New Books in Japanese Studies

Frederick Rutland—”Rutland of Jutland”—was a war hero, renowned World War I aviator…and a Japanese spy. In the years leading up to Pearl Harbor, Rutland shared information on U.S. aviation and naval developments to the Japanese, desperate for knowledge of U.S. capability.

The funny thing was, as Ron Drabkin notes in his book Beverly Hills Spy: The Double-Agent War Hero Who Helped Japan Attack Pearl Harbor (William Morrow, 2024), that most people were pretty sure that the boisterous Rutland was spying for someone. But for a variety of reasons—misplaced priorities, bureaucratic infighting, embarrassment over a British national spying on the U.S., or just bewilderment that someone so open and outgoing could pull off something as secretive as espionage—everyone left utland alone until it was too late.

Ronald Drabkin is the author of Beverly Hills Spy and peer-reviewed articles on Japanese espionage. His obsession with espionage history started when he was as a child in Los Angeles, where he vaguely understood that his father had been working for the US military in counterintelligence. Later he discovered that his grandfather had also been in “the business,” and it drove a voyage of discovery into previously classified documents on three continents. His career prior to writing was at early stage startups in the US, where he was an early adopter of Google and Facebook advertising.

(The Japanese edition of the book can be found here)

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Beverly Hills Spy. 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.

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What is going on when a graphic novel has a twelfth-century samurai pick up a telephone to make a call, or a play has an ancient aristocrat teaching in a present-day schoolroom? Rather than regarding such anachronisms as errors, Samurai with Telephones: Anachronism in Japanese Literature (U Michigan Press, 2024) develops a theory of how texts can use different types of anachronisms to challenge or rewrite history, play with history, or open history up to new possibilities. By applying this theoretical framework of anachronism to several Japanese literary and cultural works, author Christopher Smith demonstrates how different texts can use anachronism to open up history for a wide variety of different textual projects.

From the modern period, this volume examines literature by Mori Ōgai and Ōe Kenzaburō, manga by Tezuka Osamu, art by Murakami Takashi, and a variety of other pop cultural works. Turning to the Early Modern period (Edo period, 1600–1868), which produced a literature rich with playful anachronism, he also examines several Kabuki and Bunraku plays, kibyōshi comic books, and gōkan illustrated novels. In analyzing these works, he draws a distinction between anachronisms that attempt to hide their work on history and convincingly rewrite it and those conspicuous anachronisms that highlight and disrupt the construction of historical narratives.

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The South China enclave of Macau was the first and last European colonial settlement in East Asia and a territory at the crossroads of different empires. In Neutrality and Collaboration in South China: Macau during the Second World War (Cambridge UP, 2023), Helena F. S. Lopes analyses the layers of collaboration that developed from neutrality in Macau during the Second World War. 

Exploring the intersections of local, regional and global dynamics, she unpacks the connections between a plurality of actors with competing and collaborative interests, including Chinese Nationalists, Communists and collaborators with Japan, Portuguese colonial authorities and British and Japanese representatives. Lopes argues that neutrality eased the movement of refugees of different nationalities who sought shelter in Macau during the war and that it helped to guarantee the maintenance of two remnants of European colonialism - Macau and Hong Kong. Drawing on extensive research from multilingual archival material from Asia, Europe, Australasia and America, this book brings to light the multiple global connections framing the experiences of neutrality and collaboration in the Portuguese-administered enclave of Macau.

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When East Asia opened itself to the world in the nineteenth century, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean intellectuals had shared notions of literature because of the centuries-long cultural exchanges in the region. As modernization profoundly destabilized cultural norms, they ventured to create new literature for the new era.

Satoru Hashimoto offers a novel way of understanding the origins of modern literature in a transregional context, drawing on Chinese-, Japanese-, and Korean-language texts in both classical and vernacular forms. He argues that modern literature came into being in East Asia through writerly attempts at reconstructing the present’s historical relationship to the past across the cultural transformations caused by modernization. Hashimoto examines writers’ anachronistic engagement with past cultures that were deemed obsolete or antithetical to new systems of values, showing that this transnational process was integral to the emergence of modern literature.

A groundbreaking cross-cultural excavation of the origins of modern literature in East Asia featuring remarkable linguistic scope, Afterlives of Letters: The Transnational Origins of Modern Literature in China, Japan, and Korea (Columbia UP, 2023) bridges Asian studies and comparative literature and delivers a remapping of world literature.

Satoru Hashimoto is assistant professor of comparative thought and literature at the Johns Hopkins University. He has published in English, Japanese, Chinese, and French on topics in comparative literature, aesthetics, and thought engaging East Asian and European traditions. He is on the editorial board of the Journal of World Literature.

Li-Ping Chen is a teaching fellow in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts.

