Re-introducing Japan’s Conservatives

by | Sep 13, 2015

Japan’s Love-Hate Relationship with the West by Hirakawa Sukehiro. Global Oriental (Kent, UK), 2005. Hardcover, 400 pages, $90. Conservatives are often portrayed as an insular lot. Blinded by tradition and preternaturally bigoted in constitution, so goes the standard...

Five Girls, Two Nations, One Historical Imagination

by | Apr 27, 2015

Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey from East to West and Back by Janice P. Nimura. W. W. Norton, 2015. Hardcover, 352 pages, $28.Two days before Christmas, 1871, a delegation of Japanese pioneers left the port of Yokohama on the paddlewheel steamship SS America,...

The Marxist Jeremiah

by | Dec 21, 2014

Culture and the Death of God by Terry Eagleton. Yale University Press, 2014. Hardcover, 234 pages, $26.There are few polemicists writing in the English language today as erudite, or as pugnacious, as Terry Eagleton. Nor are there many public intellectuals who so defy...