The Heritage of Japanese Civilization / Edition 2 available in Paperback
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The Heritage of Japanese Civilization / Edition 2
- ISBN-10:
- 0136005241
- ISBN-13:
- 9780136005247
- Pub. Date:
- 07/15/2007
- Publisher:
- Pearson
![The Heritage of Japanese Civilization / Edition 2](http://img.images-bn.com/static/redesign/srcs/images/grey-box.png?v11.9.4)
The Heritage of Japanese Civilization / Edition 2
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Overview
For survey courses in the History of Asia and the History of Japan.
This brief survey of the long and rich history of Japan, written by one of the world's leading scholars in the field, provides an overall framework for understanding this great nation from its origins to the present day. The book explores the arts and literature, political change, economic advancement, and developments in society, commerce, and culture.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9780136005247 |
---|---|
Publisher: | Pearson |
Publication date: | 07/15/2007 |
Edition description: | New Edition |
Pages: | 192 |
Product dimensions: | 6.80(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.40(d) |
About the Author
Enlightnment: the Early Thought of Fukuzawa Yukichi (2009). He was the director of the Harvard-Yenching Institute. He has also been a visiting professor at Kyoto and Tokyo universities. He has received Guggenheim, Fulbright, and Japan Foundation Fellowships. In 1988 he was awarded the Order of the Rising Sun by the Japanese government.
Table of Contents
Maps
Documents
Preface
Chapter 1 Japanese History: Origins to the Twelfth Century
Beginnings
Jomon Culture
The Yayoi Revolution
The Spread of Yayoi Culture
Tomb Culture, the Yamato State, and Korea
Religion in Early Japan
Nara and Heian Japan
Seventh Century Developments
Nara and Early Heian Government
A Japanese Pattern of Government
People, Land and Taxes
Rise of the Samurai
Aristocratic Culture and Buddhism
Chinese Tradition in Japan
Birth of Japanese Literature
Nara and Heian Buddhism
Early Japanese History in Historical Perspective
Chapter 2 Medieval Japan: The Twelfth to Sixteenth Centuries
Military Rule by the Taira, Minamoto, and Ashikaga
The Taira at the Kyoto Court
Rise of Minamoto Yoritomo
The Question of Feudalism in Twelfth Century Japan
Kamakura Rule After Yoritomo
Women in Warrior Society
The Ashikaga Era
Agriculture, Commerce, and Medieval Guilds
Warring States Era
War of All Against All
Foot Soldier Revolution
Piracy, Trade, and Foreign Relations
Buddhism and Medieval Culture
Japanese Pietism: Pure Land and Nichiren Buddhism
Zen Buddhism
No Plays
Medieval Japan in Historical Perspective
Chapter 3 The Era of Tokugawa Rule (1600—1868)
Early Unifiers: Nobunaga and Hideyoshi
The Seventeenth Century
Political Engineering by Tokugawa Ieyasu
Economic and Social Change
The Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries
The Forty-Seven Ronin
Cycles of Reform
Bureaucratization
The Later Tokugawa Economy
Tokugawa Culture
Literature and Drama
Confucian Thought
Other Developments in Thought
Late Traditional Japan in Historical Perspective
Chapter 4 Modern Japan, 1853-1945
Overthrow of the Tokugawa Bakufu (1853—1868)
The Setting
The Politics of Restoration
Building the Meiji State (1868—1890)
Centralization and Reforms
New Ideas
Birth of the Political Parties
The Meiji Constitution
Growth of a Modern Economy
First Phase: Model Industries, the 1870s
Second Phase: Private Entrepreneurs, the1880s and 1890s
Third Phase: Sustained Growth, 1905-1929
Fourth Phase: Depression and Recovery
Meiji Imperialism and the International Order
Education, Urbanization, and Modern Ideas
The Politics of Imperial Japan (1890—1927)
The First Decade of Diet Politics (1890—1900)
The Taisho Political Crisis, 1912-1913
The Hara Cabinet, 1918-1921
The Kato Cabinet 1924-1926
Militarism and War (1927—1945)
A Crisis in Manchuria
The Great Depression
The Radical Right and the Military
The Pacific War
Japanese Militarism and German Naziism
Modern Japan in Historical Perspective
Chapter 5 Japan, the Recent Decades
The Postwar Occupation and Yoshida, 1945-1954
The American Occupation
Yoshida Shigeru and Japan’s Postwar Policy
The Cold War and the Japanese Transformation, 1955-1989
Double Digit Economic Growth
Society and Culture
Politics: The One and a Half Party System
The History of the Present: After 1990
The Economy
Society and Culture: Problems and Prospects
A New Age of Politics
International Relations
Japan’s Future in Historical Perspective
Index
Preface
The long and rich history of Japan was marked by three major transitions, each initiated by contact with a more advanced technology and different culture.
