I studied modern Japanese history in undergrad and still try to read up on it as often as I can. I'm interested in a variety of topics and themes (i.e. Okinawan identity in the nation, formation of the national subject during the war, Colonization of Korea, Postwar reconstruction, etc.), so I'd be interested in anything one would consider worth reading.
What are your favorite books on Japan?
I'll start:
The Politics of Dialogic Imagination: Power and Popular Culture in Early Modern Japan by Katsuya Hirano
Revolution and Subjectivity in Postwar Japan by J. Victor Koschmann
Money, Trains, and Guillotines: Art and Revolution in 1960s Japan by William Marotti
Becoming Japanese: Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation by Leo T.S. Ching
Brokers of Empire: Japanese Settler Colonialism in Korea by Jun Uchida
Living with the Bomb: American and Japanese Cultural Conflicts in the Nuclear Age ed. Laura Hein
Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan by Marilyn Ivy (Anthropology)
History's Disquiet: Modernity, Cultural Practice, and the Question of Everyday Life by Harry Harootunian (Historiography with an emphasis on Japan)
Cartographies of Desire: Male-Male Sexuality in Japanese Discourse by Gregory Pflugfelder
Uncovering Heian Japan: An Archaeology of Sensation and Inscription by Thomas Lamarre (part anthropology, literature, and history in my interpretation)
Dancing with the Dead: Memory, Performance, and Everyday Life in Postwar Okinawa by Christopher T. Nelson
The Proletarian Gamble: Korean Workers in Interwar Japan by Ken C. Kawashima
Organizing the Spontaneous: Citizen Protest in Postwar Japan by Wesley Sasaki-Uemura
Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan by Harry Harootunian
Japan's Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period by Carol Gluck
Pan-Asianism and Japan's War by Hotta Eri
Postwar Japan as History ed. Andrew Gordon
Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II by John Dower
War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War by John Dower
I don't often read Japanese history, but I very much enjoyed Japan at War: An Oral History by Haruko Taya Cook and Theodore F. Cook as well as Japan 1941: Countdown to Infamy by Eri Hotta.