The first volume in a two-book series about each of the atomic bomb drops that ended the Pacific War based on years of irreplicable personal interviews with survivors to tell a story of devastation and resilience

In this vividly rendered historical narrative, M. G. Sheftall layers the stories of hibakusha--the Japanese word for atomic bomb survivors--in harrowing detail, to give a minute-by-minute report of August 6, 1945, in the leadup and aftermath of the world-changing bombing mission of Paul Tibbets, Enola Gay, and Little Boy. These survivors and witnesses, who now have an average age over ninety years old, are quite literally the last people who can still provide us with reliable and detailed testimony about life in their cities before the bombings, tell us what they experienced on the day those cities were obliterated, and give us some appreciation of what it has entailed to live with those memories and scars during the subsequent seventy-plus years.

Sheftall has spent years personally interviewing survivors who lived well into the twenty-first century, allowing him to construct portraits of what Hiroshima was like before the bomb, and how catastrophically its citizens' lives changed in the seconds, minutes, days, weeks, months, and years afterward. He stands out among historians due to his fluency in spoken and written Japanese, and his longtime immersion in Japanese society that has allowed him, a white American, the unheard-of access to these atomic bomb survivors in the waning years of their lives. Their trust in him is evident in the personal and traumatic depths they open up for him as he records their stories.

Hiroshima should be required reading for the modern age. The personal accounts it contains will serve as cautionary tales about the horror and insanity of nuclear warfare, reminding them--it is hoped--that the world still lives with this danger at our doorstep.

Zen, haiku, martial arts, sushi, anime, manga, film, video games . . . Japanese culture has long enriched our Western way of life. Yet from a Western perspective, Japan remains a remote island country that has long had a complicated relationship with the outside world.

Japan--an archipelago strung like a necklace around the Asian mainland--is considerably farther from Asia than Britain is from Europe. The sea has provided an effective barrier against invasion and enabled the culture to develop in unique ways. During the Edo period, the Tokugawa shoguns successfully closed the country to the West. Then, Japan swung in the opposite direction, adopting Western culture wholesale. Both strategies enabled it to avoid colonization--and to retain its traditions and way of life.

A skilled storyteller and accurate historian, Lesley Downer presents the dramatic sweep of Japanese history and the larger-than-life individuals--from emperors descended from the Sun Goddess to warlords, samurai, merchants, court ladies, women warriors, geisha, and businessmen--who shaped this extraordinary modern society.

A devastating read that highlights man's capacity to wreak destruction, but in which one also catches a glimpse of all that is best about people.--San Francisco Chronicle

A poignant and complex picture of the second atomic bomb's enduring physical and psychological tolls. Eyewitness accounts are visceral and haunting. . . . But the book's biggest achievement is its treatment of the aftershocks in the decades since 1945. --The New Yorker

The enduring impact of a nuclear bomb, told through the stories of those who survived: necessary reading as the threat of nuclear war emerges again.

On August 9, 1945, three days after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, the United States dropped a second atomic bomb on Nagasaki, a small port city on Japan's southernmost island. An estimated 74,000 people died within the first five months, and another 75,000 were injured.

Nagasaki takes readers from the morning of the bombing to the city today, telling the first-hand experiences of five survivors, all of whom were teenagers at the time of the devastation. Susan Southard has spent years interviewing hibakusha (bomb-affected people) and researching the physical, emotional, and social challenges of post-atomic life. She weaves together dramatic eyewitness accounts with searing analysis of the policies of censorship and denial that colored much of what was reported about the bombing both in the United States and Japan.

A gripping narrative of human resilience, Nagasaki will help shape public discussion and debate over one of the most controversial wartime acts in history.

WINNER of the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize

FINALIST for the Ridenhour Book Prize - Chautauqua Prize - William Saroyan International Prize for Writing - PEN Center USA Literary Award

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY
The Economist - The Washington Post - American Library Association - Kirkus Reviews

Readers of this book will develop a comprehensive grasp of Japanese society and the core values that remain at its foundation.

Among the topics explored are:

• aimai (ambiguity), amae (dependence upon others' benevolence), and amakudari (the nation's descent from heaven)
• chinmoku (silence in communication), gambari (perseverance), and giri (social obligation)
• haragei (literally, belly art; implicit, unspoken communication), kenkyo (the appearance of modesty), and sempai-kohai (seniority)
• wabi-sabi (simplicity and elegance), and zoto (gift giving)
• As well as discussions of child-rearing, personal space, and the roles of women in Japanese society.

Next in this series:
Now available separately, Japanese Culture: The Religious and Philosophical Foundations is a fascinating journey through Japan's rich cultural history.

