A review of J.L. Huffman's informative history of Japan, taking the world as a broad context for comparative research. Memorable insights from this book include the impact that the introduction of railway technology had on the early modern Japanese psyche: i.e. reprise noting a more impactful legacy that the sight of Admiral Perry's renowned 'Black Ships'.

CAA Reviews, 2019

Book review of exhibition catalogue - exhibition held at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art in 2016 and the Crocker Art Museum in 2017. Distinguishing this catalogue from other works on Japonisme is its inclusion of diverse media and its stress on the interactions between American artists and the Japanese arts and artists with whom they came into contact over the course of nearly 100 years.

Paul Doolan describes the unique 400-year-long trading, intellectual and artistic contacts between the Dutch and the Japanese.

Journal of Socio-Information Studies 社会情報研究　(vol. 11: March 2014)

The Center for Japanese Studies at the University of Michigan was established in 1947. This followed the wartime period when "Japan" was quite visible to the Ann Arbor and University communities, because the University hosted the U.S. Army Japanese language program. 2 During this time, hundreds of soldiers traversed the campus and the city, as they tried to learn the difficult Japanese language. Many of them mastered the language and subsequently held crucial military posts where they were charged with decoding Japanese military secrets. In the postwar years, the United States government saw the need to establish a plan to help cultivate better knowledge about the former war-time enemy. In the same way, UM CJS proposed a new and vigorous program to study Japanese society as a whole-history, culture, industry, geography, and even psychology-and not in the United States, but in Japan. While previous popular anthropological works, such as Ruth Benedict's The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture, 3 largely relied on second-hand descriptions and images and were written without actually coming into contact with the Japanese, the research that CJS hoped to accomplish required researchers to be in Japan over an extended period of time. The American professors and graduate students would study Japan by living in the country, eating the food, talking to the people, walking on the land, and examining farming patterns as well as medical practices. The idea to set up the Center's Field Station in Okayama would make this vision a reality. Robert Bennett Hall, geographer and "superb academic politician," 4 was largely responsible for getting the project off

Article, 2023

To a Bengali born and brought up in India Japan is not a very well known country like England or United States of America but not an almost unknown one like Liberia or Lesotho.I came to know about Japan and its native name Nippon as the ‘country of the rising sun’ from my school geography book.I viewed a classic Kagemusha, a 1980 film by Akira Kurosawa a little later, which took me to the feudal Japan and real fights of the shadow warrior(a thief who was made to impersonate the warlord) in the celluloid. Modern Japan may not always be what Ruth Benedict viewed through her image of ‘self-responsibility’ as the ideal for a man who kept his ‘inner sword free from the rust’.

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Cross Currents, 2015

Trans-Asia Photography Review, 2016

Strategic Management Journal, 1982