Japan: A Short Cultural History [Paperback]

G.B. Sansom (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 1931 | ISBN-10: 0804709548 | ISBN-13: 978-0804709545 | Edition: 1

Japan: A Short Cultural History. ASIN: 0804709548.

Product Details

• Paperback: 564 pages
• Publisher: Stanford University Press; 1 edition (June 1, 1931)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0804709548
• ISBN-13: 978-0804709545
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.8 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #495,932 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A Good Primer on Japanese Culture, February 5, 2002

By 

Thomas F. Ogara (Jacksonville, FL USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Japan: A Short Cultural History (Paperback)

Sansom's book has been around for a long, long time, and it has been an introduction to the subject for several generations of interested readers and budding Japanese scholars.

As a book for beginners on Japan it is an excellent start. If you already know something about the subject, you will probably find that it is long on history and short on culture. The author goes out of his way to keep the political context in the forefront and always maintains the chronological order of his story, even when the development of some cultural features (e.g., Japanese Buddhism) may not be well-served by that approach. Most of the major features we associate with Japanese culture are mentioned. Too many of them are only mentioned in passing, and could have merited more in-depth treatment.

Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to denigrate the book too much; when it appeared, most western readers knew little enough on the subject, and most of what they could obtain was either fanciful, biased or just plain unreadable. The tide has turned, and there is so much material available on Japanese culture nowadays that it's hard for the beginner to figure out where to start. If he or she starts with this book, they could do far worse.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sir George Sansom (1883-1965) Revisited, May 8, 2005

By 

Robert E. Morrell (St. Louis, MO USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Japan: A Short Cultural History (Paperback)

It would probably not be much of a stretch to claim that as late as the decade following the end of the Pacific War in 1945, the popular take in the States on things Japanese, even among the more knowledgeable, was shaped largely by three classics: Sir George Sansom's Japan: A Short Cultural History (1931) and Ruth Benedict's The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946) against the background strains of Puccini's Madama Butterfly (1904). All three have had their critics and all three have survived comfortably into the 21st century.

But the Cultural History is not just curious relic. It often describes, in clear and straightforward terms, items of cultural behavior which contemporary scholars are often tempted to dispute contentiously, present in technical jargon, or ignore completely. Take, for example, this introduction to the crucial distinction in Shinto between "ritual purity" and "moral guilt":

. . . . . . . . The outstanding feature of Shinto observances is the attention paid to ritual purity. Things which are offensive to the gods were called by the early Japanese TSUMI, a word which is now rendered by dictionaries as "guilt" or "sin." Avoidance of these things was called IMI, a word meaning taboo. The Imibe, as we have seen, were a class of professional "abstainers," whose duty it was to keep free from pollution so that they might approach the gods without offence. Chief among the offences to be avoided was uncleanness. It might arise in many ways, none of which in other religions would be moral guilt. . . (p. 32ff.)

Those with a bigger appetite for historical detail might consider starting, or continuing, with Sansom's later 3-volume narrative history: A History of Japan to 1334 (1958), A History of Japan 1334-1615 (1961), and A History of Japan 1615-1867 (1963). Sansom's stated reason for not continuing his history beyond 1867 is that he had lived too close to events of the Meiji Restoration (1868) for him to develop a perspective that only distance could supply.

For readers interested in later events, The Making of Modern Japan (2000; 2002), by Marius B. Jansen, another outstanding scholar of Japanese history, would be a good choice. Since this history begins at 1600, there are overlapping accounts of the Edo period, but from two quite different perspectives.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars With some skimming, a very good introduction., February 14, 2003

By 

algo41 "algo41" (philadelphia, pa United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Japan: A Short Cultural History (Paperback)

While interested in culture, I have come to realize I am not very interested in cultural history. For one thing, it is difficult to convey a history of art or architecture or literature to a reader unless the reader is already conversant with historical examples of all of these. It is also true, for me at least, that a discussion of religious and philosophical ideas from a modern perspective, with reference to historical changes, is more enlightening than an attempt at a chronological history. On the other hand, cultural histories, such as Sansom's can provide political histories of just the right amount of detail, and this book does; and Sansom is generally able to convey the flavor of a Japanese cultural epoch. The book lacks a proper emphasis on economic and technical history. Possibly, this is due to gaps in the historical record, at least at the time this book was written (1931), since Sansom does pay attention to economics in the late stages of this book. The book does successfully stress morality and character. A Short Cultural History ends just before the Restoration in mid-19th century. The book's style is pleasantly informal, more in the style of an essayist than an academic. And despite the reservations I have expressed, I found that with a certain amount of skimming, it provides a very good introduction, one that encourages more reading. I give it 5 stars because of the challenge of writing a book such as this.