To Stand with the Nations of the World
To Stand with the Nations of the World

Author: Mark Ravina

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017-09-15

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 0190656107

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The samurai radicals who overthrew the last shogun in 1868 promised to restore ancient and pure Japanese ways. Foreign observers were terrified that Japan would lapse into violent xenophobia. But the new Meiji government took an opposite course. It copied best practices from around the world, building a powerful and modern Japanese nation with the help of European and American advisors. While revering the Japanese past, the Meiji government boldly embraced the foreign and the new. What explains this paradox? How could Japan's 1868 revolution be both modern and traditional, both xenophobic and cosmopolitan? To Stand with the Nations of the World explains the paradox of the Restoration through the forces of globalization. The Meiji Restoration was part of the global "long nineteenth century" during which ambitious nation states like Japan, Britain, Germany, and the United States challenged the world's great multi-ethnic empires--Ottoman, Qing, Romanov, and Hapsburg. Japan's leaders wanted to celebrate Japanese uniqueness, but they also sought international recognition. Rather than simply mimic world powers like Britain, they sought to make Japan distinctly Japanese in the same way that Britain was distinctly British. Rather than sing "God Save the King," they created a Japanese national anthem with lyrics from ancient poetry, but Western-style music. The Restoration also resonated with Japan's ancient past. In the 600s and 700s, Japan was threatened by the Tang dynasty, a dynasty as powerful as the Roman empire. In order to resist the Tang, Japanese leaders borrowed Tang methods, building a centralized Japanese state on Tang models, and learning continental science and technology. As in the 1800s, Japan co-opted international norms while insisting on Japanese distinctiveness. When confronting globalization in 1800s, Japan looked back to that "ancient globalization" of the 600s and 700s. The ancient past was therefore not remote or distant, but immediate and vital.

Japan in the World
Japan in the World

Author: Masao Miyoshi

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 1993-06-29

Total Pages: 380

ISBN-13: 9780822313687

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Since the end of World War II, Japan has determinately remained outside the current of world events and uninvolved in the processes determining global history and politics. In Japan and the World, distinguished scholars, novelists, and intellectuals articulate how Japan—despite unprecedented economic prowess in securing dominance in the world's market—is caught in a complex dependency with the United States. Drawing on critical and postmodernist theory, this timely volume situates this dependency in a broader historical context and assesses Japan's current dealings in international politics, society, and culture. Among the many topics covered are: racism in U.S.-Japanese relations; productivity and workplace discourse; Western cultural hegemony; the constructing of a Japanese cultural history; and the place of the novelist in today's world. Originally published as a special issue of boundary 2 (Fall 1991), this edition includes four new essays on Japanese industrial revolution; the place of English studies in Japan; how American cultural, historical, and political discourse represented Japan and in turn how America's version of Japan became Japan's version of itself; and an "archaeology" of hegemonic relationships between Japan and America and Britain in the first half of the twentieth century. Contributors. Eqbal Ahmad, Perry Anderson, Bruce Cumings, Arif Dirlik, H.D. Harootunian, Kazuo Ishuro, Fredric Jameson, Kojin Karatani, Oe Kenzaburo, Masao Miyoshi, Tetsuo Najita, Leslie Pincus, Naoki Sakai, Miriam Silverberg, Christena Turner, Rob Wilson, Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto

Japan in the American Century
Japan in the American Century

Author: Kenneth B. Pyle

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2018-10-15

Total Pages: 259

ISBN-13: 0674989082

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No nation was more deeply affected by America’s rise to world power than Japan. President Franklin Roosevelt’s uncompromising policy of unconditional surrender led to the catastrophic finale of the Asia-Pacific War and the most intrusive international reconstruction of another nation in modern history. Japan in the American Century examines how Japan, with its deeply conservative heritage, responded to the imposition of a new liberal order. The price Japan paid to end the occupation was a cold war alliance with the United States that ensured America’s dominance in the region. Still traumatized by its wartime experience, Japan developed a grand strategy of dependence on U.S. security guarantees so that the nation could concentrate on economic growth. Yet from the start, despite American expectations, Japan reworked the American reforms to fit its own circumstances and cultural preferences, fashioning distinctively Japanese variations on capitalism, democracy, and social institutions. Today, with the postwar world order in retreat, Japan is undergoing a sea change in its foreign policy, returning to an activist, independent role in global politics not seen since 1945. Distilling a lifetime of work on Japan and the United States, Kenneth Pyle offers a thoughtful history of the two nations’ relationship at a time when the character of that alliance is changing. Japan has begun to pull free from the constraints established after World War II, with repercussions for its relations with the United States and its role in Asian geopolitics.

