Emperor of Japan

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Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231518110
Total Pages : 957 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (315 download)

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Book Synopsis Emperor of Japan by : Donald Keene

Download or read book Emperor of Japan written by Donald Keene and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2005-06-14 with total page 957 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The renowned Japanese scholar “brings us as close to the inner life of the Meiji emperor as we are ever likely to get” (The New York Times Book Review). When Emperor Meiji began his rule in 1867, Japan was a splintered empire dominated by the shogun and the daimyos, cut off from the outside world, staunchly antiforeign, and committed to the traditions of the past. Before long, the shogun surrendered to the emperor, a new constitution was adopted, and Japan emerged as a modern, industrialized state. Despite the length of his reign, little has been written about the strangely obscured figure of Meiji himself, the first emperor ever to meet a European. But now, Donald Keene sifts the available evidence to present a rich portrait not only of Meiji but also of rapid and sometimes violent change during this pivotal period in Japan’s history. In this vivid and engrossing biography, we move with the emperor through his early, traditional education; join in the formal processions that acquainted the young emperor with his country and its people; observe his behavior in court, his marriage, and his relationships with various consorts; and follow his maturation into a “Confucian” sovereign dedicated to simplicity, frugality, and hard work. Later, during Japan’s wars with China and Russia, we witness Meiji’s struggle to reconcile his personal commitment to peace and his nation’s increasingly militarized experience of modernization. Emperor of Japan conveys in sparkling prose the complexity of the man and offers an unrivaled portrait of Japan in a period of unique interest. “Utterly brilliant . . . the best history in English of the emergence of modern Japan.”—Los Angeles Times

The Meiji Restoration

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Author :
Publisher : Stanford University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780804779906
Total Pages : 534 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (799 download)

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Book Synopsis The Meiji Restoration by : W. Beasley

Download or read book The Meiji Restoration written by W. Beasley and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1972-06-01 with total page 534 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First, there are questions concerning the role and relative importance of internal and external factors in the pattern of events. Did the activities of the Western powers prompt changes in Japan that would not otherwise have taken place? Or did they merely hasten a process that had already begun? Similarly, did Western civilization give a new direction to Japanese development, or do no more than provide the outward forms through which indigenous change could manifest itself? Was it a matrix, or only a shopping list? Second, how far was the evolution of modern Japan in some sense "inevitable"? Were the main features of Meiji society already implicit in the Tempo reforms, only awaiting an appropriate trigger to bring them into being? More narrowly, was the character of Meiji institutions determined by the social composition of the anti-Tokugawa movement, or did it derive from a situation that took shape only after the Bakufu was overthrown? This is to pose the problem of the relationship between day-to-day politics and long-term socioeconomic change. One can argue, paraphrasing Toyama, that the political controversy about foreign affairs provided the means by which basic socioeconomic factors became effective; or one can say, with Sakata, that the relevance of socioeconomic change is that it helped to decide the manner in which the fundamentally political ramifications of the foreign question were worked out. The difference of emphasis is significant. Finally, have recent historians, in their preoccupation with other issues, lost sight of something important in their relative neglect of ideas qua ideas? Ought we perhaps to stop treating loyalty to the Emperor as simply a manifestation of something else? After all, the men whose actions are the object of our study took that loyalty seriously enough, certainly as an instrument of politics, if not as an article of faith.

The Meiji Restoration

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Author :
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1108478050
Total Pages : 301 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (84 download)

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Book Synopsis The Meiji Restoration by : Robert Hellyer

Download or read book The Meiji Restoration written by Robert Hellyer and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-05-07 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume examines the Meiji Restoration through a global history lens to re-interpret the formation of a globally-cast, Japanese nation-state.

Chōshū in the Meiji Restoration

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Publisher : Lexington Books
ISBN 13 : 9780739101933
Total Pages : 458 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (19 download)

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Book Synopsis Chōshū in the Meiji Restoration by : Albert M. Craig

