27 books like Atlas Historique De Kyôto

By Nicolas Fiévé,

Here are 27 books that Atlas Historique De Kyôto fans have personally recommended if you like Atlas Historique De Kyôto. Shepherd is a community of 11,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.

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Book cover of A History of Tokyo 1867-1989: From EDO to Showa: The Emergence of the World's Greatest City

Blair A. Ruble Author Of Second Metropolis: Pragmatic Pluralism in Gilded Age Chicago, Silver Age Moscow, and Meiji Osaka

From my list on for understanding Japanese urban history.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am a comparative urban specialist who came to Japanese urban history through my aspiration to place Russian urban studies within a comparative context.  Several Japanese and Western Japan specialists encouraged me to advance this exploration by examining capitalist industrial urbanization in Japan.  Historians and political scientists -- particularly at Kyoto National University -- provided a platform for me to expand my engagement with Japanese urbanization; relations which have continued for some three decades.  More recently, I included Kabuki in The Muse of Urban Delirium, a collection of essays that seeks answers to the challenges of urban diversity, conflict, and creativity using various performing arts – opera, dance, theater, music – as windows onto urban life.

Blair's book list on for understanding Japanese urban history

Blair A. Ruble Why did Blair love this book?

This new edition combines under one cover Edward Seidensticker’s colossal Low City: Tokyo from Edo to the Earthquake and Tokyo Rising.  Few cities have been so fortunate as to have such erudite-yet-accessible books written about them; by an outsider, no less. A towering figure on late twentieth-century Japanese studies and letters, Seidensticker arrived in Tokyo weeks after General Douglas MacArthur had assumed control of the country. His work on major twentieth-century Japanese writers earned him graduate degrees and faculty appointments at major American universities; his freelance writing on Japanese life extended the reach of his work well beyond the halls of academia. Most strikingly, his historical works about Tokyo demonstrate a deep knowledge of, and passionate devotion to,  the city on every page.

By Edward G. Seidensticker,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked A History of Tokyo 1867-1989 as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

This is a freaking great book and I highly recommend it... if you are passionate about the history of 'the world's greatest city,' this book is something you must have in your collection. JapanThis.com. Edward Seidensticker's A History of Tokyo 1867-1989 tells the fascinating story of Tokyo's transformation from the Shogun's capital in an isolated Japan to the largest and the most modern city in the world. With the same scholarship and sparkling style that won him admiration as the foremost translator of great works of Japanese literature, Seidensticker offers the reader his brilliant vision of an entire society suddenly…


Book cover of Neighborhood and Nation in Tokyo, 1905-1937

Blair A. Ruble Author Of Second Metropolis: Pragmatic Pluralism in Gilded Age Chicago, Silver Age Moscow, and Meiji Osaka

From my list on for understanding Japanese urban history.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am a comparative urban specialist who came to Japanese urban history through my aspiration to place Russian urban studies within a comparative context.  Several Japanese and Western Japan specialists encouraged me to advance this exploration by examining capitalist industrial urbanization in Japan.  Historians and political scientists -- particularly at Kyoto National University -- provided a platform for me to expand my engagement with Japanese urbanization; relations which have continued for some three decades.  More recently, I included Kabuki in The Muse of Urban Delirium, a collection of essays that seeks answers to the challenges of urban diversity, conflict, and creativity using various performing arts – opera, dance, theater, music – as windows onto urban life.

Blair's book list on for understanding Japanese urban history

Blair A. Ruble Why did Blair love this book?

Cities often look quite different from the bottom up than from the top down. The practical demands of making cities work often rest on the shoulders of the most local of officials.  Consequently, neighborhood officialdom often engages with citizens and residents more openly, even in authoritarian systems. Such engagement may hold the seeds of future democratic change. Hastings’ study of Honjo Ward and other proletarian Tokyo districts before World War II reveals a surprisingly robust participatory political and cultural environment across the early twentieth century.

By Sally Ann Hastings,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Neighborhood and Nation in Tokyo, 1905-1937 as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

In this pre-World War II analysis of working-class areas of Tokyo, primarily its Honjo ward, Hastings shows that bureaucrats, particularly in the Home Ministry, were concerned with the needs of their citizens and took significant steps to protect the city's working families and the poor. She also demonstrates that the public participated broadly in politics, through organizations such as reservist groups, national youth leagues, neighborhood organizations, as well as growing suffrage and workplace organizations.


