Joe's Reviews > The Making of Modern Japan

I read this through around page 430. It's very good, just very heavy. It's like taking a college course in Japanese history. It has huge breadth: the internal politics, foreign policy, and culture of Japan are all here. You learn the differences between the daimyo and the bakufu pretty quickly. It's a story of clashing institutions. It can be hard to follow.

The author has a good eye for compelling details and primary sources. Europeans only play a small role in early Japanese history. We get a good sense of this when one of the Dutchmen who has been dispatched to Japan describes how he can only communicate with the Japanese if he agrees to be treated like a clown. The Japanese ask him to move around, dance, kiss the other men in his group, etc., so they can observe how Europeans act.

Eventually the West plays a major role. I stopped reading just after the Meiji Revolution. The book doesn't get worse there, it's just that I know a good amount of post-Meiji history already. I thought the book did a good job of introducing the period by describing some of the individual heroes of the history that later showed up on Japanese currency.

The book this reminded me of most is The Venture of Islam , which has a similar broad scope of a civilization. This book is a little more unfriendly to beginners, but it seems just as definitive.