James Steele is an architect who received both his bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, and practiced in the Philadelphia region before accepting a position at Dammam University in Saudi Arabia where he taught for eight years. He then served as Senior Editor at Academy Editions, and taught at the Prince of Wales's Institute of Architecture in London before relocating to the University of Southern California School of Architecture in 1991, receiving a PhD in Urban Planning and Development at USC in 2002. Professor Steele has taught history and theory as well as design studio, and also organized the first Foreign Studies Program for architecture students in Malaysia in 1998. He administered it up through its fifteenth and final session in 2013 and then founded and became the director of a new undergraduate program in South America, based in Sao Paulo, Brazil. He has written extensively on contemporary architecture and has been a guest critic and speaker at numerous universities in the United States and internationally.

Acknowledgements. Introduction: The (Dis) Continuities of Japanese Architecture. Part 1: An Enduring Cultural Framework. 1. The Land and its People. 2. History and Religion. 3: Paroxysm and Change. Part 2: From Modernity to Modernism: 1869-1940. 4. The Search for Knowledge and its Consequences. 5. Modernism Sidetracked on the Road to War. Part 3: From Re-birth to Economic Collapse. 6. Post-War Reconstruction, From Survival to Recovery: 1945- 1950. 7. The Le Corbusier Syndrome. 8. Metabolism Revisited. [...] '70: A Joyful Vision of a New World. 10. The Shinohara School. 11. Post-Modernism: Apostasy or Prophesy? 12. A Decade of Excess: Life Inside the Bubble. Part 4: Transitional Figures. 13: Witness to War. 14: Conflicting Identities. 15: Relief and Rebuilding. Part 5: The Next Generation. 16. Doing More With Less. 17. On the Surface. 18. Intersticial Space: The New Engawa. 19. Reinventing Modernism. 20. Technology As Nature. 21. Searching for the Sublime. Notes. Bibliography. Glossary. Index.