Volume 30, Number 6 · April 14, 1983
The Real Stuff
By John K. Fairbank
Kenkenroku: A Diplomatic Record of the Sino-Japanese War, 1894-1895 Press)
by Mutsu Munemitsu, edited and translated by Gordon Mark Berger
The Japan Foundation (Princeton University Press/University of Tokyo, 318 pp., $27.50
My Thirty-Three Years' Dream: The Autobiography of Miyazaki Toten
translated by Eto Shinkichi, translated by Marius B. Jansen
Princeton University Press, 298 pp., $24.00
The news that Mr. Reagan's 'peacekeeper' in Japanese waters is to be a better armed Japan makes one think back to the half century of Japan's military expansion from 1894 to 1945. Fortunately a nation that has beaten its swords into Toyotas seems unlikely to revert to militarism as a way of life. But the springs of Japan's modern performance, whether military or industrial, must have a message for us. How an island people poor in natural resources came from behind and have now almost got ahead of us in material technology seems worth pondering. The answer plainly lies in the immaterial realm of motivation.
Review, 2068 words
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