The first transition was from a hunting and gathering society that had been in place for thousands of years to an agricultural and metal-working society of villagers and local aristocrats. The transition began in about 300 BCE, when northeast Asian peoples, crossing from the Korean peninsula to Japan, introduced the new technologies and their accompanying culture.
In the second transition the Japanese actively reached out for the technologies, writing system, and culture of China, and changed from a pre-literate to a historical East Asian society. Developments within this society between the seventh and nineteenth centuries constitute the longest span of recorded Japanese history.
In the mid-nineteenth century, massive contacts with the West led to the rapid development of modern industries and the acceptance of new ideas and values. Japan transformed itself and became the first non-Western modern nation.
This volume consists in the main of the Japan chapters of The Heritage of World Civilization, extensively revised and expanded. It provides a chronological framework and a narrative of Japan's history. It highlights periods of rule but also addresses social, economic, and cultural developments which were continuous and cut across rule-periods. There are, to be sure, excellent thick histories of Japan, particularly of the modern era. Their principal drawback is that length precludes the assignment of other readings. For the instructor who wishes to approach Japanese history topically or assign collections of original documents, monographs, novels and films, it is hoped that the brevity of this text will prove an advantage.
Brevity being the goal, the author asserts with seeming confidence many things that may be true only in the balance. Proper qualifications would take up many pages. Also, in telling the story of Japan's past the author has emphasized key historical variables, but in doing so has inevitably left out minor themes that merit attention. Reading assignments from the Suggested Readings at the end of each chapter may provide a counterpoint to the interpretations in the text.
Geography helps us to understand Japanese history. The climate varies widely, from the northern island of Hokkaido, where ice and snow may last into the spring, to the southern island of Kyushu, where palm trees dot the shores of Miyazaki and Kagoshima. But the central axis of the Japanese economy, culture, and polity has always been the temperate zone that stretches from western Honshu, through Osaka and Kyoto, to the Kanto plain and Tokyo in the east. Also of historical salience is the mountainous spine that runs through the length of the country and breaks up the country into regions. When central authority was weak, the regions often became politically autonomous. Maps identify most of the places mentioned in the text.
Even in studying the Westour own civilizationwe catch only glimpses of what it meant, say, to be a merchant in late medieval Paris. What family, society, and nature looked like to a Japanese monk or merchant is yet more difficult to know. But some inkling may be gained from original sources. To this end, many translations of poems, philosophical essays, and passages from novels are included in the narrative and in boxed quotations. The immediacy of these writings provides windows onto the actual thought and feelings of actors in Japan's history. We find that Japanese living a thousand years ago had many of the same hopes, fears, joys, and sorrows that we do today. We recognize these shared feelings despite the powerful shaping of human experience by different cultural modalities and social institutions.
The final section of each chapter reviews chapter materials in a larger comparative context. The comparisons point out that similar processes occur in widely divergent societies. But it should be remembered that such similarities are always embedded in dense structures that are quite dissimilar. Each chapter is followed by review questions, which may help elucidate the main themes of the chapter.
Japanese names in the text are given in the Japanese fashion, with the family name first. Thus Ito Hirobumi is Mr. Ito, his given name, Hirobumi. Artists and writers, however, are often known by their "pen names." Natsume Soseki, for example, was Natsume Kinnosuke as a youth, but later on, as an established novelist, was known as Natsume Soseki or simply by his pen name as Soseki. Japanese long vowels are indicated by a macron. Thus, Ito is pronounced I-toh, not Ito, and Soseki as Soh-seki, not So-seki. Long vowels are omitted from familiar words treated as English terms. Osaka is just Osaka, Tokyo is Tokyo, and shogun, except in the full Japanese title of Seii Tai Shogun, is just shogun.
In writing this book, I have drawn on many fine studies; my intellectual debts are legion and, as usual in a text of this nature, largely unacknowledged. But I would like to mention those to whom I owe a particular and personal debt, those whose ideas I have absorbed so completely as to think of as my own. Edwin O. Reischauer was first a mentor and then a colleague; Benjamin I. Schwartz was the colleague with whom I first taught a course on modern Japanese history; others with whom I have taught are Robert Bellah, Harold Bolitho, Peter Duus, Steve Ericson, Carol Gluck, Andrew Gordon, Howard Hibbett, Akira Iriye, Kate Nakai, Henry Rosovsky, Donald Shively, William Steele, and Ezra Vogel. I owe special thanks to my wife, Teruko Craig, who has tirelessly read and proofread the manuscript and made valuable suggestions. Finally, I would like to express my appreciation to the staff at Prentice Hall, to Judy Winthrop for her project management, and to Professor Chong-kun Yoon, who read the manuscript for the publisher and made numerous suggestions. All errors made are my own.