History of Modern Japan

"Although the broad outlines of the story were familiar (as they will be to every reader) almost all the more detailed information was new to me. I thought the book was masterly in the intermeshing of the personal and the political, the quotidian and the spiritual, the psychoanalytic with the journalistic, the long-historical with the contemporary, and everywhere finding and highlighting the poetic and the aesthetic. -- Neil MacGregor Director of Humboldt Forum and former Director of The British Museum"