商品の詳細

• 発売日: 2009-12-08
• オリジナル言語: 英語
• 版型: ハードカバー
• 232 ページ

内容説明
This book re-evaluates the Meiji Restoration of 1868 from the perspective of political conservatism, a category which is largely neglected in the scholarship on Japan's political development in the nineteenth century. It also critiques the persistent tendency to frame the explanation of the events of that period in terms of the precedents of Western experience - the spread of Enlightenment ideals, popular revolution, and 'modernization'. Approaching the event from the context of the Western encroachments on East Asia in the 1840s the book highlights the first conservative responses to that threat and how they evolved into a distinctly modern political force in both the government and the world of letters. The Restoration of 1868 itself is characterized as but one stage in a more protracted struggle to redefine the polity and the nature of public space with the primary aim of national preservation rather than 'Westernization'. Within this context indigenous expressions of reaction and conservatism are analyzed in their evolution into mass-media oriented ideological movements and are highlighted as being by far the most substantial and decisive forces in the development of Japan's modern political culture.