Monsters, spirits, fantastic beings, and supernatural creatures haunt the folklore and popular culture of Japan. Broadly labeled yōkai, they appear in many forms, from tengu mountain goblins and kappa water sprites, to shape-shifting kitsune foxes and long-tongued ceiling-lickers. Popular today in anime, manga, film, and video games, many yōkai originated in local legends, folktales, and regional ghost stories. The Book of Yōkai invites readers to examine how people create, transmit, and collect folklore, and how they make sense of the mysteries in the world around them.

Revised and expanded, this second edition features fifty new illustrations, including an all-new yōkai gallery of stunning color images tracing the visual history of yōkai across centuries. In clear and accessible language, Michael Dylan Foster unpacks the cultural and historical contexts of yōkai, interpreting their varied meanings and introducing people who have pursued them through the ages.

First revealed to Westerners in the chronicles of Marco Polo, Japan was a legendary faraway land defended by a fearsome Kamikaze storm and ruled by a divine sovereign. It was the terminus of the Silk Road, the furthest end of the known world, a fertile source of inspiration for European artists, and an enduring symbol of the mysterious East. In recent times, it has become a powerhouse of global industry, a nexus of popular culture, and a harbinger of post-industrial decline.

With intelligence and wit, author Jonathan Clements blends documentary and storytelling styles to connect the past, present and future of Japan, and in broad yet detailed strokes reveals a country of paradoxes: a modern nation steeped in ancient traditions; a democracy with an emperor as head of state; a famously safe society built on 108 volcanoes resting on the world's most active earthquake zone; a fast-paced urban and technologically advanced country whose land consists predominantly of mountains and forests.

Among the chapters in this Japanese history book are:

• The Way of the Gods: Prehistoric and Mythical Japan
• A Game of Thrones: Minamoto vs. Taira
• Time Warp: 200 Years of Isolation
• The Stench of Butter: Restoration and Modernization
• The New Breed: The Japanese Miracle

Monsters, spirits, fantastic beings, and supernatural creatures haunt the folklore and popular culture of Japan. Broadly labeled yōkai, they appear in many forms, from tengu mountain goblins and kappa water sprites, to shape-shifting kitsune foxes and long-tongued ceiling-lickers. Popular today in anime, manga, film, and video games, many yōkai originated in local legends, folktales, and regional ghost stories. The Book of Yōkai invites readers to examine how people create, transmit, and collect folklore, and how they make sense of the mysteries in the world around them.

Revised and expanded, this second edition features fifty new illustrations, including an all-new yōkai gallery of stunning color images tracing the visual history of yōkai across centuries. In clear and accessible language, Michael Dylan Foster unpacks the cultural and historical contexts of yōkai, interpreting their varied meanings and introducing people who have pursued them through the ages.

Nothing less than a masterpiece. With epic research and mesmerizing narrative power, Judgment at Tokyo has the makings of an instant classic.
--Evan Osnos, National Book Award-winning author of Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China

In the weeks after Japan finally surrendered to the Allies to end World War II, the world turned to the question of how to move on from years of carnage and destruction. For Harry Truman, Douglas MacArthur, Chiang Kai-shek, and their fellow victors, the question of justice seemed clear: Japan's militaristic leaders needed to be tried and punished for the surprise attack at Pearl Harbor; shocking atrocities against civilians in China, the Philippines, and elsewhere; and rampant abuses of prisoners of war in notorious incidents such as the Bataan death march. For the Allied powers, the trial was an opportunity to render judgment on their vanquished foes, but also to create a legal framework to prosecute war crimes and prohibit the use of aggressive war, building a more peaceful world under international law and American hegemony. For the Japanese leaders on trial, it was their chance to argue that their war had been waged to liberate Asia from Western imperialism and that the court was victors' justice.

For more than two years, lawyers for both sides presented their cases before a panel of clashing judges from China, India, the Philippines, and Australia, as well as the United States and European powers. The testimony ran from horrific accounts of brutality and the secret plans to attack Pearl Harbor to the Japanese military's threats to subvert the government if it sued for peace. Yet rather than clarity and unanimity, the trial brought complexity, dissents, and divisions that provoke international discord between China, Japan, and Korea to this day. Those courtroom tensions and contradictions could also be seen playing out across Asia as the trial unfolded in the crucial early years of the Cold War, from China's descent into civil war to Japan's successful postwar democratic elections to India's independence and partition.

From the author of the acclaimed The Blood Telegram, which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, this magnificent history is the product of a decade of research and writing. Judgment at Tokyo is a riveting story of wartime action, dramatic courtroom battles, and the epic formative years that set the stage for the Asian postwar era.

