sex, mixed-race children, and adoption revolved around control of women and their bodies to strengthen nationalism and imperialism. This monograph is an important read for listeners who are interested in the topics of race, gender and empire and scholars in Asian Studies, History, and Gender Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/japanese-studies