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The Tormented Alliance: American Servicemen and the Occupation of China, 1941–1949 (UNC Press, 2022) explores the wartime partnership between China and the United States from the ground up. Beginning in 1941, and especially after Pearl Harbor, both sides had high hopes for wartime cooperation against Japan. But as The Tormented Alliance shows, ‘a military alliance with the United States means a military occupation by the United States.’ This occupation was underpinned by inequalities of race, gender, nation, wealth, and power which strained relations between China and the United States during both the Second World War and the ensuing Chinese Civil War. The tens of thousands of US military personnel in China transformed themselves into a widely loathed occupation force: an aggressive, resentful, emasculating source of physical danger and compromised sovereignty. Following multiple archival trails, Fredman finds how negative on-the-ground interactions between US servicemen and all kinds of Chinese people – civilian and military – turned Sino-American cooperation into a ‘tormented alliance’ and helped unravel it from below.

This groundbreaking study is highly recommended for anyone interested in twentieth-century China, US foreign relations, and the history of war.

Mark Baker is lecturer (assistant professor) in East Asian history at the University of Manchester, UK.

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Over the course of World War II, guerrillas from across the Philippines opposed Imperial Japan's occupation of the archipelago. Although the guerrillas never possessed the combat strength to overcome the Japanese occupation on their own, they disrupted operations, kept the spirit of resistance alive, provided important intelligence to the Allies, and assumed frontline duties fighting the Japanese. By examining the organization, motivations, capabilities, and operations of the guerrillas, James Villanueva argues that the guerrillas were effective because Japanese punitive measures, along with a strong sense of obligation and loyalty to the United States, pushed most of the population to support the guerrillas. Unlike their predecessors opposing the Americans in 1899, the guerrillas during World War II benefited from the leadership of US and Filipino military personnel and received significant aid and direction from General Douglas MacArthur's Southwest Pacific Area (SWPA) Headquarters, conducting one of the most effective and sophisticated resistance campaigns in World War II.

Awaiting MacArthur's Return: World War II Guerrilla Resistance against the Japanese in the Philippines (UP of Kansas, 2022) is the first comprehensive comparative analysis of the major World War II guerrilla groups across the Philippine Archipelago, providing a fuller picture of the nature of the war in the Southwest Pacific and revealing the extent to which the guerrilla movement affected operations for both Allied and Imperial Japanese forces.

Analyzing the organizational effectiveness of the guerrillas resisting the Japanese occupation of the Philippines, this book alternates narrative chapters with thematic chapters examining the guerrillas' organization, logistics, administration, intelligence gathering, and the support they received from Allied forces and provided the Allies in turn. Villanueva offers the most in-depth analysis of the guerrillas' military organization and effectiveness in the context of existing theories of insurgency and counterinsurgency while using an extensive body of memoirs, archival guerrilla and US Army and Navy records, and translations of Japanese documents and interviews with Japanese officers.

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When scholars and policymakers consider how technological advances affect the rise and fall of great powers, they draw on theories that center the moment of innovation—the eureka moment that sparks astonishing technological feats. In Technology and the Rise of Great Powers: How Diffusion Shapes Economic Competition (Princeton UP, 2024), Jeffrey Ding offers a different explanation of how technological revolutions affect competition among great powers. Rather than focusing on which state first introduced major innovations, he investigates why some states were more successful than others at adapting and embracing new technologies at scale. Drawing on historical case studies of past industrial revolutions as well as statistical analysis, Ding develops a theory that emphasizes institutional adaptations oriented around diffusing technological advances throughout the entire economy.

Examining Britain’s rise to preeminence in the First Industrial Revolution, America and Germany’s overtaking of Britain in the Second Industrial Revolution, and Japan’s challenge to America’s technological dominance in the Third Industrial Revolution (also known as the “information revolution”), Ding illuminates the pathway by which these technological revolutions influenced the global distribution of power and explores the generalizability of his theory beyond the given set of great powers. His findings bear directly on current concerns about how emerging technologies such as AI could influence the US-China power balance.

Our guest today is: Jeffrey Ding, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Georgetown University.

Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023).

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Is there much to say about historical ties between two countries that are 8000 kilometres apart from each other? Actually, yes. In this episode Ene Selart, Junior Lecturer at University of Tartu, talks about her new book The Relations of Estonia and Japan from the 19th Century to early-21st Century (Tartu Ülikooli Kirjastus, 2024) which explores surprisingly intricate connections between Estonia and Japan. The book is trilingual (in Estonian, English and Japanese) and published by University of Tartu Press.

Ene's research reveals that Estonian sailors got to the shores of Japan already in the early 19th century, during Japan's isolation period. Later, many Estonian soldiers participated in Russo-Japanese war and shared their experiences in letters and memoirs. All these cases offer a unique glimpse in how Estonians viewed and perceived Japan. The episode also explores the challenges of writing such a book and Ene's journey through ups and down of researching this field.

The episode is hosted by Dr. Arvydas Kumpis, Assistant Professor at the Department of Cultural Studies at Vytautas Magnus University. Since 2023 he is also serving as the Head of Centre for Asian Studies.

