"Meili Snow Mountain: In Search of Seventeen Friends", by Naori Kobayashi, translated by Unil, Beijing United Publishing Company, May 2021
Meili Snow Mountain is one of the famous "Four Sacred Mountains" in Tibet, and perhaps the most well-known of them. In fact, it stems from a mountain accident that occurred on January 3, 1991, which led to the death of seventeen members of the Sino-Japanese joint mountaineering team. Today, this mountain accident has evolved into several kinds of "folklore" and even "supernatural events", all of which eventually end up in the "punishment" of the gods for arbitrary people. In fact, as soon as the mountaineering team entered the local village, an unexpected conflict began: the locals regarded it as a sacred mountain and fiercely opposed the climbing. Through various channels of negotiation, the matter of mountaineering permission was finally completed, but the tragedy also began. This book is not a variety of "legends" that people say, but the life story of a person who persevered in searching for the remains of the victims of the mountain disaster, and more importantly, the story of a proud, ignorant, empty and lonely modern person who was inspired by it and obtained rebirth and meaning.
Creating a New Japan: A History of U.S.-Japan Relations Since 1853, by Ralphber, translated by Shi Fangzheng, Shanxi People's Publishing House, June 2021
In times of great change, or in times of uncertain prospects, people are turning to history, and it is a wise choice. This is perhaps why the history of Japan-U.S. relations has been of interest to readers and publishers in recent years. The history of Japan-U.S. relations contains a wealth of information, such as "modern colonialism and world civilization", "the clash of empires", "the rise of great powers and the rise and fall of hegemony", "racism and the clash of civilizations", and other topics that people are talking about today, and people always seem to find their corresponding parts in them. Originally titled "Conflict," the book is a panoramic representation of the conflict of ideas and interests between Japan and the United States. Meaningfully, starting from the ninth line of the "Preface" and continuing to the penultimate line of the "Conclusion", the author's six-hundred-page historical narrative never forgets to turn his attention to China. Exactly what message the author wants to convey depends largely on the reader's own mental structure and ability to capture.
The Biography of Tsurumi Shunsuke, [Japanese] Kurokawa, translated by Natsukawa, Guangxi Normal University Press, July 2021
Many times, the imagination of a particular person will often profoundly affect our understanding of a people or a particular era. Toshisuke Tsurumi may be such a character for the reader. Militarism and imperialism, which are the labels of modern Japan, were presented with the image of democracy after the war. These big labels are good, but they sometimes solidify or even weaken our understanding of Japan and the Japanese people. Born into a wealthy family, Tsurumi Shunsuke had a rebellious and bohemian adolescence before the war, studied in the United States with great enthusiasm, and served the imperial army in the Philippines; after the war, he had the era of studying the japanese spirit during the war, the era of teaching at the university, the era of compiling enlightenment books at his own expense, and the era of taking to the streets again and again to protest against the powerful (including the United States and Japan). Chizuru Ueno once said, "The word liberalism was for him." True; Shunsuke Tsurumi defined the spirit of the postwar generations of Japanese nationals.
Loyalty and Rebellion: The State of Spiritual History in Japan's Transition Period, by Maruo Maruyama, translated by Lu Ping, Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House, August 2021
Following the publication of the 2018 Chinese translation of Thoughts and Actions in Modern Politics, this book is another collection of Maruyama's famous essays. People of insight translated these two collections of papers, which can be said to be a great benefit to learn a lot. The content of this book belongs to the study of the history of modern Japanese political thought in terms of classification, but because the author's gaze always looks through the turbidity of reality, it is not an exaggeration to say that this book is a study of political philosophy. With Maruyama's gaze, we see the relatively constant factors that have profoundly influenced the direction of modern Japan. Of course, it also depends on how we read it. Maruyama once suggested that Chinese readers should "re-read" in the Chinese context, but in fact, this puts forward high requirements for readers. For example, this book contains Maruyama's representative paper "The "Ancient Layer" of Historical Consciousness", and Chinese scholars have also introduced the concept of "ancient layer" earlier. This concept tends to be "literal" and stops at a crude literal understanding: the ancient layer is given a decisive role. In fact, Maruyama has a very elaborate exposition of this concept, and how to further read it out of it is a more important question.
Hirofumi Ito: The Founder of Modern Japan, by Noo Ito, translated by Ying Zhang, Social Sciences Academic Press, September 2021.
How did Hirobumi Ito grow from the son of a farmer to the "founder of modern Japan"? Broadly speaking, how could he bring a small country in Haidong to the big stage of world politics and civilization, so that Japan could go to war with the Qing Empire, Tsarist Russia, and the Anglo-American Empire? I myself have read two biographies of Ito before, and with the relevant narratives I have read in other biographies of modern Japanese figures and the history of modern Japan, I have lost a certain pleasant feeling of exploration and anticipation when reading this biography. But perhaps thanks to this, thanks to a certain degree of transparency and misidentification of historical events and historical processes, reading again allowed me to focus on the social structure, universal humanity, and the mental structure of specific people that transcend historical events. These relatively constant forces, like the riverbed, have constrained the course of this river in Japanese history.
Li Yongjing