Japanese Biography

Errett Lujan served during World War II with the U.S. Army 200th/515th Coast Artillery (Anti-aircraft) Regiment in the Philippines, the largest regiment on the islands when the Japanese invaded just hours after Pearl Harbor. The regiment was credited as both the first and the last to fire on the enemy before surrendering. Lujan survived the invasion, the Bataan Death March and more than three years in POW camps. After the war, he said little to his family about his harrowing experiences.

Kimi’s Obaachan, her grandmother, had always been a silent presence throughout her youth. Sipping tea by the fire, preparing sushi for the family, or indulgently listening to Ojichan’s (grandfather’s) stories for the thousandth time, Obaachan was a missing link to Kimi’s Japanese heritage, something she had had a mixed relationship with all her life. Growing up in rural Pennsylvania, all Kimi ever wanted to do was fit in, spurning traditional Japanese cuisine and her grandfather’s attempts to teach her the language.

The late Dr. Michihiko Hachiya was director of the Hiroshima Communications Hospital when the world's first atomic bomb was dropped on the city. Though his responsibilities in the appalling chaos of a devastated city were awesome, he found time to record the story daily, with compassion and tenderness. Dr. Hachiya's compelling diary was originally published by the UNC Press in 1955, with the help of Dr. Warner Wells of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Kiyo's father arrived in California determined to plant his roots in the land of opportunity after leaving Japan. He, his wife, and their nine American-born children labored in the fields together, building a successful farm. Yet at the outbreak of World War II, Kiyo's family was ordered to Poston Internment Camp. This memoir tells the story of the family's struggle to endure in these harsh conditions and to rebuild their lives afterward in the face of lingering prejudice.

When Ian Buruma arrived in Tokyo in 1975, Japan was little more than an idea in his mind, a fantasy of a distant land. A sensitive misfit in the world of his upper middle class youth, what he longed for wasn't so much the exotic as the raw, unfiltered humanity he had experienced in Japanese theater performances and films, witnessed in Amsterdam and Paris.

One by one, things that Norm and his Japanese American family took for granted are taken away. In a matter of months, they, along with everyone else of Japanese ancestry living on the West Coast, are forced by the government to move to internment camps, leaving everything they have known behind.

20万部突破『暗殺』15万部突破『下山事件 最後の証言』で注目！大藪春彦賞作家・柴田哲孝が放つサイコスリラー警察小説！歌舞伎町で発生した外国人女性連続殺人。刑事と元FBI捜査官が猟奇殺人者の正体を追う！雨の降る静かな夜に。眠れない一夜を過ごしたいあなたに。

The Block Manager is the gripping memoir of Janet, an American-born child of Japanese immigrants. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Janet's life in California was uprooted when thousands of Japanese Americans on the West Coast - including Janet's family - were forced into internment camps. Because of her brilliant command of English and Japanese, she was assigned the job of block manager. Janet was shuffled between three camps, got married, and had a child while the war raged on.

Three months after Kyo Maclear’s father dies in December 2018, she gets the results of a DNA test showing that she and the father who raised her are not biologically related. Suddenly Maclear becomes a detective in her own life, unravelling a family mystery piece by piece, and assembling the story of her biological father. Along the way, larger questions arise: what exactly is kinship? What does it mean to be a family? And how do we belong to larger ecosystems?

当時の若者たちが命を捨てても守りたかったもの。再び還ることのできない出撃を前に、特攻隊員たちは真心のこもった手紙を書き残した。両親への感謝、幼い弟妹への気遣い、この国の未来への想い―。永別の哀しみの中にも取り乱すことなくつづられた手紙には、隊員たちの無垢な想いが溢れている。永久に語り継ぐべき感動の記録の中から5編を知覧特攻平和会館の参事、川床剛士さんがご朗読。

※本コンテンツは、「サンプルを聴く」ボタンの再生で作品全編を聴くことができます。

Nanako Hanada's life is in crisis. Recently separated from her husband, living in youth hostels and internet cafes, her work is going no better. Book sales at the eccentric Village Vanguard bookstore in Tokyo, which Nanako manages, are dwindling. Fallen out of love in all aspects of her life, Nanako realises how narrow her life has become, with no friends outside of her colleagues, and no hobbies apart from reading and arranging books. That's when Nanako joins a meet-up site where people meet for 30-minute bursts to find romance, build a network, or just share ideas.

