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Book Review
| The Human Tradition in Modern Japan. Edited by ANNE WALTHALL. Wilmington: Scholarly Resources Books, 2002. Pp. xx +241. $60.00 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).
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The Human Tradition in Modern Japan is a fascinating work that unearths the lives of twelve diverse men and women who lived in Japan between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. Though these people are not as "ordinary" as Anne Walthall's introduction leads one to believe—princesses, samurai, Diet members, lesbian writers, and iconic entertainers are not ordinary—they are, nevertheless, not makers of history so much as humans dealing with life's choices and the historical changes swirling around them as best they can. |
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The book is composed of an editor's introduction and twelve biographical chapters, separated into five chronological sections. Each section opens with a very concise, informative, and jargon-free historical overview of the period that it covers. For the non–Japanese specialist, these overviews provide an ample framework in which to place and to understand the biographies. To further aid those unfamiliar with Japanese history, each chapter opens with a brief synopsis of the main figure to be discussed and the social, political, or cultural sphere that figure occupied in Japan. Walthall has done an excellent job in unifying the twelve authorial voices into one, as each chapter flows effortlessly into the next, with no essay standing out from the others. |
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A major theme of this work is family and the ways in which people try to protect and to advance their family. Cecilia Segawa Seigle's essay on Princess Shinanomiya provides a glimpse into the trials and tribulations of a seventeenth-century Japanese aristocratic family and the shared human experiences, such as births, deaths, and family turmoil, that these refined people had to deal with. Gail Lee Bernstein's account of an early twentieth-century rural patriarch who sent all fourteen of his children to college is illuminating for what it reveals about the power of education to socially advance one in the world, while at the same time not necessarily delivering personal happiness. |
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