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Originally Posted by Japania
I’m interested in Japanese Psychology (the way they see life, face problems, the prevalence of anxiety and depression…). Could anyone recommend a book to me about it?
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I have a couple of recommendations.
Communicative Styles of Japanese and Americans (Barnlund)
Even if you're not American it will still shed plenty of light on Japanese
Japanese Cultural Encounters (Kataoka)
Read the reviews on Amazon. I think they will give you an idea of what this is about. I'll try to explain it anyways. It's basically a "choose your own adventure" style book. You'll have paragraph describing a situation... then you'll have four answers each providing an explanation or a way to deal with it. If you have done a decent amount of studying on Japanese culture a lot of the stuff may seem obvious with a couple of shockers here or there. At any rate, at the end of each answer there is a page number written. If you go to that page it will tell you if your answer is correct or not and give a short explanation on why. It's a very interactive book and a really good approach, but you could probably read it in a day. I recommend reading it in conjunction with some other books so you can suplement some of the info in it with some longer and more general concepts. I think it will sink in better that way.
Both of these books might not go into great detail about what you want to know. They might brush over it a bit though (I'm thinking specifically of the anxiety and depression part). They'll certainly provide you with some great general information which could assist you in getting a lot closer to understand what it is you're looking for though.
Dogsbody, that sounds like an interesting read. You might be interested in a book titled "Confession of a Mask" (Kamen no Kokuhaku) by Yukio Mishima. I think it's a more abstract look at the era through a character who struggls to fit in.
Confessions of a Mask - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
I think the wikipedia article gives a nice preview of it, if not going slightly too much into detail.
I'd like to check out the REAL TENKO though. It sounds really interesting.