Concentrating on the period following Admiral Perry's visit in the 1850s, this encyclopedia examines the historical events, leaders, and societal pressures in the country's past that affected Japan's entry into the modern age. Like its companion volume, the encyclopedia covers important political topics, the arts, religion, business, literature, education, journalism, and other major social, cultural, and economic forces. Emphasizing the close ties that always existed between the emperor system and nationalism, the encyclopedia carefully explores the various forms of nationalism that...

First published in Boston in 1881 and rarely available today, Japanese Episodes reveals House as a writer, commentator and observer of things Japanese at his best and was to inspire Lafcadio Hearn in the same pursuit twenty years later. Formerly a reporter for the New York Tribune, House was a respected journalist in the United States, and though later he became a paid apologist for the Japanese state in many of his writings, sought to find a balance between his integrity as a writer and the task of arguing Japan's case to the outside world: an objective many have since argued...

Japan in World History ranges from Japan's prehistoric interactions with Korea and China, to the Western challenge of the late 1500s, the partial isolation under the Tokugawa family (1600-1868), and the tumultuous interactions of more recent times, when Japan modernized ferociously, turned imperialist, lost a world war, then became the world's second largest economy--and its greatest foreign aid donor. Writing in a lively fashion, Huffman makes rich use of primary sources, illustrating events with comments by the people who lived through them: tellers of ancient myths, court women who...

Japan in World History ranges from Japan's prehistoric interactions with Korea and China, to the Western challenge of the late 1500s, the partial isolation under the Tokugawa family (1600-1868), and the tumultuous interactions of more recent times, when Japan modernized ferociously, turned imperialist, lost a world war, then became the world's second largest economy--and its greatest foreign aid donor. Writing in a lively fashion, Huffman makes rich use of primary sources, illustrating events with comments by the people who lived through them: tellers of ancient myths, court women who...

Employing a wide range of primary source materials, Modern Japan: A History in Documents, Second Edition, provides a colorful narrative of Japan's development since 1600. A variety of diary entries, letters, legal documents, and poems brings to life the early modern years, when Japan largely shut itself off from the outside world. A picture essay highlights the tumultuous decade and a half following the arrival of Commodore Matthew Perry and the U.S. Navy in 1853, which led to unprecedented changes and a new government. The dramatic rush to modernity in the late 1800s and early...