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PODCAST

New Books in Japanese Studies

This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: ⁠newbooksnetwork.com⁠ Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox:

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All Episodes

44:58

Ted Goossen on translating Hiromi Kawakami’s “Third...

New Books in Japanese Studies ·

2026/04/10

Translator Ted Goossen talks about everything from first landing in Japan in 1968 to the differences between translating Haruki Murakami and Hiromi Kawakami, especially the complexities of Hiromi Kawakami’s latest book The Third Love.Amy has a deep discussion with Ted Goossen about Japan, it’s emerging culture, it’s historically strong women and how Japanese literature and its themes are changing. In addition to talking about Hiromi Kawakami’s novel The Third Love, other prominent people mentioned

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80:34

Ruth Mandujano López, "Steamships Across the Pacific:...

New Books in Japanese Studies ·

2026/04/09

How did the movement of people, goods, and ships reshape connections between Latin America and Asia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries?In Steamships Across the Pacific: Maritime Journeys between Mexico, China, and Japan, 1867–1914 (U Hong Kong Press, 2025), Ruth Mandujano López examines this question through the lens of maritime travel. Focusing on Mexico’s participation in emerging steamship networks linking it to China and Japan, the book traces how these routes facilitated new

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54:04

Marty Friedman with Jon Wiederhorn, "Dreaming...

New Books in Japanese Studies ·

2026/04/03

Marty Friedman is a multi-platinum recording artist and government-appointed Ambassador to Japan Heritage. He has written three books in Japanese and had long running columns in the Asahi Weekly, Nikkei Entertainment, Cyzo, Big Comic, Young Guitar, Guitar World and Burrn.The show opens with a moving tribute to Ozzy Osbourne, formerly of Black Sabbath, who passed away on July 25, 2025. Friedman then turns to the reason for writing his book, co-authored with Jon Wiederhorn. He talks about the

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60:25

Robert Cribb and Sandra Wilson, "Twelve Japanese War...

New Books in Japanese Studies ·

2026/04/01

“Japanese war crimes are notorious. During the Second World War, as Japanese forces overran Southeast Asia and the Pacific, they massacred, murdered, raped, and tortured Asians and Westerners who fell into their hands. They also mistreated hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war (POWs) and civilian internees. After the war ended in 1945, the victorious Allied powers conducted trials in which they brought Japanese perpetrators to justice, as they also did with Germans in Europe… In this

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64:22

Peter Mauch, "Tojo: The Rise and Fall of Japan's Most...

New Books in Japanese Studies ·

2026/03/31

The military general who became Emperor Hirohito’s prime minister, Tojo Hideki is most often remembered as an iron-fisted leader who dragged Japan into World War II and—after spectacular losses—was eventually executed as a war criminal. Yet Tojo was far more than his ignominious end. In fact, as Dr. Peter Mauch argues in Tojo: The Rise and Fall of Japan's Most Controversial World War II General (Harvard University Press, 2026), he was one of the twentieth century’s most accomplished military

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78:04

Gregory Smits, "The Ryukyu Islands: A New History...

New Books in Japanese Studies ·

2026/03/30

The Ryukyu Islands between Japan and Taiwan consist of around 160 islands and are home to about 1.5 million inhabitants. Across the islands' history, sea-lanes and trade patterns have connected them to the East China Sea region, giving them a unique vantage point on the region's changes and making them a useful lens through which to view and understand those transformations. In this book, Gregory Smits marshals his expertise to canvass the environmental, political, and social history of this

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35:14

Robert Whiting, "Gamblers, Fraudsters, Dreamers &...

New Books in Japanese Studies ·

2026/03/27

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

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70:54

Nicholas Evan Sarantakes, "The Battle of Manila:...

New Books in Japanese Studies ·

2026/03/26

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

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44:33

Hiromi Ito, "The Thorn Puller" (Stone Bridge Press,...

New Books in Japanese Studies ·

2026/03/20

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

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32:59

Pedro Thiago Ramos Bassoe, "Supernatural Japan: Izumi...

