Aliens in the East: A New History of Japan's Foreign Intercourse

In the early twentieth century, the Japanese accepted many modern western ideas, particularly industrialism. But, Harry Emerson Wildes argues, the people of Japan remained essentially the same as when the first foreigners stepped upon their shores in 1543: exclusive, intensely nationalistic, suspicious of strangers, set in a rigid and hereditary social system, and possessed of a mystic veneration of their emperor and their ancestors.

The author of this volume knows the Japanese from firsthan...