Mirror in the shrine : American encounters with Meiji Japan
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Mirror in the shrine : American encounters with Meiji Japan
Harvard University Press, 1988
- : pbk
Available at 99 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Note
Bibliography: p. 279-284
Includes index
Description and Table of Contents
- Volume
-
ISBN 9780674576414
Description
Cross-cultural contacts between America and Japan in the nineteenth-century are typified in the stories of three visitors--missionary William Elliot Griffis, scientist Edward S. Morse, and writer Lafeadio Hern.
- Volume
-
: pbk ISBN 9780674576421
Description
In the last third of the nineteenth century, three Americans with diverse purposes sailed to Japan-the missionary William Elliot Griffis, the scientist Edward S. Morse, and the writer Lafcadio Hearn. They were to become part of the first generation of American experts on Japan, regularly quoted and widely read. More significantly, their own lives were vastly changed, broadened and enriched in unexpected ways, so that their thoughts dwelt as much on what Americans could learn from the pagan Japanese as on what Americans could teach them.
In telling these stories, Robert Rosenstone evokes the immediacy of daily experience in Meiji Japan, a nation still feudal in many of its habits yet captivating to Westerners for the gentleness of the people, the beauty of the landscape, the human scale of the unspoiled old towns, and the charm of arts and manners. He describes the odyssey of the ambitious and strong-minded Christian minister Griffis, who won few converts but, as a teacher, assisted at the birth of modern Japan. He portrays the natural scientist Morse, a born collector who turned from amassing mollusks to assembling comprehensive collections of Japanese folk art and pottery. He recounts Lafcadio Hearn's fourteen years in Japan. Hearn, who married a Japanese, became a citizen, and found in his new homeland ideal subject matter for exotic tales of ghosts, demons, spectral lovers, local gods and heroes, spells, enchantments.
Rosenstone recreates the sights and textures of Meiji Japan, but Mirror in the Shrine brings to the reader much more than a traditional rendering. Rather, through the use of some of the techniques of modernist writing, the book provides a multi-voiced narrative in which the words of the present and the past interact to present a fresh view of historical reality. While charting the common stages of these three Americans' acculturation-growing to like the food, the architecture, the spareness, the mysterious etiquette-the work also highlights the challenges that Japan issues to American culture, in this century as well as in the last: Is it possible to find human fulfillment within the confines of a hierarchical, even repressive, social order? Is it possible for our culture to find a place of importance for such qualities as harmony, aesthetics, morals, manners?
This is a book for anyone who is at all interested in Japan or in the meeting of East and West. The "old Japan hand" will reexperience the freshness of an early love; the newcomer will find it equally evocative and fascinating.
by "Nielsen BookData"