The Japanese Discovery of Europe, 1720-1830

The Japanese Discovery of Europe, 1720-1830 PDF Author: Donald Keene
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804774161
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 276

Get Book Here

Book Description
This is an account of the growth and uses of Western learning in Japan from 1720 to 1830. These are the dates of the beginning of official interest in Western learning and of the expulsion of Siebold from the country, the first stage of a crisis that could be resolved only by the opening of the country of the West. The century and more included by the two dates was a most important period in Japanese history, when intellectuals, rebelling at the isolation of their country, desperately sought knowledge from abroad. The amazing energy and enthusiasm of men like Honda Toshiaki made possible the spectacular changes in Japan, which are all too often credited to the arrival of Commodore Perry. The author chose Honda Toshiaki (1744-1821) as his central figure. A page from any one of Honda's writings suffices to show that with him one has entered a new age, that of modern Japan. One finds in his books a new spirit, restless, curious and receptive. There is in him the wonder at new discoveries, the delight in widening horizons. Honda took a kind of pleasure even in revealing that Japan, after all, was only a small island in a large world. To the Japanese who had thought of Chinese civilization as being immemorial antiquity, he declared that Egypt's was thousands of years older and far superior. The world, he discovered, was full of wonderful things, and he insisted that Japan take advantage of them. Honda looked at Japan as he thought a Westerner might, and saw things that had to be changed, terrible drains on the country's moral and physical strength. Within him sprang the conviction that Japan must become one of the great nations of the world.

The Japanese Discovery of Europe, 1720-1830

The Japanese Discovery of Europe, 1720-1830 PDF Author: Donald Keene
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804774161
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 276

Get Book Here

Book Description
This is an account of the growth and uses of Western learning in Japan from 1720 to 1830. These are the dates of the beginning of official interest in Western learning and of the expulsion of Siebold from the country, the first stage of a crisis that could be resolved only by the opening of the country of the West. The century and more included by the two dates was a most important period in Japanese history, when intellectuals, rebelling at the isolation of their country, desperately sought knowledge from abroad. The amazing energy and enthusiasm of men like Honda Toshiaki made possible the spectacular changes in Japan, which are all too often credited to the arrival of Commodore Perry. The author chose Honda Toshiaki (1744-1821) as his central figure. A page from any one of Honda's writings suffices to show that with him one has entered a new age, that of modern Japan. One finds in his books a new spirit, restless, curious and receptive. There is in him the wonder at new discoveries, the delight in widening horizons. Honda took a kind of pleasure even in revealing that Japan, after all, was only a small island in a large world. To the Japanese who had thought of Chinese civilization as being immemorial antiquity, he declared that Egypt's was thousands of years older and far superior. The world, he discovered, was full of wonderful things, and he insisted that Japan take advantage of them. Honda looked at Japan as he thought a Westerner might, and saw things that had to be changed, terrible drains on the country's moral and physical strength. Within him sprang the conviction that Japan must become one of the great nations of the world.

The Japanese Discovery of Europe, 1720-1830

The Japanese Discovery of Europe, 1720-1830 PDF Author: Donald Keene
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 255

Get Book Here

Book Description


Japanese Discovery of Europe

Japanese Discovery of Europe PDF Author: Donald Keene
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

Get Book Here

Book Description


The Japanese Discovery of Europe

The Japanese Discovery of Europe PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description


The Origins of Japanese Trade Supremacy

The Origins of Japanese Trade Supremacy PDF Author: Christopher Howe
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226354866
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 528

Get Book Here

Book Description
For many in the West, the emergence of Japan as an economic superpower has been as surprising as it has been sudden. After its defeat in World War II, Japan hardly appeared a candidate to lead industrialized nations in productivity and technological innovation, and the "Japanese miracle" is often explained as the result of U.S. aid and protection in the postwar years. In The Origins of Japanese Trade Supremacy, Christopher Howe locates the sources of Japan's current commercial and financial strength in events tnat occurred well before 1945. In this revisionist account, Howe traces the history of Japanese trade over four centuries to show that the Japanese mastery of trade with the outside world began as long ago as the sixteenth century, with Japan's first contact with European trading partners. Although profitable, this early contact was so destabilizing that the Japanese leadership soon restricted foreign trade mainly to Asian partners. From the early seventeenth to the middle of the nineteenth centuries, Japan developed in relative isolation. Though secluded from the scientific and economic revolutions in the West, Japan proved adept at finding novel solutions to its own problems, and its economy grew in size, diversity, and technological and institutional sophistication. By the nineteenth century, when contacts with the West were reestablished. Japan had developed a remarkable capacity to absorb foreign technologies and to adapt and create new institutions, while retaining significant elements of its traditional system of values. Most importantly, Japan's long-standing reliance on its own ingenuity to solve problems continued to flourish. This tradition, born of necessity, is the most important foundation for Japan's current position as a world economic power.

