Full name: Low City, High City: Tokyo from Edo to the Earthquake

Author: Edward G. Seidensticker Rank: Rating: Original Rating: Pop Rating: Genres/categories: Purchase/reserch links: LibraryThing Amazon Goodreads ISBNs: 9780394507309 0394507304

Certain conjunctions of time and place exert a special fascination--Paris in the twenties, turn-of-the-century Vienna, Weimar Berlin. Tokyo in the years between the Meiji Restoration and the Earthquake of 1923 is one of these. Until 1867 the city was called Edo--it was the shogun's capital, the biggest city in a country almost completely closed to the outside world for two and a half centuries. Then, helter-skelter, it became a modern metropolis brimming with Western fads, ideas, and technologies, exuberantly inventing and imitating even as it yearned for the past it was destroying. East and West met here as never before--or since. Similar books: A History of Japan, 1615-1867 by George Sansom Inventing Japan by Ian Buruma Early Modern Japan by Conrad Totman Japan by Patrick Smith The Making of Modern Japan by Marius B. Jansen The Great Wave by Christopher Benfey The World of the Shining Prince by Ivan Morris A Modern History of Japan by Andrew Gordon In the Realm of a Dying Emperor by Norma Field Japan in War and Peace by John W. Dower Peasants, Rebels, and Outcastes by Mikiso Hane Emperor of Japan by Donald Keene Japanese Inn by Oliver Statler Embracing Defeat by John W. Dower The Last Samurai by Mark Ravina