Reviews for The Japanese Nation

The average rating for The Japanese Nation based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-01-08 00:00:00 Eclipse Klokan Ikegami's "Bonds of Civility" combines the historical analysis of poetry, flower arrangement and the tea ceremony with sociological theory, revamping ideas of public and private civil society in Japan. Many of Ikegami's lines of analysis are interesting: the difference between the Habermas's analysis of politics and the emergence of autonomous individuals as civil society in Europe and the emergence of a different kind of civil society in Japan with the Shogunate and feudal Japan, for example, is phenomenal. While I applaud the efforts of Ikegami to shake up East Asian historical interpretation, I found it difficult to accept that participation in poetry circles represents "boundary trespasses" between the levels of social hierarchy found in Japan. Indeed, Ikegami has difficulty drawing these boundaries as well: between chapters, arts popular among the common people were at once high arts filled with literati, great script writers, and fantastic historical illusions would later be described as low, debase arts which brought people into a frenzy.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-07-03 00:00:00 Yvonne Hartley Recently I have heard a lot of Japanese scholars challenging the idea that Tokugawa Japan was a constricted feudal society. Eiko Ikegami argues that the Tokugawa aesthetic publics of haiku, flower arranging, and tea ceremony groups, and the spread of "common knowledge" through literacy and the publishing industry, are part of the reason Japan was able to make its rapid transition to "modernity" in Meiji. As a participant in a haiku circle and a resident of modern Japan, I found myself nodding in recognition through a lot of the book. I also used to think that the iemoto system of arts learning was kind of a racket, but reading this made me realize that becoming a master and teacher of an art was actually one of the few ways that a person could be recognized on his own merit, free of the constraints of feudal society. 納得。