The Japanese word gaijin means "unwelcome foreigner." It's not profanity, but is sometimes, a slur directed at non-Japanese people in Japan. My novel is, called Gaijin...

With a white mother and a Japanese father, Koji Miyamoto quickly realizes that his home in San Francisco is no longer a welcoming one after Pearl Harbor is attacked. And once he's sent to an internment camp, he learns that being half white at the camp is just as difficult as being half Japanese on the streets of an American city during WWII. Koji's story, based on true events, is brought to life by Matt Faulkner's cinematic illustrations that reveal...

The New York Times "Best Cookbooks of Fall 2019" Bon Appetit's "Fall Cookbooks We've Been Waiting All Summer For" Epicurious' "Fall 2019 Cookbooks We Can't Wait to Cook From" Amazon's Picks for "Best Fall Cookbooks 2019" Ivan Orkin is a self-described gaijin (guy-jin), a Japanese term that means "outsider." He has been hopelessly in love with the food of Japan since he was a teenager on Long Island. Even after living in Tokyo for decades and...

This epic novel by master writer James Clavell, loosely based on the Namamugi Incident and Anglo-Satsuma War that took place in the late 1800s, is a richly researched, panoramic view of Japan's budding relationship with the Western powers, its sweeping societal changes, and the political upheaval that followed. As Malcolm Struan, the son of Culum and Tess Struan, and a small band of Westerners travel down the Tōkaidō road, they are attacked by...

Having crossed a continent by train and sailed around the world by container ship, Clive Wilkinson has always had a penchant for slow travel. As his eightieth birthday approaches, he and his wife Joan set out on a new expedition: to tour the edges of England by electric car. How hard could that be? In a 1,900-mile odyssey through fading seaside towns, rainswept hilltop passes and England' s only desert, each day' s driving for these unlikely pioneers...

"A highly entertaining memoir describing what it was like to work for Japan's premiere animation studio, Studio Ghibli, and its reigning genius Hayao Miyazaki. A behind-the-scenes look at what it's like for a gaijin (foreigner) to work in a thoroughly Japanese organization run by four of the most famous and culturally influential people in modern Japan."--

"Japan, 1957. Seventeen-year-old Naoko Nakamura's prearranged marriage to the son of her father's business associate would secure her family's status in their traditional Japanese community, but Naoko has fallen for another man--an American sailor, a gaijin--and to marry him would bring great shame upon her entire family. When it's learned Naoko carries the sailor's child, she's cast out in disgrace and forced to make unimaginable choices with consequences...

A Room Where the Star-Spangled Banner Cannot Be Heard is the highly acclaimed, moving debut of Levy Hideo (also known as Ian Hideo Levy), a white American author living in Japan who writes fiction and nonfiction in Japanese. Set against the political and social upheavals of the 1960s, which include student protests against the Vietnam War and the U.S.-Japan Mutual Cooperation and Security Treaty (AMPO), the novel tells the story of Ben Isaac, a blond-haired,...

"I had been here before: I was going from being a mere 'interpreter' to being a 'cultural interpreter.' It was a dangerous path to tread." Walking Japan's ancient inland route in search of a vague romantic notion, the author encounters a string of idiosyncratic characters, locals with a story to tell. Recording their stories, the author braids a travelogue deftly interwoven with his own experiences since he first set foot in Japan some thirty-years...