New Books in Japanese Studies

Marshall Poe
  • 4.6 (10)
  • Books
  • Updated Semiweekly

This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: ⁠newbooksnetwork.com⁠ Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: ⁠https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/⁠ Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to learn about more our latest interviews: @newbooksnetwork Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/japanese-studies

  1. 2d ago

    Hannah Shepherd, "The Narrowing Sea: Fukuoka, Pusan, and the Rise and Fall of an Imperial Region" (U California Press, 2025)

    In The Narrowing Sea: Fukuoka, Pusan, and the Rise and Fall of an Imperial Region (U California Press, 2025), Hannah Shepherd examines the shared histories of Pusan and Fukuoka over the eight decades from Japan's forced opening of Korea's ports in 1876 to the end of the Korean War in 1953. One city was Korean, the other Japanese; one was a burgeoning colonial port, the other a provincial city buoyed by imperial expansion. Wars, colonization, and capitalist industrialization forged intimate connections between the two, knitting together an imperial region that transcended its maritime boundaries. Drawing on both Japanese and Korean archives, and emphasizing the concept of imperial urbanization, Shepherd challenges traditional views of empire and urban growth and shows how local networks, migration, and capital flows shaped the region's exploitative and uneven geographies. The waters between Fukuoka and Pusan narrowed through intensified interactions that continued even after the end of empire, creating enduring legacies for the postwar and postcolonial eras. Dr. Hannah Shepherd is Assistant Professor of History at Yale University. Dr. Samee Siddiqui is Assistant Professor of World History at Drury University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/japanese-studies

    1h 20m

  2. 4d ago

    Jeremy Yellen, "The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere: When Total Empire Met Total War" (Cornell UP, 2019)

    Jeremy Yellen’s The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere: When Total Empire Met Total War (Cornell University Press, 2019) is a challenging transnational exploration of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, Japan’s ambitious, confused, and much maligned attempt to create a new bloc order in East and Southeast Asia during World War II. Yellen’s book is welcome both as the first book-length treatment of the Sphere in English and for also being innovative in both approach and analysis. The book is divided into two parts, each addressing one of the “two Pacific Wars,” as Yellen puts it: a “war of empires” and “an anticolonial war… for independence.” The first half of the book treats the Japanese “high policy” of the Sphere. Here, Yellen not only provides—through the Coprosperity Sphere—a provocative new reading of the Tripartite Pact and the imbrication of Japan’s regional and global geopolitical strategies, but also outlines an important timeline of how Japanese conceptualizations of the Sphere evolved with the changing economic, political, and military expediencies of the Pacific War. Though ideas about the Sphere as a regional order of hierarchical solidarity with Japan at its apex, a “grand strategy of opportunism” rooted in the “sphere-of-influence diplomacy” and “cooperative imperialism” of Japan’s bombastic and enigmatic foreign minister, Matsuoka Yōsuke, Yellen shows that plans for the Sphere only became specific and concrete when Japan’s war situation descended into increasing desperation from 1942 on. The second half of the book shifts gears to examine responses to the Sphere in the Philippines and Burma. Yellen shows that for local nationalist elites like Burma’s first prime minister Ba Maw, whether Japanese rhetoric about the creation of more-or-less liberal international order within the Sphere for the top-echelon nations like Burma and the Philippines was genuine or self-serving, “even sham independence brought opportunity.” By focusing on these pragmatic nationalists (“patriotic collaborators”) Yellen contributes to a growing body of literature on empire that refuses to be pigeonholed by binaries of virtuous resistance and traitorous collaboration. This podcast was recorded as a lecture/dialogue for a live audience at Nagoya University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/japanese-studies

    3 min

  3. 4d ago

    Matthieu Felt, "Meanings of Antiquity: Myth Interpretation in Premodern Japan" (Harvard UP, 2023)

    Meanings of Antiquity: Myth Interpretation in Premodern Japan (Harvard UP, 2023) is the first dedicated study of how the oldest Japanese myths, recorded in the eighth-century texts Kojiki and Nihon shoki, changed in meaning and significance between 800 and 1800 CE. Generations of Japanese scholars and students have turned to these two texts and their creation myths to understand what it means to be Japanese and where Japan fits into the world order. As the shape and scale of the world explained by these myths changed, these myths evolved in turn. Over the course of the millennium covered in this study, Japan transforms from the center of a proud empire to a millet seed at the edge of the Buddhist world, from the last vestige of China’s glorious Zhou Dynasty to an archipelago on a spherical globe. Analyzing historical records, poetry, fiction, religious writings, military epics, political treatises, and textual commentary, Matthieu Felt identifies the geographical, cosmological, epistemological, and semiotic changes that led to new adaptations of Japanese myths. Felt demonstrates that the meanings of Japanese antiquity and of Japan’s most ancient texts were—and are—a work in progress, a collective effort of writers and thinkers over the past 1,300 years. Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/japanese-studies

    44 min

  4. 6d ago

    Alicia Volk, "In the Shadow of Empire: Art in Occupied Japan" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

    Alicia Volk’s In the Shadow of Empire: Art in Occupied Japan (University of Chicago Press, 2025) uncovers the largely overlooked history of Japanese art during the years of occupation (1945-1952). Volk’s diverse case studies trace the intersections of politics and art in this charged period. As it had accommodated, shaped, and resisted empire, Japanese art now accommodated, shaped, and resisted the push and pull of defeat, occupation, and the dawning Cold War. In the Shadow of Empire’s chapters present a range of practitioners and practices and their struggles in the new geopolitical order taking shape around them, taking into account not just the domestic context of Japan’s relationship with the American-led occupation, but with Japan’s erstwhile Asian empire, the socialist bloc, and audiences in “the West.” Spoiler alert! At the conclusion of the podcast, we talk about this image. Alicia Volk is professor of Japanese art at the University of Maryland; she is the author of Made in Japan: The Postwar Creative Print Movement and In Pursuit of Universalism: Yorozu Tetsugorō and Japanese Modern Art, recipient of the Phillips Book Prize. Nathan Hopson is an associate professor of Japanese language and history in the Department of Foreign Languages, University of Bergen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/japanese-studies

