I`ll chine in with a couple of recommendations too:  The Road
to Sata by the late Alan Booth--fantastic book and will give you
great insight into Japanese people.  Anything by Reishauer the former
American ambassador to Japan.

Kevin
http://www.how-to-teach-english-in-japan.com

- In japan_kfss@yahoogroups.com, "Miriam Solon" <screaminmimi@...> wrote:
>
> Sorry for posting this as a special notice, but I need to find out
> who's still out there and interested. If this provokes a wave of
> unsubscribes, I'm not concerned about that.
>
> I just finished reading "The Strangeness of Beauty" by Lydia Minatoya.
> I'm usually wary of fiction set in Japan written by Americans, even
> Japanese Americans, but this book is a beautiful meditation on what it
> meant to be Japanese in the first third of the 20th century, from the
> point of view of an issei who returns to Japan after a dozen years in
> Seattle.
>
> Minatoya works every angle and makes this a study in history as it
> affected everyday people, comparative ethnography, and comparative
> literature without once losing the reader in academia. It's all in the
> details, such as revelations about little-known social taboos; and in
> the larger themes, such as domestic resistance to Showa Japan's
> growing militarism.
>
> If you've ever been baffled by Japanese customs and weren't even sure
> of what you were seeing, much less what to ask, this book will give
> you a lot of insights.
>