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In our interview about Black Snow: Curtis LeMay, the Firebombing of Tokyo, and the Road to the Atomic Bomb (W. W. Norton & Company, 2022), James M. Scott discusses the principles and personalities involved in the most destructive air attack in history.

Seven minutes past midnight on March 10, 1945, nearly 300 American B-29s thundered into the skies over Tokyo. Their payloads of incendiaries ignited a firestorm that reached up to 2,800 degrees, liquefying asphalt and vaporizing thousands; sixteen square miles of the city were flattened and more than 100,000 men, women, and children were killed.

Black Snow is the story of this devastating operation, orchestrated by Major General Curtis LeMay, who famously remarked: “If we lose the war, we’ll be tried as war criminals.” Scott reconstructs in granular detail that horrific night, and describes the development of the B-29, the capture of the Marianas for use as airfields, and the change in strategy from high-altitude daylight “precision” bombing to low-altitude nighttime incendiary bombing. Most importantly, the raid represented a significant moral shift for America, marking the first time commanders deliberately targeted civilians which helped pave the way for the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki five months later.

Drawing on first-person interviews with American pilots and bombardiers and Japanese survivors, air force archives, and oral histories never before published in English, Scott delivers a harrowing and gripping account, and his most important and compelling work to date.

Andrew O. Pace is a historian of the US in the world who specializes in the moral fog of war. He is currently a DPAA Research Partner Fellow at the University of Southern Mississippi and a co-host of the Diplomatic History Channel on the New Books Network. He is also working on a book about the reversal in US grand strategy from victory at all costs in World War II to peace at any price in the Vietnam War. He can be reached at [email protected] or via andrewopace.com. Andrew is not an employee of DPAA, he supports DPAA through a partnership. The views presented are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of DPAA, DoD or its components.

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In Japan, a country popularly perceived as highly secularized and technologically advanced, ontological assumptions about spirits (tama or tamashii) seem to be quite deeply ingrained in the cultural fabric. From ancestor cults to anime, spirits, ghosts, and other invisible dimensions of reality appear to be pervasive. In Spirits and Animism in Contemporary Japan (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), international scholars from various backgrounds consider together this “invisible empire” and highlight the “agency of the intangible.”

The contributors of this edited volume approach spirits and animism in contemporary Japan from diverse perspectives. Satō Hiroo opens the book with a chapter on the transformation in Japanese visions of the afterlife, the status of the dead, and regional traditions of memorialization. Andrea De Antoni looks further into the ontology of spirits via an investigation into recent cases of spirit possession (tsuki, hyōi) that is treated at the Kenmi Shrine in Shikoku.

Jason Josephson-Storm traces both the European and Japanese genealogies of theorizing “primitive” civilizations and their beliefs in spirits, magic, and an animated nature. In Fabio Rambelli’s chapter, a unique type of epistemological system for understanding the existence of spirits is introduced: Minataka Kumagusu’s “Minakata mandala,” which involves Buddhist philosophy, Western science, and an awareness of the Japanese folk tradition all at the same time.

In Ellen Van Goethem’s chapter, she explores how and why there were widespread assumptions about how the city of Kyoto was animated by invisible agencies such as guardian spirits and the flow of qi (Jp. Ki). Carina Roth continues the discussion on enchanted landscapes by drawing our attention to “power spots” (pawā supotto) and “healing” forests as recent developments in contemporary Japanese religiosity.

Focusing on the role of media in the public perceptions of new religious movements (NRMs) and their animistic positions, Ioannis Gaitanidis shows how the media paradoxically both helps to normalize animism as part of “traditional” Japanese culture while chastising animistic NRM’s egregious behaviors. Concerning spirits in modern Japanese fiction, another type of powerful media in contemporary Japanese society, Rebecca Suter identifies in her chapter a “fantastic hesitation” that authors take on, which opens doors to the “undecidability of reality” that seems to be a main gateway to the spirit world. Centering on the media arts scene in Japan, Mauro Arrighi in his chapter highlights how animism serves as one of the main creative sources for contemporary artists. Then, Jolyon Thomas turns our focus to anime and their depictions of humanity’s connection with nature. In doing so, he invites us to reflect on the term “animism” and how the spirits of anime are really rooted in late capitalist modernity with its attendant pleasures and woes. In the closing chapter, Andrea Castiglioni points out a growing tendency in recent Japanese films to focus on violent spirit entities (araburugami), rather than benign figures. He argues that this perhaps is related to the emergence of a new kind of national identity for Japan as a country that is uniquely able to control the unpredictability of nature and malignant invisible agencies.

In this podcast episode, I spoke with the editor of this edited volume, Dr. Fabio Rambelli.

Fabio Rambelli is a professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Daigengna Duoer is a PhD student at the Religious Studies Department, University of California, Santa Barbara. Her dissertation researches on transnational and transregional Buddhist networks connecting twentieth-century Inner Mongolia, Manchuria, Republican China, Tibet, and the Japanese Empire.

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