In a single short book as elegant as it is wise, Ian Buruma makes sense
of the most fateful span of Japan's history, the period that saw as
dramatic a transformation as any country has ever known. In the course
of little more than 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 economic dynamo.
What explains the seismic changes that thrust this small island nation
so violently onto the world stage? In part, Ian Buruma argues, the story
is one of a newly united nation that felt it must play catch-up to the
established Western powers, just as Germany and Italy did, a process
that involved, in addition to outward colonial expansion, internal
cultural consolidation and the manufacturing of a shared heritage. But
Japan has always been both particularly open to the importation of good
ideas and particularly prickly about keeping their influence
quarantined, a bipolar disorder that would have dramatic consequences
and that continues to this day. If one book is to be read in order to
understand why the Japanese seem so impossibly strange to many
Americans, Inventing Japan is surely it.
