BOOKS ON JAPAN

The Making of Modern Japan

Marius B. Jansen (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000)

CONTENT: Nearly 900 lugubrious pages about Japan's past four centuries.

GIST: Scholarly but dull mainstream treatise on Japan points out many trees but gives no vivid sense of the forest. Princeton professor emeritus Jansen pays little attention to the role of religion, and merely notes that "no student of the Japanese past could doubt that a nation so gifted, resourceful, and courageous [is] destined to play a major role in the millennium now begun."

Japan: A Modern History

James L. McClain (New York: W.W. Norton, 2002)

CONTENT: Only 700 pages, and better-written.

GIST: Also a flyover of four centuries, but McClain occasionally gets down to ground level to describe life in both the opulent courts of wealthy shoguns and the thatched huts of common folks scratching to stay alive at subsistence level. Most of the work deals with Japan in the 20th century and readably explains how the country emerged into the world and surged for four decades, but then brought disaster upon itself.