Modern Japanese Thought

Over the past two centuries, Japan has undergone Westernization not only in the external realm of material culture and sociopolitical organization, but also in the inner realm of thought and morals. Modern Japanese Thought brings together four chapters from Volumes 5 and 6 of the Cambridge History of Japan, plus a new introduction and a chapter on postwar intellectual history. This comprehensive intellectual history describes the forces that made Japanese thinkers both receptive of and hostile to Western ideas and values from the 1770s to the 1990s. The important themes reflected throughout the book are: the potential of Western knowledge to discredit as well as bolster the existing order; and the perennial tension between indigenous and alien, traditional and modern, and rulers and ruled in Tokugawa, imperial, and postwar Japan.