Emperor of Japan
Emperor of Japan

Author: Donald Keene

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2005-06-14

Total Pages: 957

ISBN-13: 0231518110

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The renowned Japanese scholar “brings us as close to the inner life of the Meiji emperor as we are ever likely to get” (The New York Times Book Review). When Emperor Meiji began his rule in 1867, Japan was a splintered empire dominated by the shogun and the daimyos, cut off from the outside world, staunchly antiforeign, and committed to the traditions of the past. Before long, the shogun surrendered to the emperor, a new constitution was adopted, and Japan emerged as a modern, industrialized state. Despite the length of his reign, little has been written about the strangely obscured figure of Meiji himself, the first emperor ever to meet a European. But now, Donald Keene sifts the available evidence to present a rich portrait not only of Meiji but also of rapid and sometimes violent change during this pivotal period in Japan’s history. In this vivid and engrossing biography, we move with the emperor through his early, traditional education; join in the formal processions that acquainted the young emperor with his country and its people; observe his behavior in court, his marriage, and his relationships with various consorts; and follow his maturation into a “Confucian” sovereign dedicated to simplicity, frugality, and hard work. Later, during Japan’s wars with China and Russia, we witness Meiji’s struggle to reconcile his personal commitment to peace and his nation’s increasingly militarized experience of modernization. Emperor of Japan conveys in sparkling prose the complexity of the man and offers an unrivaled portrait of Japan in a period of unique interest. “Utterly brilliant . . . the best history in English of the emergence of modern Japan.”—Los Angeles Times

Nation-Empire
Nation-Empire

Author: Sayaka Chatani

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2018-12-15

Total Pages: 482

ISBN-13: 1501730770

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By the end of World War II, hundreds of thousands of young men in the Japanese colonies, in particular Taiwan and Korea, had expressed their loyalty to the empire by volunteering to join the army. Why and how did so many colonial youth become passionate supporters of Japanese imperial nationalism? And what happened to these youth after the war? Nation-Empire investigates these questions by examining the long-term mobilization of youth in the rural peripheries of Japan, Taiwan, and Korea. Personal stories and village histories vividly show youth’s ambitions, emotions, and identities generated in the shifting conditions in each locality. At the same time, Sayaka Chatani unveils an intense ideological mobilization built from diverse contexts—the global rise of youth and agrarian ideals, Japan’s strong drive for assimilation and nationalization, and the complex emotions of younger generations in various remote villages. Nation-Empire engages with multiple historical debates. Chatani considers metropole-colony linkages, revealing the core characteristics of the Japanese Empire; discusses youth mobilization, analyzing the Japanese seinendan (village youth associations) as equivalent to the Boy Scouts or the Hitler Youth; and examines society and individual subjectivities under totalitarian rule. Her book highlights the shifting state-society transactions of the twentieth-century world through the lens of the Japanese Empire, inviting readers to contend with a new approach to, and a bold vision of, empire study.

"Rich Nation, Strong Army"

Author: Richard J. Samuels

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2018-08-06

Total Pages: 473

ISBN-13: 1501718460

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Since World War II, Japan has become not only a model producer of high-tech consumer goods, but also-despite minimal spending on defense-a leader in innovative technology with both military and civilian uses. In the United States, nearly one in every three scientists and engineers was engaged in defense-related research and development at the end of the Cold War, but the relative strength of the American economy has declined in recent years. What is the relationship between what has happened in the two countries? And where did Japan's technological excellence come from? In an economic history that will arouse controversy on both sides of the Pacific, Richard J. Samuels finds a key to Japan's success in an ideology of technological development that advances national interests. From 1868 until 1945, the Japanese economy was fired by the development of technology to enhance national security; the rallying cry "Rich Nation, Strong Army" accompanied the expanded military spending and aggressive foreign policy that led to the disasters of the War in the Pacific. Postwar economic planners reversed the assumptions that had driven Japan's industrialization, Samuels shows, promoting instead the development of commercial technology and infrastructure. By valuing process improvements as much as product innovation, the modern Japanese system has built up the national capacity to innovate while ensuring that technological advances have been diffused broadly through industries such as aerospace that have both civilian and military applications. Struggling with the uncertainties of a post-Cold War economy, the United States has important lessons to learn from the way Japan has subordinated defense production yet emerged as one of the most technologically sophisticated nations in the world. The Japanese, like the Venetians and the Dutch before them, show us that butter is just as likely as guns to make a nation strong, but that nations cannot hope to be strong without an ideology of technological development that nourishes the entire national economy.

