A Perspective of Modern Japan. . - Reviews - book review

Contemporary Review, August, 2002 by Raymond Lamont-Brown

Japan: A Modern History. James L. McClain. W. W. Norton & Company. [pounds sterling]27.50. ISBN 0-393-04156-5.

The people of Japan, in all their variations, have constructed their own history in an individualistic way. This is a difficult concept for the gaijin (foreigner) to grasp when brought up on the premise that the Japanese are a consensus society. This fact came as a surprise to the author when he first began his studies in Japan in 1966. James McClain has based his new history of modem Japan, within the period 1603 to the present, on a personal discovery of the place and its people.

As so many others have done Mr McClain came to the realisation that Japan is distinct rather than being inscrutable. His history sensibly reflects this and how he learned to abandon stereotypes for the Japanese and study what made the Japanese act as they did in history, and how they enjoyed the benefits of the outward-looking Meiji Era, from 1868, but reaped the whirlwind of militarism at Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

The author was divided his subject matter into five easily accessed sections: Traditional Japan; Japan in Revolutionary Times; Japan in the New Century; Japan at War; Contemporary Japan.

Each section is preceded by a useful Chronology. There is also a helpful 'back up' series of maps, notes, glossary and reading list. Mr McClain therefore begins his text in a year significant in UK history as an era of change. In 1603 Elizabeth I of England died at Richmond Palace, three years after the English sailor, William Adams, had arrived in Japanese waters aboard the Liefde. On the twelfth day of the second month of 1603 Emperor Goyoze appointed Ieyasu Tokugawa shogun (generalissimo) and thus began a seminal event in Japanese history; the Tokugawa were to administer Japan until the next great change in Japanese history, the fall of that Shogunate rule in 1867, and the restoration of imperial rule.

In Ieyasu Tokugawa's time Japan was made up of the domains of some 250 daimyo (feudal lords) in a country largely isolated from the outside world. Mr McClain shows how this agricultural society of farms and villages was forged into a powerful nation with a rich culture that had been wrought from intellectual ideas and arts absorbed from China by way of Korea. The narrative weaves the rise and fall of the samurai (warrior) and the emergence of a political, economic and military force that was to bring its mighty neighbours China and Imperial Russia to their knees in two wars, the outcome of which stunned the world. Yet the military skills that brought Japan international stature at the turn of the twentieth century led to disaster forty years on.

It is good to see that the author has paid attention to the social conditions of the lower classes and the social groups of 'non-people', such as the eta ('polluting' outcasts) and hinin ('non-humans'), who only enjoyed the rights and duties of other imperial subjects from 1871. These groups have been traditionally ignored in general histories. There is a good examination too of other 'contentious' areas such as Japan's relations with Korea and the role of women in modem Japan. The section on Contemporary Japan runs from 1945 to 1997 and forms a series of essays on such subjects as the Occupation, Japan's recovery after World War II and the entrance of a new era, not so much marked by the millennium but by the death of Emperor Hirohito in 1989.

This is a book to be recommended to the general reader with only a tenuous grasp of modem Japanese history. Further it will prove useful to students of Japanese modem history, for the structure allows easy access to particular eras and historical aspects, albeit written by an American for an American readership.