Book review: A History of Japan, by Conrad D. Totman
My wife and I are going to visit Japan this year, and since I can only engage with things through my brain, I decided I had to read a long-ass full history of Japan as prep. I spent some time looking around and most options didn't convince me. Some think you are an idiot and need to sound cool to keep you entertained. Others are the opposite and very dry. Others looked good but started from the Edo period (which, in retrospect, seems like a reasonable decision, but I was feeling completionist). Finally I settled for Totman's A History of Japan, which is way longer than I wanted (~700 pages) but whose Introduction is so good that I was hooked.
This is an ecological history of Japan, in the non-hippie sense of the word. Its focus is on the material foundations of civilization (land, resources, climate, population) and how they shape everything else. This means that Totman's interests are... peculiar. The Battle of Okinawa? Boring, let's just mention it in passing. The long-term effects of reforestation? Now that is interesting, let's talk about it for a good couple of pages.
That approach also informs the structure of the book. Totman organizes all of Japanese history into four big ages: foraging, dispersed agriculture, intensive agriculture, industrialism. Each age is in turn divided into a period of growth followed by a period of stasis. Needless to say, this is not the usual periodization of Japan, which uses milestones like the Genpei War, the Battle of Sekigahara, or the Meiji Restoration. In his defense, he's straightforward about this difference and makes a good case for it.
The ecological perspective produces some genuinely interesting insights that, I guess, you won't find in conventional narrative histories. I particularly liked the running argument about how industrialism makes a society suddenly depend on a global resource base, and the endless implications of that switch. There's also the fantastic observation that previous ages used the current productive capacity of the Earth, while industrialism consumes the product of many previous Earths: fossil fuels, mineral deposits, and so on.
So, all in all, I don't regret reading this book and I certainly learned a lot. But it might work better as a second history of Japan than a first. Totman sometimes says things that amount to "everyone knows this, so let's skip it", which is fine if you do, and frustrating if you don't. In hindsight, maybe starting with one of those shallower books that treat you like an idiot and focus on samurai, and then reading Totman, would've been a better sequence.