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The Scottish enlightenment and the stages of civilization -- American geography textbooks -- John Hill Burton's Political economy -- Invention, the engine of progress -- An outline of theories of civilization -- Reflections.
When Commodore Perry arrived in Japan to open the country to Western trade in 1853, he found a medieval amalgam of sword-bearing samurai, castle towns, Confucian academies, peasant villages, rice paddies, upstart merchants, bath houses, and Kabuki. Fifteen years later, Japan was on its way to becoming the only non-Western nation in the nineteenth century with a modern centralized bureaucratic state and industrial economy. This book is a study of the Meiji Restoration that changed the face of Japan. Prominent historian Albert M. Craig tells its story through that of the domain of Choshu-whose role in the formation of modern Japan was not unlike that of Prussia in Germany-during the fifteen cr...
"For Introduction to Chinese History and Introduction to East Asia courses."A clear and manageable single volume narrative covering all the major periods of Chinese history. The text is presented chronologically and features brief principle interpretations to provide an accessible introductory overview of an expansive subject area.
Michigan Classics in Japanese Studies No. 13
This short survey of the rich and long history of Japan provides an overall framework from its origins to today. It presents traditions in every field of the arts and literature, political changes, economic advancements, and developments in society, commerce, and culture.Five chapters cover distinct eras: Japan's origins to the twelfth century; medieval Japan, Tokugawa Rule, modern Japan: 1853-1945, and from war's end to the new millenium.For anyone interested in the civilization of Asia and Japan.
"In Seeing Stars, Dennis J. Frost traces the emergence and evolution of sports celebrity in Japan from the seventeenth through the twenty-first centuries. Frost explores how various constituencies have repeatedly molded and deployed representations of individual athletes, revealing that sports stars are socially constructed phenomena, the products of both particular historical moments and broader discourses of celebrity. Drawing from media coverage, biographies, literary works, athletes’ memoirs, bureaucratic memoranda, interviews, and films, Frost argues that the largely unquestioned mass of information about sports stars not only reflects, but also shapes society and body culture. He exa...
Challenging the popular view of the Meiji Restoration as a "revolution from above," this book argues that its main cause was neither the growing threat of the West nor traditional loyalty to Emperor and nation, but rather lay in class conflict and long-term institutional change. The author sees the Restoration as a revolution against feudal privilege carried out from below by a service intelligentsia of minor administrators, priests, scholars, and village officials. The book focuses on the politically most effective body of activists, those in the domain of Choshu, and on their most important leaders of the 1850s and 1860s: Yoshida Shoin, Kusaka Genzui, and Takasugi Shinsaku. It examines their social and educational background, explores their motives for acting, and follows them through their intellectual and political struggles. The final chapter explains various heretofore puzzling aspects of the Meiji period (1868-1912) in terms of its revolutionary origins, and concludes by showing that the Restoration, far from being uniquely Japanese, had many of the characteristics we associate with the great revolutions of England, France, and Russia.
In this book social scientists scrutinize the middle decades of the nineteenth century in Japan. That scrutiny is important and overdue, for the period from the 1850s to the 1880s has usually been treated in terms of politics and foreign relations. Yet those decades were also of pivotal importance in Japan's institutional modernization. As the Japanese entered the world order, they experienced a massive introduction of Western-style organizations. Sweeping reforms, without the class violence or the Utopian appeal of revolution, created the foundation for a modern society. The Meiji Restoration introduced a political transformation, but these chapters address the more gradual social transitio...