100 Books for Understanding Contemporary Japan

Nifty, but would kind of be more useful to me if it was a shorter list. I’m curious to hear what the rest of the audience has read from this list, and what of that they’d recommend.

Thanks! Very interesting.

I really want to read the Tale of Heike at some point. There is a great version for the “Biwa”:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVo9QVgc4FI&feature=related

I think in Japan the first few lines are about as famous as the phrase “to be or not to be”. Anyway, they are awsome:

祗園精舎（ぎおんしょうじゃ）の鐘の声、諸行無常（しょぎょうむじょう）の響きあり。娑羅双樹（さらそうじゅ）の花の色、盛者必衰（しょうじゃひっすい）の理（ことわり）をあらわす。
おごれる人も久しからず、唯春の夜の夢のごとし。たけき者も遂にはほろびぬ、偏に（ひとえに）風の前の塵（ちり）に同じ。

The sound of the Gion Shōja bells echoes the impermanence of all things; the color of the sāla flowers reveals the truth that the prosperous must decline. The proud do not endure, they are like a dream on a spring night; the mighty fall at last, they are as dust before the wind.

I’m still waiting for a good book (or books) for the generalish reader about (1) why the bubble economy collapsed, (2) what MITI (or whoever) has done differently since then / whether there has been any significant economic liberalization / whether Japanese policy is still thoroughly dominated by the bureaucratic sector and (3) the social and cultural fallout that resulted from the narrative of modern Japan losings its legitimacy (if indeed it has).

For a decade now, I’ve had a sense that Japan–though still the second largest economy in the world–has just been going through the motions, so to speak. This has seemed particularly relevant in regard to Japan because it seemed that the Japanese people have been more inclined than many in the West to buy into the notion of a national mission, even if it was recast from military to economic terms after 1945. Without that, will Japan become… just another nation?

Anyhow, of the books I’ve read on this list, most (as the post indicates) are rather dry and academic, but not necessarily uninteresting for all that. However, quite a lot of the ones I recognize, and probably many others, are decades old. While that’s fine for history and literature, I don’t think that studies of ‘the Japanese people,’ ‘the Japanese mind,’ or what have you from 1988 or even 1998 are necessarily relevant today. I read them as nostalgia pieces from a Japan that doesn’t really exist anymore. (I’ve been reading Donald Richie’s Japan diaries lately, and many of the entries from the past 15 to 20 years are laments, both his and others, about how the modern globalized Japan has little in common with the Japan of the 50s and 60s. I might just as well say that Japan, six months short of 2010, has very little in common with the Japan of 1995!)

That said, my favorite book about ‘old new’ Japan is still Ian Buruma’s dated, biased, sometimes downright snotty, but very readable A Japanese Mirror (also published as Behind the Mask), which interprets Japanese cultural tropes in terms of then-current 70s/80s pop culture references–yakuza flicks, the Japanese Red Army, Rose of Versailles, et cetera. It’s long since out of print, but you can pick up a used copy on Amazon for a buck or two. I find myself going back to it even more often than, say, The Enigma of Japanese Power, which is curiously absent from this list.

(Half the readers of the blog have really never read Genji, a Japanese literature anthology, a standard work in English on Japanese history or a book about manga or anime?)

I know it isn’t a book but Paranoia Agent really opened my eyes to modern Japanese thinking.

There should be at least 6 titles in there that deal with Nihonjinron. How can you understand contemporary Japan with understanding Nihonjinron?