Magisterial in vision, sweeping in scope, this monumental work presents a seamless account of Japanese society during the modern era, from 1600 to the present. A distillation of more than 50 years' engagement with Japan and its history, it is the crowning work of our leading interpreter of the moder[...]

In this book social scientists scrutinize the middle decades of the nineteenth century in Japan. That scrutiny is important and overdue, for the period from the 1850s to the 1880s has usually been treated in terms of politics and foreign relations. Yet those decades were also of pivotal importance i[...]