Forrest Norvell’s Reviews > The Making of Modern Japan > Status Update

Forrest Norvell
Forrest Norvell is on page 456 of 936
It's a relief reading history by someone who's neither wedded to Marxist historiography nor totally reactionary.
Dec 30, 2009 06:43PM
The Making of Modern Japan

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Forrest Norvell
Forrest Norvell is on page 65 of 936
Super chewy, with a nicely modern and clear-eyed take. It's gonna take me a while to get through this one.
Dec 23, 2009 01:55PM
The Making of Modern Japan


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message 1: by Kristin (new)

Kristin Are you making a trip to Japan soon or just interested?
Happy New Year!


Forrest Norvell Happy New Year!

I'm going to try to visit Japan (again) this year, but I'm reading this now because I've been interested in Japanese culture (both high and low) forever and learning how to read Japanese for a while, but realized I didn't have a very good grasp of pre-WWII Japanese history. There was a kerfuffle here about a display of samurai armor and artifacts at the Asian Art Museum (see http://www.asiansart.org/ for a précis) that piqued my interest in getting past the popularized image of early modern Japan (aka the Tokugawa shogunate) as well.

I'm actually trying to find documentation of "classical" Japanese history (pre-Heian era), but what's become clear to me (and strikes me as remarkable) is that there just isn't that much known about ancient Japan that isn't shrouded in myth. The history of Japan was pretty much treated as a tool to legitimize the Japanese emperor until the Marxist historical tradition found its way into Japan, and even now attempts to demythicize Japanese history are politically loaded (for instance, the Imperial Household Agency of Japan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial...), which among many other things controls the mauseoleums / tomb mounds from Japan's tomb-building era, refuses to allow researchers to take DNA samples of Japan's ancient rulers, probably out of fear it would show intermarriage between Japan's rulers and those of Korea and China – a notion that strikes at the heart of the Japanese imperial discourse of the divine and intrinsically Japanese appointment of the Japanese ruling house. Never mind that it's already been conclusively shown that the modern Japanese people displaced the original settlers of the Japanese islands a few thousand years ago).

If you see the Cambridge History of Japan pop up in my feed, you'll know I've gone off the deep end. It's the definitive source in English on things old and Japanese, but it's also ridiculously expensive (and, in fact, costs more used online than it does new via Amazon -- what's that all about, internet?). My choices are either to pay for it or to enroll in one of the universities around here that have it, because it doesn't appear to be in any public libraries in SF.


message 3: by Kristin (new)

Kristin Sounds fascinating! The fear of intermarriage between the Japanese and Chinese & Koreans is interesting on a more contemporary sociological level, as well. Lots of tension there.

I'll keep an eye out for that Cambridge History in your feed, then- sounds like if it shows up, all is well in your part of the world. Tee-hee. (The deep end, eh?)


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