Book cover of Neighborhood Tokyo

Blair A. Ruble Author Of Second Metropolis: Pragmatic Pluralism in Gilded Age Chicago, Silver Age Moscow, and Meiji Osaka

From my list on for understanding Japanese urban history.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am a comparative urban specialist who came to Japanese urban history through my aspiration to place Russian urban studies within a comparative context.  Several Japanese and Western Japan specialists encouraged me to advance this exploration by examining capitalist industrial urbanization in Japan.  Historians and political scientists -- particularly at Kyoto National University -- provided a platform for me to expand my engagement with Japanese urbanization; relations which have continued for some three decades.  More recently, I included Kabuki in The Muse of Urban Delirium, a collection of essays that seeks answers to the challenges of urban diversity, conflict, and creativity using various performing arts – opera, dance, theater, music – as windows onto urban life.

Blair's book list on for understanding Japanese urban history

Blair A. Ruble Why did Blair love this book?

Theodore Bestor carries the neighborhood theme forward into the boom years of the 1980s.  Based on ethnographic fieldwork between 1979 and 1981, Bestor pulls apart the deep web of social, economic, and political relationships which hold neighborhoods and communities together despite being submerged in the enormity of Tokyo.  He uncovers actors, institutions, and customs which facilitated modernization while sustaining a veneer of tradition.  At it core, Bestor’s neighborhood revealed a social and cultural inventiveness that enabled its communities to engage with and benefit from unprecedented social change.

By Theodore C. Bestor,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Neighborhood Tokyo as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

In the vastness of Tokyo these are tiny social units, and by the standards that most Americans would apply, they are perhaps far too small, geographically and demographically, to be considered "neighborhoods." Still, to residents of Tokyo and particularly to the residents of any given subsection of the city, they are socially significant and geographically distinguishable divisions of the urban landscape. In neighborhoods such as these, overlapping and intertwining associations and institutions provide an elaborate and enduring framework for local social life, within which residents are linked to one another not only through their participation in local organizations, but also…


Book cover of The City as Subject, 13: Seki Hajime and the Reinvention of Modern Osaka

Blair A. Ruble Author Of Second Metropolis: Pragmatic Pluralism in Gilded Age Chicago, Silver Age Moscow, and Meiji Osaka

From my list on for understanding Japanese urban history.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am a comparative urban specialist who came to Japanese urban history through my aspiration to place Russian urban studies within a comparative context.  Several Japanese and Western Japan specialists encouraged me to advance this exploration by examining capitalist industrial urbanization in Japan.  Historians and political scientists -- particularly at Kyoto National University -- provided a platform for me to expand my engagement with Japanese urbanization; relations which have continued for some three decades.  More recently, I included Kabuki in The Muse of Urban Delirium, a collection of essays that seeks answers to the challenges of urban diversity, conflict, and creativity using various performing arts – opera, dance, theater, music – as windows onto urban life.

Blair's book list on for understanding Japanese urban history

Blair A. Ruble Why did Blair love this book?

Osaka became an industrial giant during the Meiji period, remaining one of the world’s fastest-growing cities throughout the later decades of the nineteenth century and early decades of the twentieth.  The city outgrew Tokyo in both population and industrial production for a brief period during the 1930s.  This was a time when social displacement, horrendous public health and housing failings, and labor unrest threatened communal wellbeing.  The city responded with some of the most innovative social policies of the era, especially under the leadership of Mayor Seki Hajime.  As Hanes uncovers, Seki used his training as a social economist to promote increased industrial production that simultaneously became people-centered. The result was a modernized Osaka that retained a vibrant social inventiveness in the years leading up to World War II.

By Jeffrey E. Haynes,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The City as Subject, 13 as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

In exploring the career of Seki Hajime (1873-1935), who served as mayor of Japan's second-largest city, Osaka, Jeffrey E. Hanes traces the roots of social progressivism in prewar Japan. Seki, trained as a political economist in the late 1890s, when Japan was focused single-mindedly on "increasing industrial production," distinguished himself early on as a people-centered, rather than a state-centered, national economist. After three years of advanced study in Europe at the turn of the century, during which he engaged Marxism and later steeped himself in the exciting new field of social economics, Seki was transformed into a progressive. The social…


Book cover of The Historic Urban Landscape: Managing Heritage in an Urban Century

Matthias Ripp Author Of A Metamodel for Heritage-based Urban Development: Enabling Sustainable Growth Through Urban Cultural Heritage

From my list on understanding that cultural heritage can be part of the solution to climate change.

Why am I passionate about this?

