1. Introduction: Japan's internal and external worlds, 1582-1941 2. Japan and its Chinese and European worlds, 1582-1689 3. The Japanese economy, 1688-1789 4. An age of stability: Japan's internal world in perspective, 1709-83 5. Prosperity amid crises, 1789-1853 6. Sakoku under pressure: the gaiatsu of the 1850s and 1860s 7. Fashioning a state and a foreign policy, 1868-1919 8. From peace to war, 1919-41.

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A History of Japan, 1582–1941: Internal and External Worlds

A History of Japan, 1582–1941: From peace (Versailles 1919) to war (Pearl Harbor 1941)

Introduction to bibliography

Japan in the sixteenth century was an archipelago of which the main component was a large island (Honshu) separated from three middle-sized islands (Kyushu, Shikoku and Ezo) by narrow straits. It was already in physical and human terms a remarkably isolated country. To the west, it faced two inward-looking countries, one the great landmass of China, the other the Korean peninsula whose proximity to Japan made it the vehicle of contact with China. To the east lay the enormous north Pacific ocean, little explored until the late eighteenth century. Cultural influences (Confucian philosophy and Japan's writing system, both Chinese in origin, and the Buddhist religion itself) had all been transmitted through Korea more than a thousand years previously, by a small elite body of monks, scholars and noblemen, some of them returning Japanese. Later contact was fitful, and at the end of the sixteenth century, there was little trade and even less cultural movement between Korea and Japan. However, unsettled international conditions would give Korea, in the seminal decade of the 1590s and again after 1868 in the troubled times of renewed western encroachments in Asia, an importance transcending existing isolation. Isolation to the east and west was reinforced by an absence of contacts to the north, accounted for by climatic conditions, and to the south, created by economic circumstances.

A History of Japan, 1582–1941: Japan and its Chinese and European worlds, 1582–1689

The two most widely held historical images of Japan are its self-imposed isolation (sakoku) from the outside world for almost two and a half centuries, and admiral Perry's challenge to it in 1853. Japan is equally known for its rapid economic growth after 1868 and, already famous for its cars, electronics and pioneering high-speed trains, for becoming in the 1980s the world's second economic superpower. Two questions stand out. Why did Japan pursue from the 1630s a policy of isolation; and why abandoning it in modern times did it succeed so well economically? Between the sakoku period ending in 1853–9 and its post-1960 economic triumphs stand its years of wars and conflicts, culminating in its challenge to the United States in the Pacific war. These events raise their own questions. Were they in some way a consequence of aggression latent in Japanese history, or were they simply part of a complex and mainly post-1840 story embracing the western rape of China, a failed effort by Japan to fashion a successful security policy in a changing Asia, and America's aggressive exercise of its new imperial mantle in the Pacific? Westerners had long seen a policy of exclusion as either irrational or unnatural (though this was qualified in the accounts by four keen-sighted contemporaries, the well-known Kaempfer and the much less well-known Thunberg, Titsingh and Golownin (Golovnin), all of whom spent time in Japan).

A History of Japan, 1582–1941: Introduction: Japan's internal and external worlds, 1582–1941

Growth of the Meiji Landlord System and Tenancy Disputes after World War I: A Critique of Richard Smethurst, Agricultural Development and Tenancy Disputes in Japan, 1870-1940

Nishida Yoshiaki

Papers

Growth of the Meiji Landlord System and Tenancy Disputes after World War I: A Critique of Richard Smethurst, Agricultural Development and Tenancy Disputes in Japan, 1870-1940