In The Meaning of Internationalization, Edwin O. Reischauer—former American Ambassador to Japan and one of the world's most acclaimed scholars of Japanese life and culture—delivers a heartfelt message to the Japanese people on the need to look beyond their borders at the changing nature of the world. Reischauer stresses the need to adapt in order to survive these changes and thrive in the new reality that our ever-shrinking world is bringing about.While directed at the peo...

From an award-winning historian, a concise overview of the deep and longstanding ties between China and the Koreas, providing an essential foundation for understanding East Asian geopolitics today.In a concise, trenchant overview, Odd Arne Westad explores the cultural and political relationship between China and the Koreas over the past 600 years.Koreans long saw China as a mentor. The first form of written Korean employed Chinese characters and remained in...

In this major revision of his classic history of Japan—from the tribally divided state under the leadership of Yamato in the fifth century through centuries of dynastic rule to the death of Emperor Hirohito in 1989—the eminent Harvard historian and former U.S. Ambassador to Japan Edwin O. Reischauer incorporates nearly a decade's worth of new scholarship.His book is divided into three parts: the first part examines traditional Japan from the early Chinese influences to the flowerin...

An internationally acclaimed expert explains why Chinese-style architecture has remained so consistent for two thousand years, no matter where it is built.For the last two millennia, an overwhelming number of Chinese buildings have been elevated on platforms, supported by pillars, and covered by ceramic-tile roofs. Less obvious features, like the brackets connecting the pillars to roof frames, also have been remarkably constant. What makes the shared features more ...

In the early 1960s fewer than five percent of Japanese owned automobiles, China's per capita income was among the lowest in Asia, and living standards in rural South Korea put it among the world's poorest countries. Today, these are three of the most powerful economies on earth. Dwight Perkinsdraws on extensive experience in the region to explain how Asia sustained such rapid economic growth in the second half of the twentieth century. East Asian Development covers Japan, South Ko...

In 1961, President Kennedy named Edwin O. Reischauer the U.S. Ambassador to Japan. Already deeply intimate with the country, Reischauer hoped to establish a more equal partnership with Japan, which had long been maligned in the American imagination. Reischauer pushed his fellow citizens to abandon caricature and stereotype and recognize Japan as a peace-loving democracy. Though his efforts were often condemned for being "too soft," the immensity of his influence (and the truth of his argum...

Current accounts of China’s global rise emphasize economics and politics, largely neglecting the cultivation of China’s people. Susan Greenhalgh, one of the foremost authorities on China’s one-child policy, places the governance of population squarely at the heart of China’s ascent.Focusing on the decade since 2000, and especially 2004–09, she argues that the vital politics of population has been central to the globalizing agenda of the reform state. By helping tra...

In Lost Modernities Alexander Woodside offers a probing revisionist overview of the bureaucratic politics of preindustrial China, Vietnam, and Korea. He focuses on the political and administrative theory of the three mandarinates and their long experimentation with governments recruited in part through meritocratic civil service examinations remarkable for their transparent procedures.The quest for merit-based bureaucracy stemmed from the idea that good politics could be e...

The classic samurai novel about the real exploits of the most famous swordsmanMiyamoto Musashi was the child of an era when Japan was emerging from decades of civil strife. Lured to the great Battle of Sekigahara in 1600 by the hope of becoming a samurai—without really knowing what it meant—he regains consciousness after the battle to find himself lying defeated, dazed, and wounded among thousands of the dead and dying. On his way home, he commits a rash act, becomes a fugitive, an...