Review: History of Japan (Captivating History)

I took a Japanese history class at the University of Hawai`i back in 1996, but didn't think too much about it until I started a job here in Japan in January.

Since Amazon was offering this Kindle Unlimited ebook that cost nothing, I decided to check it out. Though it's not exactly a great piece of scholarship (or even serious writing), it was a good refresher.

Depending on how you slice it, Japanese history can be divided into five periods. These are my definitions:

1. Pre-history (to about 600 A.D.)
2. Warring families (to about 1300)
3. Three shogunates (to 1853)
4. Bakumatsu to 1945
5. Post-war

Prehistory includes the Jomon and Yayoi cultures. The big discussions about this period are where they came from, what pottery technology they had and how they might be related to the (comparatively) indigenous Emishi and Ainu.

The warring families period includes religious conflict between Shinto and Buddhism, administrative reforms and cultural developments following contacts with China, civil war, and expansion to the northeast. Like feudal Europe, the names of the families don't really matter -- just that there were a lot of clans and they fought for power.

The shogunates (Kamakura, Ashikaga, and Tokugawa) supplanted the emperor in terms of authority, but not as the symbolic head of state. This period includes the Mongol invasions and the time of Warring States. The third shogunate faced a crisis when it was forced to open to the outside world 1853.

The Bakumatsu is the "end of the shogunate" period. It begins in 1853 and technically lasted until the Meiji Restoration in 1868, but the effects of Japan's epiphany that there's an outside world that it needed to catch up to (and surpass) were driving factors until 1945.

Since then, Japan has caught up to the West in terms of its economy, but rapid growth stopped in the 1990s. Nowadays, it is dealing with issues like a declining birthrate, an aging population, and massive amounts of internally held public debt.

The book is an easy read, but there are some confusing parts. For example, in 645 the pro-Shinto Fujiwara clan staged a coup against the pro-Buddhist Soga clan, and Tenji became emperor, but then "Buddhism was named the national religion." So ... the losers won?

Other parts are strangely worded. Near the end of World War II, "Thailand had the support of pro-Allied rebels, which prevented the entrenchment of the Japanese." But if the "rebels" were supporting the Thai government, could they really be called rebels?

Then, describing the Battle of the Coral Sea, the Japanese sank "several US ships, including Lexington, which represented a good chunk of the US carrier strength."

Is that the term? "A good chunk"?

At some points, the vagueness of the passive tense turns bothersome. "There were bombing raids on the city of Osaka … 1,700 bombs were dropped" and "civilian targets were bombed, giving rise to severe accusations based on ethical reasons."

I think the author was working under some tight deadlines, because the frequency of awkward descriptions and word choice errors become more frequent in later chapters. For instance, "Okinawa is one of the islands in the Kyushu area of Japan located south of the country." No. First, Okinawa is part of the country, not south of it; second, Okinawa is about as far from Kyushu as Norfolk is from Boston – nearly 600 miles.

A few paragraphs later, the author describes "the annexation of Okinawa," though he probably meant "occupation." The U.S. never annexed Okinawa.

Sadly, Japanese history appears to end in 1954, with nothing significant happening again until the Heisei era began in 1989. Apart from a few final notes on current issues, that is pretty much how the book ends.

In summary, it's a fairly easy read. There's a lot of discussion about battles, how bad the peasants had it, and various power struggles, but very little in terms of what drove the evolution of the Japanese state. If you're interested in the broad strokes of Japanese history, it's worth the price, but don't expect a deep discussion about any particular topic. And certainly not an accurate or trustworthy one.