Understanding Modern Japan Through Its Literature

Roy Starrs, M.A., PhD (University of British Columbia), now an honorary professor at the University of Otago in New Zealand, before his recent retirement taught Japanese and Asian Studies in Canada, the United States, Denmark, and New Zealand. He has published widely on Japanese topics, including books on the major novelists Yukio Mishima, Yasunari Kawabata, and Naoya Shiga, as well as studies of Japanese modernism, the relation between Japanese politics and religion, and cultural responses to the triple disaster of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown that hit Japan in March, 2011. His most recent book is The Paradoxes of Japan’s Cultural Identity (Routledge, 2025). At present, he is working on a three-volume multidisciplinary comparative study of global cultural responses to disaster from ancient times to the present.

Elliot Neaman studied in Vancouver, Canada, Zürich, Switzerland, Berlin, Germany, Berkeley, CA. Professor of History, University of San Francisco. Board member of the Journal of Right-Wing Studies. His previous books include A Dubious Past (California U Press, 1999), Free Radicals (Telos Press, 2016). Journals: German Politics and Society, New German Critique, World Economics Journal, German History Review, Journal of Central European History, Journal of Eastern European History, Telos.

Professor Matthew Feldman is a specialist on fascist ideology and the far-right in Europe and the USA. He is the author or editor of more than 20 books, including three book-length studies, and more than 40 articles or academic book chapters. Published volumes include Clerical Fascism in Interwar Europe (Routledge, 2008), A Fascist Century (Palgrave, 2008), and, with Roger Griffin, the five-volume collection Fascism: Critical Concepts (Routledge, 2003). More recent volumes include Doublespeak: The Rhetoric of the Far-Right since 1945 (with Paul Jackson, 2014), The ‘New Man’ in Radical Right Ideology and Practice, 1919–1945 (with Jorge Dagnino and Paul Stocker, 2017), as well as the journal specials Far-right Populism and Lone Wolf Terrorism in Contemporary Europe (Democracy and Security, 2013) and The Ideologies and Ideologues of the Radical Right (Patterns of Prejudice, 2016). His most recent monograph, Ezra Pound’s Fascist Propaganda, 1935-1945, appeared with Palgrave in 2013. He has published two collections of essays with Ibidem Press, Falsifying Beckett (2015) and Politics, Intellectuals, and Faith (2020).