    1 hr

  5. May 21

    Evelyn Iritani, "Safe Passage: The Untold Story of Diplomatic Intrigue, Betrayal, and the Exchange of American and Japanese Civilians by Sea During World War II" (FSG, 2026)

    In October 1943, the Gripsholm—a Swedish ocean liner—and the Teia Maru—a Japanese troop ship—sat in Mormugao, a port in Portuguese India. There, the two ships exchanged their passengers: Allied civilians stuck in Japanese territory after Pearl Harbor , and an assortment of Japanese, Japanese-American, and other Japanese-ethnic people from the Americas.The trade capped a long and fraught diplomatic exchange between the U.S. and Japan, two countries at war. Evelyn Iritani’s book Safe Passage: The Untold Story of Diplomatic Intrigue, Betrayal, and the Exchange of American and Japanese Civilians by Sea During World War II (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026) tells the story of how this exchange came about: How U.S. civilians tried to survive in Japan or occupied Hong Kong, or how the U.S. government pressured Japanese Americans, housed in internment camps, to accept repatriation to Japan, a country many had never known. Evelyn is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. Her previous book, An Ocean Between Us: The Changing Relationship of Japan and the United States Told in Four Stories From the Life of An American Town (William Morrow and Company: 1994), won a Washington Governor’s Writers Day Award. Evelyn began her career at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and moved to the Los Angeles Times in 1995 to cover international economics. Her reporting garnered numerous awards, including the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting and the George Polk Award for Economics Reporting for a series she co-authored on Wal-Mart.She can be found on her website, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Safe Passage. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.  Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/japanese-studies

    51 min

  6. May 18

    Evan N. Dawley, "Taiwan: A People′s History" (Reaktion Books, 2026)

    While most English-language histories of Taiwan focus on its geopolitical role, Taiwan: A People’s History (Reaktion, 2026) by Dr. Evan N. Dawley centres on the people of Taiwan themselves and explores how they have formed a unique polity, telling the story of the Indigenous Taiwanese, the Hoklo and Hakka who came from China before the twentieth century, Japanese colonialism and the Chinese who arrived after 1945. Dr. Dawley describes how successive waves of immigration changed Taiwan and how these diverse groups of Indigenous tribes and settlers interacted economically and culturally, creating new Taiwanese identities in the process. Over the last century Taiwan has developed from an authoritarian state to one of the world’s most vibrant democracies and advanced economies. It is a successful independent society, albeit one whose existence remains under a shadow. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/japanese-studies

    1h 11m

  7. May 10

    Patrick Noonan, "Age of Disaffection: The Aesthetic Critique of Politics in 1960s Japan" (Columbia UP, 2025)

    The 1960s in Japan have long been understood as a period of radical political engagement. But as political movements from Old Left Communism to New Left revolts appeared to fail in their efforts to revolutionize Japanese society, artists and intellectuals came to reject the ideals of postwar politics. Instead, they advocated withdrawing from political participation and making self-transformation the grounds for social change.This provocative book uncovers a paradox at the heart of the 1960s: how political disillusionment became the basis for a new form of politics—a politics of the self. Examining aesthetic criticism, popular literature, avant-garde art, cinema, and political theory, Patrick Noonan argues that cultural producers in 1960s Japan cultivated what he calls an “ethos of disaffection” toward revolutionary politics and postwar society. Departing from approaches that define politics as contestation, Age of Disaffection: The Aesthetic Critique of Politics in 1960s Japan (Columbia UP, 2025) foregrounds cultivation, or the production of ways of feeling and relating to the world in efforts to redefine the political. It presents an unorthodox account of the 1960s: withdrawal from political activity developed not as the decade ended but as it was unfolding. Noonan reveals how Japanese artists and intellectuals in this period confronted a crucial question that continues to vex efforts at radical change today: transform institutions or alter how people relate to themselves and others? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/japanese-studies

    43 min

  8. May 7

    Lucy Stewart, "The Japanese Garden: Ella Christie and Cowden" (Birlinn, 2026)

    As detailed in The Japanese Garden: Ella Christie and Cowden (Birlinn, 2026) by Lucy Stewart, at the turn of the twentieth century, Scottish adventurer Ella Christie returned home from a trip to Japan inspired to build her own Japanese garden. As might be expected from a woman who thought nothing of travelling to the other side of the world in search of the unusual, Ella’s approach to developing the garden was trailblazing. She chose a female designer – the gifted Taki Handa – to create the seven-acre site in the grounds of Cowden Castle, near the Scottish town of Dollar. In doing so, the Japanese Garden at Cowden became the first and only garden of its size and scale to be designed by a woman. It remains a unique and utterly authentic bridge between British and Japanese culture. This book tells the remarkable story of Ella Christie, her travels and the creation of her garden, its gradual decline and triumphant restoration. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/japanese-studies

    53 min
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Ratings & Reviews

4.6
out of 5
10 Ratings

About

This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: ⁠newbooksnetwork.com⁠ Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: ⁠https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/⁠ Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to learn about more our latest interviews: @newbooksnetwork Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/japanese-studies

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