Tanaka: Japan′s Orient: Rendering Pasts Into History (cloth) - Hardcover

Tanaka, Stefan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520077318 ISBN 13: 9780520077317

Publisher: University of California Press, 1993

Synopsis

This study examines how Japanese historians during the late 19th and early 20th centuries created the equivalent of an "Orient" for their new nation state. After the Meiji Restoration, Japan faced the necessity of becoming modern while both shedding the Western characterization of "Oriental" and maintaining its own identity. The concept of "toyoshi" (Oriental studies) made it possible to fit the changes of the previous century - the arrival of the West with its technical and cultural baggage and the decline of China - into a comprehensive ideological system. Unlike other scholars, who depict the encounter between Japan and the West as a struggle between modernity and tradition, Tanaka argues that the Japanese were, in fact, attempting to use a variety of pasts - Chinese, Indian, and proto-historic Japanese - to construct an identity that was both modern and Asian.

About this title

Review

"Fascinating. . . . Tanaka has provided a rich account of the ways in which Japanese historians adopted and adapted European ideas of progress and cultural identity in order to reformulate their ideological relationship to China. An impressive work of scholarship."--Talal Asad, "New School for Social Research

About the Author

Stefan Tanaka is Associate Professor of History, University of California, San Diego.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0520077318
• ISBN 13: 9780520077317
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 318