You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
For nearly three decades Japanese Culture has garnered high praise as an accurate and well-written introduction to Japanese history and culture. This widely used undergraduate text is now available in a new edition. Thoroughly updated, the fourth edition includes expanded sections on numerous topics, among which are samurai values, Zen Buddhism, the tea ceremony, Confucianism in the Tokugawa period, the story of the forty-seven ronin, Mito scholarship in the early nineteenth century, and mass culture and comics in contemporary times.
The Channel Tunnel may be the greatest engineering project in Europe this century. This book describes the tremendous engineering achievement of the construction of the tunnel. Written by twenty of the key engineers involved, it provides a fascinating, informative and inspiring account of the project for both engineering professionals and general readers.
The Channel Tunnel has been called the greatest engineering project of the century, overcoming a unique set of financial, political and engineering challenges. This book provides a comprehensive insight into the events which culminated in the first dry link between Britain and France. It describes the relationship between the site investigation, data interpretation and construction of the works. It examines areas such as the difficulties inherent in predicting geology from a relatively small number of boreholes and revealing how the use of modern geophysical techniques.
A leading cultural historian of premodern Japan draws a rich portrait of the emerging samurai culture as it is portrayed in gunki-mono, or war tales, examining eight major works spanning the mid-tenth to late fourteenth centuries. Although many of the major war tales have been translated into English, Warriors of Japan is the first book-length study of the tales and their place in Japanese history. The war tales are one of the most important sources of knowledge about Japan's premodern warriors, revealing much about the medieval psyche and the evolving perceptions of warriors, warfare, and warrior customs.
"Represents a major advance over previous publications.... Students will find this volume especially useful as an introduction to the primary sources, terminology, and dominant themes in the history of chanoyu." --Journal of Japanese Studies "Tea in Japan illuminates in depth and detail chanoyu's cultural connections and evolution from the early Kamakura period... It is the quality of seeing the familiar and not so familiar elements of tea emerge as a dynamic saga of human invention and cultural intervention that makes this book exhilarating and the details that the authors provide that make these essays fascinating." --Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese
Reflecting the Past is the first English-language study to address the role of historiography in medieval Japan, an age at the time widely believed to be one of irreversible decline. Drawing on a decade of research, including work with medieval manuscripts, it analyzes a set of texts—eight Mirrors—that recount the past in an effort to order the world around them. They confront rebellions, civil war, “China,” attempted invasions, and even the fracturing of the court into two lines. To interrogate the significance for medieval writers of narrating such pasts as a Mirror, Erin Brightwell traces a series of innovations across these and related texts that emerge in the face of disorder. I...
This provoking study of the Japanese tea ceremony (chanoyu) examines the ideological foundation of its place in history and the broader context of Japanese cultural values where it has emerged as a so-called ‘quintessential’ component of the culture. Sen Soshitsu Xl argued that tea be viewed as the expression of the moral universe of the nation.
Japan began to fascinate the West after the account of Marco Polos sojourn in China. This set off an interest in the oriental world. The Portuguese, being the first, arrived in Japan in 1543 which was followed by others. The experience Japan had with Europeans put upon itself isolation for about 200 years. After the forceful opening by Mathew Perry in 1853, many Westerners again began to arrive in Japan. Later during the 1980s, there was an influx of migrant workers which become a hot topic of debate. The book throws much light onto the historical background as well as the events that lead up to the present state of affairs in relation to issues of discrimination, crimes and problems related to foreigners.
The Chinese themes of the Four Graybeards of Mt. Shang and the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove figure prominently in the art of Momoyama-period Japan (ca. 1575-1625). Kendall Brown proposes that the dense and multivalent implications of aesthetic reclusion central to these paintings made them appropriate for patrons of all classes - the military, who were presently in power, the aristocracy, who had lost power, and the Buddhist priesthood, who forsook power. These paintings, and their attendant messages, thus serve as dynamic cultural agents that elucidate the fundamental paradigms of early modern Japanese society. Unlike traditional art history studies, which emphasize the style and history...