Exporting Japanese Aesthetics

Exporting Japanese Aesthetics PDF Author: Tets Kimura
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1782846581
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 286

Get Book Here

Book Description
Exporting Japanese Aesthetics brings together historical and contemporary case studies addressing the evolution of international impacts and influences of Japanese culture and aesthetics. The volume draws on a wide range of examples from a multidisciplinary team of scholars exploring transnational, regional and global contexts. Studies include the impact of traditional Japanese theatre and art through to the global popularity of contemporary anime and manga. Under the banner of soft power or Cool Japan, cultural commodities that originate in Japan have manifested new meanings outside Japan. By (re)mapping meanings of selected Japanese cultural forms, this volume offers an in-depth examination of how various aspects of Japanese aesthetics have evolved as exportable commodities, the motivations behind this diffusion, and the extent to which the process of diffusion has been the result of strategic planning. Each chapter presents a case study that explores perspectives that situate Japanese aesthetics within a wide-ranging field of inquiry including performance, tourism, and visual arts, as well as providing historical contexts. The importance of interrogating the export of Japanese aesthetics is validated at the highest levels of government, which formed the Office of Cool Japan in 2010, and which perhaps originated in the 19th century at governmentally endorsed cultural courts at world fairs. Increased international consumption of contemporary Japanese culture provides a much needed boost to Japans weakening economy. The case studies are timely and topical. As host of the 2020/2021 Tokyo Olympic Games and the 2025 Osaka Expo, Cool Japan will be under special scrutiny.

Punishment and Power in the Making of Modern Japan

Punishment and Power in the Making of Modern Japan PDF Author: Daniel V. Botsman
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691130302
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 336

Get Book Here

Book Description
The kinds of punishment used in a society have long been considered an important criterion in judging whether a society is civilized or barbaric, advanced or backward, modern or premodern. Focusing on Japan, and the dramatic revolution in punishments that occurred after the Meiji Restoration, Daniel Botsman asks how such distinctions have affected our understanding of the past and contributed, in turn, to the proliferation of new kinds of barbarity in the modern world. While there is no denying the ferocity of many of the penal practices in use during the Tokugawa period (1600-1868), this book begins by showing that these formed part of a sophisticated system of order that did have its limits. Botsman then demonstrates that although significant innovations occurred later in the period, they did not fit smoothly into the "modernization" process. Instead, he argues, the Western powers forced a break with the past by using the specter of Oriental barbarism to justify their own aggressive expansion into East Asia. The ensuing changes were not simply imposed from outside, however. The Meiji regime soon realized that the modern prison could serve not only as a symbol of Japan's international progress but also as a powerful domestic tool. The first English-language study of the history of punishment in Japan, the book concludes by examining how modern ideas about progress and civilization shaped penal practices in Japan's own colonial empire.

On the Frontiers of History

On the Frontiers of History PDF Author: Tessa Morris-Suzuki
Publisher: ANU Press
ISBN: 1760463701
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 247

Get Book Here

Book Description
Why is it that we so readily accept the boundary lines drawn around nations or around regions like ‘Asia’ as though they were natural and self-evident, when in fact they are so mutable and often so very arbitrary? What happens to people not only when the borders they seek to cross become heavily guarded, but also when new borders are drawn straight through the middle of their lives? The essays in this book address these questions by starting from small places on the borderlands of East Asia and looking outwards from the small towards the large, asking what these ‘minor pasts’ tell us about the grand narratives of history. In the process, it takes the reader on a journey from Renaissance European visions of ‘Tartary’, through nineteenth-century racial theorising, imperial cartography and indigenous experiences of modernity, to contemporary debates about Big History in an age of environmental crisis.

The Dutch East India Company in Early Modern Japan

The Dutch East India Company in Early Modern Japan PDF Author: Michael Laver
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350126055
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 188

Get Book Here

Book Description
Michael Laver examines how the giving of exotic gifts in early modern Japan facilitated Dutch trade by ascribing legitimacy to the shogunal government and by playing into the shogun's desire to create a worldview centered on a Japanese tributary state. The book reveals how formal and informal gift exchange also created a smooth working relationship between the Dutch and the Japanese bureaucracy, allowing the politically charged issue of foreign trade to proceed relatively uninterrupted for over two centuries. Based mainly on Dutch diaries and official Dutch East India Company records, as well as exhaustive secondary research conducted in Dutch, English, and Japanese, this new study fills an important gap in our knowledge of European-Japanese relations. It will also be of great interest to anyone studying the history of material culture and cross-cultural relations in a global context.

The Cambridge History of Japan

The Cambridge History of Japan PDF Author: John Whitney Hall
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521223553
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 878

Get Book Here

Book Description
Volume 4 of The Cambridge History of Japan examines the turbulent period from 1550 to 1800.