In this superb book, by far the best in its genre, Andrew Gordon, director of the Reischauer Institute for Japanese Studies at Harvard University, provides a richly detailed and engagingly analytical perspective on the past 200 years of Japan's history. He draws on a variety of sources to evoke a textured ambience of the times, describing not only the experiences of Japan's elite but also those of average men and women in the rice paddies and factories, buffeted by societal traumas and transformations. The text is substantially enhanced by a Web site (www.oxfordjapan.org) with study questions, documents and online reference sources, making it ideal for classroom use.
In tracing the rise and fall of the Tokugawa shogunate, Gordon emphasizes that it did not ". . . solely rely on the coercive power of hegemon and henchmen." The ideological foundations of the regime involved a synthesis of Buddhist, Shinto and neo-Confucian elements. It was a dynamic era of peace that spurred economic development and featured cultural diversity. From the early 1800s, however, it was a sclerotic system that was increasingly challenged from within and eroded by considerable local autonomy. The arrival of Commodore Matthew Perry in 1853 hastened the collapse of an already crumbling regime.
The Meiji Restoration and subsequent program of modernization was led by former samurai who assiduously built a cult of the emperor to confer legitimacy on their initiatives. The loose ties that bound the central and local leaders during the Tokugawa Period were replaced by a highly centralized, authoritarian state that invoked the emperor to promote an ambitious set of reforms that helped create a sense of nation and nurture a strong economy and military. Most authors emphasize the pace and breadth of the Meiji modernization, but Gordon also enlivens the narrative with tales of uprisings and resistance by those who bobbed in the wake of "progress." The socioeconomic, political and cultural reverberations of industrialization are carefully detailed and convey a sense of what it was like to live and work in those times. In addition to huge wage differentials between men and women in the factories, working conditions also left much to be desired. "Discipline was harsh and sometimes arbitrary. Sexual harassment by male supervisors cannot be documented with numerical certainty, but it was a constant theme in the songs of these women. Finally, the poorly ventilated mills were incubators of disease, especially tuberculosis, which was the AIDS of its day."