Kategoria BISAC: History >> Asia - Japan

Several of the essayists reflect on the politics of...

Several of the essayists reflect on the politics of...

In the past few years, there has been a growing appreciation by Western scholars of the vast scale, great achievements, and methodological originality of Japanese archaeologists. However, an understanding of the results of their work has been hampered in the West by a lack of up-to-date and authoritative texts in English. This book provides Western readers for the first time with a uniquely East Asian perspective of Japanese archaeology.

Prehistoric Japan is organized into 16 chapters covering the environment, the history of the Japanese investigations of their past, the...

The political influence of temples in premodern Japan, most clearly manifested in divine demonstrations--where rowdy monks and shrine servants brought holy symbols to the capital to exert pressure on courtiers--has traditionally been condemned and is poorly understood. In an impressive examination of this intriguing aspect of medieval Japan, the author employs a wide range of previously neglected sources to argue that religious protest was a symptom of political factionalism in the capital rather than its cause. It is his contention that religious violence can be traced primarily to...

New in paperback.

Of related interest:
A History of Writing in Japan, by Christopher Seeley

On July 29, 1643, ten crew members of the Dutch yacht Breskens were lured ashore at Nambu in northern Japan. Once out of view of their ship, the men were bound and taken to the shogun, Tokugawa Iemitsu, in Edo, where they remained imprisoned for four months. Later the Japanese government forced the Dutch East India Company representative in Nagasaki to acknowledge that the sailors had in fact been saved from shipwreck and that official recognition of the rescue (i.e., a formal visit from a Dutch ambassador) was in order.

Prisoners from Nambu provides a lively, engrossing narrative...

A thousand years ago, most visitors to Japan would have arrived by ship at Hakata Bay, the one and only authorized gateway to Japan. Hakata was the location of the Korokan, an official guest-house for foreign visitors that is currently yielding its secrets to the spades of Japanese archaeologists. Nearby was Dazaifu, the imperial capital of western Japan, surrounded by mountain fortresses and defended by an army of border guards. Over the ages, Hakata was a staging ground for Japanese troops on their way to Korea and ground zero for foreign invasions of Japan. Through the port passed a...