Throughout its modern history, Japan offers a unique example of
extreme national consciousness combined with exceptional
sensitivity to the outside world - one or another part,
significantly, at one or another time. Here, in the 1975 Brown
& Haley lectures at the University of Puget Sound (updated to
account for recent developments and publications), Princeton
historian Jansen, a leader in Japanese studies, briefly examines
changing Japanese perceptions of other nations through the careers
and views of key figures who, in old age, wrote their memoirs. In
1771, after 140 years of Japanese seclusion, doctor Sugita Gempaku
witnessed the dissection of an executed criminal; when he
discovered that the Chinese medical textbooks were wrong and a
Dutch anatomy he'd acquired was right, Sugita undertook, with a
colleague, to translate the Dutch work - touching off an era of
translation of Western books that expanded into an assault on the
Chinese cultural tradition. . . already under attack by literary
ideologues of Japanism. (Jansen is always careful not to construe a
symbolic event as the sole cause.) In 1871-73, after Perry "opened"
Japan, Kume Kunitake accompanied the great governmental learning
expedition around the world; the Japanese had much to learn, he
reported, but there was a choice of what to learn from where and no
immediate danger of falling, like China, under Western domination;
Japan could proceed to modernize slowly, for its own benefit -
meanwhile, as Kume later wrote, watching materialistic Britain
"begin to decline." For Japan's 20th century outlook, Jansen has no
such well-placed memoirist (yet), nor so clear a pattern of
rankings. Japan counted now; the rest of the world, after World War
I, was in disarray. Nationalist China was weak; totalitarian states
loomed in Europe. The Japanese courtship of the major maritime
powers, Britain and the US, was no safeguard against racism (at
Versailles, in the 1924 US immigration legislation, at the
arms-limitation conferences). "A strong Japan might well reconsider
its stance and strike out for regional domination." There was,
Jansen points out, no consensus; but rather a drift - to a war seen
as preferable to inaction. It's a cogent, thoughtful analysis -
extended into an assessment of Japan's international role today -
that provides an excellent grounding for students and a stimulating
review for specialists. (Kirkus Reviews)
Long recognized as an authority on Japanese history, Marius
Jansen synthesizes a lifetime of scholarship in this landmark book.
Bringing together the series of Brown and Haley lectures delivered
in 1975 at the University of Puget Sound, Japan and Its World
continues to be a source of insight for anyone interested in the
changing ideas the Japanese have had of themselves, the United
States, and the Western world during the past two centuries.
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