Download or read book Chōshū in the Meiji Restoration written by Albert M. Craig and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2000 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Commodore Perry arrived in Japan to open the country to Western trade in 1853, he found a medieval amalgam of sword-bearing samurai, castle towns, Confucian academies, peasant villages, rice paddies, upstart merchants, bath houses, and Kabuki. Fifteen years later, Japan was on its way to becoming the only non-Western nation in the nineteenth century with a modern centralized bureaucratic state and industrial economy. This book is a study of the Meiji Restoration that changed the face of Japan. Prominent historian Albert M. Craig tells its story through that of the domain of Choshu-whose role in the formation of modern Japan was not unlike that of Prussia in Germany-during the fifteen crucial years between 1853 and 1868. Whereas previous studies have stressed the role of discontented lower samurai and frustrated rich merchants and peasants in this transition, claiming that they provided the motive power behind the political movements of the Restoration period, this work sharply challenges these earlier interpretations. Craig instead emphasizes the vitality of traditional values in Japan's early reaction to the West and foregrounds the critical contribution of the old society to the formation of the new Meiji state. Choshu in the Meiji Restoration is a seminal work for scholars and students of Japanese history.

Sakamoto Ry?ma and the Meiji Restoration

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Author :
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780231101738
Total Pages : 452 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (17 download)

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Book Synopsis Sakamoto Ry?ma and the Meiji Restoration by : Marius B. Jansen

Download or read book Sakamoto Ry?ma and the Meiji Restoration written by Marius B. Jansen and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jansen tells the story of the Restoration in the career and thought of Sakamoto Ryoma and, to a lesser extent, Nakaoka Shintaro, each an example of the new type of political leader: idealistic, individualistic, and patriotic.

Christian Converts and Social Protests in Meiji Japan

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Publisher : University of Michigan Press
ISBN 13 : 0472901931
Total Pages : 279 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (729 download)

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Book Synopsis Christian Converts and Social Protests in Meiji Japan by : Irwin Scheiner

Download or read book Christian Converts and Social Protests in Meiji Japan written by Irwin Scheiner and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2020-06-01 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nowhere has there been a discussion of the confusion necessarily generated by the rapidity of the change or of the agony created in the lives of many whose attitudes, expectations, and even success depended on the continuance of now abolished institutions. Historians have ignored the settled conditions of most samurai and instead concentrated on the study of the minority of activist samurai leaders who, with the backing of only a few Han (feudal domains) sought to overthrow the old order and whose success in doing so has made the study of the modernization of Japan the prime concern of historians. The history of the Meiji period may have been an overall political and industrial success story, but for a fuller understanding of the conditions of that success it is also necessary to understand "what it was really like" for the members of the old elite to be estranged from the proponents of revolution and what many members did to assure their own social and psychological position in a world they had not expected. In this book the author attempts to show that the impact of the Meiji Restoration destroyed the meaningfulness of the Confucian doctrine for these declasse samurai. Through Christianity, the samurai attempted to revive their status in society by finding a doctrine that offered a meaningful path to power. But in doing so, they had to accept a new theory of social relations. Ultimately, as the convert's understanding of society became totally informed by the Christian doctrine, they accepted a transcendent authority that brought them into conflict with society about them. Therefore, to understand the development of a Christian opposition in Meiji society we must begin with the conversion experience itself. [intro]

New Directions in the Study of Meiji Japan

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Author :
Publisher : BRILL
ISBN 13 : 9004644849
Total Pages : 872 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (46 download)

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Book Synopsis New Directions in the Study of Meiji Japan by : Helen Hardacre

Download or read book New Directions in the Study of Meiji Japan written by Helen Hardacre and published by BRILL. This book was released on 1997-06 with total page 872 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These essays on Meiji Japan, written by scholars from nine nations, reflect a determination to destabilize existing paradigms in the social sciences and humanities, in favor of a multiplicity of perspectives that privilege subjectivity and the inclusion of non-elite groups.

The Imperial Museums of Meiji Japan

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Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 304 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (97 download)

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Book Synopsis The Imperial Museums of Meiji Japan by : Alice Yu-Ting Tseng

