Ulysses S. Grant and Meiji Japan, 1869-1885

Ulysses S. Grant and Meiji Japan, 1869-1885 PDF Author: Ian Patrick Austin
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000022382
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
Ulysses S Grant, besides being the General-in-Chief of the Union armies at the time of the Union victory in the American Civil War, was also President, 1869–1878, at a time when the United States was undergoing significant transformations, both economically and strategically, and growing in confidence as a world power. At the same time, Japan, following the Meiji Restoration of 1868, was seeking to join the ranks of the developed, read exclusively Western, states. This book explores the interaction of Grant with Meiji Japan, compares and contrasts developments in the two countries and assesses the impact each country had on the other. It discusses the travels of the Iwakura Mission in the United States, considers Grant’s 1879 visit to Japan and examines the personal relationship between Grant, the Meiji emperor and the other leaders of the Meiji government. The book argues that Grant’s thoughtful consideration of the key issues of the day, issues common to many countries at the time, and his suggested policy responses had a huge impact on Meiji Japan.

Ulysses S. Grant and Meiji Japan, 1869-1885

Ulysses S. Grant and Meiji Japan, 1869-1885 PDF Author: Ian Patrick Austin
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000022382
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
Ulysses S Grant, besides being the General-in-Chief of the Union armies at the time of the Union victory in the American Civil War, was also President, 1869–1878, at a time when the United States was undergoing significant transformations, both economically and strategically, and growing in confidence as a world power. At the same time, Japan, following the Meiji Restoration of 1868, was seeking to join the ranks of the developed, read exclusively Western, states. This book explores the interaction of Grant with Meiji Japan, compares and contrasts developments in the two countries and assesses the impact each country had on the other. It discusses the travels of the Iwakura Mission in the United States, considers Grant’s 1879 visit to Japan and examines the personal relationship between Grant, the Meiji emperor and the other leaders of the Meiji government. The book argues that Grant’s thoughtful consideration of the key issues of the day, issues common to many countries at the time, and his suggested policy responses had a huge impact on Meiji Japan.

The Political History of Modern Japan

The Political History of Modern Japan PDF Author: Kitaoka Shinichi
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429808461
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
Spanning the 130-year period between the end of the Tokugawa Era and the end of the Cold War, this book introduces students to the formation, collapse, and rebirth of the modern Japanese state. It demonstrates how, faced with foreign threats, Japan developed a new governing structure to deal with these challenges and in turn gradually shaped its international environment. Had Japan been a self-sufficient power, like the United States, it is unlikely that external relations would have exercised such great control over the nation. And, if it were a smaller country, it may have been completely pressured from the outside and could not have influenced the global stage on its own. For better or worse therefore, this book argues, Japan was neither too large nor too small. Covering the major events, actors, and institutions of Japan’s modern history, the key themes discussed include: Building the Meiji state and Constitution. The establishment of Parliament. The First Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese Wars. Party Politics and International Cooperation. The Pacific War. Development of LDP politics. Changes in the international order and the end of the Cold War. This book, written by one of Japan's leading experts on Japan's political history, will be an essential resource for students of Japanese modern history and politics.

A Yankee in Meiji Japan

A Yankee in Meiji Japan PDF Author: James L. Huffman
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780742526211
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
This unique book portrays the evolution of Meiji Japan through the life of crusading journalist Edward H. House (1836-1901). In chapters that alternate between history and biography, James Huffman, shows how one man bridged continents--shaping American attitudes, influencing Japan's movement toward modernity, and providing a contemporary critique of imperialism. Huffman also captures the human drama of House's life: his early bohemianism, the mystical way Japan drew him, the painful struggle with gout, the joy and torment of adopting a Japanese girl, his fight for women's education, and the vicissitudes of friendship with Mark Twain. Meticulously researched, the book draws on House's voluminous writings and on hundreds of letters between House and major figures in both America and Japan, including Mark Twain, U.S. Grant, John Russell Young, Edmund Clarence Stedman, Okuma Shigenobu, and Inoue Kaoru. With its lively, accessible prose and seamless interweaving of the life of House with the history of the Meiji era, this book will be welcomed by students, scholars, and general readers interested in modern Japanese history and in America's nineteenth-century foreign relations.

The Meiji Restoration

The Meiji Restoration PDF Author: Robert Hellyer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108478050
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
This volume examines the Meiji Restoration through a global history lens to re-interpret the formation of a globally-cast, Japanese nation-state.

