From the Archives: Stranger in the Shogun’s City

Over the last few weeks the book Stranger in the Shogun’s City has come up several times in conversations with fellow history buffs and book nerds.  Each time, my response has been “I love that book!”  And after a while I decided it was time to tell those of you who didn’t read this review…

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Angels of the Underground

Now and then I realize that a book slipped through the cracks, that I read it and never reviewed here on the Margins. My friend Theresa Kaminski’s  Angels of the Underground: The American Women Who Resisted the Japanese in the Philippines in World War II is one of those books[1], something I realized only after…

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Pure Invention

Those of you who also read my newsletter may remember that for the last few months I have been exploring the question of Japanese pop culture and the United States. It has been fascinating and frustrating. I know a lot more than I did when I began my quest in early February, but I still…

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