… is a terrible book if you are not a historian. I would highly recommend not attempting to read this book, ever.
It’s full of big words and extensive allegories to obscure psychology studies, none of which you will be familiar with unless you have a background in psychology. If you do have a background in psychology, the references to further obscure Japanese political entities will undoubtedly take you to your knees, as each of the book’s many authors seems to delight in filling paragraph upon paragraph with what seem like nothing more than comma-separated lists of names of people you have never heard of.
On top of all of this, I have never seen more references to Russia in a book about Japan. Every chapter looks like it makes a reference to Marxist communism and Moscow, even the one on cultural traditions and their originals in Edo. For a book that is about the history of a feudal agrarian society, they really like to make a lot of comparisons to an industrial socialist regime. I’d love to know if their comparisons hold any weight, but with all the sociology terms they use, I can’t make heads or tails of their arguments.
Each author seems to be trying to out-do the last, using longer, more obscure words, sometimes even jumping into another language (particularly, German), and it completely clouds whatever point they were trying to make in their writings.
Anyway, our assignment for the weekend was to read one chapter from this book and prepare a 5-minute presentation on it. We had to specifically target these questions:
- How
- By whom
- Under what circumstances
- To what social and political effect
… and while I’ll gladly admit that the “by whom” should be very easy, with the extensive lists of names available in my chapter, I have no idea who any of these people were or how they had any effect on the situation, and I have no plans to read the journals and other books referenced at the bottom of the page – and I don’t have access to them anyway.
How: I’ve tried to read the mere 20 pages of hist-o-speak to no avail in finding a “how”, simply a “what”: Edo is an artificial time-frame before the Meiji restoration; it is a time at which most “Japanese” traditions” (both of those in quotes because of everything that has been talked about earlier on this book and the meaning of `tradition`) were either founded, become popular, or simply became “Japanese”.
By whom: <Insert extensive list of Japanese people I have never heard of>
Under what circumstances: In the post-Meiji era, Edo was looked back upon as a better time, the “way things were”, the feudal-traditional past. Before Edo was a time when Japan was untouched by the west, after Edo was a time when Western foundations encroached and become part of the efforts to modernize Japan. Thus, Edo was the peace between these two time periods: The mixing of Western contact with the feudal, classical Japan.
To what social and political effect: I have no idea. There are a bunch of references in the chapter to who I believe are random political figures from Japan, and lots of references to socialism and Marxism, but I really have no idea what Carol’s talking about.
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