Yokohama

Yokohama PDF Author: Ann Yonemura
Publisher: Smithsonian Books (DC)
ISBN:
Category : Block printing
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
"It is a special honor for the Yamanouchi Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd., to assist the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution in presenting the museum's first major exhibition of Japanese art, Yokohama: Prints from Nineteenth Century Japan. Japanese woodblock prints, which have enjoyed appreciation throughout the world, were the first artistic medium to respond to the profound changes affecting Japanese technology, society, and institutions during the years following the opening of Yokohama to international trade in 1859. To the people of Japan more than one hundred years ago, Yokohama prints provided the first views of the customs and achievements of the technologically advanced nations of the United States and Europe. The colorful prints enhanced Japanese understanding of nations as yet unseen except by a few official travelers"--

Historical Dictionary of U.S. Diplomacy from the Civil War to World War I

Historical Dictionary of U.S. Diplomacy from the Civil War to World War I PDF Author: Kenneth J. Blume
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 144227333X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 597

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Book Description
The period encompassed by this volume—with the start of the Civil War and World War I as bookends—has gone by a number of colorful names: The Imperial Years, The New American Empire, America’s Rise to World Power, Imperial Democracy, The Awkward Years, or Prelude to World Power, for example. A different organizing theme would describe the period as one in which a transformation took place in American foreign relations. But whatever developments or events historians have emphasized, there is general agreement that the period was one in which something changed in the American approach to the world. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of U.S. Diplomacy from the Civil War to World War I contains a chronology, an introduction, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 1,000 cross-referenced entries on important personalities, politics, economy, foreign relations, religion, and culture. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about diplomacy during this period.

Gender and Nation in Meiji Japan

Gender and Nation in Meiji Japan PDF Author: Jason G. Karlin
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824838270
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
Gender and Nation in Meiji Japan is a historical analysis of the discourses of nostalgia in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Japan. Through an analysis of the experience of rapid social change in Japan’s modernization, it argues that fads (ryūkō) and the desires they express are central to understanding Japanese modernity, conceptions of gender, and discourses of nationalism. In doing so, the author uncovers the myth of eternal return that lurks below the surface of Japanese history as an expression of the desire to find meaning amid the chaos and alienation of modern times. The Meiji period (1868–1912) was one of rapid change that hastened the process of forgetting: The state’s aggressive program of modernization required the repression of history and memory. However, repression merely produced new forms of desire seeking a return to the past, with the result that competing or alternative conceptions of the nation haunted the history of modern Japan. Rooted in the belief that the nation was a natural and organic entity that predated the rational, modern state, such conceptions often were responses to modernity that envisioned the nation in opposition to the modern state. What these visions of the nation shared was the ironic desire to overcome the modern condition by seeking the timeless past. While the condition of their repression was often linked to the modernizing policies of the Meiji state, the means for imagining the nation in opposition to the state required the construction of new symbols that claimed the authority of history and appealed to a rearticulated tradition. Through the idiom of gender and nation, new reified representations of continuity, timelessness, and history were fashioned to compensate for the unmooring of inherited practices from the shared locales of everyday life. This book examines the intellectual, social, and cultural factors that contributed to the rapid spread of Western tastes and styles, along with the backlash against Westernization that was expressed as a longing for the past. By focusing on the expressions of these desires in popular culture and media texts, it reveals how the conflation of mother, countryside, everyday life, and history structured representations to naturalize ideologies of gender and nationalism.

Itō Hirobumi - Japan's First Prime Minister and Father of the Meiji Constitution

Itō Hirobumi - Japan's First Prime Minister and Father of the Meiji Constitution PDF Author: Takii Kazuhiro
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317818482
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
The brilliant and influential statesman, Itō Hirobumi (1841-1909), and the first prime minister of Japan’s modern state, has been poorly understood. This biography attempts to set the record straight about Itō’s thought and vision for Japan’s modernisation based on research in primary sources. It outlines Itō’s life: the son of a poor farmer, he showed exceptional talent as a boy and was sent to study in Europe and the United States. He returned home convinced that Western civilisation was the only viable path for Japan. Following the Meiji Restoration of 1868, Itō became a powerful intellectual and political force behind reforms of Japanese laws and institutions aimed to shape a modern government based on informed leadership and a knowledeable populace. Among his many achievements were the establishment of Japan’s first constitution—the Meiji Constitution of 1889, and the founding in 1900 of a new type of constitutional party, the Rikken Seiyukai (Friends of Constitutional Government), which, reformulated after 1945, became the Liberal Democratic Party that has dominated Japanese politics in the postwar period. Concerning Itō’s role as Japanese Resident-General in Korea from 1905, the author argues that Itō’s aim, not understood by either the Japanese home government or Koreans themselves, was not to colonize Korea. He was determined to modernise Korea and consolidate further constitutional reforms in Japan. This aim was not shared by others, and Itō resigned in 1909. He was assassinated the same year in Manchuria by a Korean nationalist. The Japanese language edition of this book is a bestseller in Japan, and it received the Suntory Prize for Social Sciences and Humanities, one of Japan's most prestigious publishing awards.

Imagining a Postnational World

Imagining a Postnational World PDF Author: Marc Andre Matten
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004327150
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 374

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Book Description
This book analyses the historical significance of rivaling concepts of world order in 20th century East Asia. It discusses in detail the relationship of territoriality and political rule, discourses of amity and enmity, and finally the role of hegemoniality in the process of imaging a possible postnational world in twenty-first century East Asia and beyond.

Northeastern Asia and the Northern Rockies

Northeastern Asia and the Northern Rockies PDF Author: Stephen Little
Publisher: punctum books
ISBN: 1685711162
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description