The New Cambridge History Of Japan Volume 2 Early Modern Japan In Asia And The World C 1580 1877

This major new reference work presents an accessible and innovative survey of the latest developments in the study of early modern Japan. The period from about 1580 to 1877 saw the reunification of Japan after a long period of civil war, followed by two and a half centuries of peace and stability under the Tokugawa shogunate, and closing with the Meiji Restoration of 1868, which laid the foundation for a modern nation-state. With essays from leading international scholars, this volume emphasizes Japan's place in global history and pays close attention to gender and environmental history. It introduces readers to recent scholarship in fields including social history, the history of science and technology, intellectual history, and book history. Drawing on original research, each chapter situates its primary source material and novel arguments in the context of close engagement with secondary scholarship in a range of languages. The volume underlines the importance of Japan in the global early modern world.

This volume provides the most comprehensive treatment in Western literature of the Heian period, the Japanese imperial court's golden age.

This volume in The Cambridge History of Japan provides the most comprehensive account available in any Western language of Japan's transformation from a feudal society to a modern nation state. Volume 5 traces the roots and the course of political, social, and institutional change that took place in Japan from late Tokugawa times to the early twentieth century. The interrelated collection of authoritative and analytical essays by specialists in the history of nineteenth century Japan discuss the fissures in late feudal society, the impact of and response to the Western world, the overthrow of the shogunal government, and the revolutionary changes that were instituted as defensive measures to strengthen the country against what seemed a dangerous competition with the Western world.

This major new volume presents innovative recent scholarship on Japan's modern history, including its imperial past and transregional entanglements. An international team of leading scholars offer accessible and thought-provoking essays that present an expansive global vision of the archipelago's history from c. 1868 to the twenty-first century. Japan was the first non-Western society to become a modern nation and empire, to industrialize, and to deliver a high standard of living to virtually all its citizens, capturing international attention ever since. These Japanese efforts to reshape global hierarchies powered a variety of debates and conflicts, both at home and with people and places beyond Japan's shores. Drawing on the latest Japanese and English-language scholarship, this volume highlights Japan's distinctive and fast-changing history.

This book seeks to describe how Japan manipulated existing diplomatic channels to ensure national security. Rather, far from aiming at seclusion, Japan's diplomacy in the seventeenth century was orchestrated to achieve certain objectives, both outside the country and inside it. The aim was to build Japan into an autonomous center of its own. Since the country was "closed," elaborate and expensive foreign embassies were obliged to make the journey to Edo. Countries which were perceived as potential threats, such as Portugal and Spain, were excluded from this process. Only those such as the Chinese and the Dutch, with whom trade was recognized as desirable, were allowed a supervised presence in Japan itself. Closing the gates to Japan was not the object. Rather, carefully judging just when they should be open and shut was the aim.

--V.3. Medieval Japan, edited by Kozo Yamamura. v.4. Early modern Japan, edited by John Whitney Hall. v.5. The nineteenth century, edited by Marius B. Jansen. v.6. The twentieth century, edited by Peter Duus.

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This elegant history considers a fascinating array of texts, cultural practices, and intellectual processes—including maps and mapmaking, poetry, travel writing, popular fiction, and encyclopedias—to chart the emergence of a new geographical consciousness in early modern Japan. Marcia Yonemoto's wide-ranging history of ideas traces changing conceptions and representations of space by looking at the roles played by writers, artists, commercial publishers, and the Shogunal government in helping to fashion a new awareness of space and place in this period. Her impressively researched study shows how spatial and geographical knowledge confined to elites in early Japan became more generalized, flexible, and widespread in the Tokugawa period. In the broadest sense, her book grasps the elusive processes through which people came to name, to know, and to interpret their worlds in narrative and visual forms.