A review of “Japan: A Short History” by Mikiso Hane
For the last two millennia, Japanese history has been divided into eras named after the capital or after the shogun or emperor of the time:
the Yamato period (c.300-710) with the political centre located in the area around Kyoto, then known as Yamato; the Nara period (710-784) named after the capital city; the Heian period (794-1185) when the capital was Heian, present day Kyoto; the Kamakura period (1185-1333) named after the headquarters of the shogunate; the Ashikaga shogunate (1338-1573); the Tokugawa or Edo period (1603-1868) when the country was ruled from Edo (current Tokyo); and, more recently, the eras of the emperors Meiji (1868-1912), Taisho (1912-1926), Showa (1926-1989) and Heisei (1989-2019).
Mikiso Hane (1922-2003) was a history professor at Knox College, Illinois, USA and most of his 200 or so pages cover the years from Tokugawa rule onwards. Japan was effectively – and deliberately – cut off from the rest of the world until the arrival of four American warships in 1853, but the Meiji restoration period saw rapid modernisation and the emergence of the country as a major world power.
Japan entered the First World War on the Allied side in order to take over German concessions in China. The annexation of Korea in 1910 and the occupation of Manchuria in 1931 were followed by the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and the unconditional surrender to the USA after the dropping of two atomic bombs in 1945.
Hane makes a point of covering not just political developments, but social and cultural changes, including the role of women. When covering the contemporary scene, he highlights the increasing longevity of the Japanese and the restrictions on immigration. although his book was published in 2000 before the full effect of the falling birth rate, all of which are dramatically impacting the demographics of the nation.
He is frank about the social situation: “Despite the rise in living standards, problems of overcrowding, housing shortages, poorer sanitation facilities compared to other industrial nations, and pollution continue to plague the populace.”