Japanese Historians

Ancient Period: From the Old Stone Age to the Nara Period in the 8th Century

Ancient Period: From the Old Stone Age to the Nara Period in the 8th Century

Until 1951, when Kurosawa’s Rashomon won the Golden Lion award for best film at the Venice Film Festival, Japanese cinema was isolated from world distribution and the international discourse on film. After this historic event, however, Japanese cinema could no longer be ignored.

Traditional Japanese architecture-whether Buddhist temples or Shinto shrines, residences, castles, or teahouses-has become increasingly familiar around the world. Through the media of motion pictures, art books, T.V. documentaries and dramas such as Shogun, as well as through personal experience, more and more people have gained an acquaintance and appreciation of the architecture of premodern Japan.

The Pacific War Papers is an annotated collection of extremely rare Japanese primary-source documents, translated into English, that provides an invaluable resource for historians and students of World War II. These naval and diplomatic documents come from the collection of the late Gordon Prange, the eminent scholar of Pearl Harbor, who obtained them from Japanese naval leaders while working for the Military History Section of the American forces that occupied Japan. Donald M. Goldstein and Katherine V. Dillon have assembled this collection so that these important documents are not lost to history.