検索キーワード： 日本

For those looking for the real story behind the fictionalized movie account of the 47 Ronin story, this is the definitive, fascinating account of this unforgettable tale of a band of samurai who defied the Emperor to avenge the disgrace and death of their master, and faced certain death as a result. It led to one of the bloodiest episodes in Japanese history, and in the process, created a new set of heroes in Japan.

In the ashes of postwar Japan lay a gold mine for certain opportunistic, expatriate Americans. Addicted to the volatile energy of Tokyo's freewheeling underworld, they formed ever-shifting but ever-profitable alliances with warring Japanese and Korean gangsters. At the center of this world was Nick Zappetti, an ex-marine from New York City who arrived in Tokyo in 1945 and whose restaurant soon became the rage throughout the city and the chief watering hole for celebrities, diplomats, sports figures, and mobsters.

 Bold Venture tells the nearly forgotten story of the American airmen who flew perilous combat missions over Hong Kong during the Second World War.  

To most people in the West, particularly the youth, the mere mention of Japan immediately evokes various images. A delectable rainbow of sushi, hand-rolled temaki, and platters of crispy, golden-brown tempura. An idyllic, crystal-clear lake flanked by trees covered with delicate, cotton-candy-pink sakura blossoms.

Midway is the most famous naval battle of the Pacific War, and one of the most mythologized. The traditional view of the battle, popularized in its immediate aftermath and surviving through to the present day, is of a heavily outnumbered American force snatching victory in the face of overwhelming odds. This view is simplistic and, in many respects, wrong. Pacific War expert Mark Stille provides a detailed analysis of this pivotal battle, and argues that Midway was neither a miraculous American victory, nor a product of good fortune.

Japón es uno de los países que más se adaptan en el mundo. Puede hacer un cambio muy rápido, aun después de crisis que detendrían el progreso de otras naciones. Cuando los shogunatos colapsaron en el siglo XVII, el sistema feudal se desintegró. Sin embargo, en menos de un año, los ferrocarriles reemplazaron a los carros de bueyes. Durante la Primera Guerra Mundial, surgió una economía de primer nivel en tierras de cultivo desiertas.

Il Giappone è il paese degli opposti: tradizione e modernità, spiritualità e tecnologia convivono fianco a fianco dando origine a una speciale alchimia. Il fascino che il paese del Sol levante esercita sui visitatori è quello di un luogo privo di una specifica collocazione, situato in un tempo e in uno spazio quasi magici, slegati da tutto il resto del mondo. Gli scenari del Giappone appaiono come livelli di un videogioco: gli enormi schermi e i vestiti gotici delle ragazze; le torri futuristiche e i bar con karaoke; i boschetti di bamboo e le cime ghiacciate.

Dreux Richard presents post-Fukushima Japan in three illustrative parts. He follows members of Japan’s Nigerian community, whose struggles with a hostile immigration system lead to the death of a Nigerian immigrant in a Japanese detention center, investigated here for the first time. In Japan’s northernmost city, Richard goes door to door with the region’s youngest census employee, meeting the city’s elderly residents and documenting the stories that comprise the nation’s record-breaking population decline. Finally, he takes us into the offices of energy executives....

The man known to most of the world as Emperor Hirohito ruled during some of the most tumultuous years in Japanese history. When he came to the throne in 1926, he inherited control of a country which had only recently emerged as a major industrial and world power. Through the aggressive expansion and wars of the 1930s, Hirohito was at the head of one of the world’s foremost powers. Throughout the maelstrom of World War II, he remained in power, a distant and, to most outsiders, inscrutable factor in the rise of the Japanese Empire.

Drawing on years of research in Japan, Michael Dylan Foster unpacks the history and cultural context of yokai, tracing their roots, interpreting their meanings, and introducing people who have hunted them through the ages. In this delightful and accessible narrative, listeners will explore the roles played by these mysterious beings within Japanese culture and will also learn of their abundance and variety through detailed entries on more than 50 individual creatures.

The American occupation of Japan holds a singular and problematic place in the histories both of Japan and of American foreign policy. For the Japanese, the occupation marked the transition from war to peace, from authoritarianism to democracy, and from privation to plenty, making it a passage from one of the darkest chapters in Japanese history to one of the brightest.

By midsummer 1945, Japan had long since lost the war in the Pacific. The people were not told the truth, and neither was the emperor. Japanese generals, admirals, and statesmen knew, but only a handful of leaders were willing to accept defeat. Most were bent on fighting the Allies until the last Japanese soldier died and the last city burned to the ground.

Lucie Blackman - tall, blond, 21 years old - stepped out into the vastness of Tokyo in the summer of 2000 and disappeared. The following winter, her dismembered remains were found buried in a seaside cave. The seven months in between had seen a massive search for the missing girl involving Japanese policemen, British private detectives, and Lucie’s desperate but bitterly divided parents. Had Lucie been abducted by a religious cult or snatched by human traffickers? Who was the mysterious man she had gone to meet? And what did her work as a hostess in the notorious Roppongi district of Tokyo really involve?

A naive young man, a railway enthusiast and radio buff, was caught up in the fall of the British Empire at Singapore in 1942. He was put to work on the 'Railway of Death' - the Japanese line from Thailand to Burma. Exhaustively and brutally tortured by the Japanese for making a crude radio, Lomax was emotionally ruined by his experiences.

Chris Harding's enormously enjoyable new book distils Japan's long, complex and fascinating history into the stories of 20 remarkable individuals. These vivid and entertaining portraits take the listener from the earliest written accounts of Japan right through to the life of the current empress, Masako. We encounter shamans and warlords, poets and revolutionaries, scientists, artists and adventurers - each offering insights of their own into this extraordinary place.

Dive into Japanese history—and discover who the samurai really were—in this fascinating study that reveals the flawed human warriors behind the idealistic myths.

In the closing months of the Second World War hundreds of thousands of Japanese, mostly civilians, died. American planes were beginning to run low on plausible targets when it was decided to use two atomic weapons in a final flourish to try to end the war. Richard Overy’s remarkable book rethinks how we should regard this last stage of the war and the role of the bombs. The popular view that bombing worked in this case has now to be set in a broader context of what was happening in Japan in the months before surrender. The easy equation ‘bombing equals surrender’ is no longer viable.

Après sa Divine Comédie, voyage sonore dans la Mythologie européenne, la romancière Amélie Nothomb nous accompagne, dans une deuxième saison très personnelle, à la rencontre du Japon de son enfance, avec ses mythes, ses rites et ses cultures. Dans ce documentaire audio de 10 épisodes, enrichi en son binaural, nous explorons les mythes et spiritualités japonais aux côtés d’Amélie Nothomb. Nous découvrons, dans ses yeux, un pays vecteur de réalisations personnelles.

Aokigahara, also known as the sea of trees, is a forest on the flanks of Mount Fuji on the island of Honshu in Japan, spread over 30 square kilometres of rock hard lava which was laid down during the last major eruption of Mount Fuji in 864. The western edge of Aokigahara, where there are various caves that fill with ice in winter, is a popular destination for tourists. Parts of Aokigahara are very dense, and the porous lava rock absorbs sound, all adding to a sense of solitude that some visitors decide to be the perfect place to implement their final act.

As the Japanese swept across Asia in the early years of World War II, the retreating Allies looked for ways to keep up the fight. In Malaya and Burma, agents had been left behind to stir resistance behind enemy lines, building up anti-Japanese operations from the safety of the jungle. In China, the American Office of Strategic Services helped both Nationalists and Communists in resisting the Japanese.