Employing a wide range of primary source materials, Modern Japan: A History in Documents, Second Edition, provides a colorful narrative of Japan's development since 1600. A variety of diary entries, letters, legal documents, and poems brings to life the early modern years, when Japan largely shut itself off from the outside world. A picture essay highlights the tumultuous decade and a half following the arrival of Commodore Matthew Perry and the U.S. Navy in 1853, which led to unprecedented changes and a new government. ...
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Employing a wide range of primary source materials, Modern Japan: A History in Documents, Second Edition, provides a colorful narrative of Japan's development since 1600. A variety of diary entries, letters, legal documents, and poems brings to life the early modern years, when Japan largely shut itself off from the outside world. A picture essay highlights the tumultuous decade and a half following the arrival of Commodore Matthew Perry and the U.S. Navy in 1853, which led to unprecedented changes and a new government. The dramatic rush to modernity in the late 1800s and early 1900s--accompanied by Japan's entry into the imperialist rivalry--is seen through travel accounts, novelists' recollections, and imperial rescripts, while editorial cartoons and prison memoirs recount the early twentieth-century rush, first toward pluralism, then toward war. Japan's recovery after defeat in World War II and its emergence as a vibrant democracy with the second largest economy in the world is chronicled through records as diverse as a funeral eulogy, a comic book description of Adam Smith's economic theories, and an e-journal interview. The documents are woven together in a scintillating narrative that brings to life one of the world's most remarkable national stories.
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