This work comprises the works of Shoeki translated in full. When Ando Shoeki's writings were discovered nearly a century ago, they were thought to be forgeries, such was their uniqueness and revolutionary nature. But his sharp and thoughful criticism of the Japanese feudal order proved to be genuine. Shoeki's philosophy combines and criticizes Buddhism, Confucianism and traditional Oriental medical theories offering a unique view of humanity, society and the natural world that is startling in its modernity. He advocates ecology, equality of the sexes and the abolition of the feudal order. His writings combine Swiftian parable, Platonic dialogue and philosophical treatise, and is an important key to understanding the history of Japanese thought.
"Ordinary Economies in Japan directs our attention to a subordinate yet powerful theme in modern Japanese economic thought that appeared unobtrusively in the mid-Tokugawa period and found expression in the formation of voluntary, non-hierarchical associations of commoners who purposively organized their self-help activities apart from state authority. Tetsuo Najita's compelling analysis of kô is groundbreaking and explains a great deal about Japanese modernization that economic historians have overlooked or undervalued."—Stephen Vlastos, University of Iowa
The ashes of Herbert Norman now lie in the British cemetery at Rome, near those of Shelley and Keats. His distinguished life and tragic death, in April 1957, are recalled and examined in this book by scholars and diplomats from four countries—the United States, Japan, Canada, and Britain. Born in rural Japan the son of a Canadian missionary, Herbert Norman studied at the University of Toronto and went in 1933 to Cambridge University on a scholarship. There, in that intellectual hothouse where it seemed one had to choose politically between communism and fascism as the future of the West, he joined the Communist party—a move that became a crime later in the fixed and ‘sightless’ (as the editor describes them) eyes of his American accusers. According to Edwin Reischauer, later the US ambassador to Japan, ‘his harassment by the American government was unforgiveable.’ His suicide in Cairo, while Canadian ambassador to Nasser’s Egypt during and after the delicate times of the Suez Crisis and the establishment of the UN peace-keeping force, raised broader questions for Lester Pearson—‘the right, to say nothing of the propriety, of a foreign government to intervene’ in Canadian affairs. Norman was also a renowned historian of Japan. His Japan’s Emergence as a Modern State has been called a classic, and between 1946 and 1950, as head of the Canadian Liaison Mission in Tokyo, he was a close and friendly adviser to General Douglas MacArthur in his efforts to reconstitute that country. Both this work and his writings on Japan were sympathetic to human freedoms and democracy, and they too became controversial as sides congealed in the Cold War. Five papers in this book assess Norman’s scholarly work in the historiography of Japan. Four lecture papers by Norman (three previously unpublished) are included which show his change from ‘a doctrinaire Marxist to a Jeffersonian Liberal,’ a change historians can accept as fact whereas intelligence agencies could not and remade Norman into a communist. He was not a spy, the editor concludes, and should be remembered as the hero of a modern tragedy.
Since the late-19th century, Japan has made remarkable strides in industrialization. Beginning with the economic vision of Miura Baien in the 18th century, and employing a detailed comparison with the West, this book delves into the economic thought of the scholars who played a pivotal role in Japan’s modernization process. The author takes Fukuzawa Yukichi’s theory of ‘civilization’ as the standard measure of Japan’s modernization and compares it with differing visions from various critics whose research focused on rural poverty and social problems, such as Maeda Masana, early socialists, Yanagita Kunio and Kawakami Hajime. Further, the book explores new liberalism (Ishibashi Tanzan, Fukuda Tokuzo) and Marxism (Yamada Moritaro, Uno Kozo) in the 1920s and 1930s. After discussing the dilemmas faced by economists during wartime (Takata Yasuma, Ryu Shintaro, Shibata Kei), the author concludes this intellectual history with the country’s post-1945 democratic reforms and their early demise. This book is valuable reading for students and researchers of Japan’s intellectual history. However, due to the book’s comparative perspective, as well as the universality of the modernization experience, it will also appeal to students and researchers of the history of economic thought and modern intellectual history.
Nature Across Cultures: Views of Nature and the Environment in Non-Western Cultures consists of about 25 essays dealing with the environmental knowledge and beliefs of cultures outside of the United States and Europe. In addition to articles surveying Islamic, Chinese, Native American, Aboriginal Australian, Indian, Thai, and Andean views of nature and the environment, among others, the book includes essays on Environmentalism and Images of the Other, Traditional Ecological Knowledge, Worldviews and Ecology, Rethinking the Western/non-Western Divide, and Landscape, Nature, and Culture. The essays address the connections between nature and culture and relate the environmental practices to the cultures which produced them. Each essay contains an extensive bibliography. Because the geographic range is global, the book fills a gap in both environmental history and in cultural studies. It should find a place on the bookshelves of advanced undergraduate students, graduate students, and scholars, as well as in libraries serving those groups.
