The Best Books on Japanese History

One short survey to start with, one big modern history to grow into, the medieval and wartime books that carry the arguments, and the one classic text worth reading in the original

The best single-volume history of Japan for a reader starting from nothing is Kenneth Henshall's A History of Japan: From Stone Age to Superpower (third edition, 2012). It is short, it covers the whole span from the first settlers to the twenty-first century, and it is honest about the places where the evidence runs thin. It is not the deepest book on this list, but it is the one you can finish in a week and come away from with the shape of the story in your head, which is the right first ambition for a country whose history is usually taught to Western readers as a series of disconnected set pieces: samurai, Perry's ships, Pearl Harbor, the economic miracle.

Once the shape is there, the book to grow into is Marius Jansen's The Making of Modern Japan (2000), which runs from the battle of Sekigahara in 1600 to the end of the twentieth century and is the fullest account in English of how the Tokugawa order was built, how it fell, and what replaced it. Conrad Totman's A History of Japan (second edition, 2005) is the alternative for readers who want the whole span, including the long centuries before 1600, told with unusual attention to land, forests, rice and population. Pierre Souyri's The World Turned Upside Down covers the medieval centuries that the survey histories rush through. John Dower's Embracing Defeat and Herbert Bix's Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan are the two great books on the war and its aftermath, and they do not entirely agree with each other. Ian Buruma's Inventing Japan is the short, sharp account of the modern century, and Miyamoto Musashi's The Book of Five Rings is the one classic text on the list, included because a reader who wants to know what a samurai actually thought should read one rather than read about them.

Every title below is checked against Open Library and publisher records, with editions, years and ISBNs verified rather than scraped. Where historians genuinely disagree, above all about the emperor's responsibility for the war and about how closed Tokugawa Japan really was, the guide says so rather than picking a side.

The books

Which Japanese history book to start with

Start with Henshall. It is the shortest serious survey of the whole of Japanese history in print, and its structure is the one a newcomer needs: a chronological run from prehistory through the classical court at Nara and Kyoto, the rise of the warrior houses, the Tokugawa peace, the Meiji transformation, the road to war, the occupation and the postwar boom, with a short review at the end of each chapter that says what mattered and why. Henshall does not pretend that every period is equally well documented, and he is willing to say when a traditional story is doubtful. The book's limits are the limits of its length: it cannot linger, and a reader who already knows the outline will want something denser. That reader should go straight to Jansen or Totman.

Jansen's The Making of Modern Japan is the book most historians of Japan would hand you if you asked for one big volume on the modern country. It begins in 1600, on the argument that the Tokugawa settlement is where modern Japan starts, and it spends a third of its length on the Tokugawa centuries before it reaches Perry, which is unusual and correct: the Meiji leaders did not build on nothing, and the literate, urban, commercially sophisticated society they inherited is the reason the transformation after 1868 went as fast as it did. The book is long, close to nine hundred pages, and it was completed at the very end of Jansen's life, so its last chapters on the postwar decades are thinner than its middle. Read it for the Tokugawa and Meiji sections above all.

Totman is the other big survey, and the one to choose if you want the centuries before 1600 as well as those after. His approach is distinctive: he treats Japanese history as the history of a population living on a mountainous archipelago with limited arable land, and he keeps returning to forests, rice yields, irrigation and demography as the things that set the limits within which emperors and shoguns acted. Some readers find this bracing and some find it dry. It is worth knowing before you buy that Totman is more interested in how people fed themselves than in how they fought, and that the book is a long one.

Then read by period. Souyri for the medieval centuries, from the rise of the Kamakura warrior government to the wars of the sixteenth century; Buruma for a fast, opinionated run through the modern century from Perry's arrival in 1853 to the Tokyo Olympics of 1964; Dower for the occupation; Bix for the emperor. Musashi can be read at any point, and it is short enough to read in an afternoon, though it repays a second reading once you know something about the world its author lived in.

A word on the two wartime books, because they are the ones most readers come to Japanese history for. Embracing Defeat is not a book about the war; it begins with the surrender broadcast in August 1945 and ends with the occupation's close in 1952, and its subject is what defeat felt like from inside: the hunger, the black markets, the sudden freedom of the press, the writing of a new constitution by Americans in a week and its adoption by a Japanese parliament, the war-crimes trials, and the reinvention of the emperor as a gentle marine biologist. It is long, but it is written with a novelist's eye for the telling detail and it is the book on this list most likely to be read twice. Bix is a harder read, a biography built from Japanese court records and diaries, and its argument matters more than its prose. Read Dower first; read Bix if the question of the emperor takes hold of you.

If you want a modern textbook rather than a narrative, Andrew Gordon's A Modern History of Japan is the one most university courses use and it covers the same ground as Jansen in a third of the length, with more on labour, women and the postwar decades. If you want the samurai as soldiers rather than as a social class, Stephen Turnbull's The Samurai: A Military History is the standard popular account of their campaigns. Neither is ranked below because Jansen and Souyri do the same jobs at a higher level, but both are reliable.