Download or read book The Imperial Museums of Meiji Japan written by Alice Yu-Ting Tseng and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It was not until Japan's opening to the West during the Meiji period (1868-1912) that terms for "art" (bijutsu) and "art museum" (bijutsukan) were coined. The Imperial Museums of Meiji Japan documents Japan's unification of national art and cultural resources to forge a modern identity influenced by European museum and exhibition culture. Japan's Imperial Museums were conceived of as national self-representations, and their creation epitomized the Meiji bureaucracy's mission to engage in the international standards and practices of the late nineteenth century. The architecture of the museums, by incorporating Western design elements and construction methods, effectively safeguarded and set off the nation's unique art historical lineage. Western paradigms and expertise, coupled with Japanese resolve and ingenuity, steered the course of the museums' development. Expeditions by high-ranking Japanese officials to Europe and the United States to explore the burgeoning world of art preservation and exhibition, and throughout Japan to inventory important cultural treasures, led to the establishment of the Imperial Museums in the successive imperial cities of Nara, Kyoto, and Tokyo. Over the course of nearly four decades, the English architect Josiah Conder, known as "the father of modern Japanese architecture," and his student Katayama Tokuma, who became the preeminent state architect, designed four main museum buildings to house the national art collection. These buildings articulated the museums' unified mission to preserve and showcase a millennium-long chronology of Japanese art, while reinforcing the distinctive historical and cultural character of their respective cities. This book is the first English-language study of the art, history, and architecture of Japan's Imperial Museums, the predecessors of today's national museums in Tokyo, Kyoto, and Nara. The Imperial Museums of Meiji Japan examines the museums' formative period and highlights cross-cultural influences that enriched and complicated Japan's search for a modern yet historically grounded identity.

Women and Public Life in Early Meiji Japan

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Author :
Publisher : U of M Center For Japanese Studies
ISBN 13 : 192928067X
Total Pages : 241 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (292 download)

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Book Synopsis Women and Public Life in Early Meiji Japan by : Mara Patessio

Download or read book Women and Public Life in Early Meiji Japan written by Mara Patessio and published by U of M Center For Japanese Studies. This book was released on 2011-01-07 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Women and Public Life in Early Meiji Japan focuses on women’s activities in the new public spaces of Meiji Japan. With chapters on public, private, and missionary schools for girls, their students, and teachers, on social and political groups women created, on female employment, and on women’s participation in print media, this book offers a new perspective on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Japanese history. Women’s founding of and participation in conflicting discourses over the value of women in Meiji public life demonstrate that during this period active and vocal women were everywhere, that they did not meekly submit to the dictates of the government and intellectuals over what women could or should do, and that they were fully integrated in the production of Meiji culture. Mara Patessio shows that the study of women is fundamental not only in order to understand fully the transformations of the Meiji period, but also to understand how later generations of women could successfully move the battle forward. Women and Public Life in Early Meiji Japan is essential reading for all students and teachers of 19th- and early 20th-century Japanese history and is of interest to scholars of women’s history more generally.

Master Potter of Meiji Japan

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Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN 13 : 9780199252558
Total Pages : 222 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (525 download)

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Book Synopsis Master Potter of Meiji Japan by : Moyra Clare Pollard

Download or read book Master Potter of Meiji Japan written by Moyra Clare Pollard and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2002 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first book in a European language to make a comprehensive study of the life and works of the astonishingly versatile and accomplished Meiji potter, Makuzu Kozan (1842 - 1916), who was acclaimed as one of the greatest ceramic artists of the Meiji period.The Meiji period, after the opening of Japan to the West in the mid-nineteenth century, was a time of momentous change for Japanese society and Kozan's Makuzu workshop makes an ideal case study to examine the effects of these changes on the Japanese ceramic industry. This book tells the story ofKozan's Makuzu wares from their origins in a traditional workshop in Kyoto to their maturity in a prolific factory in the newly-opened port of Yokohama, where Kozan's ability to cater to the demands of a new Western export market and to incorporate new Western glaze techniques led to enormoussuccess, both in Japan and abroad at the international exhibitions that flourished from the 1850s.Lavish illustrations highlight Kozan's remarkable and technical and artistic achievements, while ceramic marks and box inscriptions are analysed as a practical guide to dating Makuzu ware. Clare Pollard discusses the role of later generations of the Miyagawa family in the running of the workshop andrelates developments in Makuzu ware to the work of other major potters of the era, both in Japan and in Europe and America.Incorporating contemporary sources (including previously unstudied archival material from the Makuzu workshop itself), recent research and the study of a large corpus of Makuzu wares in museums and private collections all over the world, the book examines the artistic, political, and commercialfactors that influenced Kozan and his contemporaries as they strove to come to terms with shifting life-styles and changing attitudes to the arts, and moved towards the creation of a modern ceramic industry.

