Routledge Library Editions: Japan
2 total works
Japanese cultural life had reached a low ebb at the beginning of the Tokugawa period. The Japanese society which emerged when Tokugawa Ieyasu had completed the process of pacifying warring baronies was neither literary, nor hardly literate. The rulers were warriors and the people they ruled were largely illiterate. The Japan of 1868 was a very different society: practically every samurai was literate and it was a world in which books abounded. The transformation which had occurred in these two and a half centuries was an essential precondition for the success of the policy which the leaders of the Meiji Restoration were to adopt. An in-depth survey of the development and education during the period, this book remains one of the key analyses of the effects of Tokugawa educators and education on modern day Japan.
The Japanese way of work is notoriously ‘different’. But is it Japan or Britain which is the odd man out? When originally published this was the first book to explore the real differences, through a point-by-point comparison of two Japanese factories with two British ones making similar products. In the first half of the book this comparison is pursued in systematic detail and clear illustration of the attitudes and assumptions which underlie what the author calls the ‘market-oriented’ system of Britain and the ‘organization-oriented’ system of Japan. One chapter shows how the employment institutions of the two countries fit into their political, family and educational institutions – an exercise in functionalist sociology which dominates t he later chapters and makes a major contribution to the discussion of development and of the ‘convergence’ of different systems.