A new volume of the Nitobe lecture series has been published in June 2017. This volume is a collection of lectures from the 2015–16 Nitobe Leadership Program. The 12 lecturers from various fields talked about what we can do for a better society and future based on their own experiences and hard-won wisdom. (Available only Japanese)

This volume is a collection of lectures mainly from the 2013–14 Nitobe Kokusai Juku. The 13 lecturers from various fields talked about what we can do for a better society and future based on their own experiences and hard-won wisdom.

This volume is a collection of lectures mainly from the 2011 and 2012 Nitobe Kokusai Juku. The lecturers from various fields talked about how Japan can get through “a time of crisis” after the March 11 earthquake in 2011.

Starting with the encounter of Matsumoto Shigeharu and John D. Rockefeller, 3rd at a conference of the Institute of Pacific Relations in 1929 in Kyoto, this book traces how the close personal relationship and mutual trust forged and deepened between the two led in the early postwar period to the creation of a unique institution devoted to promoting international understanding through cultural exchange, the International House of Japan.

Why has Japan’s presence in the international community declined in recent years? That is not only because the Japanese economy has been less and less influential, but because there are fewer and fewer Japanese “internationalists” who can play a leadership role.

This collection of lectures, given at the 2009-10 Nitobe Kokusai Juku by twelve eminent professionals from academia, journalism, and international organizations, constitutes a “bible” for aspiring young internationalists as well as anyone concerned with Japan’s future role as a member of international society.

You have in your hands an unprecedented account of the history of East Asian calligraphy. Here is a book every bit as accessible and fascinating for noncalligraphers and for individuals unversed in kanji as it is for calligraphers and for kanji-literate readers. The author, Ishikawa Kyuyoh, speaks of “the drama of the stylus” [brush and chisel], and he brings that drama alive by positioning it in compelling context: historical and spiritual, as well as artistic and cultural.

——From the translator’s introduction

What kinds of disparities do women in Japan face today? What role do a woman’s family background, education, and decisions regarding marriage and children play in determining her place in society? Is there a social gap between full-time homemakers and working women? What about women in the workplace: do women in clerical or part-time positions enjoy social parity with those on the management track? Providing an in-depth analysis based on statistical data, this timely book offers penetrating insights into these issues and suggests remedies to help Japan grapple with this growing social dilemma.

What led Japan to its disastrous war against the United States and Britain? Why was the notification delayed, giving rise to American vilification of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor without a declaration of war?

In this ground-breaking book, former Japanese diplomat Iguchi Takeo looks at the failure of diplomacy before examining in depth Japan’s final memorandum to the United States and its delayed transmission to the Japanese embassy in Washington and thus to the US State Department.

This photo book provides an overview of the International House’s history of cultural exchange and intellectual cooperation from its dawn in 1952 to the present day. With over 300 images chronologically documenting various significant moments of cross-border dialogue between East and West, it illustrates the House’s pioneering role in promoting mutual understanding between Japan and other countries via dynamic intellectual exchange.

Why has Japan’s presence in the international community declined in recent years? That is not only because the Japanese economy has been less and less influential, but because there are fewer and fewer Japanese “internationalists” who can play a leadership role.

This collection of lectures, given at the 2008 Nitobe Juku by ten eminent professionals from academia, journalism, and international organizations, constitutes a “bible” for aspiring young internationalists as well as anyone concerned with Japan’s future role as a member of international society.

What was the Edo inheritance? The Japanese have often thought of the Edo period as Japan’s dark ages, when the nation, isolated under the Tokugawa shogunate’s national seclusion policy, fell hopelessly behind the rest of the world. In this book Tokugawa Tsunenari argues that, on the contrary, Tokugawa Japan was in many ways ahead of the West in its long peace and widespread prosperity. Writing from his unique perspective as the eighteenth head of the house of Tokugawa, the author points out that a reevaluation of the Tokugawa era is long overdue.

