Book Review

Asia

This is a detailed survey of the political history of modern Japan, from 1825, the year when the bakufu issued an order to expel Western vessels approaching Japan, to the present. It is not based on scholarly research in primary sources. Chushichi Tsuzuki states that the book began as a series of lectures at a Japanese university; hence it is based primarily on Western and Japanese publications. These are skillfully synthesized and integrated in the discourse with the author's insightful observations and analyses. The basic accounts are known to students of Japanese history, but the details here will be illuminating to many readers of this study.	1
Twenty-one chapters are divided into three parts with appendixes. One is an extensive annotated bibliography of English and Japanese works. A brief historical background is presented in the introduction and the main discourse starts with part one, entitled "From Seclusion to Expansion, 1825–1900."	2
Chapter one consists of a brief survey of the Tokugawa rule and the debate between proponents who favored opening to the West and those who opposed it. The following chapters cover the opening of the country, the Meiji Restoration, and the emergence of the people's rights movement. Tsuzuki also makes interesting observations, seeing, for example, the replacement of the daimyo domains with the prefectures as a second coup d'etat. He then moves on to the drafting and adoption of the Meiji constitution. He also speaks of the birth of emperor-centered ideology that accompanied the advent of the constitution. Next Tsuzuki covers the Sino-Japanese War and the consequent emergence of Japanese nationalism and imperialism. Then he deals with industrialization, especially the years of growth from 1885 to 1914 and the subsequent emergence of the zaibatsu, the condition of the workers, the nascent labor movement, and the emergence of socialists and anarchists. On economic development, standard works are cited, but this reviewer was somewhat surprised that the author did not incorporate Kazushi Ohkawa and Henry Rosovsky's Japanese Economic Growth: Trend Acceleration in the Twentieth Century (1973) in his account.	. . .