You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Japan is on the verge of a sea change. After more than fifty years of national pacifism and isolation including the "lost decade" of the 1990s, Japan is quietly, stealthily awakening. As Japan prepares to become a major player in the strategic struggles of the 21st century, critical questions arise about its motivations. What are the driving forces that influence how Japan will act in the international system? Are there recurrent patterns that will help explain how Japan will respond to the emerging environment of world politics? American understanding of Japanese character and purpose has been tenuous at best. We have repeatedly underestimated Japan in the realm of foreign policy. Now as Japan shows signs of vitality and international engagement, it is more important than ever that we understand the forces that drive Japan. In Japan Rising, renowned expert Kenneth Pyle identities the common threads that bind the divergent strategies of modern Japan, providing essential reading for anyone seeking to understand how Japan arrived at this moment -- and what to expect in the future.
Analyzing the dynamics of historical change, the text discusses the major forces in Japan's development from 1600 to the present day, including samurai officialdom, industrialization, militarism, and social values.
In this update of the 1992 edition, the author describes the emergence of Japan's new Asian strategy since the Cold War and the dilemmas it poses for American policymakers.
Focusing on the marginal region of Toyama, on the Sea of Japan, the author explores the interplay of central and regional authorities, local and national perceptions of rights, and the emerging political practices in Toyama and Tokyo that became part of the new political culture that took shape in Japan following the Meiji Restoration.
Few institutions are as well suited as the monarchy to provide a window on postwar Japan. The monarchy, which is also a family, has been significant both as a political and as a cultural institution. Ruoff analyzes numerous issues, stressing the monarchy's "postwarness" rather than its traditionality.
Following the end of World War II in Asia, the Allied powers repatriated over six million Japanese nationals and deported more than a million colonial subjects from Japan. Watt analyzes how the human remnants of empire served as sites of negotiation in the process of jettisoning the colonial project and in the creation of new national identities.
"Japan’s “Christian Century” began in 1549 with the arrival of Jesuit missionaries led by Saint Francis Xavier, and ended in 1639 when the Tokugawa regime issued the final Sakoku Edict prohibiting all traffic with Catholic lands. “Sakoku”—national isolation—would for more than two centuries be the sum total of the regime’s approach to foreign affairs. This policy was accompanied by the persecution of Christians inside Japan, a course of action for which the missionaries and their zealots were in part responsible because of their dogmatic orthodoxy. The Christians insisted that “Deus” was owed supreme loyalty, while the Tokugawa critics insisted on the prior importance of ...
Long obscured by the more dramatic activities of post-World War II student activists, the history of the Japanese left-wing student movement during its formative period from 1918 until its suppression in the 1930s is analyzed here in detail for the first time. Focusing on the Shinjinkai (New Man Society) of Tokyo Imperial University, the leading prewar student group, Henry DeWitt Smith describes the origins and evolution of student radicalism in the period between the two World Wars. He concludes with an analysis of the careers of the Shinjinkai members after graduation and with an explanation of the importance of the prewar tradition to the postwar student movement.
"Like all empires, Japan’s prewar empire encompassed diverse territories as well as a variety of political forms for governing such spaces. This book focuses on Japan’s Kwantung Leasehold and Railway Zone in China’s three northeastern provinces. The hybrid nature of the leasehold’s political status vis-à-vis the metropole, the presence of the semipublic and enormously powerful South Manchuria Railway Company, and the region’s vulnerability to inter-imperial rivalries, intra-imperial competition, and Chinese nationalism throughout the first decades of the twentieth century combined to give rise to a distinctive type of settler politics. Settlers sought inclusion within a broad Japa...
This study focuses on postwar Japan's foreign policy making in the political and security areas, the core UN missions. The intent is to illustrate how policy goals forged by national security concerns, domestic politics, and psychological needs gave shape to Japan's complicated and sometimes incongruous policy toward the UN since World War II.