The Emergence of Meiji Japan

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Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780521484053
Total Pages : 372 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (84 download)

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Book Synopsis The Emergence of Meiji Japan by : Marius B. Jansen

Download or read book The Emergence of Meiji Japan written by Marius B. Jansen and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1995-09-29 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paperback edition brings together chapters from volume 5 of The Cambridge History of Japan. Japan underwent momentous changes during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. This book chronicles the hardships of the Tempo era in the 1830s, the crisis of values and confidence during the last half century of Tokugawa rule, and the political process that finally brought down the Tokugawa regime and ended centuries of warrior rule. It goes on to discuss the samurai rebellions against the Meiji Restoration, and national movements for constitutional government which indirectly resulted in the Meiji Constitution of 1889. The significance of Japan's Meiji transformation for the rest of the world is the subject of the final chapter, in which Professor Akira Iriye discusses Japan's drive to Great Power status. 'Constitutional rule at home, imperialism abroad', became new goals for early twentieth-century Japan.

Women Writers of Meiji and Taisho Japan

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Publisher : McFarland
ISBN 13 : 0786481978
Total Pages : 193 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (864 download)

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Book Synopsis Women Writers of Meiji and Taisho Japan by : Yukiko Tanaka

Download or read book Women Writers of Meiji and Taisho Japan written by Yukiko Tanaka and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2015-11-16 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After centuries of repression of the female voice in literature, the Meiji (1868-1912) and Taisho (1912-1926) periods in Japanese history saw important changes in both the way women wrote and the way they were read. However, even the most accepted female writers of these two eras were judged by criteria different from those applied to men, and only the most conservative were praised by the (male) critics. This study of the women who wrote in the modern era examines both famous and now-obscure writers within the context of their moments in time and their influence on later generations of Japanese women writers. Arranged chronologically, the book covers the pioneering women of the early Meiji period, the ethos of reactionary conservatism, the romantic movement in poetry, women writers of the naturalist school, Taisho liberalism, and the new era of literary women. An introduction outlines the various schools of Japanese female writers during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as the social and cultural trends that helped produce them. The text is appropriate for both well-read scholars of Japanese literature and newcomers to the works of the "fair ladies of the back chamber," as these creative and driven writers were once called.

Modern Japanese Art and the Meiji State

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Publisher : Getty Publications
ISBN 13 : 1606060597
Total Pages : 378 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (6 download)

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Book Synopsis Modern Japanese Art and the Meiji State by : Dōshin Satō

Download or read book Modern Japanese Art and the Meiji State written by Dōshin Satō and published by Getty Publications. This book was released on 2011 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is an insightful and intelligent re-thinking of Japanese art history & its Western influences. This broad-ranging and profoundly influential analysis describes how Western art institutions and vocabulary were transplanted to Japan in the late nineteenth century. In the 1870-80s, artists and government administrators in Japan encountered the Western 'system of the arts' for the first time. Under pressure to exhibit and sell its artistic products abroad, Japan's new Meiji government came face-to-face with the need to create European-style art schools and museums - and even to establish Japanese words for art, painting, artist, and sculpture. "Modern Japanese Art" is a full re-conceptualization of the field of Japanese art history, exposing the politics through which the words, categories, and values that structure our understanding of the field came to be while revealing the historicity of Western and non-Western art history.

Commemorating Meiji

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Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1000441350
Total Pages : 152 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (4 download)

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Book Synopsis Commemorating Meiji by : D.V. Botsman

Download or read book Commemorating Meiji written by D.V. Botsman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-09-16 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2018 marked the 150th anniversary of Japan’s Meiji Restoration, a milestone that the government of Prime Minister Abe Shinzō has actively sought to highlight and celebrate. Whereas other studies have focused on the events of the Meiji Restoration itself, this volume reflects upon the politically charged history of commemorating Meiji, particularly in the twentieth century. This other history of Meiji remains largely unknown outside of Japan, even though it is particularly relevant in the aftermath of a wide range of government-sponsored celebrations marking the Meiji Sesquicentennial. At moments of official historical commemoration, it is natural enough to imagine a direct line linking the act of commemoration to the original event that is the ostensible focus of remembrance and celebration. In fact, the commemoration of Meiji today cannot be understood simply in terms of the relationship between the present and 1868, or even the longer Meiji period. The chapters in this volume highlight the politics of memory as they played out across a series of milestones over the twentieth century. Together they show the pressing need to look more closely at issues of commemoration as a key topic in their own right. The chapters in this book were originally published in Japanese Studies.

