Books published by Stone Bridge Press

The classic travel journal, a quest for personal discovery and the ancient beauties and dying values of modern Japan.

How is China organized politically? What are the issues that young people face in today's China? What is China doing about its problem with pollution? Is the Chinese internet like our internet? What's China's role in the world today? And how much do you know about China's great woman emperor or the Chinese explorer whose voyages may have inspired the legend of Sinbad the Sailor? What are the major Chinese holidays, their superstitions regarding numbers, and the true nature of the Chinese written language?In nearly 60 brief essays, long-time China expert Larry Herzberg tackles important facts and myths about China, its history, people, and culture, as well as its contemporary society. Anyone dipping into this book will emerge that much smarter about China, whether visiting, conducting business, studying the language, or simply being fascinated by one of the world's greatest and most influential civilizations.

The first volume in this easy to read, comic-style series on Chinese history

Tsuneichi Miyamoto (19071981), a leading Japanese folklore scholar and rural advocate, walked 160,000 kilometers to conduct interviews and capture a dying way of life. This collection of photos, vignettes, and life stories from pre- and postwar rural Japan is the first English translation of his modern Japanese classic. From blowfish to landslides, Miyamotos stories come to life in Jeffrey Irishs fluid translation.

How China became the China we know today, through war and societal transformation.

60 years of observation: an American journalist's memoir about Tokyo's modern urban transformation, its criminal underworld and, oh yes, baseball.

Tokyo Stroll is for travelers who want to wander the streets and discover the city as it unfolds before their eyes. Select neighborhoods are profiled with detailed maps identifying locations and landmarks of interest. There is no "e;start at point A and go to point B"e; prescribed route. Instead readers are encouraged to wander as whimsy takes them. Food, shopping, and sights at every turn are provided with descriptions and over 150 maps to aid discovery. Includes detailed notes on etiquette, money, and travel. Indexed.

: A cultural and personal journey into the famous sutra that teaches "form is emptiness; and emptiness is form."

Yukio Mishima (b. 1925) was a brilliant writer and intellectual whose relentless obsession with beauty, purity, and patriotism ended in his astonishing self-disembowelment and decapitation in downtown Tokyo in 1970. Nominated for the Nobel Prize, Mishima was the best-known novelist of his time (works like Confessions of a Mask and The Temple of the Golden Pavilion are still in print in English), and his legacyhis personais still honored and puzzled over. Who was Yukio Mishima really? This, the first full biography to appear in English in almost forty years, traces Mishima's trajectory from a sickly boy named Kimitake Hiraoka to a hard-bodied student of martial arts. In detail it examines his family life, the wartime years, and his emergence, then fame, as a writer and advocate for traditional values. Revealed here are all the personalities and conflicts and sometimes petty backbiting that shaped the culture of postwar literary Japan. Working entirely from primary sources and material unavailable to other biographers, author Naoki Inose and translator Hiroaki Sato together have produced a monumental work that covers much new ground in unprecedented depth. Using interviews, social and psychological analysis, and close reading of novels and essays, Persona removes the mask that Mishima so artfully created to disguise his true self. Naoki Inose, currently vice governor of Tokyo, has also written biographies of writers Kikuchi Kan and Osamu Dazai. New Yorkbased Hiroaki Sato is an award-winning translator of classical and modern Japanese poetry, and also translated Mishima's novel Silk and Insight.

An American's unique behind-the-scenes look at Japanese business and how the animated films of Hayao Miyazaki were introduced to the world.

Introducing the works of a major Chinese writer--liberal, cosmopolitan, and lyrically exotic--once banned but now embraced, and newly "discovered" in the West.

Two women. Two cultures. One music.