New Books in Japanese Studies ·

2026/03/18

Supernatural Japan: Izumi Kyoka and the Global Fantastic (U Michigan Press, 2026)examines the role of Japanese writer Izumi Kyōka (1873–1939) in the formation of modern literature of the fantastic in Japan as a global literary genre. Kyōka wrote some of the most famous stories of ghosts, monsters, and the supernatural in modern Japanese literature, including The Holy Man of Mt. Kōya, The Grass Labyrinth, and The Castle Tower. Despite the clearly modernist elements and global influences of Kyōka’s

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57:25

Osamu Kitayama and Jhuma Basak, "Psychoanalytic...

New Books in Japanese Studies ·

2026/03/10

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

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48:32

Subodhana Wijeyeratne, "The Islands and the Stars: A...

New Books in Japanese Studies ·

2026/02/23

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

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54:06

Jie-Hyun Lim, "Victimhood Nationalism: History and...

New Books in Japanese Studies ·

2026/02/21

Nationalism today depends on the perception of victimhood. The historical memory of past suffering endows nationalist movements with political legitimacy and a sense of moral superiority. Koreans recall Japanese colonial atrocities, while Japan commemorates the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Israel sanctifies the Holocaust and Poland trumpets the Nazi and Soviet occupations. Even Germany and Russia, perpetrators of historical crimes, today cast themselves as victims by pointing to

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63:14

David M. Henkin, "Out of the Ballpark: How to Think...

New Books in Japanese Studies ·

2026/02/18

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

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58:53

Kristin Roebuck, "Japan Reborn: Race and Eugenics...

New Books in Japanese Studies ·

2026/02/10

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

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71:31

Rosina Buckland and Oleg Benesch, "Samurai" (British...

New Books in Japanese Studies ·

2026/02/07

Samurai (British Museum Press 2026) is a richly illustrated volume co-authored by exhibition curator Rosina Buckland (British Museum) and Oleg Benesch (York) to accompany the special exhibition "Samurai" at the British Museum 3 Feb - 4 May 2026. More than a catalogue, Samurai uses the exhibit to explore the overlapping and diverging myths and histories of the samurai from medieval warriors to bureaucrats to global pop culture phenomena. As the exhibition website observes, "The samurai is an iconic

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64:20

Alex Wellerstein, "The Most Awful Responsibility:...

New Books in Japanese Studies ·

2026/01/21

Dropping the atomic bombs on Japan during World War II was, arguably, the most controversial decision of the 20th century. The responsibility for that “decision” has logically fallen on US President Harry S. Truman. But in The Most Awful Responsibility: Truman and the Secret Struggle for Control of the Atomic Age (Harper, 2025), Alex Wellerstein argues that Truman's actual decision wasn’t what everyone thinks it was.The conventional narrative is that American leaders had a choice: Invade Japan,

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63:10

Anne Sokolsky ed., "Bold Breaks: Japanese Women and...

New Books in Japanese Studies ·

2026/01/20

The various words for “divorce” in Japanese—rien, enkiri, fūfu wakare, rikon—reflect how the socially constructed institutions of marriage and family, along with their dissolutions, have been understood in Japanese history and jurisprudence. Employing a broad definition of divorce as the end of a romantic union sanctioned by law, social custom, or mutual agreement, Bold Breaks: Japanese Women and Literary Narratives of Divorce explores the shifting attitudes toward divorce in literature by women

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84:06

Bo Tao, "Cooperative Evangelist: Kagawa Toyohiko and...

New Books in Japanese Studies ·

2026/01/04

Cooperative Evangelist: Kagawa Toyohiko and His World, 1888-1960 (University of Hawai’i Press, 2025) by Bo Tao uncovers the extraordinary world of a Japanese man who was once described as the “Saint Francis” or the “Gandhi” of Japan. A renowned religious figure on the world stage, Kagawa Toyohiko (1888–1960) received wide acclaim for his work as a street preacher in the slums of Kobe as well as his espousal of nonviolent methods of social reform. His reputation as a pacifist figure, however, rested

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60:26

Jolyon Baraka Thomas and Matthew D. McMullen, "The...

New Books in Japanese Studies ·

2025/12/28

For nearly two decades, the Nanzan Guide to Japanese Religions (U Hawaii Press, 2024) has served as a valuable resource for students and scholars of religion in Japan. This exciting update expands the audience to include non-specialists of Japan while also complicating the notions of "Japan" and "religion." Asking the provocative question "why study Japanese religions?" the editors argue that studying Japan is vital for the academic study of religion writ large and make a case for the continued

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128 results

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