Wow! eBook
Historical Dictionary of United States-Japan Relations
Author(s): John Van Sant (Author), Peter Mauch (Author), Yoneyuki Sugita (Author)
- Publisher: Scarecrow Press (UK)
- Publication Date: 29 Jan. 2007
- Language: English
- Print length: 344 pages
- ISBN-10: 0810856085
- ISBN-13: 9780810856080
Book Description
The
Historical Dictionary of United States-Japan Relations traces this one hundred and fifty year relationship through a chronology, an introduction, appendixes, a bibliography, and cross-referenced dictionary entries on key persons, places, events, institutions, and organizations. Covering everything from Walt Whitmans poem, A Broadway Pageant, commemorating the visit of the Shoguns Embassy to the U.S. in 1860, to zaibatsu, this ready reference is an excellent starting point for the study of Japans dealings with the U.S.Editorial Reviews
Review
a very useful reference guide and is recommended…
This is a superb, authoritative, and comprehensive guide and dictionary, indispensable for pivotal individuals, as well as for events, treaties, even debates in the extraordinary―and extraordinarily revealing―150 years of relations between Japan and the United States. — Walter LaFeber
The compilers of this volume, John Van Sant, Peter Mauch, and Yoneyuki Sugita have drawn on a wide range of sources, listed in the useful sixteen-page bibliography, to produce this wealth of information on a variety of subject areas. . . . The main value of this publication is to be derived from the rich and comprehensive 243-page body of the dictionary. The entries are written in clear and succinct prose, many of which point the reader in the direction of other related head words that are presented in bold type. . . . [A] practical and welcome resource for those studying U.S.-Japanese relations and an important reference work that should definitely be held by institutions with programs in Asian and American studies.
The Japanese started arriving in America as castaway sailors in the 1840s. By 1853 President Millard Fillmore responded with a commodore, escorted by the biggest battleships in the world, to negotiate trade relationships in Japan. Thus began the complex relationship that developed between the US and Japan, partially based upon “gentlemen”s agreements” that excluded the Japanese from the US, and partly based on the threat or reality of war. Working from an initial chronology, these entries describe the people and events that eventually became one of the world”s more amicable relationships. Here Junichiro Koizumi expresses his opinion of the US with a denunciation of terrorism at 9/11 followed by a visit to North Korea; here liberal Mike Mansfield impresses conservative Ronald Reagan so much the new president asks Mansfield to retain his post as ambassador to Japan; here we find why Japan”s military is even now limited to defense.
About the Author
John E. Van Sant is associate professor of history at the University of Alabama-Birmingham.
Peter Mauch is a lecturer of international history at Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto, Japan.
Yoneyuki Sugita is associate professor of American history at Osaka University of Foreign Studies and author of Pitfall or Panacea: The Irony of US Power in Occupied Japan.
