This is a fresh and surprising account of Japan's culture from the 'opening up' of the country in the mid-nineteenth century to the present.
'How much I admired it, what a lot I learned from it and, above all, how very much I enjoyed it ... Masterly.' Neil MacGregor
It is told through the eyes of people who greeted this change not with the confidence and grasping ambition of Japan's modernizers and nationalists, but with resistance, conflict, distress. 
We encounter writers of dramas, ghost stories and crime novels where modernity itself is the tragedy, the ghoul and the bad guy; surrealist and avant-garde artists sketching their escape; rebel kamikaze pilots and the put-upon urban poor; hypnotists and gangsters; men in desperate search of the eternal feminine and feminists in search of something more than state-sanctioned subservience; Buddhists without morals; Marxist terror groups; couches full to bursting with the psychological fall-out of breakneck modernization. These people all sprang from the soil of modern Japan, but their personalities and projects failed to fit. They were 'dark blossoms': both East-West hybrids and home-grown varieties that wreathed, probed and sometimes penetrated the new structures of mainstream Japan.

Japan Story: In Search of a Nation, 1850 to the Present

History

Harding, Christopher

Asia

Penguin Books, Ltd.

The Light of Asia: A History of Western Fascination with the East

This rich and enjoyable book by the acclaimed author of Japan Story explores the many ways in which Asia has influenced Europe and North America over centuries of tangled, dynamic encounters From the time of the ancient Greeks onwards the West's relationship with Asia consisted for the most part of outrageous tales of strange beasts and monsters, of silk and spices shipped over vast distances and an uneasy sense of unknowable empires fantastically far away. By the twentieth century much of Asia might have come under Western rule after centuries of warfare, but its intellectual, artistic and spiritual influence was fighting back. The Light of Asia is a wonderfully varied and entertaining history of the many ways in which Asia has shaped European and North American culture over centuries of tangled, dynamic encounters, and the central importance of this vexed, often confused relationship. From Marco Polo onwards Asia has been both a source of genuine fascination and equally genuine failures of comprehension. China, India and Japan were all acknowledged to be both great civilizations and in crude ways seen as superseded by the West. From Chicago to Calcutta, and from antiquity to the new millennium, this is a rich, involving story of misunderstandings and sincere connection, of inspiration and falsehood, of geniuses, adventurers and con-men. Christopher Harding's captivating gallery of people and places celebrates Asia's impact on the West in all its variety.

Penguin

A SUNDAY TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2020\n'Mightily impressive ... a marvellous read' Sunday Times\nFrom the acclaimed author of Japan Story, this is the history of Japan, distilled into the stories of twenty remarkable individuals.\nThe vivid and entertaining portraits in Chris Harding's enormously enjoyable new book take the reader from the earliest written accounts of Japan right through to the life of the current empress, Masako. We encounter shamans and warlords, poets and revolutionaries, scientists, artists and adventurers - each offering insights of their own into this extraordinary place.\nFor anyone new to Japan, this book is the ideal introduction. For anyone already deeply involved with it, this is a book filled with surprises and pleasures.

The Japanese: A History in Twenty Lives

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

Penguin Uk

This book is a critical examination of the legal regulation of what may be described as serious antitrust violations, typically involving large and powerful corporate producers and traders operating across Europe, if not also in a wider international context. The discussion takes into account economic arguments, incorporates a historical perspective, and evaluates different legal strategies used by competition regulators.

Regulating Cartels in Europe: A Study of Legal Control of Corporate Delinquency (Oxford Studies in European Law)

Joshua, Julian

Business

Oxford University Press

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, urgent and unprecedented demands among oppressed peoples in colonial India drove what came to be called "mass conversion movements" towards a range of Christian denominations, launching a revolution in South Asia's two thousand-year Christian history. For all the scale, drama, and lasting controversy of a movement that approached half a million members in Punjab alone by the end of the 1930s, much actually depended upon a varied range of tempestuous local relationships between converts and mission personnel, based upon uncertain and constantly evolving terms. Making extensive use of Protestant Evangelical and newly-uncovered Catholic mission sources, Religious Transformation in South Asia explores those relationships to reveal what lay behind the great diversity of social and religious aspirations of converts and mission personnel. In this highly accessible study, Christopher Harding overturns the one-dimensional Christian missions of popular imagination by analysing the way that social class, theological training, culture, motivation, and personality produced an extraordinary range of presentations of "Christianity" in late colonial Punjab. Punjabi converts themselves were animated by a similarly broad spectrum of expectations and pressures, communicated through informal social networks and representing a brand of subaltern consciousness and resistance rarely considered by mainstream Indian historiography. These internal dynamics produced a first generation of rural Punjabi Christianity that was locally variable, highly fluid, and conflict-ridden-testament to the ways in which the meanings of conversion were contested by all sides in an encounter with far-reaching implications for the future of Christianity and religious identity in India and Pakistan.

Religious Transformation in South Asia: The Meanings of Conversion in Colonial Punjab (Oxford Historical Monographs)

One of the most contentious and high-profile aspects of EU competition law and policy has been the regulation of those serious competition or antitrust violations now often referred to as 'hard core cartels'. Such cartel activity typically involves large and powerful corporate producers and traders operating across Europe and beyond, and comprise practices such as price fixing, bid rigging, market sharing, and limiting production in order to ensure 'market stability' and maintain and increase profits. There is little disagreement now, in terms of competition theory and policy at both international and national levels, regarding the damaging effect of such trading practices on public and consumer interests, and such cartels have been subject to increasing condemnation in the legal process of regulating and protecting competition. Regulating Cartels in Europe provides critical evaluation of the way in which European-level regulation has evolved to deal with the activities of such anti-competitive business cartels. They trace the historical development of cartel regulation in Europe, comparing the more pragmatic and empirical approached favored in Europe with the more dogmatic and uncompromising American policy on cartels. In particular, the work considers critically the move towards the use of fully fledged criminal proceedings in this area of legal control, examining evolving aspects of enforcement policy such as the use of leniency programs and the deployment of a range of criminal law and other sanctions. This new edition of the work covers emerging themes and arguments in the discipline, including the judicial review of decisions against cartels, the criminological and legal basis of the criminalization of cartel conduct, and the range and effectiveness of sanctions used in response to cartel activity.

Regulating Cartels in Europe (Oxford Studies in European Law)

Allen Lane.

A SUNDAY TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2020\n'Mightily impressive ... a marvellous read' Waldemar Januszczak, Sunday Times\nFrom the acclaimed author of Japan Story, this is the history of Japan, distilled into the stories of twenty remarkable individuals.\nThe vivid and entertaining portraits in Chris Harding's enormously enjoyable new book take the reader from the earliest written accounts of Japan right through to the life of the current empress, Masako. We encounter shamans and warlords, poets and revolutionaries, scientists, artists and adventurers - each offering insights of their own into this extraordinary place.\nFor anyone new to Japan, this book is the ideal introduction. For anyone already deeply involved with it, this is a book filled with surprises and pleasures.

Cartel Criminality

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Routledge

A Cop's Cop

Connolly, Edward F.

True Crime

Avon/Books

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