Synopses & Reviews
1
The Black Ships
When Commodore Matthew (Old Matt) Calbraith Perry sailed into Edo Bay on July 8, 1853, with four heavily armed ships, on a mission to open up Japanese ports to American ships, he could be forgiven for thinking the Japanese were an ignorant people. Japan had been cut off from most other countries for roughly two hundred years. Japanese rulers, fearful of foreign aggression and worried that Christianity, promoted by European missionaries, would make their subjects unruly, had outlawed the Christian religion, expelled most foreigners and all priests, and forbidden Japanese to go abroad. Anyone bold enough to defy these rules faced execution, usually of a most gruesome kind. Few were so bold. Trade with China and Korea still went on, but since the 1630s, the Western presence in Japan had been limited to a handful of bored Dutch merchants confined to a tiny man-made island off the city of Nagasaki.
It was one of the most extraordinary confrontations in modern history. There was Perry with his four black ships of evil, thundering an ominous salute at the Japanese coast by firing his cannon. And there were the Japanese, lined up on the shore, armed with swords and old-fashioned muskets. Commodore Perry insisted on dealing only with the highest representatives of the Japanese government, without really knowing who they were. The distinction in his mind between the emperor, a grand but still powerless figure, and the shogun was fuzzy. The emperor, living in Kyoto, the old imperial capital, was the symbol of Japanese cultural continuity. His duties were ceremonial and spiritual, while the shogun ruled, as the samurai generalissimo, from his seat in Edo, today's Tokyo. From 1603, the shoguns all belonged to the Tokugawa clan, hence the name of their government, Tokugawa bakufu (shogunate), also known as Edo bakufu.
Perry, however, unaware of all this, kept on insisting that his letter from President Millard Fillmore of the United States of America, demanding the right to put up and trade at Japanese ports, be taken straight to the emperor, who, even if such a letter had ever reached him, would not have known what to do with it.
Communications with the Japanese were laborious, since the only European language known to their interpreters was Dutch. After Portuguese missionaries were banned from Japan in the seventeenth century, Dutch merchants, who were more interested in money than spreading the faith, were the only Europeans allowed to stay. The Japanese officials, though curious about American armaments and content to drink brandy and sugar on board Perry's flagship, were under instruction to tell the flowery-flagged devils to go away. They insisted that the only place to conduct business with foreigners was Nagasaki. But Perry, confident in the power of his guns, refused to budge. The Reverend Samuel Wells Williams, the official American interpreter, whose grasp of Japanese was tenuous, wrote in his journal that the universal Yankee nation had come “to disturb Japan's] apathy and long ignorance.
When, after long deliberations, during which the Japanese countered Perry's imperious behavior with polite vagueness and other stalling tactics, Perry was finally allowed to go ashore, the two sides set out to impress each other with as much pomp as they could muster. The commodore strode forth, flanked by his two tallest black bodyguards. The Japanese were
Review
Buruma's early chapters are especially good, written with characteristic equanimity and clarity....But, again, it is the reverberations with contemporary Japan that give the book particular interest....What emerges from the book is a picture of a country that has not come to terms with the momentous events of its recent past. Japan is still looking for its place in the world." Anthony Head, Times Literary Supplement (read the entire TLS review)
Synopsis
In 1853, when American warships forcibly opened Japan's ports, the island was a closed, feudal, preindustrial society run by local warlords. A Japanese child born in that year might have lived to see Japan become a great power whose military empire spanned the Pacific. That person's child would have lived through Japan's national suicide during World War II and its rebirth as a global economic force and Asia's first working democracy, symbolized by and celebrated at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. What explains this strange and fateful transformation?
In a single masterful narrative, Ian Buruma chronicles Japan's journey to its current position in the world order. It is the story of a country unusually arrogant about the superiority of its own ways, and at the same time unusually open to outside ideas. Time and again, Buruma shows, that combination has bred deep collective anxiety and wild social mood swings, with fateful consequences. Writing with a wit and authority made possible by a deep intimacy with his subject and his own remarkable gifts, Ian Buruma has produced a book that stands without rival as a single-volume account of the invention of modem Japan.
Synopsis
Annotation In a single short book as elegant as it is wise, Ian Buruma makes sense of the most fateful span of Japan's history, the period that saw as dramatic a transformation as any country has ever known. In the course of little more than a hundred years from the day Commodore Matthew Perry arrived in his black ships, this insular, preindustrial realm mutated into an expansive military dictatorship that essentially supplanted the British, French, Dutch, and American empires in Asia before plunging to utter ruin, eventually emerging under American tutelage as a pseudo-Western-style democracy and economic dynamo.
What explains the seismic changes that thrust this small island nation so violently onto the world stage? In part, Ian Buruma argues, the story is one of a newly united nation that felt it must play catch-up to the established Western powers, just as Germany and Italy did, a process that involved, in addition to outward colonial expansion, internal cultural consolidation and the manufacturing of a shared,heritage. But Japan has always been both particularly open to the importation of good ideas and particularly prickly about keeping their influence quarantined, a bipolar disorder that would have dramatic consequences and that continues to this day. If one book is to be read in order to understand why the Japanese seem so impossibly strange to many Americans, "Inventing Japan is surely it.
Synopsis
Includes bibliographical references (p. [183]-187) and index.
Synopsis
The author of Bad Elements and The Missionary and the Libertine traces the history of Japan from the country's nineteenth-century feudal isolation, to its rise to military power and defeat during World War II, to its rebirth as a global economic and working democracy in the postwar era. 25,000 first printing.
About the Author
Ian Buruma studied and worked in Japan for many years. He is the author of Bad Elements, The Missionary and the Libertine, Anglomania, A Japanese Mirror, Gods Dust, The Wages of Guilt, and Playing the Game. He lives in London.
Table of Contents
Prologue: Tokyo Olympics -- Black ships -- Civilization and enlightenment -- Ero Guro Nansensu -- Ah, our Manchuria -- War against the west -- Tokyo boogie-woogie -- 1955 and all that -- Epilogue; the end of the postwar.