"As we passed from the city center into the Fukushima suburbs I surveyed the landscape for surgical face masks. I wanted to see in what ratios people were wearing such masks. I was trying to determine, consciously and unconsciously, what people do in response. So, among people walking along the roadway, and people on motorbikes, I saw no one with masks. Even among the official crossing guards outfitted with yellow flags and banners, none. All showed bright and calm. What was I hoping for exactly? The guilty conscience again. But then it was time for school to start. We began to see groups of kids on their way to school. They were wearing masks." Horses, Horses, in the End the Light Remains Pure is a multifaceted literary response to the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown that devastated northeast Japan on March 11, 2011. The novel is narrated by Hideo Furukawa, who travels back to his childhood home near Fukushima after 3/11 to reconnect with a place that is now doubly alien. His ruminations conjure the region's storied past, particularly its thousand-year history of horses, humans, and the struggle with a rugged terrain. Standing in the morning light, these horses also tell their stories, heightening the sense of liberation, chaos, and loss that accompanies Furukawa's rich recollections. A fusion of fiction, history, and memoir, this book plays with form and feeling in ways reminiscent of Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory and W. G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn yet draws its own, unforgettable portrait of personal and cultural dislocation.

This book brings to life a unique, historical manuscript on the care and keeping of horses in 16th century Japan. With remarkable calligraphy and illustrations, reproduced in color and translated to English and modern Japanese, this manuscript reveals a mix of Buddhist medical traditions, Japanese fortunetelling, and ancient Indian religious ideas. The reproduction is supplemented with a history of the horse in Japan and a detailed discussion of the medicine they practiced, providing essential context and analysis. Together the expertise of David Ramey, DVM, Kaoru Tomoyoshi, BA, Dan Sherer, PhD and Katja Triplett, PhD, present a truly rare treasure worthy of the Smithsonian Library.

Karl Friday, an internationally recognised authority on Japanese warriors, provides the first comprehensive study of the topic to be published in English. This work incorporates nearly twenty years of on-going research and draws on both new readings of primary sources and the most recent secondary scholarship. It overturns many of the stereotypes that have dominated views of the period. Friday analyzes Heian -, Kamakura- and Nambokucho-period warfare from five thematic angles. He examines the principles that justified armed conflict, the mechanisms used to raise and deploy armed forces, the weapons available to early medieval warriors, the means by which they obtained them, and the techniques and customs of battle. A thorough, accessible and informative review, this study highlights the complex casual relationships among the structures and sources of early medieval political power, technology, and the conduct of war.

Each great samurai warlord, or daimyo, had a division of troops known as the Hatamoto, 'those who stand under the flag'. The Hatamoto included the personal bodyguards, the senior generals, the standard bearers and colour-guard, the couriers, and the other samurai under the warlord's personal command. Apart from bodyguard and other duties in immediate attendance on the daimyo, both horse and foot guards often played crucial roles in battle. Their intervention could turn defeat into victory, and their collapse meant certain defeat. As favoured warriors under the warlord's eye, members of the bodyguards could hope for promotion, and a few even rose to be daimyo themselves. All the three great leaders of the 16 and 17th centuries – including Oda, Hideyoshi and Tokugawa – had their own elite corps. Such troops were naturally distinguished by dazzling apparel and heraldry, with banners both carried and attached to the back of the armour, all of which will be detailed in an array of colour artwork specially created for this publication.

Originally published in 1932, Kathleen Tamagawa’s pioneering Asian American memoir is a sensitive and thoughtful look at the personal and social complexities of growing up racially mixed during the early twentieth century. Born in 1893 to an Irish American mother and a Japanese father and raised in Chicago and Japan, Tamagawa reflects on the difficulty she experienced fitting into either parent’s native culture.

This book gives a first glimpse of a larger project documenting the eight native horse breeds of Japan. Once necessary for farming and transportation, most of these breeds have lost their practical purpose and have declined in number. Primarily confined to small islands, the horses have never been able to migrate, and their future existence is now uncertain.

In this, the most comprehensive treatment in English to date, a senior scholar of early Japan turns to three sources - historical, archaeological and mythological - to provide a multifaceted study of ancient Japanese society. Analyzing a tremendous amount of recent archaeological material and synthesizing it with a thorough examination of the textual sources, Professor Kidder locates Yamatai in the Yamato heartland, in the southeastern part of the Nara basin. He describes the formation in the Yayoi period of pan-regional alliances that created the reserves of manpower required to build massive mounded tombs. It is this decisive period, at the end of the Yayoi and the beginning of the Kofun, that he identifies as Himiko's era. He maintains, moreover, that Himiko played a part in the emergence of Yamato as an identifiable political entity. In exploring the cultural and political conditions of this period and identifying the location of Yamatai as Himiko's area of activity, Kidder considers the role of magic in early Japanese society to better understand why an individual with her qualifications reached such a prominent position. He enhances Himiko's story with insights drawn from mythology, turning to a body of commentary for explanations buried deep in mythological stories and the earliest descriptions. Himiko and Japan's Elusive Chiefdom of Yamatai is required reading for Japan historians as well as scholars with an interest in literature and art history during this formative stage in Japan's past.