Tokyo Romance - Japanese Inspired Fashion & Accessories for Women | Perfect for Date Nights, Travel & Casual Wear

Ian Buruma has always been one of my favorite writers, especially in the way he uses insightful and precise language to capture the personalities of those he observes. In this case, through those characters and his relationships with them during the years he lived in Japan, he manages to capture an entire oeuvre as well, the avant-garde fringe theater and arts culture of Tokyo during the 1970s.I first lived in Japan as an undergraduate during the early ‘sixties, more than a decade earlier, but found in Buruma’s memoir many similarities in our experiences - and the lessons learned therefrom. Even within the more prosaic educational world of the university I attended, it didn’t take long to realize “once a gaijin, always a gaijin” was a necessary dictum to accept, however much one might wish otherwise.During my forty-plus years of teaching Japanese history at the university level that followed, I witnessed student initial notions of Japan shift from images of WWII, geisha, samurai and the atom bomb to fears of “Japan as Number One” and on to the Soft Power influences of manga, anime, Miyazaki and Murakami.Buruma reminds us all that there’s still much more to know about Japan beyond even these changeable and superficial idealized attitudes and images. On the basis of shared similarities and insightful observations alone, I can not recommend this memoir highly enough. It brought back memories and provided both confirmation of my own experiences and insights into a layer of Tokyo life and culture, recognizable but unexperienced.