Product Description: De entre todas las potencias emergentes del siglo XX, Japón constituye una de las menos conocidas, si bien resulta indudable que su desarrollo ha sido espectacular. Como resume magistralmente W.G. Beasley, se trata de un país que ha saltado en poco más de una generación desde un feudalismo tardío hasta las primeras formas ...read more

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Product Description: This set of volumes is part of a major new series, and features the collected writings of some of the most outstanding Western scholars who have been actively writing about Japan and connected subjects over the last half century. (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Developed in close collaboration with W. G. Beasley, this book contains a wide and substantial cross-section of writings, thematically structured around essays in the special areas of Bakufu and Meji Studies.

Product Description: This book covers the history of Japan from the mid-19th century up to the present day. It charts the spectacular rise of a society which leapt in little more than a generation from late feudal to early industrial forms of organisation - an exceptionally disturbing experience for the Japanese as they left behind the traditional and Asian and moved towards the modern and Western...read more

Product Description: It is now generally recognized that Japan has been much the most successful of the countries outside Europe and North America in achieving modernization. The transformation from a feudal society with a Confucian ethic to a ‘modern, Western style economy’ is charted in this book (originally published in 1990) which follows the political, economic and social changes from the decline of the Tokugawa in the 1860s all the way through to the death of Emperor Hirohito and the end of the Showa era in 1989...read more

The Japanese Experience is an authoritative history of Japan from the sixth century to the present day. Only a writer of W.G. Beasley's stature could render Japan's complicated past so concisely and elegantly. This is the history of a society and a culture with a distinct sense of itself, one of the few nations never conquered by a foreign power in historic times (until the twentieth century) and the home of the longest-reigning imperial dynasty that still survives. The Japanese have always occupied part or all of the same territory, its borders defined by the sea. They have spoken and written a common language, (once it had taken firm shape in about the tenth century) and their population has been largely homogeneous, little touched by immigration except in very early periods. Yet Japanese society and culture have changed more through time than these statements seem to imply. Developments within Japan have been greatly influenced by ideas and institutions, art and literature, imported from elsewhere. In this work Beasley, a leading authority on Japan and the author of a number of acclaimed works on Japanese history, examines the changing society and culture of Japan and considers what, apart from the land and the people, is specifically Japanese about the history of Japan.The arrival of Buddhism in the sixth century brought a substantially Chinese-style society to Japan, not only in religion but in political institutions, writing system, and the lifestyle of the ruling class. By the eleventh century the Chinese element was waning and the country was entering a long and essentially "Japanese" feudal period—with two rulers, an emperor and a Shogun—which was to last until the nineteenth century. Under the Togukawa shogunate (1600-1868), Chinese culture enjoyed something of a renaissance, though popular culture owed more to Japanese urban taste and urban wealth.In 1868 the Meiji Restoration brought to power rulers dedicated to the pursuit of national wealth and strength, and Japan became a world power. Although a bid for empire ended in disaster, the years after 1945 saw an economic miracle that brought spectacular wealth to Japan and the Japanese people, as well as the westernization of much of Japanese life. (view table of contents)

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Describes political, economic, and social movements that have influenced Japan's modern development and foreign relations