Reddit Reddit reviews A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present, 2nd Edition

We found 5 Reddit comments about A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present, 2nd Edition. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

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A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present, 2nd Edition
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5 Reddit comments about A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present, 2nd Edition:

u/t-o-k-u-m-e-i · 8 pointsr/japan

Well, what era are you interested in?

Hands down, the best English overview of the modern era available is A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present by Andrew Gordon. If you want WWII and after, John Dower's War Without Mercy and Embracing Defeat are good places to start. Chalmers Johnson's MITI and the Japanese Miracle isn't fun reading but does a good job of explaining the post war economic boom.

I don't know of any single volume works that are good overviews of specifically the Edo/Tokugawa period. As far as more focused, intelectual histories go, I'm fond of Ooms' Tokugawa Ideology and Najita's Visions of Virtue in Tokugawa Japan

I have no recommendations for the Muromachi, Kamakura, Heian, Nara or Asuka periods. I don't study them and only know them in passing from survey courses.

Faris's Sacred Texts and Burried Treasures does a good job of teaching the controversy about ancient Japanese history, and the origins of the peoples on the islands.

I'm coming at this as someone who is working on a PhD in modern Japanese history right now, so some of these (Najita, Ooms, Faris, Johnson) might be heavier reading than you're looking for.

u/[deleted] · 7 pointsr/japan

Hmm, I wonder why it's not showing up in the thread... was it reported as spam or something? I'll repost it here then.

I'm going to assume that you're pretty serious about learning more about Japanese history/culture... these are pretty hefty books. I'm also listing them in (roughly) chronological order.

The Tale of the Heike -- It's required reading for all students in Japan and will give you a nice look at Japan's past (12th century). It should be required reading for all Japanese literature students, too. It's basically historical fiction gathered from a number of sources close to that time. There's a lot of history and a lot of embellishment.

Giving Up the Gun: Japan's Relationship to the Sword -- This book covers the creation and fall of the Tokugawa Shogunate, but it focuses especially on (surprise, surprise!) the relationship Japan has with the sword (as opposed to the gun). The katana is almost a legendary weapon for a number of reasons, and this book is a good read because it looks at why Japan never really had the same epiphany Europe did with respect to warfare -- or at least, not in the same way.

A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present -- I read this a few times and it's not a bad summary of how Japan changed over the years, though I'm not a huge fan of this book. The Tokugawa Shogunate lasted long enough that I feel that it deserves its own (series of) books, followed by one on the Meiji Restoration and another on the post-war period. Since it's all rolled up in one, this ends up being a dense Cliff Notes version of Japanese history. That having been said, though, this is not a bad book at all for what it is.

Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II -- I'd probably consider this the definitive post-war Japan book. If you read only one book out of all of these, you should read this one.

Shift: Inside Nissan's Historic Revival -- I consider this a very important modern Japan book, even if you don't give a shit about cars. Japan has always been a very, very closed society and the corporations are no different. So when Carlos Ghosn came in and took over Nissan -- and turned it around -- it was a huge, huge thing. It still is, in many ways. If you want to read something about modern Japan being internationalized, this is one of the books to read.

Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan -- This is a pretty famous book for a lot of reasons. Jake Adelstein studied Japanese and became a reporter for the crime section of Yomiuri Shinbun, which is one of the largest newspapers in Japan. He wrote this book; it's filled with dramatization, self-aggrandization, and one-sided reporting, but it's still worth reading. Japan isn't the seamy mess of crime and slavery he makes it out to be, but it's not the technology and beautiful girl paradise a lot of other people want it to be either.


On the "fictional" side of things...

The Chrysanthemum and the Sword -- This was one of the seminal works on Japan, back during World War II. The problem is that there are so many bad assumptions and things that we now know are incorrect... but it was a seminal work for so long that it has really, really affected Western stereotypes of Japan. It's worth it just for that; not as a commentary on Japan itself, but as a critical reading of how the West did (and continues) to see Japan. Use it to focus your critical lens, so to speak.

u/ikaruja · 5 pointsr/japan

This is what we studied in my upper level course:

Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present: Andrew Gordon

http://www.amazon.com/books/dp/0195339223

u/lalapaloser · 1 pointr/japan

I'm about to graduate with a degree in Japanese History so I can recommend a lot of books on different topics, but I need to know something more specific. For a broad summarization of Japanese history, I recommend Andrew Gordon's A Modern History of Japan.
Since you're interested in Okinawa (which has been a big part of my focus), I'd recommend Okinawa: Cold War Island ed. by Chalmers Johnson, this book is more rooted in poli-sci. I found Christopher Nelson's Dancing with the Dead an extremely fascinating anthropological account of war memory and trauma in Okinawa. The first chapter of Norma Field's In the Realm of a Dying Emperor focuses on Chibana Shōichi, an Okinawan who burned Hi no Maru at a national sporting event (the rest of the book is really interesting and well written as well). I can plenty of other books depending on what you're interested in. Just let me know :)

u/LetsGetTea · 1 pointr/japan

I, too, was looking for some really good Japanese history books and in my searches I found that these are among the best: A History of Japan, by George Sansom.

They start with pre-history and go up to 1867. Sansom's stated reason for not continuing his history beyond this year is that he had lived too close to events of the Meiji Restoration (1868) for him to develop a perspective that only distance could supply. For later events, The Making of Modern Japan (Amazon), by Marius B. Jansen, another outstanding scholar of Japanese history, would be a good choice. Since this history begins at 1600, there are overlapping accounts of the Edo period, but from two quite different perspectives.

An alternative presented by t-o-k-u-m-e-i:
>The best overview text in terms of presentation and interpretation for 1600 to the present is Gordon's A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present.

>The Jansen book is also good, but I (and most of the profs I know) feel that Gordon's interpretation is better

In short, this set is a good buy and is likely to remain a standard text for decades to come.

I've only just recently started reading the first book of the series and I find it very insightful. It starts by describing the geography of Japan and how that shaped and molded the early Japanese and their sensibilities.

Amazon Links:
A History of Japan to 1334
A History of Japan, 1334-1615
A History of Japan, 1615-1867

Google Books Previews:
A History of Japan to 1334
A History of Japan, 1334-1615
A History of Japan, 1615-1867

Author:
Sir George Bailey Sansom

Edit:
The author also has a shorter book published earlier which focuses primarily on culture.
Amazon - Japan: A Short Cultural History
Google Books - Japan: A Short Cultural History

Edit2:
Added an alternative suggestion for the history from 1800 onward given by t-o-k-u-m-e-i.