A study of the effects of foreign education and contact on the though pattern and activities of one of Japan's leading, yet little known, intellectuals and political reforms. Ono Azusa. It is based on his diary, private papers, published works and contemporary accounts.

From the early seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century Japan saw the creation, development, and apparent disappearance of the field of natural history, or "honzogaku." Federico Marcon traces the changing views of the natural environment that accompanied its development by surveying the ideas and practices deployed by "honzogaku" practitioners and by vividly reconstructing the social forces that affected them. These include a burgeoning publishing industry, increased circulation of ideas and books, the spread of literacy, processes of institutionalization in schools and academies, systems of patronage, and networks of cultural circles, all of which helped to shape the study of nature. In this pioneering social history of knowledge in Japan, Marcon shows how scholars developed a sophisticated discipline that was analogous to European natural history but formed independently. He also argues that when contacts with Western scholars, traders, and diplomats intensified in the nineteenth century, the previously dominant paradigm of "honzogaku "slowly succumbed to modern Western natural science not by suppression and substitution, as was previously thought, but by creative adaptation and transformation.

A comprehensive intellectual history describing the forces that made Japanese thinkers both receptive and hostile to Western ideas and values.

This study contains twenty-two essays by leading historians on the Tokugawa Period (1600-1868), eight of which have never before been published. The Tokugawa Period has long been seen as one of Eastern feudalism, awaiting the breakthrough that came with the Meiji enlightenment and the opening of Japan to the West. The general thrust of these papers is to show that in many institutional aspects Japan was far from backward before the Meiji Period, and that many of the preconditions of modernization were present and developing much earlier than has generally been believed. This collection will be particularly valuable to students and scholars of comparative and Japanese modernization. Originally published in 1968. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

A collection of 46 essays that trace the course of democracy in Japan from 1868 to 1952.

In his study of the treatment of political criminal suspects and prisoners from 1868 to 1945, Richard H. Mitchell makes a major contribution to our knowledge and understanding of Japan's criminal justice system at a most critical juncture in that country's history. Through careful research and sensitive evaluation of the source materials, Mitchell identifies two contrasting themes--a high degree of state repression and a concern for human rights--and shows how a system that clearly involved considerable brutality, torture, and illegal detention also exhibited elements of humanity and fairness. He argues that this contradiction is best understood by viewing prewar Japan as a "paternalistic police state," in which brutality was the other side of benevolence. The scope of inquiry of this study encompasses a broad range of issues. It assays laws for control of political dissent as well as the origins of the movement for human rights of criminal suspects and convicts, giving special attention to the behavior of defense lawyers. It sorts out the actors and their roles in upholding or violating individual rights and does a superb job of conveying the subtle difficulties faced by judges as well as the markedly "un-American" legal context of political trials. It describes and makes critical distinctions between conditions in prisons and facilities for special detention and surveillance, and it challenges a number of common assumptions, including long-cherished views about the differences between the 1920s and 1930s. Numerous cases of alleged police brutality are evaluated and police actions analyzed. Tenko (conversion), a novel method of dealing with political criminal suspects and convicts, is explored together with the little-known Criminal Compensation Law. Throughout, the yardstick by which treatment of accused and convicted criminals is judged is the state's own laws and regulations. In addition to evaluation by these internal standards, Mitchell devotes his final chapter to a very useful comparison with the situation in Europe during the same period. There is no other work in English on precisely this subject and no other related work of this scope. Although Mitchell's focus is on political offenders, there is enough material on the overall system to make this volume easily the best available resource on prewar Japanese criminal justice.