Japanese Biography

Shohei Ohtani, also known as "Shotime," is widely known for his skills in both pitching and hitting. At the 2016 Japan Series, Ohtani led his team, the Fighters, to victory. He later signed to the Los Angeles Angels in 2017 and earned the title of American League Rookie of the Year in 2018. In 2021, Ohtani made Major League Baseball history with over ten homeruns, over twenty stolen bases, and over one hundred strikeouts. That same year, at only age twenty-seven, he was given the American League Most Valuable Player Award.

Euphemistically labeled as the "Water Supply and Prophylaxis Administration" and "HippoEpizootic Administration" of the Imperial Japanese Army, Unit 731 and Unit 100, as well as their subsidiary branches, performed human experimentation on the innocents under the leadership of Dr. Ishii Shiro. Although the exact number of victims is unclear since the Japanese destroyed most of the evidence at the end of the war, but it ranged from 3,000-250,000 innocent men, women, and children.

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.

Ben Kuroki was a twenty-four-year-old Japanese American farm boy whose heritage was never a problem in remote Nebraska—until Pearl Harbor. Among the millions of Americans who flocked to military stations to enlist, Ben wanted to avenge the attack, reclaim his family honor, and prove his patriotism. But as anti-Japanese sentiment soared, Ben had to fight to be allowed to fight for America. And fight he did.

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.

Here are the dramatic stories of the fall of Bataan, the siege of "the Rock," the daily struggles to tend the sick, the wounded, and the dying, during some of the heaviest bombardments of World War II. Once captive, the doctors and corpsmen waged a desperate war against disease and starvation for nearly three and a half years, amid an enemy who viewed surrender as a disgrace. To survive, the four POWs tried to function as a family.

As a young man, Norman Bethune served as a stretcher-bearer in the First World War. The experience left him with the dedication and passion to lead crusades to find a cure for tuberculosis, to introduce universal health care in Canada, and to introduce mobile blood transfusion units to save wounded soldier's lives on the battlefield. He served with the Republican armies during the Spanish Civil War and in China where he died of blood poisoning in 1939 Because of his left wing politics, Bethune was ignored for decades in his home country. His childhood home in Gravenhurst, Ontario sees large...

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.

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。

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?

Gaman is a word that means strength in Japanese within the silence there is no yellow peril only the courage to be. Kenichi Yabusaki (Ken) was born a prisoner of war in an American concentration camp in Minidoka, Idaho. When President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 on Feb. 19, 1942, some 120,000 people of Japanese descent, primarily on the West Coast, were forced into ten main concentration camps across the continental US with no due process.

A Universityのテーマは「複雑な世界で、より善く生きる」タイパ・コスパと言った、いかに効率よく生きるかを競うことばかりに注目が集まる時代。

Acclaimed military historian Major Bruce Norton USMC (Ret.) brings to light a long-forgotten memoir by a marine captured at Corregidor in 1942 and interned for three devastating years by the Japanese. With unflinching prose, the words of Marine Sergeant Maj. Charles Jackson describe the fierce yet impossible battle for Corregidor, the surrender of thousands of his comrades, the long forced marches, and the lethal reality of the P.O.W. camps. Joining some of the most important eyewitness accounts of war, I AM ALIVE! is a testament to the men who fought and died for their country.

こんなに、ほんとに読んだのね。美味しいお茶とおやつ、かたわらには猫......今日もゆるゆるページをひらく。「読書と暮らし」のあれこれを軽やかにつづった話題のエッセイ集が待望の文庫化。新章「それからの日々」も収録した完全版！

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.

The fierce, bloody battles of Bataan and Corregidor in the Philippines are legendary in the annals of World War II. Those who survived faced the horrors of life as prisoners of the Japanese.

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。

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.