Overcome by modernity : history, culture, and community in interwar Japan /

The Cambridge History of Japan, v.6: The Twentieth Century (CH, Jan.90) features a 64-page chapter by Harootunian and Tetsuo Najita entitled "Japanese revolt against the West: Political and Cultural Criticism in the Twentieth Century." Harootunian has now expanded those ideas into a dense monograph of 414 pages. The range of his reading is awe-inspiring, and he has thought deeply about issues of social and intellectual change. In addition to arguing his case--that modernism and fascism are fundamentally linked and that Western models do not necessarily fit the Japanese historical experience--he provides extended descriptions and discussions of the ideas and works of Japanese thinkers accessible only to advanced specialists. This book requires rereading. At first sitting, one is overwhelmed with the torrent of citations and the complexity of the thoughts. Harootunian does not help the reader much. He uses every latest fragment of academic jargon, entangled in "unruly" sentence structures even he concedes may be "complex and often unintelligible." Specialists will and should be mesmerized. Most others can gain almost all the basic insight by consulting the much more accessible Cambridge History chapter cited above. Graduate students and faculty. R. B. Lyman Jr. emeritus, Simmons College