The following list of books are must reads for those who are interested in Japanese culture, anime, and manga. This list focuses on important events and sections of Japanese culture that anime doesn’t examine. Hidden Horrors: Japanese War Crimes in World War II by Yuki Tanaka Tanaka examines little-discussed crimes against humanity Japan did against…
Tag: books
Book Addiction Has a Word: Tsundoku
I love books and suffer from a mild case of tsundoku. Tsundoku is the Japanese word for the tendency to buy books and not read them. My books clump together in great piles that mock me for not reading them fast enough. Of course, I come home from the library with books that I have…
I Am a Cat. You Need to Natsume Soseki’s Writing or You Can’t Call Yourself a Japanophile
Japan’s novelist Natsume Soseki remains relevant for us today. Soseki grew up during the upheaval after the fall of the Shogun and the rise of the Meiji period. He numbered among the first Japanese to live in a Westernized Japan. His experiences of modernization mirror what we experience today with our own transition into attentionization,…
The Courage to be Disliked – A Book Review
The Courage to be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga combines Greek philosophy with German psychology in a distinctly Japanese package. Don’t let that put you off to it. The book uses the old Greek discussion format: a young man argues with an older philosopher about Alfred Adler’s psychological ideas. Adler was an opponent…