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A Companion to Japanese History. Edited by WILLIAM M. TSUTSUI. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2007. 632 pp. $49.95 (paper).
William M. Tsutsui introduces A Companion to Japanese History as an amibtious snapshot of Japan studies since the breakdown of the authority of modernization theory in the last half of the twentieth century. Though partially revived to consider empire's "benefits," especially since the Vietnam War, modernization theory has largely disappeared as the paradigm by which we approach not only Japan, but all non-Western nations. Nevertheless, as Tsutsui explains, with a few exceptions, there is no reference work that captures the expansive set of interests and methodologies since modernization theory's collapse. The Companion, then, places itself against the six volumes of The Cambridge History of Japan (Cambridge University Press, 1988- 1999), the latter's modernization theory bias, Tsutsui claims, rendered them "anachronisms from the moment they appeared." The Companion's thirty essays form five sections. The first four are largely chronological. A fifth section of eleven essays is titled "Themes in Japanese History."
This chronological and thematic division puts tremendous pressure on the authors of the chronological pieces to summarize their fields while also providing the necessary narrative and background of the periods. Each has adopted different ways to address this tension. Mark J. Hudson's essay on archaeology, "Japanese Beginnings," places Japan's population, land mass, ecology, and technology into global periods and geographies without slighting the politics of the competing archaeologies of commoner and imperial life. As throughout the Companion, a lack of maps makes this essay harder to read and potentially less useful than it might have been. G. Cameron Hurst III's...