For nearly a century, Japanese writers gave voice to the anxieties of a
nation headed inexorably toward war. Not just any war, but one that in
the minds of many would eventually--and inevitably--take place with
Japan's neighbor across the Pacific, the United States.
In the wake of U.S. Navy Commodore Matthew C. Perry's first visit to
Japan with his Black Ships in 1853, Japanese novelists and military
analysts, along with a few foreign counterparts, produced a dizzying
array of prophetic visions of this coming conflict, creating a massive
body of popular works through which Japan would debate its own passage,
however violent, into the modern, globalized era. Painstakingly
researched by one of Japan's preeminent men of letters, Tokyo Prefecture
Vice Governor Naoki Inose, The Century of the Black Ships is a
landmark study of a literary tradition that anticipated the defining
moment in the lives of a nation and its people.