Synopses & Reviews
First published in 1939, this Singer tour de force offering some fifty carefully chosen classic texts from Yamato to the Momoyama period and fully annotated, remains as significant a point of reference today as it did sixty years ago. It is both a primer for the student of Japanese social history as well as a delightful guided tour through a thousand years of Japanese culture, customs and etiquette. 'Some of these pages are chosen as they throw light on ways in which the Japanese in remoter periods felt, thought and behaved,' writes Singer. 'Some may illuminate details of social organization, economic conditions and administration. The most beautiful, however, may be taken as definitive formulations of standards, norms, moral, religious, aesthetic and sentimental; expressions of the innermost life of a nation which give significance to its existence and justify its greatest aspirations.'
Synopsis
First Published in 2002. This book looks at the small groups of Japanese people who were perpetually endangered by foreign invasions, actual and potential, and even more by the disruptive forces of their own ambitious kith and kin. These people were scattered over a number of islands, each again divided by mountain ranges into a set of island-like districts, and they lived and enjoyed a perilous existence which made them stronger and still more secretive. Traits and tendencies of this order are in the strictest sense ultimate data of sociological analysis. The purpose of the present book is to facilitate these studies, by presenting a co-ordinated number of texts dating from the epochs in which the foundations of Japanese civilization were laid.