Offering a fascinating glimpse into the secretive inner world of the samurai, the Hagakure remained closely guarded and was shown only to a chosen few for more than a century. This was a culture in which death was embraced, not as a morbid fascination, but as a method for eliminating fear. Yamamoto tells his readers how to foster courage, how to serve selflessly, how to become a skilled master of your own destiny, and how to infuse life with beauty while acknowledging its transience. Yamamoto's penetrating insights and profound aphorisms reflect important moral principles that still apply to us today.

This masterpiece, preserved for generations in northern Kyushu by warrior chiefs as moral and practical instruction for themselves and their samurai retainers, is now presented in this beautifully illustrated edition that will enlighten anyone with an interest in Japanese culture and world literature.

A luxurious hardback edition of the classic work The Way of the Samurai, presented with beautiful gold embossing and gilded page edges.

To many people, the word samurai conjures images of menacing masks, long blades and elaborate armor. However, this classic text by Inazo Nitobe reveals the greater depths to samurai culture - they were not simply warriors but an aristocratic class who practiced literary and military arts in equal measure.

Essential to this way of life was the samurai's moral code and the quality of bushido, roughly translated as chivalry. The Way of the Samurai provides an intriguing exploration of bushido and other valued qualities such as rectitude or justice, courage, politeness, veracity, honor, loyalty and self-control. It also explores the Samurai's more violent traditions, such as the chilling act of hara-kiri or self-immolation.

This mixture of chivalric principles with brutal warfare is fascinating. While many aspects of Samurai culture have disappeared, its principles still have resonance in modern Japanese society and around the globe.

This compact gilded hardback edition is an essential read for anybody interested in Japanese culture.

ABOUT THE SERIES: Arcturus Ornate Classics are beautifully bound gifts editions of iconic literary works across history. These compact, foil-embossed hardbacks are richly illustrated and printed using deluxe ivory paper.

Newly revised and updated, A History of Japan is a single-volume, comprehensive account of Japan's history. Starting in ancient Japan during its early pre-history period, A History of Japan covers every important aspect of history and culture through feudal Japan to the post-Cold War period and the collapse of the Bubble Economy in the early 1990s. Recent findings shed additional light on the origins of Japanese civilization and the birth of Japanese culture.

This book includes an in-depth analysis of Japanese religion, arts, culture, and people from the 6th century B.C.E. to the present. Classic illustrations and unique pictures are dispersed throughout the book, enhancing its exploration of Japan's rich history.

Fans of the FX series Shogun will appreciate the detailed historical context provided in this book, particularly the sections covering the feudal period that align with the time portrayed in the show. However, A History of Japan transcends the current interest in this era, offering a lasting resource for understanding Japan's broader historical and cultural development.

Highlights of A History of Japan include:

• Archaic Japan including Yamato, the creation of a unified state, the Nana Period, and the Heian period
• Medieval Japan including rule by the military houses, the failure of Ashikaga Rule, Buddhism, and the Kamakura and Muroachi Periods periods
• Ealy Modern Japan including Japanese feudalism, administration under the Tokugawa, and society and culture in early modern Japan
• Modern Japan including The Meiji Era and policies for modernization, from consensus to crisis (1912-1937), and solutions through force

Japan's Sengoku Jidai, known as the 'Warring States Period, ' was a time of profound crisis and upheaval, characterized by constant warfare and social unrest. During this turbulent era, the traditionally low-born rural military class of 'bushi' (samurai warriors) rose to power, overthrowing their social superiors in the court and reshaping the landscape of Japan. At the center of this tumultuous age stood three remarkable individuals: Oda Nobunaga (1534-1582), Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1537-1598), and Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543-1616). Each of these figures played a unique and pivotal role in the re-unification of Japan during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

This groundbreaking narrative history of the Sengoku era weaves together the epic tales of these three figures for the first time. It provides a comprehensive survey of the Azuchi-Momoyama Period (1568-1600), covering the reigns of both Nobunaga and Hideyoshi, as well as the foundational years of the Tokugawa shogunate (1600-1616). The book delves deep into the pivotal battles fought by each of these three hegemons, from the decisive clash at Okehazama in 1560 to the legendary Battle of Sekigahara in 1600, and the Two Sieges of Osaka Castle in 1614-15.

Moreover, the book examines the political and administrative structures of their rule, shedding light on the role played by western foreigners ('nanban') and the Christian religion in early modern Japanese society. With its broad scope, the story of Japan's three unifiers - dubbed 'the Fool, ' 'the Monkey, ' and 'the Old Badger' - unfolds as a sweeping saga, encompassing acts of unimaginable cruelty alongside tales of great samurai heroism that continue to resonate through the peaceful Edo/Tokugawa period and beyond.

