Ben Ami Shillony Collected Writings

This volume of the Collected Writings of Modern Western Scholars on Japan brings together the work of Ben-Ami Shillony on modern history, crisis and culture, Japan and the Jews.

Special areas: modern history; crisis and culture; Japan, the Jews and Israel. This volume forms part of the major new series, published by Curzon Press under the Japan Library imprint, featuring the collected writings of many of the most outstanding western scholars who have been actively writing about Japan and connected subjects over the last half century. Developed in close collaboration with Ben-Ami Shillony, this book contains a wide and substantial cross-section of their writings, thematically structured around essays, including published and unpublished conference and symposium papers, contributions to refereed journals, chapters from multi-author volumes, translations and book reviews, as well as newspaper and more broadly based general-interest articles and commentaries as available. A full introductory section, written by the author, reviewing his association and historical ties with Japan as well as specialist interests, prefaces each volume. Thus, for the first time in scholarly publishing, this series makes available a comprehensive collection of the author's lifetime output (other than single-author volumes) that might otherwise be lost or dispersed.

Shillony's writings cover modern history, crisis and culture, Japan and the Jews.

This set of volumes is part of a major new series, and features the collected writings of some of the most outstanding Western scholars who have been actively writing about Japan and connected subjects over the last half century.

This important new and original study on the institution of the Japanese emperors focuses on the enigma of the institution itself, namely, the extraordinary continuity of the Japanese dynasty, which is unknown anywhere else in the world, yet which is now at risk on account of more recent laws of succession.

The book offers a fascinating picture of the four emperors of modern Japan, their institution, their personalities and their impact on the history of their country. Leading scholars from Japan and other countries have contributed essays which treat this subject from various angles.

Jews in Japan: Presence and Perception. Antisemitism, Philosemitism and International Relations is a study on the history of real and imagined Jews in Japan, which discusses the little known cultural, political and economic ties between Jews and Japan, and follows the evolution of Jewish stereotypes in Japan in the last century and a half. The book begins with the arrival of Jews and their image in late 19th to early 20th-century Japan, when the seeds of later stereotyped visions were sown. The discussion then focuses on wartime Japan, delving into the complex and mixed attitudes of the Japanese Empire toward Jews. In postwar Japan, the partial reception of the Holocaust intertwined with earlier antisemitic and philosemitic manifestations, resulting in instances of both hatred and admiration toward Jews. Finally, the book explores the recent reframing of Japanese-Jewish historical encounters within the context of the growing ties between Japan and Israel. This study sheds new light on the little explored relations between Jews and Japan, offering thought-provoking insights into the coexistence of antisemitism and philosemitism, the political and diplomatic uses of Jewish history, and the perpetuation of Jewish stereotypes in a land devoid of a local Jewish population.

In 1870, a prominent samurai from Tōhoku sells his castle to become an agrarian colonist in Hokkaidō. Decades later, a man also from northeast Japan stows away on a boat to Canada and establishes a salmon roe business. By 1930, an investigative journalist travels to Brazil and writes a book that wins the first-ever Akutagawa Prize. In the 1940s, residents from the same area proclaim that they should lead Imperial Japan in colonizing all of Asia. Across decades and oceans, these fractured narratives seem disparate, but show how mobility is central to the history of Japan’s Tōhoku region, a place often stereotyped as a site of rural stasis and traditional immobility, thereby collapsing boundaries between local, national, and global studies of Japan. This book examines how multiple mobilities converge in Japan’s supposed hinterland. Drawing on research from three continents, this monograph demonstrates that Tohoku’s regional identity is inextricably intertwined with Pacific migrations.