Reviews for Reinventing Japan: From Merchant Nation to Civic Nation

The average rating for Reinventing Japan: From Merchant Nation to Civic Nation based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2009-08-13 00:00:00 Dalton Boozer What can one get out of a 25 year old non-fiction anthology? Facts up until 25 years ago, and this book does indeed cover current events at the time it was written. There's hundreds of years to cover on most of these topics, and while I would have wished for something more up-to-date, that doesn't detract from what's here. It's important to note that this is an anthology of articles written by a number of authors. As one might expect, some of them are quite good and some quite bad. Weiner wrote the first two (the introduction and chapter 1), and his contributions are quite bad. They are full of overly large words and sentences that obscure meaning and bore the reader, and they contain very little content. The last chapter by Creighton on media imagery of foreigners is only barely on topic, is full of spin and scare quotes, and where it touches on the contents of the other chapters it adds nothing. The other six chapters are very informative. They are on the Ainu, Burakumin, Korean atom bomb victims, Chinese in Japan, Okinawans, and people of Japanese descent returning to Japan. Each gives a detailed history of the people in question with facts and figures. Rather than concentrating on individuals and their stories, the focus is on law and political movements. I would have appreciated more first-hand, individual views, but I cannot complain about the detailed history and politics I got. The largest oversight here is the lack of an article on Koreans in Japan, one of the larger minorities (perhaps the third largest, after Burakumin and Okinawans). The sole article on Koreans focuses only on one small set of Koreans in Japan: those who were directly affected by the atomic bomb.

Review # 2 was written on 2011-08-22 00:00:00 Regina Sanders Race a social construct determined by historical and national context. "Racialized" minorities distinguished by relative size, settlement pattern, length & status of residence, degree of social economic and political integration, or by a combination of these factors.