Book Breaks

Wednesday, April 11, 2018, 18:15 - 20:30      ​​​​​​​ Damian Flanagan     Damian Flanagan presents: “An Evening with Yukio Mishima.”   He’s back, for one night only! Join us for a celebration of literary great Yukio Mishima (1925-70) as writer and critic Flanagan discusses his recent...

Wednesday, April 10, 2019, 18:15 - 20:30                 ​​​​​​​     Tokyo is a city that defies the orthodox and conventional, demanding a sensitive approach to particular occurrences in the smaller scale. Given its changing nature, urban scholars often find it...

Tuesday, March 06, 2018, 18:15 - 20:30     ​​​​​​​  Richard Lloyd Parry Asia Editor of The Times     No one who was alive at the time will forget March 11, 2011, when a massive earthquake sent a 40-metre high tsunami smashing into the coast of north-east Japan....

Tuesday, February 20, 2018, 18:15 - 20:30     ​​​​​​​   Professor Philip Seaton of Hokkaido University   “Contents tourism” is probably not a familiar term to many, but most people these days will have seen stories about the phenomenon and been contents tourists themselves. “Contents” are the...

Tuesday, January 23, 2018, 18:15 - 20:30           Kazuo Abiko　 （我孫子和夫）　 　　　　　　　　　   Ko Yamaguchi (山口光）   The environment surrounding news media has changed drastically over the past two decades, primarily due to rapid advancement of information technology. The hardest-hit might be the newspaper...

Wednesday, January 10, 2018, 18:15 - 20:30    Robert S. Boynton Professor of Journalism New York University   During the 1970s and early eighties, dozens – perhaps hundreds – of  Japanese civilians were kidnapped by North Korean commandos and forced to live in ‘Invitation-Only Zones’ in North Korea,...

Monday, December 18, 2017, 18:15 - 20:30     Yasuko Claremont, Ph.D. Honorary Senior Lecturer, University of Sydney     The atrocities committed by the Japanese Imperial Army in occupied countries over 70 years ago are still live issues in Japan today, the basic cause being the inability...

Wednesday, October 25, 2017, 18:15 - 20:30       "On an early fall day when Washington, Seoul, Tokyo and Beijing were in an uproar over the latest North Korean outrage, a U.S. Forces van propelled me and three other camera people past the scenic barbed wire and...

Tuesday, September 12, 2017, 18:15 - 20:30 Pachinko is a tour de force following one Korean family through the generations, beginning in early 1900s Korea with Sunja, the prized daughter of a poor yet proud family, whose unplanned pregnancy threatens to shame and ruin them. Min Jin Lee...

Wednesday, July 26, 2017, 18:15 - 20:30   Peter MacMillan     Peter MacMillan, a renowned translator of Japanese literature, will speak on his new translation of The Tales of Ise and One Hundred Poems, One Poem Each (英語で読む百人一首 = Eigo de yomu hyakunin isshu).  ...