![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Bibliographic Data: Smith, Thomas C. Native Sources of Japanese Industrialization, 1750-1920. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.
Main Argument: Rather than one single subject, this book collects ten articles written by Smith over nearly thirty years of his career, focusing on aspects of the Tokugawa economy and moving into the class motivations of the Meiji Restoration before ending on the early evolution of the industrial labor force in Meiji and Taishô Japan. Through it all, Smith is concerned with asserting the seminal differences of the Japanese experience of the early modern, the modern and industrialization in ways that, however well-hedged, call into grave question several sacred cows of the historiography of the same in Euroamerica.
( The vitality of tradition; the roots of the present in the past )
Further reading: Susan B. Hanley, Everyday Things in Premodern Japan (reread); Thomas C. Smith, The Agrarian Origins of Modern Japan
Meta notes: Everyone who knew him in my department speaks very highly of Professor Smith, particularly Professor Berry, and it's interesting to read this book and to feel, just below the level at which I could pull out an illustrative quotation, his influence on her writing and scholarship (especially on Japan in Print), both of which she will quite happily confirm via anecdotes. Professor Barshay, the late Donald Shively, and other people and names I know make appearances in the footnotes, and it's impossible to avoid the sense of East Asian studies as something of, well, if not a family, a clan, in that all of us have certain scholarly lineages which we can trace and link up with others', and which have a profound if subtle influence on our scholarship and thought.
Main Argument: Rather than one single subject, this book collects ten articles written by Smith over nearly thirty years of his career, focusing on aspects of the Tokugawa economy and moving into the class motivations of the Meiji Restoration before ending on the early evolution of the industrial labor force in Meiji and Taishô Japan. Through it all, Smith is concerned with asserting the seminal differences of the Japanese experience of the early modern, the modern and industrialization in ways that, however well-hedged, call into grave question several sacred cows of the historiography of the same in Euroamerica.
( The vitality of tradition; the roots of the present in the past )
Further reading: Susan B. Hanley, Everyday Things in Premodern Japan (reread); Thomas C. Smith, The Agrarian Origins of Modern Japan
Meta notes: Everyone who knew him in my department speaks very highly of Professor Smith, particularly Professor Berry, and it's interesting to read this book and to feel, just below the level at which I could pull out an illustrative quotation, his influence on her writing and scholarship (especially on Japan in Print), both of which she will quite happily confirm via anecdotes. Professor Barshay, the late Donald Shively, and other people and names I know make appearances in the footnotes, and it's impossible to avoid the sense of East Asian studies as something of, well, if not a family, a clan, in that all of us have certain scholarly lineages which we can trace and link up with others', and which have a profound if subtle influence on our scholarship and thought.