A gorgeous Collector's Edition covering the history of Japan from prehistoric times to the end of the Heian period. Japan has gripped the imagination of readers of their spiritual and delicate myths, ghost stories and folktales for many generations but there is much more to draw our fascination. From the veneration of Mount Fuji to the long periods of isolation from other countries, to the warring kingdoms and the inception of the martial rule of the Shogunates, this history reveals the origins of the civilization that produced some of Japan's most beautiful art and literature and influences on modern Japanese culture.

Flame Tree Collector's Editions present the foundations of speculative fiction: authors, myths, tales and history without which the imaginative literature of the twentieth century would not exist, bringing the best, most influential and most fascinating works into a striking and collectable library. Each book features a new Introduction and a Glossary of Terms or lists of Ancient Leaders.

An elegant and absorbing tour of Tokyo and its residents

From 1632 until 1854, Japan's rulers restricted contact with foreign countries, a near isolation that fostered a remarkable and unique culture that endures to this day. In hypnotic prose and sensual detail, Anna Sherman describes searching for the great bells by which the inhabitants of Edo, later called Tokyo, kept the hours in the shoguns' city.

An exploration of Tokyo becomes a meditation not just on time, but on history, memory, and impermanence. Through Sherman's journeys around the city and her friendship with the owner of a small, exquisite cafe, who elevates the making and drinking of coffee to an art-form, The Bells of Old Tokyo follows haunting voices through the labyrinth that is the Japanese capital: an old woman remembers escaping from the American firebombs of World War II. A scientist builds the most accurate clock in the world, a clock that will not lose a second in five billion years. The head of the Tokugawa shogunal house reflects on the destruction of his grandfathers' city: A lost thing is lost. To chase it leads to darkness.

The Bells of Old Tokyo marks the arrival of a dazzling new writer who presents an absorbing and alluring meditation on life in the guise of a tour through a city and its people.

This celebrated literary classic has delighted generations of Japanese. In its pages, you will find a vivid contemporary description of the fourteenth-century intrigues and battles that led to the destruction of the Hojo family, the military overlords of the nation, and made it possible for the Emperor Go-Daigo (1288-1339), one of Japan's most remarkable sovereigns, to reassert the power of the throne. Go-Daigo's first hesitant attempts to overthrow the Hojo, the early defeats suffered by his supporters, his dethronement and exile, the legendary exploits of his generals, the growing strength of his arms, and his ultimate return to the throne are all recounted in engrossing detail.

The anonymous authors of The Taiheiki diversify their narrative through the skillful use of the rich treasure house of the Chinese dynastic histories, the verse of the Six Dynasties and T'ang, and the Confucian teachings underlying the strict warrior code of loyalty and filial piety. They write with a deep sense of the inevitability of karma--determined fate and the impermanence of man and his works--but the spirit of the age is reflected in their praise of valor and military prowess, their taste for descriptions of the trappings of war, and their frequent irreverent asides. Considered a part of the gunki monogatari, or war tales canon in Japan, The Taiheiki celebrates martial adventure and can be seen as a prose counterpart to the Homeric epics of the Iliad and the Odyssey.

Drawing on a vast range of Japanese sources and illustrated with dozens of astonishing documentary photographs, Embracing Defeat is the fullest and most important history of the more than six years of American occupation, which affected every level of Japanese society, often in ways neither side could anticipate. Dower, whom Stephen E. Ambrose has called America's foremost historian of the Second World War in the Pacific, gives us the rich and turbulent interplay between West and East, the victor and the vanquished, in a way never before attempted, from top-level manipulations concerning the fate of Emperor Hirohito to the hopes and fears of men and women in every walk of life. Already regarded as the benchmark in its field, Embracing Defeat is a work of colossal scholarship and history of the very first order.

For 700 years, Japan was ruled by military commanders who waged war against one another incessantly. Shogun tells the fascinating story of Tokugawa Ieyasu, the man who finally unified and brought lasting peace to the nation. He established a new central government which enabled his descendants to rule Japan for the next 260 years--a period in which Japanese culture as we know it today flourished.

The dramatic episodes retold in this book include:

• Ieyasu's crushing victory at the Battle of Sekigahara, the largest battle ever fought in Japan
• His creation of a new form of government with a centralized system of control that allowed his descendants to rule Japan peacefully for the next 15 generations
• Ieyasu's fateful decision to limit the spread of Christianity in Japan, ultimately banning the religion and massacring tens of thousands of ardent believers