Frederik L. Schodt – författare

The little-known true story of how a flamboyant circus promoter helped introduce Japan to the West in the late 19th century.

"Professor" Risley (Richard Risley Carlisle) introduced the Western circus to Japan in 1864. Three years later, this former acrobat gave many in the West their first glimpse of Japan when he took his "Imperial Japanese Troupe" of acrobats and jugglers on a triumphant tour of North America and Europe. Over the next few years, the Troupe performed before presidents, monarchs, and ordinary citizens.

Frederik L. Schodt argues compellingly that such early popular entertainments helped stir a curiosity about all things Japanese that eventually led to japonisme, The Mikado, and, in our time, the boom in manga and anime. Schodt''s depiction of Risley and his troupe is enlivened by portraits of the circus demimonde and supported by nineteenth-century photographs, posters, and drawings, many in color.

His accounts of these first meetings between Westerners and Japanese shed new light on how different cultures meet, mingle, and influence each other. Descriptions of crowds, dazzling routines, and superstar troupe performers like the famous Little All Right are a delightful revelation to anyone interested in Asia, the circus, and popular entertainment.

The true story of a half-Chinook, half-Scot adventurer who entered feudal Japan in 1848 and helped pave the way for its modernization.

How Japan, after 250 years of self--imposed isolation, began the process of modernization is in part the story of Ranald MacDonald. In 1848 this half-Scot, half-Chinook adventurer from the Pacific Northwest landed on an island off Hokkaido. Although promptly arrested and imprisoned for seven months in Nagasaki, the intelligent, well-educated MacDonald fascinated the Japanese and became one of their first teachers of English and Western ways.

Based on primary research in Japan and North America, this book chronicles the events leading to MacDonald''s journey and his later struggle to obtain recognition at home.

The classic text by renowned manga expert in a beautiful new casebound edition, with a new foreword and afterword by the author.

This landmark book, first published at the height of the manga boom, is offered in a hardcover collector''s edition with a new foreword and afterword.

Frederik L. Schodt looks at the classic publications and artists who created modern manga, including the magazines Big Comics and Morning, and artists like Suehiro Maruo and Shigeru Mizuki; an entire chapter is devoted to Osamu Tezuka. The new afterword shows how manga have evolved in the past decade to transform global visual culture.

A cultural and personal journey into the famous sutra that teaches "form is emptiness; and emptiness is form."

The Heart Sutra is the most widely read, chanted, and copied text in East Asian Buddhism. Here Frederik L. Schodt explores his lifelong fascination with the sutra: its mesmerizing mantra, its ancient history, the “emptiness theory, and the way it is used around the world as a metaphysical tool to overcome chaos and confusion and reach a new understanding of reality--a perfection of wisdom. Schodt''s journey takes him to caves in China, American beats declaiming poetry, speculations into the sutra''s true origins, and even a robot Avalokiteśvara at a Kyoto temple.