A History of Japanese Political Thought, 1600-1901

"This book is the closest one to a textbook, but Watanabe is really explicit that he’s not writing a textbook here. It’s similar to a textbook in terms of its range and breadth. But it’s also quite selective. A textbook that tried to cover the sweep of early modern into late modern Japanese history would be a book that tended to focus on what happened and why it happened. One of the things that I find really appealing about this book is the way that Watanabe looks at how things worked and what people thought about them. It was originally published in Japanese, but the translation is excellent, and the book was very much written to appeal to people who don’t have a background in Japanese history or Japanese political thought. It’s really wonderful. It tackles the early modern period, all the way across the Meiji transformation into the early twentieth century. There’s something about this book that really gets at a lot of unspoken assumptions, that tries to think about the common sense of this particular era in a way that transports you into the past. One of the big things that they’re grappling with are ideas associated with Confucianism . Watanabe is really good at explaining how Confucianism can be interpreted in different ways, how it didn’t really function as a monolithic orthodoxy but could actually facilitate all kinds of debate and discovery in the early modern period. Watanabe allows you to think about ways in which this rather scholarly discourse enabled thinkers to criticise the way things worked from within and debate the implications of economic change during this period. Certainly, in the 19th century, thinkers were beginning to look toward important texts coming out of Europe. Translations began to appear. Watanabe handles this period well, pointing out that thinkers were inspired by new ideas that were coming in through translation. But the interpretation of these ideas, and what Japanese thinkers got out of them, often resonated with ideas and modes of thinking that spread before the onrush of new translated texts in the latter half of the century."