Designing Japan: A Future Built on Aesthetics presents renowned designer Kenya Hara's vision of how his industry can support Japan in crafting a future founded on a unique philosophy of beauty as well as crowd-sourced wisdom from around the world. The book spans history from the beginnings of professional Japanese design in the sixteenth century to the impact of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake, but Hara's focus is the future. A master collaborator, meticulous organizer, and globally conscious innovator, he draws on more than three decades of participation in design work and exhibition curating, as well as deep professional interaction with creators from many fields. Designing Japan serves as a foundation course on the essence of Japanese aesthetics while maintaining a practical approach to Japan's circumstances and future possibilities. Hara reveals the methods by which designers in Japan continue to work in tandem with government and industry to form publicly accessible aesthetic inquiries into how this island nation will proceed as its population ages, other nations take over manufacturing, and technology develops. Illustrations and examples recognize successful problem solving through design, proving that it is a living, changing industry that remains relevant not in spite of, but as a partner to, advancing technology.

Designing Japan: A Future Built on Aesthetics

Kenya Hara

Japan Publishing Industry Foundation for Culture

The Northern Territories, Takeshima, and the Senkaku Islands-what exactly is the territorial extent of Japan? To answer this fundamental question, the author, an authority on international law, retraces and analyzes the history of negotiations over these territories, while also setting forth his vision of the future of issues concerning territorial land, air, and sea.

The territory of Japan

Politics & Social Sciences

Serita Kentaro

Politics & Government

Wasan-a unique form of Japanese mathematics-was developed during the Edo period (1603-1868), a time when the entire country was isolated from the rest of the world. Mathematics was enjoyed as a form of entertainment by adults and children alike and by people of all social classes. Jinkōki, an extraordinary mathematics textbook, was used at private elementary schools called terakoya and became a bestseller that could be found in every household. Furthermore, world-class works were produced by Japanese mathematicians such as Seki Takakazu and Takebe Katahiro. This book explores the beauty and fascination surrounding wasan by providing a guided tour that goes back in time over three hundred years and navigates through the mysterious and incredible world of mathematical wizardry found during the Edo period Japan.

Wasan, the Fascination of Traditional Japanese Mathematics

Education & Teaching

Sakurai Susumu

Schools & Teaching

Edo Japan Encounters the World continues the conversation, begun nearly twenty years earlier in The People and Culture of Japan, between scholar of Japanese literature Donald Keene and historical novelist Shiba Ryotaro. In discussions that took place in Osaka and Kyoto from 1989 to 1990, these two penetrating and original observers of Japanese culture turn their attention to the long peace of the Edo period (1603-1868), when Japan developed in relative isolation from outside influence. From analysis of literary masters like Basho and Chikamatsu to critiques of the repressive aspects of Edo life, their exchanges bring much insight to this often romanticized period of Japanese history.

Edo Japan encounters the world

Donald Keene Shiba Ryotaro

Securing the generous support of the politicians and industrialists who propelled Japan's modernization, Ogawa Jihei VII created many outstanding gardens at the end of the nineteenth and the first few decades of the twentieth century. Expressing a Japanese aesthetic even while incorporating modern techniques, his methodology reveals the nature of modernization as Japan experienced it. With a keen eye for architecture, author Suzuki Hiroyuki takes a long-awaited look at modernization and the modern garden. Awarded the Architectural Institute of Japan's Annual Prize for Publication in 2014.

Landscape Gardener Ogawa Jihei and His Times A Profile of Modern Japan

Crafts, Hobbies & Home

Suzuki, Hiroyuki

Gardening & Landscape Design

What makes Japanese art unique? In The Japanese Sense of Beauty, art critic and historian Takashina Shūji reflects on the aesthetic and philosophical sensibilities underlying Japanese art throughout its history, from the earliest calligraphy and painted screens to modern masters like Hishida Shunso and Yokoyama Taikan. Along the way, Takashina explores themes such as the relationship between subjective perspective and "flat" composition and the playful intermingling of word and image throughout the plastic arts of Japan. He also offers fresh critical perspectives on many individual artists, including Takeuchi Seihō, one of the first to fuse traditional techniques with Western realism, and Takahashi Yuichi, who combined a vivid mastery of texture with deceptively traditionalist compositions. Other essays in this wide-ranging collection touch on everything from the symbolism of Mount Fuji to the ancient music known as gagaku, showing how even the most disparate topics can shed new light on what is essential to Japanese culture. The Japanese Sense of Beauty is an important contribution to the study of aesthetics and cultural history, offering insights that will change the way you think about Japanese art.