What the historians argue about

The loudest argument is about Hirohito. Bix's biography, which won the Pulitzer Prize, argues that the emperor was an informed, engaged and at times decisive participant in the policies that led Japan to war and kept it fighting, and that the postwar picture of a constitutional monarch who reigned but did not rule was constructed after 1945, with American help, to keep him on the throne. Critics of Bix accept that Hirohito was better informed than the old picture allowed but argue that the constitutional and political constraints on him were real, that his interventions were rare, and that Bix reads too much intention into the record. Dower's Embracing Defeat is on the same side of the argument as Bix about the postwar reinvention of the emperor, and it shows in detail how the occupation authorities decided that a blameless Hirohito was more useful to them than a prosecuted one. The question is not settled, and a reader should take Bix's thesis as a strong and well-documented argument rather than as the consensus.

The second argument is about isolation. The old story is that Tokugawa Japan shut itself off from the world in the 1630s and stayed shut until Perry forced it open. Jansen and Totman both show that this is at best a half-truth: trade with the Dutch and the Chinese continued at Nagasaki throughout, Korea was reached through Tsushima and the Ryukyu kingdom through Satsuma, and Japanese scholars were reading Dutch books on medicine and astronomy long before 1853. What the Tokugawa did was control and channel foreign contact, not abolish it. This matters for the whole modern story, because a Japan that had genuinely been sealed for two centuries could not have done what it did in the thirty years after Perry.

The third argument is about 1945. Is the postwar country a new creation, built by the occupation on the ruins of the old, or a continuation of the prewar one under new management? Dower's book is the great account of the rupture, of a society remaking itself in defeat, but Dower is also clear about how much survived: the bureaucracy, most of the business world, and the emperor himself. Historians who write of a transwar Japan emphasise the continuities across 1945, in industrial policy and in the people who ran it. Both readings are defensible and the good books on this list hold both in view.

A fourth, quieter argument runs through Souyri and Totman: whether the word feudalism, borrowed from European history, describes medieval Japan at all. Souyri's title, The World Turned Upside Down, refers to the medieval Japanese idea of the lower overthrowing the higher, and his book is an argument that the centuries between the twelfth and the sixteenth were not a static age of lords and vassals but a period of real social upheaval, in which peasants, merchants, monks and provincial warriors all pushed against the old order. Readers who arrive at Japanese history through samurai films should read Souyri first and the films second.

Finally there is the word restoration. The events of 1868 are called the Meiji Restoration because the young emperor was formally restored to the authority the shoguns had exercised in his name for centuries. Jansen and Buruma both treat this as a revolution wearing the costume of a restoration: the men who carried it out were middle-ranking samurai from the western domains, they abolished their own class within a decade, and the state they built owed more to Prussia and Britain than to the ancient court. Whether the word revolution fits, given that the changes came from above and left the emperor at the top, is a question the books on this list answer differently, and a reader who notices which word each author reaches for will learn something about where that author stands.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best single-volume history of Japan?

For a first book, Kenneth Henshall's A History of Japan: From Stone Age to Superpower (third edition, 2012): short, complete and honest about the gaps. For the full modern story, Marius Jansen's The Making of Modern Japan (2000), which covers 1600 to the end of the twentieth century in about nine hundred pages. Conrad Totman's A History of Japan (second edition, 2005) is the big survey of the whole span for readers who want the centuries before 1600 too.

What is the best book on the samurai?

Pierre Souyri's The World Turned Upside Down: Medieval Japanese Society (2001) is the standard scholarly history of the warrior centuries and the best corrective to the film version of the samurai. If you want a samurai's own words, Miyamoto Musashi's The Book of Five Rings, written in the 1640s, is short and available in several translations; Thomas Cleary's is the clearest. For the samurai as soldiers, campaign by campaign, Stephen Turnbull's The Samurai: A Military History is the standard popular account, reliable on the battles if lighter on the society that produced them.

Was Hirohito responsible for the war?

Historians disagree. Herbert Bix's Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (2000) argues that the emperor was informed, engaged and at times decisive, and that the image of a powerless constitutional monarch was built after 1945. Other historians accept that he knew more than the old picture allowed but argue that the constraints on him were real and his interventions rare. John Dower's Embracing Defeat shows how the occupation chose to keep him on the throne and shield him from prosecution. Reading Bix and Dower together is the honest approach.

Was Japan really closed to the world before 1853?

Not in the way the old story suggests. The Tokugawa government restricted foreign contact from the 1630s, but trade with the Dutch and Chinese continued at Nagasaki, Korea was reached through Tsushima and the Ryukyu kingdom through Satsuma, and Japanese scholars studied Western medicine and science through Dutch books. Jansen and Totman both make the point that the Tokugawa controlled foreign contact rather than abolishing it, which is why Japan could modernise as fast as it did after Perry. The word sakoku, usually translated as closed country, was itself coined late in the Tokugawa period rather than at its start.

Explore related events on the timeline

• Hiroshima & Nagasaki on the interactive timeline

Related guides

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• The Best History Books: One Per Era

Sources consulted

• A History of Japan: From Stone Age to Superpower (Open Library record)
• The Making of Modern Japan (Open Library record)
• A History of Japan, Totman, 2nd ed. (Open Library record)
• The World Turned Upside Down: Medieval Japanese Society (Open Library record)
• Embracing Defeat (Open Library record)
• Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (Open Library record)
• Inventing Japan, 1853-1964 (Open Library record)
• The Book of Five Rings, Cleary translation (Open Library record)

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