Mount TBR #36

I bought this book in October 1979 in the Umeda branch of the Kinokuniya Bookstore in Osaka. In the last 40 years, I moved it and stored it over three residences in three cities and have been looking at it on a shelf since 1998. I guess I didn’t read it because I figured it would always be there to finally get to one of these days.

I read this book for Mount TBR Reading Challenge 2019.

The Western World and Japan: A Study in the Interaction of European and Asiatic Cultures  – George Sansom

This history covers from the 17^th century to the late 19^th century. The first part is an examination of the contact the influences between Europe and India and China. The Portuguese, for example, were determined to disrupt the trading relationships between what is now known as the Arab world and India. Through superior technology, drive, and ruthlessness, they did so, but cultural influences tended to flow in only one direction: from Asia to Europe. Members of ancient cultures saw no need for European products and held European ideas in low esteem.

The second, greater part of the history covers the waning days of the closed country policy of the Tokugawa regime and the Meiji era from its inception in 1868 to about 1894, the year of the First Chino-Japanese War. Sansom judiciously covers the political ideas and machinations of the major factions of the time, giving the reader the sense that Japan was lucky to avoided a bloody civil war. The examination of trends in journalism and literature is masterly in content and style.

Sansom is writing for specialists, but his writing is pleasant in tone and pace for the thinking reader that is committed to the topic. Granted, there are statements that make one’s teeth grind. For example, in discussing what distinguishes East from West in the late 1940s, Sansom writes of “the restless energy that impelled Hellenic culture to expand. . . . There are dark and silent intervals, and sometimes the Hellenic spirit seems to be in danger of extinction; but it reasserts itself and continues to exert upon the Eastern as well as the Western world an influence that cannot be permanently resisted.” 

We shall see. It's not like the Hellenic Spirit is exactly thriving in the Western World these days.