Our latest batch of seven articles have been released Early Access today.
Two of these are part of 2026’s Special Section examining “Kyoto’s Imperial Modernity: Erasure and Preservation.”
Mariko Okada examines the experiences of Kyoto’s Geisha during the war, in Competing with Housewives on the Home Front: Kyoto’s Geisha and the Fifteen Years’ War.
Philip Seaton examines how Kyoto’s universities narrate the war today, in Kyoto’s Universities at War, 1937-1945: Using Institutional History, Addressing Institutional Responsibility.
The articles in the Special Section by Oleg Benesch and Ran Zwigenberg, by Steven Ivings, and by Daniel Milne and David Moreton are already available Early Access, and the Section itself will be published in this year’s issue in December 2026.
We then have four research articles that run the gamut from the commodification of early modern literary identities, the role of imperial household grants in the prewar and wartime periods, nuclear weapons in Mishima Yukio’s fiction, and a cryptogamic history of homosexuality in modern Japan.
Jingyi Li, Ginkei and Co.: Commodifying Literati Identity in Nineteenth-Century Japan.
Yūsuke Katō, Imperial Household Grants from 1914 to 1945: On the Social Functions of the Monarchy in Modern Japan.
Scott Mehl, The Nuclear Beautiful: The Ethics and Aesthetics of the Bomb in the Writings of Mishima Yukio.
Patrick Carland-Echavarria, Plants in the Shade: Cryptogams as Queer Metaphor in Modern Japanese Discourse.
Finally, we conclude with a wonderful reflexive research note by Kristopher W. Kersey on Materiality, Visuality, and Phenomenology: Strategies of Reproduction in Modern Japanese Books.
Please take a moment to enjoy the rich research presented here!