Japan Story

This is a fresh and surprising account of Japan´s culture from the ´opening up´ of the country in the mid-nineteenth century to the present. ´How much I admired it, what a lot I learned from it and, above all, how very much I enjoyed it ... Masterly.´ Neil MacGregor It is told through the eyes of people who greeted this change not with the confidence and grasping ambition of Japan´s modernizers and nationalists, but with resistance, conflict, distress. We encounter writers of dramas, ghost stories and crime novels where modernity itself is the tragedy, the ghoul and the bad guy; surrealist and avant-garde artists sketching their escape; rebel kamikaze pilots and the put-upon urban poor; hypnotists and gangsters; men in desperate search of the eternal feminine and feminists in search of something more than state-sanctioned subservience; Buddhists without morals; Marxist terror groups; couches full to bursting with the psychological fall-out of breakneck modernization. These people all sprang from the soil of modern Japan, but their personalities and projects failed to fit. They were ´dark blossoms´: both East-West hybrids and home-grown varieties that wreathed, probed and sometimes penetrated the new structures of mainstream Japan.