In a single short book as elegant as it is wise, Ian Buruma makes
sense of the most fateful span of Japan's history, the period that
saw as dramatic a transformation as any country has ever known. In
the course of little more than a hundred years from the day
Commodore Matthew Perry arrived in his black ships, this insular,
preindustrial realm mutated into an expansive military dictatorship
that essentially supplanted the British, French, Dutch, and
American empires in Asia before plunging to utter ruin, eventually
emerging under American tutelage as a pseudo-Western-style
democracy and economic dynamo.
What explains the seismic changes that thrust this small island
nation so violently onto the world stage? In part, Ian Buruma
argues, the story is one of a newly united nation that felt it must
play catch-up to the established Western powers, just as Germany
and Italy did, a process that involved, in addition to outward
colonial expansion, internal cultural consolidation and the
manufacturing of a shared heritage. But Japan has always been both
particularly open to the importation of good ideas and particularly
prickly about keeping their influence quarantined, a bipolar
disorder that would have dramatic consequences and that continues
to this day. If one book is to be read in order to understand why
the Japanese seem so impossibly strange to many Americans,
"Inventing Japan" is surely it.
"From the Hardcover edition."
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