O VER the past ten years, MN has reviewed a considerable number (twenty-four by my count) of important scholarly Japan-related books written in German. The Journal of Japanese Studies has also published reviews or at least short notices (twenty-six by my count) of such works. But too many German books unfortunately go unnoticed in Englishlanguage journals. Since my field is Japanese history and I work in Munich, the publishing capital of Germany, I mention here briefly some German books not reviewed in those journals. I could, of course, deal with more, but both MN's space and my knowledge are limited. Selecting a handful of books from the scores that have appeared in recent years is a thankless and unrewarding task, God wot, and my brief notes cannot of course do justice to these works. But such a list at least shows the wide scope, not to mention the scholarly depth, of material published about Japan. I have not referred to books whose contents are more or less available in English-language publications, but have included works 'auxiliary' to historical studies when, in my opinion, they provide an interesting new approach. Many of the works listed here perhaps could have made a greater impact if published in English. But university regulations often require that doctoral and super-doctoral (Habilitationen) dissertations be published in the author's native tongue. Further, reviewers tend to chide non-native writers of English for their foreignisms and this may understandably deter some scholars from writing in English. Still, about 100 million people having German as their native language, plus an ever-growing number of East Europeans learning the language, make up a considerable market for books on Japanese studies written in German. What is said here about German applies, mutatis mutandis, to various other European languages in which important studies on Japan are produced: Czech, Dutch, Finnish, French, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Scandinavian (Danish, Norwegian, Swedish), and Spanish. While it is true that Japan-related works published in some of these languages are relatively few, the overall volume of such books appearing in these languages is impressive. Unfortunately full many a book is born to blush unseen and waste its learning on the non-English air. This is a great pity and must be frustrating for the individual authors. But until computers can