Reinventing Japan: Facing the West and Creating New Selves

The book is a fascinating, insightful tour through Japan's modern history, cultural factions, leaders, and luminaries. A thoughtful and informative book that I wish I'd had before traveling to Japan. Dr. Kathryn Sorrells, Professor Emeritus of Communication Studies, California State University, Northridge, author of Intercultural Communication: Globalization and Social Justice. This book offers an inside look at Japan that will delight "old-hands" as well as those looking for an accessible introduction to modern Japan--its culture, its politics, and its people. Kelly discussed some of the key figures that shaped contemporary Japan, among them: Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka, who helped make Japan an economic superpower Akio Morita, the founder of Sony Inazo Nitobe, author of Bushido: The Soul of Japan Haruki Murakami, the perennial candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature DT Suzuki, who introduced Zen to the West Hayao Miyazaki, animator and co-founder of Studio Ghibli What happens when a civilization is forced to measure itself against a radically different worldview? In Reinventing Japan, Bill Kelly examines how Japan, confronted with the challenge of Western modernity, undertook one of the most remarkable cultural and social transformations in history. From the Meiji Restoration of the late nineteenth century through the upheavals of the twentieth century, Japan struggled not only to adopt Western science, industry, and institutions, but also to redefine what it meant to be Japanese in a rapidly globalizing world. Kelly shows how statesmen, scholars, artists, and ordinary citizens alike wrestled with questions of identity: How much of the West should be embraced? What should be preserved from Japan's past? And how could new forms of selfhood be created in the tension between tradition and innovation? The answers to these questions reshaped education, politics, literature, philosophy, and everyday life, producing a society that was at once modern and distinctly Japanese. This is not simply a tale of Westernization. It is the story of a nation that, through acts of selective borrowing, creative adaptation, and conscious resistance, charted its own path into modernity. Sweeping in scope yet attentive to human experience, Reinventing Japan offers an essential perspective on how cultures reinvent themselves in the face of foreign influence—an issue as urgent today as it was more than a century ago.