The Japanese sense of beauty

Takashina, Shuji

Philosophy

Toshio Suzuki has devoted himself to Studio Ghibli for some thirty years, producing such world-renowned animated classics as Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away. Early in his career he met the two genius directors Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata and gained their confidence. Working with these two inimitable directors, he experienced the joys and sorrows of filmmaking, and he continues today to guide the studio. Based on his innate inquisitive nature and the accumulated resources of thirty years, Suzuki has recounted in this book the story not only of Miyazaki and Takahata but also the other figures working at Studio Ghibli or in connection with it. It is a fascinating tale, told with penetrating insight and heartwarming humor.

Mixing work with pleasure

Humor & Entertainment

Toshio Suzuki

Movies

Today, as globalization deepens daily and the world becomes increasingly integrated, the time has come to revise the conventional Euro-centric view on world history. Haneda Masashi has been exploring for several years now how best to create a new world history. The world history that we learn and understand today is already out of step with the times. Therefore, it is imperative to envisage a new world history that is suitable to our own time. What description of history, then, is appropriate for our contemporary times? To answer this question, the author first reviews what kind of perception we have of world history and what is wrong with it. Subsequently, he looks into what is the new world history that is called for and how it can be created. Haneda finds that more and more people are behaving with an awareness of themselves as inhabitants of this earth, willing to mutually transcend differences of views so as to defend this one and only earth of ours and let people the world over live more peacefully and happily. On the basis of these soul-searching explorations, the author comes to propose a world history for inhabitants of the earth from the viewpoint of "there is one world."

Toward creation of new world history

Haneda Masashi

Nakano Kōji opens the door to the treasury of Japanese classics by introducing six writers who are his personal favorites. The writers under his lens span seven centuries, ranging from the twelfth century to the nineteenth. Three are poets; three wrote timeless prose. The hermit-monk Ryōkan, a poet who loved nothing more than bouncing balls with neighborhood children or just sitting sprawled in his hut listening to the sound of rain, teaches the value of living with a spirit of play. Kenkō offers trenchant comments on the aesthetics of life, grounded in an appreciation of the immediacy of death. Kamo no Chōmei, a journalist par excellence, found happiness late in life by flouting convention and "rejoicing in the absence of grief." Dōgen, the founder of Sōtō Zen in Japan, takes us on a mind-bending trip to the Dharma-ultimate truth-that involves revolutionary ways of conceiving of time, life, and death. Saigyō, the beloved itinerant monk-poet, continually explores his own wayward heart and its vast, incorrigible love of beauty. Buson the haiku poet uses his painter's eye to capture cosmic vistas as well as moments of poignancy in poems of seventeen syllables.

Words to live by

Nakano Koji

Toward the end of the Tokugawa shogunate, Mutsu Munemitsu was ousted from his home Kishu-han as a result of his father's defeat in a power struggle. To avenge this, Mutsu bolstered his talent to become a man of "genius and learning in equal measure." He joined the Kobe Naval Training Center founded by Katsu Kaishu and, later, Kaientai, a trading and shipping company and private navy founded and managed by Sakamoto Ryoma before the Meiji Restoration was accomplished. During the Meiji era, Mutsu fully exercised his extraordinary ability, including working to revise unequal treaties with Western powers as foreign minister. In his last days, he scrambled to end the First Sino-Japanese War; his efforts resulted in the signing of the Treaty of Shimonoseki with favorable terms for Japan. Mutsu also helped Japan ride out the subsequent wave of the Tripartite Intervention from Russia, France, and Germany. This book's author, a career diplomat himself, traces the footsteps of modern Japan's diplomacy by reviewing the philosophical and political journey of this extraordinary diplomat who protected the dignity of Japan as a modern nation throughout his professional life.

Mutsu Munemitsu and His Time

Okazaki, Hisahiko

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