Showing titles in Japan

A FINALIST FOR THE 2024 CUNDILL HISTORY PRIZE LONGLISTED FOR THE 2024 BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE A Best Book of the Year in The Economist, Prospect, The Telegraph, TLS, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, and Foreign Affairs 'Magisterial' – Max Hastings, The Sunday Times...

The Japanese experience of war from the late-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century presents a stunning example of the meteoric rise and shattering fall of a great power. As Japan modernized and became the one non-European great power, its leaders concluded that an empire on the Asian mainland...

Written in 1645 by legendary samurai Miyamoto Musashi, The Book of Five Rings is a timeless treatise on strategy, discipline, and mastery. Drawing from a lifetime of undefeated duels and battlefield experience, Musashi distills his philosophy into five sections—Earth, Water, Fire, Wind, and Void—each exploring a different dimension of combat and mindset.

Code of the Samurai is a 400-year-old explication of the rules and expectations embodied in Bushido, the Japanese Way of the Warrior. With a bright, conversational narrative by Thomas Cleary, this book is indispensable to corporate executives, students of Asian culture, martial artists, or anyone sincerely interested in Japan and its people.

Brought to you by Penguin. Chris Harding's enormously enjoyable new book distils Japan's long, complex and fascinating history into the stories of twenty remarkable individuals. These vivid and entertaining portraits take the reader from the earliest written accounts of Japan right through to...

There are very few modern hobbies that can honestly claim they have lived three distinct lives. Most begin as a craze, settle into a niche, and then either fade or become quietly institutional. The Pokémon Trading Card Game did something stranger and more enduring. It began as a children’s pastime, became a cultural flashpoint that adults argued about in staff rooms and school assemblies, then returned decades later as a booming adult obsession with its own economy, celebrities, and mythology. That alone would make it worth studying.

In 1908, at the age of two, Henry Pu Yi ascended to become the last emperor of the centuries-old Manchu dynasty. After revolutionaries forced Pu Yi to abdicate in 1911, the young emperor lived for 13 years in Peking’s Forbidden City, but with none of the power his birth afforded him. The remainder of Pu Yi’s life was lived out in a topsy-turvy fashion: fleeing from a Chinese warlord, becoming head of a Japanese puppet state, being confined to a Russian prison in Siberia, and enduring taxing labor.

Only three short years after the end of the Japanese occupation, war came again to Malaya. The Chinese-backed guerrillas called it the War of the Running Dogs - their contemptuous term for those in Malaya who remained loyal to the British. The British Government referred to this bloody and costly struggle as the 'Malayan Emergency'. Yet it was a war that lasted twelve years and cost thousands of lives. By the time it was over Malaya had obtained its independence - but on British, not on Chinese or Communist terms.

In 17th century Japan, a masterless samurai with nothing but his sword and unwavering resolve defeated over sixty opponents in life-or-death duels. He died undefeated.

"War Crimes: Japans' World War II Atrocities" demands a prominent place in military history. Mr. Thurman and his daughter, Christine Sherman, bring to life the atrocities which the tribunal was formed to prosecute. War crimes remain a part of world history, and the world should know about them.

A joyous exploration of the cultural phenomenon that created Mario, Zelda and Pokémon, and an ode to our love of gaming, by one of the most trusted voices in video games writing. 'Among the best things ever written about Nintendo.' Tom Bissell , author of Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter From the instant classics to the hidden gems, Nintendo's video games occupy a special place in the hearts of hundreds of millions of people around the globe.

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER ‘A stunning book, among the most immediate and thrilling works of history I have ever read’ At 8:15am on August 6th 1945, an atomic bomb was dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. In an instant, the temperature at its core rose to millions of degrees...

Folk tales of the Shaolin Temple depict warrior monks with superhuman abilities. Today, dozens of East Asian fighting styles trace their roots back to the Buddhist brawlers of Shaolin, although any quest for the true story soon wanders into a labyrinth of forgeries, secret texts and modern retellings. This new study approaches the martial arts from their origins in military exercises and callisthenics. It examines a rich folklore from old wuxia tales of crime-fighting heroes to modern kung fu movies.

Listeners of this book will gain a clear understanding of what makes the Japanese, and their society, tick.

This Pulitzer Prize-winning history of World War II chronicles the dramatic rise and fall of the Japanese empire, from the invasion of Manchuria and China to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Told from the Japanese perspective, The Rising Sun is, in the author’s words, "a factual saga of people caught up in the flood of the most overwhelming war of mankind, told as it happened - muddled, ennobling, disgraceful, frustrating, full of paradox."

百万都市を一手に支配した江戸町奉行所の「実働部隊」が，与力と同心だ．治安維持をはじめとする幅広い分野にわたる彼らの業務の実態と，組屋敷での生活，そして深い教養と豊かな人脈に裏打ちされた知られざる文化活動に光を当てる．

永遠に続くかに見えた「天下泰平」は，またたく間に崩れ去った．近世社会の骨格を作り上げていた世襲的身分制は根本から解体され，国民の政治参加までもがはじまる．しかし，その過程で流された血は，とても少なかった．

The untold story of how Japan became a cultural superpower through the fantastic inventions that captured—and transformed—the world’s imagination. “A masterful book driven by deep research, new insights, and powerful storytelling.”—W. David Marx, author of Ametora: How Japan...

 Few events have ever shaken a country in the way that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor affected the United States. After the devastating attack, Japanese forces continued to overwhelm the Allies, attacking Malaya with its fortress of Singapore, and taking resource-rich islands in the Pacific - Borneo, Sumatra, and Java - in their own blitzkrieg offensive. Allied losses in these early months after America's entry into the war were great, and among the most devastating were those suffered during the Java Sea Campaign.

The incredible true story of Louis Zamperini, now a major motion picture directed by Angelina Jolie. THE INTERNATIONAL NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER In 1943 a bomber crashes into the Pacific Ocean. Against all odds, one young lieutenant survives. Louise Zamperini had already transformed himself from...