Isamu Noguchi, born in Los Angeles as the illegitimate son of an American mother and a Japanese poet father, was one of the most prolific yet enigmatic figures in the history of twentieth-century American art. Throughout his life, Noguchi (1904-1988) grappled with the ambiguity of his identity as an artist caught up in two cultures.

His personal struggles--as well as his many personal triumphs--are vividly chronicled in "The Life of Isamu Noguchi," the first full-length biography of this remarkable artist. Published in connection with the centennial of the artist's birth, the book draws on Noguchi's letters, his reminiscences, and interviews with his friends and colleagues to cast new light on his youth, his creativity, and his relationships.

During his sixty-year career, there was hardly a genre that Noguchi failed to explore. He produced more than 2,500 works of sculpture, designed furniture, lamps, and stage sets, created dramatic public gardens all over the world, and pioneered the development of environmental art. After studying in Paris, where he befriended Alexander Calder and worked as an assistant to Constantin Brancusi, he became an ardent advocate for abstract sculpture.

Noguchi's private life was no less passionate than his artistic career. The book describes his romances with many women, among them the dancer Ruth Page, the painter Frida Kahlo, and the writer Anais Nin.

Despite his fame, Noguchi always felt himself an outsider. "With my double nationality and my double upbringing, where was my home?" he once wrote. "Where were my affections? Where my identity?" Never entirely comfortable in the New York art world, he inevitably returned to his father's homeland, where he had spent a troubled childhood. This prize-winning biography, first published in Japanese, traces Isamu Noguchi's lifelong journey across these artistic and cultural borders in search of his personal identity."

With this book the editors complete the three-volume series on modern Japanese colonialism and imperialism that began with "The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895-1945" (Princeton, 1983) and "The Japanese Informal Empire in China, 1895-1937" (Princeton, 1989). The Japanese military takeover in Manchuria between 1931 and 1932 was a critical turning point in East Asian history. It marked the first surge of Japanese aggression beyond the boundaries of its older colonial empire and set Japan on a collision course with China and Western colonial powers from 1937 through 1945. These essays seek to illuminate some of the more significant processes and institutions during the period when the empire was at war: the creation of a Japanese-dominated East Asian economic bloc centered in northeast Asia, the mobilization of human and physical resources in the older established areas of Japanese colonial rule, and the penetration and occupation of Southeast Asia.

Introduced by Peter Duus, the volume contains four sections: Japan's Wartime Empire and the Formal Colonies (Carter J. Eckert and Wan-yao Chou), Japan's Wartime Empire and Northeast Asia (Louise Young, Y. Tak Matsusaka, Ramon H. Myers, and Takafusa Nakamura), Japan's Wartime Empire and Southeast Asia (Mark R. Peattie, E. Bruce Reynolds, and Ken'ichi Goto), and Japan's Wartime Empire in Other Perspectives (George Hicks, Hideo Kobayashi, and L. H. Gann).

Building upon a previous study of Japan's colonial empire, this volume examines the period from 1895 to 1937 when Japan's economic, social, political, and military influence in China expanded so rapidly that it supplanted the influence of Western powers competing there. These fourteen essays discuss how Japan's "informal empire" emerged in China and how that "empire" influenced Japan's own internal development. "Describes in rich detail Japan's organization of a wide range of cultural, educational, economic, military, and bureaucratic institutions that formed the mainstays of Japanese influence in China along with the trading, manufacturing, intelligence-gathering, and political intriguing which they managed."--Wen-hsin Yeh, The Journal of Asian Studies Originally published in 1989. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Building upon a previous study of Japan's colonial empire, this volume examines the period from 1895 to 1937 when Japan's economic, social, political, and military influence in China expanded so rapidly that it supplanted the influence of Western powers competing there. These fourteen essays discuss how Japan's "informal empire" emerged in China and how that "empire" influenced Japan's own internal development. "Describes in rich detail Japan's organization of a wide range of cultural, educational, economic, military, and bureaucratic institutions that formed the mainstays of Japanese influence in China along with the trading, manufacturing, intelligence-gathering, and political intriguing which they managed."--Wen-hsin Yeh, The Journal of Asian Studies

