Hashima is a small island located off the extreme southwest coast of Japan, about ten miles from Nagasaki. Its dark warship-like silhouette earned it the nickname of Gunkanjima ("battleship island"). During the wave of industrialisation in the nineteenth century, a coal seam was discovered on the island and the Mitsubishi corporation opened a mine there. Workers settled on the island and the population increased, the small mining town quickly becoming a modern and autonomous settlement. During the 1950s, Gunkanjima became one of the most densely populated places in the world with over 5,000 inhabitants. But after an accident and the restructuring of the Mitsubishi mining project, the mine closed in January 1974. The last inhabitants deserted the island, the connection by boat was suspended, and since then Gunkanjima has become a ghost town. Marchand and Meffre photographed the island between 2008 and 2012. Born in 1981 and 1987 in the Parisian suburbs, Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre began to photograph separately in 2001. They began working together for their project on the urban decay of Detroit in 2005, which Steidl published to acclaim as The Ruins of Detroit in 2010.

This book presents essays exploring the ways in which popular culture reflects and engenders ongoing changes in Japan–Korea relations. Through a broad temporal coverage from the colonial period to the contemporary, the book’s chapters analyse the often contradictory roles that popular culture has played in either promoting or impeding nationalisms, regional conflict and reconciliations between Japan and Korea. Its contributors link several key areas of interest in East Asian Studies, including conflicts over historical memories and cultural production, grassroots challenges to state ideology, and the consequences of digital technology in Japan and South Korea. Taking recent discourse on Japan and South Korea as popular cultural superpowers further, this book expands its focus from mainstream entertainment media to the lived experience of daily life, in which sentiments and perceptions of the "popular" are formed. It will be useful to students and scholars of Japanese and Korean studies, as well as film studies, media studies and cultural studies more widely. Chapter 3 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

In July 2015, MAKIKO was granted rare permission to photograph the restricted zone of Battleship Island, shortly after it was recognised as a UNESCO World Heritage site. Ringed by a seawall, and covered in tightly packed buildings, the tiny fortress-like island was once the most densely populated place on Earth. Now it is a ghost town - completely uninhabited for more than forty years. In the book, archive photographs break the eerie silence of the island's contemporary landscape and, through the memories of a former resident of the island, MAKIKO brings it back to life.

Twisted Mirrors is a collection of papers which examine the monstrous in relation to humanity. Culled from an international conference, these essays were written by scholars from a variety of fields and represent a broad cross-section in the scholastic investigation of the monstrous.

The rapid pace of technological, social and cultural change throughout the 20th century propelled Japan forward but left countless establishments, industries and entire towns deserted. Through his photography Jordy Meow explores these forgotten places and sheds light on a lost world that was thriving just a few decades ago

Specifically designed for use on a range of undergraduate and graduate courses, Introducing Japanese Popular Culture is a comprehensive textbook offering an up-to-date overview of a wide variety of media forms. It uses particular case studies as a way into examining the broader themes in Japanese culture and provides a thorough analysis of the historical and contemporary trends that have shaped artistic production, as well as, politics, society, and economics. As a result, more than being a time capsule of influential trends, this book teaches enduring lessons about how popular culture reflects the societies that produce and consume it. With contributions from an international team of scholars, representing a range of disciplines from history and anthropology to art history and media studies, the book’s sections include: Television Videogames Music Popular Cinema Anime Manga Popular Literature Fashion Contemporary Art Written in an accessible style by a stellar line-up of international contributors, this textbook will be essential reading for students of Japanese culture and society, Asian media and popular culture, and Asian Studies in general.

The history of post Second World War reconstruction has recently become an important field of research around the world; Alternative Visions of Post-War Reconstruction is a provocative work that questions the orthodoxies of twentieth century design history. This book provides a key critical statement on mid-twentieth century urban design and city planning, focused principally upon the period between the start of the Second World War to the mid-sixties. The various figures and currents covered here represent a largely overlooked field within the history of 20th century urbanism. In this period while certain modernist practices assumed an institutional role for post-war reconstruction and flourished into the mainstream, such practices also faced opposition and criticism leading to the production of alternative visions and strategies. Spanning from a historically-informed modernism to the increasing presence of urban conservation the contributors examine these alternative approaches to the city and its architecture.

A woman who dreams of machines. A paper lantern that falls in love. The most compelling video game you’ve never played and that nobody can ever play twice. This collection of Catherynne M. Valente’s stories and poems with Japanese themes includes the lauded novella “Silently and Very Fast,” the award-nominated “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Space/Time,” and “Ghosts of Gunkanjima”—which originally appeared in a book smaller than your palm, published in a limited edition of twenty-four. Also included are two new stories: the semiautobiographical, metafictional, and utterly magical “Ink, Water, Milk” and the cinematic, demon-haunted “Story No. 6.” -- VIZ Media

Following on the heels of their incredibly successful The Ruins of Detroit, this major new project by the prolific French photographer duo Marchand/Meffre, poignantly eulogizes and celebrates the tattered remains of hundreds of movie theaters across America. They are in every American city and town—grandiose movie palaces, constructed during the heyday of the entertainment industry, that now stand abandoned, empty, decaying, or repurposed. Since 2005, the acclaimed photographic duo Marchand/Meffre have been traveling across the US to visit these early 20th-century relics. In hundreds of lushly colored images, they have captured the rich architectural diversity of the theaters’ exteriors, from neo renaissance to neo-Gothic, art nouveau to Bauhaus, and neo-Byzantine to Jugendstill. They have also stepped inside to capture the commonalities of a dying culture— crumbling plaster, rows of broken crushed-velvet seats, peeling paint, defunct equipment, and abandoned concession stands—as well as their transformation into bingo halls, warehouses, fitness centers, flea markets, parking lots, and grocery stores. Using a large format camera, the photographers’ carefully composed images range from landscape exteriors to starkly beautiful closeups. Presented here in a gorgeous oversized format, exquisitely printed with superior inks and spot varnish, this illustrated eulogy for the American movie palace is certain to become a modern-day classic.

The crumbling grandeur of Budapest, in luscious photographs from the duo behind The Ruins of Detroit Between 2014 and 2016, French photographers Yves Marchand (born 1981) and Romain Meffre (born 1987) visited 400 of the more than 4,000 internal courtyards in Budapest. Their large number and variety of styles incorporating different facets of classicism and modernity make them a remarkable architectural phenomenon--a charming second city within the city. Marchand and Meffre systematically documented these courtyards, producing a typological series that describes this particular form of collective housing and reflects the city's tumultuous history, its changing political regimes and economy. Budapest Courtyards allows us to delight in the crumbling grandeur of the courtyards, and observe the developments and personal strategies of adaptation which they evidence. "In line with their work on Detroit and Gunkanjima Island, Marchand and Meffre have managed to navigate two extremes at the intimate heart of the Hungarian capital to best superimpose the Budapests of today and the last century, producing an extensive series that offers an untarnished view of this unique heritage." --Hélène Bienvenu