The first film directed by Akira Kurosawa (1910-1998), Japan’s most famous film director, was Sanshiro Sugata (Judo Saga), an adaptation of a newly published novel by the judo master and Naoki Prize-winning author Tsuneo Tomita (1904-1967). The action film was set in the 1880s when… Read more »

“The books for which there is the greatest amount of demand are those that pack the greatest amount of crime into the smallest space, and corrupt the morals of all classes”, writes Isabella L. Bird (1831-1904) in Unbeaten Tracks in Japan: An account of Travels… Read more »

In 1964, the year of the first Tokyo Olympics, Alfred A. Knoff published the first American Edition of Kobo Abe’s (1924-1993) The Women in the Dunes in English, translated by E. Dale Saunders (1919-1995).This first edition is beautifully illustrated with multiple drawings, rendered in pen… Read more »

Writing and publishing books about Japan is not a new phenomenon and some of the themes, such as the alleged paradox of and contradictions within Japanese society are not new either.Many such themes have endured for over one hundred years, or more. Authors have continued… Read more »