World War I and the Triumph of a New Japan, 1919–1930
World War I and the Triumph of a New Japan, 1919–1930

Author: Frederick R. Dickinson

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2013-10-03

Total Pages: 235

ISBN-13: 1107470846

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Frederick R. Dickinson illuminates a new, integrative history of interwar Japan that highlights the transformative effects of the Great War far from the Western Front. World War I and the Triumph of a New Japan, 1919–1930 reveals how Japan embarked upon a decade of national reconstruction following the Paris Peace Conference, rivalling the monumental rebuilding efforts in post-Versailles Europe. Taking World War I as his anchor, Dickinson examines the structural foundations of a new Japan, discussing the country's wholehearted participation in new post-war projects of democracy, internationalism, disarmament and peace. Dickinson proposes that Japan's renewed drive for military expansion in the 1930s marked less a failure of Japan's interwar culture than the start of a tumultuous domestic debate over the most desirable shape of Japan's twentieth-century world. This stimulating study will engage students and researchers alike, offering a unique, global perspective of interwar Japan.

The History of US-Japan Relations
The History of US-Japan Relations

Author: Makoto Iokibe

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-03-15

Total Pages: 355

ISBN-13: 9811031843

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Examining the 160 year relationship between America and Japan, this cutting edge collection considers the evolution of the relationship of these two nations which straddle the Pacific, from the first encounters in the 19th century to major international shifts in a post 9/11 world. It examines the emergence of Japan in the wake of the 1905 Russo-Japanese War and the development of U.S. policies toward East Asia at the turn of the century. It goes on to study the impact of World War One in Asia, the Washington Treaty System, the issue of Immigration Issue and the deterioration of US-Japan relations in the 1930s as Japan invaded Manchuria. It also reflects on the Pacific War and the Occupation of Japan, and the country’s postwar Resurgence, democratization and economic recovery, as well as the maturing and the challenges facing the US Japan relationship as it progresses into the 21st century. This is a key read for those interested in the history of this important relationship as well as for scholars of diplomatic history and international relations.

Japan Restored
Japan Restored

Author: Clyde Prestowitz

Publisher: Tuttle Publishing

Published: 2015-11-10

Total Pages: 291

ISBN-13: 1462915329

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In Japan Restored, New York Times bestselling author Clyde Prestowitz envisions post-bubble Japan in the year 2050, when the country's economic prosperity will have made it a world leader in every area. In 1979, the book Japan as Number One: Lessons for America by Harvard University professor Ezra Vogel caused a sensation in the United States by pointing out that Japan was surpassing America as world economic leader; to this day, it remains the all-time bestselling non-fiction book by a Western author in Japan. The book was timely: Japan's subsequent "bubble era" of the 1980s saw the country booming. But since the economic bubble burst at the start of the 1990s, Japan has been in decline. Japan Restored takes up where Vogel left off. Written as a vision of Japan in the year 2050, Prestowitz looks back to the mid-2010s as such a low point for Japan that a special reform commission was set up that helped the country regain its former position as a leader in technology, in business, and geopolitically. Looking at education, innovation, the role of women, corporate organization, energy, infrastructure, domestic government, and international alliances, Prestowitz draws up a fascinating and controversial blueprint for the future success of Japan. In wake of the 2021 Olympics in Tokyo and the economic chaos caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, Japan Restored is as timely as the 1979 book that inspired it.

The Perry Expedition and the "Opening of Japan to the West," 1853–1873
The Perry Expedition and the

Author: Paul Hendrix Clark

Publisher: Hackett Publishing

Published: 2020-04-01

Total Pages: 170

ISBN-13: 1624668909

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By the time U.S. Commodore Matthew Perry's squadron of four ships sailed into Tokyo Bay on July 8, 1853, the Japanese Tokugawa government had already fended off similarly unwelcome intrusions by the French, the Russians, the Dutch, and the British. These Western imperialists had the power and the means to force Japan into the kinds of treaties that would effectively spell the end of Japan’s autonomy, maybe even its existence as an independent country. At the same moment, Japan was also grappling with a serious insurrection, the death of an emperor, and the death of a shogun—as well as with a series of natural disasters and associated famines. The Japanese response to this incredible series of catastrophes would permanently alter the balance of geopolitical power around the world. Drawing on the best recent scholarship, this short introductory volume examines the motivations and maneuvers of the major participants in the conflict and sets the "opening" of Japan in the context of broader global history. Selections from twenty-​nine primary sources provide firsthand accounts of the event from a variety of perspectives. Several illustrations are also included, along with a note on historiographic interpretation.