Decades before trade moved between the United States and Japan at its present pace, there was a Japanese immigrant's son with an American dream. Born to a farming tycoon in California, George Aratani was forced to leave the family business behind when incarcerated with more than 100,000 Japanese Americans during World War II. After the war, he traveled to Japan with little idea of what he would import from the war-devastated archipelago. What followed was the development of his two powerful businesses, Mikasa and Kenwood.

In December 1937, the Chinese capital, Nanjing, falls and the Japanese army unleash an orgy of torture, murder, and rape. Over the course of six weeks, hundreds of thousands of civilians and prisoners of war are killed. At the very onset of the atrocities, the Danish supervisor at a cement plant just outside the city, 26-year-old Bernhard Arp Sindberg, opens the factory gates and welcomes in 10,000 Chinese civilians to safety. He becomes an Asian equivalent of Oskar Schindler, the savior of Jews in the Holocaust.

その日、僕は出家した、彼女と社会を捨てて――。道元が開いた曹洞宗の本山・永平寺。ひとたび山門を潜れば、そこは娑婆とは別世界。東司（トイレ）にも行鉢（食事）にも厳格な作法がある。新入りは、古参僧侶に罵倒され、規矩を徹底的に叩き込まれる。

Scottish-born but a Queenslander to the bone, Jock McLaren was a true Australian hero. As a prisoner, he escaped twice, first from Changi and later from the infamous Sandakan POW camp in Borneo. After paddling a dugout canoe across open sea, he fought for two years with American-led Filipino guerrillas, his exploits so audacious the Japanese put a price on his head.

Follow the author on his odyssey from a 24-year-old Midwesterner unable to speak a word of Japanese as he recounts his initial struggle to survive even Japanese 101, to cramming four years of college Japanese into one year with top grades, to gaining functional fluency, conquering kanji, and finally gaining sufficient mastery over the language to develop marketable Japanese skills as a Japanese teacher and translator, all within four short years.

Since the beginning of civilization, crime and injustice has existed. At the same time, gangs in all shapes and sizes have been around, from rebels, dissidents, and rogue soldiers to the average circle of miscreants loitering in alleys and behind convenience stores. In Japan, a gang of a different breed would arise - one underscored by honor, respect, family, and a code of ethics. They are the Yakuza. The Yakuza claim to be the Robin Hoods of the Far East. While they may lean towards the other side of the law, justice is all they truly aim for.

人間は堕落する。それを防ぐことはできないし、防ぐことによって人を救うことはできない。人間は生き、人間は堕ちる。そのこと以外の中に人間を救う便利な近道はない。戦争に負けたから堕ちるのではないのだ。人間だから堕ちるのであり、生きているから堕ちるだけだ。人は正しく堕ちる道を堕ちきることによって、自分自身を発見し、救わなければならない。 戦後発表され、絶大な支持を集めた安吾の「堕落論」 “堕ちることにより救われる”という安吾の思想は、 今の時代にこそ聴いておくべき書なのかもしれない! “堕落しろ”とは、まさに呪縛からの“解放”にほかならない!

「悲劇的なもの」への憧憬と渇仰。それは三島由紀夫にとって存在の深部から湧出する抑えがたい欲動であった。自己を衝き動かす「前意味論的欲動」は、彼の文学を研ぎ澄ませ昇華させると同時に

本書を読めば、富を築くことは決して夢物語ではなく、人は望むような人生を送れることがわかるはずだ。お金や名声、報償、幸福は、それを得る覚悟と決意のある人なら、誰でも手に入れられるのだ。