When Commodore Perry arrived in Japan to open the country to Western trade in 1853, he found a medieval amalgam of sword-bearing samurai, castle towns, Confucian academies, peasant villages, rice paddies, upstart merchants, bath houses, and Kabuki. Fifteen years later, Japan was on its way to becoming the only non-Western nation in the nineteenth century with a modern centralized bureaucratic state and industrial economy. This book is a study of the Meiji Restoration that changed the face of Japan. Prominent historian Albert M. Craig tells its story through that of the domain of Choshu--whose...
When Commodore Perry arrived in Japan to open the country to Western trade in 1853, he found a medieval amalgam of sword-bearing samurai, castle towns...
The idea that society progresses through stages of development, from savagery to civilization, arose in eighteenth-century Europe. Albert Craig traces how Fukuzawa Yukichi, deeply influenced by the Scottish Enlightenment, "translated" the idea for Japanese society, both enriching and challenging the concept.
Fukuzawa, an official in the Tokugawa government, saw his career collapse when the shogunate ended in 1867. Reinventing himself as a thinker and writer, he made his life work the translation and interpretation of the Western idea of the stages of civilization. He interpreted key...
The idea that society progresses through stages of development, from savagery to civilization, arose in eighteenth-century Europe. Albert Craig tra...
Among the leading specialists on Japan, the authors--both Japanese and Western--represent a range of disciplines from economics, history, and political science, to sociology, anthropology, psychiatry, and literary criticism. Some of the essays draw comparisons with China or Korea, some with England, Europe, or America, and some with countries of the Third World. By showing us how the Japanese experience relates to that of other contexts, the authors provide us with important insights into Japan as well as into other societies undergoing a modern transformation.
Originally published...
Among the leading specialists on Japan, the authors--both Japanese and Western--represent a range of disciplines from economics, history, and polit...
