War Revolution And Japan By Ian Neary - ISBN 1-873410-08-5.

Condition is "Very good".

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Description

The end of the Cold War years has brought tumultuous change. Revolutionary changes, however, are not new to the Japanese.

THIS BOOK is the product of the History, Politics and International Relations section of the Sixth Conference of the European Association of Japanese Studies (Berlin, September 1991). The papers are loosely linked by the general theme of revolution. The issues raised range from the growth of nationalism during the Tokugawa to interwar political alternatives to current Japanese perspectives on changes in Eastern Europe.

Karine Marandjian's paper on the Tokugawa Confucian Sato Naokata is most intriguing because of Sato's implication that the concept of "middle kingdom" could at the time be stretched to include China and Japan (as well as India, Korea, Annam, and others) in a wider awareness of Asian civilization. This perception could then, in turn, be used on the newly arriving Europeans, who were of course designated the new "barbarians" of the day. Asian tradition was thus upheld. Ben-Ami Shillony's article follows this line of thought well by examining some of the more overt trappings of Imperial China copied by the Meiji leadership in an effort to establish a leading Asian role. To this end there were several native Japanese traditions that were overturned by the imported Chinese model, such as the female right to imperial succession.

Several of the papers deal with prewar Japan in transition. Margaret Mehl argues convincingly, though not surprisingly, that the changing official historiography between 1868 and 1891 was used to legitimate contemporary political reforms. Ulrike Wohr's article on the Shinshin Fujinkai (True New Women's Society) is interesting because she describes a women's organization that seems to want to be modern yet remained more wedded to new religious movements than to either anarchism or socialism.

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