Japan: Past and Present (Third Edition)

323 pp. From the origins of the Japanese people to the present, Dr. Reischauer, a leading American scholar born in Tokyo, omits nothing essential to an explanation of the rise, fall, and resurgence of this Asiatic empire. The complexities of the language, of Shinto, of imperial rule, of the recent disastrous military dictatorship, of the American occupation, and of present-day Japan are all clarified. The author describes the decisive cultural revolutions in which Japan borrowed what she needed from Chinese civilization and later from the West, struggling each time to assimilate these borrowings to her indigenous civilization.