Description
Book SynopsisWhen Europeans landed in Japan they encountered people they perceived as white-skinned and highly civilized, but these impressions did not endure. Gradually the Europeans' positive impressions faded away and Japanese were seen as yellow-skinned and relatively inferior. This book traces racial roots of the modern clash between Japan and the West.
Trade Review" From White to Yellow is a big book in every way. The product of immense research, it is an exceptionally ambitious work that makes a string of innovative and far-reaching arguments. Even more strikingly, it is simply the first of a planned two-volume series that, once completed, will span over six hundred years of European interactions with Japan. ... The scale of the task and the depth of the research invite a comparison to Donald Lach' s Asia in the Making of Europe, a groundbreaking series that can best be described as an almost supernatural feat of scholarship. ... Overall the work is a significant achievement that should be read by anyone working in the field. It moves Japan from the margins to the very center of discussions over the development of early modern racial discourse, making a powerful case for the importance of the European encounter with Japan. Japan represented a problem for Europeans, and Kowner brilliantly dissects the varied ways in which they struggled to deal with it in the early modern period." Monumenta Nipponica " A path-breaking book, rich in insights and extraordinary well researched, with a huge bibliography covering works in twelve languages. Kowner has meticulously explored the ramifications and details of encounters between Europeans and the various Others. [From White to Yellow] is unsurpassed in its careful examination of European writings on Japan." Journal of World History " A remarkable scholarly achievement. It throws valuable light on evolving European attitudes to race and to racial hierarchies and demonstrates how they were filtered through different social mechanisms - religion, trade, power." Ethnic and Racial Studies
