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Things Japanese: Being Notes on Various Subjects Connected with Japan
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An engaging collection about everything from the abacus to zoology in Japan, designed to preserve knowledge about a society that was modernizing beyond recognition. This book remains an erudite source of information about culture, history, art, religion, and daily life.
Basil Hall Chamberlain (1850–1935) lived in Japan for thirty-five years and was one of the foremost Japan ...more
Basil Hall Chamberlain (1850–1935) lived in Japan for thirty-five years and was one of the foremost Japan ...more
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Paperback, 540 pages
Published
April 1st 2007
by Stone Bridge Press
(first published 1890)
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I picked this up for $4 at a remainder sale. As expected with a hundred-year-old title by a British author on Japan, the book is salted with European assumption of superiority, though not as much as one might think. Chamberlain's style is clear and pleasant, if not brilliant, and sometimes amusing. I've enjoyed this for the window into turn-of-the 20th-century Japan. The Japanese people's frequent return to Japanese ways after sampling Western, surprised me at first but pointed up the good sense
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This remarkable book written in the early years of the 20th century (very early years...he writes in the updated version I read from that the outcome of the Russo-Japanese War is "still uncertain") is an incredibly eclectic set of entries on all sorts of "things Japanese" by an eccentric, witty, and knowledgeable man who at that point had lived in Japan for many years (through one of the most stunning transformations of any society in history, possibly). The book is sort of the equivalent of a m
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La compilación de conceptos culturales de Japón de este libro me ha parecido muy amena e interesante.
Dado que esencialmente en origen está escrito hace más de un siglo hay algunas entradas a las que no he encontrado interés, esencialmente las que reflejan temas relacionados con detalles de economía de los años en los que fue documentada la obra , y algunas otras con un tono machista indigesto que en esta edición del siglo XXI eran totalmente prescindibles.
Si uno deja de lado estos inconvenientes ...more
Dado que esencialmente en origen está escrito hace más de un siglo hay algunas entradas a las que no he encontrado interés, esencialmente las que reflejan temas relacionados con detalles de economía de los años en los que fue documentada la obra , y algunas otras con un tono machista indigesto que en esta edición del siglo XXI eran totalmente prescindibles.
Si uno deja de lado estos inconvenientes ...more
2,5 *
So this is more of a mini-encyclopedia and I admit I skimmed a few parts I was not as interested in. Not for everyone, but if you are interested in a vintage look at Japan (because this book was last updated pre-1930s) it can be a fun resource.
Published in 1890, Chamberlain's book obviously is not the last word on 'things Japanese', but it is central to understanding nineteenth-century European mediations of Japan. Certainly amongst the three or four most widely-read English-language books on Japan before 1940.
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B. A. Chamberlain was a professor of Japanese at the Tokyo Imperial University and was one of the greatest European Japanologists, along with Ernest Mason Satow, Lafcadio Hearn, and William G. Ashton.
He arrived in Japan on the eve of June 1873, left for Geneva in 1911 where he lived until his death in 1935.
He arrived in Japan on the eve of June 1873, left for Geneva in 1911 where he lived until his death in 1935.
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