A sweeping yet intimate portrait of World War II’s legacy in Japan Showa 1944-1953: A History of Japan continues Eisner award-winning author Shigeru Mizuki's historical and autobiographical account of Japanese life in the twentieth century. In this volume, the tail-end of the Pacific War and its devastating consequences upon the author and his compatriots loom large. Two rival navies engage in a deadly game of feint and thrust, waging a series of ruthless military campaigns across the Pacific islands. From Guadalcanal to Okinawa, Japan slowly loses ground. When the United States unleashes the atomic bomb–then still a new and now enduringly terrible weapon–it is the ultimate, definitive blow. The catastrophic fallout from both explosions surpasses the limits of popular imagination. Mizuki's own life is irrevocably changed in the shadow of history. After losing an arm during his time in service, the author struggles to forge a path into the future. Should he remain on the island of Rabaul as an honored friend of the local Tolai? Or should he return to the rubble of Japan and return to his earliest artistic inclinations? This penultimate installment of a landmark series is a searing condemnation of war, told with the deft hand of Japan's most celebrated cartoonist.

Emperor Hirohito reigned for more than sixty years, yet we know little about him or the part he really played in the turbulent history of Showa Japan. Stephen Large draws on a wide range of Japanese and Western sources in his study of Emperor Hirohito's political role in Showa Japan (1926-89). This analysis focuses on key events in his career such as the extent to which he bore responsibility for Japanese aggression in the Pacific in 1941, and explains why Hirohito remains such a contested symbol in Japanese post war politics.

Japan's momentous Showa era began in 1926, when Emperor Hirohito ascended the throne, and ended with his death in 1989. This was a tumultuous period in modern Japanese history—a time of great disaster and tremendous triumph for Japan. This book focuses on the post-war period in Japan when the nation stood at the zenith of her economic power. Today, the term Showa is shorthand for a glamorous period in which, all too briefly, Japan was the richest nation on earth and the envy of the developed world. A growing nostalgia for this period is now memorialized in Japan in a national holiday. It was an era of stratospheric growth which saw Japan's transition from an isolated, impoverished nation to a peaceful one holding an exalted position as the world's second largest economy. But what is the true meaning of the Showa era, and what is its legacy for the Japanese today? In Showa Japan, Hans Brinckmann provides a clear-eyed exploration of the Showa period as it really was—not just a time of wondrous change but of wild excesses that would eventually come crashing down with the bursting of Japan's economic bubble—exactly as occurred in the rest of the world, but almost 20 years earlier! From the heights of extravagance to the lean years that followed, Brinkmann, a long-time resident of Japan, examines the impact of the Showa era and its aftermath on every aspect of Japanese society. Featuring dozens of period photographs, interviews, and a wealth of factual information and personal reflections, this book provides an in-depth portrait of a Japan that once was—as well as a blueprint for one that might still be, if only the lessons of the past could be learned.

From the author of Audition, a wickedly satirical and wildly funny tale of an intergenerational battle of the sexes. In his most irreverent novel yet, Ryu Murakami creates a rivalry of epic proportions between six aimless youths and six tough-as-nails women who battle for control of a Tokyo neighborhood. At the outset, the young men seem louche but harmless, their activities limited to drinking, snacking, peering at a naked neighbor through a window, and performing karaoke. The six "aunties" are fiercely independent career women. When one of the boys executes a lethal ambush of one of the women, chaos ensues. The women band together to find the killer and exact revenge. In turn, the boys buckle down, study physics, and plot to take out their nemeses in a single blast. Who knew that a deadly "gang war" could be such fun? Murakami builds the conflict into a hilarious, spot-on satire of modern culture and the tensions between the sexes and generations.

After centuries of repression of the female voice in literature, the Meiji (1868-1912) and Taisho (1912-1926) periods in Japanese history saw important changes in both the way women wrote and the way they were read. However, even the most accepted female writers of these two eras were judged by criteria different from those applied to men, and only the most conservative were praised by the (male) critics. This study of the women who wrote in the modern era examines both famous and now-obscure writers within the context of their moments in time and their influence on later generations of Japanese women writers. Arranged chronologically, the book covers the pioneering women of the early Meiji period, the ethos of reactionary conservatism, the romantic movement in poetry, women writers of the naturalist school, Taisho liberalism, and the new era of literary women. An introduction outlines the various schools of Japanese female writers during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as the social and cultural trends that helped produce them. The text is appropriate for both well-read scholars of Japanese literature and newcomers to the works of the "fair ladies of the back chamber," as these creative and driven writers were once called.

A new simplified edition translated by Don Sanderson. The original three-volume work, first published in 1979, has been revised specially as a single volume paperback which concentrates on the development of Japanese literature.