When Japanese signals were decoded at Bletchley Park, who translated them into English? When Japanese soldiers were taken as prisoners of war, who interrogated them? When Japanese maps and plans were captured on the battlefield, who deciphered them for Britain? When Great Britain found itself at war with Japan in December 1941, there was a linguistic battle to be fought--but Britain was hopelessly unprepared. Eavesdropping on the Emperor traces the men and women with a talent for languages who were put on crash courses in Japanese, and unfolds the history of their war. Some were sent with their new skills to India; others to Mauritius, where there was a secret radio intercept station; or to Australia, where they worked with Australian and American codebreakers. Translating the despatches of the Japanese ambassador in Berlin after his conversations with Hitler; retrieving filthy but valuable documents from the battlefield in Burma; monitoring Japanese airwaves to warn of air-raids--Britain depended on these forgotten 'war heroes'. The accuracy of their translations was a matter of life or death, and they rose to the challenge. Based on declassified archives and interviews with the few survivors, this fascinating, globe-trotting book tells their stories.

This series on the history of the book in the East focuses attention on three areas of the world which for a long time have been undeservedly left on the margins of the global history of the book: the Middle East, South Asia and East Asia. The importance of these three regions of the world lies not only in the sheer antiquity of printing in East Asia, where both movable type and wood blocks were used centuries before Gutenberg's invention changed the face of book production in Europe, but also in the manuscript traditions and very different responses to printing technology in the Middle East and South Asia. This series forms an important counterbalance to the Eurocentrism of the history of the book as practised in the West. The three volumes are edited by renowned experts in the field and each includes an introduction which provides an overview of research in the field. This series offers a significant benefit to students, lecturers and libraries as it brings together leading articles in the field from disparate journals which are often difficult to locate and of limited access. Students are thus able to study leading articles side by side for comparison whilst lecturers are provided with an invaluable 'one-stop' teaching resource. The three volumes in this series are: The History of the Book in East Asia The History of the Book in South Asia The History of the Book in the Middle East

The history of the book in East Asia is closely linked to problems of language and script, problems which have also had a profound impact on the technology of printing and on the social and intellectual impact of print in this area. This volume contains key readings on the history of printed books and manuscripts in China, Korea and Japan and includes an introduction which provides an overview of the history of the book in East Asia and sets the readings in their context.

Meiji Japan represents a reassessment of the political, economic and social history of Japan during the Meiji period (1868-1911). The Meiji Restoration of 1868 was a pivotal event in Japanese history. Often seen as marking the break between 'pre-modern' and 'modern' Japan, the Restoration has dominated perceptions of Japan's history. This major new collection includes both earlier work written along more traditional lines and later challenges to accepted arguments. Together with a major new introduction by Peter Kornicki and bibliography, the articles presented provide a complex, nuanced and up-to-date reading of Japanese history.
Topics covered include:
* the collapse of the Bakufu and the Meiji Restoration
* economic change
* the politics and ideology of change
* social and cultural changes
* industrialization and consequences
* political and institutional change
* the economy.
Meiji Japan analyses the impact of the West, and of sometimes complacent Western notions of 'modernity', on this critical period in Japanese history. The set provides a comprehensive introduction to the history and historiography of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Japan.

This ground-breaking volume on early modern inter-Asian translation examines how translation from plain Chinese was situated at the nexus between, on the one hand, the traditional standard of biliteracy characteristic of literary practices in the Sinographic sphere, and on the other, practices of translational multilingualism (competence in multiple spoken languages to produce a fully localized target text). Translations from plain Chinese are shown to carve out new ecologies of translations that not only enrich our understanding of early modern translation practices across the Sinographic sphere, but also demonstrate that the transregional uses of a non-alphabetic graphic technology call for different models of translation theory.

This new scholarly study examines the history of the relations between the British and Japanese monarchies over the past 150 years. Complemented by a significant plate section which includes a number of rarely seen images, as well as a chronology of royal/imperial visits and extensive bibliography, British Royal and Japanese Imperial Relations, 1868-2018, will become a benchmark reference on the subject. The volume is divided into three sections. Part I, by Peter Kornicki, examines the 'royals and imperials' history during the Meiji era; Part II, by Antony Best, examines the first half of the twentieth century; Part III, by Sir Hugh Cortazzi, focuses on the post-war history up to the present day. Published in association with the Japan Society, its appearance marks the abdication of Emperor Akihito and the enthronement of Crown Prince Naruhito in May 2019. It is also a memorial volume to the late Sir Hugh Cortazzi who died in August 2018, shortly after completing his own contribution to the volume.

This is a complete catalogue, in Japanese with a parallel Japanese/English introduction, of early books acquired by the diplomats W. G. Aston, Ernest Satow, and Heinrich von Siebold in Japan, mostly in the 1860s and 1870s. Of the 2,500 items, some are manuscripts and some movable-type books from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; the bulk, however, are wood-block printed books of the Edo period (1600 1868). The editors' introduction outlines the history of the collection, identifying some of the more important items and explaining the bibliographical principles on which the catalogue has been compiled. The entries that follow give title, author/editor/illustrator, date of publication and/or printing, all participating publishers, and the seals of previous owners.

The ten chapters of this exemplary monograph cover every major aspect of the book in traditional Japan: its place in Japanese history; books as material objects; manuscript cultures; printing; the Edo period book trade; authors and readers; importation and exportation; censorship; libraries and collectors; and bibliographic catalogues.... A handsome and beautifully organized handbook that is sure to inform and stimulate research for many years to come.