I started my career in tourism but soon discovered my passion for urban heritage. Working as a site manager for a world heritage site, I gathered extensive insights on various levels of heritage management and urban governance from many colleagues around the world. Today there is no single project or meeting that does not address the challenges of climate change. Obtaining my Ph.D. late in life, in Heritage-Based Urban Development, I quickly became convinced that the traditional ideas of what cultural heritage is do not reflect the situation today and hinder giving cultural heritage a role in climate change prevention and adaption, beyond the narrative that it has to be preserved. 

Matthias' book list on understanding that cultural heritage can be part of the solution to climate change

Matthias Ripp Why did Matthias love this book?

This groundbreaking volume paved the way for a modern understanding of urban heritage and, by this, enabled more focus on resource qualities that can be used to respond to climate change.

Even a few years old, this book marked an important milestone in the evolution of a modern heritage understanding that is now often called the New Heritage Approach. Leveraging the since-then prevalent concept of cultural heritage as objects (buildings), this book elaborates based on the recommendation for the historic urban landscape, an idea of urban heritage that consists of different layers, functions, etc., and emphasizes the relations and connections between these different entities.

By Francesco Bandarin, Ron van Oers,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Historic Urban Landscape as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

This book offers a comprehensive overview of the intellectual developments in urban conservation. The authors offer unique insights from UNESCO's World Heritage Centre and the book is richly illustrated with colour photographs. Examples are drawn from urban heritage sites worldwide from Timbuktu to Liverpool to demonstrate key issues and best practice in urban conservation today. The book offers an invaluable resource for architects, planners, surveyors and engineers worldwide working in heritage conservation, as well as for local authority conservation officers and managers of heritage sites.


Book cover of Exploring Kyoto: On Foot in the Ancient Capital

John Dougill Author Of Kyoto: A Cultural History

From my list on understanding Kyoto.

Why am I passionate about this?

Kyoto is one of the world’s great cities. I first came here in 1994, its 1200th anniversary, and was entranced by its many treasures. In the city’s river basin were fostered the traditional arts and crafts of Japan. This is the city of Zen, Noh, the tea ceremony, geisha, moss and rock gardens, not to mention the aristocratic aesthetes of the Heian Era. Here in the ancient capital are imperial estates and no fewer than 17 World Heritage sites, including the Golden Pavilion and the divine Byodo-in. Faced with this wealth of wonders, I tried to weave them into a coherent story – the story of a most remarkable city.

John's book list on understanding Kyoto

John Dougill Why did John love this book?

Kyoto is known for its many famous sights. But wandering around the backstreets and through the many pockets of nature brings rewards of a completely different kind. Armed with this guide by long-term resident Judith Clancy, I enjoyed many happy days exploring lesser-known routes while appreciating the advice about places to eat and what to look at.

By Judith Clancy,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Exploring Kyoto as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

This revised and updated edition of the Japan travel classic and cultural guide gets you wandering from downtown quarters to remote mountaintop temples and features expanded information on new museums and gardens now open year-round for viewing.

Judith Clancy's expert research weaves a rich narrative of Kyoto's history, local lore, and artistic and religious background to guide you through your journey.

Includes:

31 explorations including 5 mountain routes, 17 World Heritage Sites, Arashiyama, Kiyomizu-dera, Philosopher's Walk, the city's 6 Zen temple complexes, and much more Detailed maps tracing each route Over 30 descriptive photos Tips on etiquette and behavior A…


Book cover of Of Time and Stars: The Worlds of Arthur C. Clarke

R.E. Palmer Author Of Song of Echoes

From my list on sci-fi you’ll have to prise from my dead hands.

Why am I passionate about this?

From as early as I can remember, I've been fascinated by science and the supernatural. I guess it was the bookcases of my parents and relatives that stoked my imagination as a child. From books about mysteries of the universe, to stories of fairies, nymphs and banshees, all asked questions that I longed to know the answers to. It’s a habit I've maintained throughout my life, always investigating, always challenging my beliefs. I like to think this has given me the skills to write a good, fantasy story. While I create worlds, characters, and rules of magic based on a logic that’s believable, as the world my characters live in is very real to them.

R.E.'s book list on sci-fi you’ll have to prise from my dead hands

R.E. Palmer Why did R.E. love this book?

Clarke is the master of the sci-fi short stories in my view, and this collection is a great example of his genius. My dog-eared paperback is over forty years old, and I pick it up often for both nostalgic and professional reasons. With evocative titles such as "The Nine Billion Names of God," "No Morning After," and "If I Forget Thee, Oh Earth," these stories were just what my young, curious mind needed. In just a few pages, Clarke had an amazing ability to pull you into the world of the character and make you care. Both my children have read and enjoyed this book. Brilliant collection.

