Princess Fukuko Asaka (1941-2009) started publishing science fiction and fantasy stories in Japanese magazines in the late 1950s under the pen name Bien Fu, and had stories regularly published throughout the 1960s. One of the Princess’s stories was published in the first issue of Uchujin (1957-2009),… Read more »

The Manyoshu, Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves is Japan’s oldest surviving book of poetry. It was compiled during Japan’s Nara Period (710-794) when Japan’s capital was located in Nara. The Japanese capital subsequently shifted to Kyoto at the start of the Heian Period (794-1185), a… Read more »

According to historians, Japan’s first modern cookbook Ryori Monogatari, Accounts of Cooking, was published just as the first Tokugawa Shogun, Ieyasu Tokugawa (1543-1616), came to power in 1603, and Japan’s Edo Period began (1603-1863). Tokugawa was a supporter of publishing and in particular books that provided… Read more »

Japan’s most expensive book, an edited collection of manuscripts by Claudius Ptolemaeus (100-168), was published in two-volumes by the Japanese publisher Iwanami Shoten in 1984, just before Japan’s infamous economic bubble (1986-1991), with a retail price of 1,930,000 yen. Ptolemaeus’ astronomical treatise, an astronomy textbook… Read more »