Download Inventing Japan [Modern Library Chronicles] AudioBook Free

In a single short book as elegant as it pays, Ian Buruma is practical of the most fateful span of Japan’s history, the time that saw as dramatic a transformation as any country has ever known. Throughout little more when compared to a hundred years from the day Commodore Matthew Perry arrived in his black ships, this insular, preindustrial realm mutated into an expansive military dictatorship that essentially supplanted the British, French, Dutch, and American empires in Asia before plunging to utter ruin, eventually emerging under American tutelage as a pseudo-Western-style democracy and monetary dynamo.

What explains the seismic changes that thrust this small island nation so violently onto the entire world stage? In part, Ian Buruma argues, the storyplot is one of your newly united nation that felt it must play catch-up to the established Western powers, equally as Germany and Italy did, an activity that involved, in addition to outward colonial expansion, internal cultural consolidation and the manufacturing of your shared heritage. But Japan has always been both particularly available to the importation of good ideas and particularly prickly about keeping their influence quarantined, a bipolar disorder that could have dramatic consequences and this continues to this day. If one book is usually to be read to be able to understand why japan seem to be so impossibly strange to many Americans, Inventing Japan is surely it.

From the Hardcover edition.

Category: Classics