The Making of Modern Japan: A Reader

Greenwich Readers is a major new anthology series designed specifically to supplement teaching resources at undergraduate level in the following subject areas: social sciences, humanities and law. Drawing together a varied and frequently inaccessible range of essential readings and key texts, this ongoing programme has been carefully selected to provide a detailed overview of individual subjects and forms a framework for specific courses. The overall series has been devised to offer a solution to many of the problems students encounter in accessing set course texts, and it is hoped the anthologies will alleviate both pressure on library resources as well as ensuring higher levels of course completion. All volumes benefit from introductory essays and appropriate linking passages, and full textual references are included where available.
Modern Japan presents the social scientist with a series of intriguing problems. Was Japan's pre-modern society in fact a variety of feudalism and did this type of social structure, as in the West, serve as a springboard for capitalist development? In the nineteenth century Japan alone was the only country beyond Europe and her dominions to autonomously set herself the goal of creating an industrial economy. How can this uniqueness be explained? In the process of transforming her pre-modern society Japan constructed a modern military system that was capable of confronting the Great Powers. Despite her subsequent defeat, Japan rose again to world prominence to become an economic superpower posing the question of how she was able to achieve such current distinctiveness. These themes form the foundations of an anthology that investigates these questions.

Tim Megarry lectures in Sociology at the University of Greenwich.