By Arthur C. Clarke,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Of Time and Stars as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

A varied selection of the author's science-fiction stories, including "The Sentinel", on which the film "2001" was based.


Book cover of The Tomb of Tutankhamun

Ann R. Williams Author Of Treasures of Egypt: A Legacy in Photographs From the Pyramids to Cleopatra

From my list on King Tut and his treasures.

Why am I passionate about this?

I studied the ancient world in college, but Egypt really got my attention when I covered the CT scanning of King Tutankhamun in the Valley of the Kings on January 5, 2005, for National Geographic magazine, where I was a staff writer for many years. Ancient Egypt has become one of my great passions, especially the royal successions of the 18th dynasty and the saga of King Tut. I’m currently president of the Washington, D.C., chapter of the American Research Center in Egypt, and I host a lecture about ancient Egypt every month for that group. I’m also studying hieroglyphs—and appreciating how the landscape comes alive now that I can read the signs.

Ann's book list on King Tut and his treasures

Ann R. Williams Why did Ann love this book?

Want to read about the discovery of Tut’s tomb, in the words of the man who found it and spent the next decade cataloguing and curating its contents? This is it. Originally published decades ago, the book has been recently re-issued, with the original black-and-white photos as well as a new companion volume of color images. 

By Howard Carter, A.C. Mace,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Tomb of Tutankhamun as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

"What he writes has the stamp of first-hand knowledge and the grace of a sympathetic style. The world owes a debt of gratitude that the accident of the discovery of the tomb brought to it so painstaking a workman as the author—one who was willing to sacrifice the golden possibility of haste and fame to the slow accumulation of scientific knowledge."—The New York Times

"Let me try and tell the story of it all. It will not be easy, for the dramatic suddenness of the initial discovery left me in a dazed condition, and the months that have followed have…


Book cover of Naked

Stacy Kristen Author Of Jax: An Age Gap, Second Chance at Love MC Romance

From my list on unforgettable spicy romance reads.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’m an indie romance author obsessed with all things romance, the spicier the better! I’m all about the happy ending, so all my books feature a happy ever after (HEA) or happy for now (HFN).

Stacy's book list on unforgettable spicy romance reads

Stacy Kristen Why did Stacy love this book?

I read this book because it was recommended to me by a friend. And I’m glad I did. It sucked me in and I literally read the entire collection in less than a week. Once I started, I couldn’t put it down! I rarely reread books, but this series might get me to do just that! It’s a truly enjoyable read.

By Raine Miller,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Naked as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Brynne Bennett is living the good life. An American art student at the University of London and part-time photographic model, she's putting her life back on track with school and lots of hard work. When ultra-successful London businessman Ethan Blackstone buys her nude portrait, he isn't taking 'no' for an answer. He wants Brynne in his bed and has no problem voicing his desires to her. His dominant nature captivates and ensnares her despite the demons she carries around. But there are secrets in this relationship. Huge ones. Can Ethan free Brynne from the past that has marked her? Will…


Book cover of A Map of the World

Ron Goldberg Author Of Boy with the Bullhorn: A Memoir and History of ACT UP New York

From my list on to inspire the activist in you.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’m a nice gay Jewish former wannabe actor turned AIDS activist. I joined ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, in 1987, and for the next eight years, I chaired committees, planned protests, led teach-ins, and facilitated our weekly meetings. I visited friends in hospitals, attended far too many AIDS memorials, participated in over a hundred zaps and demonstrations, and earned the title of ACT UP’s unofficial “Chant Queen.” It was the hardest, most intense, most rewarding, most joyous, and most devastating time of my life. Aware that I had witnessed history, it became my mission to record what happened and to make sure our story was not forgotten. 

Ron's book list on to inspire the activist in you

Ron Goldberg Why did Ron love this book?

Before I was an activist, my favorite audition monologue was from David Hare’s play, A Map of the World. Set at an international UNESCO conference (and, in a meta-framing, the set of a movie retelling the same story), the centerpiece is a Shavian debate between a young leftwing reporter and a celebrated rightwing author. “You will never ever understand any struggle unless you take part in it,” says the idealistic reporter in a speech that still speaks to me today, as it pits the messy, hard work and, yes, failures, of activism against the comfortable cynicism of those who criticize from the sidelines. I would later discover this same play inspired Larry Kramer to start writing The Normal Heart.

By David Hare,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked A Map of the World as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Stephen Andrews, a young journalist, and Victor Mehta, a cynical Indian novelist argue about how the west deals with the problems of the Third World


5 book lists we think you will like!

Interested in Kyoto, urban history, and Japan?

Kyoto 22 books
Urban History 5 books
Japan 516 books