The 1920s and 1930s were a turbulent era for the world economy—a time of shifting monetary policies, trade protectionism, and the Great Depression. Emerging on the world stage as the first non-Western industrial power, Japan faced charges of dumping and protectionism. This groundbreaking work by Michiko Ikeda examines the harsh environment faced by Japan in the years 1926 to 1937 and again in the years from 1948 to 1985. It draws on original study of League of Nations reports and of declassified government documents in Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Education is under pressure throughout the world as globalization and technological revolution create a new Learning Society in which citizens can never stop learning new skills in work and life. In this volume, the journalist Reiko Kinoshita examines how a Japanese learning program, the Kumon Method, has quietly spread worldwide in response to this changed environment.

Maruyama Masao (1914-96) has been widely regarded as an archetype of the twentieth-century Japanese intellectual.

In this intellectual biography, Karube Tadashi traces Maruyama’s childhood and youth in prewar and wartime Japan, vividly depicting a number of the key experiences that deepened his commitment to democratic ideals and motivated his quest to ground them in the autonomy and integrity of the individual. This was the perspective that informed Maruyama’s postwar investigation of the problems of mass society and his efforts to reinterpet the Japanese tradition by dissecting its pathologies and tracing the alternative paths to modernity latent within it.

This is a collection of papers and writings contributed to the House conference in summer 2006 to celebrate the renewal reopening of the International House of Japan. Attempting to grasp the complex and multiple meanings of “Globalization” beyond the conventional definition and understanding in terms of the growing interdependence of the world, the formation of global institutions, and mutually exclusive conditions of the global and the national (local), this volume aims at shedding light on its contradictory aspects from both a political and cultural perspective.

A prominent historian of modern Japan, the late professor Marius Jansen is known as the author of the highly acclaimed work Sakamoto Ryoma and the Meiji Restoration. He played a pioneering role in the internationalization of Japanese studies through his innovative scholarship and teaching, and was admired in Japan and Europe as well as the United States, not only for his contributions to the study of Japanese history, but for the way he tied Japan’s historical experience to the larger frames of inter-Asian, trans-Pacific, and indeed global history.

The essays complied together in this volume—all written by old friends and former students—are centered on major themes running throughout his work.

Kazuhiro Takii details the formulation of Japan’s Meiji Constitution. He looks beyond the legal codification of the document and shows how the constitution catalyzed the emergence of a modern nation-state. Takii brings a cross-cultural perspective to his analysis. He relates how key leaders of Meiji Japan had experienced the West through fact-finding missions and extended overseas travel and research, and he demonstrates how their international experience shaped the policies and character of the nation-state that they helped build.

Akihiko Matsutani offers a refreshingly informed and far-reaching account of the economic and social implications of the demographic change under way in Japan. He exposes the futility of widely proposed measures for forestalling population and economic shrinkage, such as encouraging larger families and encouraging an influx of foreign workers. Matsutani urges Japanese, instead, to learn to live with a smaller, older population.

In 1853 a flotilla of U.S. Navy warships led by Commodore Matthew C. Perry arrived in Japan. A scant fourteen years later the rule of the Tokugawa shogunate, which had lasted two and a half centuries, was at an end. What lay behind the sudden collapse of samurai rule?

Quoting extensively from contemporary sources, Watanabe Hiroshi provides a concise but wide-ranging introduction to three centuries of political thought in Japan. In examining the implications of applying Chinese political philosophy to a very different Japanese culture, he offers a fascinating look at early modern Japan, touching upon, for example, the sorrows of the samurai, avenues of protest for the peasantry, sexuality and the social order, and the excitement of new ideas and freedoms in the early Meiji period.

“The Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95 was an event that determined the subsequent course of Japan’s modern history. The war transformed the political consciousness of the Japanese people and brought about the formation of a modern nation-state. This book is an analysis of that process, focusing primarily on developments in the mass media and their impact on popular behavior . . . .

—Saya Makito, from Preface of this volume.

Architectural historian Takeshi Nakagawa revisits Japan’s traditional domestic architecture in twenty-five essays illustrated gorgeously with color photographs. The essays take on a personal warmth as the author recalls, for example, taking a nap on tatami shaded by reed blinds while “the din of cicadas would seem to pause for a moment as an occasional cool breeze blew.”