Search results for ""author james l. huffman""

This unique book introduces nineteenth-century Japan through the compelling life story of Boston journalist Edward H. House (1836-1901), America's first regular correspondent in Japan. House's accomplishments were breathtaking in variety: shaping the reputations of John Brown and Mark Twain, influencing American attitudes toward Asia, persuading Congress to return a massive indemnity to Japan, editing Tokyo's earliest English-language newspaper (Tokio Times), constructing a powerful case against imperialism, and introducing Western orchestral music to Japan. House's experiences also illustrated many of the era's key themes: Japan's use of public relations as a diplomatic tool, the contentious relations of the expatriate community, the role foreign advisors played in Japan's drive toward modernity, and the complicated nature of U.S.-Japan relations. The book captures the human drama of a special breed of early journalist. It recounts the bohemianism that made House and his friends (e.g., Walt Whitman, Artemus Ward) notorious. It narrates his tender, tortured relationship with Aoki Koto, a girl he adopted when she was on the verge of suicide. It shows a courageous struggle with gout, including 20 years in a wheelchair given to him by the powerful Okuma Shigenobu. And it details a deep friendship with Mark Twain, which eventually was destroyed by a dispute over The Prince and the Pauper. Twain's unpublished 50-page manuscript on the experience, Concerning the Scoundrel E. H. House, is introduced here for the first time. Meticulously researched, the book draws on House's voluminous writings and on hundreds of letters between House and major figures in both America and Japan, including Mark Twain, U.S. Grant, John Russell Young, Edmund Clarence Stedman, Okuma Shigenobu, and Inoue Kaoru. With its lively, accessible prose and seamless interweaving of the life of House with the history of the Meiji era, this book will be welcomed by students, scholars, and general readers interested in modern Japanese history and in America's nineteenth-century foreign relations.

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Employing a wide range of primary source materials, Modern Japan: A History in Documents provides a colorful narrative of Japan's development since 1600. A variety of diary entries, letters, legal documents, and poems brings to life the early modern years, when Japan largely shut itself off from the outside world. A picture essay highlights the tumultuous decade and a half following the arrival of Commodore Matthew Perry and the U.S. Navy in 1853, which led to unprecedented changes and a new government. The dramatic rush to modernity in the late 1800s and early 1900s, accompanied by Japan's entry into the imperialist rivalry, is seen through travel accounts, novelists' recollections, and imperial rescripts, while editorial cartoons and prison memoirs recount the major early twentieth century rush, first toward pluralism, then toward war. Japan's recovery after World War II to become one of the world's most vibrant democracies and its second largest economy is chronicled through records as diverse as a funeral eulogy, a comic book description of Adam Smith's economic theories, and an internet musing. The documents are woven together in a lively narrative that brings to life one of the modern world's most remarkable national stories. This new edition includes an updated introduction with a note on sources and interpretation, extensive revision of Chapter 1: The Land of Shogun and Daimyo, eleven new documents, seven new sidebars, seven new images, and updated further reading and websites. It revises the interpretation of the Tokugawa period; adds new material on Japanese imperialism, especially its expansion into Korea; has more emphasis on the place of minorities in modern society; quotes additional fiction and other literature; updates the most recent material to include the last 15 years of history; and adds some new editorial cartoons from the Meiji and Taisho eras, a rare 19th century photo from the Meiji era, and archival maps.

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