Originally published in 1991.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

In this extraordinary collection of writings, covering the period from 1878 to 1989, a wide range of Japanese visitors to the United States offer their vivid, and sometimes surprising perspectives on Americans and American society. Peter Duus and Kenji Hasegawa have selected essays and articles by Japanese from many walks of life: writers and academics, bureaucrats and priests, politicians and journalists, businessmen, philanthropists, artists. Their views often reflect power relations between America and Japan, particularly during the wartime and postwar periods, but all of them dealt with common themes - America's origins, its ethnic diversity, its social conformity, its peculiar gender relations, its vast wealth, and its cultural arrogance - making clear that while Japanese observers often regarded the U.S. as a mentor, they rarely saw it as a role model.

In early 1920 in Hawaii, Japanese sugar cane workers, faced with spiraling living expenses, defiantly struck for a wage increase to $1.25 per day. The event shook the traditional power structure in Hawaii and, as Masayo Duus demonstrates in this book, had consequences reaching all the way up to the eve of World War II.
By the end of World War I, the Hawaiian Islands had become what a Japanese guidebook called a "Japanese village in the Pacific," with Japanese immigrant workers making up nearly half the work force on the Hawaiian sugar plantations. Although the strikers eventually capitulated, the Hawaiian territorial government, working closely with the planters, cracked down on the strike leaders, bringing them to trial for an alleged conspiracy to dynamite the house of a plantation official. And to end dependence on Japanese immigrant labor, the planters lobbied hard in Washington to lift restrictions on the immigration of Chinese workers. Placing the event in the context of immigration history as well as diplomatic history, Duus argues that the clash between the immigrant Japanese workers and the Hawaiian oligarchs deepened the mutual suspicion between the Japanese and United States governments. Eventually, she demonstrates, this suspicion led to the passage of the so-called Japanese Exclusion Act of 1924, an event that cast a long shadow into the future.
Drawing on both Japanese- and English-language materials, including important unpublished trial documents, this richly detailed narrative focuses on the key actors in the strike. Its dramatic conclusions will have broad implications for further research in Asian American studies, labor history, and immigration history.

In this extraordinary collection of writings, covering the period from 1878 to 1989, a wide range of Japanese visitors to the United States offer their vivid, and sometimes surprising perspectives on Americans and American society. Peter Duus and Kenji Hasegawa have selected essays and articles by Japanese from many walks of life: writers and academics, bureaucrats and priests, politicians and journalists, businessmen, philanthropists, artists. Their views often reflect power relations between America and Japan, particularly during the wartime and postwar periods, but all of them dealt with common themes - America's origins, its ethnic diversity, its social conformity, its peculiar gender relations, its vast wealth, and its cultural arrogance - making clear that while Japanese observers often regarded the U.S. as a mentor, they rarely saw it as a role model.

What forces were behind Japan's emergence as the first non-Western colonial power at the turn of the 20th century? This book examines Meiji expansionism in its study of Japan's acquisition of Korea, the largest of its colonial possessions. It shows how Japan's drive for empire was part of a larger goal to become the economic, diplomatic, and strategic equal of the Western countries who had imposed a humiliating treaty settlement on the country in the 1850s. Duus maintains that two separate but interlinked processes, one political/military and the other economic, propelled Japan's imperialism. Every attempt at increasing Japanese political influence licensed new opportunities for trade, and each new push for Japanese economic interests buttressed, and sometimes justified, further political advances. The sword was the servant of the abacus, the abacus the agent of the sword. While suggesting that Meiji imperialism shared much with the Western colonial expansion that provided both model and context, Duus also argues that it was "backward imperialism" shaped by a sense of inferiority vis-a-vis the West. Along with his detailed diplomatic and economic history, Duus offers a social histo

This first volume to be published in The Cambridge History of Japan provides a general introduction to Japan's history during the first three quarters of the twentieth century. Leading historians have contributed essays, based on recent Western and Japanese scholarship, that present an overview of Japan's political development, external relations, economic growth, and social and intellectual trends.