Title
Inventing Japan, 1853-1964 / Ian Buruma.
Edition
Modern Library ed.
ISBN
0679640851 (alk. paper)
Publication Details
New York : The Modern Library, 2003.
Language
English
Description
194 p. ; 20 cm.
Call Number
DS881.9 .B87 2003
Dewey Decimal Classification
952.03
Summary
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. 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.
Note
"A Modern Library chronicles book."
Bibliography, etc. Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [183]-187) and index.
Series
Modern Library chronicles ; 12
Prologue The Tokyo olympics
The
Black ships
Civilization and enlightenment
Ero Guro Nansensu
Ah, our Manchuria
War against the west
Tokyo boogie-woogie
1955 and all that.
Prologue: Tokyo Olympics
Black ships
Civilization and enlightenment
Ero Guro Nansensu
Ah, our Manchuria
War against the west
Tokyo boogie-woogie
1955 and all that
Epilogue; the end of the postwar.
