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The Cambridge History of Japan, Vol. 3: Medieval Japan (Volume 3) Abridged Edition

by Kozo Yamamura (Editor)

4.7 14 ratings

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This third volume in The Cambridge History of Japan is devoted to the three and a half centuries spanning the final decades of the twelfth century when the Kamakura bakufu was founded, to the mid-sixteenth century when civil wars raged following the effective demise of the Muromachi bakufu. Volume 3 contains thirteen specially commissioned essays written by leading Japanese and American scholars that survey the historical events and developments in medieval Japan's polity, economy, society, and culture, as well as its relations with its Asian neighbors. The essays reflect the most recent scholarly research on the history of this period. The volume creates a rich tapestry of the events that took place during these colorful centuries, when the warrior class ruled Japan, institutions underwent fundamental transformations, the economy grew steadily, and Japanese culture and society evolved with surprising vitality to leave legacies that still characterize and affect contemporary Japan.

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Editorial Reviews

Review

"Essays by six American and six Japanese specialists provide readers with significant new perspectives and detailed information on political and economic institutions, foreign relations, and cultural developments...will be required reading for anyone wishing to take the measure of medieval Japanese historiography in English." Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History

Book Description

Survey of the historical events and developments in medieval Japan's polity, economy, society and culture.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Cambridge University Press; Abridged edition (April 27, 1990)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 736 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0521223547
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0521223546
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.42 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.5 x 1.5 x 9.25 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #495,657 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #562 in Japanese History (Books)
- #5,732 in European History (Books)
- #15,663 in Unknown

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4.7 14 ratings

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Mathieu

a nice book

Reviewed in the United States on January 7, 2013

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A very elegant book with strong sheets, but this is a very interesting volume about the transformation of the Shoen throught a Jito's control.

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Timothy J. Logan

Comprehensive and Scholarly Review of Medieval Japan

Reviewed in the United States on January 5, 2002

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This is an outstanding work and provides both the lay reader and the scholar with a comprehensive discussion of Medieval Japan with all its complexities, richness, and fascinating detail. Understanding Japanese history is a challenge and this work provides an excellent and detailed background of the feudal period.

4 people found this helpful

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Manuel Del Rio Rodriguez

Great scholarship, dull reading

Reviewed in the United States on February 9, 2010

This volume is the third installment of a set of six Cambridge Histories of Japan. It is centered on 'Medieval Japan', which in Japanese History usually applies to the period between 1185 and 1568, covering the Kamakura, Nambokucho and Muromachi periods. In this age the Imperial Court loses ground and power, and the military government of the Shoguns is established. In society, Buddhism takes a greater stranglehold on the mentalities and beliefs, and new sects arrise (Jodo, Jodo Shin, Zen, Nichiren). Central authority is progressively weakened, and a socio-economic order vagely similar to western Feudalism appears, with a strong decentralization of political power (especially for the last century or so, when daimyos rule the land with almost complete autonomy).

Now, centering on the volume: it contains all the good and bad things of the Cambridge Histories. The good ones are the superb scholarship, made by specialists on the field and touching its subjects with depth and technical expertise. But that virtue is also the greatest setback. Don't expect a clear-cut, linear, mainly political history of Medieval Japan in this volume. On the contrary, you get a set of independent and hardly related monographs which are very vaguely ordered bearing in mind chronological order and subject-matter (first the ones on political history and economy; then the ones about foreign relations, culture and religion).

If what you're looking for is an extensive an coherent historical account of Medieval Japan, and/or you're a begginer to the subject, this book isn't for you. Now, if you already have a clear scheme of the main reigns, battles, events... in your head, and you want to deepen (or even subvert) the conventional truths and explanations, the book will come handy; bear in mind that even its 'political' monographs take for granted you are acquainted with events like Jokyu no ran or the Gempei wars and don't bother to narrate much.

That being said, all monographs are high quality, but can make very dull reading (especially if, for example, you aren't too interested in different types of land tenure or taxes). Best way to use the Histories is to navigate to the monographs that interest you. In this volume, I liked very much the one by Barbara Ruch, which tried to dispell topics and stereotypes about 'Japanese Medieval Culture'.

That's about it. I give it 4 stars. The scholarship deserves more, but it is only of real use to specialists, and the occasional dullness and lack of general historial narration would take it down rather fast. 4 is the middle ground, although I feel it might be too positive for the expectations I had when I got the book.

15 people found this helpful

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R

Angry reviewer defends Cambridge History of Japan

Reviewed in the United States on November 2, 2021

The other reviews in this section spurred me to write this. It seems as though in the review section for any scholarly book there are always people complaining about how difficult it is to read or how boring it is. This makes no sense to me -- you are reading a book which contains an intense amount of information, not a fiction novel. No scholarly book is an 'easy read', regardless of the quality of writing, which was excellent in this book. Additionally this book includes several Japanese experts interpreted in English; this comes with its own set of issues, but I think the translators did an excellent job rendering their prose into English.

The next criticism was equally baffling: the book didn't have a "flow" like a narrative history and the reviewer felt that certain events were being glossed over. Firstly, no, I don't think events were glossed over. Yet even in a narrative history, events get glossed over, at least in the sense that many minor details are omitted for the sake of brevity. You are reading a general history, after all. The only way the peripheries of a topic such as the Jokyu War would be treated in depth would be in a book specifically dedicated to that subject, or a general history that was several thousand pages long. Ironically, the Cambridge History of Japan IS several thousand pages long, much longer than Sansom's or Hall's History of Japan. Then, at the same time, he felt that the book was boring because it talks about 'minor things' like taxes. Those are important! Those seemingly minor details are what helps you understand the bigger picture, and they are the exact thing he thinks were left out of the book.

The Cambridge History of Japan is a book from the 90s, assembling writing from experts in Japanese history from that time (who all have excellent books and are all widely respected in the field). It is a collection of articles by scholars who are experts in the topics they are writing about, arranged by chapters, which are arranged in chronological order. This format is desirable, because it's like a buffet of different historians writing in order, so you can pick and choose which article you want to read, or you can read it straight through. In my opinion, this is the best format to use here, because a straight-line narrative history written by one person would inevitably gloss over certain events and you might not get the same level of accuracy regarding a specific topic or chapter that you would have with multiple people working on the book. I don't think anything in this book was particularly for "specialists" -- an example of a specialist book would be Suzanne Gay's The Moneylenders of Late Medieval Kyoto. The articles simply went in depth about their subjects in the short amount of space provided for each section, and provided an excellent picture of the history of the time, not glossing over anything.

IF you want to read a book about a specific event, like the Genpei war, then you need to buy a book about the Genpei war. If you want to read about misconceptions about Japanese history, then you need to buy a book like Amino's Rethinking Japanese History. This book was as thorough as you could get for a general history of medieval Japan -- it's up to you to research the specific topics you're interested in.

3 people found this helpful

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