Japan's Local Pragmatists

Japan's Local Pragmatists PDF Author: Neil L. Waters
Publisher: Harvard Univ Asia Center
ISBN: 9780674471924
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
Against the backdrop of a comprehensive overview of Japanese historiography, Neil Waters examines in detail the local politics of the Kawasaki region during the late nineteenth century. He paints a fascinating picture of the adaptation and modifications local leaders were able to chart between open rebellion and outright capitulation.

Japan’s Local Pragmatists

Japan’s Local Pragmatists PDF Author: Neil L. Waters
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 168417239X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 191

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Book Description
"Japanese local history is used as an ingredient in historiographical theories designed to prove that the rapid pace of change in Japan led either to phenomenal success or to dismal failure. Against the backdrop of a comprehensive overview of Japanese historiography, Neil Waters examines in detail the local politics of the Kawasaki region during the late nineteenth century. Historians have hitherto focused primarily upon those regions that experienced violent peasant uprisings, class conflict, or extreme government repression. He points out that localities which survived the transition between governments without violence far outnumber those marked by open struggle. This study is one of the few to cover the political and economic history of a region in which “nothing happened.” From an examination of the implementation and impact of Restoration programs on the day-to-day level of local government in the Kawasaki region, a fascinating picture emerges of the adaptation and modifications local leaders were able to chart between open rebellion and outright capitulation."

Alternative Narratives in Modern Japanese History

Alternative Narratives in Modern Japanese History PDF Author: M. William Steele
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134404077
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
How did ordinary people experience Japan's modern transformation? What role did people in local areas play in the making of modern Japan? How do studies of local politics help explain national events? The dominant account of modern Japanese history focuses on the nation-building that brought Japan into the modern world. After centuries of isolation, American warships forced Japan to open its doors to the West and a group of tough new leaders transformed the country into one of the great military and economic powers of the world. But different perspectives need to be examined. Alternative Narratives introduces other actors, other places and other dimensions of social and political activity in an attempt to construct a broader and more complex account of modern Japanese history. Focusing on the initial years of Japan's modern transformation, from the 1850s to the 1890s, Steele explores responses of commoners to the arrival of American warships in 1853; the growth of popular political consciousness; reactions of the residents of Edo in 1868 on the deposition of the shogun; responses of the village elite to the fall of the old regime; and established frameworks of historical narration - including American attempts to understand Japan's 1868 civil war. The author draws upon a wealth of documents, including broadsheets, woodblock prints, political cartoons and local campaign literature, as well as more conventional material in an endeavour to find new and different ways to examine the past. This book forms an important resource to students of Japanese history and culture while simultaneously appealing to scholars interested in the general problem of history and history-writing.

Public Spheres, Private Lives in Modern Japan, 1600–1950

Public Spheres, Private Lives in Modern Japan, 1600–1950 PDF Author: Gail Bernstein
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 1684174023
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 425

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Book Description
The eleven chapters in this volume explore the process of carving out, in discourse and in practice, the boundaries delineating the state, the civil sphere, and the family in Japan from 1600 to 1950. One of the central themes in the volume is the demarcation of relations between the central political authorities and local communities. The early modern period in Japan is marked by a growing sense of a unified national society, with a long, common history, that existed in a coherent space. The growth of this national community inevitably raised questions about relationships between the imperial government and local groups and interests at the prefectural and village levels. Moves to demarcate divisions between central and local rule in the course of constructing a modern nation contributed to a public discourse that drew on longstanding assumptions about political legitimacy, authority, and responsibility as well as on Western political ideas.

Japan's Protoindustrial Elite

Japan's Protoindustrial Elite PDF Author: Edward E. Pratt
Publisher: Harvard Univ Asia Center
ISBN: 9780674472907
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
Through a close examination of economic trends and case studies of particular families, this study demonstrates that Japan's protoindustrial economy was far more volatile than portrayed in most studies to date. Few rural elites survived the competitive and unstable climate of this era.

A Companion to Japanese History

A Companion to Japanese History PDF Author: William M. Tsutsui
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1405193395
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 633

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Book Description
A Companion to Japanese History provides an authoritative overview of current debates and approaches within the study of Japan’s history. Composed of 30 chapters written by an international group of scholars Combines traditional perspectives with the most recent scholarly concerns Supplements a chronological survey with targeted thematic analyses Presents stimulating interventions into individual controversies

Second Metropolis

Second Metropolis PDF Author: Blair A. Ruble
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521801799
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 502

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Book Description
This book explores how social fragmentation led to pluralistic public policies in Chicago, Moscow, and Osaka.

A History of Japan

A History of Japan PDF Author: Conrad Totman
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1119022355
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 720

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Book Description
This is an updated edition of Conrad Totman’s authoritativehistory of Japan from c.8000 BC to the present day. The first edition was widely praised for combiningsophistication and accessibility. Covers a wide range of subjects, including geology, climate,agriculture, government and politics, culture, literature, media,foreign relations, imperialism, and industrialism. Updated to include an epilogue on Japan today andtomorrow. Now includes more on women in history and more on internationalrelations. Bibliographical listings have been updated and enlarged.

Isami's House

Isami's House PDF Author: Gail Lee Bernstein
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520246973
Category : Japan
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description
"There simply is no other book like this. No other family history presents such a range of insights into the ways in which individuals, women as well as men, have had to cope with changes wrought by the social modernization of Japanese family culture."--James L. McClain, author of Japan: A Modern History "Isami's House is the chronicle of a remarkable family, neither aristocratic nor famous, whose rise and decline seem to parallel Japan's. It makes absorbing reading, affording a panoramic view of a rural family's rise to local prominence at the dawn of the modern Japanese nation state, the expansion of its presence to Tokyo and then the empire, its experience in war and defeat, and finally its postwar reconfiguration as a dispersed urban family."--Norma Field, author of In the Realm of a Dying Emperor: A Portrait of Japan at Century's End

Financial Stabilization in Meiji Japan

Financial Stabilization in Meiji Japan PDF Author: Steven J. Ericson
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501746936
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 141

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Book Description
With a new look at the 1880s financial reforms in Japan, Steven J. Ericson's Financial Stabilization in Meiji Japan overturns widely held views of the program carried out by Finance Minister Matsukata Masayoshi. As Ericson shows, rather than constituting an orthodox financial-stabilization program—a sort of precursor of the "neoliberal" reforms promoted by the IMF in the 1980s and 1990s—Matsukata's policies differed in significant ways from both classical economic liberalism and neoliberal orthodoxy. The Matsukata financial reform has become famous largely for the wrong reasons, and Ericson sets the record straight. He shows that Matsukata intended to pursue fiscal retrenchment and budget-balancing when he became finance minister in late 1881. Various exigencies, including foreign military crises and a worsening domestic depression, compelled him instead to increase spending by running deficits and floating public bonds. Though he drastically reduced the money supply, he combined the positive and contractionary policies of his immediate predecessors to pull off a program of "expansionary austerity" paralleling state responses to financial crisis elsewhere in the world both then and now. Through a new and much-needed recalibration of this pivotal financial reform, Financial Stabilization in Meiji Japan demonstrates that, in several ways, ranging from state-led export promotion to the creation of a government-controlled central bank, Matsukata advanced policies that were more in line with a nationalist, developmentalist approach than with a liberal economic one. Ericson shows that Matsukata Masayoshi was far from a rigid adherent of classical economic liberalism.