BiblioVault - Books about Japanese

Basic Technical Japanese

Edward E. Daub

University of Wisconsin Press, 2011

Even if you have had no Japanese-language training, you can learn how to translate technical manuals, research publications, and reference works. Basic Technical Japanese takes you step by step from an introduction to the Japanese writing system through a mastery of grammar and scientific vocabulary to reading actual texts in Japanese. You can use the book to study independently or in formal classes.
This book places special emphasis on the kanji (characters) that occur most often in technical writing. There are special chapters on the language of mathematics and chemistry, and vocabulary building and reading exercises in physics, chemistry, biology, and biochemistry. With extensive character charts and vocabulary lists, Basic Technical Japanese is entirely self-contained; no dictionaries or other reference works are needed.

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The Battle over Peleliu

Islander, Japanese, and American Memories of War

Stephen C. Murray

University of Alabama Press, 2016

An ethnographic and historical account of the commercial, cultural, and military encroachment by Japan and the United States on the island nation of Palau

The expansionist Japanese empire annexed the inhabited archipelago of Palau in 1914. The airbase built on Peleliu Island became a target for attack by the United States in World War II. The Battle over Peleliu: Islander, Japanese, and American Memories of War offers an ethnographic study of how Palau and Peleliu were transformed by warring great powers and further explores how their conflict is remembered differently by the three peoples who shared that experience.

Author Stephen C. Murray uses oral histories from Peleliu’s elders to reconstruct the island’s prewar way of life, offering a fascinating explanation of the role of land and place in island culture. To Palauans, history is conceived geographically, not chronologically. Land and landmarks are both the substance of history and the mnemonic triggers that recall the past. Murray then offers a detailed account of the 1944 US invasion against entrenched Japanese forces on Peleliu, a seventy-four-day campaign that razed villages, farms, ancestral cemeteries, beaches, and forests, and with them, many of the key nodes of memory and identity.

Murray also explores how Islanders’ memories of the battle as shattering their way of life differ radically from the ways Japanese and Americans remember the engagement in their histories, memoirs, fiction, monuments, and tours of Peleliu. Determination to retrieve the remains of 11,000 Japanese soldiers from the caves of Peleliu has driven high-profile civic groups from across the Japanese political spectrum to the island. Contemporary Japan continues to debate pacifist, right-wing apologist, and other interpretations of its aggression in Asia and the Pacific. These disputes are exported to Peleliu, and subtly frame how Japanese commemoration portrays the battle in stone and ritual. Americans, victors in the battle, return to the archipelago in far fewer numbers. For them, the conflict remains controversial but is most often submerged into the narrative of “the good war.”

The Battle over Peleliu is a study of public memory, and the ways three peoples swept up in conflict struggle to create a common understanding of the tragedy they share.

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Brokers of Empire

Japanese Settler Colonialism in Korea, 1876–1945

Jun Uchida

Harvard University Press, 2011

Between 1876 and 1945, thousands of Japanese civilians—merchants, traders, prostitutes, journalists, teachers, and adventurers—left their homeland for a new life on the Korean peninsula. Although most migrants were guided primarily by personal profit and only secondarily by national interest, their mundane lives and the state’s ambitions were inextricably entwined in the rise of imperial Japan. Despite having formed one of the largest colonial communities in the twentieth century, these settlers and their empire-building activities have all but vanished from the public memory of Japan’s presence in Korea.

Drawing on previously unused materials in multi-language archives, Jun Uchida looks behind the official organs of state and military control to focus on the obscured history of these settlers, especially the first generation of “pioneers” between the 1910s and 1930s who actively mediated the colonial management of Korea as its grassroots movers and shakers. By uncovering the downplayed but dynamic role played by settler leaders who operated among multiple parties—between the settler community and the Government-General, between Japanese colonizer and Korean colonized, between colony and metropole—this study examines how these “brokers of empire” advanced their commercial and political interests while contributing to the expansionist project of imperial Japan.

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Business Japanese

Shoji Azuma and Ryo Sambongi

Georgetown University Press, 2001

Written for intermediate to advanced students of Japanese, this book focuses on the language used in real-life business situations, giving students both the linguistic skills and the practical information they need to conduct business in Japan.

More than a guide to language and vocabulary, Business Japanese emphasizes critical thinking and cultural awareness. The book covers Internet and other technical terminology, numbers, and the phrasing of corporate documents. In addition to language elements, the authors provide a short course in the cultural learning that takes place when Americans do business in Japan, discussing topics such as interpersonal dynamics and communications styles. The book also uses the case-study method commonly accepted in business schools. Appropriate for content-based courses as well as the independent student, Business Japanese is not only an effective language text but also an intercultural handbook.

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