Japan: The Intellectual Foundations of Modern Japanese Politics

This was a great book. It was easy to read, small (only 148 pages), direct and effective. The scholarship shows excellent depth of research, but the vocabulary and writing style is simple. Tetsuo Najita makes the highly abstract intellectuals of the most recent centuries in Japan accessible to any reader. Nicely done. Najita looks not just at history, but the driving forces, the ideas that motivated the people who inspired history. He brings new focus to Japanese history. For academic researchers or the curious Japanophile, I strongly recommend this book. I'm not a historian. I'm a graduate student studying sociology and anthropology. Still, the value of this book is not limited to history. Najita's willingness to breakout of the rigid confines of what History has been and move into new material in the history of ideas is exciting. In this, his work touches on history, philosophy, religion, sociology, anthropology and politics. The combination of seemingly divergent disciplines is surprisely smooth.