The Meiji Unification Through the Lens of Ishikawa Prefecture

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Author :
Publisher : Harvard Univ Asia Center
ISBN 13 : 9780674564664
Total Pages : 396 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (646 download)

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Book Synopsis The Meiji Unification Through the Lens of Ishikawa Prefecture by : James C. Baxter

Download or read book The Meiji Unification Through the Lens of Ishikawa Prefecture written by James C. Baxter and published by Harvard Univ Asia Center. This book was released on 1994 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Credit for the swift unification of Japan following the 1868 overthrow of the Tokugawa shogunate is usually given to the national leaders. Baxter argues that brilliant leadership at the top is not sufficient to explain how regional separatist tendencies and loyalties to the old lords were overcome in the formation of a nationally unified state.

Financial Stabilization in Meiji Japan

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Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 1501746936
Total Pages : 141 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (17 download)

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Book Synopsis Financial Stabilization in Meiji Japan by : Steven J. Ericson

Download or read book Financial Stabilization in Meiji Japan written by Steven J. Ericson and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-15 with total page 141 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With a new look at the 1880s financial reforms in Japan, Steven J. Ericson's Financial Stabilization in Meiji Japan overturns widely held views of the program carried out by Finance Minister Matsukata Masayoshi. As Ericson shows, rather than constituting an orthodox financial-stabilization program—a sort of precursor of the "neoliberal" reforms promoted by the IMF in the 1980s and 1990s—Matsukata's policies differed in significant ways from both classical economic liberalism and neoliberal orthodoxy. The Matsukata financial reform has become famous largely for the wrong reasons, and Ericson sets the record straight. He shows that Matsukata intended to pursue fiscal retrenchment and budget-balancing when he became finance minister in late 1881. Various exigencies, including foreign military crises and a worsening domestic depression, compelled him instead to increase spending by running deficits and floating public bonds. Though he drastically reduced the money supply, he combined the positive and contractionary policies of his immediate predecessors to pull off a program of "expansionary austerity" paralleling state responses to financial crisis elsewhere in the world both then and now. Through a new and much-needed recalibration of this pivotal financial reform, Financial Stabilization in Meiji Japan demonstrates that, in several ways, ranging from state-led export promotion to the creation of a government-controlled central bank, Matsukata advanced policies that were more in line with a nationalist, developmentalist approach than with a liberal economic one. Ericson shows that Matsukata Masayoshi was far from a rigid adherent of classical economic liberalism.

Politics of the Meiji Press

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Publisher : University of Hawaii Press
ISBN 13 : 0824880137
Total Pages : 264 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (248 download)

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Book Synopsis Politics of the Meiji Press by : James L. Huffman

Download or read book Politics of the Meiji Press written by James L. Huffman and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2019-03-31 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This biography introduces the young Fukuchi, in the first months after the Meiji Restoration of 1868, as a newspaper editor just beginning to write critically on social and political issues. His outspoken and politically indiscreet editorials soon made him the first journalist in history of Japan to be jailed for his writings. During the early Meiji years, he continued to grope for an ideal and a position, even joining the regime as a brash and innovative official. Only when he was independent of the government bureaucracy, however, did Fukuchi assume a position of pivotal importance. During the peak years of his career from 1874 to 1888, he demonstrated the crucial advantage enjoyed by those Japanese who had gained Western knowledge and, as editor of the Tokyo Nichi Nichi, made his most distinctive contributions to Meiji society and to journalism in Japan. Using a politically awakened press, which he had invigorated with Western techniques of journalism, Fukuchi provided the popular rationale for the course followed by the government and became the period’s leading nonofficial advocate of the “gradualist” approach toward constitutional government. He also founded Japan’s first “gradualist” political party. The Constitutionalist Imperial Party, during his years as an editor. Despite his great influence, Fukuchi left the press world in 1888, disappointed over failures and changing alliances, a vivid illustration of the precarious nature of leadership in a transitional period. Too long allied with the forces of innovation to become a casualty of change, however, he embarked on a new life as a writer of novels, plays, and history, and emerged in the 1890’s as Japan’s foremost playwright. In the life of Fukuchi Gen’ichirō is the story of a history-making figure, a man whose career embodied the response of Meiji Japan to the Western challenge of modernization, and yet a man whose personal life was inescapably subject to the tensions of an era of rapid social and political change. James Huffman’s fine biography is a notable book about an exciting man, a maker and mirror of his times.